ABSTRACT
One of the earliest, and longest-running defences of Christian religious imagery is that painting can serve as an aide-memoire. In terms of Byzantine Christian writing the implications of this defence were richly explored in the mid-seventh century works of Leontios of Neapolis and those who came after him. For Leontios the image was a sign of the physical reality that is at the origin of memory, a point that within his text privileges the incarnate Christian God.4 John of Damascus, for one, developed this thesis in his defences of the icons. In his first Oration on the Icons, perhaps dateable to c.730, he argued that: The saints during their earthly lives were filled with the holy spirit and when they fulfil their course, the grace of the holy spirit does not depart from their souls or their bodies in the tombs, or from their likenesses and holy images; not by the nature of these things, but by grace and power/5 The saints are thus worthy of remembrance, not only because of their deeds during their lifetimes, but also because they maintain within their bodies and their images the grace of the holy spirit that made them holy. Thus, for Leontios of Neapolis and John of Damascus, memory
operates as a mark of a continuing state of being, rather than as the recall of something that is absent. As such, in their writings, both the bodies and icons of Christ and the saints remain locations of their holiness and objects suitable for worship. In effect the icon is now embraced by the notion of the relic, that has already been granted to the bodies of the saints.6
