Word on the Feast of Orthodoxy

Exclusive. We are used to icons and pictures. We know that the ancient Christians did not have icons. The Old Testament specifically forbids any iconic images. "I am the Lord, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods but Me. 4 You shall not make for yourself an idol, nor any likeness of anything that is in the sky above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth" (Exodus 20: 2-3). Therefore, fundamental Protestants, referring to this passage of Scripture, deny the cultic use of religious images. Just in case, they refuse religious images in worship altogether. Orthodox Protestants, Lutherans and Anglicans use religious images in worship, crosses, icons and paintings. And the Orthodox (of all patriarchates and local churches) and Catholics have forms of veneration of religious images that look exactly like a cult. Especially taking into account the tradition of "miraculous images" (miraculous icons).

Baptism of the Holy Prince Volodymyr (1885-1896)

We will figure it out.

Feast of restoration of veneration of icons at the cathedral in 843. But it took a long time to establish it. When the Christian community began to accept many pagan believers, they brought with them their Greco-Roman culture. And in this culture there were things unusual for a Jew. For example, the culture of the image of a person and the culture of aestheticizing the human body. Many of our contemporaries imagine antiquity in the same way, as if the ancient Greeks and Romans were fitness models in white rags around their waists. This was certainly not the case. But the fact is that the statues and frescoes that have come down to us depicted idealized bodies; not as they were, but as they would like to see them. And ancient Christians lived next to this culture. In the catacombs you can find frescoes of ancient Christians. And this is ancient art. That the prophet Jonah, that the prophet Daniel in the lions' den are represented by beautiful (and sometimes even naked) athletes. Moreover, both plots refer to the Resurrection of Christ. But the Church still lives in the surrounding culture.

Does not create its own culture.

Only when several generations change does the Church begin to create its culture. Including the culture of images. And the frescoes of this period in the catacombs are attempts to spiritualize a person. Saints were depicted with big eyes and hands raised to the sky, and with deliberately distorted anatomy. I may disappoint many, but some of these images, the most popular Oranta, are most often images of specific buried people, and not at all the image of the Virgin Mary at the moment of the Annunciation.

Although images of the Annunciation and the Adoration of the Magi are also found. These images were not even then an object of worship. Most often, they are just decoration of tombs and prayer halls. Honoring the images will come later.

An important cultural distance must be mentioned here. For the pagans, the statues of the gods were not identical with the gods themselves, although popular "piety" usually equated the statues of the gods with the gods themselves. And with the help of simple mechanisms, the priests created statues that were mobile, or that "speak". But if there was a need, the statues were easily reworked. There was a statue of one deity, after a creative addition, it became another. They overthrew the emperor in the evening, and in the morning all his statues had their heads painted with the face of the new ruler of Rome. They did not see any problem in this. And the Church lived in this world.

Another head was added to the statue of Mercury, and now it is a statue of Saint Demetrius on a column in Venice. There is no profanity in this approach.

More precisely, it would be a kind of profanation if the statue were identical to the depicted person, but this is not the case. Respect for the image of the person did not mean respect for the substance. But in the east of the empire, the attitude of the pagans to the statues of the gods was more "reverent", and they also treated various kinds of material shrines more piously than in the West. And the identification of a specific shrine and deity was much more pronounced than in the West. Therefore, precisely with the arrival of many converts in the east of the empire, the problem of icono-latria - the worship (not veneration) of images appears.

Here everyone should distinguish veneration ("dulia") from worship ("latria"). In this sense, we can worship only one God. It is the fact of service, i.e. the consecration of one's whole life, the placing of one's hope, that is understood by the term of worshiping God in sense of the second commandment of the Decalogue.

We worship only God, and the reverence we show towards the Mother of God and the saints is certainly useful for the salvation of the soul, this matter is not subject to any condemnation.

It is important to note here that the Greek word "Ekon" is an image in general. Any. A relief, a statue, a picture on a board, a fresco. And the literal worship of images began. Paint was scraped from the icons and added to medicine and food and even to the Holy Communion. That is, they began to read the very material of the icons. Icons were taken as witnesses in transactions. They appointed baptized babies and made wills for them. Even before the beginning of iconoclasm, Anastasius Sinait (7th century) wrote: "many people think that baptism is sufficiently respected by those who, upon entering the church, kiss all the icons, not paying attention to the liturgy and worship." A century and even a millennium and a half have passed, but little has changed.

Naturally, among the educated clergy and aristocrats, a skeleton was formed that wanted church reform, under the slogan "back to the origins." In addition, Islam arose in the Arab East, which was mistakenly considered another Christological heresy at first. Islam categorically rejected images of living beings, including people and animals.

After the first military victories of the Muslims over the Byzantine Empire, the Greeks began to try to negotiate, to seek a compromise. And the need for a compromise with Muslims pushed to abandon the veneration of icons. Another factor, the emperors of Constantinople were concerned with the authority of the Church. An independent church was an uncomfortable factor for them. Willy-nilly, the hierarchy interfered with the omnipotence of the emperor. Therefore, there was also a desire to "press the church" with the help of reforms.

And then the era of "iconoclasm" (eikono-machia) begins. The toughest "Kulturkampf". A huge number of works of art were destroyed during this period in the most barbaric way. The revered statue of Christ on a column in Constantinople was thrown down and broken, and a statue of a charioteer, beloved by the emperor, was placed on its pedestal. Mass destruction of religious images caused riots. Cutting off the hands of artists for creating religious images is the mildest episode in the chronicle of terror that took place on the territory of the Eastern Empire.

