Feast Day icons: Lintula

After the Apostles

During the immense conflicts within the universal Church after the Council of Chalcedon, the icon became the banner of those who believed Christ was true God and true man. The miraculously ‘appeared’ imprint of the face of Christ on cloth, now believed by many to be identical with the Turin Shroud, was copied all over the Roman Empire, and the features of Christ became well known in the east and west. It is remarkable that after so many centuries, and paintings in so many different styles and traditions, we can still recognise - in all of them - the face of the Jew of Nazareth.

Nevertheless, it was in the east, faced with a jihad, formally declared against Constantinople, that the eastern emperors tried to hold together a splintering Empire by adopting the Jewish/Islamic attitude that depicting the godhead dishonours the godhead, who beyond any depiction.

The Blood of the Martyrs & the Christian Artist

In two immense and bloody purges the monks of the Christian east showed heroic bravery. St. John Damascene of the Damascus lavra and St. Theodore of the cenobitic Studite monastery in Constantinople, both of whom wrote treatises on the icon, were punished severely. Scores of Bishops were exiled, monks were drowned in sewn up sacks or tormented in torture chambers. The triumph of Orthodoxy (831CE) was the triumph of Christians everywhere. It was the triumph of the icon as a sign of the Incarnation versus a disembodied spirituality. The Orthodoxy maintained was orthodoxy to the faith of the undivided Apostolic Church.

Refectory : Joensuu

In the wake of it, monks and theologians, working together were at the forefront of maintaining and developing the tradition of the Christian artist - not as a commentator with an individual inspirational slant, but as a contributor to the liturgy. It was theologians, bishops and priests, working together as a team with artists, commonly monks, - drawn together in the aftermath of the bloodbath - who forged the principles of the Christian icon. This ‘baptism by blood,’ formed a unity between them which remains indissoluble in the Christian east, and with which there is nothing yet comparable in the west.

Orthodox chapel in Shropshire today

Schism : The Breaking of the United Tradition

The west had it own problems: the western Emperor, Charlemagne, was too concerned with the remains of paganism to distinguish between idolatry and icon. Quoting St. Gregory the Great, out of context, he insisted that arts be limited to a minor educational and decorative role - calling a Council to condemn users of icons as idolators, and largely ignoring the protest of the Pope in Rome. The upshot of this was that, at the Protestant Reformation, the magisterium was in no position to respond to the iconoclasm of western reformers with the same theological vigour with which the east had previously responded and, despite re-affirming the early Councils at Trent, the visual arts tended to remain devotional and decorative with a low theological input, dependent on personal inspiration. This has isolated the western artist - particularly if they happen to be a religious - in a way the eastern iconographer has never known.

This wide gulf between the understanding in east and west of who a Christian artist is and his/her function as a sacred person, remains a major stumbling block in dialogue with the Christian east and urgently needs to be addressed.