Images and Icons within Russian Orthodox

Art and Spirituality of the Russian Orthodox Tradition

One of the features of Russian Orthodoxy that most strikes Westerners when they encounter Orthodoxy is the prominence of icons, or sacred images. The Russians inherited from Byzantine Orthodoxy a sense of the importance of images in worship, both public and private, that had been enhanced by the 3 iconoclast controversy of the eighth to ninth centuries, and the final defeat of iconoclasm. This controversy, far more important in Byzantium than in the West, made icons a required aspect of Orthodox practice. It also involved the acceptance of an understanding of the place of religious images as ways of disclosing invisible realities, but also a way in which the material found an important place in religious practice, and indeed came to be held to be entailed by God’s assumption of humanity in the Incarnation. Because of the ‘linguistic filter’, all of this became hugely important within the world of Slav Orthodoxy. Orthodox devotion revolved around icons, and, as in Byzantium, they played a role in the defence of the Orthodox nations against attack. Legends traced icons back to the time of Christ; the Vladimir icon of the Mother of God being claimed as the work of St Luke the Evangelist (a claim Byzantine had made for the Hodigitria icon of the Mother of God). Particular icons—especially of the Mother of God—were associated with different places and had their own cult. Icons also provided a way of linking the public worship of the Church with the private devotions of Orthodox Christians: homes came to have a small domestic shrine, the ‘beautiful corner’, krasny ugol.