A Feast That Became a Broader Celebration of Orthodoxy

The feast's liturgy, the Synodikon of Orthodoxy, was composed to be read at the service itself, and beyond its original focus on icons it grew over the following centuries into a wider proclamation, listing doctrines and teachers the church affirms and pronouncing anathema on a lengthening series of rejected teachings and named heresiarchs, so that the day gradually came to function as a general celebration of Orthodox doctrine as a whole rather than of the icon controversy alone.

The procession with icons that marks the feast today, in which clergy and laity carry icons around the church or in a circuit outside it, is a direct dramatization of what the 843 synod actually restored: images that could once again be displayed, carried and venerated openly rather than hidden or destroyed. The feast is kept across the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox communions, though the specific text of the Synodikon read varies somewhat by jurisdiction, reflecting each church's own later doctrinal history layered on top of the original ninth century core. Placed at the start of Great Lent rather than at a moment closer to the actual anniversary, the feast also frames the season of penitence that follows it as a season undertaken by a church already reaffirmed in its own doctrinal identity, rather than as a season of uncertainty about what that identity is.