What Church History Reveals About the Origins of Icon Veneration
Was the veneration of icons part of the faith and worship handed down by Christ and His apostles, or did it develop in the centuries that followed?
The question turns serious when we remember what the Second Council of Nicaea (AD 787) did. It went far beyond commending the practice. It pronounced anathema on those who refused it. And both Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism receive that council as ecumenical, binding on the whole church.
Having Christian art on a wall is one thing. Bowing before a painted image, saluting it (which could include kissing it), and offering incense and lights before it is another. The historical record shows that Christian images came into use long before their devotional veneration became widely established in the church. So if a church pronounces anathema on Christians who refuse to bow before images, we have every right to ask: Where did Christ or His apostles ever command such a thing, much less authorize the church to condemn those who decline it?
What the Second Council of Nicaea Declared
In its formal decree, the council ruled that images of Christ, of Mary, of the angels, and of the saints should be set up in churches, in homes, and by the wayside, and that “to these should be given due salutation and honourable reverence.” It added that “incense and lights may be offered” to them “according to ancient pious custom.” Then came the anathemas:
“We salute the venerable images. We place under anathema those who do not do this. . . . Anathema to those who do not salute the holy and venerable images.”
Second Council of Nicaea (787), concluding acclamations following the Definition of Faith, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 14, The Seven Ecumenical Councils, ed. Henry R. Percival.
We need to be clear about the weight of that word. In the New Testament, anathema means “accursed” (Galatians 1:8–9), and Paul links it with being “cut off from Christ” (Romans 9:3). In the history of the church, it came to mean a grave condemnation that excluded a person from the communion of the faithful. A solemn Western rite for pronouncing anathema, preserved in the Roman Pontifical, shows how seriously the word was taken: the person was declared “condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels,” unless he repented. That medieval Western rite is not the decree of Nicaea II, and we should not confuse the two. But the council’s own words are severe enough. Those who refused to venerate the images were placed under anathema.
The Roman Pontifical’s form of anathema, as quoted in The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907), s.v. “Anathema.”
The council did draw a line. It said that the honor given to images is not the true worship (in Greek, latreia) that belongs to God alone, and it reasoned that “the honour which is paid to the image passes on to that which the image represents.” Even so, it required that honor, and it placed under anathema every Christian who would not give it.
Nor is this only an Eastern matter. The Catechism of the Catholic Church appeals to Nicaea II in defense of the veneration of icons and insists that “The Christian veneration of images is not contrary to the first commandment which proscribes idols” (CCC 2131–2132). Rome and Constantinople stand on the same decree.
What the Early Evidence Shows
A few terms will help. An iconoclast (“image-breaker”) opposed icons. An iconophile (“image-lover”) defended them.
1. The Scholarly Starting Point: Robin M. Jensen
Robin Jensen, a leading historian of early Christian art, summarizes where her field stands:
“Scholars generally agree that Christian iconography emerged only in the 3rd century.”
Jensen is careful not to overstate the case. She argues that classical philosophy shaped early Christian objections to images of God even more than the Bible did. But on the question that matters most here, she is clear. She argues “that when it emerged, Christian art essentially served non-idolatrous didactic rather than devotional purposes.” In plain English, Jensen argues that the earliest Christian art served mainly to teach, rather than to provide objects of devotion.
Robin M. Jensen, “Aniconism in the First Centuries of Christianity,” Religion 47, no. 3 (2017): 408–424.
2. The Earliest Report: Irenaeus of Lyons
Irenaeus wrote Against Heresies around AD 180. He tells us he saw Polycarp “in my early youth,” and that Polycarp had been “instructed by apostles.” In describing the followers of Carpocrates, a Gnostic sect notorious for immoral living, he wrote:
“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.”
Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.25.6 (see also 3.3.4 on Polycarp), in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson.
Notice where Irenaeus places this practice. He finds it in a heretical sect, and he compares it to the way pagans honored their idols. One of our earliest surviving descriptions of people honoring an image of Christ comes from a church father describing heretics.
3. An Early Warning: The Synod of Elvira
A canon traditionally linked to the Synod of Elvira, a gathering of bishops in Spain early in the fourth century, contains this striking ruling (canon 36):
Placuit picturas in ecclesia esse non debere, ne quod colitur et adoratur in parietibus depingatur.
“It has seemed good that images should not be in churches so that what is venerated and worshiped not be painted on the walls.”
Synod of Elvira, canon 36. Latin text from Early Church Texts; English translation from the Catholic University of America’s online edition of the Elvira canons.
Scholars debate the synod’s date and what prompted this canon. Some argue that the canon belongs to a later collection, perhaps from the late fourth or early fifth century. Whatever prompted the prohibition, the canon certainly shows that pictures in churches were a matter of concern and restriction. Whoever wrote it was not demanding their presence.
4. The Council’s Own Record: Richard Price
Richard Price is a Roman Catholic priest and historian. He produced the first new English translation in over 150 years of the full record of Nicaea II, the council’s own minutes. In his introduction he writes:
“[T]he iconoclast claim that reverence towards 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. The iconophile view of the history of Christian thought and devotion was virtually a denial of history.”
