"The Second Council of Nicaea,...amounted to a decisive victory over the Platonic misunderstanding of Christianity--a victory that has received too little attention in the West--by maintaining the paradox of a spiritualization that is incarnation. The Council, which in its affirmation of the image sees the inner consistency of the Incarnation and which in the East is still celebrated on the Feast of Orthodoxy as the watershed between pre-Christian and Christian Hellenism--this Council is the ready-made answer to the problem of desacralization, which arose in the West in the sixteenth century and by now in the twentieth has assumed its most acute form. Iconoclasm is not the breakthrough from the Old Testament into the New but, rather, the destruction of the Incarnation and thus a relapse into the Law, which could permit no images because the Image had not yet appeared."
Joseph Ratzinger, Dogma and Preaching, San Francisco: Ignatius, 2005, 237.