Phenomenology of the Icon: Mediating God through the Image 9781009317924, 9781009317900, 100931792X

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Phenomenology of the Icon

Mediating God through the Image Stephanie Rumpza

PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE ICON

How can something finite mediate an infinite God? Weaving patristics, theology, art history, aesthetics, and religious practice ­ with the hermeneutic phenomenology of Hans-Georg Gadamer and ­Jean-Luc Marion, Stephanie Rumpza proposes a new answer to this paradox by offering a fresh and original approach to the Byzantine icon. She demonstrates the power and relevance of the ­phenomenological method to integrate hermeneutic aesthetics and divine ­transcendence, illustrating how the material and visual dimensions of the icon are illuminated by traditional practices of prayer. Rumpza’s study targets a problem that marks a major fault line in continental philosophy of religion – how to understand the i­ntegrity of finite beings in relation to a God that transcends them. For ­philosophers, her book demonstrates the relevance of a cherished religious practice of Eastern Christianity. For art historians, she p ­ roposes a novel philosophical paradigm for understanding the icon as it is approached in practice. Steph a nie Ru mpz a  is a researcher at Sorbonne Université (Paris-IV). Her work focuses on the mediation of image, word, and expression and the relation between phenomenological and theological thinking.

PH E NOM E NOL O G Y OF T H E IC ON Mediating God through the Image S T EPH A N I E RU M PZ A Sorbonne Université

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge cb2 8ea, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, usa 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009317924 doi: 10.1017/9781009317900 © Cambridge University Press & Assessment 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Rumpza, Stephanie, 1986– author. title: Phenomenology of the icon : mediating God through the image / Stephanie Rumpza, University of Paris, Sorbonne. description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2022033347 | isbn 9781009317924 (hardback) | isbn 9781009317900 (ebook) subjects: lcsh: Spirituality – Christianity. | Idols and images | Icons. | Icons, Byzantine. | Christian art and symbolism. | Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1900–2002. | Marion, Jean-Luc, 1946– classification: lcc bv4501.3 .r855 2023 | ddc 242–dc23/eng/20230126 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022033347 isbn 978-1-009-31792-4 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Figures page vii Foreword ix Jean-Luc Marion Acknowledgments xii List of Abbreviations xiv

Introduction: The Seashell Problem

1

1 Understanding the Icon

10

2 Resonance: Gadamer’s Aesthetics

56

3 The Window: Marion’s “Icon”

93

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4

The Icon and Art The Patristic Defense of the Icon The Icon in Twentieth-Century Theology The Icon and Phenomenology Philosophers and the Image The Aesthetic Event The Painting: Truth and Representation Rich Mediation The Phenomenality of God The Painted Icon Transparency and Kenosis Transparent Mediation

10 21 39 52

56 62 75 85

94 109 118 127

4 Representation: The Icon and Artwork

133

5 Presence: The Icon and Prayer

161

4.1 Representation, Recognition, and Paradox 4.2 Glory 4.3 Poverty 4.4 Exceeding Aesthetics 5.1 Manners of Presence 5.2 Presence of Prayer: A Response to the Call

v

133 139 147 155

161 167

vi

Contents 5.3 Prayerful Presence of the Icon 5.4 Real Presence and Iconic Presence

172 184

6 Substitution: The Icon and Veneration

188

7 Performance: The Icon and Liturgy

217

8 The Love Letter: Iconic Mediation

246

6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4

Image and Gesture A Phenomenology of Substitution Icon and Substitution Limitations of Substitution

The Event of Liturgy Liturgy and Eschatology Iconostasis: Closed Door or Open Window? Transfiguration of Vision Defining Iconic Mediation The Seashell Problem Revisited The Love Letter The Horizon of Love

188 192 199 214

217 223 233 237

246 255 263 266

Bibliography272 Index292

Figures

1.1 Mummy Portrait, Isidora Master (100 A.D.) page 14 1.2 Christ Pantocrator, Sinai (mid sixth century) 15 4.1 Vita Icon of St. George (first half of the eighteenth century) 135 4.2 Deesis Christ (1580) 138 4.3 Annunciation (second half of the sixteenth century) 143 4.4 Ascension (early fifteenth century) 145 5.1 Protection of the Mother of God (sixteenth century) 177 5.2 St. Ignatius of Antioch (c. 1750) 181 6.1 Mandylion, Gregory Kroug (1960) 200 6.2 Icon Veneration (thirteenth century) 201 6.3 St. Luke the Proto-Iconographer, Vladislav Andrejev (2005) 206 7.1 August Calendar Icon (second half of the eighteenth century) 221 7.2 Intercession (c. 1225) 224 7.3 Inner Narthex Dome, Monastery of Christ at Chora (early fourteenth century)  226 7.4 Dome Mosaic of Christ Pantocrator, Monastery of Christ at Chora (early fourteenth century) 227 7.5 Cathedral of the Annunciation in the Moscow Kremlin (fifteenth–nineteenth centuries) 228 7.6 Church of Saint George, Mogosoaia (1688) 229 7.7 Stavropoleos Iconostasis (early eighteenth century) 234 7.8 Iconostasis, Leonid Ouspensky (1966–1970) 235 7.9 Transfiguration, Federico José Xamist (2013) 239

vii

Foreword

To any reader seriously interested in the crucial issue of the icon, Stephanie Rumpza’s work will appear as an invaluable achievement. This is evident for technical reasons, as it holds together a number of different fields and sources of information that have rarely been united before: the history of patristic theology as well as modern and post-modern philosophy, from hermeneutics and phenomenology to semiotics and pragmatism, etc. This provides sufficient means to bring together two different questions, otherwise kept apart: the concept of the icon from a speculative and contemporary point of view and the positive description of the icon according to the components, laws, and, so to speak, rules of engagement (to use the military ­formulation of the criteria to open fire) – a very difficult issue, as it implies opening up the narrow sense of the “icon,” as merely a form of Byzantine painting, onto the dimensions of a possible practice for today and for the future. Only this attempt to connect them both can give us a genuine insight into the style of visibility of the icon in general. I must admit that the result is quite convincing. If a challenging path to clear, the track is easy to follow. First, an account of the history of the theological approach to the icon: iconoclasm, idolatry, iconophilia, final dogmatic standards, and this disturbing conclusion, “the more we study these debates, the less we understand what an icon means.” Second, a turn to hermeneutics, that is, to Gadamer’s insights, which are applied neither for textual nor existential interpretations (as previously done by Heidegger), but in a more original way, for the development of an account of visual art, and spiritual or liturgical practice. This move leads the inquiry to join my own work, focusing on the phenomenological structure of the icon as such, which means to consider its relation to the visible as such, by studying its opposition to the idol. In the idol, I trigger the visible by seeing it from my point of view and my intentionality; in the icon, on the other hand, I experience the visible as coming down upon me, as seeing me according to a reverse intentionality. Third, ix

x

Foreword

these steps alone would remain still too abstract to provide access to a real understanding of the icon qua icon. In Rumpza’s words, “[U]ntil we see more positively what the icon does as an icon, it sounds like what the icon does remains inconsequential.” Then begins a new moment: exploring the actual procedures of framing, designing, and painting the icon according to the Byzantine tradition, not to reconstitute them (they are still well known and still in use) but to understand their conceptual aims. They first aim at “representation” (Vorstellung), that is, the production of a ­visible, which should not be too quickly explained as an image, because this visibility, while brilliant and glorious, remains the visibility of something that no one has ever seen in our visible world and will never appear in this visibility. This representation does not intend to serve as a stand-in for an impossible or absent presence but to lead the viewer to strive with all his forces and with her whole heart for this presence through prayer. This leads to “re-presentation” again, but now understood as substitution (Vertretung): some visible stands for another visible, or better, some visible stands for an invisible that, although it remains hidden, projects out into our visible realm. In the icon, we don’t see the invisible becoming visible. This is not because of a lack of revelation of a stingy or shy divinity, but because we don’t see, we no longer even need to see anything. On the contrary, we consent to being seen, we see (and experience) being seen, and as this gaze (invisible, like each gaze is) crosses our (invisible) gaze, we feel the weight of the Other. The experience of the icon, if we are courageous enough to dare to face it in prayer, provides us with the same experience as any other human self when we cross gazes. With a major difference, in this encounter, we meet the everlasting Other, not an other who is fading, provisional, mortal, and deceiving, but the Other who lives forever. This structure implies that the icon has to be performed, achieved by acts: prayer, which consists in silence and speaking, touching and listening, solitude, and liturgical community. We perform the icon, we are embedded in it, and we are reformed by it into what, at last, we shall be – those looked at by the charity of God. The final and most convincing moment of this inquiry leads to the analysis of the love letter. This provides a perfect analogy to the icon. Reading a love letter, we have the words of the author, but we don’t have his or her immediate presence. We don’t even learn anything factually, and nothing means anything (at best, it reports a past state of mind of the writer, perhaps already fading away when we read it, or lying, even). Unless, of course, every word means something. This is only possible if we take each of them as the written gaze of the other, watching us, exactly as we are

Foreword

xi

meant to take the icon. In both cases, reversing the intentionality makes the crucial difference. A love letter may work as an idol (for instance, in the Liaisons dangereuses) or as an icon (for instance in Paul’s Letter to the Philippians 2:12: “… not only when I am present but all the more now when I am absent, continue to work out your salvation!”). At stake here is a reverse intentionality, not only in significations, but in the visible. Far from the superficial accusation of neglecting the hermeneutics of the gift in the icon, this alone achieves its genuine hermeneutics: the i­ nterpretation of my self by the gaze of the icon on me. No doubt, this work will stand as a landmark in the understanding of the icon. jean-luc marion de l’Académie française

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this material have appeared in other publications. An extended version of Chapter 6 has been published as “Longing in the Flesh: A Phenomenological Account of Icon Veneration,” International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, Vol. 81, no. 5 (2020), 466–484; an alternate version of Chapter 3 has been published as “Crossing the Visible or Crossing It Out?: Jean-Luc Marion’s Icon as Window into Heaven,” Horizons, Vol. 49, no. 2 (2022) 21–48; other related drafts of this material are found in “On Spiritual versus Carnal Visibility: Phenomenologically Dismantling an Orthodox Iconoclasm,” Image, Phenomenon and Imagination in the Phenomenology of Religious Experience, 193–207, eds. Martin Nitsche and Olga Louchakova-Schwartz (Nordhausen: Verlag Traugott Bautz, 2022), and “Phenomenology of the Christian Life: Transfiguration of the Gaze,” Filozofia Chrześcijańska 19 (2022), 27–45. I would like to thank those whose comments have helped improve this work along the way, including Grégoire Aslanoff, Charles Barber, Jeffrey Bloechl, Natalie Carnes, Maximos Constas, Ian Gerdon, Gary Gurtler, Marie-Aimée Manchon, Rick Moreno, Richard Kearney, my two anonymous reviewers, and my stalwart eagle-eyed proofreader from Blandings. Vladislav Andrejev, Lydie Aslanoff, Andrew Gould, Jim Forest, Georges Habet, David Hendrix, Miodrag Markovic, Tudor Rebengiuc, Linda Theodorou, and Federico José Xamist generously agreed to share their iconographic and photographic talent, and Lisa Lunsford lent her expertise to a few specialized translations. I would like to extend my thanks to Beatrice Rehl, for her warm reception of this project, and to the wonderful editorial team at Cambridge Press. A number of other people and institutions have supported me in Paris in a variety of ways during the research and writing of this project, beginning with an exchange program between Boston College and the École normale supérieure, under the welcome of Frédéric Worms. Emmanuel Falque and Jérôme de Gramont kindly invited me to attend classes and lectures at the Institut Catholique de Paris. I am xii

Acknowledgments

xiii

especially grateful to the professors who have been so hospitable to me at Paris IV, now Sorbonne Université, over these past years, particularly Claude Romano, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Vincent Carraud and Emmanuel Cattin. And, of course, I hesitate to imagine what would have become of this project or my research here without my partner in the trenches: the wise council and faithful encouragement of Murray Littlejohn have been a constant guard against shrapnel of every kind. Finally I must acknowledge a twofold debt that is evident in the pages that follow, and in so much more besides. Jean-Luc Marion, in his writing and teaching, has been a powerful model of originality and rigor, a gift as invaluable as his generous guidance along the path which has led me from the University of Chicago to Paris; my endless thanks to him for opening so many new and unexpected horizons. And in my time as Fellow of Blandings College, I have gained enormously from the unsparing hospitality of Jean-Yves Lacoste and the unapologetically high bar he sets; I have learned so much from what he has said and so much from what he hasn’t. It is a fortune to be so deeply in debt to both of them for their thinking, their inspiration, and their friendship. To them, and to all whose support has helped light the way, I offer my sincerest thanks.

Abbreviations

Jean-Luc Marion AR BG/ED

CP CV/CdV

GR GWB/DSE ID/IeD IE/DS

RD SP/LS

D’ailleurs, la Révélation. Paris: Grasset, 2020. Being Given: Towards a Phenomenology of Givenness. Translated by Jeffrey Kosky. Stanford University Press, 2002. Étant donné. Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997. Courbet, ou la peinture à l’œil. Paris: Flammarion, 2014. The Crossing of the Visible. Translated by James K. A. Smith. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. La croisée du visible. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1991. Givenness and Revelation. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. God Without Being. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Dieu sans l’être. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1982. The Idol and Distance: Five Studies. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson. New York: Fordham University Press, 2001. L’idole et la distance, Paris: Grasset, 1977. In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Translated by Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002. De surcroît. Études sur les phénomènes saturés. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2001. Reprise du donné. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2016. In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine. Translated by Jeffrey K. Kosky. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. Au lieu de soi. L’approche de Saint Augustin. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2008. xiv

List of Abbreviations VR/VeR

xv

The Visible and the Revealed. Translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Le visible et le révelé. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2005.

Hans-Georg Gadamer GW PH RB TM

Gesammelte Werke. Vols. 1–10. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1999. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Translated and edited by David E. Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. Translated by Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Truth and Method. Revised Translation by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2014.

Patristic Authors JD

TS PL PG

John Damascene. On the Divine Images. Three Apologies Against Those Who Attack the Divine Images. Translated by David Anderson. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997. Theodore the Studite. On the Holy Icons. Translated by Catharine P. Roth. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminar Press, 1987. Migne, Jaques-Paul. ed. Patrologia Cursus Completus: Series Latina. Vols. 1–217. Paris: Migne, 1844–1865. Migne, Jaques-Paul, ed. Patrologia Cursus Completus: Series Graeca. Vols. 1–161. Paris: Migne, 1857–66.

Introduction: The Seashell Problem

A well-known legend tells of St. Augustine contemplating his treatise on the Trinity as he walked along the seaside. There he saw a boy, scooping up water in a seashell and running to deposit it into a small pool some distance away. Augustine asked what the boy was doing and was amused to hear that the child was trying to carry the entire ocean into a hole he had dug in the sand. On seeing his incredulity, the boy challenged him back: is it not even more impossible to try to comprehend the mystery of God with the limits of the human mind? This story illustrates quite well philosophy’s dilemma when it turns to question the Divine. Whatever God is far exceeds our ability to speak it, just as the boy’s pool is so far exceeded by the ocean. Our understanding may be broad, but it is nevertheless limited by our finitude, that is, it comes to an end. Whatever God might be, It or He would definitely not come to an end. Augustine flatly denies the possibility of a comprehensive grasp of God (“si cepisti, non est Deus”),1 but perhaps there may be other ways of encountering Divinity than “comprehending.” Our verb must be at first deliberately vague here. Aristotle told us that thinking is a kind of touch, but perhaps we have many ways of “touching upon” what is other than us. Many philosophers have spoken of the problem of knowing God, others of proving God, still others of feeling, or experiencing God. In all of these cases, a question is posed about some form of touching, a meeting point, or an encounter between the finite being and that which infinitely exceeds it. Whatever its nature, is such a noncomprehensive encounter possible? But there is another key element of our original story to acknowledge. Augustine is not directly touching God with his thinking, and the child is

1

Augustine, Sermo 52, VI.16, PL 38, 360; The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings, vol. 1, ed. Andrew Radde-Gallwitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 309–310.

1

2

Introduction: The Seashell Problem

not directly funneling the ocean into the pool. Both are using mediating elements: Augustine is trying to understand God in language, and the boy is transporting the ocean with a seashell. This refines our original question: would it be possible to have a noncomprehensive encounter with God by the mediation of a finite thing? First, of course, we must give a provisional definition of mediation. In the history of philosophy, this term has been used in many ways. Aristotle argued that the μεταξύ is a critical component for sense perception: the medium of air or water is required for the appearing of the object to reach my eyes, or the sounding of a tone to be carried to my ears.2 The metaxu thus carries the perceptive “touch” from the object of investigation to the sense organ that receives it. Yet, for Aristotle, this medium does not alter the sensible form received, nor does it enter the process of thought, which has direct contact with the intelligible forms. In later philosophy, by contrast, knowledge involves some kind of “addition” to the immediate data of experience, in various ways: in Kant, a priori forms of experience stand between (metaxu) the thing in itself and the known thing; in hermeneutic philosophy, interpretation stands between (metaxu) a past text and its living appropriation; in Hegel, sensuous immediacy is abolished by intellectual knowledge – but this abolition leads to some higher immediacy that mediates contradictions; in logical positivism, sense data are raw food for knowledge, and the mediation of logic is required to make them intelligible. In all recent philosophies, sheer immediacy is rare. In one way or another, immediacy always needs some form of mediation. This does not mitigate the fact that mediation remains for many a source of suspicion, one step removed from the original and thus a potential source of error.3 Other common uses of the term can call into question this idea that there even is an original that can or ought to be known prior to the medium. Following the religious and legal history of this word, mediation describes a middle position or third-party capable of reconciling me with an estranged party when our conversation has been damaged, allowing us to overcome our discord. Note well the implications: in theory, one could describe the work of a mediator objectively, observing from a distance the reconciliation as it takes place between two others. Yet if I am one of 2 3

Aristotle, De Anima, II.7. This is often an assumption of “media studies,” which has often been employed to analyze technologies of communication in human civilization. See Fritz Heider, Ding und Medium (Berlin Vrin Kadmos Kulturverlag, 2005); Sybille Krämer, Medium, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to Media Philosophy (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015). By contrast, for an approach to the question of mediation engaging with the post-Hegelian metaphysical tradition, see the work of William Desmond, for example Being and the Between (New York: SUNY Press, 1995).

Introduction: The Seashell Problem

3

the estranged parties, this is no longer possible. My perspective has broken down too far to be able to make clear and balanced claims about the whole situation. In such a case, there is no getting a grip on how things stand “originally” or “objectively,” no getting around the mediator, for the mediator is my only way of attaining a truth that goes beyond the fragments of my warped, immediate perspective. In this sense, whatever I hope to bridge to is only accessible in mediation. A third common use of the term confirms this sense: the medium is also important in art. Museums include next to the title of an artwork and artist the materials used to create it. Art is not merely a bloodless idea but an expression that can only take shape through its embodiment in the particular possibilities and limitations of different finite materials. Oil paint is slow to dry and maintains a certain sheen and transparency that allows for a great degree of precision and luminosity, but it is perhaps less suited to create dreamy, blurred floats of colors. Watercolor would be a much better medium for that task. Contemporary art has extensively tested this idea by discovering how new materials, often of the most unremarkable kind, can be transformed into art. Making portraits out of masking tape or music out of microphone feedback requires a masterful grasp of how the unique qualities of a given material can best be set into play in an event of aesthetic communication. This also involves the recognition that anything can be used to create an aesthetic expression, if we are sensitive to its particular character. Thus, a medium in this sense means the unique set of possibilities and limitations that determine and embody an aesthetic expression that would exist neither without it nor prior to it.4 Mediation is a concept with a diverse and complicated usage, but it is not necessary to perform a deep philosophical genealogy to understand the question being posed here. Building from these examples, let us formulate a preliminary definition, which will be refined as we proceed: the medium, by its unique capacities and limitations, facilitates an encounter across a distance that would be otherwise impossible to cross. This sharpens the articulation of our particular problem. Like the seashell, a mediation is finite. An infinite God would definitively exceed the limitation of a medium, like the virtually endless ocean exceeds the seashell. Or even worse, as the boy’s seashell does indeed hold part of the real ocean, and thus his project seems to have a degree of success, even if severely limited. If the question of God were strictly parallel, this would mean that God would be infinite in a way 4

I use the word “aesthetics” here in its broadest sense to refer to a sensible experience of art or beauty. The narrower sense of this term in relation to 18th c. German philosophy will be discussed in Chapter 2.

4

Introduction: The Seashell Problem

we can imaginatively extend and grasp as n + 1. This kind of “everlasting” God is still only a finite extension of finitude, firmly within the realm of limits. If we want to be more accurate to the notions of God actually held by believers, we must recognize what Kierkegaard called the “infinite qualitative difference” between God and creatures.5 For God is “absolute,” that is, not relative to anything else. The root ab-solvere is not defined in contradistinction to finitude but “separated” or “set free” or, literally, “loosed beyond” the system of limitations. As God is not infinite magnitude, the seashell, instead of containing a piece of the ocean, would have to leave the plane of numerical magnitudes to grasp the whole ocean at once. If the mind cannot comprehend God, it is also certain that this would be impossible for a seashell. Thus, whatever finite thing I set up between me and God would fall infinitely short of its goal. Its claims to the infinite in vain, it would serve not as a mediator but as an imposter. Now I no longer encounter God, but something else, more accessible, perhaps dazzling and delightful to the eyes, which takes his place. Mediation then seems to lead us directly into idolatry. On the other hand, upon recognizing this danger, we might instead give up all attempts at mediation. Perhaps we even go so far as to destroy and eliminate the use of anything with pretensions of mediating the divine, knowing that it is bound to fail, that the best it can do would only lead others astray. After eliminating all mediating elements, we may or may not be able to approach God directly, but we would at least be free of idolatry’s errors. Destruction and avoidance both are forms of iconoclasm, which despairs of any finite thing having a capacity for touching on the divine. While idolatry and iconoclasm embrace contrary courses of action, this very opposition reveals a deeper unity. Both are the consequences of the inadequacy of finite activity to definitively grasp the divine. In this case, there are only two possible outcomes: Either the seashell would refuse to hold more than its capacity of water and fail to carry the ocean, or it would try to exceed its limits and burst apart, and cease to be a seashell. Its finite limits could not maintain their integrity before the boundlessness of the sea. One prefix marks the infinite abyss of difference between ab-solvere “to break free,” and dis-solvere, “to break apart.” For finite things to break free of our limitations is the very evisceration of the structures that let us be ourselves. No one can see the face of God and live. But could we not find a middle ground between idolatry and iconoclasm? For example, one could argue that although the majority of finite 5

Søren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 127.

Introduction: The Seashell Problem

5

things in the world are distractions from God, it could be possible to construct a special category of “sacred” words, events, or things, different than ordinary words, events, or things, specially designed to mediate God’s presence. This would be something like a kind of seashell punctured by special holes to let the ocean through it. Obviously it would now be completely useless as a seashell, but perhaps the destruction of its natural limits would at least spare it from being completely shattered when it tries to contain the ocean. Perhaps the religious word or image, in a similar way, could render itself humbled and mysterious, partially destroyed to leave space for God to manifest himself. But if this is the case, we are still positing a competition between creature and Absolute, merely a delayed one. We are assuming that there is not enough “room” in a finite thing for God to work through it as it naturally is; the creature must diminish, contort, or efface itself to make space for God in ways that conflict with its natural being, like holes in a seashell. The implication is that finitude could not ultimately serve as a mediation for the encounter with God. Rather, like everything else, it is an obstacle to God. It must be minimized. In short, we are back to the iconoclastic claim: Everything finite must get out of God’s way. This means that while any kind of visual art or music may present us with something beautiful, profound, and even imbued with a feeling of sacredness, if it is finite, it can only extend our finite reach in a limited fashion. It thus seems to be a distraction from the infinite, clouding our attention with earthly things that inevitably fail to give us the divine. The only proper response would be iconoclasm. Clearly, we would have to banish concrete religious practice, and this would be a great loss for culture and expression, but perhaps it would still not be unlivable. By extension, we must also banish all philosophy, all thoughts, all words, and even hints of ideas. These too, as finite, add nothing, and only take away from an encounter with God. This too does not seem inherently unlivable. We would be left in perpetual agnosticism, refusing to weigh in on what exceeds our capacity. God would not enter into experience, and anything we would experience would by definition not be a God. Philosophy could not speak of God, but it could still speak of the mystery of human life, and perhaps our encounter with God could survive in nonrational forms – subjective, immediate, emotional experiences. But even emotional experience is finite, so these must be ruled out too as a possible place of encounter of God. It remains then for us to follow not religious, but a-religious, negative practice, divesting ourselves of any false ideas about what God might

6

Introduction: The Seashell Problem

be. Our aim could be to close the eye of the intellect and fall back into the blankness of mind that would impose as little limitations as possible. But this is still not enough. It is not simply a matter of not speaking and not practicing. Not even the silence of a blank mind allows a creature, essentially circumscribed by limits, to approach the uncircumscribable Absolute. To put it in different words, all finite reality, including all that we do and are, is definitively closed to a God who transcends it completely. Perhaps there is one final hope of a solution in those religions that have a mystical tradition, which claims that in rare cases some kind of direct unity with God is possible. As it is traditionally conceived, mystics enter into a unity with God that is unlike any other experience, something impossible to describe or articulate. Theology might say that this encounter is one where God himself gives the mystic a new, supernatural capacity of experience that far exceeds whatever humans could achieve on our own: The seashell is miraculously transformed to hold the whole ocean in a way beyond human imagining. It’s not immediately clear whether this would preserve the finite creature or destroy it by completely overwriting whatever kind of thing it was in its finitude; a seashell that can hold the whole ocean is no longer really a seashell as we know it. It would be a worthy task to explore the possibility of mystical experience and adjudicate interpretations of it across different religious traditions, but as this does not help us solve our current dilemma of finite identity, we must set it aside.6 What we can say is this: It is one thing to claim that mysticism offers a possible path to God that would take us beyond the mediation of finite things. It is something entirely different, however, to definitively exclude finite mediation as a possible path to encounter with God. Even if mysticism could be allowed as a mode of access, it is rare. Further and more troubling than the elitism of such a spirituality of the few is the implication that finitude would add nothing to the encounter with God. That, rather, finitude is from the outset destined to always be an obstacle to God. It must be minimized, just as those hoping to prepare for the mystical encounter with God may attempt to minimize their activities, thoughts, and feelings in a practice of meditation or contemplation. Everything finite must get out of God’s way. This latter course, as we have seen, would claim that not only art, but nature, other human beings, and all of creation are only obstacles to God. Ultimately so are our very selves. If we wanted

6

Readers interested in such an investigation should read Anthony Steinbock’s Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).

Introduction: The Seashell Problem

7

any relation to the Divine, it would only be possible at the cost of our dissolution. As we can see when we begin to let our questions deepen in this way, what looks like a conversation about mediation is, in fact, a question of our very identity. If creation in its natural being blocks out God, this competition could only end in our destruction. Seashell or ocean, idolatry or iconoclasm: either our nature or God’s. There is no third option. We have done nothing to prove that there is indeed such a God, since for this conception of philosophy, a proof would be impossible. Yet we are forced to take one side of the wager. We can either live out our finitude, totally enclosed within the finite capacities of ourselves and our world, or we can try to live open to an infinite God who demands all creatures turn against each other and eventually against themselves in a thorough cosmic evisceration. A religion to such a transcendent God would be our isolation and destruction and not our salvation: “Let everything that lives and breathes wilt and disintegrate before the Absolutely Other!” With such a bleak account, we might hope our vibrant world of finitude could be left in the peace of atheism. Between God and the creature, it is no contest as to who is left standing at the end of days. The possibility of God would be our greatest danger. But must the finite really eviscerate itself to reveal the infinite? Can it maintain its integrity, and thus its identity, as finite, and still mediate God? Can God be both present and absolute? Despite the perplexity that follows from the seashell problem, the majority of religious practice and belief over thousands of years holds that the mediation of God is indeed possible. How? To answer this question, I propose to center on Christianity, which has a markedly rich tradition of sacred art, poetry, music, liturgies steeped in elemental symbolism, and an insistence on community. It admits the possibility of touching upon God in a way that utterly transcends the finite; yet it makes no effort to banish the finite from this encounter. It also has a long history of highly developed theology and philosophy that insists that finite thinking can allow, and not obstruct, the revelation of God. How can Christianity allow these practices? How can it justify its daring insistence that not only is such an encounter with God possible, but that it could be enhanced by redoubling the limits of finitude within finite practices of mediation? History has faced this question before. One particularly violent eruption still haunts us through our vocabulary: the fierce controversy of Iconoclasm. This debate which took place in the Byzantine Empire between the eighth and ninth centuries focused on the production and veneration of images of Christ and the saints. Many worried that to create

8

Introduction: The Seashell Problem

an image of the invisible God would be to flatten the Absolute into the finite order, thus failing to reach God and producing only idols. Others insisted that not only was the transcendence of God not compromised by his visibility in the icon, but that such a practice was a virtual necessity to Christian practice. I propose that if we want an answer to our philosophical problems, the image is an excellent place for us to start, for more reasons than its historical significance. We can sometimes fool ourselves when it comes to language, using our words far beyond their actual reach. They are abstract, flexible, free to refer in loose ways, and thus seem at first to be perfectly fitted to hint obscurely at the Divine. But as critical philosophers remind us, we too easily slip into a false sense of security, thinking that we have really freed ourselves from the weight of materiality while our feet remain firmly planted on the ground.7 Images bypass some of this cocky confidence of religious language that thinks it can skirt the real issues. They force us to deal with the questions head on, viscerally, in the flesh. An image cannot be abstracted or changed in its transmission as a word can, and it takes far more effort to produce. It reminds us how deeply rooted we are in the senses we prefer to take for granted, and it solidly embodies what it portrays. The image will thus keep us honest about our claims. At first it may seem to be grossly material and incompetent, one of the weakest links in philosophy of religion, particularly as many religious traditions still find visual images too crude to serve as sites of divine mediation. This is all the better for our purposes. If we succeed at defending the image as genuine religious expression, we will rescue other forms of religious expression and practice along with it as well (“higher” or no). Perhaps the image also has a corrective to issue these other forms of religious discourse, teaching them how to hold themselves accountable to the paradoxically rich poverty of human knowing. It will help us guard against any residual metaphysical dualism that slips into our philosophical thinking. This is particularly evident in the tradition of the Byzantine icon. As something to be looked at, touched, or kissed, it demands we include the corporeal and not just the abstract, practice and not just theory. It keeps us firmly tied to a concrete religious tradition considered central by many Christian believers, and it subverts the philosophical temptation to abstract away a “spirituality” 7

Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews as Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), A 235–36/B 294–95; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Fourth Edition. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), §38.

