Jonathan Pageau - Icon Veneration is the Fulfillment of the Second Commandment

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:06]Hello and welcome to Cleave to Antiquity. My name is Ben and today I'm joined by a very special guest, Jonathan Pacio. Welcome to the show.

[00:00:13]>> It's great to finally meet you. I've been hearing a lot about your content and so here we are.

[00:00:18]>> Yeah, I appreciate you taking the time to swing by. I think we have a very interesting discussion ahead of us today. Um, so as you may know and as the audience knows, you know, I was a former Protestant pastor, uh, and you know, a lot of people who watch the show are either evangelicals looking into orthodoxy or other Protestants looking into orthodoxy or maybe people who have already, uh, journeyed into the Orthodox church, but you know, they still want to learn how to maybe present these things to their family members, so on and so forth. A common objection by evangelicals about icon veneration is that well this breaks the second commandment right thou shalt not bow before false idols. This is a common rebuttal that we get uh towards people you know maybe interested in orthodoxy.

[00:01:04]Oh you're you're committing idolatry.

[00:01:06]This is absolutely not the case. So I was excited to have you on the show to discuss this topic here.

[00:01:11]>> Yeah. No, I'm happy. It's one obviously as someone who makes icons who's done it, you know, for several years and someone who was also an exrotestant, it's something that I've thought about quite a bit and has been important on my own journey. So, yeah, >> absolutely. I've seen uh I've seen a number of videos against uh icon veneration and things like this, like especially from figures like Gavin Ortland. Uh Redeem Zoomer just put one out. I believe he called it idolatry as well. One of the first things that pops up into my mind, even I know we'll get into the second commandment in just a moment, but if you were to call icon veneration idolatry, it's almost like you're saying, well, the church fell away for a long period of time because this was absolutely everywhere in the early church. I mean, especially if you're to consider Nika 2. So, what did the church completely fall away after Nika 2? You'd almost have to be some form of restorationist to hold this position. It's kind of interesting.

[00:02:03]>> Yeah, for sure. And I think that also you know the uh the the argument that there were no images in the early church you know is being reduced. It was formulated by Protestants, you know, during the enlightenment, you know, that the early church had no images and that images came later. But those, you know, with Dura Aropus, which is, you know, early 3rd century church, you know, coming to light, which is the only church actually that we have the walls for, you know, that that that precedes Constantine. And there are images there images of Jesus in the in the church, you know, there's an image of of Jesus as the good shepherd. There's also an image uh of of of Christ healing the paralytic. And so you know the clearly that at least if you go just by what we have in terms of facts that the early church had had images right right as early as we can we can find sort like physical things. So you know >> right that's something that I bring up when this uh this subject comes up quite a bit. I'll go to the Roman catacomb churches and if you look at them they look almost exactly like an Orthodox church today. They have um uh you know an an image of uh Christ on the on the ceiling. You know they've got the mosaics. They've even got the arches.

[00:03:14]The ar the uh architectural style is very similar as well.

[00:03:18]>> Exactly.

[00:03:19]>> So it's it's weird that there would be this kind of objection especially since even in scripture we see in the Old Testament images in the temple right we have the cherubim um you know uh even on the curtains and so on and so forth. So it seems to be a uh you know this is a hold over from Old Testament uh Judaism >> of course and it's not just that it's that you know the the second commandment has a purpose you know and the it has several purposes of course on the one hand it was so that we don't worship false gods you know that's obviously one and then you can't make an image of God because God is invisible God is not is not seen and so those two reasons make complete sense uh for why we would have the second commandment. But then the problem that comes up is what happens when God gives us an image. You know what happens? What does that do? And Christ affects all of the the commandments, right? You know, when Christ uh deals with the different commandments. So for example, you know, we don't celebrate the Sabbath, we have changed the day. We have made it into Sunday, which is we we celebrate the resurrection of Christ. And we don't Christians don't celebrate the Sabbath.

[00:04:31]The same people that will say that the second commandment, you know, contradicts icons are the people that don't celebrate the Sabbath and it's like the commandment is right next to to that one. The question is how does Christ affect the second commandment?

[00:04:44]You know, I actually believe that Christ is the reason for all the ten commandments. That is that hiding behind the ten commandments is always the logos is always the logos of God and ultimately those commandments are pointing to the incarnation and how the incarnation will be a a kind of resolution of these commandments will be a a a kind of finality of what the commandments are. So the question is if we take the second commandment what does Christ do to the second commandment and I think the answer is the one the church gave which is that one of the reasons why we don't have images of God in the Old Testament is because God was going to give us an image you know and God did give us an image in Christ now some people what they say is okay fine we can have images of Jesus actually most evangelicals have images of Jesus anyways in their children's Bibles and you know in all these different these different places but they say we we can have images of Jesus but we shouldn't venerate the images right and so now we have this other problem which is that usually this aspect of veneration is not only about images there's a sense in which veneration itself is a problem and so most Protestants don't venerate anything they they they only worship God but they don't venerate anything and this of course is definitely contradicted by the old testament which is that in the old testament we see constantly that the the Israelites are very much capable of differentiating absolute adoration and veneration because they do it all the time. You know, when they're bowing down before the ark of the covenant, you know, when they're they're they're doing these different types of prostrations that you see uh appear in the Old Testament.

