The icon controversy
Iconoclasm shakes the Eastern church
In 726 AD, the Byzantine emperor Leo III orders the removal and destruction of a famous icon of Christ above the Chalke Gate in Constantinople. The crowd that gathers to remove it is attacked by a group of women who pull down the ladders. A riot follows.
This is the beginning of one of the most sustained theological controversies in the history of the Eastern church: the Iconoclast controversy, which will convulse the Byzantine empire for over a century.
The iconoclasts — the image-breakers — argue that veneration of icons is idolatry. The second commandment forbids making images of God. The incarnation does not change this: to depict Christ in an image is to confuse his divine and human natures, either by depicting only the human or by claiming to depict the divine.
The iconodules — the image-venerators — argue the opposite: the incarnation changes everything. Before Christ, God was invisible and could not be depicted. After Christ, God has a human face. To refuse to depict that face is implicitly to deny the incarnation — to claim that Christ was not truly human, truly visible, truly present in matter.
John of Damascus, writing from outside the Byzantine empire in Muslim-controlled territory, develops the most sophisticated defense of icons: the image is not worshipped but venerated; the veneration passes through the image to the prototype; the incarnation is the ultimate justification for the use of images in worship.
The controversy is settled at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 AD — icons are restored — and then flares again before being finally settled in 843 AD: the Triumph of Orthodoxy, still celebrated annually in the Eastern church.
“I do not venerate matter; I venerate the Creator of matter who became matter for my sake.”
— John of Damascus, Against Those Who Decry Holy Images, c. 730 AD
“The Word became flesh, and lived among us. We saw his glory, such glory as of the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth.”
John of Damascus's defense of icons is really a defense of the incarnation. If God became matter — if the eternal Word took on flesh, bone, face, voice — then matter has been sanctified. The physical world can carry the holy.
The iconoclast impulse — the fear that material things will distract from the spiritual — keeps returning in every generation and every tradition. The instinct is understandable. The flesh can become an idol. Images can replace what they are meant to point toward.
But the incarnation is the permanent answer to the iconoclast: God chose matter. He did not transcend the physical — he entered it. The wood and paint of an icon is not a distraction from the holy. It can be a window into it.
What material things in your life point you toward God rather than away from him?