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from the “religion.” And in this, the icon has developed a very deliberate way of presenting this content, such that it not only claims to give us an experience of God but also teaches us what an experience of God is. Icons thus exercise a privileged place in our vocabulary and history to discuss any mediation of the sacred, and by investigating them, we will gain solid ground to discuss the broader philosophical implications. But this starting point immediately brings us face to face with another problem: What is the icon, exactly? Most of us would identify it as a certain kind of religious image used by Eastern Christians. We might further re­cognize that it is claimed to be distinct from other pictures, especially powerful or especially holy. But why, or how? What is it exactly that makes an icon so special? What causes people to bow before it and kiss it? And where should we turn to find our answers? A cursory investigation will quickly reveal that there is no existing body of literature that will provide a clear and coherent answer to all these questions. This is in part because the icon refuses to remain easily within one disciplinary boundary. Art history, theology, and philosophy all have something important to tell us about what kind of mediation the icon is, and their accounts do not always neatly align. Far from being a deterrent, this confusion is a cause for intrigue: What is it about this picture object that makes it so hard to pin down? Is this the sign we are on the track to a creaturely meeting with God? Even if we are happily not charged with the task of resolving these difficulties into a comprehensive definition of the icon (as if such a thing could be possible!), it would be brash to plunge blindly ahead. Thus, before we can lay out a path to investigate the icon’s mediation of God, we must first configure with careful and critical deliberation the way we must grasp what it is to be an icon. Our manner of proceeding under such circumstances must be one of mutual interrogation, advancing, like the stride of a runner, through the alternation of left and right, be it the religious tradition and its philosophical interrogation, or the history of art and contemporary religious practice. The interchanging of steps will carry us all the more clearly toward the paradox we seek: the Infinite in the finite, the Absolute in the relative, the Invisible in the visible – God impossibly in the flesh.

chapter 1

Understanding the Icon

Two embedded inquiries stretch out into the vast horizon before us. The primary question is to discover what it would mean for a finite thing to mediate God without falling into the seashell trap discussed in the Introduction. Our strategy of approach to this general question is by investigating one concrete instance of such mediation, and this opens up our second question, how the icon purports to do this, through its particular finite capacities and limitations. The first step on this journey must be to secure our terms: what is it that I mean when I speak of an “icon”? And who has the privileged place to define it? Aesthetics? Art history? Theology? Philosophy? The icon can be understood from each of these angles; yet it seems to exceed each of these discourses as they currently exist, resulting in blind spots, mutual critiques, and even apparent contradictions that preclude easy resolution. Our path of inquiry thus immediately plunges us into a dense forest of questions. What can we learn from these existing scholarly approaches that will hone our understanding of the icon’s unique capaci­ty for mediation? What disciplinary limitations must we recognize and overcome in order to understand why the icon could be said to facilitate a creaturely encounter with God?

1.1  The Icon and Art Recognizing the significance of the icon requires that we recognize the significance of its history. Whatever else it is, the icon belongs to a tradition of art that originated in a particular time and place and developed over centuries of use in particular cultures, and the weight of this tradition continues to have an authoritative and constitutive power over the meaning of the icon in the present day. It is a fitting start, then, to first look for answers about the icon’s identity in the history of art. Up until the early nineteenth century, art historians did not think much of the “primitive” art prior to the Renaissance, nor, indeed, of the Eastern Roman Empire. Voltaire dismissed 10

1.1  The Icon and Art

11

the entire history of Byzantium as “a disgrace to the human mind,”1 and Hegel called its inhabitants the “dregs” of humanity.2 Not far from this perspective, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which gave the first major historical account of the Byzantine Empire in English, set up icons as merely a “visible superstition” of the ignorant populace, with semi-pagan rituals that the rationalist elite “condescended to indulge,”3 an interpretive trend that was repeated into the twentieth century.4 This perspective on Byzantine history also led scholars to mystify all icons as an ancient tradition preserved without change from early Christianity. Thus, Didron in his 1845 translation of the iconographic canons of Dionysius of Fourna explains with fascination that “the Greek artist” is a “slave” to the theologian and is “bound to traditions like an animal to his instinct,”5 thanks to the conservative Church authorities suppressing all artistic creativity. Yet, in fact, the supposedly ancient and rigidly prescriptive painter manuals were only suggestive guidelines no more than a few generations old, and most of the icons that historians thought had been preserved from early Christianity were just as young, exhibiting the ornamentation of the post-seventeenth-century iconographic tradition in its decline.6 Yet growing interest eventually initiated more serious investigation in the icon. As abstraction and primitivism began to break the stranglehold of realism in the Western art world, art historians finally began to recognize in the iconographic tradition an aesthetic sophistication where they had previously only seen crude conventionalism; indeed, many major twentieth-century artists from Gustav Klimt and Alphonse Mucha to Henri Matisse, Kazmir 1 2

3 4 5

6

Voltaire, “Le pyrrhonisme de l’histoire,” Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, vol. 27 (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1883), chap. 15, p. 265. G. W. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, trans. J. Sibree as The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 338ff; David Talbot Rice gives a detailed history of this scholarly reception of Byzantine history and art in English since the nineteenth century, The Appreciation of Byzantine Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 20–42; see also Robert S. Nelson on the marginalization of Byzantium in scholarship, “Living on the Byzantine Borders of Western Art,” Gesta 35 (1996), 1–13. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 3, ed. J. B. Bury (London: Methuen & Co., 1897), 1669–1670. Percy Gardiner, for example, called icons “a petrified art” of pious peasants, “destitute of all Christian life,” Principles of Christian Art (London: John Murray, 1928), 183. Adolphe Napoléon Didron, Manuel d’iconographie chrétienne grecque et latine, traduit du manuscrit byzantin, le guide de le peinture par P. Durand (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1845), ix; this superstitious romanticism was also spurred on by those who used icons, as can be found in Nikolai Leskov’s 1872 icon-based adventure novel The Sealed Angel, trans. L. A. Kantz (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), Hans Belting, Bild und Kult, trans. Edmund Jephcott as Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 17–18. Robin Cormack, Painting the Soul: Icons, Death Masks, Shrouds (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 29–31.

12

Understanding the Icon

Malevitch, and Andy Warhol drew significant inspiration from Byzantine icons. Scholarly interest permitted ancient icons to be returned to their most original condition, even if damaged, rather than following the prior custom of repainting them for immediate religious reuse. New restoration techniques revealed the colorful clarity of the old masters, which had been long hidden under centuries of candle smoke and soot.7 The early decades of the twentieth century saw an influx of Russians seeking refuge in the intellectual centers of Western Europe and the expulsion of Greeks from Asia Minor to Greece, bringing their religious tradition and treasured masterpieces with them. This generated a new interest as well as new possibilities of studying ancient models, which in turn encouraged the renewal of iconography as an art form.8 With no small thanks to the pioneering efforts of the recently formed field of Byzantine art history, today the best icons are considered to be outstanding aesthetic accomplishments, and it is not out of the ordinary to see icon collections in art galleries or even entire museums of icons. Icon as Artwork The first major task of art history is to identify the icon in history as a particular form of religious representational art. While varying across time and place, and at times entangled with images of other cultures, one will recognize the icon’s wide-eyed faces, angular garments, hieratic posture, and distinctive compositional forms that include portrait and narrative images of Christ and the saints. The primary media for icons is sturdy enough to survive centuries: frescos and mosaics, as well as the “portable wall”9 of panel icons, made of wood wrapped in linen and gesso. They are painted in egg tempera and protected by a thick layer of oil known as the olipha. These painted icons will be my primary focus here, but it is important to recognize that this aesthetic tradition also extends to other media, including sculptures and reliefs, coins, textiles, and manuscript illuminations.

7

8

9

Kurt Weiztmann, The Icon: Holy Images – Sixth to Fourteenth Century (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1978), 237; Eugene Trubestskoi, Icons: Theology in Color, trans. Gertrude Vakar (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973), 94; Cormack, Painting the Soul, 21–23. Belting, Likeness and Presence, 17–20; André Grabar, Byzantine Painting, Historical and Critical Study, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Geneva: Skira, 1953), 31; Oleg Tarasov, Icons and Devotion: Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia, trans. and ed. Robin Milner-Gulland (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 207–223, 345–382; Gilbert Dagron, Décrire et peindre. Essai sur le portait iconique (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 8, 80–82. Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis, trans. Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), 133.

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13

The early centuries of Christian art borrowed from the broader cultural context, combining the naturalistic styles of Egyptian and Roman portraiture with the idealistic styles of Greek portraiture, while adapting elements of pagan culture in their symbolic portrayals of Christ as the Good Shepherd, Philosopher, Miracle Worker, and so on.10 Jewish art, representing biblical themes, figures, and narratives, was developing around the same time, or just in advance of Christian religious art, leading to mutual influence, inspiration, and perhaps even competition.11 When the Roman Emperor Constantine endorsed Christianity in the fourth century, freeing Christians from political pressure and persecution, Christian art also incorporated the styles and themes of the Greco-Roman imperial portraits, more formalized and typological.12 Most of these oldest icons were lost or destroyed in the iconoclastic conflict in the eighth and ninth centuries. The few that still exist today, most of which are at the Monastery of St. Catherine, Mount Sinai, were more naturalistic, closer to contemporary paintings of the time.13 Once officially sanctioned by the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, at least after the ensuing second wave of iconoclasm subsided, icons began to develop a more conventional and idealized style as they spread widely throughout Europe. While icons were thus used in both Eastern and Western Europe in the centuries that followed, icons from the Byzantine Empire were often given a privileged authority, as some of them were believed to be of miraculous origin, and thus were used as models for many Western copies. Greek masters also shared their craft with the burgeoning Russian church, as it was reaching what is often considered the height of the icon’s aesthetic achievement in 10

11 12

13

Not many of these images have survived, but evidence of early iconography can be found in the apocryphal Acts of John, XXVI–XXIX and Irenaeus’ Against the Heretics (I.25.6), which both appeared in the late second century. See especially Thomas E. Mathews, The Clash of the Gods (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) and The Dawn of Christian Art in Panel Paintings and Icons (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2016); Belting, Likeness and Presence, 99; André Grabar, Christian Iconography: A Study of its Origins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968); and Robin Margaret Jensen, Face to Face: Portraits of the Divine in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress University Press, 2005). See François Boespflug, Le Dieu des peintres et des sculpteurs. L’Invisible incarné (Paris: Musée du Louvre Éditions, 2010), 26–27. Grabar, Christian Iconography, 37ff; Belting, Likeness and Presence, 26, 78ff, 102ff, 129; h ­ owever, one must heed Thomas Mathews’ call for prudence against what he calls the “Emperor Mystique” or the tendency to apply this imperial hermeneutic everywhere in early Christian art: this trend in ­scholarship, which proliferated in the wake of Grabar (likely spurred on by the political nostalgia of the early 20th c.), had the unfortunate effect of obscuring the diversity of influences of early Christian art, in particular the influence of pagan gods on Christian images. See Mathews, Clash of the Gods. Jeffrey C. Anderson, “Byzantine Panel Portrait,” in The Sacred Image East and West, ed. Leslie Brubaker and Robert Ousterhout (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 27.

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Understanding the Icon

Figure 1.1  Romano-Egyptian Mummy Portrait, Isidora Master, 100 A.D. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection, Malibu, California. Photo: The Getty’s Open Content Program.

the Palaeologan period, leading to the Muscovite and Novgorodian styles, all of which make up the golden period of iconography from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. But while these are the most celebrated traditions, icons flourished wherever there were Eastern Christians, encompassing a diverse range of styles from Coptic to Cretan. The period of aesthetic development was followed by several centuries of “decadence,” where force and elegance were replaced by ornate embellishment. Eastern Christians fell from political power and lost their wealth, and without these resources, the iconographic tradition that had been perfected as a master craft in the Byzantine Empire now survived as something more akin to a regional folk art. The naturalistic revolution of Renaissance art eventually crept in with Western political influence throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One might have expected to see the end of this tradition of the icon and an adoption of new and varied aesthetic traditions with the gradual loosening of this rigidly prescribed style. And yet, the opposite happened. Despite the increasing popularity of new realist styles, leading theologians exhorted Eastern Christians to return to the height of their aesthetic heritage. Today, traditional forms of the icon

1.1  The Icon and Art

15

Figure 1.2  Christ Pantocrator, mid-sixth century. Monastery of Saint Catherine, Mount Sinai. Photo: Jim Forest

have reclaimed their place as the primary sacred art in Eastern Christian cultures, and iconographers continue to discuss how to bring this living past to the present day. Icon as Cult Image Even as art historians have worked to catalog, analyze, and develop a chronology for the wealth of new collections of icons that became available during the twentieth century, a second approach to icons began to develop. In his monumental work Bild und Kult (translated as Likeness and Presence), Hans Belting marked the icon as prior to a pivotal historical change: whereas the modern world understands painting as an object for disinterested aesthetic appreciation, prior to the Renaissance, most people viewed religious images as a part of cult practice. Robin

16

Understanding the Icon

Cormack’s Writing in Gold advanced this approach, placing Byzantine art within the broader scope of society and culture. The majority of art historians today recognize with Cormack that “art objects are infinitely complex,”14 and that any serious account of the history of the icon and its influences cannot treat the icon as merely an image, but should be inseparable from the history of its related practices and cultural context.15 Whether used by an ecclesial community or private families, icons have always been embedded in contexts of prayer and devotion. Early texts document a wide variety of such practices, especially before the Second Council of Nicaea formalized them under a centralized ecclesial authority in 787. This is obvious in the case of those early Christian images found in churches, which are clearly places of cult activity, but we see this also for the early images in the catacombs, where the dead were buried and honored. Thus, the themes of images taken from the Greco-Roman world, including figurations of Christ as the Good Shepherd and the Philosopher, as well as those images taken from Jewish narratives, such as Adam and Eve, were not disinterested artistic expressions, but communicated an essential meaning within the context of burial: meanings of hope, rebirth, victory, and salvation for the remembered dead.16 Private representational images were also widespread in Christian homes by the fifth century and likely existed much earlier. Once again, these were used not for decoration but for private practices of devotion, likely taking inspiration from similar pagan practices of prayer.17 Similarly, to understand the full influence of the imperial portraits on the iconic tradition, one must recognize that the emperor’s portrait was displayed not to satisfy his subjects’ visual curiosity but to extend the power of the emperor to the far corners of the realm. It was understood as bearing the very presence of the emperor, appearing on the coins, weights, and seals, as well as the military standard, with portraits in every courtroom and statues in the town square. No political decisions could be conferred in this image’s absence.18 As the nature of the particular reverence due to the emperor had long been entangled with a belief in the 14 15 16 17 18

Cormack, Painting the Soul, 23. Robin Cormack, “‘New Art History’ vs. ‘Old History’: Writing Art History,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 10 (1986): 223–232. Grabar, Christian Iconography, 32. Ibid., 83–86; Cormack, Painting the Soul, 67–75; Mathews, The Dawn of Christian Art, 22, 26–27, 131ff. Grabar, Christian Iconography, 64–66; Belting, Likeness and Presence, 102–106; Charles Barber, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 35.

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17

emperor’s  divinity,  it  is no surprise that the particular practices honoring the emperor’s images should be patterned after the veneration of pagan gods.19 The emperor’s portrait was regularly treated as if it were the emperor himself, with the proper processions, incense, candles, and prostrations (and defaced if another emperor seized control). If to honor the image was to honor the emperor himself, to insult it was to insult the emperor as well.20 The sovereign presence conveyed by this image was quickly adapted to proclaim the presence of the heavenly sovereignty of Christ and his Virgin Mother, and along with it came these same practices of veneration; the same was sometimes true as well for icons of Saint Peter.21 Thus, following this second wave of art history, to consider the place that icons have in the history of art also means to consider their place within the history of human practices that developed around the worship of God and respect for political authority, as well as the rituals of birth, burial, and the private consecration of everyday life. Icon in Byzantine Experience Following new developments of contemporary philosophy and art criticism, more recent work in Byzantine art history has reclaimed the icon in a broader way still, seeking to understand the icon not just from an objective description of its related practices but in terms of how the icon would have been felt or experienced within the larger world of Byzantine material culture. This approach has opened new ways to consider how the icon mediated its meaning, first of all by recognizing that the icon does not fit within our contemporary categories of understanding. Glenn Peers emphasizes the need to think of icons and other things in Byzantine culture outside the modern concept of “objects,” suggesting that we must see them as imbued with their own kind of life.22 Alexei Lidov has broadened the examination of the image as such to the consideration of the spatial dimensions that it projects.23 A number of scholars have reconsidered the overlapping roles of the five senses in Byzantine aesthetics. Many, including Robert S. Nelson, 19 20 21 22 23

Mathews, The Dawn of Christian Art, 125–126; see also his Clash of the Gods. Belting, Likeness and Presence, 103; John Beckwith, Early Christian and Byzantine Art, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), 78–79. Belting, Likeness and Presence, 26, 78ff, 102ff, 129, 142–143; Grabar, Christian Iconography, 41ff, 68–71. Glenn Peers, Animism, Materiality, and Museums: How Do Byzantine Things Feel? (Yorkshire: Arc Humanities Press, 2019). Alexei Lidov, Hierotopy: The Creation of Sacred Spaces in Byzantium and Medieval Russia (Moscow: Indrik, 2006).

18

Understanding the Icon

Béatrice Caseau, and Roland Betancourt, focus especially on touch,24 while others, most notably Liz James and Bissera Pentcheva, have reinterpreted the icon as a “synesthetic” rather than merely visual experience, where multiple senses fold together in the moment of encounter.25 Art history is thus an important start to understanding what kind of mediation the icon is said to enact, based on its uniqueness and particularity as an image that originated within particular cultures at particular times. It can place the icon within broader trends of the history of art and trace its influence across time and place. It can explore ways in which the icon is set apart from other forms of art or analyze the uniqueness of a single image within its particular context. Art history also recognizes that stopping short at mere aesthetic analysis is insufficient, since the icon was never made to be regarded passively like a painting in a museum. The grasp of the icon as an aesthetic object must be further paired with its relation to cult practices and can be further enriched by imagining how it would have been experienced within the Byzantine world. Limitations of Art History However, the work of art history will not be a sufficient authority if we hope to understand how the icon might be said to mediate God. First, for the obvious limitations: art historians’ area of study primarily concerns art. The primary task of this field of study is to explicate particular aesthetic objects, a very different kind of task than to investigate the philosophical why and how of mediation as such. Art historians are also interested in history. We may fruitfully draw on Byzantine thinkers’ insights for understanding the use of icons in the present day, particularly recognizing that many religious traditions have continuously lived out the same practices in light of the same texts.26 And yet, after a millennia of development in art 24

25

26

See, for example, the volume edited by Susan Ashbrook Harvey and Margaret Mullett, Knowing Bodies, Passionate Souls: Sense Perceptions in Byzantium (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, 2017); Robert S. Nelson, “To Say and to See: Ekphrasis and Vision in Byzantium,” in Visuality before and beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 143–168; Roland Betancourt, Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) and “The Icon’s Gold: A Medium of Light, Air, and Space,” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 23:1 (Fall-Winter 2016), 252–280. Liz James, “Senses and Sensibility in Byzantium,” Art History 27:4 (September 2004), 522–537; Bissera Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon: Space Ritual and the Senses in Byzantium (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 2010). Cormack, Painting the Soul, 24–25.

1.1  The Icon and Art

19

and culture, and especially after the rise of digital technology, we cannot assume that we have exactly the same experience or philosophy of images as we did in the ninth century. Some translation work will be needed. Further, art history is not as such equipped to account for the radical difference of an infinite God. Insofar as icons and their practices of veneration attempt to enter into a relation with what transcends the finite world, they cannot, in principle, be fully understood merely from the horizon of a historical, anthropological, cultural, aesthetic approach, or by comparison to the finite world of paganism and other human practices, however informative these parallels can be. Indeed, art history often stumbles over the theological significance of icons. We see this especially in the discussion of veneration, which art historians often approach with “deep discomfort,” as Thomas Mathews observes, as if it were a “gross pagan rite, like bloodbaths or infanticide.”27 It is one thing to identify what behaviors were associated with the cult of images; it is another to understand the reasons that a rational human being might actually engage in such actions. This lack of understanding has taken many forms, from mildly paternalistic curiosity in Byzantine “magic” to a sardonic, wholesale disparagement of these practices as “barbaric” and primitive from the start.28 One might expect as much from Voltaire or Gibbon under the sway of rationalist scorn for any perspective related to faith. Yet, this attitude survives in subtler forms today. Belting’s condescension is mild but decisive, as he refuses to entertain any reasons Byzantine thinkers gave to their behavior, and dismisses as insignificant any distinctions they made between what practices were deemed a well-formed expression of faith and which practices were not.29 Contemporary scholars seeking a greater openness to the Byzantine perspective are certainly less naive about elevating their native secular worldview to a scientifically objective standard, yet even attempts to read the Byzantine world in a sympathetic light can result 27 28

29

Mathews, Dawn of Christian Art, 16–17, gives a number of examples of how this bias has negatively impacted the scholarship of pre-iconoclastic images. Otto Demus, Byzantine Mosaic Decoration: Aspects of Monumental Art in Byzantium (Boston: Boston Book & Art Shop, 1948), associates veneration with Byzantine “magic” but refrains from explicit judgment, while John Beckwith, in Early Christian and Byzantine Art, 168, does not hold back: for all its snobbish attitude education in Greek culture, medieval Byzantine society … appear[s] to the modern eye not infrequently as savage and violent as any barbarians. With their fierce, intellectual, gloomy Christianity – neither God nor his Saints ever smiles – went often a concern with magic, prophecy, and all kinds of witchcraft which affected the aristocracy as well as the common people. Belting, Likeness and Presence, 225.

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Understanding the Icon

in fanciful patronization (Glenn Peers accounts for veneration based on an anthropomorphized “neediness” that inanimate things have for human affection)30 or a collapse into terms digestible within a secular worldview (Robin Cormack identifies veneration as a question of powerful emotion and Roland Betancourt treats it as a form of unrequited human love).31 These approaches toward veneration all carry some explanatory power and can be an aid to our understanding, but if taken by themselves they risk neutralizing the icon by failing to fully appreciate that believers are really claiming something different of these images and practices, something that relates to the infinite and invisible God, and which will necessarily transcend any human thought, image, or practice. If the icon necessarily surpasses the limitations of the field of art history, it is no surprise if even good faith attempts of art historians fail to appreciate all dimensions of the icon’s mediation. To understand the icon, one must also understand how these practices before the icon were understood by the people who followed them in their theological and philosophical meaning. This does not forbid art historians from interdisciplinary research that seeks to do just that, bringing their expertise in these material objects to bear on the philosophical or theological ideas of the culture in question; the work of Charles Barber for example demonstrates the fruitfulness of such an approach.32 Yet, it means that our discussion of the icon’s unique forms of mediation would be incomplete without broaching this second disciplinary field of patristic thinking, all the more so since the ­self-understanding of those who made icons in Byzantine culture continues to serve as an authoritative source for those who use icons today. As Moshe Barasch observes, one did not simply ignore an icon; one either venerated it or smashed it.33 The material traces in art bear witness to this double-edged response to a single belief, faces violently scratched out and faces kissed clean of pigment. If we seek the reasons for iconoclastic effacement and iconophile devotion, we will be led to the trauma of iconoclasm that inescapably marked the history of the icon, and this requires that we take another approach than a historical aesthetic analysis alone can offer. 30 31 32

33

Peers, Animism, Materiality, and Museums. Cormack, Painting the Soul; Betancourt, Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium. See especially Figure and Likeness, which explores at length how the nuanced study of particular images can help us to understand the philosophy and theology of those who created and prayed with them. Moshe Barasch, Icon: Studies in the History of an Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 1–2.

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1.2  The Patristic Defense of the Icon The beginning of iconoclasm is usually traced to 726, when Emperor Leo III removed the icon of Christ from the Chalke gate, the main entrance of the imperial palace. The iconophile Patriarch Germanos of Constantinople was exiled in 730, and Patriarch Anastasius, who succeeded him, mandated widespread destruction of holy images. This first major wave of iconoclasm swept the empire until 787, and after a brief respite, a second followed in 814–842. Each contained its own line of iconophile argumentation, which sometimes took opposing paths to their shared end of defending the image, the first primarily represented by the Patriarch Germanos and the monk John of Damascus, and the second primarily represented by Patriarchs Nikephoros and Photios as well as the monk Theodore Studite. The period even included a warring set of councils claiming to be the legitimate Seventh Ecumenical Council, although in the end the iconophile Council of Nicaea of 787 (initiated by Empress Irene) won out over the iconoclast Council of Hieria of 754 (also known as the Council of Constantinople, initiated by Emperor Constantine V). Surrounded by the confusion between Christian and pagan practices, the situation of ongoing destruction of images, thought to be a pious crusade against idolatry by some and a grave act of blasphemy by others, bred an urgency that placed persuasion over coherent argument, and apologetics over reflection. What led to this extreme conflict? Sacred images had already been used in Christian culture since at least the second century, and they were widespread by the sixth century. As discussed above, alongside the rise of images came a proliferation of a wide variety of devotional practices. Many of these had pagan roots and some of them seemed pagan through and through.34 Strange behaviors like eating wax effigies of saints or mixing icon paint flecks with the Eucharist for consumption by the faithful and naming particular icons as godparents seemed to point to popular animism, perhaps spurred on by legends of icons miraculously moving, speaking, bleeding, and healing on their own initiative.35 There was no universally accepted guidance on what kind of veneration was appropriate 34 35

Mathews, The Dawn of Christian Art, 13–16, 22, 68–69. Letter of the Emperors Michael II and Theophilus to Louis the Pious, Monumenta Germaniae historica, Leges, Sect. III, ii/2 (1908), 478f, cited in Mango, Art of the Byzantine Empire, 312–1453 (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 157–158; Belting, Likeness and Presence, 60, 192–96, 308; G. Vikan, “Ruminations on Edible Icons: Originals and Copies in the Art of Byzantium,” Studies in the History of Art 20 (1989): 47–59.

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and why. Individual ecclesial authorities spoke out against some of these extremes in different ways. Some of them banned images altogether.36 This confusion was only exacerbated as the nature of the images changed. Where the oldest images preferred symbolic types, depicting Christ as the Good Shepherd, the Philosopher, or the Lamb of God, the first official ecclesial word on the image takes a different approach. In 692, Canon 82 of the Quinisext Council decreed that, instead of depicting Christ under “the ancient types and shadows” of the Lamb, images should portray him “in human form.”37 This was the first time a universal ecclesial authority weighed in on images, as Charles Barber observes, and while only one concrete directive was given, the implication of making such a judgment at all is enormous: art is hereby claimed, at least implicitly, as a legitimate and normative form of theological expression which the Church has the right to regulate. Yet all of this is left unsaid, and no clarification is given about what this would mean and how it should work.38 Even more seriously, the content of the artistic judgment given would become a cause for contention among Christians who were troubled by the implications of naturalistically port­raying the Incarnate God in a visual medium.39 This seemed to some a direct conflict with the scriptural prohibition against idols and carven images, at least by the iconoclastic interpretations inherited from their Judaic origins and echoed by the iconoclastic culture of their Muslim neighbors.40 And in addition to this, a striking culmination of military defeats and natural catastrophes only increased the tendency of the superstitious to believe the Byzantine Empire, like the idolatrous Israel of the Hebrew Scriptures, had sinned and lost favor in God’s eyes.41 When the Emperors at last stepped up as the most vocal spokesmen advocating iconoclasm, the theological concerns became deeply tangled with political subtext, creating even more complications; the image of Christ after all had replaced the image of the emperor on military standards 36 37

38 39

40

41

Such as Eusebius and Epiphanius; see Mango, Art of the Byzantine Empire, 16–18, 41–43. Canon LXXXII of the Council of Trullo (or Quinisext) in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, Vol XIV, translated by H. R. Percival (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 1899), 726; Mansi, XI 977ff; see TS I.10, PG 99, 340d. Barber, Figure and Likeness, 11, 40. It is important to remember that the images that were actually in question during this controversy, which have been mostly destroyed, were much more naturalistic than the more formal ­post-iconoclast icons. See Anderson, “Byzantine Panel Portrait,” p. 27. L. W. Barnard, The Graeco-Roman and Oriental Background of the Iconoclastic Controversy (Leiden: E. J. Brill. 1974), especially 1–2, and 143–145. Belting, Likeness and Presence, 225; see also Beckwith, Early Christian and Byzantine Art; and Henry Maguire, Icons of Their Bodies: Saints and Their Images in Byzantium, 118. Peter Brown. “A Dark-Age Crisis: Aspects of the Iconoclastic Controversy.” The English Historical Review 344 (1974): 23–24.

