Nicea II: A Revocare

Image credit: Liviu Florescu via Unsplash.com

This essay is cross-published from Earth and Altar (APA), with Fr Jefferies’ and E&A editor’s permission.

The Rev. Ben Jefferies has served as a parish priest since 2014. He is the editor of the St. Bernard Breviary, and is presently doing doctoral research on E.B. Pusey. He is married with three daughters and lives in Wisconsin.

Revocare. I take it back. I have changed my mind on Nicea II. I believe it is ecumenical.

It was so before I saw it to be, of course, but since I had previously objected to the ecumenical status of Nicea II in public, my conscience obliges me to explain my change of mind publicly.

Several internal inconsistencies began to emerge as cracks in my intellectual foundation, furthered by a series of thoughtful pushbacks from gracious interlocutors: Fr. Chad Hatfield, former St. Vladimir’s Theological Seminary president, and a number of thoughtful young men and women who pushed my thinking with astute questions at the recent (and excellent) Anglican Way Institute conference. There was also Fr. Matthew Kirby, in the comments on Archbishop Mark Haverland’s blog, and above all, Fr. Mark Perkins in his gracious, thoughtful, detailed, and generous series of essays on Earth & Altar back in 2020. I gave a paper against Nicea II at the AWI conference, but over the last few weeks, I came to the inescapable conclusion that I have been in the wrong. Where I was wrong, and why I think I was so, I shall try to sketch here. (It is still coming into focus, admittedly.) If a closer attention to the details of the catholic faith is accomplished through any of this, then that is a gain. Where I have sown confusion or created false trails, for that I repent. And I ask the reader who may have followed this exchange to graciously consider these new thoughts, to weigh them against what I have written in the past, and to change their mind also.

Let me begin with the third anathema. It is the one that mandates the veneration of icons, and it has long been my chief concern about Nicea II: “If anyone does not salute such representations as standing for the Lord and his saints, let him be anathema.” For the past several years, I have found myself in a funny position. When a crucifix is processed with in church, do I not reverence it? Do I sometimes reverence it? Should I encourage my children one way or the other? I must admit that I have had no problem kissing the relic of St. Bernard’s tomb that I possess nor the portrait of our Savior painted by Murillo that hangs in my prayer corner. I bow before the altar each time I pass it. Why am I getting hung up on the mandating of this veneration? I have gotten real heady, such as when the processional crucifix passes by, I try to make a mental act of salute without any bodily gesture. It’s been weird.

In contemplating the anathema, I wondered whether it would be better to pass by an image of Christ without saluting it much in the same way that we treat mere art on the wall, which eventually becomes background and forgotten through familiarity. Does not saluting lead to more or less love for our Lord Jesus? I could not escape the obvious conclusion that it would lead to less love for him—and that this is a profound problem.

The more I studied how the anathemas function in the first six ecumenical councils, the more I became unpersuaded by Fr. Mark Perkins’s (and C.B. Moss’s) argument that they are not a part of the horos—the definition). They absolutely are. But I have been misinterpreting the third anathema of Nicea II in a few ways. First, the word in question is aspazomai, not proskynesis (usually translated as bow in English). The gloss for aspazomai is salute, but it could also be greet or embrace. Sure, the presiding metropolitan, Patriarch Tarasius of Constantinople, in the attached conciliar documentation says that bowing (proskynesis) is a normal form of saluting, but it is not an exclusive synonym. Nicea II only enjoined (on pain of anathema) saluting, and this is a mercy. If it had made bowing mandatory on pain of anathema, I think I never could have reconciled this with the catholic faith. But the fathers of Nicea II did not. Saluting, on the other hand, is necessary. It is necessary to recognize the glory of the prototype being represented: The Incarnate Word himself. To insist on the permissibility of icons (as I have done in the past), but to be silent on saluting them is to miss the logic of the argument for icons in the first place. I kiss the Gospel book because the contents it makes known leads to eternal life. I also kiss icons because what is portrayed leads to eternal life.

