WHY  ICONS ARE SO OMNIPRESENT IN ORTHODOXY;
AND WHY  CHRIST'S MOTHER  IS  ALMOST 
ALWAYS PORTRAYED WITH HIM PRESENT

 [The text is © 1999. 2002 by Orchid Land Publications]

[upgraded 20020925]

CLICK HERE FOR A THOROUGH TREATMENT OF ICONS IN THE 
FORM OF FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS & ANSWERS 
ABOUT ICONS BY FR. DEACON JOHN WHITEFORD

CLICK HERE FOR A LEARNED TREATISE ON ICONS 
BY READER TIMOTHY COPPLE

PART OF THE DEFENCE OF THE HOLY ICONS AGAINST 
THEIR DENIGRATORS by ST. JOHN OF DAMASKOS

Order Jim Forest's Praying with icons 
(Saint Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1997)

A SHORT BUT INFORMATIVE CHAPTER ON ICONS THAT
CONVEYS THE SPIRIT OF ORTHODOX ICONS 
by Fr. Hierodeacon Pangratios, is found in
  Miracles of the last days (New Sarov Press,
Christ of the Hills Monastery, 1999)

See icons HERE CLICK HERE FOR ICON-SELLERS  SEE HERE for PRAYING IN FRONT OF AN ICON

     There is more than one question being answered in the account that follows.  The first is fundamental:   Why are icons so prevalent in  Orthodoxy?   The other two questions involve icons of the most holy Theotókos, the Mother of God.
     The first question is answered, not just by speaking of the symbolic value of being surrounded by the company of Saints in the surrounding icons on the wall of an Orthodox temple--though that is anything but negligible for the Orthodox phronema or mindset, where the communal tradition of the Saints and the joining of earth and heaven has a strong attraction.  It is most succinctly answered in the way St. John of Damaskos summed up the heart of the matter in a few sentences in his famous treatise On the divine icons.   
     But the answer quoted below  will be clearer if the historical background is summed up first.  Semitic religion--first, the Hebrew religion of the Old Testament; and then, more significantly for the time of the controversies over the holy icons, Islam--absolutely forbids material portrayals of God.  This distaste, stemming from a fear of idolatry, combined during the early Christian centuries with the Hellenistic-Gnostic view of matter as inherently evil, something caused by evil and causing evil to exist.  This combination of views led to a rejection of the idea that a good God would become evil matter--the incarnate God the Son in Jesus of Nazareth.   Orthodox Christianity, intent on upholding the Incarnation and the value of Christ's Suffering in the body and our Salvation through and in His glorious Resurrection--all nonsense to Gnostics and especially Manichaeans,¹ who despised materiality--has from the beginning always affirmed the view of Genesis 1:31 that the material world is good and serves as a channel for or vessel of spiritual energy; this is the mysteric or sacramental view--rejected by Protestantism in this form, and especially by Protestants who fail to view matter anything but un-spiritual or even anti-spiritual.   Several of the God-bearing Fathers, basing themselves on  Tim. 3:16:

stated that the Incarnation--that wedding of matter and spirit, as well as of God and humanity--was the first Mystery (Sacrament) of human Salvation.  As such it is the basis of all other Mysteries (Sacraments), Jesus Christ having sanctified materiality--body/flesh, matter, and time--all so alien to Gnostics (CLICK HERE).
     Where the Orthodox center their Faith on Christ's Resurrection and the resurrection of the bodies of the faithful (1 Cor. 15:13,16-17,21), resurrection of our bodies is almost ignored by some Protestants and is rejected by some, while Western Christianity generally seems to demote the victorious Resurrection of Christ relatively to the earth-changing but un-victorious Crucifixion of our Savior.
      The debate about creation and the role of materiality arose in various ways from time to time.  Eventually, it came to center on the veneration of icons as channels of spiritual energy--as well as, of course, the pragmatic rôle of icons as the "books of the unlettered."  In passing, it should be noted that conservative (i.e. Orthodox) Christianity adheres to Ex. 20:4 by rejecting graven images, requiring that all portrayals be two-dimensional. 
     In this debate, St. John of Damaskos, who had served as Grand Vizier under the Umayyad Caliph in Damaskos--the leader of the Muslim world at that time--wrote:

I worship one GOD, one Deity, but I adore (latrévo) the Trinity of Persons—GOD the Father, GOD the Son Who has saved [me], and GOD the Holy Spirit—one GOD.  I do not worship created being along with the One who created it; but I worship the Creator Who made the likes of me and, without contaminating Himself [i.e. with the materiality which He assumed] and with no degradation, came down into creation in order that He might glorify my nature and render me a partaker of the divine Nature [2 Pet. 1:4b].

