Icons Speak: Their Message

Description

Introducing the Twelve Great Feast Days of Orthodox Christianity through the written and the visual Gospel (the Bible and Icon) emphasizing their meaning for us today. The great power of the icon is the power to remind.   The Holy Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council decreed, “The icons remind those who pray of the icons’ prototypes and, through gazing upon the icons, the believers lift up their minds from the images to the prototypes.”   This is why Orthodox Christians venerate icons—praying before them, lighting candles before them, kissing them, setting lamps before them, and censing them. If icons were merely “artistic depictions,” all of this veneration would be criminal idolatry and sinfully absurd. Why? Because only God deserves such honor. Thus, the icons are venerated because, through their prayerful use, the believer ascends from image to proto-image (prototype).   As the Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council wrote,   An icon remembers its prototype. Thus, in one beholder it will awaken in the bright clarities of his conscious mind a spiritual vision that matches directly the bright clarities of the icon; and the beholder’s vision will be comparably clear and conscious. But in another person, the icon will stir the dreams that lie deeper in the subconscious, awakening a perception of the spiritual that not only affirms that such seeing is possible but also brings the thing seen into immediately felt experience. Thus, at the highest flourishing of their prayer, the ancient ascetics found that their icons were not simply windows through which they could behold the holy countenances depicted on them but were also doorways through which these countenances actually entered the empirical world. The saints came down from the icons to appear before those praying to them.   These words express the purpose of this book: to make the great feast days of the Orthodox Church come alive through the study of the icon of each feast, together with its scriptural text. Almost all the icons in this book are biblical icons whose reality is grounded in the revealed word of God. FOREWORD 4   A PRAYER RECITED BEFORE PAINTING AN ICON 5   CHAPTER ONE 8   CHAPTER TWO 20   CHAPTER THREE 27   CHAPTER FOUR 37   CHAPTER FIVE 47   CHAPTER SIX 63   CHAPTER SEVEN 70   CHAPTER EIGHT 83   CHAPTER NINE 94   CHAPTER TEN 101   CHAPTER ELEVEN 115   CHAPTER TWELVE 127   CHAPTER THIRTEEN 143   CHAPTER FOURTEEN 158   CHAPTER FIFTEEN 171   CHAPTER SIXTEEN 182   ADDENDUM - Saint George 194   ADDENDUM - Ladder of Divine Ascent 198   Notes 205