[00:06:19]Nobody believes, you know, when Abraham bowed down before uh before his wife's h father, he didn't he didn't think that that was God. Like he wasn't he didn't have this idea that somehow he was committing idolatry. And it's the same when David bowed down before the ark of the covenant or when or when you know the different characters will bow down before the temple. And if you think about someone in the temple like bowing down towards the ark of the covenant, what's right there? It's like literally the cherubim right there. So they're literally bowing down in front of the of the cherubim. And that wasn't a problem because it they they definitely understood the difference between absolute worship and veneration. And therefore if God gives us an image of Christ. So if we think of something like we worship God completely, we adore God and we venerate the means by which God reveals himself to us. Right? So you can understand it that way. That is not only even the not not only even the the um the objects of the temple but the people, right? Right? So it's like if someone you know it says in in uh in the proverb that you should bow down before your brother if you're asking for forgiveness like there the sense in which this person isn't you know is the means by which I'm coming back to God and so I also have to lower myself in front of them. The same with bowing down before the king. The king has an image of authority as being someone that God has granted that authority over me. Then I also am willing to bow down and make myself lower in a position to that. Um, and so you know, all of that it makes total sense if God gives us an image and we don't venerate it, what does that mean, >> right?

[00:07:55]>> Does it mean that it's not really an image that that Christ wasn't really the image of God that we don't recognize recognize in the incarnation the means by which God is revealing himself to us?

[00:08:06]To me, that's what it seems to imply is that we we we've there's something broken in the way that we see this.

[00:08:12]>> Absolutely. And I think one point to bring up about what you were saying earlier about the um in the in the temple them bowing before uh you know the images of the cherubim so on and so forth. You would have to stretch that pretty far to say okay so well they might have been bowing before it. This was something the other Paul said in the debate recently said well they might have been bowing before it but they were thinking about something else or they were intending to do something else.

[00:08:38]You've got to stretch the logic pretty far to get around that in the Old Testament. And one thing that I'll bring up for evangelicals that might actually help is, you know, a lot of them will wear crosses and maybe they'll, you know, give the cross a kiss. What do you think that is? That's veneration. You're already doing it. You don't realize you're doing it.

[00:08:55]>> Yeah. We venerate all the time. You know, you venerate. You venerate constantly. When you when you look at an image and you you have if someone ripped a picture of your mother in front of you and you got angry, that means that you have veneration for her image. It's completely normal to venerate, you know, the images of the of the people that we love and especially, of course, of Christ uh and of the saints. And so, you know, this is this is something that usually there's, like you said, there's a kind of a performative contradiction >> in in people where they don't see that they're actually engaging in the behaviors that they're that they're criticizing. And it's much better to be it's much better to be aware and to be able to uh to do that. And even evangelicals like one of the things that I point out to them is that in the Old Testament there is this idea of elevating the name of God, right? And so constantly there are all these verses in the Psalms where it says we we lift up your name, right? People will sing that even in Protestant churches until today.

[00:09:53]We lift up your name. We make ourselves lower to the name of God. And people completely understand that if you make yourself lower and you lift up the name of God that God is not his name. I mean I hope Protestants know that God is not his name. That his name is not completely equal to to to what God is and that it is a manifestation that God has given to us. And because God has spoken his name to us and has given us his name, therefore we can we can see it as a means by which God is revealing himself to us. So we bow down before his name. We lift it up above us. We praise his holy name. And so you know again the same question. You know God did not give us an image until Christ. And in some ways the fact that we didn't bow down before his his image. We didn't we didn't raise up his image is because we didn't have one. But once he gives us one, we should absolutely do the same for his holy image that we do for his holy name because it has become and you can think about it almost like it's actually in the logic of manifestation of God's of God's, you know, revelation which is that it starts in the ear, right? It starts in the invisible. It moves from the invisible and the the that which can be heard but not seen and then it moves out into space, right? He moves out into space in terms of the of the tabernacle and the temple and ultimately he moves out into space in terms of the actual body of the incarnated God. And so it's actually in the very logic of of of revelation it would move from the the the let's say the voice to the image, right? From the the wind to the space, you know, it's it's like the logic of creation itself even. I would say >> that's very interesting. This this kind of makes me remember a conversation I had with Kongman Lee who's currently a Protestant but he's a kind of inquiring into orthodoxy. We had a conversation he was telling me about in in his culture it's very natural to bow to show respect and you know his family's evangelical and things like this and he goes to his grandmother's grave and he just very instinctually he felt the need to bow.