In other words, Christians have saluted icons in different ways depending on their cultural and social contexts. Consider that proskyneo primarily meant obeisance or bowing (a point I have leaned on heavily in the past) in Late Antiquity. In the Byzantine Church, however, the sense of the word shifted to embrace or kiss, according to the 1908 edition of the ancient Pedalion (otherwise known as The Rudder in English translation), a compendium of ecclesiastical law normative for the Orthodox. In its commentary on Nicea II, the editors write:

In the case of holy icons adoration and salutation (commonly called kissing) are one and the same thing. For, in the ancient Greek language, the main verb kyno (in the compound verb proskyno, meaning to adore) means “to embrace and kiss.” The preposition pros indicates an intensification of the meaning “embrace and kiss” and implies longing and yearning. Hence, in order to express the full meaning of the Greek word in English we should have to employ some such circumlocution as “to embrace and kiss longingly and yearningly.” That is why the present Synod [Nicea II], in its Act 7, said “in all respects to accept and recognize the venerable icons, and to adore them, or, more explicitly speaking, to embrace and kiss them.”¹

I have indeed been overly wooden and litigious in my approach to the anathema, especially in the light of the way in which the church has actually (not) enforced it. Contrary to my implications, they do not, for example, excommunicate church members who walk by an icon and do not venerate it with a specific gesture. Moreover, when the Synod of 843, the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” as the Eastern churches know it, recapitulated Nicea II, it focused almost exclusively on simply being anti-Iconoclastic, with only a passing reference to the proper modes of veneration. This can be seen in the Synodikon of Orthodoxy and it is also obvious in the Moscow Statement (1976) and the Dublin Statement (1984), both of which came out of ecumenical dialogues among Anglicans and Eastern Orthodox. In short, the anathemas have suffered (in my earlier treatments) from an overly literal interpretation that neglects the real and living tradition of the Church that actually sits under the seventh council.

Is there a danger of idolatry in venerating icons? Is there a danger in misusing them and allowing veneration (of whatever form) to lead to hyper-veneration that is in fact latreia, making the icon a magical talisman? Yes. My fear about this has been a driving factor in my thinking till now, and I have had to muffle all along my remembrance of the ancient principle: The abuse does not nullify the proper use. Indeed, the corrective to abuse is the proper use, which requires catechesis and pastoral care. Indeed, I have been really struck by the Council of Trent on this front. Session 25 of Trent is the first time that Nicea II is explicitly received in the West, and the Tridentine bishops very helpfully frame Nicea II (albeit, not entirely accurately) with a caution against misuse:

Moreover, that the images of Christ, of the Virgin Mother of God, and of the other saints, are to be had and retained particularly in temples, and that due honour and veneration are to be given them; not that any divinity, or virtue, is believed to be in them, on account of which they are to be worshipped; or that anything is to be asked of them; or, that trust is to be reposed in images, as was of old done by the Gentiles who placed their hope in idols; but because the honor which is shown them is referred to the prototypes which those images represent; in such wise that by the images which we kiss, and before which we uncover the head, and prostrate ourselves, we adore Christ; and we venerate the saints, whose similitude they bear: as, by the decrees of Councils, and especially of the second Synod of Nicea, has been defined against the opponents of images. [...] And if any abuses have crept in amongst these holy and salutary observances, the holy Synod ardently desires that they be utterly abolished [...] Moreover, in the invocation of saints, the veneration of relics, and the sacred use of images, every superstition shall be removed.

The phrases “utterly abolished” and “every superstition shall be removed” leave some room for interpretation. A misused image could be stored out of sight for a time. Perhaps it could also be destroyed, if necessary. Whatever the particular solution in each case, there is clearly a place, if not for aniconic Christianity, at least for iconic minimalism such as characterizes Cistercianism as well as Anglicanism. If the Tridentine teaching can be characterized as the norm for Western reception of Nicea II, this is certainly something I, as a catholic-minded Anglican, can get on board with.

Speaking of the western reception of Nicea II, I have made much of the Synod of Frankfurt which in 794 rejected Nicea II. I considered this history in the paper I gave last week, and I was unsettled by what I found. First of all, contrary to how I first learned of it, the Frankfurt Synod was not convened for this issue. It was a regular meeting of the far Western bishops (England, Spain, Frankia, et al.). The condemnation of Nicea II was not even the first item on their list; it is addressed in the second canon. Moreover, the language with which they repudiate Nicea is remarkable:

The question was introduced of the recent synod of the Greeks on the worship of images held at Constantinople. There it was laid down that those who refuse to pay service and veneration to the images as to the divine Trinity should be judged anathema. Our most holy fathers, absolutely refusing that service, held them (i.e. the Greeks) in contempt and unanimously condemned them.²

