An Ontological Justification for Icons
With the kind permission of Dr Anna Zhyrkova, here is an excerpt from her chapter, “John of Damascus’ Philosophy of the Individual and the Theology of Icons” in The Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium , ed. A. Kaldellis & N. Siniossoglou (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 431–46. During the seventh and eighth centuries, the Byzantine empire underwent dramatic political and socioeconomic changes. Previously the dominant political entity, it suffered a tremendous loss of territory and political power. While under threat from the caliphate and the Bulgar khanate, it failed to retain political and spiritual connections to Rome, and its economic and administrative systems experienced numerous transformations. Even as it faced the external menace of Islam, internally it was coping with the sociopolitical consequences of the Christological controversies. However, rather than treating this period as analogous to the western Dark Ages, we might consider it an age of redefinition—