The Icon 4/7; Iconoclast and Protestant

”In the Reformation period what we see in there action against holy images in this country and elsewhere is a reversion to the conviction that the image is always primarily severed – shadow, phantom, nothing in itself, something which invites inappropriate reverence which commands an attention or suggests attention that is in fact due only to the Holy in itself, to God and to God’s word. And on the other side of the Reformation divide, what do we see not so much theorised   theologies and philosophies of art and expressed in practice, what we see is an attempt to recapture something of the by then largely lost sense of the image’s presence. Western Christianity had long since turned its back on the Eastern theology of the icon.”

Rowan Williams