What is the importance of icons in the lives of believers?

As the Holy Fathers affirm, “what Scripture tells us in words, the icon announces to us and makes present to us through colors”. Holy Scripture speaks to us about the Incarnation of the Son of God, who came into the world to save us – and the icon does the same. Moreover, there is such a close connection between the act of incarnation and the icon that Saint Theodore the Studite states, in the context of the iconoclastic disputes, that “he who rejects the icon ultimately rejects the mystery of the incarnation of the Word”. We know that the Incarnation of the Son of God is the foundation and reason for the representation and veneration of icons: if Jesus Christ had not taken human form, we would not have been able to represent Him in icons. And as for the representation of saints, this would not have been possible either, precisely because through God’s work of redemption of the human race, man received the opportunity to become a saint.

The saints become models of holiness that we must follow in order to taste the happiness of Heaven. And we see, thus, that icons also fulfill an important role in the life of the Christian – a liturgical or cultic one. We pray to God and the saints through icons, because they predispose us to dialogue with the divinity and respond to a certain need for concreteness of man. For this reason, it is customary to paint churches and for believers to have icons in their homes.

A third role of the icon would be the pedagogical one. Being painted according to a certain canon, the icons place before the eyes of the viewer events from the history of the salvation of the human race, inspired either by the Holy Scripture or by the lives of the saints. Saint Gregory the Great says that “icons are for the unlearned what the Holy Scripture is for the literate”. By these words, we should not understand that icons would only be useful to the ignorant. The saint wants to highlight the special importance of icons, which he places on the same pedestal as Holy Scripture. An icon is also pedagogically useful to all Christians, because it offers another perspective, a seen perspective of the Word of God.

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