Icon

Heard in the wild

The longer version

What it means

An icon is a sacred image — Christ, the Virgin Mary, a saint, a biblical scene — painted in a traditional style on wood, often with gold backgrounds and elongated, stylized figures that look nothing like a photograph, on purpose. In Orthodox churches icons are everywhere: on a screen (the iconostasis) that separates the altar from the congregation, on stands where people kiss them on entering, on the walls and ceiling. Orthodox homes have an "icon corner" for prayer. Catholics use icons too, especially in the Eastern rites and increasingly in the West.

Orthodox theology says an icon is a window: you look through it, not at it. The honor given to it passes to the one it shows.

Why people say it

Orthodox Christians say that because God became visible in Jesus — "the image of the invisible God" — He can be depicted, and that refusing to depict Him denies the Incarnation. Icons also teach: for centuries they were the Bible of those who couldn't read. And they're beloved. An Orthodox Christian praying before an icon of Christ experiences it as being in His presence, the way a photograph of your mother makes her near.

How to respond

If you visit an Orthodox church, you'll see people kiss icons, cross themselves, and bow; you're not expected to, and standing respectfully is fine. Don't touch icons casually, and ask before photographing. If an Orthodox or Catholic friend gives you an icon, it's a gift of something they hold sacred — receive it that way. If the practice troubles you (it troubled Christians for a century, after all), the distinction between honoring and worshipping is the place to start the conversation.

If you hear it in different churches

Orthodox: central, everywhere, theologically essential. Eastern Catholics: the same. Roman Catholics: icons alongside statues and other art, increasingly popular. Anglicans and Lutherans: some use, especially in high-church settings. Reformed, Baptist, and evangelical churches: historically none — the Reformed tradition removed images from churches — though icons have grown fashionable among some younger evangelicals. Pentecostals: none.

Where does “Icon” come from?

Christian images appear in the catacombs by the 200s. In the 700s and 800s the Byzantine Empire went through "iconoclasm" — the smashing of icons as idolatry — until the Second Council of Nicaea (787) defined the distinction between veneration and worship and affirmed icons, citing the Incarnation. The final restoration of icons in 843 is celebrated as the "Triumph of Orthodoxy" on the first Sunday of Lent. The Reformation revived the argument: Calvinists removed images, Lutherans kept them, and Anglicans went back and forth. The word is Greek eikon, "image."

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