These bishops and scholars, including Benedict of Aniane, Alcuin of York, and Smaragdus, were no dummies and were more than capable of distinguishing between degrees of “worship” (even if they were hamstrung by having only the one word, adoratio). (Which, as an aside, I only have very lately learned is a fact of Latin lamented as early as St. Augustine.³) Here the bishops seem to be dealing quite shrewdly. Charlemagne, as the presiding king, who is motivated to contradict Pope Adrian I, who had given his approval to Nicea II. The Bishops agreed only to a very conditional and therefore limited rebuke: that if the council that met in Nicea II anathematized those who do not pay to images the same worship as is given to the Trinity, then it must be condemned. But Nicea II expressed exactly the opposite: “Certainly this is not the full adoration (latreia) in accordance with our faith, which is properly paid only to the divine nature.” I had not actually examined the records from Frankfurt until now, and this was a rather big blow to my mental case.

Incidentally, two larger questions about the history of the church and theology have also shifted in my mind. The first pertains to the authority and reception of the ecumenical councils generally, which ought to be understood as a dynamic historical process, each successive council ratifying and reifying the one that came before it. Take Nicea I (325). It was not certain at the time that the homoousios would win the day and that it would be necessary to unite the orthodox against the Arians. It was not certain, to begin with, that the word could be reappropriated from its earlier usage among the modalist Sabellians. It is conceivable that a Eusebian creed that had all the same elements as the Nicene Creed, minus the homoousios, could have become the bulwark to defend the catholic faith. But as the middle decades of the fourth century rolled on, and Arianism persisted and grew under different leaders, some of whom hid behind a Eusebian creed, it became clear to orthodox bishops that Athanasius was right in his argument the church needed homoousios in order to ward off Arianism. The Cappadocian solution of assigning ousios to the oneness of God, and hypostasis to the threeness of God, made homoousios permanently safe from Sabellianism. Constantinople I (381), then, reaffirmed the Nicene Creed as the orthodox confession and included an expanded clause on the Holy Spirit against the Arian-inspired pneumatomachi.

Having articulated the full divinity of the Son, the Church then moved on to the collateral question of how full divinity and his humanity exist in the one person of Jesus Christ. When Cyril opposed Nestorius at Ephesus in 431, the Council mentioned nothing about Constantinople I (381) nor its creed, but it did read aloud the Nicene Creed, which had been ratified by Constantinople. A portion of the followers of Cyril went to an extreme, led by Eutyches, whom the Synod of Ephesus (449) attempted to exonerate. Against this, Chalcedon was called in 451, setting an upper-limit to Cyrilline theology and proscribing monophysitism a la Eutyches. At Chalcedon, Ephesus and the Creed of 381 were affirmed, thus clarifying and reifying the first, second, and third ecumenical councils and marking itself as the fourth. This method is no accident; it is the norm of ecumenical councils: The proof of a council’s ecumenicity is established in the decades that follow it. I realize now that my previous view on the councils was indeed overly simplistic (as Fr. Perkins pointed out), and indeed, while St. Paul and St. John and St. Peter all believed in the same God as we do: A God who is a Trinity in Unity, and who worshipped the same Lord: Christ Jesus who is both fully God and fully man. It would have taken them a little time and thought to sift through the controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries, just as it takes us now a little time and thought.

If we place ourselves mentally in the year 788, it is not immediately apparent that the council that met in Nicea in 787 was ecumenical. Had not Hiera (754) already claimed to be so? Like homoousios in the fourth century, it took time for the Church to discern which view of images would was necessary (or at least helpful) to defend the catholic faith. In retrospect, the iconoclasts are clearly wrong (as I have always contended), and some of them alarmingly Eutychian. Jesus clearly made himself visible, and therefore representable. In this much, St. John of Damascus is clearly right: To defend the making of images is to defend the incarnation—the full, visible, portrayable humanity of Jesus.

I struggled with the veneration of these images. But, since the image really does represent the prototype, while I am not certain the veneration of an image automatically is received by the prototype, I am sufficiently convinced of the opposite: To ignore an image of Christ, without paying reverence to the prototype, is to form a habit of cold indifference to the Lord himself; as if Christ Jesus were merely an ornament in the cosmos, easily ignored. Nicea II anathematized those who refuse to greet an icon—and this is actually a catholic sentiment. Image-saluting is not in the Bible, but neither is the homoousios. Both were developed by the Church to safeguard different aspects of our catholic faith. And in so doing, they did so rightly, and ecumenically, and therefore authoritatively.

I also became increasingly troubled by the violence used by the Iconomachs against the Iconophiles, and was horrified to recently learn that Emperor Leo III attacked monasteries (the monks were all iconodules), closed them down, and forced monks and nuns to marry each other. This is not the action of a godly leader, to put it mildly.

