The Difference Between Icon, Idol and Sacred Image

Icon, idol, image: three Greek and Latin words

The three terms come from Greek or Latin, and their etymology already sheds light on the difference.

Icon transcribes the Greek eikōn (εἰκών), which simply means "image, likeness, portrait". It is a positive and noble word. The Greek Bible uses it in the very first chapter of Genesis: man is created kat' eikona Theou, "in the image of God" (Gen 1:26-27).^[3] Saint Paul applies it to Christ himself: "He is the image (eikōn) of the invisible God" (Col 1:15).^[4] The icon, in the strong sense, is therefore first of all a biblical notion: a visible reality that refers to an invisible reality greater than itself.

Idol transcribes the Greek eidōlon (εἴδωλον), which does not mean "image" in general, but "phantom, spectre, appearance without substance": the empty silhouette of a thing that has no reality of its own. The Greek translators of the Old Testament (the Septuagint) chose this pejorative word to render the Hebrew terms designating idols. The idol, etymologically, is the image of a nothing: the figure of a god who does not exist.^[5][6]

Sacred image is the ordinary Latin expression, imago sacra, for any lawful representation of holy things. It is the broadest term: it covers the frescoes of the catacombs, Gothic stained glass, statues, illuminations, and the icon itself as one of its particular cases.

Why this confusion is dangerous

The confusion is not merely a question of words. From the Byzantine 8th century to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, sincere Christians accused the Church of falling into idolatry by painting Christ, sculpting the Virgin and bowing before a crucifix. The accusation always supposes the same mistake: confusing the image with the idol, that is, believing that as soon as the sacred is represented, it is adored in God's place.^[7]

Yet the Church has never taught that images themselves must be adored. She has always distinguished, with great clarity, the image that leads to God from the idol that holds back from him. To understand this distinction is to defuse at a stroke the oldest and most widespread objection against Christian art. It is also to guard oneself against a real danger: for a sacred image can degrade into an idol in the heart of the person who looks at it badly, as we shall see below.

What the Bible really forbids

The first commandment of the Decalogue (the second in the Protestant numbering) seems, at first reading, to condemn every image:

"You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any image of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down before these gods and you shall not serve them." Book of Exodus 20:4-5^[8]

But the Hebrew text and its context immediately clarify the meaning. The prohibition does not target art in itself: it targets the manufacture of a god. Deuteronomy gives the decisive reason: at Sinai, the people saw no form of God; they must therefore not forge an image that would claim to enclose and represent the invisible.

"Since you saw no form on the day when the Lord spoke to you at Horeb from the midst of the fire, take good care of yourselves: do not corrupt yourselves by making an idol for yourselves, a form of any kind." Deuteronomy 4:15-16^[9]

What God forbids, then, is reducing him to a manufactured figure, and still more divinizing a creature: a star, an animal, a statue. The Catechism sums it up: "The divine injunction included the prohibition of every representation of God by the hand of man", because God transcends every image.^[10] The ban bears on the idol, not on the image.

The idol, a "nothing"

The Bible does not merely forbid the idol: it ridicules it. The prophet Isaiah describes the craftsman who fells a tree, burns half of it to warm himself and bake his bread, then sculpts the other half, bows down before it and prays to it: "Deliver me, for you are my god!" The absurdity is plain: a piece of the wood used to make a fire is adored.^[11] The psalms drive the point home:

"Their idols: silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have a mouth and do not speak, eyes and do not see. [...] May those who make them become like them!" Psalm 115 (113 B), 4-8^[12]

Saint Paul draws the theological conclusion: "We know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is no God but the One."^[13] Here etymology recovers its full meaning. The idol is an eidōlon, a phantom: it represents a god who has no existence. That is the first radical difference from the sacred image. The sacred image refers to a real prototype: Christ really lived, the Virgin exists, the saints reign with God. The idol, by contrast, refers to a void: behind it, there is no one.

The sin of idolatry according to the Catechism

Idolatry is not a vanished superstition. The Catechism defines it as a permanent temptation, and describes it in a sense that goes far beyond stone statues:

"Idolatry does not concern only the false cults of paganism. It remains a constant temptation to faith. It consists in divinizing what is not God." Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2113^[14]

Divinizing what is not God: that is the heart of idolatry. Money, power, pleasure, the nation, the self can become idols without any statue being involved.^[15] The idol, in the deep sense, is not first of all a sculpted object: it is everything to which man gives the place that belongs to God alone. And that is precisely why an image, even a pious one, can become one: not by its nature, but by the heart that stops at it.

God himself commands images

If the first commandment condemned every image, the rest of the Bible would be incomprehensible. For the same God who forbids idols commands the making of sacred images. At the very moment when he gives the Law, he prescribes placing two golden cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant:

"You shall make two cherubim of gold; you shall make them of hammered gold, at the two ends of the mercy seat. [...] The cherubim shall have their wings spread upward." Book of Exodus 25:18-20^[16]

Further on, in the desert, God commands Moses to make a bronze serpent and raise it on a pole: whoever looks at it after being bitten is healed (Num 21:8-9).^[17] Solomon's Temple itself will be filled with sculpted figures: cherubim, palm trees, flowers, oxen (1 Kings 6-7).^[18] The Catechism draws the rule from this:

"Already in the Old Testament, God ordained or permitted the making of images that would symbolically lead to salvation through the incarnate Word: thus the bronze serpent, the ark of the covenant and the cherubim." Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2130^[19]

Conclusion: it is not the image that God disapproves of, but the idol. From the Old Testament onward, the sacred image has a function willed by God: to lead toward him.

