Fr. Matt,
This is the kind of information that makes this forum helpful. I think that you mean that the 7th Council says that God the Father is invisible, not that it identifies the Ancuent of Days, and that there are plenty of church fathers who do both.
Orthowiki takes the opposite view of the Church fathers' opinions:
It also quotes St Nicodemos of the Holy Mountain as taking the opposite view of the 7th Council:
A vagante website, "True Orthodox Christianity" argues that the 7th Council banned images of the Father when it stated:
“
Christians have never made an icon of the invisible and incomprehensible divinity, but it is only insofar as the Word became flesh and dwelt among us that we paint the mysteries of man’s redemption.”
However in the Orthowiki article, St. Nicodemos argued effectively against that interpretation of the Council. He noted that Christians made images of the Ancient of Days, which he said was the Father, and that the Seventh Council openly allowed for images of doves representing the Holy Spirit as it appeared in the Gospels. St. Nicodemos reasoned that if we can depict the Spirit as a dove as it appeared, then we should be able to depict the Father as the Ancient of Days as He appeared to Daniel. St. Nicodemos took the prohibition on depicting His divinity to be against putting blazing images on the Father.
In contrast, if we were to interpret the Ancient of Days as referring to Christ's Divinity, then those earlier depictions of the Ancient of Days would be in violation of the Council's declaration that "Christians have never made an icon of the invisible and incomprehensible divinity".
The vagante article says:
St. Nicodemos argues in return that:
It sounds like St. Nicodemos is dealing with a Greek or Latin language issue where in the Greek St. Gregory would have written that Christian's have not "blazoned" an image of God the Father because we can't depict divinity.
One way to address the discrepancy with the 7th Council (if it actually bans images of the Father) could be the option that Daniel saw a representative image of the Father because he was having a vision. So for instance, in John's vision, John saw the Son as a Lamb. Now of course Jesus doesn't actually look like a hooded lamb. And in Orthodoxy there is actually a ban on depicting Jesus that way. But nonetheless, that was the representative symbol that he had in the vision. So based on the 7th Council, Daniel would not have directly seen the literal image of the Father, but he saw the Father in an indirect representational way on a vision like John saw Jesus in the form of the Lamb, which us also banned for written painted/images.
I wonder where exactly the 7th Council banned images of the Father:
CHURCH FATHERS: Second Council of Nicaea
I searched the text for "the Father" and didn't find anything specific on that.
Orthowiki says:
When it says that images of the Father don't conform to the 7th Council, it would be helpful to be more specific.
The Orthowiki article on the "Ancient of Days" mentioning the 17th century Moscow Council addresses its decisions as things that have been ignored:
The Saint Jonah EO Church webpage on the identity of the Ancient of Days puts together alot of patristic quotes favoring the identification of the Father with the Ancient of Days. It also quotes from our liturgy:
The Ancient of Days Icon: Patristic, Liturgical, and Historical Evidence
The article above also addresses possible discrepancies when on one hand fathers and hymns call Christ Ancient of Days and on the other hand they specifically identify the Ancient of Days in Daniel 7 as the Father. It quotes St. Dionysius and then comments:
The above article notes that even the 17th Moscow Council confirmed that Rublev's icon of the meeting with Abraham was the Holy Trinity and that we have hymns identifying the three Angel's as God's three hypostases. This shows that God the Father visited Abraham, but in an image that he could see. This explains how Daniel could envision the Father: he was seeing a representative image in a vision.
One of the page's examples has a hymn calling the Father's angelic form an "image":
One argument in favor of the Ancient of Days being Christ is that the Ancient of Days sits down in Daniel 7, and this act of sitting down is interpreted by some as signifying that he is the judge in the story, and as we know, it is Christ who judges. However, while I see that the Ancient of Days sits down in Dan 7:9 it isn't clear to me that this proves that the Father is the judge and that Christ does not judge. Conceivably the Father in the story did not sit down to judge mankind but to decide to give the dominions over mankind to the Son, as it says in following verses that the Son was given dominion, the implication being that the Ancient of Days gave Him Dominion.
So based on all the information it looks like the Ancient of Days is probably the Father, although I am open to contrary information. And I don't see this as a big problem with regard to His direct invisibility because the Father appeared in the image of an angel to Abraham. So in case Daniel 7 doesn't serve as evidence for the larger point that an OT figure could see an image of the invisible Father, then the meeting with Abraham serves as such.
