Letter 546: Theodore Studite, Letter 546; Greek heading: Ἰωάννῃ Γραμματικῷ.

I confess my thanks to the holy God that I have heard your dear voice, even if late in the day; for I could not say that I owe thanks to the one who cut it off with that disgraceful rashness. But since your wise Honor, together with the dispelling of grief, has also brought forward in turn the argument concerning the venerable icon [eikon, image] of Christ, this I have to say, O thrice-longed-for one: that I found your recent letter to be in agreement with, advocating rather than contradicting, the things that were long ago dispatched by me. For confessedly, in accordance with the lemmata [premises, propositions] you have already set out, every image is indicative of another, namely of the prototype [the original it represents]; and, if one must speak according to the grammarians' terminology, this would be a referential thing, which is also called assimilative and demonstrative and reciprocal. And indeed, the veneration [proskynesis] must be offered to the icon of Christ not as to matter, but as to Christ himself, seeing that the honor paid to the icon ascends to the prototype, the matter being set apart by the notion of the conception, distinct from the character that is figured in it. And the veneration is to be offered in the manner of worship [latreia, the adoration owed to God alone], as you say, to the Savior Christ both before the flesh and after the incarnation, both before the icon and through it; and none of those who think rightly, I suppose, are at variance with what has been rightly laid down as doctrine. But indeed it is also not incongruous to follow the illustrations of the sun in relation to water, and of the immaterial triangle, that is, the mathematical one, in relation to the material one; since, by hypothesis, if the sun or the triangular figure be taken as an object of worship before the one is reflected in the waters and the other appears in matter, it is clear that even after its falling there, that is, its conjunction, each one is an object of worship. For in this way you too have aptly shown that our Lord Jesus Christ, both after the incarnation as before the incarnation, is an object of worship and is to be venerated. Christ, then, O my good man, is confessedly an object of worship, but his venerable icon is not an object of worship, just as the sun, by hypothesis, when mingled with the water, [is worshiped] but not the image of the sun; and the triangle made material, but not the image of the triangle. For consider that the worship [latreia] of us Christians is one, offered to the holy and consubstantial Trinity alone by all visible and invisible nature; and it is not permissible to call the venerable icon of Christ an object of worship. For one of two things follows: either to admit the worship pertaining to it into the worship of the Trinity, which is impossible (since it is not allowable to introduce any addition into the Trinity, for it would be found to be a tetrad); or, if it is not admitted there, but is in itself an object of worship, to lay down as doctrine that our acts of worship are two. And what else would the pagan iconoclasts [Hellenioi, here the heathen image-fighters] seek from us than to prove from this that we worship with a twofold worship, worshiping the creature alongside the Creator, and that we are in no way inferior to the Arians [followers of Arius, who denied the full divinity of the Son] in impiety? The icon of Christ, therefore, must be venerated, not worshiped; but rather the Christ venerated in it must be worshiped, according to the word of truth, since these are two things, the icon and the prototype, and the difference is not at the level of the hypostasis [the concrete subsistent person], but according to the principle of the essence [ousia].