Is Veneration of Icons Idolatry?

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Is Veneration of Icons Idolatry?

That "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above or in the earth beneath, nor of those things that are in the waters under the earth. Thou shalt not adore them, nor serve them" (Exodus 20:4-5 and Deuteronomy 5:9) might, at first glance, be seen as an absolute command or prohibition against worship of any kind of image (A. Fortescue, Veneration of Images, 1910, Volume VII). "For iconoclasts (image-breakers), every image could only be a portrait and a portrait of God was inconceivable in view of God's ineffable and unknowable qualities." Claim that icons were a sacred art was, iconoclasts argued, simply to clothe them in superstition and even heresy since they denied any presence of the person represented, the prototype, in his iconographic image. They could not see that the icon portrayed the visible of the invisible and the invisible in the visible (Evdokimov, 1972:193-194). Calvin, in arguing against the use of icons, said "the majesty of God is defiled by an absurd and indecorous fiction, when he who is incorporeal is assimilated to corporeal matter; he who is invisible to a visible image" (Institutes I.XI.2; Callihan, Credenda/Agenda, Vol. 6, No. 5). But God's command to Moses to build, according to the image shown to him on Mount Horeb, the tabernacle and all that it was to contain, including the cherubim cast in metal (Exodus 25:18; 26:1, 31), St. John of Damascus said, was an exception to the general rule, thus rendering the prohibition of images as not an absolute one" (Ouspensky, 1992:45-6). The prohibition of the image was to "forbid the chosen people to worship creatures in place of the Creator", and "to protect the spec...

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Fortescue, Adrian Iconoclasm, Catholic Encyclopaedia, Volume VII, 1910, Robert Appleton Company

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