St. Theodore and the Holy Icons
Today (Nov. 12), we celebrate the feast of St. Theodore the Studite (d. 826). To say that Theodore’s biography is complicated would be an understatement. Born into a family with strong ties to imperial bureaucracy, he was a monastic founder who was also embroiled in the politics of his day. He fell in and out of favor with the ruling monarchs (he was exiled three times), in no small part due to his criticism of the divorce and remarriage of Emperor Constantine VI and his unwavering support of the use of icons in Christian worship and devotion. In short, unless you were an expert on the late Byzantine empire you probably could not get a good grasp of the complexities of the historical events in which Theodore was involved.
But this fact about Theodore’s life should in and of itself give us some cause for hope, and provide us with some perspective on our own times. Because, although Theodore lived in a world every bit as messy as our own, he managed to emerge as a saint – and, in truth, his legacy is quite straightforward. Theodore is remembered as the great defender of icons. The feast of the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” celebrated in the Eastern churches on the first Sunday of lent, commemorates the end of the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy (in 843). It is a celebration of the restoration of icons to their churches, and it would indeed be difficult to imagine an Orthodox church without them nowadays. This is the triumph in which Theodore played a heroic role.
What is at stake in the use of images in our churches? This question, despite the triumph of Orthodoxy, is still very much with us in the West today due to the Protestant Reformation. In his work On the Holy Icons, Theodore makes clear that what is at stake is not idolatry (as his opponents claim) nor even the proper function of art as such. What is at stake is a correct understanding of the incarnation. Theodore’s overall argument is simple: God made himself visible in Christ, and so we may make images of him.
It is indeed something to marvel at that we can depict Christ and say that we are depicting God, but it is more startling still that God should have become a human being. It is true that God has no bounds says Theodore, but he was wrapped in swaddling clothes. It is true that God cannot be touched and yet he was touched by his disciples. It is true that God cannot suffer and yet he was crucified. [1] It is therefore true that God is invisible, and yet we may paint him. We set our faces towards these paradoxes when we behold the icon of the Lord. Theodore explains that if we think of images as dangerous or even as frivolous, we deny what God has done for us in the incarnation, and how God has willed to teach us about himself:
If merely mental contemplation were sufficient, it would have been sufficient for Him to come to us in a merely mental way; and consequently we would have been cheated by the appearance both of his deeds … and of his sufferings. But enough of this! As flesh He suffered in the flesh, He ate and drank likewise and did all the other things which every man does, except for sin.[2]
In short, we depict the Lord because he depicted himself in human flesh for our sake. The Lord came among us because we needed to see him with our eyes in order to reform our hearts.
On this feast of St. Theodore, then, let us not take for granted our images and icons. To take them for granted and to fail to give them the respect and veneration which is due to them is to reject God’s will in teaching us by our senses. Let us also not take for granted the beauty that Theodore fought to preserve, the beauty that we find in our churches and in our homes – the beauty that is God become man, which we can glimpse and contemplate by our human art.
