The Development of Icon Veneration — An analysis of the thought of Gregory the Great
Within the intense debate about sacred images throughout history, the opinion of the great Pope St. Gregory I is held in high regard because of its influence on later debates [1]. The main source for the saint’s thinking is found in the two letters sent to bishop Serenus of Massilia, where Gregory congratulates him for preventing the adoration of images, but rebukes him for destroying them, enunciating his famous maxim about the didactic role of images:
“To adore images is one thing; to teach with their help what should be adored is another. What Scripture is to the educated, images are to the ignorant, who see through them what they must accept; they read in them what they cannot read in books…Therefore you ought not to have broken that which was placed in the church not in order to be adored but solely in order to instruct the minds of the ignorant. It is not without reason that tradition permits the deeds of the saints to be depicted in holy places…” [2]
Historian Celia M. Chazelle has conducted an extensive analysis of these letters, and she raises the question that will guide the argumentation of this text, pointing to what Gregory meant by “adoration” in this context:
“First, it is evident now that these texts alone tell us nothing about Gregory’s views on, the validity and role of other types of artwork besides large-scale pictures of sacred events set in public view on church walls…Second, when Gregory wrote that pictures should not be adored — a word that for him referred especially to the honour due to God alone — did he mean simply that they should not receive the honour owed the divine (while presumably other, lesser types of worship could be tolerated), or that any worship given to them was necessarily the equivalent of the reverence properly bestowed on God and consequently unacceptable? The one, small clue that he held to the first opinion is provided in the letter of 600. The statement that the depiction of a holy event should cause its viewer to experience compunction and prostrate himself in adoration of the Trinity seems to leave open the possibility that such worship could take place before the work of art. There is nothing about Gregory’s statement that directly denies this, and indeed Gregory may have thought that in churches with walls covered with artistic representations it was difficult for the faithful to prostrate themselves in adoration of the holy Trinity away from an image.” [3]
Another Gregorian letter was used by the defenders of images at the time of the iconoclast controversy, but on a smaller scale. It is the letter to Bishop Januarius, where it is reported that Christians broke into a synagogue and put up a cross and an image of Mary. Gregory rebukes these Christians and orders them to restore the synagogue:
“considerantes hae de re vestrae voluntatis intentum, ac magis judicium, his hortamu affatibus, ut sublata exinde cum ea qua dignum est veneratione imagine atque cruce, debeatis quod violenter ablatum est reformare;” [4]
Gregory’s order that the image and the cross be removed with “the veneration deserved” seems to indicate in his thinking some respect for images, but we will focus on the letters to Serenus. At first it is necessary to establish that in Gregory’s work we do not find a definition of iconodulia, but this is not a problem, as we shall see, it actually represents a broad step in the development in the use of images and their theology.
As Chazelle analyzes, the Pope never talked about images other than mosaics on church walls that featured the lives of “holy people,” there are no opinions or even condemnations of the use of portable or individual icons in Gregory’s work. However, it seems safe to say that he was not opposed to them, since he did not condemn their use in his letter to Januarius, but also because of the use of icons of Christ in Gregorian missions, as in the one led by St. Augustine of Canterbury:
“A procession went into Aethelberht’s city headed by a priest carrying a silver processional cross, accompanied by another carrying an image of Christ on a board, all singing ‘Deprecamur Domini’, an antiphon from a Rogation Litany current in Gaul: ‘We beseech Thee, O Lord, in Thy great mercy that Thy wrath and anger may be turned away from this city and from Thy holy house, for we have sinned.’ The procession echoed the open-air litanies of Rome, the language of the Church and of continental civilisation. The processional cross with its silver and precious stones did honour to Christ but also represented to the Kentings the wealth and power of this continental belief. The cross had become the classic remedy against the demons, which the Christian mission would have believed had their base in the temples of the pagan kingdom whose capital they were entering: it was their protection. The figure of Christ on a board sounds like a Byzantine icon, and perhaps was a Western imitation, but it instantly pointed up the contrast between Christianity and Germanic paganism which did not have representational art” [5]
