Ikons or idols?

earth, but it is also a place where earth meets heaven. We have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, where millions of angels have gathered for the festival, with the whole church where everyone is a first-born son and a citizen of heaven, with the spirits of the saints who have been made perfect (Hebrews 12:22-23), and when we enter a temple where all the walls are covered with ikons of Christ and the saints and angels, this is made visible to our senses.

The ikons are not simply for decoration; nor are they purely didactic, to teach the scriptures to the illiterate (though they do these things). Their primary purpose is to enable us to see what is normally unseen, to make visible what is normally invisible. So ikons are an intrinsic part of our faith; they are evidence of things hoped for (Hebrews 11:1).

So when the iconoclastic controversy finally ended, Orthodox Christians celebrated the "Triumph of Orthodoxy", and still do so, on the first Sunday of Lent each year, going in procession around the church with ikons.

Veneration and worship

We honour the ikons and greet those depicted there. But the ikon is a window, not a solid statue. The honour given to the image passes to the prototype. We may keep a photograph of someone we love, and, especially when we are far away from that person, the photo reminds us of them. We might even kiss the photo, if the absence has lasted a long time, but it is not the photo that we love, but the person shown in it. So with the ikons. We do not love them for themselves (which would be idolatry), but for the ones depicted on them.

So the Seventh Ecumenical Council decreed that ikons may be venerated, with honour (proskinesis) but we may not give them the worship (latria) that belongs to God alone. That latria is the "latry" in "idolatry".

The veneration of ikons, therefore, is nothing like idolatry, because it is ikons that draw us to worship God. Idolatry, on the contrary, is offering worship (latria) to something other than God, to something that is a substitute for God in our mind. Idolatry is when we worship and serve creatures rather than the creator (Romans 1:25), the gift rather than the giver. Ikons are not idols (except to those who collect them as works of art or as investments).

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