Having observed that adoration cannot be given to any created being—only to GOD— Damascene later continues in the strongest incarnationalist terms:

I don’t worship matter; I worship the Creator of matter, Who became matter for my sake, . . . and Who effected my Salvation through matter.

This is the living motto of the Orthodox ethos.  The Orthodoxagree that the creation was good (Gen. 1:31).  All of this is of course nonsense for a Gnostic heretic.  The rôle of flesh (which word could simply refer to createdness or creaturehood) in our Salvation is prominent in the New Testament.  It is especially salient in Rom. 8:3c-d,4:

      For with respect to what the Law  was unable [to effect] . . . GOD, having sent His own Son in the likeness [omoíoma] of flesh of sin [i.e. the realm permeated with sinfulness] and for the sake of sins, condemned sin in [or  with] the flesh in order that the righteousness of the [Old Testament] Law might be fulfilled in you who do not walk according to flesh but according to spirit.

     As the author of Miracles in the last days points out (p. 22), the holy Fathers have always understood the healing figure of a serpent that God in Num. 21:5-9  commanded Moses to fashion out of brass to be a foreshadowing of Christ.  For  the image of the serpent healed the serpent's bite "in the same way that Christ used death as a means by which to destroy death."  

     The first Lordsday of the Great Fast is the Lordsday of Orthodoxy; it celebrates the ratification of icons at the seventh Ecumenical Synod as being an essential ingredient of Orthodoxy, representing, as the festival does, a pervasive example of how the Incarnation of the LOGOS sanctified created matter--images and, indirectly, the wood and colors they are made of (though only the image of the holy person or event in the life of Christ or one of His members is venerated; observe that when we venerate a divinized member of Christ's Body, we are honor the Head of Christ's  Body--Our Lord, God, and Savior, Jesus Christ Himself).   This exemplifies the way that the Orthodox center everything on CHRIST'S RESURRECTION and THE RESURRECTION OF OUR MATERIAL BODIES.  In contrast with religions (cf. Hinduism and Buddhism) in which becoming bodiless or even nothing is Salvation, the idea that Salvation is purely spiritual and indeed non-material, is a doctrine that some Protestants reject, one that most Protestants unconsciously accept in their antimysteric (antisacramental) view of the role of materiality and temporality in religion.   

St. Gregory Palamãs (in his "Defence of the holy Hesychasts") called the desire to go out of the body the worst [aspect] of Hellenic error and the root and fountain of every error and cacodoxy ["wrong belief"]-- an invention of demons, a doctrine fostering the loss of one's senses, and the product of madness."  Continuing to condemn this folly, he points out that  those who want to expel the mind from the body (the vessel of the "heart" and soul) or those who try to bring it into the body (as though it were elsewhere) ignore the fact that "essence (ousía) is one thing and energy another" in favor of sophistic arguments.  The failure to make the distinction between essence and energy--because of the absence of energy (operating outside of its source) in Western theology--made it impossible to avoid a number of heretical errors concerning the all-holy Trinity, the Fall of humanity through the sins of our first ancestors [e.g. the cacodoxy of inherited or transferable guilt and merit], Grace (not uncreated Energy but either a static created form or habit of the soul or divine imputation), and Salvation.

Whereas the Old Testament views place and history and soterial, a Gnostic anti-"flesh" attitude prevails among most Denominationists that one meets.   Protestants generally treat the Incarnation as a moral event; traditionalists, however, view it ontologically in understanding its moral value to depend on the ontological reality of the mysteric marriage of the timeless and uncreated divine with the corporeal-temporal in the Incarnate Person who acts--teaches, illustrates, suffers, rises again.    (Though materiality is not repugnant to Jews and Muslims, a material (bodily) God certainly is repugnant to them, meriting the harshest of censures.)  We can now see why the perhaps most widely used "Evangelical" translation of the Bible gnostically renders sárx "flesh" as "sinful nature"--as if nature, rather than individuals, sinned or could sin!   (CLICK HERE for more on this; look under nature and under sin.)  IF HUMAN NATURE WERE SINFUL, THEN JESUS CHRIST DID NOT BECOME TRULY HUMAN, AND WE ARE LOST!  This is all a part of the un-Orthodox notions that sin is "natural," rather than individual, that human nature is sinful, and that we today inherit our first ancestors' sinning--as if I were better or worse because some ancestor was better or worse than other people!   (This is not place to discuss the difference between the Icon [Image] and Likeness of God in Orthodoxy and the rôle of the divine Energies in Orthodoxy; see other pages on this website (including THIS ONE and, more profusely, THIS ONE).   It will suffice simply to say that it solves, in an ontological manner, the moral problems that the Augustinian-Western teachings of original guilt have unsuccessfully tried to solve.)