It was then that the Pope of Rome, St. Gregory the Great, when iconoclasm was still only an initiative of individual priests and bishops, formulated the need for religious images in this way: "an icon is the Bible for the illiterate." When iconoclasm was in full swing, Pope Gregory III in 731 excommunicated Emperor Leo and all iconoclasts. Only a generation later, in 787, the Ecumenical Council in Nicaea restored the veneration of icons with the following formula: "for the honor given to the image passes to the original, and veneration of the icon is veneration of the essence of what is depicted on it." But it was a political appeasement of the warring parties.

Then there will be a second iconoclastic period. But only in 843 at the cathedral in Constantinople icon-worship will be fully restored. The relics of famous confessors St. Theodore the Studite and St. Patriarch Nicephorus, who suffered for his faith and died in exile. Empress Feodora and her son and the entire court came out to meet the relics, carrying candles in their hands. They followed the relics on foot to the Basilica of the Twelve Apostles.

If we talk about shrines, then in Christian theology, icons are only images, but not shrines. God does not "live" in icons. Unfortunately, we are given a serious foothold here by the Orthodox theologians of the 20th century, who developed the theology of the presence of God in the shrines. Where, upon superficial reading, it turns out that Divine grace is accumulated in icons, as it were.

Of course, such theology is unknown to the Fathers of the Seventh Council. But even if we analyze this theology, we will see that according to it, God is not present in the sanctuaries essentially, but only by action - "grace" or "energy". Unfortunately, many modern Christians are victims of the Soviet materialist school and understand grace and energy to be something like benevolent radiation. In Byzantine theology, this is certainly not the case. Therefore, the object of worship in the Christian cult is God and only Him.

All religious images are only meant to remind people about God. In this sense, the Bible is also an icon. An image of God, described in words, which helps a person fix his attention on God.

After all, it is the same with the Bible. A person can easily start praying not to God, but to the image of God that he has created for himself in his head. The image was created even on the basis of the Bible. It is very important to realize this distance.

If Jesus Christ met an artist, and then there was quite realistic art, we would know what He looked like. But thank God it didn't happen. We would become slaves to a specific image of the image, the length of the nose and the color of the eyes. We would worship the image, not the personality. It is very easy for us to "dismember Christ." Maybe that's why God didn't allow any artist to make at least a sketch.

And what about the "Shroud of Turin"? Fortunately, the person on this canvas is quite blurred. Even in the negative, this image does not have a specific portrait characteristic. There are many reconstructions from the Shroud of Turin, which are similar to each other only in the length of the nose, hair and beard. There is also the so-called "average inhabitant of first-century Palestine", whose face they try to insert into religious images. And it's not serious either. But all this shows us how prone we are to idolatry. This is exactly what God's commandment to Moses is about. Do not worship anything and anyone but God.

But how to worship the invisible, incomprehensible God? Ideally, of course, one would like to achieve complete spiritual contemplation of God, where worship is connected with deep admiration for the greatness of God. There are believers who experienced such states, but briefly (even the great prophet Moses himself).

But in our ordinary life we ​​come to God through reason and emotion. And the trouble is that in the search for contemplation of God, we can easily and casually deceive ourselves and inject serotonin into our brains and convince ourselves that we have touched the mystery of the Godhead, and this would be idolatry. We are material, we need form. We dress feelings in thoughts, thoughts in words. We give form with words. And we create a ceremony.

The rite comes from the word "ryadno", that is, clothes. The clothes of our religiosity, mind, faith and feelings. They must save us from self-deception. Such is the paradox.

In order to be saved from idolatry, an icon is needed. The main thing is to realize that the icon is not God. As the nameplate says, 220W is not electricity. And God here gives us freedom of creativity.

We adopted biblical symbols of God's presence from antiquity, light - candles, lamps, fragrant incense smoke, water. And forms of behavior of the human body in the presence of God, bowing, standing and raising hands, like figures on the frescoes in the catacombs. And what about Michelangelo? Did he sin by portraying a muscular old man when he portrayed God the Creator?

It should be understood that there is also symbolic art. The ancient Jews were protected from such complexity as the distinction between genres and types of art. But we understand how to consider the message addressed to us by Maestro Buonarotti. If you look closely, God the Creator on the fresco of the creation of Adam is encased in a cloak that repeats the outline of the human brain. According to the maestro, God addresses man through reason. You can argue about this idea, you can just keep silent. We perfectly understand that this is only a symbol far from God, but addressed to our mind. This would not have happened with the ancient Jews. Mankind was young then, and any image of God automatically became an idol.

But we are God's people, we grew and developed. Icon worshipers, who turned icons into idols, and many other disasters also survived. We will survive those that will come. Today is a wonderful holiday, the Feast of Orthodoxy.

We have already solved the issue with the cult of icons. But there is another important spiritual and moral question. And what does this whole story with iconoclasm teach us?

She teaches us "not to throw out the baby with the bathwater." And speaking in scientific language, it teaches to distinguish what should be - the norm, and what has turned out due to stupidity and sinfulness - excess. Distinguish between use and abuse. Understand that abuse should not be a reason to prohibit use. That banning the use of religious images is like the idea that if all sharp objects were banned in the world, murders would disappear. They will not disappear. Because the reason for the murders is not the presence of sharp objects, but the evil that lives in the human heart.

And the reason for idolatry is not the presence of idols at all. The reason for idolatry is the human desire to privatize God. Make God your property. And this desire is the sublimation of unbelief and lack of love. Love does not want to privatize anyone.

This desire to privatize God was ridiculed by the Old Testament prophets. This is what drives those who worship the created image, the kind of people who want God to be obligated to be with them. And this is a mistake. The celebration of Orthodoxy is a celebration of love.

When we love God, we want to be with him, not privatize him. We want to be his children, and we do not want to appropriate him, that is exactly what Orthodoxy is.

Hieromonk Feofan (Skorobagatov) of Polotsk, doctor of theological sciences