The struggle against iconoclasts
A violent disagreement shook the Christian Church 1200 years ago.
From the time of St Constantine the Great, the Roman emperors accepted Christianity. Most of them encouraged the Christians to build Churches and to use pictures to explain their faith to all the people of the Roman Empire. There were a few Christians who thought you should not use pictures at all, and the Church had to be careful that people did not worship statues or icons in the way that the pagans did. However, in most parts of the Christian world, the people developed their religious art for almost 500 years.
Quite suddenly the Byzantine emperors ordered the Church to stop using pictures or any sort of images. Icons were smashed and mosaics were painted over. For a while there was a fierce struggle between the icon smashers and the icon users.
Quite a few of the Byzantine emperors hated Icons, so did the courtiers and many of the soldiers. These people who hated icons, or smashed them, are often called the 'iconoclasts'. The iconoclasts taught that physical thing's had nothing to do with spiritual thing's. They said you could not use a man made icon to help you with prayer, or to bring you closer to God. They also said that you should not have any pictures of people in Church. The only picture they allowed was a fresco or mosaic picture of the Cross.
The New Testament teaches that God loves us so much that He sent Christ to become a human being. Christ came in order to save us, and to give us a chance to come back to God again. He became matter just as we are. Because God became a man in Christ, this physical world has begun to be reunited with the heavenly world again. Matter has started to regain its full glory. Christ has shown us that human flesh can become filled with God. He was physical matter that was God bearing. In the same way all physical matter can become filled with God's presence. This happens to the saints, to the water at a baptism, or to the bread and wine for Holy Communion. It can also happen to the wood and paint of an Icon.
The Church accepts that before Christ came into the world it was impossible to make a picture of God: no one had seen Him or understood Him enough. Once Christ came and dwelt on earth, it was possible to make a picture of God because Christ was God.
Finally, Orthodox Christians believe in the Resurrection of Christ in a physical body. We believe in a physical resurrection for all believers when Christ returns in Glory. We do not believe that our minds will survive alone, or that some ghostly spiritual form will rise from the dead. Both body and soul will be saved, matter and spirit together. So we believe that mind and body should join in worship. Spirit and matter should unite in praising God.
It took about a hundred years for all these ideas to be argued out. In the end the iconoclasts were overcome, and in 787 at the Seventh Ecumenical Council*, icons were put back into the Churches.
On the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy (first Sunday of Great Lent) we celebrate the triumph of true Orthodox believers over the Icon smashers. Icons are brought from home, and others are lifted down from the walls of the Church for a procession to show everyone how we feel about them.
St John of Damascus says "The Icon is a song of triumph, and a revelation, and an enduring monument to the victory of the Saints and the disgrace of the demons."
* apart from the Scriptures and the Creed, one source of authority for Orthodox Christians are the Ecumenical Councils, i.e. councils where the whole of the Church met together in order to decide points of doctrine. For Orthodox Christians there were seven of these, the first in the year 325, the last in the year 787. The seventh Ecumenical Council came together to defend the veneration of icons after a long period of about hundred years or so, during which the Church was split into the iconoclasts, who rejected the veneration of icons and saw it as being idolatrous, and those who defended the icons. In the end, the icons were defended, not as being objects of worship, because only God could be worshipped, but they were defended as being objects, which could be venerated, the veneration passing by the icon to the prototype that it represented. This idea was initially expressed by St Basil the Great earlier on in the history of the Church.
adapted from "Explaining Icons" Stylite Publishing Ltd.
http://home.it.net.au/~jgrapsas/pages/Holy_Icons.htm
and from "Why Do We Need Icons?"
http://fomacenter.ru/english/index.php?issue=5§ion=63&article=1078