By “the golden age of the fathers,” Price means the era of the great church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries. He also points out what the council failed to produce. For all its claims that images had held a venerable place in the church from the beginning, “no attempt was made at Nicaea to prove by direct citation that the painting and veneration of images went back before the fourth century. The Acts include no iconophile text earlier than St Athanasius.”
Richard Price, trans., The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787), Translated Texts for Historians 68 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018), 39, 43.
Athanasius died in AD 373. The council that pronounced anathema on those who refused icon veneration did not cite a single text in support of the practice from the first three centuries of Christianity.
Price is no hostile critic hunting for ammunition. He is a priest of the church that receives Nicaea II as ecumenical, and he has spent years with the council’s own record. His judgment carries weight precisely because of where he stands.
What the Commandment Already Said
History raises the question. Scripture settles it. Listen to the second commandment:
“You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God . . .” (Exodus 20:4–5)
The bishops at Nicaea read their Old Testament in Greek, in the translation known as the Septuagint. There Exodus 20:5 reads ou proskynēseis autois oude mē latreusēs autois: “You shall not bow down to them, nor serve them.” Both of the council’s key words are in the commandment. Nicaea reserved latreia (service, worship) for God and then required proskynēsis (bowing, reverence) toward images. The commandment forbids both, and it forbids them toward the very thing in question: carved images and likenesses.
Someone may answer that the same Greek verb is used elsewhere for proper respect shown to people, as when Abraham bowed to the Hittites (Genesis 23:7). That is true, and it misses the point. Exodus 20 is not about greeting a neighbor. It is about bowing to an image, which is exactly what Nicaea required.
The New Testament confirms it. When Peter entered the house of Cornelius, “Cornelius met him and fell down at his feet and worshiped him. But Peter lifted him up, saying, ‘Stand up; I too am a man’” (Acts 10:25–26). The Greek verb is proskyneō. Luke gives no indication that Cornelius mistook Peter for God. He describes him as “a devout man who feared God” (10:2). Yet Peter at once refused his act of reverence and told him to stand.
The apostle John had the same experience, twice. When he fell at the feet of the angel who had shown him the visions of Revelation, the angel said, “You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers who hold to the testimony of Jesus. Worship God” (Revelation 19:10; see also 22:8–9). Again the verb is proskyneō. Whatever John intended, the angel refused the act and directed his attention to God alone. He did not accept the bow and pass it along. He refused it and said, “Worship God.” The issue here is not a shared Greek word. It is the act itself: a religious bow, offered as devotion, toward something other than God. If John was forbidden to offer such reverence to a heavenly messenger, those who require Christians to bow before sacred images must show from Scripture why that act is permissible, much less obligatory on pain of anathema.
One more scene makes the point vivid. The Catechism points to the bronze serpent as an image God Himself ordained (CCC 2130; see Numbers 21:8–9). That is true. But centuries later, when the people of Israel had begun making offerings to that very serpent, King Hezekiah “broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made” (2 Kings 18:4), and Scripture commends him for it (18:3). Making an image is one question. Turning it into an object of religious devotion is another. God commanded the first in that case, and He commended the king who put an end to the second.
The Question We Cannot Avoid
Those who defend icon veneration appeal to the incarnation of Christ and distinguish the reverence they give images from the worship that belongs to God alone. Those arguments deserve to be heard and examined fairly. But neither the incarnation nor an appeal to tradition establishes an apostolic command to venerate images.
An Orthodox reader may reply that the doctrine of the Trinity also received its full creedal expression centuries after the apostles, and no one calls it an innovation. The same test applies to both. The Trinity can be shown from Scripture itself, which teaches that there is one God and that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are each fully God. The creeds put into careful words what the Bible already teaches. Icon veneration needs the same demonstration, and that is exactly where it fails. A council cannot make a practice binding merely by declaring it apostolic. Its authority to impose that obligation must itself be established from the Word of God.
Some writers today argue that veneration can be traced earlier than most historians allow. Even if a few earlier examples could be proven, the deeper question would stand. An old practice is not thereby an apostolic one, and biblical warrant for making the practice obligatory is exactly what is missing.
By AD 787, a practice that had grown up over centuries was declared part of the church’s sacred tradition, with anathema pronounced on everyone who refused it.
The question remains: By what authority may the church require what Christ and His apostles did not command?
For those of us who hold that Scripture alone is the only infallible rule of faith and worship, everything turns on that question. The Second London Baptist Confession (1689) puts it this way: the acceptable way of worshipping the true God “is instituted by himself, and so limited by his own revealed will, that he may not be worshipped according to the imagination and devices of men, nor the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representations, or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scriptures” (22.1). And it reminds us that “God alone is Lord of the conscience” (21.2).
The church is called to guard and proclaim the faith once for all delivered to the saints. It has no authority to bind the consciences of God’s people to religious practices that cannot be established from His Word.
We must never confuse the antiquity of a practice with its divine authority, nor the authority claimed by a council with the authority of the apostles.
The final court of appeal must always be the Word of God.