"Протоиерей Иоанн Мейендорф. Byzantine Theology " - читать интересную книгу автора

iconoclasts easily found in the Greek Christian tradition itself new
arguments indirectly connected with condemned Monophysitism or with foreign
cultural influences. An iconoclastic trend of thought, which could be traced
back to early Christianity, was later connected with Origenism. The early
apologists of Christianity took the Old Testament prohibitions against any
representation of God just as literally as the Jews had. But in their
polemics against Christianity, Neo-Platonic writers minimized the importance
of idols in Greek paganism and developed a relative doctrine of the image as
a means of access to the divine prototype and not as a dwelling of the
divine himself and used this argument to show the religious inferiority of
Christianity. Porphyry, for example, writes,

If some Hellenes were light-headed enough to believe that the gods live
inside idols, their thought remained much purer than that [of the
Christians] who believed that the divinity entered the Virgin Mary's womb,
became a foetus, was engendered and wrapped in clothes and was full of
blood, membranes, gall, and even viler things.1

Porphyry obviously understood that the belief in an historical
incarnation of God was inconsistent with total iconoclasm, for an historical
Christ was necessarily visible and depictable. And, indeed, Christian
iconography began to flourish as early as the third century. In Origenistic
circles however influenced as they were by Platonic spiritualism, which
denied a matter of permanent God-created existence and for whom the only
true reality was intellectual," iconoclastic tendencies survived. When
Constantia, sister of the Emperor Constantine, visited Jerusalem and
requested an image of Christ from Eusebius of Caesarea, she received the
answer that "the form a servant," assumed by the Logos in Jesus Christ, was
no longer in the realm of reality, and her concern for a material image of
Jesus was unworthy of true religion; after His glorification, Christ could
be contemplated only "in the mind."2 There is an evidence that the
theological advisers of Leo III, the first iconoclastic emperor, were also
Origenists with views most certainly identical to those of Eusebius. Thus, a
purely "Greek" iconoclasm, philosophically quite different from the Oriental
and the Islamic ones, contributed to the success of the movement.

Iconoclastic Theology.

It seemed that no articulate theology of iconoclasm developed in a
written form before the reign of Constantine V Copronymos (741-775). The
emperor himself published theological treatises attacking the veneration of
icons and gathered in Hieria a council claiming ecumenicity (754). The Acts
of this assembly are preserved in the minutes of the Seventh Ecumenical
Council, the Second of Nicaea, which formally rejected iconoclasm (787).
It is remarkable that Constantine, in order to justify his position,
formally referred to the authority of the first six councils; for him,
iconoclasm was not a new doctrine but the logical outcome of the
Christological debates of the previous centuries. The painter, the Council
of Hieria affirmed, when he makes an image of Christ, can paint either His
humanity alone separating it from the divinity or both His humanity and His