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and official currency, and not all of the emperors were pleased by this decision. Many historians argue that it was politics, not religion, that was the real reason for the conflict. Some hold that the icons themselves were just a pretext for the real battle, the political or financial contest of the centralized ecclesial and imperial authorities against the peripheral power of the folk tradition and influential monastic communities (for some of these scholars it is further emphasized that the latter should be considered “vulgar” and “superstitious”).42 Marie-José Mondzain pushes this idea even farther, in her attempt to isolate the philosophical and political stands from the theological ones: it is not that the image is an excuse for political control, but the image, like the Church, is itself intrinsically political, which has as a goal to enforce the boundaries of authority and power.43 As the work of these scholars has made clear, politics, culture, and money were involved in the iconoclastic crisis, and the imperial and ecclesial structures were closely intertwined in Byzantine society. At the same time, this is no reason to take the icon as merely a stand-in for conflict between other forces, as if it never mattered in itself. As Jaroslav Pelikan argues “only political reductionism and social determinism of the most naïve sort can interpret ‘ancient heresies’ as ‘disguised social movements’ as though they were nothing more.”44 Nor is this any reason to be naive about the difficulty of critically sorting out the actual historical events from the rhetorical exaggeration, forgery, and narrative invention we often find in historical accounts.45 Our interest, however, is not in the full dimensions of the conflict as a historical event, but the icon as a mediation. And it is for good reason that philosophers and theologians look to the debates of this period as a rich source of reflection concerning the meaning of icon. We find here one of the most famous standoffs between the Christian articulation of the icon’s significance as a mediation as well as the Christian refusal of the icon on the grounds of idolatry. From this context, we might expect that the vague and adversarial notions of images from earlier centuries would be purified in the 42

43 44 45

Ernst Kitzinger, “The Cult of Images in the Age before Iconoclasm,” 146; Beckwith, Early Christian and Byzantine Art, 78; L. Barnard, “The Theology of Images,” in Iconoclasm, ed. A. A. M. Bryer and J. Herrin (Birmingham, 1977), 13; Brown, “Dark-Age Crisis,” 19–34. Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, trans. Rico Franses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 39, see also 7. Jaś Elsner even argues that the polemical reception and articulation of these events is of much more historical interest than what did or did not actually take place. “Iconoclasm as Discourse: From Antiquity to Byzantium,” The Art Bulletin, 94:3 (2012), 386.

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crucible of bitter controversy to yield the cool elegance and clarity of universal doctrine. This, after all, is what happened in the early Christological debates beginning with Nicaea I; might Nicaea II not do the same for the icon? Might this not be the authoritative center which will clearly lay out for us the philosophy that explains the icon’s unique way of mediating God? Yet, this is not what we will find, either in the official ecclesial documents or in the writings of the iconophile Fathers. First, when we begin to lay out the arguments, we will quickly see that the core of the debate had virtually nothing to do with images in the sense we are looking for, pictorial representations which claim in some way to mediate an infinite God. Such painted images themselves were only an afterthought and test case for the theological problem around which everything truly turned: what does the Incarnation mean? It is this that primarily concerned the iconophiles. For Scripture decrees that it is Christ who is the only true “icon,” of the invisible God, the εἰκὼν τοῦ θεοῦ τοῦ ἀοράτου (Col 1:15). The first seven centuries of Christendom had struggled to formulate a clear doctrine of this impossible unity of Man and God against the endless new possibilities of heresy deviating from it. Now in the eighth century, the icon as a painted image became the arena for working out implications of the Incarnation in the concrete, Nicaea II serving not so much as a parallel, but an offshoot of Nicaea I. We must leave the full explication of the Christological level of the debate to others. It is the other side of the argument which concerns us here, the one overshadowed in the patristic accounts: what exactly is the painted image claiming to do when it is said to mediate God? Even if this question is not addressed explicitly, it remains of central importance; one’s definition of a picture will either support or undermine the Christological aims of the conversation. If we hope to find any patristic insight into the icon’s mediation, these questions must be considered. Without claiming to be comprehensive, I will sketch out some of the representative positions in the iconoclastic debate, turning to primary figures from both waves of iconophiles, John Damascene (665–749) and Theodore Studite (759–826), and the most coherent iconoclastic objection, the iconoclastic Council of Hieria (754).46 46

For a more thorough explication of this controversy, one could turn to Christoph von Schönborn’s classic work which devotes the entire first half to the formulation of Christology, and only then turns to the iconoclast debates, God’s Human Face: The Christ-Icon, trans. Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994). Charles Barber is a helpful resource for these complicated lines of debate in their historical context in Figure and Likeness, and Kenneth Parry explores the ancient philosophical roots behind the question in Depicting the Word: Byzantine Iconophile Thought of the Eighth and Ninth Centuries (Leiden, Brill, 1996). Sergeĭ Bulgakov also provides a very sharp and

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John of Damascus While what we know of their position comes from their opponents, the first wave of iconoclasts seems to have put forward a relatively simple claim: it is idolatry to make and venerate images. They argued this first based on the evidence of Scriptures (in particular the command against making “graven images” in Ex. 20:4), and the writings of a number of Church Fathers who condemned images or encouraged imageless prayer (frequent citations included passages from Gregory Nazianzen, John Chrystostom, Basil, and Athanaisus, for example, but the most explicit condemnations of images came from Eusebius and Epiphanius).47 The iconoclast interpretation of these traditional sources perfectly encapsulates our seashell problem: God is unknowable, inaccessible, invisible, or, in the preferred term of the time, “uncircumscribed,” ἀπερίγραπτος. But an image is finite, visible, “circumscribed,” περίγραπτος. Therefore, any image would necessarily fall far short of capturing anything remotely related to God, and thus would be immediately false, that is, immediately idolatrous. In his three Orations in defense of the holy images, written between 726 and 733, John of Damascus reclaims the same tradition, and the support of many of these same Church Fathers, by changing the terms of the debate: it is not a question of the image, it is a question of the Incarnation. Indeed, from the Old Testament alone, we have no basis to make an image of the infinite God, as in the command against graven images. But the situation is radically altered when the Son became incarnate. The invisible God took on visible flesh, the infinite entered finitude, and the formless took on the form of human nature. “Therefore I boldly draw an image of the invisible God, not as invisible, but as having become visible for our sakes by the partaking of flesh and blood. I do not draw an image of the immortal Godhead, but I paint the image of God who became visible in the flesh.”48 While we do not have any basis for imaging the Father, who remains invisible, uncircumscribable, unknowable, the Son presents us with God’s visibility in human flesh.

47

48

concise analysis of the logic of the primary arguments in Icons and the Name of God, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012), 1–40, and Marie-José Mondzain offers clarification particularly of the position of Patriarch Nikephoros, in Image, Icon, Economy. See the most relevant passages in Mango, Art of the Byzantine Empire, 16–18 and 41–43, although iconophiles such as John Damascene would denounce the iconoclast writings of Epiphanius as a later forgery, JD I.25, II.18. See also Mathews, The Dawn of Christian Art, 135–137; Parry, Depicting the Word, 145–155. JD, I.4; PG 94, 1236a.

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Behind this approach lies a scriptural justification, for, as mentioned above, St. Paul declares Jesus Christ to be the “Image (εἰκών) of the Invisible God” (Col. 1:15). This verse had been deeply significant for early theology as Christians struggled to understand the relation between the Son and God the Father. First used by Athanasius and later popularized by Basil, one important way of interpreting this verse was to appeal to an example of everyday life: the portrait of the emperor. “He who venerates the image venerates the emperor represented in it,”49 and “the honor of the image passes over to the archetype.”50 As ritual honor of the emperor’s portrait was commonplace in Roman culture, it was able to serve as a central way of explaining and defending the more mysterious relation between the Father and the Son. Image veneration, in a political context, was thus used to justify the Trinitarian relations, which were meticulously worked out over six ecumenical councils between 325 and 681. In John of Damascus, these Trinitarian relations will return the favor: the relation of Father and Son, by now wellestablished, is being used to defend the tradition of image veneration. John first explains that God the Father is inaccessible and incomprehensible (ἀκατάληπτον) but God the Son is his image, the perfectly consubstantial expression of the Father (JD I.4). If the visibility of the Father is not possible directly, it is possible through the Son, especially since he became man. The Son is the most perfect icon, a “natural image,” because he fully is the very God that he shows, a perfect likeness to the Father in every way except for the fact that he is begotten, where the Father is the one who begets. Thus, the Son is the ultimate icon, and this icon became flesh, so that the one who sees Jesus sees the Father (Jn 14:8–9), through the recognition granted by the Holy Spirit (JD III.18). This does not lead immediately to painted images, however. It leads to the entire cosmos “imaging” God in a secondary way. Drawing from the Christianized Neoplatonic tradition given its most brilliant articulation in Maximus the Confessor, John’s definition in I.9 states that “an image (εἰκών) is of like character (ὁμοίωμα χαρακτηρίζον) with its prototype, but with a certain difference.” In III.16, he states that it is “a likeness (ὁμοίωμα), 49 50

Athanasius, Third Discourse against the Arians XXIII, 5; in Selected Writings, trans. John Henry Newman and Archibald Robinson, modified;, PG 26, 332b. Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit, XVIII, 45; PG 32, 149c; echoed by John Damascene in JD, I.21, PG 94, 1252d-1253a, and repeated by Theodore Studite as well, TS I.8. For more on the patristic image-theology and its relation to the debates of iconoclasm, see Gerhart B. Ladner, “The Concept of the Image in the Greek Fathers and the Byzantine Iconoclastic Controversy,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 7 (1953): 1–34 and Ambrosios Giakalis, Images of the Divine: The Theology of Icons at the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Leiden: Brill, 2005).

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or a model (παράδειγμα), or a figure (ἐκτύπωμά) of something, showing in itself what it depicts.” An εἰκών, for John, would be better understood not as a picture, but as a type, a form, an echo, a sign, an imprint, or emanation; any trace that has some autonomy and yet is caused by and still intimately united with the original. This structure is general enough to be applied to a vast number of things. Or, as it turns out, everything. John enumerates a loosely connected series of “images” in III.18–23, beginning with (1) the natural image of the Son who images the Father. This primary natural image of God is followed by lesser kinds of images; (2) God’s foreknowledge, or things yet to come; (3) man as image of God; (4) forms and types of invisible and bodiless things, which Scripture describes in physical terms; (5) prefiguration of what is to come, as the symbolic signs of the Old Testament; (6) remembrance of past events to prompt our praise and honor of God, whether words written in books of the Law or the material images of Aaron’s staff or the jar of manna. It is from this understanding of image that we can account for veneration. Because of its shared likeness, the image shares in the holiness or grace of its prototype. God alone is worshiped without qualification, but other things can be honored or given “relative worship” (JD III.27–40; see TS I.19) insofar as they are close to God, or are filled with “divine grace and strength” (II.14; see TS I.12). We avoid touching a red-hot iron, not because of the iron itself, but because it partakes of the fire’s heat. Similarly, we venerate images, not because of their nature as painted wood, but because they share in the likeness of God and his saints, who are themselves dwelling places of God, “likenesses as far as possible” (III.33). The image, because of its likeness to holy things, would thus be in itself venerable, just as the iron in a fire is naturally hot, although the ultimate source of the holiness, like the source of heat, clearly does not belong to it. Examples of those images to which we give relative worship include the dwelling places of God, the things through which God works our salvation, and those things dedicated to God. This then blends seamlessly into the social and political: we already give veneration to each other and to authorities. Thus there is nothing to fear if we give honor to painted icons. However, if John is interested in “images” in this sense of a broad structural relation, he in fact has very little interest in “pictures” like the painted icon. First of all, he neglects to include the painted icon on his list of images, leading interpreters to disagree as to which kind of category of “image” it is supposed to fall under. None of the classes of εἰκών John lists seems to fit pictures in an obvious way. While the destruction of the painted image is certainly the occasion for his writing,

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it seems that his concern is not about the painted image as such. Rather, he fears that to eliminate the icon on spurious grounds leads to the cheapening of the image relation as such, jeopardizing the entire created order as an image of God. That is, to deny that the Incarnation allows us to make an image of God is to deny the very reality of the Incarnation and everything that follows from it. It is to deny that the Eternal Son of the Father came to earth, born of a human mother to live a human life, to die a human death, and to be resurrected with a glorified human body, which remains his for all eternity. This is why John urges us not to hold back, but express with “every kind of drawing, word, or color” (I.8) the great mysteries of the events of Christ’s life for anyone who will look at them. The conjunction of drawing and words leads us to the recognition that if John lacks a specific focus on pictures, he nevertheless sees a broader need for concrete “imaging” in our understanding. Because we are embodied creatures and unable to immediately grasp higher intangible things, God provides for us in our need, and “presents to us what is intangible by clothing it with form” (I.11). Images are thus a concession to adapting the truth to our embodied understanding, a launching board to help us analogously grasp higher truths. The painted icon would obviously be included as one of these mediations, at least in theory. In John’s text, it is once again ignored. It is omitted from the list of examples of icons he gives explicitly, which include metaphors (like the sun, a river, the mind, or a rose for understanding the Trinity) and types found in the Old Testament (the bronze serpent, jar of manna, Aaron’s staff). Thus, on the one hand, John’s expansion of “image” leads to a brilliant parallel between the theological, the anthropological, and the cosmological. As Christ is an image of the invisible Father and enters the world of visibility, and man is made in the image of God, the symbols and signs given by God are also images of him, and so are the painted icons. This has led to valuable theological reflection on the use of icons in this theological tradition, and has served as a very effective response to the crisis of his day, partly through his work of rallying the resources of Scripture and the Fathers to the side of the iconophiles. On the other hand, the “image” of the perfect unity in difference of the Trinitarian relations is not so selfevidently linked to the structure of created images. Or at least, it seems a source of potential confusion that John uses the same word for both, without much concern for the infinite abyss of difference that Christian theology acknowledges between God and creation. Perhaps it is theology’s prerogative to define “image” beginning from God under the assurance of

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Scripture and tradition inspired by the Holy Spirit, but what do we mean then when we use the same word for them both? Further, in what way does this creaturely “image,” once we have found it, relate to the “image” of a painting? John gives us very little by way of any answers to these questions. Although he is rightly celebrated as defender of icons, John tells us almost nothing about the painted kind. Iconoclastic Council of Hieria While most of our knowledge of the iconoclasts has survived only as the strawmen characterizations of the iconophiles, we have a refined formulation of iconoclastic thinking in the Council of Hieria in 754. If John of Damascus justified cosmological iconity by an appeal to the Incarnation, this council takes up this very same line of thought to provide a rebuttal on strictly Christological terms: it is impossible to make an image of the Incarnate Christ, since according to the Council of Chalcedon, Christ is fully God and fully man, two natures in one person without separation or mingling. The name of Christ can signify the person of Christ appropriately, God and man, but the image is guilty of two charges: (a) it scandalously purports to lock the incomprehensible Godhead into visible form, and (b) in doing so it thereby mingles the incomprehensible divine nature with Christ’s visible humanity. Here at last we seem to have an image as an actual picture. In order to defend themselves from this powerful double claim, some iconophiles apparently had argued that they do not attempt to image the invisible divinity (and thus mingle natures), but only Christ in his humanity, which can be depicted. The Council uses this excuse to tighten the noose: this is only to replace the heresy of confusing or flattening natures of Christ (Monophysitism) with the heresy of seeing these natures as separable, not essentially bound together in one person (Nestorianism). Their conclusion traps the iconophiles in a Christological double bind: “Whoever, then, makes an image of Christ, either depicts the Godhead which cannot be depicted, and mingles it with the manhood (like the Monophysites), or he represents the body of Christ as not made divine and separate and as a person apart, like the Nestorians.”51 Once again, Christology is foregrounded. At the same time, it is not actually Christology upon which the argument turns. Its logic is in fact very much dependent on the philosophical claims about the nature of a picture. 51

Definition of the Council of Hieria, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, XIV, 544; Mansi, XIII, 264.

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The painted icon, according to these iconoclasts, flattens what it can into a visible tell-all, and screens out the rest. Unlike the name of Christ, which iconoclasts grant properly allows the “unspeakable” Divinity of Christ, the picture has no room for such paradox of the “unshowable,” but claims total visibility. In this respect, it performs a total conceptual grasp. Thus, the claim to show God is false or misleading; invisible, paradoxical things will simply not “show up” in painting’s necessarily comprehensive visibility. Far better for the artist to pass over in silence, to paint nothing at all. This is a prime example of the seashell mediation described in the previous chapter. It is striking that this concern is not unlike that of the Tractatus, where the narrow vision of propositional language that Wittgenstein has achieved can very precisely speak of certain things, and therefore must avoid at all costs application to what is beyond its capacity, which would only give a dangerous illusion of clarity. The iconoclasts’ image, like the early Wittgenstein’s philosophical language, is a tool only capable of grasping a certain range of reality, and while it seems to function well beyond these limits, this is only an illusion. It is precisely our failure to recognize its massive failure that necessitates our strict caution. One must respect the limits of one’s tool. Yet the iconoclasts differ from Wittgenstein and our seashell model, for it is not only a position based on the weakness of the mediating tool to capture the truth in expression. Motivating the iconoclasts’ conviction of the image as flattening is in fact the very definition of image prioritized by John of Damascus: that an image is most truly defined as the relation of the Son to the Father. But unlike John, who used this same term to apply to a range of different kinds of likeness in the created world, the iconoclasts refuse to extend this term “image” to weakened degrees of likeness. Or at least, they refuse to extend it to any likeness that comes from an “artificial” relation. That is, any image for these iconoclasts must be “natural,” defined by consubstantiality, which means that an “image” and its original share in the same essence.52 Following this logic, the Eucharist is the only proper image of Jesus: “This and no other form, this and no other type, has he chosen to represent his incarnation.”53 Not only is it divinely ordained, and not man-made, but with the Eucharist there is a parallel of essential identity: as Christ’s human body is divine, the bread is also made divine. Only the Eucharist could authentically be an image, because only the Eucharist claims to truly be Christ, consubstantially. The painted icon, 52 53

Schönborn, God’s Human Face, 157ff. Definition of the Council of Hieria, XIV, 544; Mansi, XIII, 264.

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on the other hand, is for the iconoclasts only a liar, claiming to be Christ, but remaining merely a painted piece of wood, fashioned by the “polluted hands” of human artifice and not given by the initiative of God. Clearly, it is not worthy of veneration. This brings us to a second difference from Tractarian visibility. It is true that the depiction itself is singled out as the gravest heresy, as a theological distortion. But while this act of creating an image is in itself an “evil art,” the text also frequently pairs the errors of those who “make and venerate” icons, and frames the document against the fear not just of false doctrine but false worship. This is particularly the case when it comes to the saints. The image of the saint is not forbidden because of a lack of respect for the cult of saints (unlike the iconoclast position that John of Damascus was arguing against), for this iconoclast council in fact anathematizes all who deny the intercessory power of saints and who fail to confess Mary as Mother of God, worthy of honor above any other creature. Nor is it forbidden on the grounds of comprehensive circumscription, like the charge against portraying Christ.54 Rather, it is anathema because making painted images of the saints is related to the pagan practice of worshiping the dead. Images once again, are all “natural images,” in full, living identity with the original, so that an artificial image of lifeless pigment is at best at the level of a corpse; it is unable to properly reveal those who are believed to be eternally alive in God. The only “representation” appropriate to the saints is a living one, by mirroring these saintly virtues in our own lives.55 For as humans we ourselves share the essence of the saint, and so we are appropriate material to fashion our lives into an image of their holiness. And it is this that is worthy of veneration. Ultimately, we can isolate two factors here: (1) the idea that a visible image claims comprehensibility, unlike a name, and (2) that the only appropriate image is therefore a “natural image,” sharing in essence with the original, whether the relation between the Father and the Son, the Son and the Eucharist, or the saint and other humans. With this kind of full identification of the image with original, it naturally follows that any true image deserves the full veneration due to the original, but that paintings of Christ or saints are not true images. 54

55

This omission opens up a host of questions which are given no answer here. We might begin by wondering whether the iconoclasts have really faced the idea of sainthood, for the Christian belief in deification holds that humans who are sanctified are elevated to a share in non-circumscribable divine nature. Definition of Hieria, 546; Mansi, XIII, 264.

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Understanding the Icon Theodore Studite

Theodore Studite responds to this wave of iconoclasm by redefining the image more carefully than the general causal and cosmological explanations which we saw in the case of John of Damascus, who mostly ignored painted images. His language emerges from the context of the early ecumenical councils as well as the backdrop of Aristotelian logic.56 Where the Trinity had been understood as identical in nature (οὐσία) and different in person (ὑπόστασις), the icon has the opposite structure: different in nature, and identical in hypostasis.57 To translate this into ordinary terms, the image and the original are different kinds of things, a picture is a painted wooden board, and a person is flesh and blood. Nevertheless, they share an appearance belonging to a certain person, just as they share the person’s name.58 Theodore advances his argument through this parallel: what is predicated of the image or name is predicated of the original, if in different ways: one “synonymously” and the other “homonymously.”59 If we ask what is shown in a picture, we do not respond, “shapes and colors formed into an outline which seems to be like Jesus,” or “an appearance which is a likeness of Moses,” we simply say, “Jesus” or “Moses,” the same answer as we would give if asked to identify these men in person.60 At the same time, we know fully well that the piece of wood with colors on it is not a man; our words are thus meant in figurative sense. The identity is not one of matter, nature, or essence, but “only a formal, an ideal, a relational one.”61 To put it in more contemporary terms, the picture has a referential function for Theodore, and does not claim a full and essential identification with the original in the flesh, nor does 56

57 58 59

60

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Living in Constantinople, Theodore Studite would not have had access to the Neoplatonicinspired cosmological model of Maximos the Confessor which inspired John of Damascus (nor the texts of John himself). For more on the Aristotelian framework of the iconophile debate, see Kenneth Parry’s chapter on Aristotelianism in Depicting the Word, 52–63, and Mondzain’s Image, Icon, Economy, which discusses the similar position of Theodore’s contemporary, the Patriarch Nikephoros. Kenneth Parry, Depicting the Word, 58; Ouspensky in Meaning of Icons, 32. TS I.8, I.11, II.17. Nikephoros’s defense of icons also rests heavily on this point, Antirrhetikos, I, 38; PG 99, 337a. TS I.16, PG 99, 360d; note that Roth’s English translation parallels these terms with the words “properly” and “figuratively,” but the Greek is more simple: αλλ᾽ ἐπὶ μὲν τοῦ πρωτοτύπου συνωνύμως, ὅτι καὶ κυρίως · ἐπὶ δὲ τοῦ παραγώγου ὁμωνύμως, ὅτι καὶ οὑ κυριῶ. Most commentators continue to repeat the basic formula of “shared likeness, different essence,” but it is worth nothing that especially in the first two orations it is a question first of language, or rather, language is the primary way Theodore explains the referential character of appearing working in the image. John of Damascus also makes use of this idea briefly as part of his extended commentary on a passage from St. Sophronius of Jerusalem the in the florilegia to Oratio I, 48, PG 94, 1282c. Ladner, “The Concept of the Image in the Greek Fathers,” 16, see TS III.2, 12; PG 99, 425b.

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it claim to have captured the totality of the original as a visible thing, as iconoclasts argued. With this referential function of the painted image it is easy to explain what it means to venerate it. “Those things which have a single likeness obviously also have a single veneration.”62 Thus, we do not venerate the image, as mere matter, but we venerate Christ, the ὑπόστασις, the “who” that is given in the image that presents his likeness. While Theodore mostly focuses on the idea of naming and language revealing the referential character of the image, it is clear that the painted image offers more than merely a sign or word – it offers an identity of appearance (εἴδος).63 This focus on predication or reference to the original is much closer to most contemporary philosophical accounts of image than the Trinitarian-cosmological approach of John of Damascus or the flattening visibility of the iconoclasts. We do recognize a picture of a person by seeing their likeness, just as we do not generally think the image purports to expose the total visibility or repeat the whole reality of the original. However, several problems remain with this definition of an “identity” of appearing. It is unfair to assume this identity would be held to a standard of an exact copy, as if the best icon is a photograph or hyperrealist painting that portrays its subject with maximal accuracy. While it is true that icons of the eighth and ninth centuries were understood as “lifelike” representations, Theodore would not have recognized perfect accuracy as the defining criterion of identity. He allows that poorly made icons can still perform their function adequately, for example, even if we prefer more beautiful ones.64 But then this means that for Theodore, an identity of appearing is a simple, one-size-fits-all intentional reference. Essentially, the icon is like a passport photo. There is no possibility of asking about the particular way this appearing references its original, or whether one painted image could be better than another painted image; it is simply a manner of showing the appropriate content, and letting the original be recognized. That is, to put it in familiar philosophical terms again, the picture has become a matter of “reference” alone, and not “sense” – it is only question of identifying the original and not of the way it is referencing. Perhaps this failure to account for the uniqueness of image is, like for John of Damascus, a positive way of establishing continuity of the image with other “images” of divine revelation. Although less systematically than John, Theodore also locates the icon as within a class of broader 62 63 64

TS III.C, 15. TS I.8. TS III.C, 1–5.

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cosmological “images”: truth and its shadow, nature and art, original and copy, cause and effect, original and name, and finally even the intimately united “natural image” of a being and its appearing (closer to singular identity than John’s “natural image” of Son of Father).65 Thus, while Theodore has made an advance in speaking about the character of painted images, his account is still very general about exactly how this mediation works. Missing Mediation We could plunge into the iconoclastic debate in much more detail. But we have seen enough to recognize the broad lines of how this debate can, and cannot, help us. It offers us first of all an excellent theology of the image, connected very deliberately to the paradoxes of the Incarnation and the mystery of the Trinity. It suggests an intrinsic link between painted images and the whole of creation, centered on Christ, leading immediately to a multiplicity of mediations. And it suggests the ontological coherence of the image, which is not one disconnected object that must be linked up to a second by the brute force of our intelligence or the trickery of our illusion. Rather, it is an organic expression of its cause, as a shadow, an echo, a reflection, a trace. This is one possible avenue to talk about the icon, and it can serve as a guide for the more general question of mediation between God and creature. However, it, too, has its limitations. Patristic thinking is not the only way – and I dare to suggest not the best way – to answer the specific question I am asking about iconic mediation. I argue this for several reasons, some of which we have already begun to see. 1. It has nothing to say about the particular image. Most importantly, the debate surrounding the εἰκών has very little to say about the painted image. While the iconoclasts hold an unreachable standard of identification of image and original that locks us back into our original seashell problematic, the iconophiles answer this charge by establishing a continuity between the painted image and other kinds of εἰκών in general. In one sense, this supports my argument, which is a question of mediation in general. But in another, and very important sense, the mediation here is asserted without attention to finite particularity. The unique paradoxes or difficulties of painted images are thus ignored. The iconophiles might be forgiven for this. After the intricate and exhausting work 65

TS I.11-12. I.14, II.25

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of balancing the paradoxes of Trinitarian theology and Christology, the nuances of created being might seem trivial. But there remains a genuine ambiguity on exactly what the painted image is doing, and this is essential in understanding what it is to be a painted icon. According to Sergeĭ Bulgakov, “Controversies over icon veneration imply, in essence, either an acceptance or a rejection of art … The character of the icon depends on the character of art,”66 a conclusion later affirmed by C. A. Tsakiridou, who argues that while the iconophile Fathers defended the image, their logic operated “by effectively undermining its art.”67 I pointed out the iconoclast errors that emerged from a too-comprehensive definition of “image,” but exactly what alternative claim can we use to correct it? Does a painting give a reference parallel to a name, like a passport photo, or does its visibility give us something more complicated? For both Theodore Studite and John of Damascus, as Tsakiridou observes, the icon seems to be a “mere record of a person’s physical features – a kind of two dimensional historical mask.”68 If we dig deeper into the philosophical world of the eighth and ninth centuries, we could begin to find some answers in the relation of visibility and invisibility, and the special role that visibility played in the Byzantine philosophy of cognition, negotiating the realms of the physical and spiritual without the blunt dualism one finds in the ancient Greeks.69 And yet, if we are honest, even then, “visibility” is an extremely inadequate description of what a painting does. It is not unlike defining speech as “sounds.” Such a bare-bones definition cannot explain how images are showing the original in this particular way, in contrast to the many other possibilities of “imaging” or mediating. Attending only to the what and avoiding the how is a collapse of the very meaningfulness of mediation. Poetry and scientific description may both speak of the stars, but their different manners of giving us the original is deeply significant, and not at all redundant. This was not

66 67 68 69

Bulgakov, Icons and the Name of God, 43. See also 65. C. A. Tsakiridou, Icons in Time, Persons in Eternity: Orthodox Theology and the Aesthetics of the Christian Image (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), 3; 173. Ibid., 164–165; see also 193–205. Anca Vasiliu is an excellent resource on this point, EIKÔN. L’image dans le discours des trois Cappodociens (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2010); see a brief overview of the progression of these ideas in Christianity in Dagron, Décrire et peindre, 22–30.

