Photo: obitel-minsk.ru
My wife once fell from a swing, although she was not hurt very badly. Her phone rang immediately after. Her loving mother, miles away, nervously asked in Persian, “Oftādi” (“Did you fall?”).
Only recently did I learn that there is a word for this phenomenon—“simulpathity.” Recent case study research has attested to its reality (click here for an overview), thus affirming what the faithful have always believed: We are not merely sophisticated animals, beasts with the power of speech. We are not reducible to, or totally confined within, our bodies. We act not only through, but also beyond, our bodies. Of course, long before such studies were conducted, we learned this truth from the Holy Scriptures. For though I am absent from you in body, St. Paul told the Colossians, I am present with you in spirit (Col. 2:5). To put it differently, the research is slowly acknowledging the fact that love is an energy that connects people across geographic and even eschatological distances.
But what does this have to do with icons? When we kiss the holy icons with sincerity, we emit love for the people depicted or symbolized in these images. Are we not obeying Christ’s command (John 13:34) in doing so? We should think of love as a kinetic energy, and symbols as a medium through which this energy passes. When one prays for another, he typically refers to him by the symbol of his name. This sign serves as a conduit through which his love can reach its referent. So, when someone says, “I can feel your prayers,” perhaps he is not trading in cheap sentimentality, but is expressing a genuine experience of this energy.
Why, then, reject icons? For these images are also symbols and, therefore, portals that channel our love towards certain referents, such as Christ and His saints. Indeed, books—including the Bible, which Christian iconoclasts otherwise honor—could be regarded essentially as collections of images. After all, an image is “a visual representation of something,” and words visually represent ideas, concepts, and objects. Thus, as St. Theodore the Studite noted in his “First Refutation of the Iconoclasts,” Christ’s “image was drawn in writing by the apostles and has been preserved up to the present. Whatever is marked there with paper and ink, the same is marked on the icon with varied pigments or some other material medium.”1
Essentially, reverencing icons and prayer fall under the same broad category of devotion. In both cases, we are transmitting something—e.g., a request, a feeling of gratitude—through the spiritual realm.
The refusal of many Protestants to embrace these symbols of faith—these written and painted channels of love—seems to stem more from a subconscious cultural bias than from a reading of Holy Scripture. If I were a betting man, I would consider putting money on there being a strong statistical correlation between cultures in which people kiss sacred objects and those in which people kiss one another when greeting them. Today’s Christian iconoclasts who are aware that the ancient catacomb churches of Rome featured sacred art normally stress a distinction between using religious art as décor and venerating it. The former is fine, but the latter is idolatrous, they will say.
However, this distinction is less meaningful in Mediterranean and Eastern European cultures, where the things people love or respect—as well as the objects that symbolize them—are instinctively kissed. In predominantly Protestant America, we are not averse to venerating objects; we are just culturally raised to venerate differently. Although the American flag is not normally kissed, one does often place his hand on his heart when saluting this symbol, and he still correctly senses that there is something problematic about burning it.
In short, we overlook the fact that iconography is not just a doctrinal issue. It is also a cultural issue that turns on the less significant question of whether you love or venerate with your lips or some other part of your body, or your mind only.
