Icons: Tradition and Symbolism
This lecture discusses the origin of icons when Christianity first spread through the Late Roman Empire. The intellectual training of the great theologians of the 4th century, such as St Augustine, was based on the philosophy of Plato and the later schools of Platonic thought. Early Christian art was not a matter of decoration, or narrative or aesthetics, it was a vehicle for understanding the universal ideas at the heart of all religion and philosophy: the meaning of human life on earth and in eternity.