[00:11:55]So he bowed before you know the the grave and he was uh he said like a quick prayer or something and they were very upset. He was like, "But this this was so natural." I'm like, "Well, see, you get it. It's built into you."

[00:12:07]>> I've seen Oh, man. I've seen products in venerate graves for sure. I've seen it.

[00:12:12]And they don't realize how, you know, and it's the same with so many things.

[00:12:17]You know, people will go to Washington DC and visit, you know, visit the Lincoln Monument or the or these different presidential monument, just stand there and like look at the monument and it's like, what do you think? You do you realize that that's form of veneration like when you actually go to like a sacred space and present yourself you know before the image of a president you know this is a this is a form of veneration um but you know what can you do I think I think that one of the problems that happens when there's no veneration is in some ways things get flattened and I and I've seen this happen when some ways one of the things that veneration does is that it actually also differentiates the means by which God reveals himself with God himself. So we actually are able to notice that here are all these means by which God reveals himself to us and we have reverence and respect for it. But we can tell the difference between that and God. And what happens when you don't venerate is that you ultimately flatten the whole thing and you ultimately end up treating God like your boyfriend. You know, you end up treating God like you know or my buddy, my pal. You know, God is kind of like God. And so we you don't have that absolute that sense of absolute transcendence because you don't have the scale by which to see it. You don't have the sense of saying oh my father that's why you have to honor your father and your mother by the way.

[00:13:37]That's why you have to venerate the king. That's why you have to obey your ruler because you can see that God is revealing some aspect of his authority through these characters but that it's not him. And so I reverence you know my my my parents. I have honor for those that are above me. And then I can see through that that no God is above that all of that and the the the level of worship that I need to give to God is beyond all the levels of respect that I give to all these different intermediary figures. But if I but if I don't give any respect to the intermedi intermediary figures then like I said ultimately you know I go to the bathroom and I think that you know play praying on the bathroom with my buddy God you know is is is totally cool. Like there's no problem with that. There's no difference between there's no sense of actual adoration. And I and even I remember when I was a Protestant, this is wild, is that nobody knelt before God even either.

[00:14:29]Like people didn't kneel at all. Like they never knelt in any way. They never bowed down to God as well. And so, okay, so you don't bow down before icons, but then you end up not bowing down before God himself because of this weird kind of uh misunderstanding. Anyways, it's a it's a very odd thing that happened.

[00:14:47]>> Yeah, it does. It does seem to devolve almost naturally in the more non-denominational evangelical circles.

[00:14:54]Exactly like you're saying once you've usurped that kind of hierarchy of veneration to worship to God.

[00:15:01]>> Um it it does seem like things de devolve pretty quickly. You can see this in the evangelical ser uh services. Uh you know the the the liturgy isn't there. It's uh it's contemporary music.

[00:15:12]Um you know it's not really seen as a sacred space now. looks more like a concert venue. I mean these things are you can see the parallels in almost every aspect of contemporary worship.

[00:15:22]>> Yeah. Exactly. And so, you know, and it it is a kind of radical almost like a radical platonism that you see happening, which is in some ways this almost this idea that creation isn't a suitable suitable uh vehicle for God's revelation, right? That there's something about creation that is so devoid and so lost that that yeah, we we we kind of use it, but there's no connection between obviously it's nominalism on steroids. there's no connection between between God and the world. And therefore, what we do here doesn't really matter, right? It's like if I if there's no sense that if I use a rock song that that rock song has a kind of natural shape that might not be suited for the highest form of worship, you know, that that if I wear my ripped jeans and t-shirts that there's something about that that might not be suited for the sacred the sacred space because everything has been flattened and level. and going to the mall is the same as going to church. You know, it's all it's all the same because in some ways God is so removed from reality that there is there isn't that hierarchy that reveals that reveals, you know, the different ways that that the world participates in God.

[00:16:33]>> That's that's actually super profound uh that entire point that you're making there about usurping the hierarchy because you do end up with this just me and my Bible under a tree. It's me and my buddy God type situation there. But even if you were to look at Rome with the way that they usurp the hierarchy in a different way, uh they basically stripped the patriarchs of their powers like in in their system, set up parallel jurisdictions and so on and so forth.

[00:16:57]And you can see the way that that manifests itself in their lurggical changes. We can track this through Vatican 2, so on and so forth. And uh they almost end up in a pretty similar situation in a slightly different way.

