I was thinking in the shower today about the theology of icons in Orthodoxy and Catholicism. It seems to me that icons don’t really make a whole lot of sense in Western theology. There is nothing in the Western view of God that necessitates icons.
They make perfect sense in Eastern theology. You have to have a theology of uncreated energies for theosis and deification to work, which would, in turn, be the only basis for having the ability to communicate with the living dead.
I’m kind of curious how Catholics try to mesh their stance on icons with their theology proper. Anyone?
September 15th, 2007 at 8:49 pm
Well, I think most Catholic theologians would say there’s nothing essentially different between Eastern icons and, say, Western sculptures or stained glass. After all, these are the “icons” of the Latin Church. The decision of the Seventh Ecumenical Council doesn’t say anything about theosis, energies or deification in the specifically Orthodox sense, as far as I know—and how exactly are these necessary to be able “to communicate with the living dead”?
I guess I’m just confused why icons should be a problem at all for Catholics.
September 15th, 2007 at 11:07 pm
Well, I know historically Catholics believe in icons, but theologically it doesn’t flow from their theology of God.
The Eastern view posits the energies to be both, in a sense, part of and yet outside of God. Humans partake of his energies through theosis and their deification connects the living saints to the living dead saints. Partaking of the divine energies means partaking of God Himself.
The role of theosis is more important in someone like Lossky than it is in, say, Zizoulas, and I am trying to articulate how I think Lossky is viewing it from piecing together the few short passages I’ve gotten my hands on (anyone want to buy his book for me for Christmas?). Zizoulas, in my opinion, is reformulating the Orthodox view in a contemporary way that I am not really sure is fully Orthodox by relegating the energies to a communion ontology. But I’m really an amateur here. I wish I had more time to think about this stuff. I was just throwing that off the top of my head hoping for some interaction, seeing if there really is a reason icons are necessary in Catholic theology.
Catholic theology has God create something fully outside of his being. Thus creature and Creator are fully separate. There is really no theological basis for the living saints to be able to communicate with the dead saints living in Christ. Human bodies are a barrier without a theology of theosis because until we are dead, we cannot be fully in Christ. The creator/Creature distinction poses too great of a problem. (I can think of a way around this line of thinking, but I don’t really know if it’s a Catholic way of thinking about the question.)
What I was getting at was that icons are necessary when you consider the Orthodox view of God. The Catholic view doesn’t seem to necessitate icons. They almost seem a bit tagged on to me.
September 16th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
I’m not really up to speed on my theological history, but I think that the Orthodox doctrines of energies and such are later developments during medieval times, and would likely be rejected or at least heavily modified before acceptance by the Catholic Church (if there was any future reunion, for instance). And because icons existed ostensibly before these lines of theology came about (developed?), then a different explanation for their importance is necessary. In any case, I don’t see how the Orthodox doctrines are necessary in order for icons to be venerated, either in the flat Eastern variety, or in the more three-dimensional Western.
Catholic theology has God create something fully outside of his being. Thus creature and Creator are fully separate. There is really no theological basis for the living saints to be able to communicate with the dead saints living in Christ.
God and His creation are, of course, infinitely different, but the Incarnation has deified creation and they are no longer “separate.” I’m unsure what this has to do with living Christians praying to (not “communicating with”) saints who have died or brought bodily into heaven. All things are possible with God, after all. If He wishes our prayers to be heard by saints and angels, then they will be (cf. Rev. 5:8, 8:3).
I guess I’m just not understanding your difficulty.
September 17th, 2007 at 9:00 am
I have to go to work, but the divine energies theology was spoken of in AT LEAST the fourth century. My guess is even earlier.
Ahh, off to work.
September 17th, 2007 at 10:11 am
Ok, maybe I’m just showing off my lack of theological training here. If theology about divine energies predates the middle ages, I’d be interested in reading an article that summarizes it, if you know of any. This is a topic I’ve only encountered tangentially to other topics, and I’ve never bothered to study it in-depth.
Even so, I don’t notice anything in the decrees of the Seventh Ecumenical Council about energies, nor anything that would be contrary to Western practice. The theology of the council seems much in line with what I’ve learned of Latin theology:
But again, I’m still somewhat unlearned in this area. Any clarification on what all this has to do with communication with the saints in heaven would be welcome.