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     The other questions deal with the most holy Theotókos or "Birth-giver of God," who is not worshiped but given superveneration (hyperdouly) by the Orthodox because of several verses in the first chapter of St. Luke's Gospel.  An intelligent and honest reader will note that she is there called blessëd two or three times--blessëd among women and blessëd throughout all generations.   Moreover, in verse 1:43, she is called the "Mother of God," namely, the Mother of the One Who is God as well as human--when St. Elizabeth addresses her as "the Mother of my Lord."  Knowledgeable readers will recognize the Jewish custom of substituting "my Lord" for (most uses of) YHWH--God's name, which it was forbidden for Jews to pronounce. 
       Since the m. h. Theotókos is the Queen of Saints and Queen of the cosmos, she has the first place of honor among the Saints venerated by the Orthodox as God's heros and heroines--and of course portrayed in our icons.          That the m. h. Theotókos is practially always portrayed with our Lord, God, and Savior, Jesus Christ--either as a babe in her arms or being crucified with her standing nearby or with Him standing by at her falling asleep--is simply logical:  Her importance for us lies entirely in and depends entirely on His importance for us.  We invoke her intercessions in our prayers--just as we would those of any other Christian, living or dead--not recognizing the cleavage of the Body of Christ between living and dead upheld in Protestantism, whose concept of the "Body of Christ" and the "Communion of Saints" differs so vastly from the view of conservative Christians.  As Jesus's all-pure Mother, she is nearest to Him; and her supplications to Him on our behalf are most powerful. 
      It is no wonder, then, that icons are so omnipresent in Orthodox temples and homes--in the east corner on or the eastern wall of, say the dining room, where family prayers--and thanks for our daily bread--are offered.   The holy icons not only recall to  us Christ and His Saints--in the Communion of Saints that we aspire to be members of; they actually bring Grace, the uncreated Energy of Christ, to their venerators and thus, as with any Mystery (Sacrament), they bring us the Grace of Worship, obedient piety, and faith in our Salvation--wrought in and through the Mystery (Sacrament) of the human-divine incarnate Christ.   If all of this is foreign to the modern Gnostic, it shows how far moderns have strayed from the faith of the Fathers and Mothers of the Church.

     Until the recent past, many denominations allowed no icons or pictures, though occasional exceptions were made for stained-glass windows--where grapes, Jesus and His disiciples, and other scenes were sometimes allowed.   Later the Cross and the fish got accepted by Christians on the religious left--at first by the far left (the Pentecostal wing) of Evangelicalism, and then by Evangelicals more generally.  As this Gnosticism--the rejection to portrayals of religious persons and objects--has waned, a worse development has come in, namely, the treating of the US flagpole as sacred.  This recalls the sacred poles (a.k.a. phallic symbols, though linguistically they were of both genders in the language of the place) of the Canaanites in the Old Testament--a phenomenon found in the Pacific Islands, in Asia, in Africa, in South America, in Australia . . . and now "christianized" in North America!  Phallic worship has at times been disguised or mitigated in treating sacred poles as instruments of Grace or healing.   Has this point been reached when a youth praying around the flagpole in Wichita (according to Time, Sept. 28, 1998, p. 68) prayed,   "I pray you do wonders through the pole and let your wonders show through the pole"?  
     The religious potpourri currently represented in the religious beliefs and practices of some--a mixture of Christianity and Gnosticism, relativism with intolerance for others' mixtures of various elements, the relics or "prayer cloths" of one TV Evangelist, and either the secularization of religion around a secular banner or the taking up into religion of secular objects--will appeal to some more than to others.  An Orthodox Christian will not get near any of this except to admonish representatives of syncretistic views about religion to think through what they are doing and listen to the holy tradition.

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     ¹An outlook ancestor to later Paulicians, Bogomils, Cathari, and other puritanical groups.  One ancient group of this sort considered the material body so irrelevant to Worship and religion that it allowed sexual orgies--since whatever happened to the body was, for them, neither immoral nor moral!

FOR  FURTHER ON THE RATIONALE OF ICONS, CLICK  HERE