Veneration and the Integration of the Whole Person
Matter matters, and when the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, the Church has the remedy.
Note: This is the second of a two-part series examining veneration and its practice in both Orthodoxy and secular culture.
Part one, which looks at what veneration is and why we do it, along with the practice of veneration in secular culture, can be found here.
Not in spite of matter, but through matter
“Then God saw everything He had made, and indeed, it was very good.”
- Genesis 1:31
“So all this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying: ‘Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,’ which is translated, ‘God is with us.’”
- Matthew 1:22-23
“Lord, now You are letting Your servant depart in peace,
According to Your word;
For my eyes have seen your salvation
Which You have prepared before the face of all peoples,
A light to bring revelation to the Gentiles,
And the glory of Your people Israel.”
- Luke 2:29-32
“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life – the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare to you that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us – that which we have seen and heard we declare to you, that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. And these things we write to you that your joy may be full.”
- 1 John 1:1-4
After reading part one, you may be thinking, “OK, I’ve come around to veneration of relics of the saints. But what about icons? They’re just wood. And doesn’t the Bible forbid graven images?”
If it wasn’t already in regards to relics, this is where the theology of the Incarnation truly becomes essential. What is often reduced to Jesus dying on the cross to satisfy the wrath of the Father (the heresy of Penal Substitutionary Atonement) has a reality to it that is much more cosmic.
The Word of God was “in the beginning,” and became man for our sakes. His existence is eternal – there was never a time where He was not.
“All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men… And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth… And of His fullness we have all received, and grace for grace. For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”
- John 1:3-4, 14,16-17
Reducing the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, to a debt that was paid on the Cross in a transactional way so that we may be saved from the Father’s punishment is a fundamental misconception of what the Incarnation means. Holding God to earthly standards of justice as it plays out in a courtroom, therefore belittling Him, is heresy – which is, separation from God.
When God entered into His creation in the person of Christ, He entered into what He had already proclaimed as “good.” Yes, we have fallen away from God, and the creation now rebels against us because of it. But it is still good, and it is still what God has given us for our salvation.
The Nativity of Christ is salvific. His public ministry is salvific. His Passion and Crucifixion is salvific. His Resurrection is salvific, and the very basis of our faith. But something that is also salvific, which is often missed in the West, is His ascension. As has been established, worship is not songs and a sermon – worship is an offering. The ascension is Christ, having assumed human nature and restoring it to pre-Fall perfection as the New Adam, offering Himself as a perfect, blameless offering to God the Father, and thus raising up our humanity with Him.
As St. Justin Popovic says:
“No one ever elevated the human body as did the Lord Christ by His bodily resurrection, the ascension of His body into heaven, and its eternal session at the right hand of God the Father. In this way, the Resurrected Christ extended the promise of resurrection to the nature of the human body – having made for all flesh a path to eternal life.”
Notice the emphasis on the body. In the Incarnation, Christ did not just come to save our souls. He came to save our whole selves.
In the Orthodox Church, cremation is not permitted. All those who hold themselves to the teachings of the Orthodox Church receive a bodily burial as their proclamation of the Resurrection until Christ’s second coming. To cremate oneself, and to believe that one is just a soul, or even worse, “a soul trapped in a body” which is under some sort of torturous prohibition, is to reject God’s creation as it pertains to our own makeup and existence, and, most importantly, to reject the truth of the bodily Resurrection.
We are not pagans looking to be freed from our bodies. We are Christians. God gave us our bodies as a means to our salvation. With our bodies, we worship the Lord through various prayerful actions and we produce the good works necessary that are laid out in Matthew 25. And God did not only create humans and say that we are good – He took on flesh Himself.
Since Christ took on flesh, and since we “beheld His glory,” it is permissible to depict Him, along with His saints, on the icons. Jesus Christ is a real, historical person – not an idea – and to venerate His image is to venerate Him, as the honor granted to the image, as taught by St. Basil the Great, is transferred to the prototype.
St. John of Damascus, the most notable defender of icons during the iconoclast period, said that the invisible things of God have been made visible:
“I do not worship matter. I worship the God of matter, Who became matter for my sake, Who willed to take His abode in matter, Who worked out my salvation through matter. Never will I cease honoring the matter which wrought my salvation! I honor it, but not as God. Because of this I salute all remaining matter with reverence, because God has filled it with His grace and power. Through it my salvation has come to me.”
These saints who lived out Christ’s promise to perform “greater works” make up the great cloud of witnesses (Hebrews 12:1) who are engaged in the heavenly worship around the Throne of God shown to us in Revelation.
As we enter into the Church, see the beautiful icons, and participate in the worship which is not of this world, we are able to pray with St. Symeon, who upon taking the incarnate Christ-child up in his arms to present in the temple, said, “For my eyes have seen Your salvation, which You have prepared before the face of all peoples.”
"When thoughts are choking me like so many thorns, I enter the Church, the hospital of souls. The beauty of the icons delight my vision like a verdant meadow, and without my noticing it stirs my soul to praise God."
- St. John of Damascus
Recognition, perception, and presence in Orthodox veneration
“Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness…’ So God made man; in the image of God He made him; male and female He made them.”
- Genesis 1:26-27
“Nevertheless when one turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.”
- 2 Corinthians 3:17-18
“For it is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”
- 2 Corinthians 4:6
“Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord, as His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue, by which have been given us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.”
- 2 Peter 1:2-4
Making present that which is unseen is not unfamiliar to the modern person.
When the flag, Liberty Bell, or Constitution are present, what is truly being represented there are the transcendent ideals they embody.
When a historic event like the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, George Washington crossing the Delaware, or even traumatic events like the assassination of John F. Kennedy is depicted, we are calling that event to remembrance and, in our mind, entering into it.
