#Will graven windows#

The Son is the identical image of the invisible God man’s created nature is a copy of God’s, the uncreated the creation dimly reflects the divine. Sacred images are means of instruction in the faith, memorials of Christian lives, incitements to lead a good life, and channels of grace by their sacramental power. To argue that images are impermissible, according to John, is to say that matter is evil.

Christians, he said, do not live under the old covenant, which prohibited images, but under the new age of grace. John argues that an image of the invisible God would be serious error, but that an image of the incarnate God is different, for Christ assumed human flesh. He carefully distinguishes between adoration ( latreia) - due to God alone - and veneration ( proskunesis) in its various degrees, a sign of the subordination and lowliness of the venerator. From 726–730, John of Damascus emerged as the chief iconodule theologian. On the iconostasis itself - standing between heaven and earth - are several levels of icons, representing a great cloud of witnesses, pointing to the church opening out to eternity. Although divided by the iconostasis, these two are considered parts of one whole, the meeting place of heaven and earth. The nave, where the congregation stands, is the image of the human world and all that is in it.

Only the clergy can enter the sanctuary no woman can go in. The iconostasis divides the sanctuary - the area behind it - from the congregation. To this day, the most prominent feature in an Eastern Orthodox church is the iconostasis, a tall screen across the whole room, towards the front. Latin had but one word, adoro, to translate both terms it seemed to imply idolatrous worship. However, the iconoclasts failed to appreciate the iconodule distinction between latreia (worship, adoration) and proskunesis (veneration of images). These books rejected both the iconoclast council of 754 and the iconodule (those in support of icons) Nicaea II Empress Irene had no right to teach men or call a council. Charles the Great had the Libri Carolini drawn up, which argued that only God can be adored the principle that veneration is given to the image because of its relationship to the original is false and misleads simple people. The council aroused opposition from the newly powerful Frankish Kingdom. Images were to be given “honorable reverence, not indeed that true worship of faith which pertains only to the divine nature…for the honor 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.” The council anathematized any who equated images with idols. It ordered the restoration of images, since they showed the incarnation was real. When Empress Irene came to de facto power, she called a council in 787. He called a council in 754 that condemned images as blaspheming the incarnation. The only real image of Christ is the one he gave us, the Eucharist. If it portrays Christ in both natures, his deity is reduced to the level of humanity. Emperor Constantine V argued that if an image pictures only Christ’s human nature, it severs his humanity from his person. The Quinisext Council of 692 decreed that Christ was to be depicted in human form “so that we may perceive through it the depth of the humiliation of God.” Leontius of Neapolis saw images of Christ as an extension - a reenactment - of the incarnation.

#Will graven windows#

What caused these convulsions? In the previous century, images were increasingly seen as windows to the spiritual world icons of Christ and the saints became objects of devotion, actively promoted by the church. The papacy was forced to ally with the Franks, rather than the East, for iconoclasm was alien to the West. Monks were publicly lashed to death or had their nostrils slit one was torn to pieces by a mob, while Patriarch Constantine of Constantinople was publicly beheaded. Even then, a revival of iconoclasm followed and only in 843 was the turmoil finally ended by Patriarch Methodius, an occasion marked thereafter as the Feast of Orthodoxy. Not until the Empress Irene called the second council of Nicea in 787 was the issue settled in favor of images. In 726, Emperor Leo’s order to destroy the image of Christ at the imperial palace provoked a riot, and a long and virulent controversy engulfed the Eastern church.