A Christian brother asked…I have lately been doing a great deal of reading in the patristics. But I have a question for you: have you interacted with some of the more articulate, reasoned, and historically aware of the Reformers on the matter of icons, for example, Calvin? What of some of the fathers who seem to have a definite aversion to the use of images in worship, such as Lactantius?
And a sister answered…
If you can just apply your reasoning faculties to the problem, you believe, you will eventually know where to put your faith.
My choice, once I saw it, was a bit simpler. The Faith comes as a package. You are actually choosing, not between millions of possibilities, but between, on the one hand, the fantasy of self-willed intellectualism – a mother unreason that sprouts an infinity of offspring unreasons – and on the other hand, the revelation of Christ.
Accepting the church’s teaching as a whole is an act of loyalty and submission to Christ.
I never did study out the issue of icons, and I don’t regret it because icons are not an issue to me now. However there are other issues I studied and on those, I have passed through so many mental phases that’s its very clear to me now: my judgment, be it ever so good, will never be an arbiter of doctrine. Doctrine is revealed, not made. Human judgment must be informed from outside. Human judgment is the great fat idol of our day.
Many fathers said and did many things. Christ is manifest in them at the point where they come to agreement in love, at the point where they are sharing something that came down to them from apostolic teaching and not from their own reason. For this cause I don’t read “the fathers” all that much. I love Athanasius’ On The Incarnation of the Word and I found some very important things in the writings of St. Simeon the New Theologian. What’s important to me is to know that I am in communion with these fathers and am part of the body that keeps their faith. I am not the member that does the research. There are members who do. I do not have to be everything.
What is constant among us (and the experience of constancy is strong in Orthodoxy), is not the individual arguments this one or that one made, but rather the faith which lives in every one of them. This faith is a living thing, and is instilled and passed down in the Church, not through argumentation but through parental nurture.
To enter the kingdom of God, we do not become as doctors at law. Rather we become as little children. We are bathed, fed, disciplined, and taught by our spiritual parents. I am speaking literally and explicitly here of baptism, communion, confession, and preaching.
I trust the Orthodox Church’s teaching on icons for the same reason you and I both accept the same canon of the New Testament. (Yes, I know protestants have tried to prove that if we use our reasoning faculties we’ll come to the same conclusion the church came to on the canon of the New Testament because it’s that obvious. But it wasn’t that obvious even to the men who made the decision in the first place. Several books were under debate.)
What confuses protestants on the topic of schism is that the church from which they separated was itself a separated church, and had thus sprouted immorality and unreason itself. But lots of us are figuring that out these days. It’s not that hard.
By the way, I read your poem “An Image of Jesus Christ from the Book of Hebrews”.
It’s a reminder that we all form images in our mind, and indeed the scriptures themselves present such images to our mind. The difference between the image in our mind (derived from scripture) and the materially rendered image (derived from scripture) is that the one is the private experience of one person, subject to fantasy, corruption, and delusion, and the other is the common property of the whole church, – the light of day can shine on it, no heresy can enter it, all can examine it.
My son has learned more from icons than from any words any of us ever said to him. He refers to icons as angels and has assured me that his angel (the icon on his wall) protected him and one time, even came inside him in a dream. He used to see “monsters” but his cross and his icon never fail to comfort and protect him. Christ himself ministers to my son in ways that I missed when I was his age, and my religion was entirely verbal and rational.
In all this I haven’t meant to provide you with arguments that refute the reformers or the church father you mentioned – I can’t do that. I am only trying to show you the experience of Orthodoxy from the inside to explain why I couldn’t care less what the iconoclasts taught.
By the way, I don’t proclaim you will automatically go to hell if you can’t see your way clear to “the most conservative church on the face of the earth” (to quote Mark Noll.) God winks at certain things in times of ignorance. My life-long Baptist mother recently passed away, and while I made some provision for her in the Orthodox manner, the three dreams I had of her console me that God’s mercy has remembered her. All the same that’s no reason not to care. I know that you do care.
I’ve been thinking how to express the sum faith by which all these things, at once, become acceptable to me and not a matter for me to pass judgment on.
And that is simply the faith that Christ is the Head of the Church. It’s no use saying “Which church?” If you start by believing that the true church is the one to which Christ is united as a man’s head is united to his body – not theoretically but functionally – you will find your way there as the implications of this revelation become clear to you. Even the scriptures take on a whole new life when they function within the Church. I speak as one who knows, not as one who has to theorize any longer.
On this topic of images, see also my topical blog Imageless, which collects the testimonies of an Orthodox presbyter on this subject.