[00:17:08]So it seems like no matter which way you tinker with the hierarchy of uh veneration, it seems to have ripple effects downream. Sure. I think that in the case of Rome, what we saw is, you know, a let's say putting too much of God into one place, right? Like basically saying, you know, this this is the vicor, you know, this is the only place through which God's grace flows and through which God manifests uh himself. You know, in some ways uh you know, sadly, it's this it's the sin of St. Peter. You know, for all my love of St. Peter, it's it's the same sin of, you know, thinking that you're going to walk out on the water and it's going to be you that does it, right? It's like, I'm the one I'm the one that that's able to walk out on the water. I'm the one that has been chosen as the as the uh you know, as the the vicer and therefore ultimately what that does is it ultimately what happens it flips. It's actually it's a it's actually an image of all sin. You know, St. Maximus has this one of my favorite um one of my favorite quotes from St. Maximus. He says, you know, there are right, you know, there are right si right-hand sins and left-hand sins. He talks about how, you know, the right-hand sins are the sins of pride and and self-sufficiency and arrogance.

[00:18:17]And he said it all starts with the right-hand sin, but once you've committed that, then all the left-hand sin come in, all of, you know, prostitution and drunkenness and all of the kind of uh sins that bring you to breaking down. And I think that that's what happened in the in Rome is that they held on and then they declared you know the that that the pope uh you know cannot be wrong in certain context and that that that he's completely uh the this voice of God himself and then right after like one generation after then it all falls apart into into liturggical and and ecclesial chaos. So it's like a it's like a nice little image of how sin functions >> and Peter does that too. St. Peter says, "I'm the one." He goes out on the water and then as soon as he says, "I'm the one," he starts to sink. And then he's the same. He tells he tells Christ, he's like, "No, you won't have to die." Like, "I'm, you know, we'll stop it." And like, "We we're the ones. We can make it not happen." And Christ turns around and says, "Get behind you, Satan." It's like it's it's so it's too perfect to see how Rome did that. And then and then the same thing happened to them, you know?

[00:19:24]>> Absolutely. Yeah. It is. It is like once you've once you've blurred the lines like you just said with the the vicor of Christ, you've put all the power into that one place, you're starting to blur the lines and now you get statements like we just had today. Uh Pope Leo made a statement uh he said uh this is how we expand the communion between Christians and Muslims. Uh and he's referencing Nasraat from Vatican 2 that say that Muslims and Christians have the same God. This is a complete blurring of the lines.

[00:19:50]>> He used the word communion.

[00:19:52]>> Yeah, he said communion. Yes, communion.

[00:19:55]word Pope like you know you could have said I don't know I don't know what other word you could have used you could have but you could have said partner or I don't know like some other word but communion is a bad word that's like that's really dangerous man >> yeah it's not good but uh hey I I really appreciate you coming on the show to have this chat with me I know you have a conference coming up you want to uh kind of speak about that a little bit >> yeah and so a few years ago about about two years ago we had the symbolic world summit the first time and it was it was a blast it was amazing it was really exhausting and crazy for us. So we but and so we finally decided we're going to do it again. We're going to have Father Josiah Trenum is going to come and then we're going to have Mary Harrington who many of you know as a she's more like a political commentator, you know, cultural commentator and in some ways it's a the symbolic world summit is a place where a lot of people come you know it obviously is a voice for orthodoxy but it also reaches out into kind of popular culture and into places that usually maybe the voices of orthodoxy don't reach. And so we're asking for people to come, you know, to participate. You know, it it will be an exciting place where you're going to meet all kinds of people. So, >> absolutely. So, if you're watching this, go ahead and check in the description.

[00:21:03]I'm going to play a trailer for this in just a moment, but check in the description and go ahead and attend that conference. Thank you so much, Jonathan, for uh for swinging by the show. This has been awesome.

[00:21:11]>> It's great to meet you.

[00:21:13]>> All right, y'all. Have a good one. Till next time.

[00:21:16]>> I said I would never do it again, but here we are. We are announcing the Symbolic World Summit in May 2026. I have so many great people around me that I'm just excited to do it even though I thought it would be crazy to do it again. Our summit's going to be from May 14th through 16th in Broadview Heights, Ohio. You can buy tickets at symbolicworldsummit.com.

[00:21:37]Kino speakers this year are Father Josiah Trenum and Dr. Mary Harrington, which is a combination nobody knew that they wanted, but I think is going to be absolutely incredible. And of course, Jonathan and I will be speaking as well as several people from around the Symbolic World community. A lot of people that you like, that you've seen are going to be there, are going to come. We're going to have book signings.

[00:21:57]It'll be a lot of time for people to meet and to greet. We're also doing uh supra as well. And so, come and join us.

[00:22:04]We can't wait for this. And we're excited to meet you in person.