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a concern for the iconophiles, whose practice may tell a different story than their theoretical justifications.70 Yet, it remains a concern for us, who have been made aware of the range of possibilities of meaning in painting across millennia of its development. Since we are primarily concerned with the painted image, this on its own is a sufficient reason to seek elsewhere, but we can extend our reservations still further. 2. Misleading generalizations. The issue is not simply an omission of how an image mediates, but a generalization which can distort the way that an image mediates. By considering shared patterns without considering concrete activities, the patristic iconophiles sometimes force parallels which lead to clear error. For example, there is a frequent comparison of texts as heard, and icons as seen (e.g. TS I.14, JD III.12). However, for a text to be heard it must be first seen by the one reading it, and the icon, while mostly seen, is connected in origin and in interpretation with oral legends, hymns, sermons, and poetic descriptions, not to mention the named inscription in the image.71 This difference may be trivial to a theologian looking to defend all of the created order. It is true that with the image generalized, streamlined, and emptied of difference we see something true, like a metaphor can prompt understanding precisely because it does not essentialize every detail. At the same time, for the philosopher looking for how the image can mediate God, these are not details, but important questions with significant implications. It is possible that this lack of definition even led to problems during the iconophiles’ day. Might not some of the abuses of iconic mediation, like scraping paint flecks into the Eucharist, be seen as essentially a misunderstanding of modes of mediation? That is, it is not a question of whether or not the image is holy (or whether it is as holy as the Eucharist), but whether the image is meant to be seen or eaten. A one-size-fits-all approach to mediation is not adequate to describe the complex practices of Christian prayer.

70 71

Tsakiridou, Images in Time, 3. The interplay of image and its rhetorical description, or ekphrasis, is a complicated one in Byzantine history, and very important for a culture as interested in rhetoric as Byzantium; see Henry Maguire, Art and Eloquence in Byzantium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) and Rhetoric, Nature and Magic in Byzantine Art (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998); as well as Cyril Mango, Byzantium and its Image (London: Variorum, 1984); Dagron, Décrire et peindre, especially 81–109; Liz James, ed., Art and Text in Byzantine Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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3. No defense of mediation as such. Further, what they gain by the sacrifice of particularity will be lost to us. That is, by solidifying the parallel of the painted image with the other forms of mediation, the iconophiles issue their ultimate challenge: Either accept all “images” of God, or deny them all (a regular refrain repeated throughout John’s treatises, e.g. in I.13). At this point the argument stops. They do not defend the validity of holding all images as opposed to none. Nor do they need to. They know full well that the iconoclasts would never deny the images they are already committed to, such as the Scriptures, the Eucharist, the liturgy, the Cross, and the Incarnation. As soon as they establish that the icon is parallel to these other symbols, they have hit their mark, and redeemed cosmological mediation. This strategy is certainly effective for the iconoclastic era, but we need not accept the bounds of the game that the iconoclasts did. What would prevent us from accepting the other term of the iconophiles’ ultimatum, denying all “images” of God? This remains open as a real possibility for philosophy; it is the very question which started us on this path. 4. No justification for veneration. We have seen that the iconoclasts’ definition of image as identification naturally leads to veneration: if it is a real image of God (and not a lie), it is God. But we find no compelling justification of veneration in either major iconophile. They never even considered that there should be an image of God without veneration, that one might merely have an image to look at, to think about, to teach us, to remind us, even though they would agree the image can do all of these things too.72 It was always taken without question that the image must be honored with one’s body, kissed, bowed to. There were some differences in how this is described. For John of Damascus, we venerate the image insofar as God comes to presence there in likeness.73 We honor God to the degree he is here in this thing. For Theodore, we venerate the God whom the painted image references in its shared appearance (whether this God is here or elsewhere is irrelevant to the argument). When the weakened later waves of iconoclasm wanted to have painted images, but high 72 73

See for example Barasch, Icon, 202. Alain Besançon is unfair to claim that John’s logic here is only a small step away from the logic of scraping icon flecks into the Eucharist, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 128. John’s idea of the relation between creature and God, as seen in his example of the iron’s “participation” in the fire, clearly would not allow him to support such a position.

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enough up on the wall of the church that people would not be able to bow before them and kiss them (TS II.27–28), Theodore essentially called this a logical inconsistency, failing to follow through with the true meaning of image. If they really believed in the holy image’s referential power, they would venerate it. The failure to do so is almost immediately introduced in the Third Oration as a heresy (TS III.2ff). Undoubtedly, this is at least in part a function of culture and history. The veneration of the emperor’s image was widespread at the time, and as the iconoclastic crusade was led by Byzantine emperors, this imperial veneration was never in question. Once again, the iconophiles’ arguments about images are not aimed at defending image veneration in general but at using their opponents’ assumed position to defend their own: if you agree that it is natural to honor the emperor’s image and his representatives, you must also honor images of Christ and the saints. But one could easily refuse both. 5. Differing sources of evidence. Finally, the Fathers argued their points based on Scriptures, the Fathers, and the Ecumenical Councils, in addition to some Greek philosophy and their life experience in the eighth and ninth centuries. A contemporary theologian is already operating from the wager that the Scriptures and the Ecumenical Councils are inspired by God himself, and thus takes these sources as authority. A philosopher is not bound to do the same. This does not therefore mean the iconophiles’ arguments are false, but it does deprive them of the support that makes up their best arguments. In sum, the greatest thinkers of the iconoclastic controversy did answer very important questions, but they do not adequately answer our questions. They make critically important claims about the mediation of created reality, but they do not really explain how a painted image can mediate God, nor why and how it ought to be venerated. Because they are aimed at opponents who share their creed, religious practice, and culture, they fail to directly explain the possibility of finite mediation as such. We must recognize their foundational role in understanding the religious image, and keep in mind their questions and concerns as a guideline, particularly in the final stages of our inquiry. Yet it is clear that an exclusive reliance on patristic authority, like an exclusive reliance on art history, will not guide us to an answer as to how God might be mediated in the particularities of finite things.

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1.3  The Icon in Twentieth-Century Theology Christian thinking on images did not end there, nor did the images they spoke about. While the tradition of icons – and debates about them – continued in the Byzantine world,74 one frequently is told that Western Christianity had little interest in the matter. There was of course the famous late eighth-century episode of the Libri Carolini, where Latin theologians condemned the Byzantine iconophiles, but this is not so much an incident of Western iconoclasm as a matter of distorted translation; they were justified in rejecting texts which conflated the “veneration” (προσκύνησις) due to holy images and the “worship” (λατρεία) due to God under a single Latin term (adoratio) exclusive to the latter. Apart from this, the story goes, Western Christendom followed Gregory the Great in understanding images as merely didactic, serving as a “Gospel of the illiterate,” something to teach and inspire, but nothing more.75 Common as it is, this generalization is simply untrue.76 Images were at first less widespread in Western Europe outside of Italy, and the Western philosophy of images differed from the Greek philosophy of the Byzantine Fathers, and yet Western Christianity not only affirmed the iconophile conclusions of the Council of Nicaea II but confirmed them all again at the Council of Trent (1545–1563).77 In addition to recognizing the image’s didactic function, Trent encouraged their veneration, linked images to relics and saints, and recalled the impossibility of representing God the Father. It also discouraged liturgical use of images characterized by “sensual appeal,” “seductive charm,” or profanity, although it left the determination of what such terms mean to the discretion of the local bishop. So we find not only 74

75

76

77

For a condensed summary, see Charles Barber, “Theories of Art,” In The Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium, ed. Anthony Kaldellis and Siniossoglou Niketas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 129–140; for a longer account of the critical developments in the eleventh century, see Barber’s Contesting the Logic of Painting. Letters IX.CV and XI.XIII in Epistolarum libri quatuordecim, PL 77, 1027d–1028a and 1128c; Letters 9.209 and 11.10 in John R. C. Martyn’s translation, The Letters of Gregory the Great (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2004). See also H. L. Kessler, “Reading Ancient and Medieval Art,” Word & Image 5: 1 (1989): 1. Eastern Christianity of course recognized this teaching function as well (JD I.17, III.12, III.21, III.24–25). Such characterizations often rely on the blind spots of traditional paradigms of Western history that minimize or decenter the critical importance of Byzantium. For an art historical perspective on the East–West influences, see for example Cormack, Painting the Soul, especially 5, and Leslie Brubaker and Robert Ousterhout, eds. The Sacred Image East and West. For a philosophical and theological perspective on the meanings and uses of “image” in the West see Olivier Boulnois, Au-delà de l’image: Une archéologie du visuel au Moyen Âge, V–XVIe siècle (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2008). Norman P. Tanner, ed. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. (London: Sheed & Ward; Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990): 2: 774–76.

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similar doctrinal stances on the importance of images between East and West, but also a similar doctrinal stance toward practices of veneration. However, it is possible to name at least two critical differences between East and West. First, lacking a trauma of images on the scale of iconoclasm, the West has never felt any need to carefully systematize and clarify the use of sacred images. There are some exceptions, notably during the Protestant Reformation and controversies over portraying God the Father and the Holy Spirit, but neither of these caused the same level of sustained reflection as Byznatine iconoclasm.78 As a result, the theological significance of sacred images is underdeveloped in the West, and the practices surrounding them were never standardized into communal traditions.79 In the contemporary world, devotion toward sacred images continues to be an integral part of much of Western Christianity, even if the shape of this devotion may vary widely from culture to culture and person to person. This points to a second key difference. For the Fathers of the Second Council of Nicaea and the Western Church, the particular style proper to the image and its veneration is left undefined. Trent, again, repeats this decision, leaving the judgment of what is appropriate to the local bishop. While the East continued to develop and perfect the Byzantine aesthetic tradition for sacred and political purposes, the West experienced the rapid development of Renaissance art. This led to different kinds of thinking about the role of images, leading to the popular idea of “art” we know today, which is tied to the creative expression of the individual artist and the imaginative innovation of tradition. It also encouraged a wider range of subject matter, and so art quickly gained a new place in visual communication. Rather than embracing Western developments in art, most Eastern Christians made the deliberate choice to maintain their traditional aesthetic style for sacred images: The Byzantine “icon” is thus the appropriate image for God, and “art” is for anything else. This choice is seen not only as a matter of aesthetics, but also is critically informed by theology. For Eastern Christians, the two are deeply intertwined. From its place at the beating heart of liturgical life, the theology of the icon seems to touch on almost every aspect of Christian experience, from Creation to the Incarnation and Redemption; the icon has often been called a “microcosm” of theology. While my task here is not to comprehend all aspects 78 79

Besançon, Forbidden Image, 165–181; François Boespflug, Dieu dans l’art. Sollicitudini Nostrae de Benoît XIV (1745) et l’affaire Crescence de Kaufbeuren (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1984). François Boespflug, “Images,” Dictionnaire critique de théologie, ed. Jean-Yves Lacoste (Paris: Quadrige, 1998), translated as Encyclopedia of Christian Theology (New York: Routledge, 2005), 754.

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of this very rich theology, it is clear the reasons why the Orthodox tradition adopted and developed this aesthetic tradition will be of great significance in understanding how the particular mediating structure of the icon enables an encounter with God. We can see a clear line of argumentation for these choices in the most well-known and influential figure in the twentieth-century Orthodox theology of icons, Leonid Ouspensky. He first encountered the art of iconography as a Russian immigrant studying fine arts in Paris. This led not only to his religious conversion, but to his instigation of a major renewal of this sacred art by the study of ancient models, with the help of his friend, the monk Gregory Kroug. In addition to his new ways of appropriating ancient iconography, Ouspensky developed a new way of reflecting on the meaning of icons, launching into the ambitious task of combining for the first time art history, theology, and aesthetics in a lecture course which would become his two-volume work on icons.80 Others followed this multidisciplinary example, including Paul Evdokimov and Egon Sendler (himself a Catholic).81 Two other figures might also be considered of importance in this twentieth-century tradition of Orthodox theology of the icon, although not under Ouspensky’s direct influence. Sergeĭ Bulgakov was Evdokimov’s teacher at l’Institut de théologie orthodoxe Saint-Serge in Paris, one of the primary centers of the Russian intellectual community in Paris, which Bulgakov helped found. Though his work is unique and often controversial, his recently translated Icons and the Name of God is an important example of subtle philosophical and theological reflection on the icon. The polymath Pavel Florensky remained in Russia, where he was executed in 1937. He wrote on many things, including aesthetics and icons, although for political reasons his work was not published widely at the time and became known relatively recently.82 The work of all 80

81

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The original core of this material was first published in 1952, in Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky’s The Meaning of Icons (Crestwood, NY: Vladimir’s Seminary Press), trans. G. E. H. Palmer and E. Kadloubovsky – the English and German editions preceded the French. Essai sur la Théologie de l’icône dans l’Église orthodoxe (Paris: Éditions de l’Exarchat patriarcal russe en Europe occidentale) was first published in 1960 and then revised extensively as he added a second volume; both were released together in 1980 as La Théologie de l’icône (Éditions du Cerf: Paris, 1980), trans. by Anthony Gythiel as Theology of the Icon, vols. 1–2 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992), Paul Evdokimov, L’art de l’icône: Théologie de la beauté (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1972), trans. Stephen Bingham as The Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty (California: Oakwood Publications, 1989); Egon Sendler’s L’icône: image de l’invisible. Éléments de théologie, esthétique et technique (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1981), trans. Stephen Bingham as The Icon: Image of the Invisible. Elements of Theology, Aesthetics and Technique (Redondo Beach: Oakwood Publications, 1995). Pavel Florensky is most known for Iconostasis as well as his famous essay, “Reverse Perspective,” in Beyond Vision. Essays on the Perception of Art, ed. Nicoletta Misler and trans. Wendy Salmond, 201–272 (London: Reaktion Books, 2002).

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these twentieth-century Orthodox thinkers, which draws from a similar intellectual culture and theological tradition, will enrich our inquiry on icons.83 However, while Ouspensky was a brilliant iconographer, he was not, strictly speaking, a theologian. Some of his followers and peers were more careful, and some were not. These shortcomings are recognized among icon specialists, but they continue to cause confusion in the non-specialist world, where Ouspensky’s Theology of the Icon is still considered a primary authority on icons by philosophers and theologians who have some interest in sacred images, as well as by many of the icon-venerating faithful. It has confirmed a quasi-superstitious and uninformed reflex that the icon must be set aside, as unrelated to and unquestionably higher than other forms of sacred art, an idea which we must critically confront before continuing our primary philosophical inquiry. This will be a particularly edifying confrontation, for the weaknesses of this account will allow us to sharpen our central inquiry. For we are at once closer to a concrete model of mediation in the emphasis on the Orthodox icon’s particularity, and yet at the same moment we are led farther away from it; when we ask these Orthodox thinkers why their tradition of sacred art is so unique in its mediation, we are given three primary lines of argument that have nothing to do with the particular image, or even undermine it altogether. The Icon as Inspired Tradition The first justification for the sacred character of the Byzantine icon is an updated version of one we have already seen: It has been accepted as an ecclesial tradition guided by the Holy Spirit, as a parallel to the Cross, the Scriptures, and Church teachings, or sometimes as an extension or illustration of Scripture. The icon’s authority, sometimes further affirmed in the miraculous dreams or visions from which new forms of icons can emerge,84 means that the icon is claimed not merely as a human thinking about God, but God’s own self-communication through the Church. The Byzantine icon, then, can theologically claim an authority of a wholly 83

84

While I mainly draw from the Russian tradition here, as it is more widely known in the Englishspeaking world, a similar line of thought is often found among Greek Orthodox thinkers who have been influential in Western Europe and North America, including Ouspensky’s translator into Greek, Photis Kontoglou, as well as Constantine Cavarnos and Constantine D. Kalokyris. There is a long tradition of legends of such miraculous visions. See Florensky, Iconostasis, 76; Henry Maguire, Icons of Their Bodies, 5–15; Paroma Chatterjee, “Problem Portraits: The Ambivalence of Visual Representation in Byzantium,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40:2 (2010): 223–247; Mathews, The Dawn of Christian Art, 131–151; Belting, Likeness and Presence, 47–59; and Dagron, Décrire et peindre, 74–77, 206–211.

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different character than other paintings, for, following the same logic of the Quinisext Council, icons are not merely illustrations of what believers imagine but the communication of dogmatic truth.85 This is clearly a theological claim, but it is one that encourages further philosophical clarification. For the icon has many critical differences from these other traditions it is being set alongside. The Cross came from a single historical event, and the Scriptures have been a closed canon since the fourth century, yet the canons of iconography continue to develop, and thus require ongoing critical discernment. Further, if we recognize that the icon, like the word, has a dogmatic content, we must acknowledge that an image does not communicate it in the same way that a word does. We know that the form is essential to what the icon is, but what would it mean to call a visual form “inspired truth”?86 Further, the Cross and the Scriptures are not claimed to be divinely inspired because of their aesthetic merit, but because they claim to have originated from God’s self-revelation in history. But, remarkably, Eastern Christians like Ouspensky seem to believe that there is a special value to the icon’s aesthetic particularity, in addition to, or in cooperation with, its authoritative theological content. This means, unlike the Cross, or to some extent the Scriptures, that there is far more to say about the merit of this particular aesthetic form than the simple claim that God has chosen it.87 85

86

87

Vladimir Lossky gives a beautifully succinct presentation on of the meaning of inspired tradition, “Tradition and Traditions,” in The Meaning of Icons, 9–22. During the second phase of iconoclasm, Patriarch Nikeophoros defended icons by calling them “coeval with the preaching of the Gospel” and an important practice for the faithful from the very beginning: “For just as [the apostles] instructed us in the words of divine religion, so in this respect also, acting in the same manner as those who present in painting the glorious deeds of the past, they represent the Savior’s life on earth, as it is made manifest in evangelical Scripture, and this they consigned not only to books, but also delineated on panels.” Cyril Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 175–176. Andreas Andreopoulos, Metamorphosis: The Transfiguration in Byzantine Theology and Iconography (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2005), is an excellent example of how developing forms of the Transfiguration icon can help clarify and illuminate the scriptures, and vice versa, and similarly when this icon lost understanding of its prior theological forms and lost some of its illuminating power. See also Florensky, Iconostasis, 82; Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, 12–14. Where it has explicitly raised this question, the tradition has not been uniform on this point. Bulgakov begins to try to understand this in Icons and the Name of God, 72–77, first in a positive way, saying the canon has “visions” (specific types or content) and “seeings” (symbolism of form and color). Then in a negative way: it cannot be understood as an infallible law. For a number of rich reflections of the role of the icon and text in the history of Byzantine art, see also Liz James’ Art and Text in Byzantium, and for the relation of the icon and the Scriptures, in particular, see Karin Krause, who explores a number of developing patristic attitudes toward this complex relationship “Speaking Books – Silent Pictures,” Übertragungen heiliger Texte in Judentum, Christentum und Islam: Fallstudien zu Formen und Grenzen der Transposition, ed. Katharina Heyden and Henrike Manuwald (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019), 195–261. Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, 8, 136–137; Florensky, Iconostasis, 91.

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The question about the nature of an inspired tradition ultimately belongs to a hermeneutically sensitive theology, and is not something a philosopher has any place denying or affirming. Yet if we stop our investigation at the claim to theological authority, we have lost our ability to explain why this particular aesthetic tradition has been preferred over others, and how it is to be understood. To follow such questions requires a clarification of what an image is and how it works. And this is a philosophical question, one that these Orthodox theologians have not always considered deeply enough. Metaphysical Identification This twentieth-century theological tradition has a second kind of claim on the icon which is even more central: that the icon receives a consecration that legitimates the veneration of the image for believers and allows the saintly Prototype to be present in the image in a special way. The specifics of such consecration vary across traditions, which makes it difficult to explain on definitive terms, but all involve prayer and most involve the blessing of a priest.88 This consecration is also often linked to the name; a position which holds that the Church spiritually claims the icon at the moment the name is inscribed at the final stages of painting, recognizing its legitimacy as appropriate expression of its inspired tradition. It is this “ecclesial naming” or “sanctification” by the power of the Holy Spirit, working through the hand of the iconographer authorized by the Church, which makes it available for a “participation” in the spiritual Prototype, as God alone has the authority to name God or the saints transformed into his image.89 A consecration is a theological affair, and once again presents no grounds for philosophical objection. Yet, this special theological property of the consecrated image is often immediately explained through philosophical terms: The icon is different in nature from the prototype, and identical in hypostasis.90 This common iconophile definition is purported to be a faithful appeal to the patristic tradition, but here it is being put to a use the Fathers would not have recognized. For the patristic iconophiles, “hypostatic likeness” was not 88

89

90

Evdokimov, The Art of the Icon, 178–179, 209. As this tradition of consecration was a later development in the history of the icon, it is sometimes suggested that earlier icons received this authority by being used in prayer. Ibid., 209; Bulgakov, Icons and the Name of God, 68, 78–85; Florensky, Iconostasis, 91. Russian ­the­ol­ogy in particular was torn by a bitter controversy over whether the Name of God is itself God. I will refrain from entering it here, but Bulgakov at least is not without a stake in this debate, as the English edition of his essay on icons makes reference to, and is printed alongside of, his essay on the Name of God. Ouspensky, Meaning of Icons, 32; Theology of the Icon, 128.

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a theological term, but simply a way of describing personal likeness. We might add too that the Byzantine aesthetic tradition was not a uniquely religious one, as it was used for painting saints and emperors alike. The twentieth-century theological view now changes the iconophile logic in two ways. The general philosophical account of an image is first amplified into a specifically theological possibility, of a graced “enhypostatization,”91 which allows the “hypostatic presence” of the original it represents.92 Second, this possibility is linked to the particular aesthetics of Byzantine art, which is now given an intrinsic religious significance. But once theology has annexed this neutral territory for its own purposes, what can be said about the rest of art? This conquest is simply counterproductive. By co-opting a general philosophy of images into a very narrow and specific theology of images, it is now unclear what is left for the other images to do when they show persons, and by consequence what makes Byzantine art so uniquely capable of doing something else. Worse than the problem itself is the dangerous contradiction that it raises: if this metaphysical theory intends to defend a specific tradition of images as a place of God’s presence, why does it immediately rob the particular image of its importance? The entire force of the explanation rests on the simple assertion from above that the icon is given a participation relation. If it is the participation that is so important, then why so insistent on preserving one particular aesthetic form? If, on the other hand, the particular aesthetic form matters, why interrupt it before it has had a chance to speak for itself? It is clearly not a very effective mediation if it must be rescued by metaphysical forces operating from outside its operations as a picture. And this would mean it does not mediate through what it is as a picture, but only by being broken open to become something else – a view of the icon which is thus dangerously close to a broken seashell, which as we saw in the prior chapter is only a deferred form of iconoclasm. It is true that we risk misunderstanding the icon if we try to flatten it into merely an image like any other. However, the opposite extreme, cutting off continuity with the meaningfulness of human experience, does not in the end protect the icon and its practices of veneration, but just the opposite. The uniqueness of the icon is here defended through a participation metaphysics that is applied too clumsily to be helpful; it thus becomes dangerous. One way of addressing this problem would be rework a new participation metaphysics that would understand the Byzantine icon within 91 92

Evdokimov, The Art of the Icon, 195. Florensky, Iconostasis, 70–71.

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the larger context of other images, sacred and secular. Yet, while Eastern th­eology has always prioritized the language of participation, hypostasis, and likeness, this does not necessarily obligate one to adopt such an approach to explanation of the icon. Theology does not come with a philosophical handbook, whether Neo-Scholastic or Neo-Platonic. Certainly, theology has the right to judge whether a philosophy has articulated the truths it is trying to protect, but it does not have the right to close off paths in advance, to refuse other ways of trying to understand the meaningfulness of religious practice. There is thus nothing to oppose us from searching for resources to answer the question elsewhere, and to do so is not superfluous or foolish. In fact, I contend that we can come to a clearer understanding of the icon’s mediating capacities if we begin from another starting point, which will emerge more clearly from the third line of defense of the icon. Aesthetic Justification If we limit our understanding of the icon to its authoritative place in theological tradition or to the metaphysical participation theory articulated above, we undermine the icon’s mediation by skipping over its character as an image and attributing it to something else. What makes Ouspensky and the twentieth-century Russian Orthodox so interesting is in fact a third form of argumentation, based on the uniqueness of the icon’s aesthetic form, which, they claim, grants it an extraordinary capacity to mediate God. Before we get to this point, we must first distance ourselves from the exclusivity claim that these accounts are often embedded within: that the icon is superior to all other ways of imaging God, or, at its most extreme, the only appropriate choice of imaging God. These claims are almost immediately paired with assertions that Western art, following the Renaissance, is wholly unfit for this purpose. As Ouspensky explains it, the icon is “spiritual,” due to the unique features of its symbolic language, while naturalistic styles are merely “carnal” or “sensual.”93 In contrast to the merely “sentimental” or “subjective” aspects of human subjectivity, or the “natural flesh tints” which show the body alone, the icon shows the “spiritual purity, inner beauty” of “purified and sinless flesh”94; the icon 93

94

Ouspensky, 101, 161–62, 173, 472–72, 477; see also Florensky, Iconostasis, 101, 104–114; 124; 146–148; Bulgakov, Icons and the Name of God, 76; Photis Kontoglou, What Orthodox Iconography Is (Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, n.d.), 2, 6–8. Early Christian thinkers emphasized the “natural” and remarkably “lifelike” character of icons, but the word “natural” in this twentieth-century context is employed to reflect a reductive empiricism that would have been alien to the patristic thought world. Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, 184–185; Florensky, Iconostasis, 70.

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thus shows “the transfiguration of the human body,” in contrast to realism which only shows “cult of the non-sanctified flesh.”95 As a result, realist painting “expresses the existence of a visible world which is independent of the divine world,” autonomous and secularized, and by this logic “limits itself only to the humanity of Christ,” unable to show his identity as Divine.96 The icon alone, through its symbolic language which preserves the invisibility of the invisible alongside its visibility, is able to show the world as created and transfigured by divine love. I make no objection, in principle, to comparing the capacity of different aesthetic traditions or different artworks to reveal the spiritual, nor the idea that the icon deserves a pride of place. What is alarming and interesting here is not even the polemic itself, which could be corrected by a more thoughtful study of other traditions of sacred art (and must certainly be mitigated by the recognition that the real enemy for Ouspensky was not Raphael but the kitschy sentimental realism that was currently crowding out the iconographic tradition in contemporary Russian devotional taste).97 The real danger is in the way the argument is posed: Ouspensky’s supposedly “iconophilic” position is almost entirely in accord with classical iconoclastic logic. Recall the Council of Hieria, which argued that a visible image of Christ would screen out his invisible divinity, thus either heretically flattening both natures into his humanity, or heretically separating his person by painting only one nature. Ouspensky’s grounds for dismissing realist painting seems to accept this same presumption about painting, that it gives us a flattened visible which is incapable of making visible the spiritual world. He even concedes Hieria’s logic for Western visual art, claiming that is essentially “Nestorian,” since it “represents only the human aspect of the sacred,” or “the terrestrial reality alone.”98 The only difference is that these twentieth-century iconologists have developed exactly one special exception to this iconoclast rule, at least in the unflinching formulation of Ouspensky: the indisputably clear symbolic language of the Eastern icon, authenticated by its divinely given origins, which alone 95 96 97

98

Ibid., 181, 473, 488. Ibid., 473ff. See Alain Besançon, The Forbidden Image, 132ff; for Ouspensky’s polemics against Raphael see Theology of the Icon, 183–184, 468–469, 514; see also his postface in Dieu dans l’art, 337. It is baffling that so many Orthodox theologians single out Raphael as the primary target for earthly sensuousness, since compared to other famous Renaissance artists of seriously questionable character and motives, Raphael was said to have painted his Madonnas based on the inspiration of a supernatural vision of the Mother of God, just like many ancient iconographers. Florensky at least recognizes this fact, Iconostasis, 76–78, even if he falls into a similar blanket critique of Renaissance art. Ibid., 166 n24.

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can show the Incarnate God.99 A Byzantine icon is the sole picture that could present without idolatrous comprehensiveness Christ’s invisible Divinity; the icon alone is guaranteed an ability to “bear witness visibly to these two realities.”100 This extreme position performs at the same time both an iconoclasm of all non-iconic images and an idolatry of icons! The result runs counter to the thinking of the early iconophiles, who held that iconic thinking necessitated the multiplication of “eikons” everywhere. To argue that the icon in its self-evident symbolic aesthetic language is the only guaranteed path of a divine visibility, excluding all others, is to enact a creaturely calculus that grasps the infinite through one finite formula, an idolatrous seashell claiming to hold the ocean. All we need is the right kind of symbolic language and God becomes immediately evident to us. What is most significant is not the error, but the radicality of the instinct behind it: by taking the argument to the aesthetic level, these thinkers believe the icon warrants more than an external justification. Their sense is that God did not choose this form of art at random, but that this form of art itself speaks a spiritual language which is evident to those who pay attention. Despite the problems that emerge in their particular elaboration of it, this is the first instance, within all of the prior accounts of the icon we have encountered above, where the icon is being claimed as capable of mediating God, precisely within its particular capacities and limitations. Could we adopt this insight without immediately leaping to the exclusivity of the icon, and thus give a hearing to the voice of this particular aesthetic tradition? To defend the icon with such a heavy hand once again robs us of the resources we could use to respond to this question more deeply. Instead, we might ask through the continuity of experience what the icon is, and what it is not, which means to place the icon in conversation with the larger aesthetic tradition, even if we allow that it may differ from it.101 Recent work has begun to do just this. Tsakiridou, for example,

99 100 101

Ibid., 514, 468–469. Ibid., 167. And indeed, there would have been more than adequate evidence by the time these authors were writing in the mid-twentieth century to seriously challenge such a reductive claim about the closure of art as such, including abstract art which, one could argue, strove to preserve the invisibility of the sacred within visible color and form. In Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), Mark C. Taylor has written extensively of how the “death of God” and the irrepresentability of the sacred were major themes haunting twentieth-century art, something JeanLuc Marion briefly alludes to in CV 58–59/CdV 105–6. In fact, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevitch, and Rothko were all deeply influenced by the Russian Orthodox aesthetic tradition. Evdokimov is the only one of these authors to even briefly consider the potential spiritual character of modern art.

