Ark of the Holy Orthodox Church Icon

[spiridon]

if we recognise them as heretics, why would we even let them into our homes, let alone our church or missions?
This would seem a vile exploit of the evil one to allow us to willingly allow these heresiarchs to actually adorn and imitate a Real Holy Icon ,
what would a kid learn from this , that the Holy icons that our Holy fathers have venerated throughout our Orthodox history has somehow turned from love and holyness to a veneration of hatred?
people just dont understand that these things although cool looking, arent Holy or made made to be written as to venerate- who would allow this to sit at the holy altar and be blessed at the Divine Liturgy????this is the very thing that divided the Matthewites...
sadly I thought this Icon was originally written and sold and advertised by the archbishop in colorado who was with ROAC, but has since been Deposed i believe...

[spiridon]

that icon is being sold and written at a monastery in colorado under archbishop gregory

MODERATOR EDIT: Link moved to the word "sold" because the super-long URL makes the page side scroll for those with 800x600 resolutions which we do not want.

[joasia]

It is the demons that are in warfare with the Church but they often use human beings to make this warfare happen int he physical world as portrayed in this icon.

Just the same, this depiction is not of typical Orthodox standard. The Theotokos should never be portrayed in an image that expresses violence. Don't you agree?

BTW I saw you are now signing as Joasia rather than the Joanna as you always used to. Would you rather that we all call you Joasia now?

Joanna is my name. Joasia is Polish, as the equivalent of Sasha for Alexender/Alexandra or Kola for Nikolai. By the North American standard, it's like calling me Jo or calling Robert, Bob, or calling Thomas, Tom.

If you're in the slavonic mood, you can call me Joasia(Yoasha) or just plain Joanna.

But, I'm still always me.

[joasia]

that icon is being sold and written at a monastery in colorado under archbishop gregory

That explains it. I knew there was something wrong with this depiction.

Joanna

[尼古拉前执事]

Here is some information from another group on an older type of these 2 icons. It is apparently based on an icon from Mount Athos from the 1800's. At that time it would be missing both Lenin and Athenagoras pressumably.

The icon we are talking about, in its older version posted by Fr. Nikolai, filled the whole front cover of the magazine The Orthodox Word # 239, published by the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood in Platina, California, with the blessing of His Grace Longin.

That issue was dedicated to the discussion of ecumenism, particularly as addressed by the Internation Inter-Orthodox Conference of Thessaloniki in 2004, in which ecumenism was subject to deep analysis and vehement criticism. The conclusions of the Conference seem to have been fully endorsed by The Orthodox Word magazine.

We may reasonably assume that the icon we are talking about was highly appreciated by the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood and by other conservative Orthodox circles.

At the page 259 of the magazine, one reads the following:

Front Cover: "The Mystical Image of Our Holy Church." Contemporary icon, based on a nineteenth-century fresco from Zographou Monastery, Mount Athos, Greece.

There is no further explanation about the details of the icon, but all of them seem to be identical to the picture Fr. Nikolai posted, except by the fact that the icon in the front cover of TOW has Slavonic inscriptions, while I'm unable to identify the language of the inscriptions of Fr. Nikolai's picture. The soldier besides the Persecutor Ruler in TOW icon is not Leo the Iconoclast, but Julian the Apostate. The man besides him is indeed Luther. Lenin is absent, as I've already said. There's a Slavonic inscription close to the heretic Hierarch of the right corner, but regretably I can't understand it. All the rest seems to be the same.

[joasia]

Well, iconographers have their liberty of expression, I guess, but there is no good reason to put communists and schismatics in an icon. They don't deserve that honor.

I think a better approach would be to write an icon that depicts the church crushing satan...because he is at the core of all these little men that were his tool, in the first place. Putting specific political figures in an icon is just plain tasteless.

Decon Nikolai, I think you meant that the demons are affecting the hearts of men, but not controlling the church. The church of Christ cannot be controlled; She is the Victor.

Joanna