When someone wears the ashes of a cremated loved one as a necklace or bracelet, there is the feeling that that person is with them in some immeasurable, imperceptible way.
As we are reminded of the immortality of these transcendent ideals, such as freedom, liberty, independence, or whatever words you prefer, the icons remind Orthodox Christians how these ideals flow from and are found in Christ first, and His saints who united themselves to Him second.
St. John of Kronstadt says that, in our present spiritual condition, icons explain the things belonging to the spiritual world which we could not know without images and symbols.
“It was for this reason that the Divine Teacher, the Personal Wisdom Who created all things, the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, often taught men by means of images or parables; it is for this reason that in our Orthodox temples it is the custom to represent many things to the gaze of the Christian by imagery.”
When an Orthodox Christian goes to confession, it is not in the impersonal, anonymous way that many understand it because of the prominence of the Roman Catholic tradition in movies and shows. Rather, it is deeply personal, as the Orthodox Christian stands together with their priest in front of an icon of Christ.
While gazing upon the Savior and seeing Him gazing back, an important experience occurs – the physical manifestation of the spiritual belief that Christ actually looks upon us, sees all our thoughts, hears our distress, and is always protecting us. The belief that no one shall “snatch them out of My hand” (John 10:28) finds rest in the icon.
Before the printing press, indeed, before the very practice of reading and writing was widespread at all, ancient Christians would see the entire plan of salvation play out before them through the holy icons. Our fall and restoration in Christ and the continuation of holiness that can still be found in our present day through the saints – this tapestry gives us the peace that is not of this world (John 14:27).
Just as Christ came to save the whole person, the Church acts as a physician to the whole person. More from St. John of Kronstadt:
“The Church, through the temple and Divine service, acts upon the entire man, educates him wholly; acts upon his sight, hearing, smelling, feeling, taste, imagination, mind, and will, by the splendour of the icons and of the whole temple, by the ringing of bells, by the singing of the choir, by the fragrance of the incense, the kissing of the Gospel, of the cross and the holy icons, by the prosphora, the singing, and sweet sound of the readings of the Scriptures.”
Icons, St. John says, are a requirement of our nature. We need an image – without one, we struggle to recall an absent person, and must resort to our imagination. The Church, then, answers a necessity through a capacity that God has given us.
“Icons in churches and houses are necessary, amongst other reasons, because they remind us of the immortality of the saints,” St. John continues.
Through comprehension of the icon, through seeing Christ face to face and understanding how He always sees us, we then begin to understand what it means to be made in His image and likeness. We begin to conform ourselves to that image which we have distorted in ourselves, while seeing it more clearly in others.
With any icon, first comes the recognition of the person depicted, then comes the perception of the reality that it is depicting, then, by the grace of God, comes the feeling of the very presence of the person depicted.
Recently, I gifted a friend who is inquiring into Orthodoxy some icons that I had no real use for other than keeping them as part of a collection. Icons are not decorations, but rather an active instrument in prayer and worship, so it is not right to collect them as if they are art. I have been trying to take Fr. Thomas Hopko’s admonition more seriously – that it is better to have a small number of icons which we sincerely venerate and use in prayer than it is to have a large collection which adorn our walls in an empty way.
Many of the icons were smaller in size, so my friend put them in her purse when she drove home. She later told me that the following day was the best day she had experienced in a long time – a day in which she felt happy and at peace. She thought she had taken all of the icons out of her purse when she got home the night before, but when she reached into her purse on that great day, she noticed that an icon was still there.
“I missed the guardian angel one,” she told me. “I had the guardian angel with me all day.”
A short time ago, Ancient Faith released an icon that was commissioned of the visitation of St. Raphael of Brooklyn to the Yanney homestead in Kearney, Nebraska. I live in Nebraska, so Fr. Nicola Yanney is extremely important to me as someone who showed what it means to live as a saint in my neck of the woods, and just a few generations before me.
In a reflection on Fr. Stephen Freeman’s “Glory to God For All Things” blog titled “The Peaches of Paradise,” Fr. Stephen writes about an instance where he noticed trees bearing peaches and pears depicted with the saints behind the altar in the parish in which he serves. His mind drew a blank while trying to remember any reference to these fruits in the Scriptures.
After inquiring of the iconographer, Fr. Stephen was told that the fresco is a representation of that particular place in creation (this parish is in South Carolina) being made into paradise.
Now, with the aforementioned icon of St. Raphael’s visit to the Yanney homestead, it can be said that Nebraska is officially depicted in an icon. I would be lying if I said I don’t think that’s cool.
More importantly though, it reminds me of two things. The first is that I am called to participate in my home being made into paradise. The second is that I am already living in an icon of it.
Through God's uncreated energies and the sacraments of the Church, namely the Eucharist, we are able to become “partakers of the divine nature,” as Christ is made present to us during each and every Liturgy in His Body and Blood. As we conform ourselves more and more to His image, “from glory to glory,” the dim mirror becomes more and more clear, and our knowledge of Christ becomes like His knowledge of us (1 Corinthians 13:12).
"You are gods," Psalm 81:6 states, "and all of you are children of the Most High."
This is the life of the Church which has persisted for 2,000 years. This is worship in Spirit and Truth. Just as Christ is the icon of the Father, we are icons of Him. Just as we are icons of Him, the entire creation is an icon of God’s glory.
Whether one accepts it or not, iconography and the veneration of it are part of the pattern of our entire existence.
“O Heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, Who art everywhere present and fillest all things; Treasury of Blessings, and Giver of Life – come and abide in us, cleanse us from every stain, and save our souls, O Good One.”
- Traditional Orthodox Prayer to the Holy Spirit