The reversal of the Incarnation

Everything changes with the coming of Christ. In the Old Covenant, God could not be represented because he had never been seen. But in Jesus, "the Word became flesh": the invisible God made himself visible. From now on, representing Christ is not enclosing the invisible in a form: it is depicting a face that really existed. Saint John of Damascus, in the 8th century, formulates the decisive argument:

"Of old, God, incorporeal and without form, was never represented. But now that God has appeared in the flesh and lived among men, I can represent what is visible in God. I do not worship matter, I worship the God of matter, who became matter for my sake, who willed to dwell in matter and who, through matter, worked my salvation." Saint John of Damascus, On Images, I^[20]

This is the foundation of every Christian image, and the Catechism takes it up word for word: "Basing itself on the mystery of the incarnate Word, the seventh ecumenical council, at Nicaea (787), justified, against the iconoclasts, the veneration of icons."^[21] Since Christ is himself "the image of the invisible God" (Col 1:15), making his image is no longer a transgression: it is the logical consequence of the Incarnation. Whoever refuses every image of Christ ends up denying that he really took flesh.^[22]

What makes an image "sacred"

A sacred image is not sacred because it would be magical or inhabited by a power of its own. It is sacred because it represents a holy reality and because it is meant to lift the mind toward God. The Catechism distinguishes three services rendered by the image: it teaches (it is the "Bible of the illiterate", in the formula of Saint Gregory the Great, letter to Serenus of Marseille, 600), it recalls (it imprints the mystery "in the memory of the heart"), and it leads to prayer.^[23] The sacred image is therefore a means, never an end: a transparent sign that effaces itself before what it shows. As soon as it ceases to be transparent, as soon as one stops at it instead of passing through it, it betrays its nature.

From the word "image of God" to the sacred portrait

The icon is not a third category opposed to the sacred image: it is one of its forms, particularly developed in the Christian East. The word, as we have seen, simply says "image". But the Byzantine tradition gave it a strong technical meaning: the icon is an image written according to precise rules, theologically codified, and held to be a true window toward the Kingdom: not a realistic portrait, but a regulated presence that invites prayer. The icon's own theology, its technique, its canons and its history are treated in detail in The Theology of the Icon and Byzantine Icons, and illustrated by the case of Christ Pantocrator. Here we only situate it within the typology.

Icon of the East, image of the West

The Christian East and West have both honoured the image, but with different accents. The Eastern icon is more hieratic, stylized, timeless: it wants to show the transfigured world, and flees the illusion of depth. The Western sacred image, especially after the Middle Ages, becomes more narrative, emotional, realistic: it tells a story, moves, and draws one into the scene. The difference is one of style and function, not of nature: in both cases, the worship rendered to the image goes to the prototype, never to the painted board or the marble.

Here we touch the heart of the article. The difference between an icon, a sacred image and an idol does not lie in the object. It lies in the relation established between man and the image: to whom, in the end, his worship goes.

The bronze serpent that became an idol

Scripture itself gives the most striking demonstration. The bronze serpent that God had commanded to be made (Num 21), a holy image willed by God, an instrument of healing, which Christ himself would take as a figure of his own crucifixion (Jn 3:14): this same object ended, centuries later, by becoming an idol. The people had begun to offer incense to it, as to a god. King Hezekiah destroys it:

"He removed the high places, broke the pillars, cut down the sacred poles and broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made; for until those days the sons of Israel had burned incense to it. It was called Nehushtan." Second Book of Kings 18:4^[24]

Let us meditate on this case: the same bronze object was first a sacred image (when the people looked through it toward the God who heals), then an idol (when the people stopped at it and burned incense to it as to a god). Nothing had changed in the metal. Everything had changed in the heart. This is the clearest proof that the boundary between sacred image and idol does not pass through the material, but through the relation: an image becomes an idol not when it is beautiful or ancient, but when one renders to it what is due to God alone.^[25]

"The honour shown to the image passes to the prototype"

How, then, can an image be venerated without falling into idolatry? The Church's classic answer fits in one sentence, formulated as early as the 4th century by Saint Basil about the image of the emperor, and taken up as a principle by the Council of Nicaea II:

"The honour shown to the image passes to the one who is represented in it." Saint Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit, XVIII, 45^[26]

When a believer bows before an icon of Christ, it is not the wood that he honours: his gesture crosses the image and reaches Christ himself. The image is a channel, not a terminus. Nicaea II makes this principle a doctrine of the Church; the Council of Trent, eight centuries later, repeats it against the Protestant objections:

"The honour shown to them refers to the prototypes that these images represent: so that, through the images that we kiss and before which we uncover our heads and prostrate ourselves, it is Christ whom we adore, and the saints, whose likeness they bear, whom we venerate." Council of Trent, session XXV (1563)^[27]

Saint Thomas Aquinas clarifies the mechanism: "The movement of the soul toward the image as image is one and the same movement as toward the thing represented."^[28] The image and its model are one in the believer's act: it is therefore impossible to "stop" at the image when one looks at it correctly, for to look at it correctly is already to go beyond it.