September 17th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
Well, in my unprofessional understanding (just a catechumen thus far), the veneration of 3D statuary was a Western innovation that crept in around the 5th-6th centuries and sorta took off from there. Prior to this time, the Church universal had always venerated the Saints through iconographic depiction.
If you’ll notice, veneration of 3D objects is limited to symbolic relics in the Seventh Synod / II Nicea (e.g., the Gospels, the Cross, bones of martyrs), but veneration of the post Hadean living Saints is done in the presence of 2D icons only.
The reasoning behind this is admittedly esoteric and enigmatical from the vantage point of a western Christian, but carries profoundly important theological meanings and distinctions that are merely logical extensions of Eastern Christology and (frankly) Athanasian theology per Nicea in 325.
Bluntly speaking, while the East has nothing inherently against 3D imagery in the churches (a few Eastern churches have statues in the nave itself), veneration of them is considered a direct carry over from Paganism with its worship of matter as seen in the rampant idolatry of ancient and biblical times.
Veneration of 2D icons was made possible by the Incarnation and Patristic theological development as informed by the former. Its eschatological praxis and symbolism struck a perfect balance between gnostic philosophy (which rejects matter) and idolatry (which divinizes matter). 2D iconography strikes an essential eschatological distinction between the already and the not yet by doing two things: (1) affirming matter (depicting the Saints as truly physical and human and present), and (2) denying that we are in the FULLNESS of their presence (Resurrection and Glorification are still to come). This tension between cataphatic affirmation and apophatic non-fullness is as necessary to our Christology as to our Eschatology, Ecclesiology and Liturgical Worship, and it is a guiding patristic principle all throughout.
3D imagery makes the false theological statement that the Saints (and thus Christ, since the Saints are an extension of His Body/Incarnation) are somehow circumscribed or contained by matter (i.e., matter is by nature divine and thus intrinsically eternal), whereas 2D imagery embraces theosis/deification of the human nature via the Incarnation, embracing humanity as assumed into God through Union with Christ (avoiding gnosticism), yet without ascribing divinity to all matter as an inherent property.(I.e., Christ ADDED human nature, it wasn’t eternally divine.)
All of this is tied in with the essence/energies distinction which, while already latent in Irenaeus, Athanasius the Cappadocians (esp. Basil the Great)et. al., was not thoroughly worked out as an apologetical theological system until the great theological contributions of Gregory Palamas (essentially the East’s response to Aquinas in the West) in the 14th century. However, the system was already in place in a less conspicuous manner via the absence of the filioque clause in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 A.D. (That’s another story.)
If I can scrape them up again, there are some pretty clear statements from Ss. Athanasius and Basil the Great on the essence/energies distinction within the Godhead.
September 17th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
Just as a follow up (which I should have inserted somewhere into the above): the statement in the Seventh Synod that the honor we render to the image passes beyond it to the prototype (the living Saint himself)could never be rationally defended in a 3D context, since 3D images are self-referential and inherently unable to communicate the eschatological beyondness or transcendence of the image, pointing beyond the matter on which the Saint is depicted to the Saint him/her self. This is why the East often refers to icons as “windows into heaven”. Also, the statement that the veneration we render passes beyond the image itself to the Saint (prototype) is a declaration that can be found in the writings of St. John Damascene (his three-part treatise “On Holy Images”, early 8th century) who got it from St. Basil the Great (late 4th century).
September 17th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
My wife is beckoning me to bed though I’ve hardly touched the computer today. Here’s a quote from Athanasius on the divine energies (though keep in mine what Jonathan said):
“The holy Word of the Father, then, almighty and all-perfect, uniting with the universe and having everywhere unfolded His own powers, and having illumined all, both things seen and things invisible, holds them together and binds them to Himself, having left nothing void of His own power, but on the contrary quickening and sustaining all things everywhere, each severally and all collectively; while He mingles in one the principles of all sensible existence, heat namely and cold and wet and dry, and causes them not to conflict, but to make up one concordant harmony. 2. By reason of Him and His power, fire does not fight with cold nor wet with dry, but principles mutually opposed, as if friendly and brotherly combine together, and give life to the things we see, and form the principles by which bodies exist. Obeying Him, even God the Word, things on earth have life and things in the heaven have their order.”
St. Athanasius, Against the Heathen, III.42
September 17th, 2007 at 10:08 pm
This tension between cataphatic affirmation and apophatic non-fullness is as necessary to our Christology…
Yee gads, it’s sentences like this that almost make me regret opening my big mouth. I’m probably too uneducated to say anything worthwhile here, but I’ll give it a shot.
