Fractured Windows: Reassessing the Early Church’s Resistance to Icons

J. Neil Daniels

A Shaky Claim to Continuity

The appeal of Eastern Orthodoxy, particularly for evangelicals adrift in a sea of denominational flux, lies in its claim of pristine continuity. Orthodoxy presents itself as the faith of the apostles unchanged, the church eternal, the original pattern preserved without distortion. When Hank Hanegraaff, the "Bible Answer Man," was chrismated at St. Nektarios Greek Orthodox Church in Charlotte on Palm Sunday 2017, and when Peter Gillquist led some two thousand members of the Evangelical Orthodox Church into the Antiochian Archdiocese in 1987, the testimony was the same: they had found the early church.¹ The promise is intoxicating. No more squabbles over sola fide or episcopal polity, no more doctrinal innovation, only the unbroken stream of faith flowing back to Jerusalem.²

Icons test that promise more severely than any other practice, because Orthodoxy has bound itself to a historical claim about them. The Second Council of Nicaea (787), which the Orthodox count as the Seventh Ecumenical Council, told the emperors that sacred images were to be accepted "as from the beginning God's holy catholic church inherited."³ Popular piety extends the line back to Luke the Evangelist painting the Virgin. The testimony of archaeology, the fathers, and the early councils tells another story: deep unease with images, an aniconism of several shades, and a slow, contested rise of image veneration that makes its later triumph in Byzantium look more like rupture than preservation. Richard Price, a Catholic priest and the translator of Nicaea II's Acts, concedes the point. The iconoclast claim that reverence toward images did not go back to the golden age of the fathers, still less to the apostles, "would be judged by impartial historians today to be simply correct."⁴

Defining the Question: Art or Icon?

The most basic confusion in this debate is terminological. An icon is not any image whatever. Frescoes in a catacomb or a mosaic floor in a synagogue do not automatically qualify. Icons, in the sense Nicaea II defended, are images that receive veneration: bowing, kissing, lights, incense, and prayer offered before them and, through them, to the one depicted. Orthodox theologians call them windows into heaven. That early Christians made art is not in dispute. The question is when, and by whom, that art became an object of devotion.

Three categories keep the evidence honest: the production of images, their use for teaching and memory, and their cultic veneration. Evidence for the first two does not establish the third. The Orthodox rejoinder deserves a hearing here. Hans Georg Thümmel, whom Price follows, argues that late antique piety drew no clear boundary between setting up a holy image and venerating it, so that the existence of icons is itself prima facie evidence of cult.⁵ Price adds at once that deductions from physical objects remain speculative, and he faults Ernst Kitzinger for folding related practices, such as the use of images to ward off evil, into the category of veneration.⁶ The distinctions belong to the historians themselves, and without them a painted shepherd on a cup becomes proof of a cult no text describes.

The Jewish Backdrop: A Culture of Guardrails

The roots of Christian suspicion toward images lie in Judaism. Josephus recounts the uproar when Pontius Pilate brought standards bearing the emperor's image into Jerusalem by night. A crowd lay before his tribunal at Caesarea for five days and, when surrounded by soldiers, bared their necks rather than see the law violated.⁷ Coins tell the same tale. Greek and Roman currency flaunted gods and emperors, while the Hasmoneans, Herod the Great, and the rebels of 66–70 confined themselves to palm branches, pomegranates, cornucopias, and inscriptions. Herod's son Philip placed the emperor's portrait on his coins because he ruled a largely Gentile territory, and the exception illuminates the rule.⁸

Jewish practice was not static. After the fall of the temple, synagogues at Dura-Europos in the third century and Sepphoris in the fifth carried extensive figural decoration, from Moses and the prophets to the zodiac.⁹ Rabbinic law made room for this through the same distinction this essay presses. The Mishnah records Rabban Gamaliel bathing in the bath of Aphrodite at Acco and answering a critic that the statue served as ornament for the bath, and that what is treated as a god is forbidden while what is not so treated is permitted.¹⁰ Decoration was tolerable. Devotion was forbidden. The first Christians were Jews formed by Torah and by this line between ornament and worship, and it is implausible that they abandoned the line at the moment they confessed the God of Israel incarnate. The evidence suggests they carried it with them.