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rejects these common theological ideologies that overshadow or undermine the image and works instead to show the distinctiveness of the icon from the image itself, defining iconicity within a coherent tradition of aesthetics based on the concept of enargeia or “liveliness.”102 Her account is rich and thought-provoking, with a patient attention to particular icons that shows their aesthetic distinctiveness, grounded in a nuanced theological worldview which remains in dialogue with other traditions of art. Yet beyond a deepened attention to the aesthetic experience, an important question remains. Visibility and Invisibility In addition to serving as yet another example of the image being interrupted in its own voice, Ouspensky’s exclusivity argument raises an extremely important philosophical problem. Prioritizing the icon against realism may seem to indicate that the wrong kind of image is what flattens: realist painting is like a sieve, failing to hold what is higher and leaving us only with the “mere carnality” of brute blood and bone, while the special symbolism of the icon allows it to preserve invisible and visible together, bearing witness to the spiritual world purified by the eternal light of God’s love. Yet, if we press this logic to its natural conclusion, we will see that this is not so much a question of painting, but a question of experience as such. If one claims realist images are incapable of communicating the spiritual, this assumes that the real and ordinary experiences that these images depict are also merely empirical, that the spiritual is not here now, that the world as we perceive it would thus be self-sufficient, closed to God. This is why in order to open up the possibility of divine revelation in the middle of such empiricism we would need a special kind of symbolic appearing like the icon, which can transcend the merely physical senses to the spiritual in its non-literal way of seeing.103 Thus, to seriously hold, as Ouspensky does, that realist paintings are as such merely carnal reality and nothing more is a failure to understand the nature of painting and simultaneously a rejection of the full power of ordinary sensible appearances to manifest the truth.

102 103

Tsakiridou, Icons in Time, 20, 306, etc. She also points out powerful resonances between iconography and modern art in “Theophany and Modernism,” 269–296. Oleg Komkov considers this general trend in Russian aesthetics, which he argues draws influence from Kant and Hegel as much as Dionysius and Maximus, “The Vertical Form: Iconological Dimension in 20th Century Russian Religious Aesthetics and Literary Criticism,” Literature & Theology 20:1 (March 2006): 7–19; see also Tsakiridou, 120–121.

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At the same time, we must understand why this dualism of empirical reality against spiritual truth was set in place. What Ouspensky really means to defend is the distinction between the “historical, earthly reality” of “the visible world” and “the world transfigured.”104 To be more precise, we might name this a distinction between worldly manifestation and divine manifestation.105 This problem takes us closer to the heart of the question of mediation. Before we talk about the visible image of the original, we must ask: what kind of visibility must God have? Art historians rarely considered this question. The iconophile fathers would immediately would refer us to the incarnate Christ as God and man, and the contemporary Orthodox would refer us to the patristic iconophiles. But the apparent solution of the Incarnation is not as easy as it seems, at least at face value. We need only to recall the Philosophical Fragments, where Kierkegaard argues it is in fact easier for us to see Christ’s divinity today from a distance than it would have been for his contemporaries who came face to face with a man from Galilee. Many people, after all, saw the man Jesus Christ and did not “see” his divinity.106 They saw a prophet, an insurgent, a healer, a free meal. To Peter, one of the very first to recognize Jesus as “Son of the Living God,” Jesus gives the response, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven.” (Mt. 16:16–17) That is, the accounts in the New Testament claim that to see Jesus in the flesh as God does not result merely from human acts of seeing or understanding. In the flesh or not, God somehow comes from outside the human capacity to know or see. The visibility of the Incarnation is thus not a solution of the problem, but a heightening of it: how can the Divine be known in this visible man? What would open our eyes to see it? If this problem exists for the flesh-and-blood presence of Jesus, it of course will be transposed to the question of the spiritual manifestation of a “world transfigured.” Ouspensky is not totally blind to the difficulty, but seems to think that it can be bypassed through the icon’s “artistic language” of haloes and elongated limbs.107 Is the icon’s aesthetic 104 105

106 107

Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, 491. Ibid., 160–161; it is a question not just of God and finite things, but things as they are naturally and things as they are “transfigured” with the “radiance of the Holy Spirit.” To address what Ouspensky means here would require an engagement with the Orthodox theology of participation and deification. Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 64–71. For example he acknowledges that if we were to encounter a saint in real life, we would not see his holiness; similarly, he recognizes that many people who saw Christ did not recognize him. Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, 173–174, 178.

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style really so unambiguous that it will let us recognize without question the manifestation of God in his Son, in his saints, and in the entire world that participates in his Divinity? Couldn’t we still see it as a visible among other visibles? Thus, Ouspensky fails to see that it is not primarily a problem of a painting, but a problem of original phenomenality. The scandalous ­visibility – and invisibility – of God is the heart of this question, and on this the image will certainly stand and fall. The claim to the aesthetic superiority of the icon seems to be wrapped up in a larger confusion about the word “visibility” that underlies this concern about the nature of the image as well as the nature of visible appearances, and ultimately the ambiguity of God’s self-manifestation. Once again, the solution fails to satisfy, but we are approaching more and more the philosophical crux of the matter. *** To this point, we have considered the three major approaches to the study of the icon, in art history, patristic theology, and twentieth-century Orthodox theology. While they all enrich our understanding of the icon in different ways, none on its own will be able to address the primary question of interest here, the way that the icon is said to mediate God. At this point of the investigation, at least two central blind spots remain: (a) What is the icon as a painted image, and how does it mediate the truth of what it shows by its specific, finite capacities and aesthetic devices? (b) What would it mean for God to “show himself,” or what kind of “visibility” would God have? Byzantine art history (Section 1.1) provides valuable insight into the prior question, the nature of the image and its significance for the Byzantine world, and offers us detailed attention to the significance of particular icons. However, even beyond the work that must be done to transpose these insights to the icon as it exists in the contemporary world, this discipline cannot through its own tools account for the essential theological dimensions of the icon’s meaning. The patristic iconophiles (Section 1.2) gave a theology of the visibility of God through the Incarnation but at a general level, focusing on the “who” and not the “how” in its full philosophical detail or with a clear resolution to the problem of recognizing the appearing of Divinity in incarnate flesh. Even if a deeper foray into patristic theology could elaborate a better answer to this second question than is directly present in their defense of icons, these iconophiles have very

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little interest in the former question. They skip straight from Christ to the universality of his cosmological mediation, ignoring any questions about the painting itself. Twentieth-century Orthodox theology represented by thinkers like Ouspensky (Section 1.3) has come the closest to answering both of these questions, by considering the theological significance of the icon’s concrete aesthetic character. Yet this tradition frequently overreaches its own insights and undermines its answer to both of these questions by heavy-handed metaphysical theories and polemical categorizations of painting which bypass a clear-sighted confrontation with either problem. Is an appearance always only a surface? Can ever it tell us the truth of God’s self-manifestation? What does it mean to say that God reveals himself to us and what role could art play in this “deepening” of visibility and the “transfiguration” of vision that would allow us to encounter it? I suggest that if we are seeking clarity about the complex play of visibility and invisibility, the hiddenness and exposure of truth, there is no better place to turn than phenomenology.

1.4  The Icon and Phenomenology In its most basic sense, phenomenology begins with the recognition that what we see is no mask but the self-disclosure of being. This in turn opens up a host of new ways to consider the revelatory value of mediation and the many nuances of visibility and invisibility, both finite and infinite. Might it not be the ideal framework to guide us through these knots of icon studies and toward an answer to the primary question of mediation I am asking here? Unlike the other three approaches above, phenomenology is uniquely attuned to particular differences, which will be especially helpful in treating the experience of the icon which to this point does not seem to fit in any easily recognizable category. For phenomenology holds that we do not definitively possess the truth in our concepts, but must always return “to the things themselves” in all of the nuanced ways they give themselves to us. We are always in debt to the phenomenon, as it shows itself. Should our concepts fail to allow this self-showing, we must set them aside to seek better ones. Phenomenology thus vows itself to a life of intellectual poverty, resolves to be permanently on credit. To do anything else is to ignore the evidence, blind ourselves into an illusion of wealth when we have bankrupted ourselves of our only genuine source of truth. It is also for this reason that phenomenology can fall under suspicion of those inclined to take religion seriously. Does such poverty really allow for the tools to speak about the highest realities? Many insist we must return

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to “metaphysics” (whether Neoplatonic or Thomistic) to construct more robust theories and to make definitive objective truth claims about the world in our skeptical age. How, after all, could the evidence of “mere experience” explain what is invisible, much less what is spiritual or consecrated? I will not claim phenomenology is the only possible path of explanation of the icon, nor a comprehensive one. Yet, in trying to find a path to discuss the philosophical question of mediation, it is in fact the metaphysical theories which have caused so many problems in understanding the icon, plucking it out of the world of experience to put it on a pedestal before it has a chance to show us why it belongs there. Rather than attending very carefully to what the image shows, and how, in all its complications, many writers either move on to their conclusions too quickly (everything is an icon) or filter everything through predetermined theories (the icon is an aesthetic object, an “enhypostasized” image, etc.). Believers certainly do not need phenomenology’s permission to declare that the icon is holy and act accordingly. But these “deus ex machina” theories leave enormous confusions and gaps in explanation by ignoring the icon in its mediating character as an image. Would the icon not be served, rather than disrespected, if we let the icon speak for itself? This does not mean to strip away all tradition and theological formation, if this is a part of how the icon gives itself to us, but only what obscures us from really seeing the evidence. The fruits of such a phenomenologically inspired approach are already evident in contemporary art history. It is only fitting that they be applied at a broader level for icons in the twenty-first century. It is precisely because of this “intellectual poverty,” and not in spite of it, that phenomenology can clear the ground to allow the icon to show itself from itself. This is what I will demonstrate here. For, now at the end of this survey of the vast territory of icon studies, I can at last stake my own claim: phe­nom­ enology will be an ideal way to cut through these tangles of unanswered questions on (a) the mediating character of a painted image and (b) the possible visibility of God. Both are essential to follow our central inquiry laid out in the previous chapter, discovering what kind of “seashell” the icon must be in order to mediate this paradoxical encounter with Divine. This in turn will provide an entry into the more general question of what it would mean for any finite thing to mediate God specifically through its unique capacities and limitations rather than by destruction of them. Thus, to investigate the mediating character of the icon as a painted image, I will first lay out the phenomenology of the image through HansGeorg Gadamer in Chapter 3. Deeply indebted to his teacher Martin Heidegger, Gadamer has been one of the most significant thinkers on

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art in the twentieth century, as he helps unfold in greater detail some of Heidegger’s central insights on the nature of truth, while adopting insights from Neoplatonic metaphysics as well as the many other centuries of tradition and culture. I will show how Gadamer’s hermeneutic phenomen­ol­ ogy can begin to articulate a clear understanding of what a picture is, in a way that fills in for what is conspicuously absent in these prior thinkers concerning the icon, while remaining ultimately faithful to many of their concerns. This will give us a clear starting point to consider the unique mediation of the icon as an image. However, while Gadamer’s account of the mediation of art is rich and insightful, it is firmly centered on the world of human possibilities. Does it have the tools to address what the­o­ l­ogy has been trying to tell us about the icon? For if phenomenology aims to account for the way that each “thing” must show itself from itself, we must admit the possibility that the way a God would come to evidence is utterly unique. If Gadamer himself does not offer an answer to this question, JeanLuc Marion claims it nonetheless remains possible for phenomenology to address this paradoxical phenomenality of God. In fact, to discuss this blind spot of icon studies he even repurposes the term “icon,” which I explore in depth in Chapter 3. It is critical to note from the start that Marion’s term “icon” does not mean a painted image like the one we are speaking of here. Indeed, he argues that it is impossible to make God appear through a picture, ideal, proof, or concept. God can appear only on God’s terms, breaking in free of any constraints set by me and any concepts, words, or images I could make of this experience. Yet, critics ask, does such negation of idolatry really overcome it, or does it merely confirm it all the more by ignoring the problem? While Marion suggests that painted images could serve as the site of an “icon,” many fear this only results in a relation that has nothing to do with the image, or indeed any concrete experience, which risks ruling out the Byzantine icon altogether in a general iconoclasm perversely framed in iconophile language. Must we disqualify as mere idolatry or overindulgence the symbols, rites, texts, doctrine, and tradition of ordinary religious believers in the course of their everyday religious practice? Even after this long investigation of how to understand the icon, it seems that at every turn we are thrown back into this dizzying circle of dualities. Image or God? Idol or iconoclasm? The historical and aesthetic accounts discuss the image, but ignore its relation to God. The theological accounts, ancient or modern, discuss God, but not the image. Are the phenomenological approaches of Gadamer and Marion repeating the

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dilemma in a different way? At least from this initial overview, it seems that the icon provides no immediate exit that would redeem our medi­ ating humanity after all. But I propose that the circle is not a vicious one, that if we enter more deeply into this discussion precisely at this point, we will find that phenomenology in fact has resources to help us avoid both horns of the dilemma. Synthesizing and augmenting the phenomenological insights of Gadamer and Marion developed in Chapters 2 and 3, I will provide my own concrete phenomenological study of the religious icon in Chapters 4 through 7. From the precision of a phenomenological orientation, I will be able to untangle some of the above knots of history, patristics, and Orthodox theology, and weave their insights together to the answer to the specific question: how is it that this finite, visible image, in its particular capacities, can allow for a mediation of the infinite God? Then, in Chapter 8, I will use the results of this extended phenomenological investigation as a foundation to address my first question about the mediation of any finite thing, sketching out a general definition of “iconic mediation” that will model the paradoxical possibility of finite things to mediate the Divine.

chapter 2

Resonance

Gadamer’s Aesthetics

2.1  Philosophers and the Image After emerging from the dense underbrush of icon studies, our trail has led us to a basic and central question: what is a painted image? How might its unique aesthetic form relate to the truth of what it shows? How does a contemporary philosophy of art shed light on the icon as an aesthetic mediation? Bulgakov’s keen insight bears repeating: “The character of the icon depends on the character of art.”1 And yet, we do not find any clear sense of art in John Damascene and Theodore Studite, who defended paintings only by explaining them through other, more general terms. Even if we could develop richer Byzantine aesthetics through other sources, this would provide limited solutions for the world beyond Byzantium. Mainstream twentieth-century Orthodox theology recognized that paintings could present a certain truth about the spiritual world, but the explanations that thinkers like Ouspensky offer are riddled with too many problems to take at face value. I have suggested that phenomenological aesthetics will serve as a way out of these tangles. Clearing the ground here is no small feat, for the questions of appearing do not belong to some obscure regional inquiry. As Dennis Schmidt explains, “The stakes of the question of the image, of reflections upon painting, touch upon the heart of experience and the character of a world.”2 The implications of one’s view of images, as the iconophiles rightly recognized, are indeed cosmological. The force of phenomenology is to have understood this almost from the beginning. This makes it an exception in the historically troubled relationship between philosophy and images. 1 2

Bulgakov, Icons and the Name of God, 43, 65. Dennis J. Schmidt, Between Word and Image: Heidegger, Klee, and Gadamer on Gesture and Genesis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 24.

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Image and Illusion Philosophers have long regarded painting with suspicion. Plato, in Book X of the Republic, argues that the painter’s image is the imitation of an imitation, thrice removed from the original.3 While the craftsman imitates the true couch as it really is, produced by God in nature, the painter’s couch is merely an imitation of this craftsman’s imitation. Worse, it is not an imitation of the truth of the couch, but merely the imitation of a onesided appearance. The best a painter could hope for is to deceive “children and foolish men” into mistaking his picture for the reality. Images are ultimately only a deception, a distraction from intelligibility. If Plato himself is more subtle than a single passage would reveal, the suspicion he articulates here continues to haunt the centuries of thinking that would follow. Modern philosophy begins to transform this idea of the image in ­significant ways. Kant for the first time grants art a kind of autonomy, liberating it from its role as mere imitation as well as from its servitude to a purpose outside itself, whether utility or moral value. Art becomes a free play of the imagination that has no purpose but the disinterested pleasure we take in it. But this comes at a cost, as denying art any cognitive content, risks limiting it to the sphere of subjective feelings, which, even if available universally, are fundamentally cut off from truth of any kind.4 Hegel, on the other hand, evaluates art once again based on its ability to communicate truth, as it is one of the three great avenues by which being can come to self-consciousness, along with philosophy and religion. At its best, art is “the sensible shining of an idea” (das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee), an idea that is perfectly expressed by its materials of pigments, marble, or tone. According to Hegel, Greek art had struck this balance perfectly, but by his own era, art had become “a thing of the past,” and aesthetic expression had been supplanted by religion and especially philosophy, which are clearer formations of the self-consciousness of spirit.5 Thus, Hegel in a way returns to the logic of Plato: the work of art is only a steppingstone to a higher truth that is most directly accessible through philosophy. Nietzsche, meanwhile, accepts this duality of truth and appearing and turns it on its head, praising appearing over intelligibility, and thus granting a new place for art: “My philosophy an inverted Platonism: the further

3 4 5

Plato, Republic, X.597b–598d. See especially Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews as Critique of the Power of Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 11.

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removed from true being, the purer, the finer, the better it is. Living in semblance [Schein] as goal.”6 And yet, the move to discard intelligibility without a revised understanding of the meaning of sensibility only abolishes the meaningfulness of both. In short, for most of the history of philosophy, the mediation of art would not, strictly speaking, be a lie, and yet it would be a very poor substitute for the (superior) understanding of the philosopher. Even before we pose the question of God, this kind of mediation would operate exclusively through the seashell logic discussed in Chapter 1, where the mediating image serves as an inadequate bearer of the truth of the original. As sensible appearing, it is either a weakened form of truth or not truth at all. Thus, at its best, this model of aesthetic mediation proposes that the image remain tangential: it is a temporary stand-in for the original.7 In its most severe form, art and reality even become detached, and therefore one must make a choice: either art or truth, image or original (one step away from seashell or ocean, creature or God). In no case is art a genuine and essential aid to truth, or at least not for us today alongside the great advances of human reason. Art remains something in between me and an original that is better accessed elsewhere, or something divorced from any truth that matters. This latter option introduces at an aesthetic level the competition we have seen earlier under the forms of idolatry or iconoclasm. It is from this kind of skepticism about art as such that iconologists like Ouspensky make their more polemical claims. To lay out the problem explicitly, there are two primary assumptions that must be challenged. First, that a picture may present the truth of a thing, and not merely present us with an illusion, an inadequate copy, or subjective fantasy. Second, that art offers something more than its picturing function; it cannot be reduced to an epistemological tool. As I suggested in the previous chapter, phenomenology offers a way to defend both of these claims. To address the former, let us turn not immediately to the question of the picture, but first to the question of truth, and how it relates to appearing. This will require us to rethink some of the relations that other traditions of philosophy have taken for granted.

6

7

Notebook entry 7 [156], “Ende 1870–April 1871,” Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, III.3. ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1978), 207, discussed in Marion, CV 51/ CdV 94, which we will return to in Section 3.1. For more on this development of mimesis in art, see Dennis Schmidt, Between Word and Image, 12–41; John Sallis, Transfigurements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 11–22; Marion, CV 50–54, 78–83/CdV 91–98, 140–146.

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The Truth of Phenomena The essential claim of phenomenology is that appearing belongs essentially to being, and that appearing is the way things are given to us. There is no need for an elaborate reconstructive metaphysics to put Humpty Dumpty back together again; reality was never anything but whole. It does not hide behind a mask of visibility (or audibility, tangibility, etc.), but gives itself to us there and only there. Thus the sensible and intelligible are always intertwined. Following the Greek, Heidegger translates “phenomenon” as thus simply “that which shows itself, what is manifest,” which the Greeks often identified as τὰ ὄντα, beings.8 It is true that sometimes things do not show themselves in appearances, whether they mislead us or use their showing to indicate the presence of something else that remains hidden. But in both cases these misleading appearances are derivative of phenomenality, the ­originary self-showing of being. And even if we rarely have an adequate grasp of a thing, phenomenology assures us that this does not make the thing ­inaccessible. That which we grasp is indeed the thing, and not a lie or ­deception; there is no ontic division between a noumenal “thing in itself” and the phenomenal “thing for us.” Phenomenology can thus be summed up as follows: “to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself,” an unwieldy phrase Heidegger glosses with the familiar motto, “Zu den Sachen selbst! — To the things themselves!”9 Phenomenology is no naive empiricism. As Husserl says, “things given immanently are not … in consciousness as things are in a box.”10 What shows itself really does give us the truth, but it is first of all obscured by careless assumptions, inattentiveness, ideologies, or initial confusion, and is often uprooted from its self-showing to become an empty and freefloating concept. This is why Heidegger tells us that truth is first a privative: It is an ἀ-ληθεία, un-covering, un-forgetting.11 Most of the time we do not really see, we do not really look, and move about the world with an unreflective stance Husserl calls the “natural attitude.” In order to really receive what gives itself, we have to first set aside our assumptions and

8

Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, GA 2, trans. Joan Stambaugh and Dennis J. Schmidt as Being and Time (New York: State University of New York Press, 2010), 27 [28]. Henceforth, after providing the full text information, I will cite foreign-langauge sources by giving the English page number, followed by the original in brackets. 9 Ibid, 32 [34]. 10 Husserl, Die Idee der Phänomenologie, Hua II, trans. L. Hardy as The Idea of Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), Lecture V, 52 [71]. 11 Heidegger, Being and Time, §7, §44.

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pregiven theoretical frameworks so that we can better receive what shows itself to us as it actually gives itself, and to the degree that it gives itself. Thus, in phenomenology, immanence is paradoxically not immediate, but is an achievement we must work hard to receive. Phenomenologists often call the work of clearing the way to this immanence “reduction.”12 The critical role of our activity in receiving experience highlights another key insight of phenomenology. Every “appearing” implies an “appearing to,” as a projection is invisible without the screen capable of welcoming its image. If “phenomenality” is thus a way that the thing gives itself to us, our operations of receiving it are a necessary element in its “showing up,” or “letting it be seen.” But phenomena are far more complicated than a single type of projected image, and unlike the passivity of the screen, our acts of reception, called “constitution,” are very active operations. Phenomena are of diverse kinds, each with their own way of revealing themselves, or mode of givenness, demanding we receive them accordingly in different operations. Phenomenology’s primary task is thus to clarify exactly what is giving itself, and how it is giving itself. In simple terms, intentionality is what we call this meeting point between me and the thing.13 I do not need to scheme up ways to escape the ­imprisonment of my mind in order to meet the “real world.” Intentionality is not an accomplishment, but simply the structure of our lived ­experience. As surely as our bodies are in contact with the ground, our minds are in contact with every thing we turn to. Whether I see the pipe or imagine it, it is the real pipe itself I am thinking, and not a mere idea, representation, or image of it. This touch of intentionality has two sides: my intending and what is intended are united, but not identical. There are many different ways I can intend the pipe (remembering, perceiving, anticipating, loving, etc.), and there are many different corresponding ways one and the same pipe offers itself to me. The pipe truly gives itself in all of these appearances, but it is never exhausted by any of them. In addition to these many kinds

12

13

It is not productive to enter here the debate on the exact role of the reduction in ­phenomenology; for more on this, see Eugen Fink, “The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism,” The Phenomenology of Husserl: Selected Critical Readings (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), 119; BG/ED §1–2; Jacques English, Sur l’intentionnalité et ses modes (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2006), 152. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie I, Hua III, trans. by Daniel O. Dahlstrom as Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2014), §36.

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of intentional acts, we can specify that not all acts of intending touch the pipe to the same degree or in the same way. This allows phenomenology to claim a relation to the thing through a complex play of absence and ­presence.14 Sometimes the intention is not fulfilled, that is, it lacks full givenness or evidence. If I merely speak the word “pipe” in its absence, without thinking about it, I still intend the same pipe, but my intention is empty. If I begin to remember the fragrant taste of the tobacco I smoke through it, the color of the wood or the feel of it in my hand, the ­intention has a p ­ artial degree of fulfillment. But it is in the bodily presence of the pipe, what phenomenology calls “intuition,” that my intention is fulfilled, where I receive it in its full evidence. Note as well that “evidence” here is not a collection of clues, a feeling of certainty, a method securing initial data, or a decision I enforce upon phenomena. Evidence for p ­ henomenology is another way to speak about receiving the givenness of the thing. But the world is far more complicated than a philosopher’s pipe ­collection. There are many kinds of phenomena, all of which suggest a corresponding structure of intentionality and fulfillment. My pipe shows itself differently from the dear friend I smoke it with, the Quadratic ­­formula, the feeling of wonder, or Japan. Intuition is not limited to things that can be kicked; ideas too, like the color red, mathematical objects, the idea of a house, and the relation of two pencils lying next to each other can show themselves in our experience in “categorial intuitions.” They show ­themselves as ideas, which are different kinds of things than physical things and have their own corresponding structure. We can also have complex layers of intentionality built on top of one another, such as a bittersweet nostalgia over a joyful event, a humorous encounter with a picture showing a man that looks like someone I dislike, and so on. A key task of ­phenomenology is to untangle these different kinds of structures of givenness in which things show themselves. The picture is one of these unique structures of givenness. It is a physically present thing, but gives itself in a completely different structure than other physical things. Before the pipe, I see a pipe in its bodily givenness. A painting of a pipe also presents me with the pipe, whatever Magritte’s words insist, although it will give it to me in a different way than its full 14

Robert Sokolowski argues this is one of the central developments of phenomenology, that Husserl was the first person in the history of philosophy to recognize that “absence” and “presence” were not monolithic terms, but have complex, intertwining possibilities; Presence and Absence: A Philosophical Investigation of Language and Being (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1978). This will be of critical importance in understanding the icon.

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presence, with a lesser degree of fulfillment. Take the example of a postcard of Venice. I do not first see the paper and printed ink that are bodily given. I see instead the Grand Canal, which presents itself to me through the photo or sketch. I can modify this experience to focus on the card itself, the quality of paper or the kind of ink, and so forth. But this is a ­secondary and derivative action. Without making a special effort I will first of all perceive the Grand Canal which comes to presence through its image. However, my intention of the canal through the picture will remain only partially fulfilled until I travel to Venice and stand before it in person as the gondolas pass me by. We have now answered the first problem, how a picture can present the truth. This leads us to the second: Is the picturing function really enough to explain the experience of a work of art? An amateur photo of the canal does not show itself in the same way as a professional photograph of the canal at dusk, when the sky is still pink and the water deep blue, and the lamps cast golden ripples upon the water. Does this difference matter? A good phenomenologist must say: of course! And yet it took some time for this answer to develop coherently.

2.2  The Aesthetic Event This is in part due to the interests that guided the origins of ­phenomenology. Husserl was interested in questions of formal ontology and ­eventually in establishing a rigorous science of essences that could ground the ­possibility of transcendent knowledge in human experience; despite some scattered studies on the image, art did not play a significant role in his thought. It was Heidegger who understood the far-reaching significance of the ­phenomenological possibilities of the artwork. In his landmark essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,”15 he quickly discards the standard m ­ etaphysical frameworks that have so often been used to try to account for an artwork, and creates an entirely new vocabulary to describe the truth manifested in this event: the setting into work of art amidst the struggle of earth and world, the play of clearing and concealment, and so on. If Heidegger opened a radically new path of thinking about art, these ripe ­possibilities are not spelled out in detail. One of the great ­achievements of ­Hans-Georg Gadamer is to elaborate the insights of Heidegger within a more ­thorough  and  concrete  account  of  the  experience  of  the  artwork,  while 15

Originally written in 1935 and published in 1950, it can be found in English in the collection Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 2001), 15–86.

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offering a corrective to elements lacking in Heidegger himself. Gadamer, too, develops his own language for discussing the structure of the “­aesthetic event” as he explores with greater detail the differences and ­similarities of the arts, and ­highlights the communal and historical dimensions which are  not always as evident in Heidegger. Where Heidegger quickly ­dismantles and ­abandons unhelpful ways of thinking about art, Gadamer takes a ­different approach. His first response to an inadequate ­intellectual tradition is never to simply reject it, but to redeem it, finding within it other latent p ­ ossibilities that could evade problematic conclusions and open us up to a new and richer way of understanding. Thus, Gadamer begins by recognizing the value of Kant’s move to free painting from the idea of a narrow sense of mimesis: it liberates art from a utilitarian aim, freeing it from subservience to mere imitation or c­ ompletion of what nature has already done. This is the significance of “aesthetic” ­experience, in the strict sense, which gains its own ­autonomy as an end in the “free play” of the imagination.16 At the same time, because Kant limited authentic knowledge to natural science, this achievement did not reach its full potential: art was cut off from having any real o­ ntological or cognitive import. By freeing art from the second problem of ­aesthetics above, where art is limited merely to its mere picturing ­function, Kant offers a way for a painting to be more than a mere epistemological tool. And yet he is unable to escape the first problem of aesthetics, where a ­picture is only an illusion or inadequate copy; for by his own definition art is divorced from truth.17 This “aesthetic ­differentiation,” as Gadamer calls it, alienates art from the world and judges art based only on its “­aesthetic ­quality,” apart from any possible context, content, or moral stance. Art is then seen as an experience of pure immediacy and ­timelessness, which ­flattens ­historical consciousness into a relativity of taste and traps us in r­adical subjectivity of an isolated “aesthetic consciousness.”18 So ­disconnected is art from the world according to this model that it cannot be a product of any worldly means; those who create it have the character of “genius,” mysteriously and unconsciously channeling insight from a source of irrationality ­unrelated to our everyday experience. Such a view of art thus defends its importance, but this is an importance entirely ­unrelated to truth. 16

17 18

TM 75/GW1 88. The word “aesthetics” was first coined by A. G. Baumgarten in 1735, and in ­common philosophical usage, it maintains close ties to its development in the 18th century, ­particularly through Kant. TM 77–78/GW1 90–91. TM 77/GW1 91.

