A bishop who wrote in Arabic to defend icons
Just after Charlemagne had got the Pope to crown him Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day 800, far away, between the Tigris and the Euphrates, a bishop was writing a treatise emphasising the need for Christians to venerate icons.
The bishop was Theodore Abu Qurrah. Unusually, he was writing in Arabic, the language of the ascendant rulers of the region. His book, of value in itself, says something to Christian relations with Islam today.
Two ancient manuscripts containing Abu Qurrah’s treatise lay unread until Father John Arendzen of the diocese of Westminster published an edition of the manuscript in the British Museum with a Latin translation in 1897. There was no English translation until Sidney H Griffith, a considerable scholar, published one in 1997, taking into account the other manuscript at St Catherine’s, Sinai.
Abu Qurrah, of a Syriacspeaking background, was widely learned and may have translated Aristotle’s work on logic, the Prior Analytics, into Arabic. (Much Greek philosophy was translated by Arabic-speaking Christians, not only by Muslims.) For him veneration of icons was no theoretical matter.
The city of Edessa (now Urfa in Turkey) was proud of its icon of Christ. But “many Christians are abandoning prostration to the icon of Christ our God,” he found, because “antichristians are reprimanding them for their prostration, and they sneer at them”.
It was a question of public behaviour. But Christians should not jettison beliefs just because they caused trouble in the public forum, he insists. Anti-christians cannot understand either how bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, yet such things are not abandoned lest they offend outsiders, he argues.
By “anti-christians”, the bishop meant Muslims principally, though he addresses some arguments to Jews, since they follow prohibitions against graven images in the Bible. He does, however, cite places in the Koran where God is said to have hands and a face. If such things can be said metaphorically in words, he suggests, why not visually? An icon is a statement understood by anyone, he says, even if they cannot read, as referring to God.
The stone tablets of the law were reverenced by the Jews, he writes, because they were the word of God. When the Word was made flesh, as Jesus Christ, he too was reverenced.
Who can doubt that images of Christ and his saints refer to those they represent? Take as an example a painting of your father, he writes. If every passer-by spat upon it, would you not feel offended at your father’s dishonour?
Reverence of icons is found in every church, Abu Qurrah writes, and comes down from the Apostles. If Christians got rid of every practice not mentioned in the Bible, they would lose other essentials, and the Church would “disappear”.
Abu Qurrah had lived at Mar Saba monastery (between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea), and he adopts arguments of a predecessor there, John of Damascus, who had served a Muslim ruler. But John wrote in Greek; Abu Qurrah wrote in Arabic for a new generation. For unknown reasons, Abu Qurrah had been deposed from his see, Harran (now just inside Turkey). Enemies criticised his defence of the teachings of the Council of Chalcedon (451). He was also derided as a “Maximist”, a follower of Maximus the Confessor – in retrospect high praise.
Having regained his see, Abu Qurrah in old age took his campaign for Orthodox belief to Armenia, a remarkable cross-cultural mission.