The Day the Images Came Back

The Sunday of Orthodoxy is the first Sunday of Great Lent, and it commemorates a specific historical event: the final restoration of the holy icons in 843, ending more than a century of the iconoclast controversy in the Byzantine Empire, during which the veneration of images was twice condemned and images destroyed. The restoration under the empress Theodora is remembered as the "Triumph of Orthodoxy", and the day celebrates not icons alone but the vindication of right belief as such.

The theology at stake had been settled in principle at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, which taught that the honour paid to an image passes to the person it represents, and that the veneration of icons follows from the reality of the Incarnation: because God took visible flesh, he can be depicted. On this Sunday a procession carries icons through the church, and the Synodikon of Orthodoxy is read, proclaiming "eternal memory" to the defenders of the faith and, historically, anathemas against its opponents. The feast thus turns a hard-won doctrinal outcome into an annual affirmation of what the Orthodox understand their faith to be.