This post comes from an email in the "Walk Through the Church Year" series which goes out to folks who sign up to receive two emails per month about major feasts and selected commemorations in the liturgical calendar. To receive these emails in your inbox, sign up here.

The original email was sent out in October of 2024.

Commemorating the Fathers of the 7th Ecumenical Council

The Son, Who shone forth ineffably from the Father,
was born of a woman, in two natures.
Beholding Him, we do not deny the image of His form,
but depicting it piously, we revere it with faith.
Therefore, the Church, holding the True Faith,
venerates the Icon of Christ's Incarnation.

The Seventh Ecumenical Council took place between September 24 - October 13, AD 787, in Nicaea. Convoked by Empress Irene it was attended by 350 Fathers of the Church, with Patriarch Tarasios of Constantinople presiding. The issues at stake were the Church’s understanding of the Person of Christ, and beliefs about matter and the meaning of redemption and salvation. These issues found their focal point in the controversy over icons. The council restored the veneration of icons as a good and necessary protection of the proper doctrine of the Incarnation. The council was also attended by more than a dozen previous iconoclasts who changed their understanding and came back to the Church.

Seeing Iconographically

by Ephraim

Some of us at Legacy Icons have been having discussions around seeing the world iconographically. We are surrounded by icons all day in our work, so you'd think we'd be experts at this. Yet, it is sometimes still a struggle even to understand what this means. What is it to see iconographically? How do we see each other and ourselves through this lens? How do we see creation through this lens?

Liturgical Symbols of the Spirit

Leonid Ouspensky writes that both Holy Scripture and Holy Icons, along with their direct meanings, reflect the heavenly world and that they are symbols of the Spirit they contain. They educate us in realities beyond human ideas, realities that are concrete and not theoretical. Further, he writes that Holy Scripture is conveyed by the icon "in a liturgical manner, that is, a living way, appealing to all human faculties.... Scripture lives in the Church and in each of its members both through the liturgy and through icons." p 139

Scripture speaks of creation having a similar iconographical effect.

"The heavens declare the glory of God; the firmament shows the creation of His hands."
– Psalm 18:1-4

"For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.”
– Romans 1:20

Saint John Chrysostom comments on this:
"God has placed the knowledge of himself in human hearts from the beginning. But this knowledge they unwisely invested in wood and stone and thus contaminated the truth, at least as far as they were able. Meanwhile the truth abides unchanged, having its own unchanging glory…. How did God reveal himself? By a voice from heaven? Not at all! God made a panoply which was able to draw them more than by a voice. He put before them the immense creation, so that both the wise and the unlearned, the Scythian and the barbarian, might ascend to God, having learned through sight the beauty of the things which they had seen."

"[Icons] educate us in realities beyond human ideas," writes Leonid Ouspensky. From left to Right: Theotokos The Sign, I Am The Vine, Crux Gemmata (alluding to the Transfiguration).

Humans as Icons, Created as Good

We are all icons. Genesis tells us this: “Then God said, ‘let us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness.’” (1:26) Because He made us in His image, we are created good like all other creation He made.

Gregory of Nyssa comments:
"God creates man for no other reason than that God is good; and being such, and having this as his reason for entering upon the creation of our nature, he would not exhibit the power of this goodness in an imperfect form, giving our nature some one of the things at his disposal and grudging it a share in another: but the perfect form of goodness is here to be seen by his both bringing man into being from nothing and fully supplying him with all good gifts. But since the list of individual good gifts is a long one, it is out of the question to apprehend it numerically. The language of Scripture therefore expresses it concisely by a comprehensive phrase, in saying that man was made “in the image of God,” for this is the same as to say that he made human nature participant in all good; for if the Deity is the fullness of good, and this is his image, then the image finds its resemblance to the archetype in being filled with all good."

Regarding the image and the likeness, he comments that "We possess the one by creation; we acquire the other by free will."

From Irenaeus of Lyons:
"In previous times man, it is true, was said to have been made according to the image of God, but he was not revealed as such. For the Word according to whose image man was made was still invisible. Therefore also man easily lost the likeness. But when the Word of God was made flesh, he confirmed both image and likeness. For on the one hand he truly showed the image by becoming what his image was. On the other hand he firmly established the likeness by the co-assimilation of man to the invisible Father through the visible Word."

We are able to "ascend to the God" through Christ who has made it possible by becoming man, by taking on matter (flesh). This is what salvation means. We have a way to return to God and grow in that likeness.

Unity of Spirit and Matter

In her excellent book Hidden and Triumphant: The Underground Struggle to Save Russian Iconography, Irina Yazykova writes, “In the icon we find a unity of Spirit and matter, of heaven and earth, of the visible and invisible.” (p 139) The same could be said of Christ.

We also get a picture of eternity in the icon. Yazykova again: “When we approach an icon, we find ourselves looking into a world where eternal light reigns, a place where, in the words of the Psalms, ‘mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have embraced each other. ‘(Psalm 84:11)”

Eternal, Transfiguring Truths

Icons of Christ reveal to us humanity transfigured and deified. Icons of the Theotokos show us a heart that responds to God in a manner that makes that heart ready for His abiding. Icons of the Saints invite us to offer our prayers to God, and to stand with them in those prayers. Icons of the Holy events of Scripture invite us to participate in their eternal reality and receive their eternal, transfiguring truths.

The transfiguration to which man is called involves body and soul, the whole of man. Again, Christ makes this transfiguration possible through His Incarnation and gives us a foretaste in His own Transfiguration. When we begin to understand this, we can see ourselves and each other iconographically. Each person we encounter, including ourselves in the mirror, are an image of God, with the possibility of transfiguring and restoring our broken parts – the loss of the likeness–through Christ.

Creation Transfigured

Romans 8:19 and 22 says: “For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God…For we know that the whole of creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now.” Creation awaits its own transfiguration.

Michel Quenot in his book The Resurrection and the Icon explains how we are part of this transfiguration through Christ.
“Persons who live in Christ, the New Adam, bear the world within themselves as they become members of the universal body of the Risen One, the glorified, human-divine body that is One of the Holy Trinity. Christ bears up the whole world in His resurrected body, which is not dematerialized, but rather spiritualized. As God-man and the ultimate perfection of man, His flesh is the sure sign of a metamorphosis through which the Spirit fills all things and the senses perceive the realm of divinity. Christ is the seed of the recreated universe.” (p 225)

How profound is that?! The Word creates and the Word regenerates; and we're in the middle of it all! We can see each other, ourselves and all of creation as icons of eternal beauty, that is Christ, together on the way to transfiguration!

This is a lot to take in and our own revelation of it comes by God's grace, ever more revealed as we are ready for it. We pray together with you that we might see all the world and the people in it more iconographically each day.