St. John of Damascus on the Holy Icons
February 22, 2010
Saint John of Damascus
In times past, God, without body and form, could in no way be represented. But now, since God has appeared in the flesh and lived among men, I can depict that which is visible of God….[for Christ is "the image of the invisible God. (Col. 1:15.)] I do not venerate the matter but I venerate the Creator of matter, Who became matter for me, Who condescended to live in matter, and Who, through matter accomplished my salvation; I do not cease to respect the matter through which my salvation is accomplished.
*Taken from First Homily in Defense of the Holy Icons.
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Again, so familiar, but so good!
I just realized you had that same excerpt but from a different translation lol. Yeah definitely good! =)
Nice…
“The Iconoclasts, by repudiating all representations of God, failed to take full account of the Incarnation. They fell, as so many puritans have done, into a kind of dualism. Regarding matter as a defilement, they wanted a religion freed from all contact with what is material; for they thought that what is spiritual must be non-material. But this is to betray the Incarnation, by allowing no place to Christ’s humanity, to His body; it is to forget that our body as well as our soul must be saved and transfigured. The Iconoclast controversy is thus closely linked to the earlier disputes about Christ’s person. It was not merely a controversy about religious art, but about the Incarnation, about human salvation, about the salvation of the entire material cosmos.”
Ware, “The Orthodox Church”, p. 33