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To move through and beyond Kant, Gadamer will lay out a herme­ neutical and phenomenological understanding of art and truth that will break open this modern closure by showing that purely ­subjective ­experience is an untenable abstraction. If appearance is not opposed to truth, nor the ­sensible to the intelligible, we are no longer trapped within the p ­ hilosophical dichotomy that made such a division necessary. Image and its original need no longer be in competition, but become ­powerful allies in human understanding. To see how such a ­reconfiguration is ­possible, we must explore the landscape created by Gadamer’s new ­terminology. This reappropriation and reworking of the philosophical t­radition of “­aesthetics” will allow us to understand how Gadamer can bring nuance to the definition of a painted image, and more specifically figurative art, which will advance our understanding of the icon. From here it will be possible to review how Gadamer’s work on art transforms the very idea of mediation, offering us a possible advance for our question of the relation of the creature and God. Play The first and most important move for Gadamer is to break the duality of subjectivity and objectivity. He does this through beginning not from the subject or object, but from an event that confounds that very distinction: play. Gadamer takes the term from Kant, who first used this word in the context of art, and Friedrich Schiller who developed it further, but Gadamer will put it to use in a new way. To define it simply, play means a to-and-fro motion that follows from itself, without a goal, continually renewed and repeated. It is not a “substrate” of any kind, but the whole event of movement.19 We can see this first in nature: the play of light on the waves, the play of gnats in a swarm, the play of young animals tussling in the grass. In each case, play can be seen as the expression of “superabundant life and movement.”20 Our forms of human play are a development of this play of nature and life, revealing the particular excess of human freedom which remains undetermined by instincts.21 We can see this for example in sports. Play is always patterned according to official or unofficial rules, and it always has a sense of purpose, whether a specific goal or simply responding to the movement in an ordered way. These constraints allow the motion to 19 20 21

TM 108/GW1 109. RB 23, 124/GW8, 114, 87. RB 46/GW8, 136.

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follow from itself in perpetual renewal. However, within this structure also lies an essential indetermination, an infinite set of possibilities to be played out by our free engagement. To enter the game, we must give ourselves over to the play as a whole. This means first that we must move beyond the priority of our individual conscious experience as a player. This is not therefore to opt for unconsciousness and passivity, but something more akin to the loss of selfconsciousness, what marks the difference between those who freely join a dance and those who hesitate to give themselves over to this movement. More concretely, to enter the game a player must let go of the everyday aims of his life and take up the aims of the game. Committing to the aims of play is to transcend a model of utilitarian purposefulness, for the goals of play exist at a level beyond the merely pragmatic.22 This should not surprise us, since the origin of play, nature, also exceeds explanation according to a model of utilitarian purposefulness, even a biological one. By giving oneself over to the aims of play and the free possibilities allowed by its nonpragmatic purposefulness, players are freed from the existential burden of initiative and find relaxation in the exertion. They also find risk in the commitment to the challenge of unfolding the possibilities that exist toward play’s purpose.23 In this sense, “all playing is a being-played”;24 it has a medial sense, neither strictly passive, nor strictly active; in play we enter what is beyond our individual autonomy but what transpires between us.25 Because of its transcendence over individual aims, play is also essentially communal in its structure, even if only one player happens to be in the game at a given moment. Finally, as play originates from nature, and the mode of nature is selfpresentation (Selbstdarstellung), all play echoes this ontological character. This means first that the player in “playing himself out” is continually presenting or achieving his own self-presentation.26 And as play is always openly showing something, it structurally always anticipates viewers, whether or not they are actually present. This is especially fortuitous because although the player finds his self-presentation in play, the whole of the game cannot be seen by one player; a spectator is much better able 22 23 24 25

26

RB 23/GW8 114. TM 109–10/GW1 110–111. TM 111/GW1 112. John Sallis, “The Hermeneutics of the Artwork: Die Ontologie des Kunstwerks und ihre hermeneutische Bedeutung (GW 1, 87–138),” in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, ed. Günter Figal (Berlin: Akad. Verlag 2007), 50–51. TM 112/GW1 113.

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to find it as a meaningful whole.27 If we are tempted to reintroduce the subject-object distinction of “outside observers,” we need only recall our last time attending a sporting event. Spectators do not sit with calm, measured disinterest. Rather, they are absorbed in the game as well, nervously anticipating results, straining or echoing the motion of the play with their bodies, and spontaneously crying out in joy or anger. Far from being a detached observer, Gadamer says, the spectator is the one who for whom the play most properly presents itself, in its wholeness.28 Art, too, is play. The easiest place to recognize this is the theater, where the individual actors are playing out a performance for the sake of an audience. Music, dance, and other live performances are other clear examples. But we also see this play in every other aesthetic experience. A painting may at first appear to be static, but ultimately it too is play. To experience a painting is to enter the to-and-fro movement according to the structured yet undetermined possibilities offered by the work. Each viewing, whether by a new spectator or one who is experiencing it for the umpteenth time, brings a new performance of this play. Each event of art issues a call to set aside ordinary purposefulness and subjective activities to abandon oneself over to the play. There is a loss of sovereignty of the subject, a loss of autonomy, which perhaps some would consider a defeat. And yet by giving ourselves over to this challenge we in turn receive back our selfpresentation and are enabled to take up self-understanding in a new way.29 Structure If all art is play, not all play is art. Art requires more, for it must become a work; it is ἔργον and not only ἐνεργεία.30 This gives the play of art a greater permanence and significance than most other forms of play. It allows it to be repeated.31 This dimension of “work” comes from what Gadamer calls “transformation into structure,” “Verwandlung ins Gebilde.”32 Gebilde is difficult to translate properly into English. The word “Bild,” is used 27 28 29 30

31 32

TM 113/GW1 114. TM 114/GW1 115. Donatella Di Cesare, Gadamer: A Philosophical Portrait. Trans. Niall Keane (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 49–50. Joel Weinsheimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 105–6. Here one can easily see the inspiration of Heidegger’s ­setting-into-work in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” but with some notable differences that will emerge as we continue. RB 47/GW8 137. TM 115/GW1 116.

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also for picture, and carries a strong sense of “form” or “image,” and so Gebilde carries the sense of “something with a recognizable pattern or structure that has been actively formed,”33 or “a woven texture that holds together.”34 Something becomes a text when it no longer refers back to an original author or event of discourse, but carries its own autonomy, inexhaustible by any possible interpretation, even that of the author.35 Transformation first of all indicates that this change into structure is all at once, not a gradual shift nor the addition and subtraction of certain qualities. It becomes suddenly something new, something that it was not before; when it attains this structure, it gains a new power of manifestation, becomes a vivid and tangible presence so that it entirely fulfills us.36 In his later work, Gadamer prefers to talk about “order” (Ordnung) instead of “structure,” but despite their differences these terms share the same essential function: “Art is present whenever a work succeeds in elevating what it is or represents to a new configuration, a new world of its own in miniature, a new order of unity in tension.”37 In everyday life, we find ourselves surrounded by infinite possibilities of meaning. Even when we try to make sense out of our own lives, there are so many new possibilities, endless details, and loose strings that we can never really come to a full grasp of it. But a work of art can select from these scattered indications of meaningful possibilities and transform them into a structure that presents a meaningful whole. It leaves out some things and heightens others to better affirm what something is. Whether this occurs in a play giving us a single story (from amidst the overwhelming and ever-developing possibilities within life), or a painting isolating a certain presentation of fruit on a table (from amidst the overwhelming number of visible scenes we engage in), art manifests in a new way the being of things which can be otherwise hidden by the disparate, half-formed, and contradictory possibilities of everyday life. In the artwork, the world is somehow different, elevated, more vivid. Starting from seashell mediation, one might think that the finitude of an artwork’s structure, its inability to capture the whole makes it less valuable. Yet, Gadamer shows us precisely the opposite: The finite structure of this work is precisely what gives it its illuminating power. In its finitude it also remains open to infinitely many interpretations which never exhaust the richness of truth it offers. 33 34 35 36 37

Schmidt, Between Word and Image, 21. Nicholas Walker translates it as “creation” in RB. RB 142/GW8 145. RB 146/GW8 148 RB 144, 161/GW8 147–148, 193. RB 103–104/GW8 36.

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This has only been confirmed by the advent of photography. Once a talent limited to the skill of great masters and hours of effort, copying an appearance is a possibility today possessed by virtually anyone by the push of a button. And yet, we immediately recognize the difference between an amateur’s and a professional’s photographs of the same event. They both are accurate copies of the appearance, they both are finite, they both are bound to the same limitations of the camera, and yet one seems random, cluttered with insignificant details, while the other is able to harness what appears by showing just enough, at exactly the right moment, in order to capture in one shot a story or a mood in the harmony of colors and shadows. These aesthetic photographs vividly arrest our attention and show us something essential about what the event was. In the same way, an artwork does not merely repeat an original that has already been wholly comprehended. In its structure it creates a new presentation which enhances the manifestation of the original, precisely because we do not yet know it fully, and never will. Structure is not an opposition to the freedom of play. It is the embodiment of play. Gadamer expresses this in the reversible equation: In art, “play is structure … But structure is also play.”38 In art, play is a structure, a meaningful whole which is repeatable and understandable. This means that it has a sense of unity or wholeness that pervades each part; unlike what we might find in other kinds of play or experience, in a work of art we can recognize that each part truly belongs to it. It becomes, as Schmidt suggests, a kind of “text”; whether it is woven with words or sounds or colors, it shares in a similar ontological status, with each part oriented meaningfully toward each other and toward the whole.39 And structure is play, meaning that structure by itself is only a dead letter; it needs to be played out and meaningfully received to be what it is. The music is not in the score but in the performance; a novel is not in the words but in my imaginative projection of its world; the painting is not in the frame but in my engaging with it.40 In later work, Gadamer increasingly describes this through the term Vollzug, enactment; art only exists in its enactment, as language only exists in a conversation.41 Gadamer uses the

38 39 40 41

TM 121/GW1 122. Schmidt, Between Word and Image, 21, also see Günter Figal, “Hermeneutics as Phenomenology,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 40.3 (2012), 258. RB 28/GW8, 118. Gadamer, “Artworks in Word and Image: ‘So True, So Full of Being!’” Theory, Culture & Society 23:1 (2006), 59/GW8 395; Di Cesare, Gadamer, 53.

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term “mediation,” albeit in its Hegelian sense and not in mine, to speak of this transition from text to its enactment, that is, the accomplishment of oneself through exteriorization in the other. The work cannot be itself until it is “mediated,” that is, “performed”; and this expressive aspect is not something added on to a real work, but is merely the way a work presents itself and becomes what it is.42 Similarly, as soon as we isolate the performance from the work, as the critic questions the adequacy of an opera’s adaptation, we have ceased to see it as what it is, a work of art.43 As Gadamer explains elsewhere, it is impossible to show anything to a person who looks only at the act of showing, like the dog focusing only on the pointing finger. To show means that one recognizes and identifies for oneself what is being shown.44 Together, this equation play is a structure and structure is play helps us to see that even more so than play in general, art provides a sense of determination and indetermination. Art requires us to animate it, to enter in its play, for it to achieve its full being, but it is not therefore limited to my own subjective experience. The “text” of art must leave room for my determination of it, but I must set aside my personal purposes to follow the structure of the “text” and the possibilities it guides me toward.45 There is a mysterious similarity between the creation and the reception of art, for in both cases the art takes the lead, guiding us toward how to take it up, how to let it shine through.46 In either case, it requires our willingness to attend to this self-showing; “only if one goes along with it … does it come ­forward and one receives it. Otherwise it sweeps by and seems empty.”47 This is particularly important in the clamor of our overstimulated c­ ulture.48 It is a temptation to settle for kitsch, which merely confirms what we are already familiar with and does not change us. Real art, however, requires that something new and significant be communicated, and challenges us to grow beyond our limits.49

42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49

TM 122/GW1 123; see also Marlene Zarader, Vérité et Méthode: Lire Vérité et méthode de Gadamer (Paris: Vrin, 2016), 90. RB 29/GW8 120. “The artistic experience is constituted precisely by the fact that we do not distinguish between the particular way work is realized and the identity of the work itself.” See also RB 52/GW8 142. RB 128–29/GW8 90–91. Figal, “Hermeneutics as Phenomenology,” 258. Gadamer, “Artworks in Word and Image,” 75/GW8 391–92. Ibid. RB 36/GW8 127. RB 52/GW8 142.

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Thus, in contrast to the modern “aesthetic differentiation” which abstracted the quality from the content of the art, the unity of play and structure gives us “aesthetic non-differentiation”; the whole of art is in its structured play which has a content lived out in the present. Festival An event of play like art, which maintains its identity despite constantly changing instantiations, calls for its own temporality. Gadamer finds this temporality in the word “festival.” The temporality of a festival is a reoccurring event, which means that in some sense it is the same event we enter into. But in another sense, it is different every year, by the simple fact that we enter it from different places in our lives. It is a communal time that we enter into together. This is different from clock time, by which we schedule our private hours to be spent or wasted. Rather, its special temporal quality is a fullness or autonomy which invites us together into its own non-utilitarian purposes and rhythm, emerging from its unity as a whole.50 At Christmas, for example, families and communities come together out of the isolation of their private lives for a celebration surrounding annually repeated traditions. The time is markedly different from the rest of the year, signaled by particular decorations like sparkling lights and Christmas trees, by special songs and films, and by the distinctive tastes of peppermint and mixed spices. Each year the same rituals of gift giving are carried out and the same meaning is sought for them, but each time they are also lived in a different way, as they are entered from a new place in each person’s life and their mutual relationships. Similarly, when we encounter a compelling work of art, we forget the ticking minutes of our clock time, and do not separate out the different sequence of events. Instead, we enter the play of art as a whole, letting it develop according to its own movement and logic. This applies not only to the works that are performed, for paintings invite us into a time of encounter as we tarry [verweilen] with the forms and colors. Those who do give themselves over to this temporality, who dwell in it, who learn to tarry according to the art’s time, receive themselves back from this experience. The longer they learn to dwell with it, the more riches they can gather from what the art offers.51

50 51

RB 41/GW8 132. RB 45/GW8 136.

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Recognition We can understand what is at stake in this transformation of art more clearly when we consider the cognitive activity corresponding to it, which, according to Gadamer, is recognition (Wiedererkenntnis). Before the work of art, the world is opened to us in a new way, and we affirm, “It is so!”52 “That is just how it is!” Recognition, according to Gadamer, is a joyful secondary encounter with something, which he links to the Greek word ἀνάμνησις, recollection. But it is not a question of recollecting forms from a past life like Plato’s myths of the soul, but rather of seeing what we have already known in our experience in a new way, as if we are seeing it for the first time. On the one hand, we are seeing something that we are ­familiar with. But on the other hand, we are also seeing it in a new and more authentic way, and more properly as something, as what it is.53 Recognition both affirms what is known and roots it in the a­ cknowledgement that it has exceeded our expectations, which delights us and fills us with wonder. Di Cesare explains this eloquently: [Art] wakes us from the ontic sleep in which we, bewildered, confused, and consumed in the chaos of the beings of everyday life, have lost the sense of Being. It is the event of art that reminds us of this. In the work of art we recognize the world in which we live, as if we knew it for the very first time, and in recognizing what was already known we say gratefully, though not without surprise: “so it is,” “it is just so,” to affirm its rightness. Here aesthetic experience reveals its continuity with existence, which encounters itself in art.54

However, Gadamer is quick to clarify that we will never appropriate the whole truth of something in all its meaning, nor can we abstract what we have recognized from the work in such a way that the artwork now becomes irrelevant. We are led to return to the art again and again to recognize anew the truth it offers to us. World and Community Recognition immediately brings us to a final point. Whether it is presenting a still life, a Greek tragedy, a pattern of abstract colors, or a symphony, a work of art does not give us an isolated object or subjective feeling, a detached “aesthetic consciousness.” Rather, it is an experience, and with all 52 53 54

Gadamer, “Artworks in Word and Image,” 59/GW8 395. RB 47/GW8 137. Di Cesare, Gadamer, 53.

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experience it is connected to the world in its wholeness, as shared by all of us. This is perhaps why Gadamer places increasing importance in his later work on art as symbol. The original σύμβολον was a tessera hospitalis, two halves of a coin that perfectly fit together to show an original hospitality agreement between two parties. A symbol then is a fragment that lets us recognize unity, wholeness, and ultimately belonging. This does not mean the whole is ever directly visible, in its full meaning, but that the symbol becomes the representative or stand-in for the whole beyond what we can clearly see. Gadamer thus says that the “significance of art and beauty means that in any encounter with art, it is not the particular but rather the totality of the experienceable world, man’s ontological place in it, and above all his finitude before that which transcends him, that is brought to experience.”55 Art does not simply present us with one object to recognize, but presents to us the whole world, which in turn presents to us ourselves, and presents us to each other. We can see this in several ways. First of all, we have said that art is a play, which we enter by giving ourselves over to it, putting aside our everyday concerns to take up the purposes of the art. Concretely, this means that we suspend our everyday references, which applies to both use and knowledge. Heidegger describes to us the way that our world changes when a tool we take for granted is broken, for it is removed from its referential totality and remains inconspicuously out of place.56 In the same way, the suspension of play frees up space to recognize something familiar as also new, more what it is than it has ever been before. Its being is manifested in a new and clearer way. But knowledge is never of one isolated proposition; rather, it is always related to the whole of our purposes and our lived experience, our very ­being-in-the-world. Since the world is not merely something over and against us, but something in which we are always involved, a transformation of the world enacted by our recognition means a transformation of our bearings within it. When we give ourselves over to the play of art, we receive back the truth of beings in a new way, which in turn affects the whole of our relation to the world, and thus ourselves. To change our world means that we ourselves are changed. Second, in showing us the truth of the world, art confirms us as belonging to the world. While some fear art is escapism, Gadamer argues it is a deeper plunge into reality. Especially in our modern age, with the speed of technological development, we have found ourselves increasingly alienated 55 56

RB 32–33/GW8 123. Heidegger, Being and Time, §16.

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from the world.57 Art teaches us who we are, in a way that is both new and familiar, joyful as well as frightening, confirming in both our heights and our depths, “This is you!” and yet challenging, “You must change your life!”58 Art rescues us from alienation precisely because in its representation or presentation of order, it lets us recognize the connectedness of being, and challenges us to participate in its tensions more deeply, which makes us feel more at home in a world we thought was alien, and lets us dwell there.59 In confirming us as belonging to the world, art brings us to each other. Art offers itself to everyone. By undergoing its call to play together and thus playing ourselves out, we find both our own self-presentation and a self-presentation of the whole. Thus art brings us into unity. We can see this especially in the Greek tragedies, where actors and audience are one as they experience the play of the story.60 We might say similarly that taking up the play of the painting draws us together with the community of those who experience what is shown. We may discover there new elements of human experience that are common to us all, that we had never seen before. In some sense, art is like a mirror, for in it “we catch sight of ourselves in a way that is often unexpected or unfamiliar: what we are, what we might be, and what we are about.”61 Thus, art returns us to ourselves, but as transformed, and in a new communion achieved through our playing out this whole together. We leave more united to each other with a deeper understanding of our shared world as a whole. Of course, we must make two immediate qualifications regarding this unity. First, that it is never completed once and for all, nor are the shared meanings achieved in their totality forever. The finitude of circumstances and the finitude of our understanding mean we will never grasp the whole of the truth, even if each artwork lets us encounter it and belong to it; this is once again why Gadamer calls art symbolic. Second, this unity is not always immediately available. We must learn to read a tradition.62 Art can only bring out this unity if we already share some form of communal dimension with it. If we are too removed from the original community from which 57 58 59 60 61 62

RB 103/GW8 35. PH 104/GW8 8; for the modifications to this structure through religion, see RB 150–51/GW8 152–53. RB 28/GW8 118. This idea that art is as such an important part of preserving the world is reminiscent of Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art.” See also RB 103/GW8 35–56. RB 121/GW8 84–85. RB 130/GW8 92. RB 48/GW8 138–39, and this is perhaps all the more so with contemporary art. We may come to understand to some degree by simply approaching the work, but very likely we need to learn something about art history before we can appreciate certain forms of expression.

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the art emerged, whether because the culture is too distant or, as is often the case in our own culture, our manifold artistic traditions are so alienated from each other, we must learn a work’s contextual language before we may enter this communal belonging. This language is suggested by the challenge of the work itself. Whether we share the worldview and have a spontaneous understanding, or whether we must first work through an interpretation of this world before we can inhabit it, it is “in every case that a shared or potentially shared achievement is at issue.”63 This is part of the unique possibilities of play, that we can set ourselves aside and learn to take up new purposes than our own, that we can learn to listen to what is other.64 Thus Gadamer’s account of art offers us an alternative to Kant’s aesthetic differentiation, which abstracted art from everyday experience and placed it in the static, immediate realm of pure subjectivity. This narrowing reinforced the opposition of science and humanism, while echoing the way science set the object over and apart from the observer. It had no concern for the content or truth of art, since it was only concerned with the aesthetic quality of subjective experience as removed from the world. But if the work of art is woven into the fabric of particular, temporal experience through the event of play, we must take more seriously specifically what it shows and how it relates to the world that we never leave. By taking up more deliberately Kant’s notion of play, Gadamer has shown that the theoretical distinctions of subject-object, useful-useless, limited-free, passive-active, and even sensible-intelligible prove themselves insufficient. Our involvement in art is an event which transcends the sum of anyone’s individual motion and pragmatic activity, where each of us must fully give ourselves over to it. Gadamer has opened these dualities through the self-renewing event of art, which sweeps up all players and spectators in a to-and-fro motion which transcends them, which guides them to their self-presentation in a community in its festive temporality and restores them to the world as a whole through its structure as a work. Art thus 63 64

RB 39/GW8 130. RB 36/GW8 127. This is seen also in the early humanistic notions of Bildung, for example, as Gadamer explains in Part I of TM. Of course, we must remember that not all unity is necessarily in itself a healthy unity; feminist and post-colonial philosophers would warn that art can also unite a community that perpetuates oppression. A common vision of art can harness this world-changing power for the exclusion and objectification of others. Mary Devereux considers these questions in “Can Art Save Us? A Meditation on Gadamer,” Philosophy and Literature 15:1 (April 1991), 59–73. However, Gadamer would likely respond that there is no shortcut to defeating oppression; the ­solution is not to refuse one community by asserting another, but rather the slow and i­mportant work of cultivating a healthy one together. I will return to this point in my discussion of the ­portrait, below.

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heightens possibilities to show us clearly for the first time what really is in a joyful and challenging recognition, thus bringing us back to belonging with our world, and thus with ourselves and with each other. The truth of an artwork is not then understood as a cognitive object to be mastered, for play is an event that dissolves such a simplistic framing of world experience. The truth of art can only be understood by giving oneself over into this play to let appear what it shows.65 We do not say of a poem that it is “true” in the sense that a scientific experiment is true, or “false” by failing to correspond to an external standard.66 It is false if it is empty, if it does not live up to itself. It is true if it is authentically present, if it really shines, if it shows itself to be what it is, like a true friend, or like true gold.67 This richer idea of art allows for a much more sophisticated understanding of what an image such as the icon can offer us. By speaking of art in the most general sense, freely drawing across the different genres, Gadamer has taken us far from the simplistic definitions of the iconoclasts and iconophiles, where the truth of an image is parallel to that of a logical proposition, and far from a naive aesthetics that considers the painting to be a visual object one visits at a museum. Gadamer has returned the image and its truth into a holistic account of meaning and being, experienced within a community, and taken up through actions and practices, a much richer foundation for understanding the tradition of Byzantine art and its corresponding practices of veneration. But it is true that whatever else it is, the icon is a specific kind of artwork: It is a painting, and one that depicts historical persons. Let us now turn to how Gadamer considers the specificity of representational painting, which has so vexed the iconologies of the past.

2.3  The Painting: Truth and Representation The Image and the Original Representational painting has such a central place in Gadamer’s discussion of aesthetics that even abstract art falls under “representational” terms. In later writings, notably “The Relevance of the Beautiful,” Gadamer will work to link contemporary art to the Greek theory that art, as mimesis or imitation, is the completion of nature’s possibilities. Even if it lacks direct figuration, abstract art has a “unity in tension” of color and form, with a 65 66 67

See Schmidt, Between Word and Image, 114. RB 139/GW8 239; see also Heidegger, Being and Time, §44. RB 108/GW8 73; Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” §1, Basic Writings, 116–120.

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coherence and internal logic.68 Such order in the midst of everyday ­visibility can be seen as an abstract representation of the very order of nature, like the geometrical crystal against surrounding rock.69 Against Kant, Gadamer insists that however “alien” art may seem to be, it still takes its ultimate sources and inspiration from the real world, and thus preserves its truth-bearing character and its relation to universal human experience. Representation is thus key to Gadamer’s expression of this central claim. As the word in both German and English makes clear, there is a relationship between the “self-presentation” (Selbstdarstellung) in the event of play and “presentation,” or even “representation” (Darstellung), as an essential relation of an image to an original.70 In this second sense Gadamer speaks of art as mimesis.71 Some theories of art, as we have seen in Section 2.1, have interpreted this representation or imitation to mean that painting is merely a copy (Abblid) of the original, for example Plato’s imitation of an imitation.72 A copy is dependent on the original in two ways: (1) in appearance, for it aims at perfect likeness, and (2) in being, for it ceases to have any value when the original is present, and is easily replaced with something that shows this original more adequately. The best possible copy, then, would have exact visual dependence, and complete ontological dependence. That is, a copy strives for complete inseparability of image and original; it only exists for the sake of repeating the original in its absence. It is merely a ­“self-effacing” stepping-stone.73 Other theories of representation are similar, making it a “sign” of the original, or something that draws our visible attention to immediately point beyond itself.74 The sign differs from the copy in that it directs us immediately beyond it to find the original, where the copy presents the original by its own likeness. Nevertheless, both copy and the sign are essentially only tools.75 Their worth as appearances is completely exhausted in directing us to an original. 68 69 70

71

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73 74 75

RB 102–103/GW8 34–35. See Schmidt, Between Word and Image, 128–29. RB 90/GW8 322. Jean Grondin takes particular note of Pierre Fruchon’s choice to translate Darstellung as “­représentation.” Either way, this relationship of Darstellung and Selbstdarstellung is especially natural if, as Grondin notes, Gadamer’s idea of Selbstdarstellung has a similarity to Neo-Platonic emanation. The Philosophy of Gadamer, trans. Kathryn Plant (Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 42–43. In this he deliberately reinstates what Heidegger has dispensed with, but by aligning “imitation” with Darstellung rather than “copy,” it now stands within a broadened scope. See Sallis, “The Hermeneutics of the Artwork,” 53. Gadamer knows the influence of this reading of Plato even while he argues that Plato himself was being ironic, trying to call attention to the utter inadequacy of the definition he was proposing and thus calling us to think more deeply about art. See RB 121/GW8 84. TM 139/GW1 143–44. TM 151–52/GW1 156–57. See also Heidegger, Being and Time, §15.

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Gadamer argues that neither of these models can account for representational art, which is not properly a copy (Abbild), but a picture (Bild).76 A picture is not slavishly dependent on the original for its visibility or its being. It does strive for likeness to the original, but not a slavish repetition of it, and so our gaze lingers over it rather than passing immediately beyond it. It does share in the being of what it represents, but maintains autonomous ontological dignity, for it does not become redundant even if the original should be present. It presents this likeness to the original in a new and intelligent way, by transforming the infinitely scattered possibilities of experience into a structure. The picture is not a mere ontological substitute for something that could not otherwise be present, like the copy or the sign. Through art’s structure, the original becomes something more, more what it is, something both true and excessive, something more vivid, something resonating or “shining.”77 Exactly what this means is elusive, and Gadamer will approach it in several different ways. First, as something sacred. Gadamer begins by recalling the ancient identification of the picture and that which it presents.78 In its extreme forms, this leads to picture magic, not unlike the Byzantine iconoclasts who believed that painted images were liars, unable to meet the full, living identification demanded of an image. This is why they held that the only true image of Christ would be his real presence in the Eucharist (pp. 30–31 above). While history has moved away from this idea of total identity, Gadamer insists that a level of identification is still felt in the artwork, that the physical presence of the original emerges in the picture. Thus, he suggests the artwork lies halfway between the pure utilitarian indication of the sign and the pure substitution of the symbol.79 It does not substitute completely for the original, but it still lets the original come to presence in it in a weakened way.80 Far from our 76 77

78 79 80

TM 139/GW1 142–43. The latter term I take from Sallis, who reappropriates through Hegel the Greek term ἐκφανέστατον as “the most shining forth,” as we find in the Phaedrus, 250d-e. See for example, Transfigurements, 14, and “On Shining Forth: Response to Günter Figal and Dennis Schmidt,” Research in Phenomenology 40:1 (2010): 115–119. TM 175 n57/GW1 146 n250. TM 151/GW1 155. Gadamer makes a similar point through the origins of the term “representation” as it originated in canon law, TM 142, 175–76 n59/GW1 146 n250, and also more briefly in RB 35/GW8 125–26. While we still use this term when one person replaces another in legal proceedings, it originally had a p ­ articularly theological character, as repraesentare meant “to make present.” The validity of this legal substitution thus originally rested on a theological substitution, made possible through the community of Christians as the “mystical body” of Christ, which allowed one person to be present through another. The ­representative acts wholly for the one represented, and is dependent on the represented, making the represented present in his words and actions. Yet the represented person is present in no other way.