Origen Against Celsus: The Absence of Images as Apology

Origen's Contra Celsum, written around 248, offers one of the clearest views of early Christian self-understanding. Celsus, writing some seventy years earlier, had mocked Christians for refusing to tolerate temples, altars, and images.¹¹ Pagan worship, he argued, was no folly, since the educated knew their statues to be offerings and representations and never mistook them for gods.¹² Origen did not answer by producing a painting by Luke or a venerated image in some church. He accepted the charge and made it a boast. Christians and Jews, he wrote, avoid temples, altars, and images because God commands that he alone be served and forbids the making of idols; the only statues Christians erect are the virtues the Word forms in them, and the true image of God is Christ himself.¹³

The exchange is revealing in another way. Celsus's defense, that the worshiper looks through the image to what it represents, sits close to the argument the iconophiles later drew from Basil, that the honor paid to the image passes to its prototype. In the third century a pagan made that argument and a Christian theologian refused it. Origen's later condemnation makes him easy to dismiss, but his testimony here concerns the practice of his own church, described to a pagan readership that knew what Christians did and did not keep in their meeting places.

The Council of Elvira: A Conciliar Prohibition

If Origen shows the mind of a Christian intellectual, the Council of Elvira in southern Spain, usually dated around 305 (proposals range from about 295 to 314), shows pastoral policy. Its thirty-sixth canon reads: "It is decided that there should be no pictures in church, lest what is worshiped and adored be painted on the walls" (Placuit picturas in ecclesia esse non debere, ne quod colitur et adoratur in parietibus depingatur).¹⁴

The canon is local, and its final clause is ambiguous. It may forbid pictures lest they become objects of worship, or it may forbid painting on walls the God who is worshiped. Orthodox apologists exploit that ambiguity and dismiss Elvira as a provincial synod. Neither move helps them. On either reading the bishops judged that pictures had no place in the church building, and on either reading the canon excludes the veneration of painted images. It also concedes something honest historians should concede with it, since synods do not legislate against what no one is doing. Pictures had begun to appear in some Spanish churches, and the bishops wanted them out.¹⁵

Epiphanius Tears the Curtain

Toward the end of the fourth century Epiphanius of Salamis dramatized the same conviction. In a letter to Bishop John of Jerusalem, preserved in Jerome's Latin translation, he recounts stopping at a church in the village of Anablatha and finding at its door a curtain dyed with an image of Christ or one of the saints; he did not remember which. Unwilling that the image of a man should hang in the church of Christ contrary to the teaching of the Scriptures, he tore it down and told the caretakers to use it as a winding sheet for some poor man. He asked John to see that such curtains, "which are contrary to our religion," were no longer hung in the church.¹⁶

A second body of anti-image writings attributed to Epiphanius, which the iconoclasts cited in the eighth century, met a different fate: Nicaea II dismissed them as forgeries.¹⁷ Karl Holl defended their authenticity in 1916, George Ostrogorsky attacked it in 1929, and the question remains open.¹⁸ Price reports that Thümmel judged the case for authenticity the stronger, and he observes that a forgery of such extent and quality would be a stylistic masterpiece beyond anything the eighth century is known to have produced.¹⁹ Kitzinger, declining to decide the disputed fragments, noted that even the most skeptical scholars did not doubt that Epiphanius opposed religious images.²⁰ The Orthodox church venerates Epiphanius as a saint. He hardly fits the profile of a crypto-heretic, and his act at Anablatha matches the line drawn at Elvira: art might exist, but not in the place of worship and not as an object of veneration.

The Basil Problem: A Misappropriated Prooftext

Orthodox defenders often quote Basil of Caesarea: "the honor paid to the image passes to the prototype." It sounds made for icon theology. Basil was explaining how Father and Son receive one honor. His analogy was the emperor's portrait, which is called emperor without there being two emperors, so that honor given the portrait redounds to the emperor.²¹ He borrowed the analogy from a practice his contemporaries took for granted, the ceremonial honors paid to the imperial image, which Kitzinger identifies as one of the channels through which image veneration later entered the church.²² Basil's subject was consubstantiality. Price's verdict on this passage and on the related texts from Athanasius is that each argued for the worship of Christ as the Father's image, and "none of them addressed the question of images made by hands."²³

The oft-cited Letter 360 is another matter. There "Basil" tells Julian the Apostate that he honors and venerates the features of the saints' images "especially because this was handed down and not forbidden by the holy apostles." The letter survives only in iconophile florilegia and is agreed to be a forgery from the period of the iconoclast controversy.²⁴ Price calls it the one clear forgery of iconophile origin among the golden-age texts read at Nicaea II.²⁵ It is also the only sentence in the council's patristic dossier that claims apostolic transmission for the veneration of images. The real Basil left no evidence of icon veneration. The forger knew what was missing.

