The halo shows the uncreated light of God shining through a person who’s been united with Him. It’s not decorative. It’s theological.
When you look at an icon of St. Mary of Egypt or the Theotokos or Christ Himself, that golden circle around the head represents divine light, the same light the apostles saw blazing from Jesus on Mount Tabor when His face shone like the sun. Orthodox theology calls this the uncreated light, and it’s not something created like sunlight or fire. It’s God’s own energy, His grace made visible.
The saints aren’t glowing because they’re good people who tried really hard. They’re radiating God’s light because they’ve been transformed by it. That’s theosis, becoming by grace what God is by nature. The halo tells you this person has been deified, pulled into union with God so completely that His light shines through them. It’s the visual language of transfiguration.
You’ll notice Christ’s halo looks different. It has a cross inscribed in it, and if you look closely at a traditional Byzantine icon, you’ll see three Greek letters: Ο Ω Ν. That’s “Ho On”, “The One Who Is.” It’s what God called Himself when Moses asked His name at the burning bush. Only Christ gets this halo because only He is God by nature. The Theotokos, the apostles, St. Nicholas, they all have plain gold circles. Christ has the cruciform halo with the divine name written into it.
Some icons show figures without halos. Usually these are people who haven’t been glorified yet, sinners in the scene, or sometimes Old Testament figures depicted before the Resurrection opened the way to full theosis. The thief on the cross sometimes appears without a halo in crucifixion icons, though he’s certainly a saint. It depends on what moment the iconographer is showing.
Gold is the standard color because it’s the most radiant, the closest thing we have to depicting uncreated light. Iconographers use actual gold leaf when they can. It catches the candlelight during Liturgy and seems to glow on its own. That’s intentional. The icon is a window into heaven, and the halo is part of what makes that window work, it shows you that the person you’re venerating isn’t dead and gone but alive in God’s light right now.
This isn’t just artistic convention borrowed from Roman emperors (though the visual form does have pre-Christian roots). The Church took that circular nimbus and filled it with Christian meaning, rooted it in Scripture and the Fathers. St. Gregory Palamas wrote extensively about the uncreated light in the fourteenth century, defending the hesychasts who said they’d actually seen it in prayer. The halo in iconography is connected to that same theology, the light isn’t metaphorical, and neither is the halo.
When you venerate an icon at St. Michael’s, you’re not just looking at a painting of someone who lived long ago. You’re looking through a window at someone who’s alive in God, blazing with His light. The halo tells you that. It’s a promise, really. What happened to them can happen to us. We’re all called to shine.
If you want to dig deeper into Orthodox iconography, Fr. Maximos Constas has written some excellent pieces for Ancient Faith, and Leonid Ouspensky’s “Theology of the Icon” is the classic text. But honestly, the best way to understand icons is to stand in front of them during Vespers some Saturday evening when the candles are lit and see how that gold catches the light.
