Orthodox icons and catholics

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Of course. The Catholic Church has never been against religious artwork.
 
Ion said:
Are catholics allowed to put orthodox style icons in their houses?
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Absolutely. As a Latin ( Roman) Catholic I love them, I like them a lot better than the " realistic " art found in most Latin Churches. We are carrying a beautiful Icon of the " Mother and Child " in the opening procession of the Priest and the Missal to the Altar during the entire Year of Faith. 👍
 
patrick457 said:
Another one of those Eastern-Western differences, no?
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The renaissance changed how “religious art” is defined in the West. Iconography has strict rules around it. You don’t just draw something based on what you think or how you feel, or your interpretation about someone or an event. There is a theology behind every element in an icon, and it does serve as a window from this world to the next, not merely a “picture”
 
ConstantineTG said:
The renaissance changed how “religious art” is defined in the West. Iconography has strict rules around it. You don’t just draw something based on what you think or how you feel, or your interpretation about someone or an event. There is a theology behind every element in an icon, and it does serve as a window from this world to the next, not merely a “picture”
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AFAIK the thing is that the West has historically laid more emphasis on the image as a didactic tool, a Biblia pauperum, in contrast to the ‘windows to heaven’ approach of the East. This view (minus the use of images for veneration) is what Protestants inherited, and the impetus for post-Trent Baroque religious art: a vehicle to express and convey Catholic teaching. And the process actually started much earlier: beginning from around the Gothic period we see Western artists start to aim for realism in their artworks.
 
patrick457 said:
AFAIK the thing is that the West has historically laid more emphasis on the image as a didactic tool, a Biblia pauperum, in contrast to the ‘windows to heaven’ approach of the East. This view (minus the use of images for veneration) is what Protestants inherited, and the impetus for post-Trent Baroque religious art: a vehicle to express and convey Catholic teaching. And the process actually started much earlier: beginning from around the Gothic period we see Western artists start to aim for realism in their artworks.
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Icons do in fact convey a teaching, a theology. It is not just one thing. Like I said, every element of an icon has a theological meaning and must be theologically correct. There are many elements to an icon and its best if you pick up an Orthodox book talking about it. I haven’t delved into iconography much so I can’t speak much about it. But the basics really is that it is not merely a picture. It is not art. Art is meant to be interpretative, icons are not interpretations.
 
ConstantineTG said:
Icons do in fact convey a teaching, a theology. It is not just one thing. Like I said, every element of an icon has a theological meaning and must be theologically correct. There are many elements to an icon and its best if you pick up an Orthodox book talking about it. I haven’t delved into iconography much so I can’t speak much about it. But the basics really is that it is not merely a picture. It is not art. Art is meant to be interpretative, icons are not interpretations.
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That is true. I’m not saying that the West has this while the East has that; I think that the purpose of images are ultimately similar in both sides. However, I still do think that the idea of the visual art as being primarily a teaching tool was historically given more emphasis in the West than in the East.

BTW are you familiar with the Libri Carolini? The book, written around the late 8th century, was intended to refute the supposed conclusions of the Second Council of Nicaea (‘supposed’ because the author is actually working from a bad translation of the decrees!) The idea expressed in the Libri Carolini is somewhat midway between the Iconoclast and Iconodule positions: for the author (who pseudepigraphically claims to be Charlemagne), veneration of images for what they represented was approved, but the opinion that the images partook in some degree of the nature of the thing they represented was rejected. The author condemned the Iconodules for what he perceived to be an almost-idolatrous treatment of images on their part (he disapproved of various pious practices before images and even claimed that the stories of miracles wrought by images are false - at this he is admittedly going too far), but he also rejected the Iconoclast idea of rejecting and destroying religious images altogether.

The author of the Libri Carolini thought that artworks are generally okay in that they could serve an educational purpose (teaching tools for the illiterate - the same idea Gregory the Great once expressed), as well as commemorative (as reminders of sacred persons and events) and aesthetic (images could be used to decorate a church) purposes, but they are ultimately just, well, artworks. They are ‘useful’, but they are not ‘holy’. The artist making such images wasn’t even considered to be doing a sacred task: for the author he was just a craftsman doing something no different from any other human activity. If images are to be shown respect it is for the sake of the subjects portrayed, not in themselves. Even so, he did not even think that images are necessary in the long run: a Christian should be able, he claims, to contemplate God and the virtues of the saints with oculus mentis, the “mind’s eye,” without the need for sensual means. For the writer, images aren’t ‘windows to heaven’. He instead thought that images belonged to the corporeal world, while encounter with God is intellectual and spiritual in nature. He then concludes that the Iconodules’ veneration of images was of a kind inappropriate for God. “God is to be adored, but He is not to be embraced,” concludes pseudo-Charlemagne.

The work was lost for a time before it resurfaced during the Reformation: as you might expect reformers like Calvin were excited about the work’s sometimes harsh/radical stance, prompting it to be placed in the Index of Forbidden Books.
 
patrick457 said:
That is true. I’m not saying that the West has this while the East has that; I think that the purpose of images are ultimately similar in both sides. However, I still do think that the idea of the visual art as being primarily a teaching tool was historically given more emphasis in the West than in the East.

BTW are you familiar with the Libri Carolini? The book, written around the late 8th century, was intended to refute the supposed conclusions of the Second Council of Nicaea (‘supposed’ because the author is actually working from a bad translation of the decrees!) The idea expressed in the Libri Carolini is somewhat midway between the Iconoclast and Iconodule positions: for the author (who pseudepigraphically claims to be Charlemagne), veneration of images for what they represented was approved, but the opinion that the images partook in some degree of the nature of the thing they represented was rejected. The author condemned the Iconodules for what he perceived to be an almost-idolatrous treatment of images on their part (he disapproved of various pious practices before images and even claimed that the stories of miracles wrought by images are false - at this he is admittedly going too far), but he also rejected the Iconoclast idea of rejecting and destroying religious images altogether.

