Icon

An icon (from Greek {{polytonic|?????}}, eikon, "image") is an image, picture, or representation; it is a sign or likeness that stands for an object by signifying or representing it, or by analogy, as in semiotics; in computers an icon is a symbol on the monitor used to signify a command; by extension, icon is also used, particularly in modern popular culture, in the general sense of symbol — i.e. a name, face, picture or even a person readily recognized as having some well-known significance or embodying certain qualities.

Icons in Christianity

Christianity originated as a movement within Judaism during a time when there was great concern about idolatry.

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There is no evidence of the making and use of painted icons or of similar religious images by Christians within the New Testament writings. Says Eastern Orthodox theologian Steven Bigham, " there is a total silence about Christian and non-idolatrous images" (Orthodox Research Institute, Rollinsford, 2004). Though the word eikon is found in the New Testament (see below), it is never in the context of painted icons.

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The first stage of the history of Christian art is aniconic; there are no recognizably Christian images before the 3rd Century, other than simple symbols such as the cross and ichthus. Then comes what may be termed the Symbolic Period, represented by the first recognizably Christian art--the wall paintings of the house church at Dura Europos (no later than 256 c.e.), the art of the catacombs and of early Christian sarcophagi. In this Symbolic Period, Christians depicted what Finney calls "salvation paradigms"--deliverance, redemption, salvation--through borrowed or modified "pagan" and biblical motifs (see Finney, Paul Corby, The Invisible God, Oxford University press, 1995; also Prigent, Pierre, L'art des premiers chrétiens, Desclée de Brouwer, Paris 1995; Jensen, Robin Margaret, Face to Face , Fortress, Minneapolis 2005; et al.)

Related Topics:
Cross - Ichthus

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We first encounter mention of Christian images treated like icons in a pagan or Gnostic context. Alexander Severus (A.D. 222?235) kept a domestic chapel for the veneration of images of deified emperors, of portraits of his ancestors, and of Christ, Apollonius, Orpheus and Abraham (Lampridius, Life of Alexander Severus xxix.). Irenaeus, in his Against Heresies 1:25;6, says of the Gnostic Carpocratians, ?They also possess images, some of them painted, and others formed from different kinds of material; while they maintain that a likeness of Christ was made by Pilate at that time when Jesus lived among them. They crown these images, and set them up along with the images of the philosophers of the world that is to say, with the images of Pythagoras, and Plato, and Aristotle, and the rest. They have also other modes of honouring these images, after the same manner of the Gentiles .?

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A criticism of image veneration is found in the apocryphal Acts of John (generally considered a gnostic work), in which the Apostle John discovers that one of his followers has had a portrait made of him, and is venerating it:

Related Topics:
Acts of John - Gnostic

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(27) ?...he went into the bedchamber, and saw the portrait of an old man crowned with garlands, and lamps and altars set before it. And he called him and said: Lycomedes, what do you mean by this matter of the portrait? Can it be one of thy gods that is painted here? For I see that you are still living in heathen fashion.? Later in the passage John says, "But this that you have now done is childish and imperfect: you have drawn a dead likeness of the dead." This last remark is in keeping with the notion generally held by early Christian apologists that paints can only depict matter and not spirit.

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In addition to the legend that Pilate had made an image of Christ, the 4th Century bishop Eusebius, in his Church History, provides a seed that grew into another legend of the ?first? icon of Jesus. He relates that King Abgar of Edessa sent a letter to Jesus at Jerusalem, asking Jesus to come and heal him of an illness. In this version there is no image. Then, in the later account found in the Syriac Doctrine of Addai, a painted image of Jesus is introduced to the story; and even later, in the account given by Evagrius, the painted image is transformed into an image that miraculously appeared on a towel when Christ pressed the cloth to his wet face (Veronica and her Cloth, Kuryluk, Ewa, Basil Blackwell, Cambridge, 1991). Further legends relate that the cloth remained in Edessa until the 10th century, when it was taken to Constantinople. In 1204 it was lost when Constantinople was sacked by Crusaders.

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Elsewhere in his Church History, Eusebius reports seeing what he took to be portraits of Jesus, Peter and Paul, and also mentions a bronze statue at Banias / Paneas, of which he wrote, "They say that this statue is an image of Jesus" (H.E. 7:18); further, he relates that locals thought the image to be a memorial of the healing of the woman with an issue of blood by Jesus (Luke 8:43-48), because it depicted a standing man wearing a double cloak and with arm outstretched, and a woman kneeling before him with arms reaching out as if in supplication. Scholars today think it more likely to have been a misidentified pagan statue whose true identity had been forgotten; some have thought it to be Aesculapius, the God of healing, but the description of the standing figure and the woman kneeling in supplication is precisely that found on coins depicting the bearded emperor Hadrian reaching out to a female figure symbolizing a province kneeling before him (see John Francis Wilson's Caesarea Philippi: Banias, the Lost City of Pan; I.B Taurus, London, 2004). It is noteworthy that in the later icon tradition, three-dimensional statues were forbidden in Eastern Orthodoxy, in keeping with the canons of the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 781.

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When Christianity was legalized by the emperor Constantine within the Roman Empire in the early 4th Century, huge numbers of pagans became converts. This created the opportunity for the transfer of allegiance and practice from the old gods and heroes to the new religion, and for the gradual adaptation of the old system of image making and veneration to a Christian context. "By the early fifth century, we know of the ownership of private icons of saints; by c. 480-500, we can be sure that the inside of a saint's shrine would be adorned with images and votive portraits, a practice which had probably begun earlier" (Pagans and Christians, Robin Lane Fox, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1989). Consequently it is in popular practice that we see the first evidences of Christian image veneration, and only much later that we find first, a general ecclesiastical acceptance of such images, and second, the even later creation of a detailed theological justification for the making and veneration of images occasioned by the Iconoclast controversy of the 8th century.

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