The honour passes to the prototype: John of Damascus and the argument for icons

Every Sunday in Thessaloniki, before the liturgy, people walk into church, light a candle and kiss the icons. Visitors from Protestant countries sometimes ask me, politely, whether this is idolatry. I always want to answer with a monk who died more than twelve hundred years ago, because he was asked the same question by an emperor, and his answer is one of the most careful pieces of philosophy about images ever written.

The crisis

In the 720s and 730s the Byzantine emperor Leo III began a campaign against religious images. Historians still argue about the causes: military defeats read as divine punishment, bishops in Asia Minor who distrusted images, perhaps the example of Islam and Judaism, both of which kept images out of worship. The iconoclasts' argument was simple and strong. The commandment forbids making any graven image. God is invisible and cannot be contained. Any picture of him is either a lie about him or an idol.

The most important answer came from outside the empire. John of Damascus was a monk of the monastery of Mar Saba in the Judean desert, in lands ruled by the Umayyad caliphs, which meant the emperor could not silence him. He wrote three treatises against those who attack the holy images. They are short, and they still repay reading.

The argument from the incarnation

John concedes the iconoclasts' first premise completely. In former times, he says, God, who has no body and no form, could not be depicted at all. The commandment was right for its time. Anyone who tries to paint the invisible God is making an idol.

But something has changed. God has become visible. In the incarnation, the Christian claims, the uncontainable was contained: he had a face, walked, ate, could be touched. And so John writes, in a passage I make my students learn, that he does not worship matter but the Creator of matter, who became matter for his sake and worked his salvation through matter.

The argument is not that images are permitted in general. It is that this particular image is permitted because of one particular event. To forbid pictures of Christ, on this view, is not to protect God's invisibility. It is to deny that he was ever seen. The iconoclast, John suggests, is not too strict about God. He is not serious enough about the incarnation.

Image and prototype

The second argument is the one I find most interesting philosophically. Is the icon itself holy? Does the wood contain God?

No, says John. An image is by definition a likeness that differs from what it represents. It is related to its original, its prototype, but it is not the same thing. And when we honour an image, the honour does not stop at the wood and paint. It passes through to the one depicted. John takes the formula from Basil of Caesarea, who had used it in the fourth century about the emperor's portrait: the honour given to the image passes to the prototype.

Plato had distrusted images because they are copies of copies, third in line from the truth. The Christian Neoplatonist tradition, especially Dionysius the Areopagite, turned that suspicion round. Visible things, Dionysius wrote, are images of invisible ones. An image is a step on the way up, not a fall away. The icon belongs to that second tradition. It is meant to be a window, not a wall.

The third move is a distinction in vocabulary that carries real weight. Greek has two words that English often renders as "worship". Latreia is the adoration owed to God alone. Proskynesis means bowing down, reverence, the kind of honour you might show a king, a parent or a holy book. John insists that icons receive only the second. When I kiss the icon of the Mother of God, I am not offering her, still less the wood, the worship due to God.

The Second Council of Nicaea, in 787, adopted this distinction when it restored the icons. After a second period of iconoclasm in the ninth century, the images were restored for good in 843, an event the Orthodox Church still celebrates on the first Sunday of Lent as the Triumph of Orthodoxy.

Does the argument work?

I teach this every year, and my students always find the weak points. Is the distinction between worship and veneration visible from outside? To a visitor watching a grandmother weep before an icon, perhaps not. Isn't the argument from the incarnation useful only to Christians? A Muslim or a Jew rejects the premise that God became visible, and so rejects the conclusion. And does the relation of image and prototype really allow us to venerate the saints, who are not God, through their images?

These are fair objections. But I think John meets the deepest one, which is that images inevitably distract from what they represent. Any devotion can turn into idolatry. Words can too; scripture can be revered as an object. The question is not whether a medium can be abused but whether it can be used rightly, and the icon tradition built its discipline against abuse into the craft itself: the painter's anonymity, the fixed models, the refusal of a naturalism that would make the image a portrait to admire rather than a presence to stand before.

Islamic art took another path, towards calligraphy and geometry, and the result is just as serious a theology of beauty. I do not think one tradition has to be wrong for the other to be right. But when someone asks me whether we worship pictures, I give them John's answer. We bow before the image, and the honour passes through.