The New Iconoclasm

One of the many things I love about the Byzantine Christian tradition is the Sunday commemorations of the first Ecumenical Councils. The Sunday after the Ascension recalls Nicaea I, the first council; we commemorate the first six in July, and then on the Sunday nearest October 11, we remember the seventh council, Nicaea II.

If you are familiar with the interior of our churches, the particular importance of Nicaea II for Byzantine Christians (both Catholic and Orthodox) becomes immediately apparent: it condemned the heresy of iconoclasm, the belief that any images of Christ, the Holy Virgin, the angels, or the saints violated the second commandment.

The prior Councils were all essentially Christological, and Nicaea II was no different. It declared, in short, that because Christ truly took on human nature, it is possible to depict Him in His humanity. To reject depictions of Him is to reject, in a real way, His very Incarnation. Modern Christians often misunderstand iconoclasm as a mere debate over Church aesthetics and the second commandment, missing what it means for the identity of Our Lord. To deny the icon, the image, is to deny the Incarnation.

Today, this heresy has resurfaced in an inverted way. We deny the humanity of another image of God: our very selves. The Greek word for image is eikon; in the Septuagint’s Genesis, God declares that man is made kat’ eikona Theou—in the image, the icon, of God. Humanity is the original icon, and today we are witnessing a global campaign of anthropological iconoclasm. We deny the physical, historical, and created reality of our own human nature.

The iconoclasts contended that God’s infinitude makes Him uncircumscribable; therefore, He cannot be painted. The Council Fathers, drawing on St. John of Damascus, argued that God the Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, assumed a real human body, redeeming matter and circumscribing Himself. The modern iconoclast smashes his own nature because he believes he should be infinite and uncircumscribable. We resent the limits of our biology, the borders of our physical communities, and the weight of our history, wanting instead to be pure, limitless will.

Today we deny our own humanity, having lost a poetic understanding of human nature. While classical philosophers understood Ποίησις (poiesis) as craftsmanship, the Christian tradition elevated it to recognize God’s creation ex nihilo—something which modern man (even many Christians, without realizing it) no longer believes. We were not made by God; we make ourselves. We are not God’s workmanship, but the work of our own hands. We are not given meaning and purpose by our loving Father, but we divine it ourselves.

Because we reject our created nature, we reject the rootedness that is inherent to that. God has made each of us in a particular context—historical, familial, cultural, even religious—which will conduce, with our cooperation, to our salvation. We view this inherited context as a restriction rather than a foundation. My own Protestant upbringing laid foundations whose fruit God is still revealing to me. St. Mary of Egypt’s life of sin led her to the Holy Sepulcher and to repentance, making her one of the greatest saints of the patristic age. God has allowed us to be born here, and now, for a reason. To reject the baggage of our past without acknowledging how “in everything God works for good with those who love him” is to reject our human nature.

And if we do not have a human nature—what did Christ assume? Whatever it was, it cannot save us.

This rejection of our given nature has bizarre, modern symptoms. At the May 2026 launch of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, one of those present alongside the pope, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, reportedly considered withdrawing from the presentation over the Holy Father’s firm rejection of AI consciousness. If, as modern man believes, human nature is whatever we create, why can it not be created in a machine as well? Both errors—our disembodiment and AI ensoulment—stem from the same failure to understand what human nature is.

We Christians are just as susceptible to these errors as others, though we will convince ourselves we are not. Post-Enlightenment, the implicit understanding is that orthodoxy is primarily, or even exclusively, about intellectual assent to the right doctrines. If I affirm the Church’s dogmatic declarations, read the right theological commentary, and hold the correct opinions, then I am a good Christian. We effectively reduce our faith to data.

But alongside intellectual assent are the family we have, the parish we have, and the broader mess of a culture (because it has always been a mess) we need to navigate. The Lord Jesus Christ assumed all of that too.

When we treat faith as a disembodied intellectual exercise, the practical result is a willing surrender to the push toward total isolation, especially through digital media. We are encouraged to live as solitary consumers, screen-tethered and barely connected to even the family members living under our own roofs.

Whether the media we consume is “edifying” or banal makes little difference; both turn our attention further inward. When our attention is internal and digital, we miss the shared humanity around us, and miss understanding what it is that Christ took on for our sake. I make myself, for myself, by myself.

The only remedy is authentic community with other people. We must form our own souls through the beauty, mess, and physicality of the home, first of all. We must look to see our humanity in Christ and Christ’s humanity in the man, woman, or child next to us. An understanding of Christ’s humanity answered the iconoclasts; living out Christ’s humanity answers today’s iconoclasts who reject the image of God which is Man.

I suspect that nearly everyone reading this has, somewhere in their home, maybe in several rooms, a crucifix, an icon, a statue of Our Lord, Our Lady, or one of the saints. Has this been reduced, by accident, to mere decoration?

Do you look at the statue of St. Francis in your garden and see a man brought to perfection through faith and obedience to Christ—but a man? Do you think of the crucifix around your neck and reflect on the immeasurable weight of each drop of that Man’s blood as it dripped down His brow, down the wood, and onto the ground? Start re-incarnating your vision of human nature with the images, so valiantly defended by the Council Fathers over 12 centuries ago, that are already in your home.