ABSTRACT
Because the principal subject of this chapter is the role of the Byzantine icon in worship and soteriology, there will be no prolonged discussion of the nature of the divine image in human beings or theory of deication. It will nonetheless be obvious that the premise which underlies the defence of icons is precisely that which had hitherto governed, and continued to govern, Christian thinking on these topics. The main point that defenders of the icon felt obliged to prove was the redeemability of matter, and the undeniable evidence for this was the assumption of human esh by the eternal and incorporeal image of God. Just as the Fathers of the Church, from Irenaeus to Maximus, had argued that this divine condescension to our condition enables us to participate in the very nature of God, so John of Damascus could maintain that the material representation of the divine is for most believers both a means and an incentive to the contemplation of the unseen realities which are attested by the image. As will become clear, all that has been said in the previous chapters by Filip Ivanovic on Dionysius and Torstein Tollefsen on Maximus is equally fundamental to the thinking of John of Damascus, whether his subject is the Incarnation, the image of God in humanity or the veneration of icons. Indeed, as will be apparent, these are not three different subjects for him but three corollaries of the one august truth that the human soul is not only fashioned but embodied in the image and likeness of an all-loving Creator.
