Nicaea II

Oversimplified

  • The Seventh Ecumenical Council (787), which ended the first iconoclast controversy and restored the veneration of icons.
  • Its key distinction: we venerate (honor) icons; we worship (adore) God alone — and the honor passes to the one depicted.

Summary

The Second Council of Nicaea (AD 787) is the seventh and last of the Ecumenical Councils. It resolved the iconoclast crisis, in which emperors had ordered the destruction of holy images as idolatry. The Council answered that making and venerating icons is not idolatry but a consequence of the Incarnation, and drew the decisive distinction between proskynesis (veneration, relative honor) rendered to icons and latreia (worship, adoration) due to God alone.[^1] Cross-link Icons, Design of Icons, The Incarnation.

Why images are not idols

"The Second Commandment forbids graven images — how is an icon not a violation?" The old prohibition stood because "you saw no form" when God spoke at Sinai (Deuteronomy 4.12-15) — the invisible cannot be pictured, and to try is to invent a false god. But in Christ, "the image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1.15), God took a face. St. John of Damascus draws the conclusion: he does not depict the invisible Godhead, but the flesh of God which was seen.[^2] To forbid the icon of Christ is, in effect, to deny that God truly became man. The Incarnation changed what may be depicted. Cross-link Icons.

Veneration is not worship

The Council carefully separated two acts our language blurs. The honor given an icon is relative — it "passes to the prototype," as St. Basil said of the imperial image;[^3] the one who kisses the icon of Christ worships Christ, not wood and paint. It is the honor a man shows a photograph of his mother, not the adoration owed God alone. Cross-link Invocation of Saints, Relics.

[^1]: The Decree (Horos) of the Second Council of Nicaea (787). [^2]: St. John of Damascus, On the Divine Images (Three Treatises). [^3]: St. Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit 18 — "the honor paid to the image passes to the prototype." Basil the Great