I do not advocate for icons being immediately restored in the living liturgy of the Assyrian Church of the East. I believe that the sources on our icons need to be well understood. Understanding icons in the East Syriac tradition means understanding them more deeply than just as a liturgical element. Like a cross, an icon is not just a decoration or empty sign. It has a mystical quality wherein the divine reality is made present before us, but this is a deeper teaching of the Church. It goes to how our salvation is, at heart, an intimacy with the divine. Before we attempt to revive icons liturgically, we need to be revived theologically.
A superficial and hasty understanding of divine things should never lead us to action. Prayer, which takes time and struggle, is required to properly live out theology. There is a story of Pope Paul VI, who oversaw the development of a new Order of the Mass for the Latin Catholic Church. In 1969, as part of this liturgical reform, Pope Paul VI suppressed the Octave of Pentecost, which is very ancient and celebrates the work of the Holy Spirit by extending the feast for eight days. On the Monday after Pentecost 1970, Pope Paul VI went to vest and was surprised that ordinary green vestments were laid out for him instead of red for the Octave of Pentecost. "What on earth are these for," exclaimed the pontiff, "it is the Octave of Pentecost. Where are the red vestments?" His sacristan responded: "It is now ordinary time. It is green now. The Octave of Pentecost was abolished." The Pope responded: "Green? This is impossible. Who did that?" The sacristan responded: "You did, holy father." And Pope Paul wept.
Historical or not, the story is true in that the ancient gifts of the Holy Spirit are the most precious treasures we have and once lost are difficult to recover. A love for Christ means a love for his Church and that includes our precursors in the race as much as our fellows contesting with us. Icons present the Assyrian Church with a starting point for conversing with the fathers and grappling with the tradition. They are, by far, the most popular topic to write about and that is a good thing since it gets us thinking through the faith. Unlike what happened with the Latin rite, we have maintained the authority and power of Sacred Tradition as inviolable and based on the historical record. We all accept that the Church of the Fathers is our Church, but our contemporary practice often differs from the historical record. What we lack from the tradition we lack due to the brutality of the past centuries and we crave an authentic restoration of our spiritual inheritance. There is nothing that suggests than anyone suppressed or abolished icons, the use of the bema in liturgy, liturgical fans, or the Presanctified Liturgy (just a few concrete and easy examples). But they have not been practiced in living memory, a living memory that, for over a century, has been preoccupied with each generation seeking refuge in a new context.
Perhaps the next century will see the dynamic of the account of Pope Paul VI play out in reverse. Instead of one day waking out of the holy hum-drum of two millennia of consistency with the work of the Holy Spirit to discover that the very celebration of the Holy Spirit has been curtailed, we would slowly awaken to the gifts and treasures buried for us in the very words that we never stopped repeating. Such a revival should be based on a revival in understanding the theology, especially mystical theology, of our fathers. If we do not see the mystical power of the incomprehensible God putting on the garment of names, of the incarnation, then we will not properly receive the spiritual gift that should accompany the visual gift of the icon, or any other part of sacred tradition. The iconographer's brush and the theologian's reed do the same thing and if your eye cannot see the incomprehensible mystery revealed in the one, it will be blind to the same in the other.
Saint Ephrem expressed the bedrock theological principle that only a 'luminous eye' can see the kingdom of heaven where it is depicted, and in icons with images as much as in books with words, the kingdom is present, and so our own preparation to venerate an icon or read sacred scripture is the more arduous task than obtaining either physical object.
For the mirror is a figure of the holy preaching of the outward Gospel. Within itself is depicted the beauty of the beautiful who look into it, and again in it the defects of the ugly who despise it are rebuked. And just as this natural mirror is but a figure of the Gospel, so too the Gospel is but a figure of the beauty that is above which does not fade and at which all the sins of the created world are rebuked. For in it reward is given to all who have kept their beauty from being defiled with mud. For to everyone who peers into this mirror his sins are visible, and everyone who considers it, sees there the lot which is reserved for him, whether good or bad. There the kingdom of heaven is depicted visible to those who have a luminous eye; there the lofty ranks of the good are to be seen on high, there the raised ranks of the intermediate can be distinguished, and there the low ranks of the wicked are marked out. There the fair faces, prepared for those who are worthy of them, can be recognized, there Paradise is visible, joyous with its flowers. In that mirror Gehenna, too, is visible, all fiery, ready for those who deserve to live there. (Letter to Publius, 1-2 quoted from Brock, 77)Icons, it seems, represent a good starting point for many to penetrate the space between the written and enacted life of the Church of the East. It is not the only one, nor necessarily the best one. Icons were a part of a traditional architecture and layout of Church of the East temples and as such had a scaffolding or framework, both physical and intellectual, that supported their role in our spiritual life. This all can be revived, and we owe it to our heritage to study the richness of our inheritance and use it fully. We also owe our heritage a good read and much reflection before acting. We would have to live out the written liturgy as we are able, which assumes a process of assimilating old rubrics to new dynamics. Throughout the liturgical year, many feasts and memorials presume a more complex and rich repertoire of liturgical movement. For instance, the vigil of Easter with its multiple gospel readings and, possibly, Vesperal liturgy of the Resurrection. Or the weekdays of lent with presanctified liturgies that presuppose a movement from bema to altar that makes these awkward given the current layout. One can easily find things in the tradition and develop a constantly jarring pattern of making a fad of liturgical restoration. However, there is much to consider, analyze, and discuss in every detail of the tradition. Discussing and even lovingly disputing aspects of the tradition will bear us the fruits we need to live out the tradition.
My point in retelling the story of Pope Paul VI is that stunning yourself with your liturgical choices is symptomatic of two mistakes. One is that if you are shocked with a liturgical practice, assuming you know the tradition well, something is definitely wrong. Second is that if you feel you have made a liturgical choice, something is wrong. This does not mean we cannot revive practices that persecution repressed. If a learned member of the Church of the East sees a bema in use, they shouldn't be shocked but presently surprised: "that's right!" There is nothing less wise than an unnecessary liturgical imposition since it violates the pious and true compass that preserves the Church: a love for the faith of the fathers. Such a faith compass will embrace and enliven any authentic aspect of the tradition, in prayer.
Icons are far better represented in the tradition than I have made obvious in this blog, but it would shock many in the Church of the East to see icons in their churches. This does not mean that they should not, one day, perhaps soon, be restored. It also means that we need to understand the tradition that we receive far deeper than just knowing its mechanics. Proving that the Assyrian Church of the East traditionally had and used icons is not a hard thing. It has already been done: Herman Teule, “The Veneration of Images in the East Syriac Tradition,” in Die Welt der Götterbilder, pp. 324--346. The more important work is understanding the theology that surrounds icons, that gave birth to them.
Above quote from Saint Ephrem taken from:
Brock, Sebastian. The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem the Syrian. Cistercian: Kalamazoo, 1992) ,77.
For the Italian of the Pope Paul VI story:
http://blog.messainlatino.it/2010/05/le-lacrime-di-paolo-vi-e-lottava-di.html
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