Friday, February 16, 2024

Aloys Dirksen: Epiphanius of Salamis Believed Icons and Icon Veneration Were Idolatrous

  

Epiphanius was a learned and widely read men. HE has the command of all five languages: Greek, Syriac, Hebrew, Coptic, and even Latin to a considerable extent. His fiery temperament and unreasonable impetuosity, which his long and strict asceticism failed to conquer, made the claim objectivity necessary for scholarly work impossible for him. His narrow-mindedness is apparent in the part he played in the Origenist controversy and the violence with which he attacked the veneration of images. He considered this idolatry, and in his testament he anathematized anyone who would even gaze upon a picture of the Logos-God. His temperament made him suspicious of heresy everywhere, and he made capital of even the smallest inaccuracy of statement. (Aloys Dirksen, Elementary Patrology: The Writings of the Fathers of the Church [London: B. Herder Book Co., 1959], 117)

 

Further Reading:

 

Answering Fundamentalist Protestants and Roman Catholic/Eastern Orthodox on Images/Icons