Bluntly speaking, while the East has nothing inherently against 3D imagery in the churches (a few Eastern churches have statues in the nave itself), veneration of them is considered a direct carry over from Paganism with its worship of matter as seen in the rampant idolatry of ancient and biblical times.
That’s an unreasonable complaint, considering the plethora of three-dimensional statues and carvings found under the Old Covenant. What about the bronze serpent in the desert, the golden cherubim on the Ark and in the Temple, and the Temple’s brass oxen and lions, all made by the express command of God? If you want to argue that the two-dimensional aspect of Orthodox icons are a developed form of such images, that’s fine, but don’t blame Catholics for reverting to some sort of paganism when we are only continuing a holy tradition from before the time of Christ.
3D imagery makes the false theological statement that the Saints (and thus Christ, since the Saints are an extension of His Body/Incarnation) are somehow circumscribed or contained by matter (i.e., matter is by nature divine and thus intrinsically eternal)
That’s no more the case than a claim that the Incarnation “circumscribed or contained” the Divine Nature into a created human nature. If you are scandalized by a rounded image of Christ, think how much more his contemporaries were scandalized by his obvious earthiness. Doubtless our Lord looked, felt and smelled like everyone around him. By continuing the tradition of carved images, the Catholic Church is only asserting as fully as possible the reality of the Incarnation, with all its scandal and mystery.
3D images are self-referential and inherently unable to communicate the eschatological beyondness or transcendence of the image, pointing beyond the matter on which the Saint is depicted to the Saint him/her self. This is why the East often refers to icons as “windows into heaven”.
To build on what I said in the last paragraph, wouldn’t this logically entail that the three-dimensional, incarnated Christ sleeping in Simon’s boat was “inherently unable to communicate the eschatological beyondness or transcendence” of his true Being? When you say that we need “windows into heaven” I feel like you are reverting to a pre-Christian Hebraic religious experience, wherein man could only view heaven in glimpses and theophanies. Christ is God-among-us, earthy and glorious all at once, refusing to spurn matter in exchange for a purely spiritual experience.
I don’t deny that flat icons provide a religious experience of a grand and peculiar sort, but I fear that they too often live up to that description and “flatten” one’s idea of Christ and the saints. For instance, Orthodox icons tend to portray every saint with the same face, only differentiated by facial hair or hair color. The strict rules of iconography standardize faces, colors, clothing, landscapes, etc.; it is arguable that this represents a denial of the goodness of the creation which Christ made himself a part of in order to redeem and deify it. Catholic art, for all its admitted faults and sentimentalities, glories in all creation by fearlessly representing every sort of thing God has created. One could complain that Orthodox art is a rejection of creation, that it prefers standardized and too-perfect “windows” to the panoply of the created world. (”Praise ye the Lord… all his angels,… all his hosts,… O sun and moon,… all ye stars and light,… ye heavens of heavens,… all the waters that are above the heavens,… ye dragons, and all ye deeps, fire, hail, snow, ice, stormy winds,… mountains and all hills, fruitful trees and all cedars,… beasts and all cattle, serpents and feathered fowls” (Ps. 148).) Not that I think this would be an entirely just complaint, but it seems to be the inverse of the complaint you are making against Catholic images.
Take my uneducated ramblings for whatever they’re worth.
September 17th, 2007 at 11:14 pm
“This tension between cataphatic affirmation and apophatic non-fullness is as necessary to our Christology…
Yee gads, it’s sentences like this that almost make me regret opening my big mouth. I’m probably too uneducated to say anything worthwhile here, but I’ll give it a shot.”
Cataphatic just means God can be known through what He has revealed (positive knowledge). Apophatic means He also makes Himself known through negation (knowledge through defining what God is not), Apophatic theology says God transcends language and understanding. Orthodox tend to stress the latter more than the West; it’s a big part of the way they do theology, so you’ll have to stick your apophatic lenses on to understand Orthodoxy.
Jonathan talks like this in real life, so you just have to get used to it.
At least you have the benefit of reading it slowly and process what he’s saying before he’s fifteen minutes into his argument. 
September 18th, 2007 at 10:35 am
Rick,
Thanks for the quote and the explanation. I’m sure I’ve seen “Cataphatic” and “Apophatic” defined somewhere before, but it’s been too long.