Then, Please, please, please explain icons to me in a simple, easy-to-understand-and-accept way.
Where's the Orthodox Caucus when you need them?
I don’t know about easy to accept.
The man to read is John of Damascus, I hear.
The idea, I’m guessing, is that, since the Incarnation and the institution of sacraments, the Divine can (as I like to think of it) leak through created things. Or better, created things are porous to the sacred.
Clearly, though apparently traditions arise of ‘mojo’ attaching to certain icons, it is not the icon “in itself and for itself” that is worshipped or venerated but the saint (for veneration) or the Person of the Trinity, or in one famous Icon all three persons, who are worshipped (to use the somewhat artificial formal distinction.
I can’t remember the name of the Icon of the three angels outside Abraham’s dwelling, but it’s kind of a meta-icon, to me, in the following way:
The STORY is of three ‘angels”, but angels in the OT are sometimes not easily distinguished from Elohim. So the picture is definitely of human figures. BUT there are three, and two incline their heads to the erect one on the left. One is robed in red, and I forget the other two.
So it is viewed as an Icon of the Trinity — just as, one might say, the three angels were themselves icons of the trinity. HEnce ‘meta-icon’.
This is CLEARLY not a rigorous argument I’m making. It is to convey the sense of icons. I keep meaning to read John of Damascus but something always comes up.
It’s hot, my mind is fried.