By a Benedictine Monk

Every Sunday, when we recite the Creed of the Mass, we proclaim our faith in the Creator of “all things visible and invisible.” Knowing our limited capacities, God helps us in our struggle to believe. The invisible God gave us the visible gift of His only-begotten Son. Through His visible human nature, we can see the invisible Father. The human nature of Christ is our means to salvation and the only way to come to the Father. Since He became man, He can be represented as a man with His human body in its material dimension. To deny this reality would be to refuse to believe in the visibility of the Incarnation of Christ, the most essential of the “visible things” created bys God.

Iconoclasm denies that God can be seen through the human nature of Christ. In the Synod of Constantinople in 754, they claimed that the only representation of the divinity of Christ can be found in the Eucharist. St. Theodore, Abbot of the Studium Monastery at Constantinople, accused the Iconoclasts in 815 as “Christological heretics, since they deny an essential element of Christ’s human nature, namely, that it can be represented graphically.” Iconoclasts believe in the invisible God and refuse the visible, human element of Christ. They believe in the spiritual and invisible reality of the divinity of Christ, but they do not accept Christ in the totality of His human nature. They accused those that venerated the image of Christ or the Saints as idolaters worthy of punishment and death. Many of the Catholics were put to death at this time, many were scourged and sometimes branded on the face as public idolaters. The prisons of the Empire were filled with faithful Catholics, many fled in exile, and those that remained went into hiding to avoid persecution.

Juan Andrés Rizi, Saint Benedict Destroying Idols.

The Catholic faith affirms that Our Lord is truly man and consequently is able to be materially portrayed in paintings or sculptures. This representation would be a likeness of the Man named Jesus, but Jesus is God Himself. Obviously, no painting is divine, but an image of Christ would represent the human nature that is united to the divine Person of Christ and thus worthy of veneration as a sacred object. The Catholic faith is founded upon the seven sacraments which Our Lord confided to His church. As our catechism teaches, the sacraments are material signs conferring an invisible grace. For example, water cleanses the child’s forehead at baptism; this is a material sign of the invisible grace of being cleansed from Original Sin. As human beings, we need material signs for invisible things.

In the history of humanity, we can see that the struggle between ideas is materialized by the destruction of the images of these ideas. St. Benedict, upon arriving at Monte Cassino, threw down the images of the idols, replacing them with oratories dedicated to St. John the Baptist and St. Martin. He attacked the falsehood of idolatry, replacing it with the objective truth of the Catholic faith. As the Catholic faith was introduced into pagan territory, their idols were destroyed. In reverse order, the same is true in the history of apostasy by the once Catholic nations. The French Revolution, the communist movement in Russia, Spain and Mexico all fought for the destruction of churches and Holy images representing the Catholic faith. This same type of iconoclasm can be found in the wake of the second Vatican Council. It was a struggle between traditional and modern ideas, which ended in the elimination of statues, communion rails, and other material supports of our faith. St. Augustine explains this continual conflict found in history as a war between the City of God and the City of the World.

In today’s society we see a very similar situation. In our country there are many movements claiming to react against social injustice, but in reality are agents of the Communist Revolution seeking to replace the Catholic faith with militant atheism. An image of Our Lady was defaced in New York, the statue of St. Louis in Missouri was threatened to be destroyed, in California the statue of Junipero Sera was torn down and the mission church of St. Gabriel was burned. The statues were images of the Mother of God and of saintly men and they expressed the idea of holy lives offered to our society. The mission church of St. Gabriel was a standing monument to the harmony that existed between the indigenous people and the Spanish missionaries. These very visible signs represent the invisible ideas of God revealing Himself in the Catholic Church.

Do we fall into the category of an iconoclast in our personal lives? Do we reject the visible signs of the Church because we are ashamed to be Catholic? Are we ashamed to say grace before meals in public places, wear a cross or a scapular, or publicly defend our faith? If we continue to reject the visible signs of our faith, we will reject the invisible reality of grace. We believe in the Creator of all things “visible and invisible.” As men, we need visible things to grasp the invisible. We need the human nature of Christ to be incorporated into His divinity.