The Restoration of the Image: Iconoclasm Ancient and Modern
A Reflection on the First Sunday of Lent – the Sunday of Orthodoxy and the Smashing of the Divine Likeness
First Sunday of Lent – (Hebrews §329b (11:24-26, 32-12:2a) /Saint John §5 (1:43-51))
The First Sunday of Great Lent brings us to the Triumph of Orthodoxy, a feast that the careless observer might mistake for a celebration of ecclesiastical aesthetics, a vindication of religious art, a dispute over church decoration now safely relegated to history. Such superficiality misses the mark entirely. This feast concerns nothing less than the human person, the nature of salvation, and the ongoing war against the image of God in man.
The Undepictable Made Depictable
In the eighth and ninth centuries, the Christian world convulsed under the scourge of iconoclasm. Imperial decrees ordered the destruction of holy icons. Monasteries were violated, their sacred images torn from walls and consigned to flames. Confessors were beaten, exiled, martyred. The iconoclast emperors believed themselves defenders of divine transcendence, protectors of the Second Commandment, guardians against idolatry.
The Church’s response came at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, which affirmed that the veneration of icons is not idolatry but rather a confession of the Incarnation itself. The Kondak of this feast expresses the theological precision with clarity: “The undepictable Word of the Father became depictable, taking flesh from thee, O Mother of God.”
Here lies the center of the matter: God, who cannot be circumscribed, who dwells in unapproachable light, took on flesh that could be seen, touched, measured, and yes, depicted. If Christ is truly man, possessing a human nature complete and undiminished, then He can be portrayed. If He cannot be depicted, then He did not truly assume our humanity. And if He did not become man in the fullest sense, then we are not saved, for what He did not assume, He did not heal.
This is not a dispute about paint and wood. It is a question of whether God truly entered our condition, whether matter itself has been sanctified, whether the Incarnation was real or merely apparent.
The Defiled Image Restored
Yet the Kondak does not end with the depictability of Christ. It continues: “He combined divine beauty with the defiled image, restoring its ancient dignity.”
Restoring. And what is the image requires restoration? Not merely the painted icon of Christ on the church wall, but the living icon, the image of God in man, stamped upon the human person at creation.
In Genesis it is declared that man was fashioned in the image and likeness of God. But through the ancestral sin, that image was darkened, distorted, defaced. The iconoclasts of the eighth century believed they defended God’s honor by destroying images, but the true iconoclasm – the original desecration – occurred far earlier, in Eden, when man sought to define himself apart from his Creator.
Every sin since that first rebellion has been an act of icon-smashing. Each transgression defaces the divine image within us. Each capitulation to passion obscures the likeness of God. The eighth-century controversy over painted icons was merely a visible manifestation of a deeper, more ancient war: the war against the image of God in the human soul.
The New Iconoclasm: Identity as Idol
We are accustomed to thinking of iconoclasm as a medieval aberration, an historical curiosity safely confined to the past. This is a dangerous delusion. Iconoclasm thrives in our age, though it wears new garments and speaks a different vocabulary.
The modern world wages relentless war against the image of God in man, and nowhere is this more evident than in the ideology that has come to be called “identity politics.” Here we must speak plainly, for the parallels are too striking to ignore.
The ancient iconoclasts sought to destroy the image of Christ, claiming that depicting the divine was blasphemous. The modern iconoclast does something far more insidious: he seeks to destroy the image of God within the human person and replace it with a self-fashioned identity that tolerates no questioning, no correction, no reference to any reality beyond the sovereign self.
Consider the mechanics of this new iconoclasm:
First, the denial of created nature. Just as the iconoclasts denied that matter could bear the divine presence, so the modern ideologue denies that human nature has any fixed essence, any God-given structure. Man is not created male and female in the image of God; rather, man creates himself, defines himself, declares himself to be whatever he wills. The body, that very flesh which Christ assumed and sanctified, is reduced to raw material to be manipulated, altered, rejected. Biology becomes tyranny; anatomy becomes accident; the created order becomes oppression.
Second, the assertion of autonomous self-definition. The iconoclast emperor declared himself the arbiter of theological truth, overruling councils and tradition. The modern ideologue declares himself the absolute authority over his own identity, brooking no appeal to nature, reason, Scripture, or tradition. “I am what I say I am” becomes the first and final dogma. The self becomes both creator and creation, both worshiper and worshiped.