Adoration and veneration

There remains a vocabulary trap. The Church rigorously distinguishes two kinds of worship: adoration (in Greek latreia) is due to God alone; veneration (in Greek douleia) is the honour, of an entirely different order, rendered to what God has sanctified: the Virgin, the saints, and the images that represent them.^[29] Nicaea II had drawn the same boundary in its own words: latreia for God alone, proskynesis timetike, the "prostration of honour", for holy images; douleia is the vocabulary that scholastic theology would later take up to name veneration. One clarification is necessary: the image itself is never adored, neither the wood, nor the paint, nor the material. Before an icon of Christ, the believer can adore Christ himself through the image that shows him (that is the meaning of Trent's "it is Christ whom we adore", quoted above); before an icon of the Virgin or of the saints, he renders a veneration of honour. In both cases, nothing stops at the object: everything passes to the prototype. This decisive distinction, which by itself suffices to refute the accusation of idolatry, is set out in detail in What Is the Difference Between Adoration and Veneration?.

The following table sums up the three realities according to the criteria that really matter: not the material, but the direction of worship and the reality of the prototype.

The lesson of the table is simple: icon and sacred image belong to the same family; the idol is not a third form of image, but the diversion of any image, including a holy image, toward what is not God.

Three questions to ask oneself

To know whether an image is honoured as a sacred image or as an idol, three questions suffice:

1. Where does my heart go? Do I stop at the object, or does it lead me toward God, the Virgin, the saint it represents? Is the image for me a window, or a wall?
2. What do I expect from this image? Do I lend it a power of its own ("this statue brings me luck", "this medal acts by itself")? Or do I know that every grace comes from God, the image being only a sensible help to my prayer?
3. What worship do I render? An act of adoration, which belongs to God alone, or an act of veneration, which honours the image in honour of its model?

If the image is a window, if nothing is expected from it in itself, if only a relative veneration is rendered, then it is a sacred image, even if it is made of cheap plaster. If the image becomes a wall, if an autonomous power is lent to it, if what is due to God alone is rendered to it, then it has slipped toward the idol, even if it is a masterpiece.

When can a sacred image degenerate into an idol?

The case of the bronze serpent is not a curiosity of the Old Testament: it is a permanent warning. An authentic devotion can be corrupted when superstition slips into it: when a statue, a medal or a relic is treated as a lucky charm acting by itself, independently of faith and of God. The Council of Trent, while firmly defending images, explicitly asked bishops to extirpate abuses: to remove all superstition, all lure of gain, every indecent or inaccurate image, and to instruct the people on the true meaning of veneration.^[30] The Church is therefore not naive: she knows that the holy image can be badly loved. The answer is never to destroy images, which would give the iconoclasts the victory, but to purify the heart that looks at them.

The objection is ancient. It fed the Byzantine iconoclast crisis, then the Protestant iconoclasm of the 16th century, which saw many statues and stained-glass windows broken in the name of the "second commandment" in the Protestant numbering.^[31] It rests entirely on the confusion that this article seeks to dispel: taking the image for the idol.

The Catholic answer rests on three points, already established above. First, God himself commanded images (cherubim, bronze serpent): the ban therefore does not bear on the image, but on the idol. Second, the Incarnation changed everything: the God who could not be represented made himself visible, and his image is lawful (Col 1:15; Jn 14:9). Third, the Catholic does not adore his statues: he venerates them, and "the honour shown to the image passes to the prototype". A statue of the Virgin is not a false god made of wood; it is a sensible reminder of her who lives with God, and before whom the believer performs no act of adoration. The complete development of this answer, including the detailed scriptural refutation, is found in What Is the Difference Between Adoration and Veneration? and in The Iconoclast Controversy.

There remains an honest question: do certain popular devotions not come close to superstition? Yes, sometimes, and the Church is the first to say so, as we saw with Trent. But the abuse of a thing does not abolish its good use. The answer is not to banish the image: it is to love it as a window, never as a wall.

The Christian image has a long history and a rich theology, treated in several Ignispedia articles that this vocabulary article only touches on:

• The Theology of the Icon: the meaning, technique and spirituality proper to the icon.
• Byzantine Icons: the regulated art of the icon in the East.
• Christ Pantocrator: the model icon of Christ in majesty.
• The Iconoclast Controversy and The Council of Nicaea II (787): the iconoclast crisis and its dogmatic resolution.
• What Is the Difference Between Adoration and Veneration?: the latreia / douleia distinction, the key to the answer to the accusation of idolatry.
• Why Does the Church Use Images?: the catechetical and prayerful function of the image.
• Early Christian Art and The Mosaics of Ravenna: the first Christian images.