One of the features of Russian Orthodoxy that most strikes Westerners when

they encounter Orthodoxy is the prominence of icons, or sacred images. The

Russians inherited from Byzantine Orthodoxy a sense of the importance of

images in worship, both public and private, that had been enhanced by the 3

iconoclast controversy of the eighth to ninth centuries, and the final defeat of

iconoclasm. This controversy, far more important in Byzantium than in the

West, made icons a required aspect of Orthodox practice. It also involved the

acceptance of an understanding of the place of religious images as ways of

disclosing invisible realities, but also a way in which the material found an

important place in religious practice, and indeed came to be held to be

entailed by God’s assumption of humanity in the Incarnation. Because of the

‘linguistic filter’, all of this became hugely important within the world of Slav

Orthodoxy. Orthodox devotion revolved around icons, and, as in Byzantium,

they played a role in the defence of the Orthodox nations against attack.

Legends traced icons back to the time of Christ; the Vladimir icon of the

Mother of God being claimed as the work of St Luke the Evangelist (a claim

Byzantine had made for the Hodigitria icon of the Mother of God). Particular

icons—especially of the Mother of God—were associated with different places

and had their own cult. Icons also provided a way of linking the public

worship of the Church with the private devotions of Orthodox Christians:

homes came to have a small domestic shrine, the ‘beautiful corner’, krasny

ugol.