Archaeology and Its Limits

What of the Dura-Europos house church, the perennial exhibit of Orthodox apologetics? Destroyed in 256, it holds the earliest datable Christian paintings: the Good Shepherd, Adam and Eve, the healing of the paralytic, Christ and Peter on the water, the women approaching the tomb. They decorate the baptistery. The larger assembly room, where the congregation gathered for the Eucharist, yielded no figural painting.²⁶ Critics of icons have sometimes claimed that the paintings were confined to ancillary rooms, and that claim should be dropped, since a baptistery is liturgical space. What the paintings show is their function. They are narrative scenes of salvation around a font, a sermon on the walls for those going down into the water. Nothing in the room suggests they were kissed, lit, or prayed to.

Catacomb art offers similar glimpses of Christian hope: Jonah and the fish, Noah in the ark, Daniel among the lions, the Good Shepherd. These are images of deliverance on tombs, and none shows signs of cult. The first veneration of Christian images that the literary record attests belongs to the margins. Irenaeus, writing around 180, reports that the Carpocratian Gnostics kept painted and sculpted images of Christ, one of them supposedly made by Pilate, and that they crowned these images and set them beside likenesses of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, honoring them after the manner of the Gentiles.²⁷ The earliest known crowned image of Christ belonged to heretics, and Irenaeus reported it as a mark of their paganizing.

By the end of the fourth century the practice had crept into the church itself, and a father condemned it. Around 388 Augustine, answering the Manichees, admitted that he knew many "worshipers of tombs and pictures" (sepulcrorum et picturarum adoratores) and counted them among the superstitious whom the church condemns and daily labors to correct.²⁸ Kitzinger calls this the first unambiguous notice of Christians worshiping pictures.²⁹ It arrives as a rebuke. Archaeology cannot tell us how images were used. The literary evidence fills the gap, and where it shows veneration, it shows the church's teachers resisting it.

Eusebius and the Letter to Constantia

Eusebius of Caesarea left the most explicit fourth-century statement. When Constantia, the emperor's sister, asked him for an image of Christ, he answered with a series of questions. Did she want the true and unchangeable form, which no one can paint? Or the form of the servant that Christ assumed for our sake, now transformed into the glory of the Godhead? Even that, he argued, falls under the commandment against making a likeness of anything in heaven or on earth. "Is this not something that throughout the world is banned and banished far from the churches?" He adds that he once took from a woman two figures painted as philosophers, whom she called Paul and the Savior, and kept them lest "we might seem, like worshippers of idols, to carry around our God on an image."³⁰

The iconophiles answered by branding Eusebius an Arian and, it appears, by suppressing the letter's text from the published Acts of Nicaea II.³¹ Price rejects the maneuver. The letter is generally admitted to be authentic, its central argument that the glorified Christ cannot be represented was a perfectly orthodox view in the fourth century (Gregory of Nyssa says much the same thing), and Eusebius's semi-Arianism is irrelevant to it.³² Georges Florovsky traced the theological roots of Byzantine iconoclasm to this Origenist and Eusebian tradition.³³

Eusebius did not pretend images were unknown. He reports that at Caesarea Philippi a bronze group stood before the house of the woman healed of the flow of blood, a kneeling woman before a standing man identified as Jesus, and that he had seen painted portraits of Peter, Paul, and Christ preserved into his own day. He explains both as the habit of Gentile converts who honored their benefactors after their old custom.³⁴ A century later the historian Philostorgius, describing the same statue after its removal into a church, took pains to insist that it received respect and never proskynēsis.³⁵ Both men knew the difference between having an image and venerating one, and both placed Christian practice on the near side of that line.

The Myth of Luke's Brush

The tradition that Luke painted the first icon of the Virgin is perhaps the most transparent anachronism. Its earliest notice, an excerpt attributed to the sixth-century historian Theodore Lector about an image sent from Jerusalem to Constantinople, is of uncertain reliability, and Kitzinger, following Ernst von Dobschütz's exhaustive study, judged that images ascribed to Luke probably did not surface before the era of iconoclasm.³⁶ The legend serves an obvious polemical function, anchoring veneration in apostolic origins. Augustine, writing on the Trinity in the early fifth century, knew nothing of it. The face of the Lord's flesh, he observed, is imagined in countless different ways, and "we do not know the face of the Virgin Mary" (neque enim novimus faciem virginis Mariae).³⁷ Had a portrait by Luke existed, the most learned bishop of the West would hardly have written that sentence.

