Tractatus contra eos qui imagines faciunt

A discourse of Saint Epiphanius against those who practice making images by idolatrous custom for the likeness of Christ and the Theotokos and the martyrs, and also of angels and prophets. They plastered the wall and with varied colors they depicted the images. For, they say, we make the images of the saints for their memorial and honor. But from where, in the depiction of the archangel, were bones and sinews fitted together made clearly manifest, which it would be for his understanding to declare? Those who think that in this they honor the apostles, let them learn that instead of honoring, they rather dishonor them. For Paul, having insulted the falsely named priest, declared him a plastered wall. "For we know," says John, "that when he is revealed, we shall be like him," and Paul proclaimed the saints "conformed to the Son of God." How then do you wish to see the saints, who are to be resplendent in glory, in a inglorious, dead, and speechless state, when the Lord says concerning them: "For they shall be," he says, "as angels of God"? And how do you worship angels, who are spirits and always living, by depicting them among the dead, when the prophet says: "He who makes his angels spirits and his ministers a blazing fire"? And I say that they themselves do not wish to be worshipped.

See that you do not; for I am a fellow servant of yours and of your brothers who bear the testimony of Jesus. Worship God, he says." But not even the apostles wished to be worshipped. For those who were sent to proclaim the gospel did not want themselves to be worshipped, but rather Christ who sent them. For he who received authority from him to bind and loose on earth and in heaven said to Cornelius, "I am a man of like passions as you," and taught that he himself should not be worshipped, but rather the Savior Christ. Concerning the angels, the fathers who assembled in Laodicea—for surely they were gathered for such a reason—say: "If anyone abandons the church of God and invokes angels, let him be anathema; for he has abandoned our Lord Jesus Christ and has resorted to idolatry." How can one say to depict the incomprehensible, indescribable, inconceivable, and unportrayable one, whom Moses was not able to gaze upon? Some say that since he became a perfect man from Mary the Ever-Virgin, for this reason we make him a man. And did he become incarnate for this, that you might be able to depict the incomprehensible one through whom all things came to be, by your hands? Therefore, is he not like the Father, nor does he raise the dead? Where did he command you, when he came on earth, to make an image like him and to worship and behold it? This ordinance is of the evil one, that you might despise God. For God in the whole Old and New Testament abolishes these things, saying precisely: "You shall worship the Lord God and serve him alone.