Third, the demand for universal affirmation. The ancient iconoclasts were not content to refrain from venerating icons themselves; they required all Christians to participate in their destruction. Similarly, the new iconoclasm demands not merely tolerance but active participation in the fiction. To refuse to affirm the self-created identity, to appeal to biological reality or divine creation, is to commit the unforgivable sin. Dissent is seen not merely as disagreement; it is violence, hatred, erasure.
Fourth, the creation of a new idol. And here we arrive at the deepest irony: in smashing the image of God, the modern iconoclast does not achieve liberation but rather fashions a new idol: the deified self. The self-created identity becomes sacrosanct, unquestionable, demanding worship. It is the golden calf recast for a therapeutic age. It is the Tower of Babel rebuilt with the bricks of self-assertion.
This is iconoclasm in its purest form: the deliberate destruction of the image and likeness of God within the human person, followed by the fashioning of a false image that demands the worship properly due to God alone. It is the ancient temptation of Eden, “ye shall be as gods,” dressed in the language of authenticity and self-expression.
The Orthodox Response: Matter Bears Grace
Against this new iconoclasm, Orthodoxy makes the same confession it made in the eighth century:
Flesh can be sanctified.
Matter is capable of bearing grace.
The body is not an instrument of appetite but a temple of the Holy Spirit.
There is something sacred about flesh; not because we declare it so, but because God Himself assumed it.
If matter cannot bear grace, then the Incarnation is meaningless. If the body cannot be sanctified, then salvation is merely an abstraction, a gnostic escape from the material world. If man is not truly made in God’s image, if there is no fixed human nature, no created order, no divine template, then man can indeed be remade into anything: reshaped, redefined, erased.
This is the real iconoclasm of our age, and it is far more destructive than the smashing of painted panels. It is the smashing of souls.
The Church’s defense of icons was never about art for art’s sake. It was about the goodness of creation, the reality of the Incarnation, and the possibility of human sanctification. Wood and paint can bear the presence of heaven because Christ sanctified matter by assuming it. The human body can be a vessel of grace because God took on a human body. We venerate icons not because we worship wood, but because we confess that the material world is capable of manifesting spiritual reality.
To deny this is to deny the Incarnation. To assert that the body is infinitely malleable, that biological sex is a social construct, that human nature has no fixed essence, this is to embrace a form of gnosticism that the Church condemned centuries ago. It is to declare that matter is meaningless, that the body is a prison or a costume, that salvation consists in escaping or redefining our created nature rather than transfiguring it.
“Come and See”: Encounter, Not Ideology
In the Gospel appointed for this Sunday, Nathanael asks Philip: “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” Philip does not offer a syllogism. He does not construct an argument. He simply says: “Come and see.”
This is the way of faith. Orthodoxy is not primarily a system of propositions, though it guards truth with fierce precision. It is encounter. It is the meeting of the human person with the Person of Christ.
Christ says to Nathanael: “Before Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee.” Nathanael was seen. Known. Beheld by the One who is Truth itself. This is the restoration of the image: to be seen by Christ, and in being seen, to become truly oneself, not the self we construct through assertion and demand, but the self we are in God’s eternal knowledge.
To be restored is not merely to modify behavior. It is to be known by Christ and thereby to discover our true identity, not as we imagine it, not as we declare it, not as we demand others affirm it, but as it exists in the mind of God from before the foundation of the world.
The modern iconoclast offers a counterfeit vision: “You are whoever you say you are. Your identity is whatever you declare it to be. Reality must bend to your will.” This is not liberation; it is a new slavery, for it traps the person in the prison of his own subjectivity, cut off from objective truth, from the created order, from God Himself.
The faith offers true freedom: “You are who God created you to be. Your identity is not a construct but a gift. Reality is not your enemy but your home. And Christ knows you – truly knows you – and calls you to become fully yourself by becoming fully His.”
The Cloud of Witnesses: Those Who Would Not Deny the Image
The Epistle for this Sunday speaks of the heroes of faith, those “of whom the world was not worthy.” They were stoned, sawn asunder, tempted, slain with the sword. They wandered in deserts and mountains, in dens and caves of the earth.
