Quotes About Iconophiles

Plain crosses replaced images of Christ and the saints in other parts of the empire, as in the apse of the Church of the Koimesis of the Virgin at Nicaea, where a cross supplanted a mosaic image of the Virgin.32 After the reaffirmation of the orthodoxy of icons in the ninth century, iconophiles removed the cross and reinstalled an image of the Theotokos holding the Christ child.

The iconophiles, however, would not concede this distinction between cross and crucifix and argued that the representative depiction of the crucifix was necessary to affirm the true humanity of Christ. For this reason, they regarded the removal of crucifixes as both heretical and sacrilegious. Illuminations in the ninth-century Chludov Psalter went so far as to equate the whitewashing of an icon of Christ with the act of crucifixion itself.