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attitude toward copies as a replaceable “mere appearance,” this example shows that we cannot help but sense art’s “irreplaceability” and “fragility,” and its destruction strikes us as sacrilege.81 A cynic might consider that monetary value is reason enough to preserve great works of art, but there is more to it than this. This instinct is native to us. If it sounds abstract or strange to claim this, consider the legendary tiger of the University of Chicago’s Searle Hall. There, in the most transitory of places, a classroom blackboard, a ­­magnificent tiger had been drawn in white and orange chalk one evening by an artistically talented student. The tiger remained there for decades as classes passed in and out of the chemistry building, as formulas were scribbled and erased around it, and janitors cleaned the board with nightly sponging. No instructions were needed to preserve the drawing; no one would touch it. Thirty years later, when the building had to be renovated, the blackboard was removed in order to save the tiger, which now graces the wall of the department office. What mattered about this tiger? What guided this instinct for its preservation? Gadamer would say this is simply a recognition of this sacred character of art. While symbols often need a deliberate convention to take up their role of substitution, to make a few stripes of color symbolize a country, it is already native to art. An artwork may undergo a ceremonial consecration for religious or public uses, but to some extent this consecration is superfluous; it emerges from the art itself, which points itself toward a certain use and understanding.82 For Gadamer, there is no real differentiation between religious or secular, for all art remains on the continuum of “sacredness” as described by these characteristics.83 This second way Gadamer describes this mysterious excess is as an “ontological increase.” All art “shares in the mysterious radiation of being that flows from the being of what is represented, what comes to presence there (was da zur Darstellung kommt).”84 By this he does not mean a qualitative increase like technological manufacturing, because it is not a replaceable tool; nor is it merely a genetic increase as natural reproduction; nor is it simply a wider set of choices or particular truths.85 Dennis Schmidt likens this increase in being to our experience of learning a language, falling in love, or improving our health: “[T]he world is enriched and enlarged 81

82 83 84 85

TM 140/GW1 144. This evokes what Walter Benjamin described as the “aura” of the artwork, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 221–22. TM 155/GW1 160. TM 150/GW1 155. TM 149/GW1 154. Gadamer, “Artworks in Word and Image,” 79/GW8 395.

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even as it does not change.”86 Gadamer draws on Neoplatonic tradition to describe this as a kind of “emanation.” He even briefly references John of Damascus’ defense of the icon: that the image is sacred because it comes from and somehow shares essentially in the true image of Christ.87 Gadamer’s point is not a theological one. He aims to describe a certain structure of relation: first of all, that newness which emerges in an artwork does so without diminishment to the original. Second, there is a kind of ontological dependence at play; the emanation has its own autonomy as an artwork to be encountered, but it is forever in continuity with the original which it represents. We must abandon any idea of two material substances, as if the original were giving away images like a jar dispensing gumballs. Rather, it is like the relation between heat and fire; fire, in a sense always “emanates” heat, but the heat depends on and relates back to the fire, while yet being other than it.88 The result of this mysterious excess in the picture, the “ontological increase,” is that the “correspondence” between original and its copy is ­simply not sufficient to describe the vividness of the truth shown in the image.89 Rather, the subservient relationship of copy-original becomes mutual, and to some extent even reversed. It is not that the picture simply draws its being from the original, but the original is now changed by the powerful autonomy of the picture. Mimesis no longer means a reference to an absent original, but that the original is present there as what it is only in the picture.90 Let me bring these mysterious claims to some concrete examples, which I will describe through four logical steps. First, as we saw with play, it is in the nature of being to present itself. Being is always showing itself, and any being that shows itself does not fully belong to itself, for it is always already outside itself, giving itself to anyone who could receive it. For example, nature is always already showing itself to us in mountains and oceans, forests and fields, under the first fresh rays of sunrise or in the full glare of noon. Second, because of this self-presentational character of natural landscapes, it can also be represented, or presented again in a new way. This is what legitimates the picture, say, of the Alps at dawn. Such a picture 86 87 88 89 90

Schmidt, Between Word and Image, 116. TM 175 n58/GW1 145 n249; see also RB 3/GW8 94–95, “Artworks in Word and Image,” 81–82/ GW8 398–99. See for example Plotinus’ Enneads II.9.3 and V.4.1. Increasingly in later works, such as RB, Gadamer will talk of beauty along these lines as well. James Risser, Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other: Re-reading Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 152. RB 121/GW8 85.

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is not merely a copy, derivative of the original, or a sign, merely to assist us in pointing back to the original mountain range. Rather, it is the ­self-presentation of this original being. That is, the mountain range itself comes to presence in this picture, and in a way that is new and greater than its physical presence alone. “A work of art belongs so closely to what it is related to it that it enriches the being of that as if through a new event of being.”91 This heightened self-showing in the picture in turn heightens the being of the original, makes the mountains more majestic, now bathed in the golden rays of the sun and standing out from the pink sky. Gadamer spoke of this as an emanation or the overflowing of being, which nonetheless remains in full continuity with it. But Gadamer’s most critical step is the third one: this relationship is not merely one-sided. If the image is dependent on the original, the original also becomes dependent on the image. As the German language makes it clear, there is a wordplay between image (Bild) and its original (Urbild), also translated “archetype.” Thus, Gadamer admits, “[p]aradoxical as it may sound, the original acquires an image only by being imaged, and yet the image is nothing but the appearance of the original.”92 Thus, it is not only that the mountains validate the picture, but the picture is e­ ssential to the originality of the original; “it is only by being pictured that a landscape becomes picturesque.”93 Under the sway of eighteenth-century aesthetics, which favored carefully tended geometrical gardens, travelers found the Alps savage and ugly. Now, with eyes educated by another kind of art which brings these mountains to presence in a new way, their ­grandeur and scale is breathtaking.94 And, in changing the appearing of a being, we also change the worldly relations in which it is inextricably rooted. Thus, “the world appears different when we look at it through the eyes of the work.”95 Through representation we can begin to see how the structure of art ­presents us with a new self-presentation that ­heightens the ­visibility of a being, which heightens the being of the world.  As 91 92

93 94 95

TM 147/GW1 152. TM 142/GW1 147. Gadamer immediately continues with an example of the religious picture, claiming the divine is invisible prior to being picturable in word and image. This is an interesting claim, but I choose not to enter it here since it begs our question. We have not yet established whether God could really be portrayed, and what this would mean; this will be a topic we wrestle with in Chapter 5. The fact that Gadamer moves seamlessly from this claim to pagan poets’ systemizing of the Greek gods also indicates that Gadamer is not intending to grapple with the question of God, but only to appropriate insights from religious tradition that have gone into shaping our aesthetic thinking. Ibid. RB 30–31/GW8 121, PH 98/GW8 3. RB 168/GW8 200; see also Schmidt, Between Word and Image, 116.

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we  have  been  accumulating new artistic visibility through millennia of culture, we have also been building up richer and more nuanced layers of understanding of the world, like the slow growth of coral reefs.96 Far from being a tangential stand-in, the work of art is truth-bearing and enables understanding in an even more powerful way than science. For, “prior to all conceptual-scientific knowledge, the way in which we look upon the world, and upon our whole being-in-the-world, takes shape in art.”97 We cannot stop here. To Gadamer’s analysis I add a fourth point: this relationship remains doubly asymmetrical. The landscape did not have to appear in this way. It could have also appeared otherwise, in which case its being would be enriched and directed by a different picture. Having an image is necessary for it, and becomes a real and powerful event of its self-presentation, but it does not completely exhaust its being. We could picture the Alps at night, too, in the rain or snow, from close proximity or very far away. At the same time, the picture, too, has ontological autonomy, unable to be exhausted by any one interpretation, even by a comparison with the original mountains. We can even say that a work of art helps us to see the Alps in a more vivid, more truth-bearing way than we might at first experience even in their presence in experience. This example helps us confirm the importance of how a painting can present the truth while remaining more than a mere epistemological tool. But in fact, Gadamer does not use the landscape as his leading example of representation. He complicates things considerably by using instead the example of the portrait of the hero or statesman. As icons are a form of art that show persons, it is worthwhile for us to draw out some of these complications at length. The Image and the Person Let us take as an example of a hero, someone obvious, one of the most banal or stereotypical “heroes” we can name in the past century. Mother Teresa, for example. As a being, she is always showing or presenting h ­ erself in some basic way. But as a hero, this presenting is more than merely the visibility of an individual person. A hero, as such, already bears a heightened visibility, what might be called a “public” role.98 I offer this easy and reliable test of whether someone has a public or private visibility: Can they be satirized? 96 97 98

This fitting analogy is from John Arthos, The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2009), 160. RB 164/GW8 196. Note that I use “public” here in a non-technical sense to indicate something widely known to a larger community, not in the Heideggerian sense of “publicness” (Öffentlichkeit), which is related to the inauthentic “they-self ” discussed for example in Being and Time, §27.

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Could someone choose to “be” this hero at a costume party? The unique kind of essentializing distance taken in humor, or the “transformation into structure” necessary for a costume indicates that there is a “public identity” at stake (at least relative to the group of people who would recognize it), rather than merely a person we happen to see. Thus, we must immediately introduce a double level of image that is not present in a landscape: the portrait (we might call it “imageb”) shows us a hero. This is Gadamer’s focus. Yet this is possible only if her public image as “hero” (which we might call “imagea”) already presents for us a heightened visibility of something. This introduces a perplexity that Gadamer only hints at cryptically in a footnote.99 What is this original, the zero point that the public image (imagea), shows to us? We might think at first that the original of a “public persona” is obvious: the private person. But this is not quite accurate. Mother Teresa is not presenting the heightened truth of Anjezë Bojaxhiu. What would such a thing even mean to us? Few of us can claim to have known Anjezë (much less pronounce her name). It is not the little Albanian woman from Skopje that is presented in its truth through her imagea, but rather, a heroic value: the love for the poorest of the poor, the dying, who in any pragmatic logic are “worthless” and “lost causes.” This is what this woman makes so vivid to us in her image. In other words, the imageb, the portrait, is a representation of this public image, imagea, which is recognizable for presenting to us a certain visibility of a person as incarnating a set of values. It is obvious that the portrait itself, imageb, can be a work of art. Might imagea, the public image of a person, also serve as a kind of work of art? After all, there are many kinds of public visibility (movie stars, politicians, notorious criminals, and so on), and someone’s public visibility may be interpreted in very diverse ways. Christopher Hitchens for example, interpreted Mother Teresa’s public image not as a hero, but as a religious hypocrite with the twisted desire to make the poor suffer.100 No public image is unambiguous. Yet to the extent we interpret someone as a hero, we are claiming something unique of their public visibility. While Gadamer does not explore this possibility, I suggest that heroism can indeed be understood as a self-showing heightened into a vivid shining that allows us to say, “it is so!” A human image does not exactly have a “structure” in the way that a painting does, but it might be said to have a certain patterning of action in narrative, for example, the ways Mother Teresa enacts her love for the poor.101 Her imagea 99 100 101

TM 176 n60/147 n251. Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (London: Verso, 1995). Here we can supplement Gadamer with an idea from Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, ­expanding from mimesis of images to mimesis of actions.

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as a hero carries an autonomy that speaks beyond her private person, beyond a particular moment. Like the work of art, she is not a sign pointing to something else, but the embodiment of something higher which she visibly presents, something that is not present in any other way than in the concreteness of self-presentation. Like a work of art, her public persona, her imagea shows to us, “This is you!” And at the same time, “You must change your life!” If we are open to receiving what she represents, her public image as a hero enriches the world and our possibilities as human beings. Thus, we see that a portrait as imageb can illustrate vividly a person’s most visible role, and that even in the primary level of imagea, there is a possibility of this public visibility taking on the role of a kind of work of art. Yet, like the painting of the Alps, Mother Teresa as a public figure does not exhaust her self-presentation, for she also presents herself in her p ­ rivate life, shared with her community. Privacy might seem, for a human being, to allow for a more real, more intimate, more true self-presentation than the universal (and thus flattened) public image. We might think that even a hero would be really more herself with her loved ones, her ­family and friends. Can the imageb of a portrait thus bypass an imagea, and simply ­present the primary truth of this original person as she presents herself in the intimacy of her deepest relationships? For Gadamer, the answer is negative: at least if a portrait is truly to be art, it may not show a private individual. As Davey explains, paintings that have been ­commissioned as mementos of loved ones are no longer portraits in an a­ esthetic sense; these ­paintings lose their value in the presence of the beloved, a clear ­indication that they are not truly works of art possessing their own ­autonomous ­reality.102 Gadamer also observes that those who have a close personal ­relationship to the person depicted, as well as this person herself, are ­generally the worst at judging the value of a portrait as an artwork, for ­precisely because of their closeness to the original, they cannot see it in its artistic sense. Rather than these private relationships, the portrait as an ­artwork aims always at an “idealization” of this ­individual, “the ­essential, the true appearance” (wesenhafte, gültige Erscheinung) that can be ­universally recognized.103 Therefore, in the portrait, as in all art, something more comes to light, something new unseen even by one’s close relations, something that can be potentially recognized and appreciated by anyone. 102

103

Nicholas Davey, “Sitting Uncomfortably: A Hermeneutic Reflection on Portraiture,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 34.3 (2003), 233. It is worth noting that Davey also disqualifies icons from being portraits, admirably aiming to extend Gadamer’s very brief reference to iconography with the authority of Hans Belting. However, his quick sketch of icons as “merely a copy” of Christ is not nuanced enough to be of much use here. We will return to the question of icon as portrait in Chapter 5. TM 149/HW1 154.

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However, the tension between public and private disappears in a later essay, “Plato as Portraitist.” Perhaps it is because Plato’s private acquaintances are no longer around to object when Gadamer argues that a portrait lets us see a person in his εἶδος, unlike a passport photo, which is a mere copy.104 A portrait once again shows the universality of a particular person through an individual image, such that the image faithfully makes visible or recognizable the person as a whole.105 This time, those who know him will exclaim, “Yes, that is exactly who he is!” In other words, it seems at first that Gadamer has connected imageb directly to the original person, collapsing imagea. Yet if we read carefully, we will see that, first of all, Gadamer is not interested in the original persona of Plato at all, only his public image – he thus maintains the imagea as the baseline. Further, in this essay, Gadamer does not so much understand Plato anew through the work of art, but understands the work of art through a literary portrait taken from Plato’s dialogues. This not only entangles the priority of word and image but substitutes the question of a single portrait with a ­multiplicity of portraits. Perhaps a single image simply does not say enough about the mystery of a person for us to understand him as an original, in his private relations. Perhaps the best we can do in such a case is to understand a more universal type to supplement the single imageb with other traces of personhood to construct a fuller picture.106 In short, while Gadamer seems to think the example of portraits illuminates the question of representation, it is evident the issue becomes extremely complicated very quickly. At the very least, Gadamer is not completely blind to these difficulties, as he admits he has puzzled over the question for fifty years.107 These complications of portraits and the double layer of images will return in our discussion of the icon. One final note is necessary to observe before closing: Gadamer does not once acknowledge the danger of manipulation, propaganda, and lies in portraits, which is even more conspicuous since (likely following the historical tradition of portraits) he uses the statesman, not the hero, as his primary example. Such silence on the political image’s capacity to lie is startling in a person who lived through the Second World War in 104

Gadamer, “Plato as Portraitist,” trans. Jamey Findling and Snezhina Gabova, Continental Philosophy Review 33 (2000): 268/GW7 252–53. Ibid., 246/GW 7 229. 106 Gadamer discusses “types” in a religious context for the same reason, to show how art can create general patterns to allow us to better organize and recognize what is not otherwise graspable universally, TM 143/GW1 148. 107 “Plato as Portraitist,” 246/GW 7 229. 105

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Germany, under a regime infamous for its manipulative use of the image. The visual propaganda not only valorized the public images of the state, it also deeply discredited the public images of Jewish people. Images did really heighten, challenge, and change the world for Germans, but not into its truth.108 The lack of a clear critical dimension has been the most frequent challenge from Gadamer’s interlocutors.109 However, before we begin to judge the ways it can be twisted into lies, Gadamer wants to show us the world is illuminated in a new way through what is offered by the artwork. Only after this would it make any sense to speak of the perversion of this manifestation, and to discern which images are lies and which images are authentic self-showing. If we take Gadamer’s account seriously, we will find our arsenal against corrupting, manipulative, or evil images has been profoundly strengthened, for now we know that a corrupting image has a real force that is indeed far more hurtful than sticks and stones. Slander, for example, is a very real harm to our being, for it changes our image and our appearing to others, and thus forces us to change our actions: now that we are no longer trusted, we cannot behave freely and authentically, as everything we do will be interpreted according to the fault we are charged with, and thus we are bound to respond to the constant accusation against our character. Our awareness of the manipulative danger of the image is only to confess our innate awareness of its raw manifesting power.

2.4  Rich Mediation Thus, contrary to most of philosophical history, Gadamer’s phenomenological hermeneutics gives images real power: “The picture is an event of being – in it being appears, meaningfully and visibly.”110 The image becomes a new self-showing of this being, and often a particularly vivid showing that presents the original to us in a new and heightened way. This new self-showing is not strictly necessary, and does not exhaust the original once and for all, and many other new self-showings may come to contradict it or take its place. Nevertheless, if the image is the self-showing 108

109

110

See Jean-Luc Nancy’s account of this in Au fond des images; trans. Jeff Fort as The Ground of the Image (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 38ff [77ff]; see also Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, 209–225. This is the core of Jürgen Habermas’ critique of Gadamer. See Paul Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 63–100. TM 144/GW1 149.

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of the being, then the being is changed by art, having been given a new set of possibilities that both enhance and constrain its self-showing. Art thereby changes the world in which this being is rooted and we who are always entangled in it. Art and Language And yet, in the final section of Truth and Method, Gadamer makes a claim that seems to undermine all this work. Gadamer claims here, and repeats frequently elsewhere: “Sein, das verstanden werden kann, ist Sprache.” – “Being that can be understood is language.”111 It is language that seems to be the governing level of the mediation of truth. This oft-repeated equation of intelligible being and language seems at first glance to compromise the kaleidoscopic self-manifestation of phenomena in two critical ways: first by flattening all truth back into the linguistic standard which inevitably reduces art to a “weak word,”112 incapable of accounting for the exceptional case of art’s vivid self-showing. Second, it identifies Gadamer with the position of “linguistic idealism,” as Claude Romano argues, which aligns with the anti-phenomenological Kantian paradigm of a mute, raw manifold of the sensible that is only put into order by our acts of spontaneous linguistic understanding.113 The original phenomenological breakthrough, Romano argues, is to recognize that the things themselves really appear to us, that the blueness of the sky is meaningful its “natural” self-showing, and whatever scientific, mythological, linguistic, or aesthetic manners we have of grasping it are artificial, or at least secondary, interpretations of this original experience. Even though these secondary additions may illuminate the sky further, and indeed can be properly added to the array of appearances of the original thing, it must be recognized as strictly occurring after recognizing the innate order of the thing itself through immediate perception. Otherwise, Romano warns, there is no guard against relativism. To continue with an investigation regarding the truth-bearing character of images, it is necessary to respond to both of these critiques. First, in response to the latter critique of linguistic idealism, it must be noted that in a late interview Gadamer explicitly affirms the phenomenological 111

The statement is first made in TM 490/GW1 478, and echoed in PH 31, 103/GW2 242, GW8 7, etc. RB 94–96/GW8 26–29, also Schmidt, Between Word and Image, 122–23. 113 See especially Chapter 22 of Romano’s Au coeur de la raison, la phénoménologie trans. Michael B. Smith and Claude Romano as At the Heart of Reason (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015).

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significance of prelinguistic understanding.114 Elsewhere in his later writings, he affirms the phenomenological breakthrough over Kant, that things give themselves to us in essential structures, that order is not first introduced by the subject’s spontaneous acts of understanding (including formulation of linguistic concepts), but that order preexists our grasp of it. If this is the case, we can interpret the difference as one of emphasis rather than exclusion. What Gadamer wants us to understand is that, if we pay attention to the way we actually unfold given objects in our intuition over time, it always happens in conjunction with words.115 A “pure” perception is only a limit case, “an abstraction,”116 a slice of a living moment. It does not necessarily mean that our thought is fully contained or provoked by our own words, but that the course of human thinking will always be intertwined with language. While Romano rightly voices the phenomenological critique against linguistic idealism, Gadamer is more concerned to warn us of the danger of the alternate extreme: trying to entirely “free ourselves” from language would be to “free ourselves” from meaning itself, the very opening of the understanding.117 This leads us to a second point: just as Gadamer redefined the philosophical framework of art, he redefines the framework of language. Following Heidegger, Gadamer argues that language is not a product of understanding, a tool we “have,” control, or invent; if anything, language “has” us.118 To understand this, we must unsettle traditional substance-based metaphysics and its divisions of subject-object and self-other by placing them both under the same governing clearing – the event of language.119 Language is inseparable from the event of its happening, what it says, what it speaks about, and who speaks it.120 It is also inseparable from things, which language belongs to just as much as it belongs to us.121 Language is the ocean in which we swim, the currents of our culture and tradition, the 114

Gadamer and Jean Grondin. “Looking Back with Gadamer Over his Writings and their Effective History. A Dialogue with Jean Grondin.” Theory, Culture & Society 23:1 (2006): 89–92, and especially 93. 115 Gadamer, “Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Metaphysics,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 25:2 (1994): 105–106/GW10 102–103. 116 Ibid., RB 161/GW 193. 117 Ibid., 15, 68–69; TM 444/GW1 431. 118 PH 29, 62–63/GW2 240–41; 148–149; “Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Metaphysics,” 108/GW10 105. 119 “Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Metaphysics,” 109/GW10 106; PH 75/GW2 71. Gadamer compares this to metaphysical models which united subjective and objective by God’s creation of both in a perfect correspondence. 120 “Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Metaphysics,” 109/GW10 106, see also Being and Time, §2; PH 16–17, 65–66/GW2 230–31, 151–152; RB 163/GW8 194–95. 121 PH 77/GW2 73.

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opening of reality.122 Once we recognize this, it should already be clear that we have already responded to the former critique above: Gadamer’s idea of “language” is not so opposed to “image” as his words may at times appear to indicate. Indeed, “linguisticality” (Sprachlichkeit) for Gadamer is not limited to words. As medium of our understanding, Gadamer grants that language also includes gesture, art, nature, or “any language that things have.”123 “Language” thus becomes whatever illuminates a being in the event of understanding, whether it is a “natural” showing of the thing or a “fabricated” word accumulated in our tradition that has become “grafted” onto the being. We can still distinguish being and its self-presentation, but Gadamer (unhelpfully) insists “this is a distinction that is really not a distinction at all.”124 In Figal’s words, “Zugänglichkeit ist Sein, und Sein ist immer nur als zugängliches Sein zu fassen,”125 that is, “accessibility is being and being is only grasped as accessible being.” This means that the power of art’s mediation is thus not ruled out by this association of being and language, for art is language for Gadamer. But we have seen that it remains a very special kind of language; in its ­character as “work” or “structure,” it is excessive, almost sacred, a h ­ eightening of being: art is the language “that speaks to us most directly” and with the most authority.126 True art cannot be translated into anything outside itself, whether scientific concepts, historical origin, or verbal explanation, but speaks for itself, from its own light, which shines on us anew in every ­generation as both familiar and new. It is this “excess of meaning” or “­inexhaustibility” that characterizes the unique language of art.127 People often attempt to account for this excess by appealing to something o­ utside art, such as imitation, expression, and sign. All of these e­xplanations ­insinuate that the painting is a sort of “weak word.”128 Contrary to this ­linguistic reduction, Gadamer insists that the language of painting does not have to mean in the way the verbal language means, but rather, it brings forth, shows. It cannot be circumvented. 122 123

124 125 126 127 128

PH 63/GW2 149. PH 25/GW2 238–39; Gadamer and Grondin. “Looking Back with Gadamer,” 93. TM 490/GW1 478. All phenomenality is received intelligibly and sensibly, and the “logos” of the definition, as Heidegger says, the gathering of what is already organized, can allow us to a broader definition of language than words, which is yet phenomenological. TM 491/GW1 479. Figal, “Gadamer als Phänomenologue,” Phänomenologische Forschungen (2007): 97. See also Heidegger, Being and Time, 27 [28]. PH 95/GW8 1. PH 102/GW8 7–8. RB 94–96/GW8 26–29, also Schmidt, 122–23.

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Thus, the painting is an exemplary case that demonstrates to us that “reality happens precisely within language” in its broadest sense, not behind it.129 We will not find the truth by trying to go behind or before the image, but only by entangling ourselves in it, in all its verbal and non-verbal character, for it is this that “entangles us in truth.”130 For there is nothing “behind” phenomena; reality is only found by e­ ntering into this field of manifestation that appears in sometimes simple and sometimes very complicated ways.131 Gadamer thus insists mediation is no special case but the very fabric of understanding. If this is so, the very question of mediation is changed: Everything that we know is necessarily mediated. From Seashell to Sonority If we follow Gadamer’s aesthetics, an image can no longer be seen as a meager seashell, transporting a few drops of the ocean of reality to our minds. The seashell account of mediation presumes the mediating element is merely a tool, which is not the original, which can only claim to present a limited quantity of the truth of the original, and which is ultimately intervening between me and the original. It is a shoddy substitute, at best a stepping stone to what we would much better know in person. Gadamer’s account of art will require us to abandon such a crude materialist version of mediation first of all by discarding the idea that the painting would be some thing alien to the original. Being is not something behind, alongside, or against its appearing, but rather, appearing is precisely the way that being gives itself to us. The image is thus the real presentation of the original, even if it is through a different being (thus we saw the double asymmetry and double intertwining of this “ontological independence”/“ontological dependence”). Because being is what shows itself, the real and its selfshowing in another being are entangled, natively akin. And, as Gadamer observes, showing is always finite. This is true of the original, which has limitless ways of appearing but all of them limited. It is similarly true of the mediation, which adds to this a new set of appearings that enhance and build on original appearing. This means that for 129 130

131

PH 35/GW2 245. Risser, “After the Hermeneutic Turn,” Research in Phenomenology 30:1 (2000): 151; RB 92–104/GW8 24–36; 150–153/GW8 152–53; also see Schmidt’s exposition of the former essay, Between Word and Image, 117–8. Guy Deniau, Cognitio Imaginativa. La phénoménologie herméneutique de Gadamer (Paris: Vrin, 2002), 472.

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Gadamer the finitude of a mediation should not be seen as an obstacle because of its inability to capture the whole, but should be seen as a rich and unique way of presenting the original in its wholeness. In other words, finitude for Gadamer is not a merely negative characteristic, but a positive capacity, and so we must rework our metaphor. If a seashell’s limits make it a poor container for the ocean, the very same limits of the shell can excel as a chamber for resonation, as the hollow of the conch can serve to amplify and shape resonation into its characteristic velvety bellow. To lament its finitude, to wish for its limits to be erased or expanded would be in no way an improvement in the music it makes; it would be its destruction. This is true of all sounded notes, at least the analog kind; we could not find it elsewhere than as sounded through the finite limits of the resonance chamber. As soon as we accept in a positive way the limitations of mediation’s ­finitude, it is only natural we end in a variety. Great or small, each conch has its own music to make, traced by the unique contours of its shell. This is true of other instruments as well; each has its own materials, its own shape, its own capacity to resonate the sound in different ways, its own timbre. Just as we may know that the timbre of one instrument can never exhaust the possibility of others, we know that the one ­showing we see is just one way of seeing among many. There is no way to speak of an “original” music which would somehow be purer or clearer ­without being played in ­instruments, uncomplicated by irregularities of the r­ esonance chamber. If the goal of an instrument were merely to sound a pitch, all we would need is a tuning fork. Nor would we seek an ideal music ­composed ­exclusively of cellos, exclusively of didgeridoos, or (heaven f­ orbid) ­exclusively of racketts. Beautiful music comes in infinite variety and is enriched by the unique voice of each instrument, from harp to c­ rumhorn, alone or together, c­ reating the texture of a symphony. Of course, tuning forks do have their uses, as do passport photos, but the kind of ­mediation of Gadamer’s ­aesthetics is richer for its variety, and not poorer, and the ­original is ­elevated by the many different varieties of ­showing, just as a ­melody is more beautiful played by diverse ­instruments than by pitch pipes. We do not exhaust it by a single performance, or a ­second, but ­continually return to the inexhaustible possibilities of ­meaningful ­experience to be found there. Finally, as all encounters with music take place within experience and often within the context of an ensemble or orchestra, we can say that the mediation of art for Gadamer is always related to the infinite possibilities of relation that make up the world. Each part anticipates, changes, and enriches the whole. We do not ever gain this whole at once, and it may

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take work for us to learn a symbolic language of a very distant cultural world, but we nevertheless continually add on to our traditions by what new visibility makes possible. This metaphor of resonance can better illustrate the genuine achievement Gadamer brings to our investigation. Far from being an obstacle or limitation, the mediation of the image is an enhanced access to truth in its wholeness; only by dwelling on it do we understand what it is. However, if Gadamer has redeemed the meaningfulness of the image’s mediation, he has very little to offer us in terms of a specifically religious image. That is, there is nothing in his work that would help us confront the second of the blind spots we saw in Chapter 1, the problem of the visibility of God. Gadamer has very little interest in this idea. He frequently uses religious examples, and as we have seen freely refers to the sacred and the icon, not to mention the Eucharist, the Trinity and the Incarnation.132 But these religious examples are considered as a part of the fabric of our cultural and intellectual history, as we can see when he sets Christian religious examples alongside pagan ones. He is not interested in what they mean on their own terms, but how these insights can be set to work in understanding other problems, such as the truth of philosophy, language, and art. Ultimately, Gadamer does not particularly want to escape the closure of finitude. Music makes no claim to a meaning or depth that infinitely transcends it. Rather, it claims the opposite, that the surface material is a true and guaranteed access to the whole, presented always partially, presented always in a willing act of knowing, but always belonging to the whole. We have only to recall the symbolic dimensions of art, that it is a fragment of a whole it always belongs to. There remains a mystery to art, for this whole can never be itself fully visible, even though it is somehow present in this fragment. The reason for this hiddenness is the finitude of our understanding before the infinite possibilities of the whole. It is not that any one of these possibilities is as such incomprehensible to us. Any part of the whole can take place within an accessible hermeneutical horizon of understanding. To think that one could somehow come to a knowledge of the infinite whole as such, or something that transcends this horizon 132

E.g. TM 80, 436–441/GW1 93, 422–28; RB, 3–6, 35 60–61, 73, 100, 109, 132/GW8 94–96, 125–26, 298–99, 24 33, 74, 23; PH 58/GW2 132, “So True, So Full of Being,” 60, 81–82, etc. When Richard Kearney faces him with the pointed question, “Is the hermeneutic question of Being compatible with the question of God?” Gadamer sidesteps any direct answer, instead deferring the weight of it onto different historical meanings of the terms “religion,” “philosophy,” and “theology,” and mentioning how variants of this question have appeared historically. Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 189–190.

