Icons are symbols. Late-ancient conceptions of the symbolic are quite far afield from the contemporary colloquial usage of the term. Symbols, in the ancient near-eastern philosophical register, especially that out of which Christianity was born, were not mere mnemonics, as if they were simply there to direct the memory to previously learned truths. A “symbol,” as its etymology suggests, brings two things—two realities—together. Usually, this combination of realities is asymmetrical; that is, it takes some lower or seemingly arbitrary thing and saturates it with the higher. For late-ancient Christians, there was nothing arbitrary about the relationship between the symbol and that which is symbolized. This is perhaps seen most acutely in how Christians, both ancient and modern, have revered the sacraments of the Church. Leaving aside for the moment extreme cases, Christians have largely agreed over the centuries that converts should be baptized in water, the eucharist should be confected of bread and wine, ordination should include a laying on of hands, etc. The material elements of the Church’s sacramental life do not exist as mere object lessons, though they can perform this pedagogical function as well. Water, as an example, hearkens back to the primordial and chaotic deep of Genesis 1, against which God created the heavens and the earth; the seas through which God’s people passed from slavery toward promise; and the very, shall we say “damp,” experience of birth itself. The water of baptism, into which Christ himself was baptized, becomes the means by which a person is reborn.

Similarly, the conciliar Church’s sacred art of iconography is not merely art (though it is not less than this). After a series of synods and counter-synods, conciliar Christians met in Nicaea (787) to affirm not the beauty or pedagogical efficacy of Christian iconography, but its theological necessity. The making of icons, the council affirmed, was a dogmatic consequence of the incarnation itself. The Church could no more dispense with iconography than it could with the affirmation of Christ’s full humanity and divinity. The incarnation of the Logos sanctified not only Christ’s individual body and humanity, but the entire sensible and intelligible cosmos. Icons, then, could not be reduced to mere paint on wood, or treated as the idols of the pagans, any more than the water of baptism could be reduced to the mere consequence of rainfall. Icons beckon the viewer into a dialogue. They are an invitation to engage their own beauty and then to pass beyond it with the eyes of the heart to an eternal reality: that the invisible and uncontainable God is seen and contained within the body of Christ.

As profound as this reality can be, it does not answer with any clarity why it is that humans make images. It was the twentieth-century theologian Sergius Bulgakov who first brought to my attention a particular historical anomaly. In his work Icons, he asks what theological impetus there might be for the phenomenon of image making more broadly and what separates it from the images prohibited by the decalogue. He notes in this work that the hierarchs at Nicaea (787) canonized a liturgical, rather than dogmatic, teaching, since neither iconoclasts nor icondules, as the advocates of icons were called, denied the incarnational doctrine on which the theology of icons is based. His fundamental intuition was that there was something deeper left for the Church to say on the matter.

There is a certain antinomy between the production of icons and the Christian affirmation of a transcendent God. Christians affirm with the great pseudonymous saint called Dionysius the Areopagite that even to say that God is good, or righteous, or that he even exists, is a failure. Gregory of Nyssa anticipated this when he wrote in On Virginity, “Anyone who tries to describe the ineffable Light in language is truly a liar—not because he hates the truth but because of the inadequacy of his description.” With this commitment to God’s total otherness from the visible world, how does it come to be that the Church sees icons as a theological necessity?