And So the New Year Begins (plus St Theodore refutes Bill Baldwin)

While some Orthobloggers were busy with bathroom plumbery, yours truly was watching the first half of The Fellowship of the Ring (extended version, what else?!) as the civil year rolled over. I bid my wife happy new year, with a peck on the lips. The video finished and we both crawled into bed.

Today, I have read my alotment of St. Ephrem’s Hymns, and am working on St. Theodore the Studite’s second refutation of the iconoclasts (more on that in a moment), and will hopefully complete a goodly portion of W. D. Ross’ introduction to his edition of the Greek text of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.

Now, with regard to St. Theodore.

A couple of years ago, I came across William J. Baldwin’s (oh, those Baldwin brothers!*) paper criticizing the use of icons, “Eastern Orthodoxy, Icons, and Christology .”

Here is Baldwin’s primary thesis attacking icons:

Self-consciously Nicene and Chalcedonian, they must defend icons of Christ in a way that neither violates his divinity nor separates his natures. In my opinion they fail to make the case. What results is an implicitly anti-Nicene and anti-Chalcedonian Christology.

The paradigm argument against icons takes the form of a syllogism:

MP: Scripture prohibits making images of God.
mp: Christ is God.
Conclusion: Scripture prohibits making images of Christ.

To agree with the premises and reject the conclusion, one might argue that the syllogism equivocates on the word “God,” using the term in one sense for the major premise and in another for the minor. In other words, Christ isn’t God in the same sense that the invisible God is. The Orthodox have no desire to make such a claim. They insist on the validity of the Nicene Creed. At the incarnation, “[Christ] became a man, and thus He is at once fully God and fully man.”

Alternatively, one might argue that Christ is God, but he is also a man. The images, then, represent his human nature only. . . .

It is Yahweh, the eternal I AM, who spoke from the burning bush, whose form was not seen. The Orthodox insist that he is the one whose image is seen in the icon.

The Orthodox specifically assert that, whatever an icon means, it doesn’t mean that Christ is not very God of very God. And, whatever an icon does, it doesn’t separate his natures. But then the dilemma remains. An icon of Christ is an image of his person; and the person of Christ is divine. Therefore the icon is an image of God.

Precisely, the Orthodox reply. They are suspicious of syllogisms in general; but if they revised the above syllogism, it might look like this:

MP: Scripture prohibited the making of images of God.
mp: Christ is God.
Conclusion: There is no longer any prohibition against making images of God as he has revealed himself in his Son.

(And if the syllogism has a mystical feel to it, so much the better.) . . .

The Incarnation, they say, changes things. . . .

It’s an amazing leap of logic from the premise (God has revealed himself once for all in his Son) to the conclusion (we may now make images of God). Yet the Orthodox do not seem to notice that they have leaped at all. They barely attempt to explain how to get from the premise to the conclusion. To them, the conclusion is obvious. And when they do attempt an explanation, they stumble into Nestorianism. This is almost inevitable. The only alternative is Monophysitism, of which they have an even greater horror. Yet one or the other error awaits them. To say that the Incarnation legitimizes icons is either to say that God’s nature changed when he became a man and thus is now depictable. Or it is to say that God became depictable as a man but remained undepictable as God.

Now, although Baldwin allows a cite from St. Theodore (via a defense through a Daniel Clendenin citation), he fails to deal with St. Theodore’s explicit defense of just this very criticism. That is to say, all Baldwin does is resurrect the iconoclast’s attack on icons, and then either fails to note (and thus does sloppy research) or just simply ignores (and thus does dishonest research), St. Theodore’s reply.

St. Theodore first affirms Chalcedon’s formula of Christ’s human and divine natures, and then goes on to the implications of Christ’s humanity:

Neither one [i.e., nature] makes the other into something new, nor departs from what it was itself; nor is one changed into the other (for such a change would produce the confusion we have refused to admit); but He is one and the same in His hypostasis, with His two natures unconfused in their proper spheres. (1.3)

For Christ did not become a mere man, but rather that He assumed man in general, or the whole human nature. It must be said, however, that this whole human nature was contemplated in an individual manner (for otherwise how could He be seen?), so that He is seen and described, touched and circumscribed, eats and drinks, matures and grows, works and rests, sleeps and wakes, hungers and thirsts, weeps and sweats, and whatever else one does or suffers who is in all respects a man. . . . For this is the novel mystery of the dispensation, that the divine and human natures came together in one hypostasis of the Word, which maintains the properties of both natures in the indivisible union. (1.4) (On the Holy Icons, tr. Catharine Roth, SVS 1981)

By attempting to assert that Orthodox worship the divine nature in the icon, Baldwin comes close to monophysitism by confusing the human and divine natures. Or, by denying the real humanity portrayed in the icon (by having it swallowed up in divinity) Baldwin comes close to docetism.

St. Theodore also writes concerning how Christ’s divinity can be in the icon (and still preserve Chalcedonian Christology):

In the case of the Lord’s body, because of the conjunction of natures, His divinity is conjointly both venerated and glorified, although it is subject to the circumscription of the flesh. How else could it be, since the flesh is tangible, graspable, and visible, and in no way takes on the alien properties of the uncircumscribable nature because of the union? Accordingly, as it is said, the flesh even suffered without the impassible essence sharing the suffering. But the case of the icon is entirely different. For where there is present not even the nature of the flesh which is portrayed, but only its relationship, much less could you say that thereis present the uncircumscribable divinity: which is located in the icon, and is venerated there, only insofar as it is located in the shadow of the flesh united with it. . . . Thus if one says that divinity is in the icon, he would not be wrong, since it is also in the representation of the cross and in the other sacred objects; but divinity is not present in them by a union of natures, for they are not the deified flesh, but by a relative participation, because they share in the grace and the honor. (1.12)

Baldwin’s marked failure, just as it was of the iconoclasts, is the inabilty to distinguish between the prototype and the image. Citing St. Basil’s On the Holy Spirit, St. Theodore writes:

Is not every image a kind of seal and impression bearing in itself the proper appearance of that after which it is named? For we call the representation “cross” because it is also the cross, yet there are not two crosses; and we call the image of Christ “Christ” because it is also Christ, yet there are not two Christs. It is not possible to distinguish one from the other by the name, which they have in common, but by their natures. In the same way the divine Basil says that the image of the emperor is called “the emperor,” yet there are not two emperors, nor is his power divided, nor his glory fragmented; and that the honor given to the image rightly passes over to the prototype (and vice versa) [On the Holy Spirit 18.45] (1.8).

In other words, since the icon participates relatively in the prototype, the characteristics of the prototype are relatively present in the icon. So, if the Person of Christ is human and divine, then the depiction of Christ (who can only be depicted as a Person) in the icon preserves that union (without separation, confusion, division or admixture). While the flesh of Christ is deified by virtue of the union with his divinity, the icon is not divine in the way Christ’s flesh is divine, but it participates, by way of relation, in the divinity which Christ’s Person has and which is communicated to us in his flesh.

Baldwin has failed to account for the Orthodox teaching on the relationship between the image and the prototype, and in so doing, his “logic” necessarily results in his apparent docetism or his apparent monophysitism. In attempting to escape the Scylla of idolatry he has found himself caught in the Charybdis of a heretical Christology.

They say there is no new heresy, and Baldwin proves the saying right. By failing to heed the Orthodox teaching in toto, he has simply resurrected the old iconoclast heresies. Thankfully we have the Fathers to keep us on the straight course.

*So far as I know, the author is not related to any showbiz Baldwins.