So, what about the mixed reception of Nicea II in the West that I have leaned so heavily on in previous writing? I now see this in a different light as well. The facts are there, as I put them, but the meaning of those facts I now interpret differently. On the one hand, Nicea II was formally rejected on the basis of a strawman argument at Frankfurt. This teaching, that images should receive the same worship as is given to the Trinity, is indeed to be rejected, and this is why Nicea II continued to be regarded with suspicion until the renaissance. There is a great loss in this. I see now that the Western portion of the suffered profoundly by not having a formal “ceiling” set to the devotion that is paid to images, a ceiling that Nicea II definitely institutes in proscribing latreia to images. As well as allowing statuary (instead of two-dimensional paintings) to flourish unchecked, the extravagant and un-Christian folk-piety that attached to images (mostly, statues) in the West might have Church received a healthy corrective long before Trent if Nicea II had been received rightly in the eighth century.

Accepting Nicea II as ecumenical raises important questions for Anglicans about doctrinal authority in the Church. Plainly, the Book of Homilies brooks no quarter to Nicea II. On this point it is, therefore, wrong. This has been hard for me to admit. For the longest time, I did not want my immediate canonical authority (the canon I am actually under) to compete with historic catholic authority. My Continuing brothers have accurately accused me of attributing greater authority to the Book of Homilies than to the ecumenical councils. But the Book of Homilies is a hodge-podge, derivative authority, hyper-linked to the Thirty-Nine Articles, themselves a historicized authority (via the United States amendments of 1801, etc.). I have been giving it too much weight. Nicea II is heavier. Though it smashes my earlier aspiration, I admit it.

I see now that I aspired in two directions, which I see now to have been misguided. First, I wanted a black-and-white rule by which I can say that I, as an Anglican, am right, and that the Roman Catholic Church is wrong. If I don’t have that, I have been worried that I or others might simply swim the Tiber. By accepting Nicea II as ecumenical, and minimizing the weight of the Book of Homilies, I now have a less sturdy barrier between my own position and Rome. But also, in this, the question has flipped (and here, Fr. Perkins’s thoughts have again helped me). The proper approach to Rome is not to insist that they are absolutely wrong and we are right, but rather to point out they have overstated some things and there is nothing that compels us to join them. Or, as Fr. Perkins put it, “The strongest answer to Roman and Eastern claims is not their theological errors nor our Anglican distinctives. It is simply in the Anglican Church’s valid claims to full Catholicity and Apostolicity.” My mind has changed to agree with Fr. Perkins in this now also. This leaves a squishier and more easily-surmountable barrier between ourselves and Rome, and I am learning inwardly to be ok with that. If folks go to Rome, so be it. I don’t think it is necessary nor the best course of action, but I no longer have the footing to stand as strongly against it as I once did.

Animating my desire for anti-Roman Anglican distinctives was a wishful aspiration that I might be able to find and make common-cause with my 1662-only, Anglicanism-as-Established brethren. If we could have an articulated and robust Anglican magisterium (like the Westminster Confession notionally is to Presbyterianism), then maybe we could have a point of unity as well as a clarified locus of truth. But I have learned along the way that this was an impossible project. My own willingness to bend the Thirty-Nine Articles (I have always kept the sacrament on reserve in the parish, I elevate at the consecration, I kiss relics, etc.), coupled with the general anti-catholic and narrow spirit often fostered among that school meant it was a non-starter. Speaking of relics, I also began to see, thanks to conversation with Fr. Brandon LeTourneau, how relics (which have strong biblical precedent: Elisha’s bones⁴, St. Paul’s handkerchief in Acts⁵, etc.) and images are somewhat linked together. They are condemned in the same Article of Religion, and their practice is linked in the catholic church. This was a pickle I was just living with incoherently, and now a little more coherently.

Lastly, one of the stumbling blocks in my mind for a long time has been the following: What is the practical difference between latreia and doulia? If before images we light candles, offer incense, bow, etc., what actions of worship are reserved for God alone, that could be observed as latreia distinct from doulia? For many years this was an empty box in my mind, and the idea that a different intent of the heart suffices did not satisfy me. But just last week it hit me: Our words express our latreia. The Church never sings “We praise you, O Icon.” Thas would be latreia, and would be offensive to God. We sing each day the Te Deum “We praise you, O God” Verbal praise—the fruit of lips, the sacrifice of thanksgiving—this is latreia that the whole Church gives to God. I am unaware of the Eastern Church ever offering this to an icon in an approved liturgy. Additionally, this opened to my mind the other layer of “the sacrifice of thanksgiving”—the memorial offering of Calvary in the Eucharist—this is offered to God alone, in his invisibility, and is never offered to an icon. There were things in this category! I had just been unable to see them because I had dug myself into an intellectual corner where they were beyond view.

