Dulia mean roughly, serve or to serve?
2 Kings 17:35 with whom the LORD made a covenant and commanded them, saying, " You shall not fear other gods, nor bow down yourselves to them nor serve them nor sacrifice to them.
Romans 1:25 For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.
Both Worship and service are reserved for God only.
I don't write about this too much because I don't know John of Damascus as well as I'd like and because getting it wrong theologically could be a mess.
The general issue, and I believe it comes us first with respect to icons, is how much of a cosmic revolution the Incarnation is.
We think it's very great. And, well, try this: we think that so to speak, in the wake of the Incarnation, matter's ability to 'convey' spiritual things is changed, or enhanced, or maybe real for the first time.
I like to think that one or more molecules in the glass I am drinking from, or in my tears or sweat, actually touched our Lord's sacred Body in the Jordan -- or at some other time. The tzitzyot of his garment -- combined or coincident with the faith of the woman with the issue of blood -- made touching them healing, made them a vehicle of divine healing. And, wondrously, Jesus says "I felt power go out from me," or words to that effect.
I know that this is liable to be understood superstitiously, and I know that, in the popular mind, the power in the thing is thought to be OF the thing, as though God charged the batteries and then handed it to us. This is, of course, nonsense.
It can be FUN nonsense and lead to great scenes like those in some of the Indiana Jones movies ... with melty faces and all. But it's nonsense.
But when God becomes one of His creatures, when the Creator becomes a thing that can bleed or sweat, it's a whole new ball game.
And just as the psychosomatic unity of God's breath and clay makes a man, so an "eidolon" can, after the Incarnation, become something which united with the believers faith (NOT in the eidolon as such -- the woman's faith was that the tzitzit was holy because Jesus was holy; it could not be holy without being His) can be appropriately 'set apart' and looked on as a stimulus to piety and an image of grace.
Something like that anyway.