Lifestyle

The coronation of images is an example of an old and obvious symbolic sign of honour that has become a fixed rite. The Greek pagans offered golden crowns to their idols as specially worthy...

In both East and West the reverence we pay to images has crystallized into formal ritual. In the Latin Rite the priest is commanded to bow to the cross in the sacristy before he...

But there is a difference not of principle but of practice between East and West, to which we have already alluded. Especially since Iconoclasm, the East dislikes solid statues. Perhaps they are too reminiscent...

Epiphanius of Salamis (d. 403) tore down a curtain in a church in Palestine because it had a picture of Christ or a saint. The Arian Philostorgius (fifth century) too was a forerunner of...

Long before the outbreak in the eighth century there were isolated cases of persons who feared the ever-growing cult of images and saw in it danger of a return to the old idolatry. We...

A curious story, that illustrates the length to which theworship of images had gone by the eighth century, is told in the “New Garden” ( Neon Paradeision — Pratum Spirituo ale) of a monk...

The icon seems to have been in some sort the channel through which the saint was approached; it has an almost sacramental virtue in arousing sentiments of faith, love and so on, in those...

Long afterwards the Frankish bishops in the eighth century were still unable to understand forms that in the East were natural and obvious, but to Germans seemed degrading and servile (Synod of Frankfort, 794;...

Distinct from the admission of images is the question of the way they are treated. What signs of reverence, if any, did the first Christians give to the images in their catacombs and churches?...

People prayed with extended arms to represent a cross (Origen, “Hom. in Exod.”, iii, 3, Tertullian, “de Orat.”, 14). So also to make the sign of the cross over a person or thing became...