Alexander Schmemann

4. Byzantium (22 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 7

Seventh Ecumenical Council.

Only in 787, and not in the capital but in Nicaea, did the Seventh Ecumenical Council assemble, with Patriarch Tarasius presiding.
Here the dogma of the veneration of icons was formulated and promulgated. The way had been paved for it by the reaction of Orthodox theological thought to the years of iconoclasm; first and foremost by St. John of Damascus, who died in all probability before the iconoclastic council of 753. John had lived in Syria under the rule of the Arabs; he then became a monk in the monastery of St. Sabas in Palestine. He derived his defense of icons directly from the Incarnation of Christ. Before He was made Man only symbols and “shadows” were possible. In a certain sense the whole world is full of natural images of God, but something completely new began from the moment that the Word became flesh.

When He Who is without a body and without form, Who has neither quantity nor magnitude, Who is incomparable with respect to the superiority of His nature, Who exists in Divine form — accepts a bond-servant’s appearance and arrays Himself in bodily form, then do thou trace Him upon wood, and rest thy hopes in contemplating Him, Who has permitted Himself to be seen.

An image of the Man Christ is also an image of God; as Florovsky has said, everything that is human in Christ is now the living image of God. And in this union matter itself is made new and becomes worthy of praise. “I do not bow down to matter, but to the Creator of matter, Who for my sake took on substance and Who through matter accomplished my salvation, and I shall not cease to honor matter, through which my salvation was accomplished.” This means that everything in the world and the world itself has taken on a new meaning in the Incarnation of God. Everything has become open to sanctification; matter itself has become a channel of the grace of the Holy Spirit.

This Christological definition of icons and their veneration forms the substance of the dogma promulgated by the Seventh Ecumenical Council. The whole Christological dispute, in fact, comes to a climax with this council, which gave it its final “cosmic” meaning.

We therefore, proceeding as it were along a royal road and following the God-revealing teaching of the saints, our Fathers, and the tradition of the Catholic Church . . . with all circumspection and care do decree: that, like the image of the glorious and life-giving Cross, there shall be placed in the holy churches of God, on the sacred vessels and vestments, on walls and on wood, in houses and along the roads, glorious and holy icons, painted in colors and made from mosaic and out of other substance expedient to this matter — icons of the Lord Jesus Christ — and . . . of the Mother of God . . . and of all saints and holy men.[22]

The reverence rendered to these images is different from the “true devotion according to the faith which befits the Divine nature alone”; the council defined it as a “worship of reverence.” In it the “honor rendered to the image ascends to its prototype and he who reveres an icon is worshiping the hypostasis of the one portrayed.” In this way the justification of the veneration of icons concluded the dogmatic dialectic of the age of the universal councils, which was concentrated, as we have already seen, on two fundamental themes of Christian revelation: the Trinity and the Incarnation. In this respect the “faith of the Seven Ecumenical Councils and of the Fathers” is the everlasting and immutable foundation of Orthodoxy.

 

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