It remains to be seen whether Gregory would see any problem in the theology of images presented at Nicaea II, which argues mainly around the distinction of the worship given to God and the honour given to images. In his letters to Serenus, he seems to understand that the cult that the faithful rendered to the mosaics was that absolute adoration that is due only to God. Along these lines, it seems evident that Gregory conceived of other kinds of cult besides the latria, being himself a great advocate of the veneration of the saints, the Virgin Mary, the veneration of the cross, and also of relics, as reported in his letter to Dynamius:
“We now send you as the benediction of the blessed apostle Peter a small cross, wherein are inserted benefits from his chains, which for a time bound his neck: but may they loose yours from sins forever. Moreover in its four parts round about are contained benefits from the gridiron of the blessed Laurence, whereon he was burnt, that it, whereon his body was consumed by fire for the truth’s sake, may inflame your soul to the love of the Lord.” [6]
It would be inconceivable to say that for Gregory these cults represent the same thing since in many of his writings, it is possible to see his condemnation of the adoration of anything other than God. In the Gregorian missions cited above, Gregory suggests that Augustine not destroy the pagan temples, but sanctify them, build altars for relics, and replace the worship of pagan gods with the worship of the one God and the saints, as a way to facilitate conversions to Christianity [7]:
“Tell Augustine that he should be no means destroy the temples of the gods but rather the idols within those temples. Let him, after he has purified them with holy water, place altars and relics of the saints in them. For, if those temples are well built, they should be converted from the worship of demons to the service of the true God. Thus, seeing that their places of worship are not destroyed, the people will banish error from their hearts and come to places familiar and dear to them in acknowledgement and worship of the true God.” [8]
This fact is important since we are talking about recent converts from paganism. This attitude clearly shows that Gregory believed that the worship given to the saints is not the same worship given to the pagan gods! Also, it is interesting to draw attention to the element in the letters highlighted by Chazelle. Gregory states that images cause “compunction” to the faithful and thus they worship the holy trinity [9]. This, strictly speaking, is an expression of the didactic function of images enunciated by him in the same letter, where the faithful learn what is to be adored.
However, in the letter to Dynamus he states that he hopes that the relics of Laurence “inflame your soul to the love of the Lord”. Although unintentionally, this statement draws a parallel with that function of the mosaics in the worship of the faithful, since the two functions are similar, both induce a person to God and his worship. We find in Gregory’s work a possible parallel between relics, which were undoubtedly venerated by him, and images. It is this veneration of relics that John Damascene points out as similar to icons [10] and that provide the seed of development for the theology of Nicaea II. There is still another aspect worth discussing, this statement also seems to us a germ version of the Nicaea statement:
“For, how much more frequently through the imaginal formation they are seen, so much more quickly are those who contemplate these, raised to the memory and desire of the originals of these, to kiss and to render honorable adoration to them, not however, to grant true latria according to our faith, which is proper to divine nature alone; but just as to the figure of the revered and life-giving Cross and to the holy gospels, and to the other sacred monuments, let an oblation of incense and lights be made to give honor to these as was the pious custom with the ancients” [11]
If for Gregory, who at the time was referring to mosaics that represented “holy persons,” images could impel the faithful to worship the Holy Trinity, it would not be at all absurd to say that the same could happen to the saints. Just as images induce the adoration of the Trinity, they can also induce the veneration of the saints they represent. The sense of the pope’s speech opens the margin for this thought, since Gregory practiced and encouraged the cult of the saints, and it is also similar to what was proclaimed by the council.
Finally, we note that while the Gregorian opinion does not represent an intricate theory of icons along the lines of the Council, it does offer a major step forward in the development of the theology and the role of icons in the Church, a role that begins in that reverence and respect that early Christians had for symbols, painted and drawn widely in the catacombs, and in holy relics. I close this text by recalling Gregory’s opinion on the authority of the Councils:
“Besides, since with the heart man believeth unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation, I confess that I receive and revere, as the four books of the Gospel so also the four Councils.”[12]
NOTES AND REFERENCES
[1] See Gregory the Great: A Symposium. Memory, Instruction, Worship: Contents “Gregory’s” Influence on Early Medieval Doctrines of the Artistic Image.