Spectrum of Aniconism

What emerges is a spectrum. Clement of Alexandria attacked pagan statues relentlessly, yet he allowed Christians signet rings engraved with a dove, a fish, a ship, a lyre, or an anchor.³⁸ The Apostolic Tradition, traditionally ascribed to Hippolytus of Rome, required a sculptor or painter seeking baptism to be taught not to make idols and to stop or be rejected.³⁹ Tertullian, by then a Montanist, sneered at the bishop he was attacking for drinking from a chalice painted with the Good Shepherd. The detail cuts two ways: by the early third century a shepherd could decorate a eucharistic cup, and a rigorist could despise it.⁴⁰ Elvira kept pictures off church walls. Eusebius knew of portraits and forbade their use. In the sixth century Hypatius of Ephesus, answering a suffragan troubled that paintings in his churches were receiving proskynēsis, tolerated them as a concession to simple believers.⁴¹

These positions differ, and honesty requires admitting that images spread faster than the rigorists liked. They share a common denominator all the same. Before the late sixth century no father of the church commends the veneration of images, and several condemn it. Orthodox apologists often frame the choice as binary: either an iconophobia so radical it would outlaw family photographs, or the full practice of Nicaea II. The early church lived in the middle ground. It permitted decoration and resisted devotion.

Why the Silence Speaks

The strongest evidence against the Orthodox claim is silence where speech would be expected. Had venerated images belonged to Christian worship from the start, Origen would have produced them for Celsus, Eusebius could not have told an empress that such things were banished from churches throughout the world, and Basil would have listed them among the unwritten traditions he defended: signing with the cross, praying toward the east, the words of the epiclesis, triple immersion. Images are absent from his list. When Nicaea II assembled its dossier, it produced no text earlier than Athanasius and no golden-age father who explicitly approved veneration.⁴² Kitzinger found that the Cappadocian fathers, who celebrated relics and the cross, never mention the worship of images even to oppose it.⁴³

The argument from silence has limits, and it cannot be stretched into a claim that the early church had no art. Paul Corby Finney, who writes that "no distinctly Christian art predates the year 200," argues that the delay reflects the social and economic circumstances of the first Christians and owes nothing to theological aversion, and Mary Charles Murray has challenged the older view that the early church was hostile to art as such.⁴⁴ Their revision corrects older Protestant polemic that treated all early Christian art as a lapse. It leaves the question of veneration where it was. Finney's Christians painted Jonah on their tombs. No one has found them bowing to him.

A Late Development

Kitzinger's survey places the decisive change in the generations after Justinian. Evidence for the cult of images before the late sixth century is, in his words, "scattered and spotty"; afterward the literary record of miracle-working icons, protective images, and images not made by hands grows enormously.⁴⁵ The earliest evidence of veneration that Nicaea II itself could present came from saints' lives written after 610.⁴⁶ By the eighth century icons were integral to Byzantine worship, and John of Damascus gave them a sophisticated defense: the Incarnation sanctifies matter, honor passes to the prototype, the humanity of Christ may be depicted. Those arguments deserve an answer as theology. As history they represent development, and they arose because an older aniconic instinct still lingered and had to be overcome. The legend of Luke's brush, the forged Basil letter, the dismissal of Epiphanius, the attack on Eusebius's orthodoxy: each betrays a consciousness of rupture.

Conclusion: Continuity or Reinvention?

The Orthodox church today stands draped in icons. To enter an Orthodox sanctuary is to step into a forest of holy faces, painted saints gazing back from the iconostasis, and for the faithful these images are as close as one comes to heaven on earth.

History tells a more complicated tale. The early church inherited from Judaism a firm line between ornament and worship, and it policed that line. A council kept pictures off church walls, a bishop tore down a painted curtain, a historian refused an empress an image of Christ, an apologist defended imageless worship against a pagan critic, and the greatest Latin father counted picture-worshipers among the superstitious. Images multiplied anyway, and by the seventh century the line had moved. What Byzantium embraced was a late and contested development, and the continuity Orthodoxy claims for it is illusory.