I continue to have what might be called a protestant apprehensiveness about the liability of images being thought of superstitiously, but I have been encouraged to learn that this is also held among some Orthodox. In his little book on the Seventh Council, C.B. Moss cites an Orthodox ordinal, “I will take care that that the homage due to God be not transferred to holy images nor false miracles be attributed to them whereby the true worship is perverted and a handle given to adversaries to reproach the Orthodox; on the contrary, I will study that images be respected only in the sense of the Holy Orthodox Church as set forth in the Second Council of Nicea.”⁶ Fr. Chad Hatfield also told me that it has become a standard Orthodox practice that when someone claims a miracle-working icon, a bishop will typically exorcise it, lest it be a diabolical sign and not of the Lord. It is, I believe (and this has always been a part of what animated my former arguments), right to be jealous that correct worship be given to God and that images not be used superstitiously. But, as I mentioned above, the correction for this is good catechesis, not attempting to de-throne Nicea II. As C.B. Moss puts it, the instinct to treat objects superstitiously is ubiquitous. “True Religion and rational education,” he writes, “are the remedies for it.”⁷

Animating my nervousness about Icon-devotion is a personal nervousness about the excesses of folk piety generally. But folk-piety exists everywhere; it never goes away, it stands always simply in need of canaling. The excesses of folk piety of my own culture are not as noticeable but can be equally as dangerous to true and living faith. This came home to me when I visited a nearby mega church, with its lightshow and rock band identical to the concerts held down the road at a big concert venue. This was a folk piety of entertainment, just as dulling to life in the Spirit as superstition can be. My wariness of superstitious use of images is therefore an alloy of theological judgment and cultural prejudice, and I should be more careful and charitable with it.

Anyway, forgive me, dear reader, for these wandering and self-oriented ramblings. I speak from the disorientation of a sea-change.

– The Rev. Fr Ben Jefferies

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Appendix: Article History⁸

Note that most of these have comments sections, including discourse between the respective authors.

• October 29, 2019 (Jefferies)

• October 30, 2019 (Walker)

• November 1, 2019 (McDermott)

• November 7, 2019 (Jefferies)

• November 11, 2019 (Walker)

• November 13, 2019 (Perkins)

• November 24, 2019 (Perkins)

• January 23, 2020 (Jefferies)

• October 30, 2020, part 1 (Perkins)

  • Part 2

  • Part 3

  • Part 4

  • Part 5

  • Part 6

• May 30, 2022 (Devereux)

• June 6, 2022 (Jefferies)

• June 8, 2022 (Perkins)

• July 25, 2022 (Jefferies)

• 2024 FiFNA change of statements

• January 17, 2025 (+Haverland)

• May 19, 2025 (+Haverland)

• May 29, 2025 (+Haverland)

1. The Rudder (Pedalion) Trans. by J. Nicolaides, Ed. D. Cummings (The Orthodox Christian Educational Society), 1957. The Pedalion has additional instructive material to bring to the table, worth exploring. Such as the fact that it states that the Gospel Book is worthy of more adoration than Icons, that the Eucharist is worthy of far more – indeed, total worship because Christ is himself their present. Also, that Icons are not to be anointed with oil, or blessed with any special prater, etc. to consecrate them, which is seen as a popish practice! Rather, they are inherently holy because of Him who is represented: Christ, in himself, or in his saints. Manifestly we in the west are accustomed to reading in our western corruptions onto the practices of our Eastern brothers!

2. Recorded in Mansi XIII, p.909, translation in E.J. Martin A History of the Iconoclastic Controversy (SPCK, 1930), p.251.

3. St. Augustine, Contra Faustus XX.21, “What is properly divine worship, which the Greeks call latria, and for which there is no word in Latin, both in doctrine and in practice, we give only to God.”

4. 2 Kings 13:21

5. Acts 19:12

6. C.B. Moss The Church of England and the Seventh Council (Faith Press, 1957), p.41.

7. Ibid., p.52.

8. Another link roundup @ Earth & Altar (APA) here.