[2] Caecilia Davis-Weyer. Early medieval art, 300–1150: sources and documents. Available in: https://books.google.com.br/books?hl=pt-BR&id=Q-JlTUmbMgAC&dq=gregory+I+bishop+iconoclasm&q=Gregory+iconoclasm#v=snippet&q=Gregory%20iconoclasm&f=false
[3] CHAZELLE, Celia. Pictures, books, and the illiterate: Pope Gregory letters to Serenus of Marseilles. Pag 143–144.
[4] PL, 77. Pag 944. Available in: https://archive.org/details/patrologiaecurs06goog/page/n419/mode/2up
[5] Christians and pagans, the conversion of britain from Alban to Bede”, Yale University Press, New Heaven and Lodon, Chapter 5.
[6] Book III, letter 33. Available in:https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/360203033.htm
[7] See “The Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons, Saint Gregory the Great and Saint Augustine.” Gregory also suggests in his letter to Serenus that images can strengthen the conversion of ex-pagans: “By declaring the pictures on church wal1s comparable with writing Gregory suggested not only that they brought the illiterate into contact with something otherwise reserved to the literate. As substitutes for written words the works of art distanced their viewers from the culture of heathen idols and idolatry and in doing so, for those who were former pagans, helped to strengthen their conversion. The-emphasis on the illiterate person’s ability to read such pictures, either assisted or unassisted, underscored the depictions’ capacity to divorce viewers from pagan traditions.” (CHAZELLE, Celia. Pag 148).
[8] Gregory I, Letter to Abbot Mellitus, Epsitola 76, PL 77: 1215–1216. Available in: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/greg1-mellitus.txt?fbclid=IwAR1RX5h8OLem9fTIQE-qRvROn7HlylA3ZnaTpnbLW5bUM1fyQUZ8x0cWIYQ
[9] It is interesting to quote the analysis present in the thesis “El ideario de lo sacro en Gregorio Magno (590–604). De los santos en la diplomacia pontificia”: “Citando a Kessler, debería añadirse otro posible factor a la reprensión pontificia: que destruir las imágenes de los santos –quizás de los ángeles e incluso la del propio Cristo– representaba acabar también con su poder, su magia, y, por ende, su verdad; y todo ello con el agravante de que el autor de tal infamia era el mismo obispo, el pastor de su grey. Y aunque pueda resultar una afirmación palmaria, resulta bien diferente negar o prohibir una supuesta idolatría icónica que derribar los fundamentos de su propia fe arrasando representaciones sacras y mostrando así ante paganos y herejes la impotentia del dios del Galileo.” (pag 204–205)
[“Quoting Kessler (‘KESSLER, H., “Pictorial Narrative”, p. 85, “whether magical power was extended also to narrative picture is uncertain, though Pope Gregory certainly implied that it was’), another possible factor should be added to the pontifical reprimand: that destroying the images of the saints — perhaps of the angels and even of Christ himself — represented also destroying their power, their magic, and, therefore, their truth; and all this with the aggravating factor that the author of such infamy was the bishop himself, the shepherd of his flock. And although it may be a clear statement, it is very different to deny or prohibit an alleged iconic idolatry than to demolish the foundations of their own faith by razing sacred representations and thus showing before pagans and heretics the impotence of the god of the Galilean.”]
[10] See “Relic Veneration and Icon Veneration: Parallel? St. John Chrysostom says ‘Yes’” by Erick Ybarra. Available in: https://erickybarra.wordpress.com/2023/01/27/relic-veneration-and-icon-veneration-parallel-st-john-chrysostom-says-yes/?fbclid=IwAR3wkEO1lOPsG5OleV_kX5dCKl9SPgOYnelyo7xWmB82mUsLgTsN__XnbZo
[11] Denzinger, pag 121
[12] (Epistle XXV. To John, Bishop of Constantinople, and the Other Patriarchs). Available in: https://www.tertullian.org/fathers2/NPNF2-12/Npnf2-12-228.htm#P4744_1501339