That need not trouble every Orthodox believer. Some see in tradition a living organism capable of growth, and that argument can be debated on its own terms. It is a different argument from the one Nicaea II made, and a different one from what converts are offered when they are told they have found the early church. For those who appeal to unbroken continuity, the evidence runs the other way. The windows into heaven were installed centuries after the foundation was laid.

Notes

Rod Dreher, "Bible Answer Man Embraces Orthodoxy," American Conservative, April 11, 2017; Peter E. Gillquist, "Retrospect on the EOC Reception into the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese," The Word, September 2007.
Jonathan M. Pitts, "Conversions Gradually Transforming Orthodox Christianity," Baltimore Sun, June 24, 2017.
Richard Price, trans., The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787), Translated Texts for Historians 68 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018), 38.
Price, Acts of Nicaea, 43.
Price, Acts of Nicaea, 6.
Price, Acts of Nicaea, 2, 6.
Josephus, Jewish War 2.169–74; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18.55–59.
Ya'akov Meshorer, A Treasury of Jewish Coins: From the Persian Period to Bar Kokhba (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press; Nyack, NY: Amphora, 2001).
Carl H. Kraeling, The Synagogue, The Excavations at Dura-Europos, Final Report 8, pt. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956); Zeev Weiss, The Sepphoris Synagogue: Deciphering an Ancient Message through Its Archaeological and Socio-Historical Contexts (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2005).
m. Avodah Zarah 3:1, 3:4, in The Mishnah, trans. Herbert Danby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933).
Origen, Contra Celsum 8.17, trans. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953).
Origen, Contra Celsum 7.62.
Origen, Contra Celsum 7.64–66; 8.17–20.
Council of Elvira, canon 36, in Karl Josef von Hefele, A History of the Councils of the Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1883), 1:151.
Ernst Kitzinger, "The Cult of Images in the Age before Iconoclasm," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 8 (1954): 86n6.
Epiphanius, Letter to John of Jerusalem, in Jerome, Letter 51.9, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 6.
Price, Acts of Nicaea, 432.
Karl Holl, "Die Schriften des Epiphanius gegen die Bilderverehrung," Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (1916), reprinted in Holl, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kirchengeschichte (Tübingen: Mohr, 1928), 2:351, esp. 384–85; George Ostrogorsky, Studien zur Geschichte des byzantinischen Bilderstreites (Breslau: Marcus, 1929); see Kitzinger, "Cult of Images," 92n27, 93n29.
Price, Acts of Nicaea, 40n148.
Kitzinger, "Cult of Images," 93.
Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit 18.45.
Kitzinger, "Cult of Images," 90–91.
Price, Acts of Nicaea, 41.
Pseudo-Basil, Letter 360, in Price, Acts of Nicaea, 314 and n312.
Price, Acts of Nicaea, 41; see also 71n256.
Carl H. Kraeling, The Christian Building, The Excavations at Dura-Europos, Final Report 8, pt. 2 (New Haven: Dura-Europos Publications, 1967).
Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.25.6.
Augustine, On the Morals of the Catholic Church 1.34.75.
Kitzinger, "Cult of Images," 92.
Eusebius, Letter to Constantia, in Price, Acts of Nicaea, 665–67.
Price, Acts of Nicaea, 382, 403n84.
Price, Acts of Nicaea, 664, 382.
Georges Florovsky, "Origen, Eusebius, and the Iconoclastic Controversy," Church History 19, no. 2 (1950): 77–96, cited in Kitzinger, "Cult of Images," 85n2.
Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 7.18.
Kitzinger, "Cult of Images," 92.
Kitzinger, "Cult of Images," 115n; Ernst von Dobschütz, Christusbilder: Untersuchungen zur christlichen Legende (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1899).
Augustine, On the Trinity 8.5.7.
Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation to the Greeks 4; Clement of Alexandria, Christ the Educator 3.11.59.
Apostolic Tradition 16, in Paul F. Bradshaw, Maxwell E. Johnson, and L. Edward Phillips, The Apostolic Tradition: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002).
Tertullian, On Modesty 7.1–4; 10.12; see Kitzinger, "Cult of Images," 86n5.
Kitzinger, "Cult of Images," 94–95, 138.
Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit 27.66; Price, Acts of Nicaea, 39, 41.
Kitzinger, "Cult of Images," 90.
Paul Corby Finney, The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 99; Mary Charles Murray, "Art and the Early Church," Journal of Theological Studies, n.s., 28, no. 2 (1977): 303–45.
Kitzinger, "Cult of Images," 95.
Price, Acts of Nicaea, 42.