The author of the Libri Carolini thought that artworks are generally okay in that they could serve an educational purpose (teaching tools for the illiterate - the same idea Gregory the Great once expressed), as well as commemorative (as reminders of sacred persons and events) and aesthetic (images could be used to decorate a church) purposes, but they are ultimately just, well, artworks. They are ‘useful’, but they are not ‘holy’. The artist making such images wasn’t even considered to be doing a sacred task: for the author he was just a craftsman doing something no different from any other human activity. If images are to be shown respect it is for the sake of the subjects portrayed, not in themselves. Even so, he did not even think that images are necessary in the long run: a Christian should be able, he claims, to contemplate God and the virtues of the saints with oculus mentis, the “mind’s eye,” without the need for sensual means. For the writer, images aren’t ‘windows to heaven’. He instead thought that images belonged to the corporeal world, while encounter with God is intellectual and spiritual in nature. He then concludes that the Iconodules’ veneration of images was of a kind inappropriate for God. “God is to be adored, but He is not to be embraced,” concludes pseudo-Charlemagne.

The work was lost for a time before it resurfaced during the Reformation: as you might expect reformers like Calvin were excited about the work’s sometimes harsh/radical stance, prompting it to be placed in the Index of Forbidden Books.
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No, I have not come across that. I guess I should put on my list of topics to read is a deeper understanding of iconography. It’s just that I still have so much to cover 😃 I am not even through Eastern Sacramental Theology yet.

The Eastern position of course is that images convey a number of things, among them is the corporeal reality. Christ became flesh, the saints who are of flesh exhuded holiness while on earth. This is a good reminder to us that salvation is not only for our souls but also for our bodies.

I really wish I know more about icons, I have bits and pieces that are mentioned during my study of other things. But even so, I have a much deeper appreciation to it. So much that I’m starting to be a bit “anal” (for lack of a better term) when I see “Western” art, especially those inspired by Protestantism. And I do believe the precision offered by iconography because a lot of people do tend to interpret art into scripture unwittingly. So if they see something in Western art that is theologically incorrect but was originally meant to be interpretative, then there is danger to the viewer of falling into heterodoxy.
 
ConstantineTG said:
No, I have not come across that. I guess I should put on my list of topics to read is a deeper understanding of iconography. It’s just that I still have so much to cover 😃 I am not even through Eastern Sacramental Theology yet.

The Eastern position of course is that images convey a number of things, among them is the corporeal reality. Christ became flesh, the saints who are of flesh exhuded holiness while on earth. This is a good reminder to us that salvation is not only for our souls but also for our bodies.

I really wish I know more about icons, I have bits and pieces that are mentioned during my study of other things. But even so, I have a much deeper appreciation to it. So much that I’m starting to be a bit “anal” (for lack of a better term) when I see “Western” art, especially those inspired by Protestantism. And I do believe the precision offered by iconography because a lot of people do tend to interpret art into scripture unwittingly. So if they see something in Western art that is theologically incorrect but was originally meant to be interpretative, then there is danger to the viewer of falling into heterodoxy.
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That’s what the author of the Libri Carolini was critical of: he was against the Byzantine idea that sacred icons are ‘windows to heaven’, enabling a privileged access to Christ or the saints. Contrary to St. Basil’s famous declaration (reiterated by St. John of Damascus) that “the honor paid to an image passes to its prototype,” the author did not see any connection between the image and the “truth,” and made every kind of representation into a metaphor or a symbol, whether it was a portrayal of a personification, a saint or an animal. Admittedly, this is once again an extremist view in the author’s part, but it is thought that this mentality might explain why the West did not develop a fixed system of sacred portraiture. In the West, religious art historically had a lower status than in the East, in that it did not provide a direct access to the prototype but at the same time had more freedom. (So the whole wackiness during the Renaissance and afterwards is really just a culmination of a long-occurring process rather than just something that popped out of nowhere.)

This was why the representations of plants or animals or personified concepts in Western churches did not cause much offense: in Western thinking these artworks which celebrated the created world could be interpreted as metaphors or symbols for a higher reality, a language for understanding the divine. This concept of image as mere symbol or reminder gave birth to another mentality: that of the natural world being a reflection of the divinity but one that was distant and not direct. In other words, the terrestrial world provides an ‘image’ of God, but not in a direct manner as in Eastern icons do. Part of me thinks that this might be also why the West continued to use certain symbolic images like the Lamb of God (which had become almost non-existent in the East) or the Chi-Rho and developed new ones.

http://ica.princeton.edu/images/tomekovic/st.05231.jpg

http://cache.virtualtourist.com/4/4922186-Four_Angels_surrounding_Mystic_Lamb_Ravenna.jpg

The first picture is a mosaic of the Lamb of God from Torcello, dating from the late 11th-early 12th century. It is a cropped copy of the 6th-century mosaic in the sanctuary vault at San Vitale in Ravenna (second pic): because the vault at Torcello is rectangular, the artists who made the mosaic had no choice but to truncate the original composition on its east and west sides. Otherwise they were more or less faithful to the original concept, down to the peacocks, the acanthus scrolls, and the other animals. The mosaic at Torcello demonstrates that not only did this animal and plant imagery continue to flourish in Western churches, but also in some places old preiconoclastic compositions carried such prestige that they were faithfully repeated.
 
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