What a visitor sees first
The first impression is of faces. An Orthodox church has almost no blank wall: a screen of painted panels stands between the congregation and the altar, more panels rest on stands in the body of the church, and the ceiling is usually occupied. Candles burn in front of them in brass sand-boxes. People come in, cross themselves, bow, and kiss the boards. Nobody explains this to newcomers, because for those who grew up with it there is nothing to explain.
Visitors from Reformed, evangelical and non-denominational backgrounds often arrive with a specific verse in mind, and they are right to. The second commandment is not an obscure objection dredged up to be awkward. It is in the Decalogue, it is emphatic, and a Christian who takes Scripture seriously is bound to ask about it. This article tries to give that question the answer it deserves rather than waving it away.
The commandment, read whole
The text is plain. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them” (Exodus 20:4–5, KJV). Read on its own, that appears to settle the matter, and no honest account of the Orthodox position can begin by pretending the verse is unclear.
What complicates it is the rest of the same Law. A few chapters later God commands Moses to make two cherubim of gold for the mercy seat, facing one another with outstretched wings (Exodus 25:18–20). Solomon’s temple was carved throughout with cherubim, palm trees and open flowers (1 Kings 6:29). In the wilderness Moses was told to make a bronze serpent and set it on a pole, so that anyone bitten might look at it and live (Numbers 21:8–9).
Nor does that end the argument in the other direction. Centuries later Hezekiah broke that same bronze serpent in pieces, because Israel had begun burning incense to it (2 Kings 18:4). Scripture therefore both commands the making of images and records the destruction of one. The commandment is not a prohibition on carving; it is a prohibition on giving to a made thing what belongs to the Maker. The real question is what an image is for, and what is being done in front of it.
What the Incarnation changed
The Orthodox answer turns on a claim about Christ, not about art. “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14, KJV). Saint Paul calls Christ “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15, KJV). Saint John begins his first letter with a deliberately physical list: that which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled.
Saint John of Damascus, writing in the eighth century while the controversy was raging, put the argument in two steps. First he concedes the objection entirely: “who can make an imitation of the invisible, incorporeal, uncircumscribed, formless God? Therefore to give form to the Deity is the height of folly and impiety.” That, he says, is exactly why images of God were uncommon under the Law. Then comes the turn: after God “became in truth man for our salvation” and lived on earth and was seen, what had been seen could be recorded (An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Book IV, ch. 16).
So the Orthodox position is not that the second commandment has been repealed. It is that God Himself has supplied the likeness which no human being could have invented. A Christian who paints Christ is not imagining the divine nature; he is depicting a man who was born in Bethlehem and crucified under Pontius Pilate. This is why the icon question has always been treated in the East as a question about whether the Incarnation was real.
The century the Church argued about it
The dispute was not a quiet one. From about the year 726 the Emperor Leo III began removing images from public places, and for most of the next century imperial policy ran against them. Monks and bishops who defended icons were deprived, exiled and in some cases killed. In 754 a large council meeting at Hieria condemned the making of images altogether, and its supporters believed they were purifying the Church of idolatry.
Those who defended icons argued back on Christological grounds. If Christ cannot be depicted, they said, then either His humanity was not full or His divinity was being confused with it. The argument ran for decades and cost people their lives on both sides.
In 787 the Empress Irene and the Patriarch Tarasius convened a council at Nicaea, which the Orthodox Church counts as the Seventh Ecumenical Council. Iconoclasm returned under Leo V from 815, and was ended for good in 843, when the Empress Theodora and the Patriarch Methodius restored the images. That restoration is still commemorated on the first Sunday of Great Lent as the Triumph of Orthodoxy, when parishes carry their icons in procession.
What the Seventh Council actually defined
The council did not simply say that icons were permitted. It made a distinction, in writing, and the distinction is the heart of the matter. Images of Christ, of the Mother of God, of the angels and of the saints are to be set up in churches and houses, and “to these should be given due salutation and honourable reverence” — the Greek is timetike proskynesis — “not indeed that true worship of faith (latreia) which pertains alone to the divine nature.”