Why did they suffer? Because they would not deny the image. They refused to live falsely. They chose reproach over comfort, truth over survival, martyrdom over apostasy.
The Triumph of Orthodoxy is not a celebration of political victory or ecclesiastical dominance. It is the quiet, costly triumph of those who would rather die than deny what is true. The iconoclast confessors who were beaten and exiled for defending the holy icons understood that the stakes were ultimate: to deny the icon was to deny the Incarnation, and to deny the Incarnation was to lose salvation itself.
We face a similar choice today. The new iconoclasm demands our participation. It requires us to affirm the self-created identity, to deny biological reality, to call good evil and evil good. It demands that we smash the image of God in our neighbor by pretending that he is whatever he claims to be, rather than what God created him to be.
To refuse this demand is to invite reproach. It is to be called hateful, bigoted, violent. It is to risk employment, reputation, social standing. But the alternative is spiritual death, the death that comes from denying truth, from participating in the destruction of the image of God, from bowing before the idol of the autonomous self.
“Orthodoxy or death” is not a threat we make against others. It is a reality we face ourselves. Each day we choose: Will the image of God in us be polished or neglected? Will it be restored or further distorted? Will we participate in the iconoclasm of our age, or will we stand with the confessors?
Lent: The Cleansing of the Icon
And now it is Lent. The Church in her wisdom gives us this season immediately after the Triumph of Orthodoxy, for the two are inseparable. We celebrate the vindication of the holy icons, and then we enter into the work of restoring the icon within ourselves.
Why do we fast? Not to punish the body; that would be gnostic hatred of matter. We fast to cleanse the image, to remove the accumulated soot of passion and sin that obscures the divine likeness within us.
An icon covered in centuries of candle smoke and grime is not destroyed; it is obscured. The image remains beneath the darkness. Lent is the careful, patient work of cleaning, not as with harsh chemicals that would damage the image, but with the gentle discipline of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.
We lay aside every weight, as the Epistle to the Hebrews instructs. We run the race set before us. Not alone, but under the gaze of a great cloud of witnesses, the saints who have run before us, who have preserved the image through persecution and temptation, who have refused to participate in iconoclasm ancient or modern.
Our own forebears understood this. When the “reforms” came, when the traditions were altered, when the familiar forms were changed, they stood firm. This was not for mere ritualism, but for the preservation of the image, the image of the Church as she had received it, the image of worship as it had been handed down, the image of Orthodoxy uncompromised. Many chose exile and martyrdom rather than participate in what they perceived as the defacement of sacred tradition.
One must admire their principle: there are things worth suffering for, truths worth dying for, images worth preserving even at the cost of everything.
The True Triumph
The true triumph of Orthodoxy will not be measured in processions or ecclesiastical pronouncements. It will be measured in restored souls.
When a man forgives instead of holding a grudge, the image is restored.
When a woman prays instead of despairs, the image is restored.
When a sinner repents instead of hardens his heart, the image is restored.
When we look upon the face of Christ and say with Nathanael, “Thou art the Son of God, Thou art the King of Israel,” the image is restored.
The true icon is restored when Christ shines through a human face, not a face we have constructed according to our own will, but the face God gave us, transfigured by grace, conformed to the image of His Son.
This is the victory. This is the triumph. And this triumph does not begin in the year 843 with the restoration of the icons to the churches of Constantinople. It begins in the human heart. It begins today. It begins with each of us choosing, in the face of the world’s iconoclasm, to preserve and polish the image of God within us and to refuse participation in its destruction.
The world will continue its work of icon-smashing. It will continue to deny created nature, to assert autonomous self-definition, to demand affirmation of lies, to fashion idols of the self. But the Church will continue her work of icon-restoration. She will continue to proclaim that man is made in the image of God, that this image can be obscured but not destroyed, that Christ came to restore what was defaced, and that the path to true humanity lies not in self-creation but in conformity to Christ.
May we have the courage of the iconoclast confessors. May we choose truth over comfort, reality over ideology, the image of God over the idol of self. May we enter this Lent with the determination to cleanse the icon within us, that Christ may shine forth from our lives as He shines forth from the holy icons.
For the triumph of Orthodoxy is not a past event to be commemorated, but a present reality to be lived. The image is being restored. The question is whether we will participate in that restoration or in its continued destruction.
The choice, as always, is ours.
1 March 2026