What I Like about Icons

This past Sunday was the Sunday of Orthodoxy, a day to celebrate the restoration of icons to the church after centuries of the state trying to stamp out the practice.

I've found that icons tend to be the last hangup of would-be converts to Orthodoxy. As a Protestant, I was taught to view such things as idols, and to pride myself on the fact that my kind of worship was more "spiritual."

But there's a funny thing about spirits. A professor of mine likes to point out that spirits are always looking for bodies. The truth is that none of us ever encounters something purely "spiritual." Spiritual truths are always communicated by material means. We are material beings, and we use that which is near us to connect with what is beyond us, because that which is beyond us became us.

This is the truth of orthodoxy (and not just "Orthodoxy") that the Triumph of Orthodoxy Affirms. When Emperor Leo III (and most of his successors) attempted to stamp out the practice of bowing before and kissing images, they were threatening the meaning of the Incarnation itself. Some who opposed icons claimed that the purest form of worship was "spiritual" contemplation of God. But Jesus Christ was a body. He got into the mud, where we are, not so that he might raise us out of it, but so that he might transform us in it.

Thus wood and paint can bear the divine, not because wood and paint are divine, but the one depicted by them is! In affirming that wood and paint are not an impediment to God, the Triumph of Orthodoxy ultimately affirms the truth of the Incarnation itself: the material world is not a problem God has to overcome. In Jesus Christ matter has been redeemed.

We believe the Incarnation is not over. Christ did not shed his skin when he ascended into heaven. Thus the Orthodox Church makes heavy use of matter – obviously Eucharist, but also relics and holy oil and water – as means of our salvation. (Protestants also have this sense when they treat their Bibles with reverence, or tell kids not to run in the sanctuary. The book or the room is no more inherently holy than the wood and paint of an icon. It is holy for what it communicates.) These material things are holy insofar as they bear the likeness of Christ. Thus we can say in a sense that matter itself is being saved. And because Christ became matter, he can save us material beings as well, insofar as we, by the grace of God, come to bear his likeness, too.