As I have attempted to illustrate in this article, the Church struggled greatly to come to any real and clear understanding of Who Jesus is. Of course it is really beyond human understanding of how God could be both God and Man in the Person of Jesus, the Christ. And yet the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, knew, felt and believed that Jesus was more than just a special man with special powers. But it took a long time and people teaching things that were later condemned as true heresy, before the Church was able to formulate her real thoughts on Who Jesus is. We must always remember that the Church had to first decide that God was Triune (i.e., Three-Persons-in One) before she could truly find the appropriate words and expressions to say Who Jesus is.

For Theodore the Studite, the icon of Christ is the best possible illustration of what is meant by the hypostatic union, that expression which the Church decided expresses that Jesus is both fully God and fully man. What appears on the image is the very hypostasis of God the Word in   the flesh. In the Byzantine tradition the inscription around the halo surrounding the head of Jesus says The One Who Is, the equivalent of the sacred name YHWE, the name of God, whose person is revealed, but whose essence is inaccessible. It is neither God’s indescribable divinity nor His human nature alone which is represented on an icon, but the person of God the Son who took flesh: “Every portrait,” writes Theodore, “is the portrait of an hypostasis, and not of a nature.”

To paint an image of the divine essence or of God before His human Incarnation is obviously impossible; just as it is impossible to represent human nature as such, other than symbolically. Thus, symbolic images of Old Testament theophanies are not yet icons in a true sense. But the icon of Christ is different. With bodily eyes, the hypostasis of the Logos (Word of God, the Son) could be seen in the flesh, although its divine essence remained hidden; it is this mystery of the Incarnation which makes possible the sacred icons and requires their veneration.

The defense of images forced Byzantine thought to reaffirm the full concrete humanity of Christ – one of the primary reasons why we use icons. If an additional doctrinal stand against Monophysitism was necessary, it was taken by the Byzantine Church in the eighth and ninth centuries. But it is important to recognize that this stand was made neither at the expense of the doctrine of the hypostatic union nor at that of the Cyrillian understanding of the hypostatic identity of the incarnate Logos, but in the light of the former Christological formulations. The victory over iconoclasm was a reaffirmation of Chalcedonian and post-Chalcedonianm Christology.

So if people ever ask you why we use icons in our church, you can tell them that it reaffirms our belief that Jesus was fully both God and Man. They also reaffirm that His divinity did not force His humanity to act in any certain way. Truly a Mystery!