Its reason is a principle Saint Basil had stated four centuries earlier: “For the honour which is paid to the image passes on to that which the image represents, and he who reveres the image reveres in it the subject represented.” An icon is not a terminus. Whatever is offered to it travels on.
Nicaea also answered the scriptural objection directly, by reading the commandment closely. It observed that Scripture says veneration is to be given to God but does not add the word “only”, since the Greek word covers everything from a bow between friends to the adoration of God; whereas when it comes to service, the text does add the restriction. “You shall serve him only,” the council quotes, “for to God alone do we render latria.” Readers who want to check this can read the council’s own words in English translation; the link is below.
What a person is doing when kissing an icon
Strip away the theology for a moment and watch what actually happens. A woman comes in from the street, puts down her shopping, crosses herself, bows, and kisses the corner of a painted board. She is doing what she would do to her mother at an airport. The council made this point itself, noting that the Greek verb means both to salute and to kiss, and citing David falling on his face before Jonathan and kissing him (1 Samuel 20:41, cited in the council’s text by its Greek numbering).
What is not happening is equally worth stating. Nobody believes the wood can hear. The board is wood, the paint is pigment bound in egg, and if the icon is destroyed the saint is not harmed. An icon is a meeting place, not a residence. The nearest ordinary comparison is the photograph a widow keeps by the bed and touches when she passes, though the comparison is incomplete, because the Church claims something more than sentiment: that the honour genuinely reaches the person, and that the saints are alive and praying.
In practice the gestures are simple, and a visitor is free to do none of them. Orthodox Christians cross themselves twice, kiss the icon — by custom on the hands, the feet or the edge of the garment rather than on the face — and cross themselves again. Candles are lit as a small offering and a prayer left burning. No one is watching to see whether a newcomer joins in.
Where the objection still has force
It would be dishonest to leave the impression that the danger the commandment names has never touched Orthodox life. It has. People do sometimes treat a particular icon as a charm, or an oil lamp as insurance, and the Church’s own ascetic writers have said so bluntly for centuries. Fr. Seraphim Rose, himself a convert, made the point about religious externals in general in a way that applies exactly here.
Anything outward … can become a counterfeit.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, quoted in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 63 (St. Herman Press, 2003)
The test the Church applies to itself
The safeguard is the one the council named, and it is testable. Listen to what is said in an Orthodox church and notice who is being addressed. The prayers before an icon of Christ are addressed to Christ. The prayers before an icon of a saint ask that saint to pray to Christ, in the same grammar a person uses when asking a friend to pray for him. No Orthodox prayer is addressed to a painting, and no Orthodox service treats a painting as a source of anything.
That is a claim a visitor can check rather than take on trust. Stand at the back of a Vigil, follow the text, and see whether what is said matches what is described here. If the words and the gestures ever come apart in a particular person, the fault is in the person, and the Church has never pretended otherwise.
Standing in the doorway
If you come from a tradition that has kept its walls bare out of reverence for the second commandment, nothing here is an accusation against you. That reverence is not a small thing, and the Orthodox Church spent a century fighting over the same worry. Where Orthodoxy has come out differently is on one point: it holds that when God took flesh He made Himself depictable, and the defenders of the icons held that refusing the image would, followed far enough, put the reality of that flesh in doubt. That is the Orthodox reasoning, set out to be weighed rather than pressed.
There is one more thing to say, and it is about us rather than about anyone reading. Arguments about icons are often lost before they begin, because what a stranger meets first is not the theology but the people standing under the paintings. Fr. Seraphim Rose, writing to an enquirer in 1980, put the responsibility where a parish ought to be willing to have it put, and this parish would rather quote him against itself than at anyone else.
perhaps it is our fault for not living and teaching the Orthodox Faith in a way they can understand
Fr. Seraphim Rose, letter of 27 November 1980, quoted in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 84 (St. Herman Press, 2003)