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of our finite understanding, is, for Gadamer, to radically misunderstand the nature of the human mind. As we saw with the structure of art, this finitude is not a prison, but a prism: It opens us to the infinite richness of experience that can be ever expanded.133 Because of our finite understanding, we have infinitely many ways we can see the world. Also because of finite understanding, art is one of the most critically important ways we can encounter what is, for unlike strict technical concepts, art presents us with an inexhaustible wealth of meaning to which we can continually return to enrich our world.134 Thus, Gadamer’s phenomenological explication of art expands our vision, but by rooting us within the sphere of being more deeply. He has left a few sketches of the question of aesthetics and religion,135 but it is hard to imagine what Gadamer would say about the remaining problem of the icon, the phenomenality of divinity in the face of Christ. Gadamer could certainly account for a God who belongs to the world, a God of human flesh, a God who is part of being, an ontotheology. It is more difficult to imagine how Gadamer could account for any rupture of this closed sky of finitude’s mediation. The icon claims to be the visibility of an invisible, the image of a God who does not belong within being but who is absolute from these earthly relations. This lack is not in itself a flaw; Gadamer’s primary philosophical interest simply lies elsewhere. Perhaps it is wise then to turn to someone who has indeed considered these questions at length.

133

TM 443/GW1 430. PH 102/GW8 7–8. 135 For example, he directly engages in the question of religion and art in “Aesthetic and Religious Experience,” RB 140–53/GW8 141–55. The focus here is on the word, the defining feature of Christianity filtered through a Protestant frame, which has been historically tied to its own ­troubles with images, even if Gadamer does not explicitly rule out anything himself. There are some ­intriguing points here, including a differentiation between the pagan and the Christian, which indicates Gadamer would not be hostile to the kind of project Marion is aiming at. However, its brevity makes it almost an afterthought compared to the rest of Gadamer’s corpus. 134

chapter 3

The Window

Marion’s “Icon”

What would it mean to image God, to paint in visible line and color the God beyond all form, the one who exceeds what eye has seen, what ear has heard, or what mind has even imagined? It is easy to quail before this impossible task when the question is posed so starkly, and it may cause the work of the prior chapter – enriching our understanding of the mediating character of image – to ring hollow. And yet this is precisely what the iconophiles claim, in full awareness of their audacity: If it is reasonable that we are led to the understanding of divine and immaterial things by using material images, and if God in His providence and love for mankind clothes in form and image what is without form or image for our sake, what is wrong with making perceptible images of Him who in His love for mankind stooped down to assume our form and shape?1

John Damascene, with those who uphold this tradition of icons today, boldly claims that God does show himself to us in his image. Yet, as we have seen, the icon of Christ’s incarnate human face does not solve many problems before we understand the kind of visibility the face of Christ would have. If we want to take the claim of the icon seriously on a philosophical level, we must first ask what it means for God to appear. Here once again, phenomenology will provide a way to untangle this great difficulty by bringing into play its greatest weapon: an attention to differences. If truth lies in what shows itself to us, not all things need show themselves in the same way. It would be naive to expect God to show himself in his picture the way the Alps do, or even as the hero does. How, then, does God make himself visible? While Gadamer’s aesthetics freed us from the seashell dilemma by rethinking the mediating element, elaborating the painting as a non-redundant self-showing of the real thing, Jean-Luc Marion will offer us a liberation in a different way, by 1

JD, Florilegia to Oration I, 35; PG 94, 1261b.

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rethinking precisely this special character of what is mediated, and how it might show itself to us. The first part of this chapter will show how Marion develops an answer to this question concerning the conditions of God’s phenomenality through three critical stages of his work, each linked to his use of the term “icon.” However, Marion offers still more. In a few of his writings he explores what this unique phenomenality would look like in the case of a sacred image in the tradition of Nicaea II. The second part of this chapter will thus discuss these investigations, which will illustrate all the more clearly the stakes of Marion’s position, as they lead some to conclude that he is a brazen iconoclast. While I demonstrate that a careful reading will clear Marion of this charge, his account of the icon, which resonates with a familiar Patristic spirit, will also turn out to have familiar Patristic omissions, providing a broad cosmological model of iconicity while neglecting particular possibilities.

3.1  The Phenomenality of God Early Works: Aim of the Gaze Marion’s early works, The Idol and Distance (1977) and God without Being (1982), seek to expose and divest us of our philosophical idols and clear a way for an authentic relation to God. The latter title, still his most wellknown in the English-speaking world, focuses especially on one of the greatest temptations in philosophy, constructing systems surrounding God defined as Supreme Being. This “ontotheological” approach presumes that whatever appears must obey the rules of appearing according to the horizon of metaphysics. By extension, God must also be subject to these same conditions of possibility and under the same authority as the rest of our philosophical questioning. This is true even in the work of Heidegger, who first exposes the ontotheology of metaphysics as deeply problematic, and yet still prioritizes the question of being over the question of God, thus containing questions of religion within the horizon of ontology.2 To think outside of these well-trodden paths of speaking about God, Marion recognizes, we will need a new vocabulary. He finds it by taking up the word “idol,” already in use in philosophy from Bacon to Nietzsche, 2

For a more thorough account of Marion’s debate with Heidegger, see M. E. Littlejohn and Stephanie Rumpza, “Thinking God in France: A Timeless Question and A Timely Event,” Journal of Continental Philosophy of Religion 2:2 (2020): 135–142.

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and adding to it the contrasting word “icon.” Marion does not mean here a sacred image, in particular, or even a sacred thing in contrast to a profane thing. In fact, he deliberately leaves undefined the character of the thing in question. His only condition is that both idol and icon must serve as a referent, or give “visibility” to something beyond it, which anything in principle can do.3 Thus, as Marion explains, icon and idol are not different “classes of beings” but different “manners of being” for the same beings.4 A statue, a mountain, a whisper, or a painted image of Christ could in principle serve as either an icon or an idol for someone, although not at the same time. What marks the critical difference is not in the thing but in the different modes of our reception of the “visibility” or phenomenality of the Divine. First consider the idol. In some sense, we all want to see God. In another sense, we often only really want to see a “god” who fits comfortably just at the edges of our capacity, who will dazzle us with delight, but never enough to really unsettle us. The idol is a visibility that attracts and dazzles us by seeming to have a near completeness of this vision, and a security in it. It fascinates us because we find exactly what we want to see there in full clarity; or, perhaps, just a little bit more, just enough to sweep us off our feet but without upsetting our sense of self-mastery. Either way, we are drawn to the “god” who gives us the image of what we have always wanted, and thus the idol serves as a mirror for our desire. The problem is not that the idol is strictly false. It is to some extent genuine, a “high-water mark” of the divine.5 The problem is that once we see it we stop looking elsewhere; it lulls us into a false security and we are content to rest in it. In this state, we don’t notice its limits either, which are coextensive with our limits. This, then, is the problem, framed concisely: the idol marks our greatest capacity of encountering God. Whether we carve statues to try to represent that experience or forge concepts, the problem is that it is exclusively framed from our aim, bound to our capacities. And our capacities are finite. However lovely this idol may be, it will not in the end be God. The icon, on the other hand, does not attempt to collapse God into ­visibility, but tries to preserve the invisibility that would be a necessary result for something which surpasses my comprehension or control. While the idol attracts the gaze to fixate on it, the icon is not a resting place for the 3

4 5

Husserl explains how ordinary things can gain referential function by convention or experience. Logische Unterschungen I. Hua XIX, trans. J. N Findlay as Logical Investigations vol. 1 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), §2. Note that for Marion, as elsewhere in phenomenology, “visibility” is a shortcut to mean “phenomenality” of any kind. GWB 8/DSE 16. GWB 13–14/DSE 22–23.

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gaze, but constantly urges us to move beyond it. “In this sense, the icon makes visible only by giving rise to an infinite gaze.”6 We could do no more than pure apophasis if it were left up to metaphysical categories, Marion tells us, but in fact it is not really a question here of the self-showing of a captive divine οὐσία, or substance, mute like the stone statue before the domination of our gaze. God’s phenomenality would have to be a question of personal relationality, of ὑπόστασις.7 Levinas has given a phenomenological precedent for talking about the structure of such relation, the gaze of the Other which comes from beyond my sovereign center of possibility, and which can never be absorbed into it.8 Marion adapts this in his consideration of what it would mean to try to “see” God: instead of my gaze going out to search for the invisible God in a visible referent, before the icon I must recognize myself as gazed upon from a center I do not own or possess, which is always already gazing upon me. Thus, we see Marion’s motivation in choosing the term “icon”: as we will discuss in Chapter 4, one of the central features of the traditional painted icon is that it always shows someone gazing upon us. The key to seeing something as an icon is to bring ourselves to awareness of this perpetual divine gaze, and thus Marion says, “The icon does not result from a vision but provokes one.”9 Only once we recognize this relationality can we talk about the visibility of the invisible, escaping from the dialectic of iconoclastic apophasis and idolatrous kataphasis. Whereas the idol hides the invisibility by seeming to make all revealed, the icon lets both grow together: the more visible the icon becomes, the more the invisible is manifest, similar to the way that the more that I come to know the other person, the less I think I can so easily understand him or pin him down.10 Marion by this point has already extensively discussed this relation of unity of visible and invisible as “distance,” a concept he takes up from Hans Urs von Balthasar.11 The Idol and Distance distinguishes this relation from other contemporary configurations that seek to unite the invisible and visible, including Heidegger’s  ontological 6

GWB 18/DSE 30. Ibid. See John Panteleimon Manoussakis, God after Metaphysics: A Theological Aesthetics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 20ff. 8 Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité, trans. Alphonso Lingis as Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 2011). 9 GWB 17/DSE 28. 10 GWB 23–24/DSE 36–38. 11 See especially Balthasar’s chapter “Denys” from Herrlichkeit II:I, trans. Andrew Louth, Francis McDonagh, Brian McNeil C. R. V. as Glory of the Lord, Vol. II:I: Clerical Styles (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1984), 144–204. 7

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difference, Levinas’ Otherness, and Derrida’s différance.12 What marks distance as unique is that it operates through love, which alone can dispossess itself enough to tolerate the invisible in the visible. This is the condition for a genuine communion, which does not collapse the Other into my visibility or dissolve me into the Other. Following Dionysian mystical t­heology, Marion will further claim that the discourse appropriate to love is not found in positive or negative propositions, but the “eminent way” of hyperbolic praise, a language which is not for securing metaphysical possession, but letting be in loving dispossession, in giving.13 One final point. Marion observes that the idol is like my mirror, for like the focal point of a lens, it reveals my capacity of vision by showing the “God” I am capable of aiming at. The icon, too, results in a mirror reflecting a gaze, but in the logic of reversal, we who are gazed upon are now the mirror. The more we open ourselves to this gaze, the more we reflect the One who gazes upon us, the more we are transfigured by his glory. The more we truly receive the gaze of God in the icon, the more we end by becoming ourselves icons of this Divine gaze.14 While this point is asserted more than proven here, experience can confirm this power of being gazed upon: a look of withering dismissal, of sexual objectification, of an affectionate smile, all have a power to change us. While Marion uses a brief reference to the painted icon to make his point, he has also deflated its significance, for it is clear that anything could serve as icon, and just the same it could become an idol. There is one thing that must be recognized as a reliable icon, and this involves a turn to theology. As we saw for the Patristic iconophiles, the true “icon” of God is Jesus Christ (Col 1:15). For in this human flesh we have touched, in the face of this man we have seen, we have the phenomenality of the invisible God.15 Thus, in God without Being, Marion has set up the structures of idol and icon as a way to pose the question of God’s appearing, but while he proceeds to critique the idolatries of philosophy in a philosophical way, he will ultimately turn to theology in the Hors-Texte of the book to trace a path beyond idolatry in love and praise, as he does in The Idol and Distance. The next phase of his work would find a way to discuss this 12 13

14 15

ID/IeD §17–18. ID 162/IeD 207; see “The Name, or How to Avoid Speaking it” where Marion more explicitly discusses his interpretation of Dionysius’ third way as praise in contradistinction with mere positive or negative theology. GWB 21–22/DSE 34–35. I will return to this theme in Section 7.4. GWB 24/DSE 37 (echoing 1 Jn 1:1).

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question differently; no longer immediately reaching for the theological themes of love and distance, but instead following a rigorously phenomenological approach. Phenomenological Works: Saturated Phenomena This second phase of Marion’s work relating to the “idol” and “icon” begins when Marion’s historical research in Reduction and Givenness (1989) is explored and deepened through Being Given (1997), a work which attempts to expand the very definition of phenomenality. As Marion argues, phenomenology has always aimed at “the universality of original selfgivenness”; this was Husserl’s great breakthrough.16 Heidegger, similarly, calls “givenness” the “magic word (Zauberwort) of phenomenology.”17 But Marion will argue that phenomenology has not often been radical enough to really achieve this aim, and that it has not truly faced what givenness means. Husserl’s phenomenology first considered things as objects before my coolly collected transcendental ego. Heidegger broadened the scope of phenomenology, in speaking of being that is in question for me, who am no longer transcendental subject but a Dasein who finds myself already entangled with the world and hiding from the inevitability of my death; or later, the “Open” into which the things “stand out.” However, in both these cases, the scope of phenomenological analysis is predetermined in advance according to particular construals of my rational limits, whether formal ontology, with its governing concepts of “object,” or the scope of ontological difference and its emphasis on “being,” both of which are given by me.18 For Marion, this is not radical enough to the mission of letting things show themselves from themselves. Instead, we need to clear away all prior conditions to allow what appears for me to do so on first and foremost from its own authority.19 It is this voice of the things from themselves that phenomenology has called “givenness” (Gegebenheit). It is not necessarily easy to sort out phenomena as they give themselves on their own initiative from what is imported from our preconceptions or assumptions. 16

17

18 19

Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaftern und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie, Hua. VI, trans. David Carr as The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), §68, translation modified following Marion. Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1919/20), GA 24, 58, §1, 5; cited by Marion in BG 331 n23 / ED 31 n1, followed by further textual evidence for this idea in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Emmanuel Levinas, BG 331 n23/ED 31–32 n1. BG/ED §3. BG 10/ED 15–16.

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This is precisely the function of the “reduction” for Marion, which “leads scattered, potential, confused, and uncertain visibles” to givenness, according to the degrees of their phenomenality, “so as to establish [their] right to appear or not”20 according to the sole authority of their givenness. Thus he formulates a new principle of phenomenology: “[t]he more reduction, the more givenness.”21 One of the critical results of this shift is that we are now free to consider the phenomenality of things that Husserl and Heidegger, with their predetermined frames of objects or being, either ignored or ruled out. Since the Copernican revolution of philosophy, where my standards mark the upper limit, philosophy has spoken of two key possibilities for what appears, based on the joining of what shows itself according to my intention, concept, or signification, and the degrees to which it gives itself to me in person.22 (1) Phenomena poor in intuition: where the given perfectly fulfills my intention of it. This is a rare case, found perhaps in logic or mathematics, where only simple, formal intuition is needed to confirm the concept. (2) Common law phenomena: where the given intuition is rarely, if ever, adequate to fulfill my intention of it, and my intention compensates for this shortage of intuition. This broad category fits objects of all kinds and most of our everyday ways of interacting with the world. Both “poor” and “common law phenomena” turn on whether the intuition has adequately fulfilled my intention. But by dropping my standards as the critical measuring rod, Marion recognizes a new possibility: (3) that what is given may so exceed the signification or intention I have of it that I cannot grasp it clearly and distinctly. This is what Marion calls a “saturated phenomenon.” We do not see saturated phenomena clearly, but this does not mean we see nothing. It means rather that we see nothing objective, that we experience phenomena that appear even though they are a contradiction of the possibility of objects as defined by the conditions of my transcendental ego, what Marion calls a paradox, or counter-experience. And what are these conditions? Philosophy has a traditional answer. According to Kant’s transformation of Aristotle, reaffirmed by Husserl, there are four key categories that make up the conditions of possibility for our experience: quantity, quality, relation, modality. Saturation thus is what we experience when these very rules are turned back by what is given, leaving us with four basic kinds of saturation: the event, the idol, the flesh, and the icon. 20 21 22

BG 15/ED 26. BG 14/ED 23. BG/ED §23.

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To understand this more concretely, let us focus just on the two structures of saturation most relevant to our inquiry. The “idol” and the “icon” are not used with the same meaning as in Marion’s early work. Yet they are not entirely unrelated, either, for they once again indicate a point of view organized by me as a finite subject (idol) and the point of view as organized from the Other outside me (icon).23 The idol here is no longer a closed concept of God, but any visible that bedazzles my gaze with its intensity.24 Marion uses the painting as an exemplary instance of this. Unlike most of the objects I might glance at in a room, which are quickly synthesized and thus ignored, the painting keeps attracting me to it again and again, as I formulate ever new concepts to confront it.25 The idol in one sense maintains its status as a mirror, for the fact of bedazzlement still plays at the limits of my desire, and thus is individuating me.26 Yet if the “idol” maximally attracts my gaze it is not therefore under my power. It gives itself from itself, whether I am ready or not, and it is only to the extent that I am willing to welcome its appearing from its own terms (and not mine) that I am able to receive it fully. This is what Marion terms “anamorphosis.” As in Hans Holbein’s The Two Ambassadors, an anamorphic painting uses perspective cues to direct the viewer to physically move around the room until he stands in the 23

24 25 26

This change in terminology can admittedly lead to confusion, first of all within Marion. Not only does the “idol” take on different meanings throughout his work, but many readers use the term “idol” to make incorrect assumptions about his meaning of “icon,” and interpret it as a special kind of visible image, failing to recognize that Marion’s use of this word relates to an interpersonal gaze (see my discussion in 4.4). The terminology also can be a source of difficulty when bringing Marion into dialogue with other thinkers. For example, Jenny Slatman’s chapter entitled “The Phenomenology of the Icon,” Merleau-Ponty and the Possibilities of Philosophy: Transforming the Tradition, ed. Bernard Flynn, et al., 197–219 (New York: State University of New York Press, 2009), uses Marion’s work in CV to flesh out Merleau-Ponty’s uses of the words “icon” and “idol.” But what Slatman ultimately identifies as an “icon” would be more properly identified with the aesthetic phenomenon that Marion, from his middle work, calls an “idol,” and what Slatman calls an “idol” would be, if anything, close to the “idol” in Marion’s early work. Nothing in her chapter is comparable to the “icon” in Marion’s sense, which would involve the vertical and interpersonal dimensions introduced by the gaze of the other. Slatman’s intention here is not to discuss Marion or the Byzantine tradition, but Merleau-Ponty, who is indeed using this language at the aesthetic level alone, and she is not wrong to do so. Yet it is important for readers to recognize that this vocabulary taken from Marion is not an accurate description of what Marion means by these terms. Thus, whenever reading Marion or engagements with his work that discuss “icons” and “idols,” careful attention is required. BG 229–231/ED 376–78; IE 54–81/DS 65–98. VR, 128/VeR 158, IE 71–72/DS 84–85. The concept of saturation has finally allowed Marion to fracture into two the uneasy oscillation of the idol in God without Being, which at one moment offers the complete clarity of my metaphysical control and at the next sweeps me off my feet by giving me my deepest desires. Now the former is relegated to the “poor” or “common law phenomena” and the latter is a case of saturation that Marion can explore more thoroughly.

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single spot where the strange elongated form on the canvas coalesces into a skull.27 Every saturated phenomenon can be characterized as possessing a similar structure: it directs us toward its maximum point of manifestation. This is true even for the idol. If my limits are not aligned with what gives itself in the idol, I will not be bedazzled, or struck by its saturation. It may be that I need to learn, change, or grow in order to receive what gives itself as it gives itself, to receive it as saturated. The icon, as before, concerns something other than my organizing viewpoint.28 While not strictly the Divine’s taking measure of me, the icon is once again used for cases where the transcendental ego is overturned by a reversal of initiative: when I look at the other, I find him gazing back at me.29 However, for Marion, this reversal is not pure and symmetrical inversion, a dominating subject becoming dominated object as we find in Jean-Paul Sartre, which still operates on the plane of objectivity defined by me and my limits.30 Following Levinas, Marion holds that my initiative as subject is inverted not into object but into the dative, the one addressed, the one who receives the gaze from the other.31 This is obviously not to say that faces have no visibility to see, but that the kind of visibility that is most distinctive to them as persons will never be like that of an object. We all feel the sudden pulse of energy upon discovering that we have not, in fact, been alone in a room. For we can glance over the inanimate objects that surround us with a certain degree of mastery and control, but when we come across the gaze of another person, we find someone measuring us up right back. We wince to stare into another’s eyes too long; it’s too powerful, like looking into the sun. Only lovers can bear it without being beaten back.32 As in the painted icon where I am not the aesthetic subject viewing an art object, but one subjected to the gaze of the holy, so the face of the other is an “icon” as a saturated phenomenon. Saturated phenomena are not rare. If Marion began with strong examples, like being stunned to the point of speechlessness, he soon showed

27 28 29 30

31 32

The National Gallery, London, NG1314. BG 232–233/ED 380–83; IE 104–127/DS 125–153. See also IE 113–119/DS 136–143; VR 75/VeR 11–12. For Sartre this inversion of the intentionality of the gaze renders me the object, not the dative, of the other. L’être et le néant trans. Hazel E. Barnes as Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), 345, 386 [296, 330]. IE 56–61/DS 68–73. “L’intentionalité de l’amour,” in Prolégomènes à la charité, trans. Stephen Lewis as “The Intentionality of Love” in Prolegomena to Charity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 71–101 [89–120].

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how the logic of saturation extended to things that are very common, even banal.33 That is, it is not that we necessarily experience saturated phenomena frequently, but that anything, in principle, could be experienced as saturated. From aesthetic experience to events to the feeling of joy or pain to the relations we have with other people, we live our life amidst saturated phenomena. In fact, most things, even the most simple, allow for a “doubled interpretation” which allows us to pass from the relation of simple objects to the relation of saturation.34 Even our more “objective” or “ordinary” experiences could be merely a covering over of the things that we are only sometimes receptive enough to bear in their fuller givenness.35 Whether icon or idol, and whether majestic or banal, one thing is certain: with the advent of the saturated phenomenon I no longer rule over my kingdom of objects. Constantly trying to catch up to things that exceed, delight, frighten, and confuse me, the transcendental ego itself must then admit itself to be first an “ego” affected; a dative of manifestation rather than a sovereign subject; a “prism” or “filter” through which things can come to appearing, more truly than a cogito annexing the visible from its impenetrable interior fortress.36 When objects are set loose from ulterior authorities, I discover that I am as well; I can be numbered among those givens that exceed my objective grasp, for I am truly a mystery to myself.37 Under the reduction to givenness, the ego “receives itself entirely from what it receives,”38 and Marion signals this transformation with a new term, the “gifted” (“adonné”), that is, one permanently in debt to what he receives, beginning at the level of his very self. To better explain the paradoxical structure that runs through the experience of saturation, where the relation precedes the individual and where the receiver receives himself from what he receives, Marion takes up the structure of “call” and “response” developed by Jean-Louis Chrétien.39 A call may be 33

34 35 36 37 38 39

This is the driving force of IE, which appeared in 2001, four years after BG, as well as “Banality of Saturation,” a 2004 keynote address published in Counter-Experiences as well as in VR 119–144/VeR 143–182; Christina M. Gschwandtner elaborates on further possibilities of this idea as well in Degrees of Givenness: On Saturation in Jean-Luc Marion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). VR 126/VeR 156. VR, 125/VeR 154. BG 264/ED 430. BG 262, 266/ED 426–27, 432; see also EP/PE ch 1; PS/LS, especially ch 2. BG, 268/ED 436. Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis as Otherwise Then Being, or Beyond Essence (Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 1998); Jean-Louis Chrétien, L’appel et la réponse, trans. Anne Davenport as  The Call and the Response (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), which Marion discusses beginning in BG §28, and elaborates throughout the rest of the chapter.

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temporally prior to my reaction to it, but its horizon of phenomenality is only opened by my response to it, whether to reject or accept it. A shouted name is just a noise until I turn around, or keep walking away. In short, by responding, I take a call as given for me, and thus make it visible by my belated turning to it, or away from it. Only my response will make the call visible as a call. Thus, despite a common concern that Marion has left the “adonné” powerless or passive, receiving the truth is a very active affair.40 The way we respond makes a dramatic difference on what will appear for us, whether we receive three blocks of colors or the full effect of a Rothko painting.41 It may be a possibility opened only by practice or training, culture or history, and it usually takes “attentiveness, discernment, time, and hermeneutics.”42 It is also a matter of character. For Marion reminds us of something that bloodless philosophers tend to forget: that visibility, truth, and light, is not the bottom line for human beings, but an invitation that always awaits our response, our desire to see it, or not. Saturation can be experienced as a disorienting ordeal, a painful challenge insofar as it accuses me in my limits to bear it.43 This is the other side of the looking glass so to speak: if our idols can tell us who we are, saturation will also tell us where we fall short. Augustine explains this eloquently in a passage Marion cites throughout his work: People love truth in such a way that those who love something else wish to regard what they love as truth and, since they would not want to be deceived, are unwilling to be convinced that they are wrong. They are thus led into hatred of truth for the sake of that very thing which they love under the guise of truth. They love truth when it enlightens them [lucens], but hate it when it accuses them [redarguens].44

Excess lays bare our limits, and before it we can no longer pretend to be neutral transcendental egos. Instead of judging truth, it judges us, like a spotlight revealing our every flaw and wrinkle, finding us inadequate to measure or master it. This situation is deeply painful for those who desire the truth, who desire to live in it. We can instead return to confirm our egos and our safe world of objectivity, ignoring or minimizing as best we can these paradoxical experiences; this has been a tactic of metaphysics. Or we can renounce the darkness in us, and accept an identity that involves turning toward the truth and away from the old parameters of our safe and certain identity. This will may feel like a great violence, for it goes against who we 40 41 42 43 44

BG, 304–308/ED 495–501. VR 128/VeR 158; BG 350n5/ED 203 n1. VR 136/VeR 170; RD 95; VR 124–126/VeR 154–156. VR, 139–141/VeR 175–76; SP/LS ch 3, esp §19. The Confessions X, 23, 34, trans. Maria Boulding, O.S. B. (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997).

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thought we were. At minimum it requires the courage to “resist” or brace ourselves before what threatens us and choose the truth over the stability of our egos.45 At times, Marion suggests, only love can really bear it. Only the selfless love Christians call “charity” can detach us from ourselves enough to cling to the truth of this light instead of clinging to the safety and comfort of our darkness. It is love, after all, which allows for a relation with the other to be more important than the absorption into same. In sum, we see that “icon” and “idol” are used in a different way in Marion’s phenomenological work than in God without Being, but we can nevertheless see several consistent points. From the beginning, Marion keeps a strong distinction between the point of view organized by me as a finite subject (idol) and the point of view as organized from the Other outside me (icon). From the beginning Marion also implicitly recognizes the difference between an object, which is nestled comfortably within the limits of our subjective mastery and thus neutralizes a reality which exceeds our grasp, and an idol, which maximally dazzles us by playing just beyond these subjective limits, yet still revealing where those individual limits might be. Neither will be sufficient on its own to describe the way that God shows himself to us. Marion has recognized that particularly in these paradoxical cases, idol as well as icon, to see is not a guaranteed process, but requires our willingness to see and to endure what we may not be able see easily or clearly. It will require our transformation. The Icon and Revelation We cannot expect human reason on its own devices to know God; Marion is consistent on this point. But we can’t anesthetize it from God’s revelation either, and by that very same logic. By broadening the field of phenomenality in Being Given, Marion has opened up a place to speak about the possibility of the Revelation of God which would not turn immediately to theology for answers, as in God without Being, but also would not be immediately metaphysical, nor disqualified under philosophical idolatries of Husserlian objectivity or Heideggerian being. God’s entry into phenomenality would not fall under the rules of the appearing of objects for our comprehension, so we should naturally expect this appearing to manifest itself as a saturated phenomenon. Being Given says little on this point directly, but §24 provides a brief sketch that refrains from taking a creedal, and thus theological, stance 45

VR 140–141/VeR 176–77.

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on the actuality of Revelation, but instead attempts to lay out its possibility. Marion frames his comments under the logical alternative we must make when it comes to understanding what it would mean to experience a Revelation or self-communication of God, which repeats in an intensified way the pattern we already saw with givenness: (1) we can disfigure it by fitting God within the preexisting framework of our objective rationality; or, (2) we can consent to “disfigure” or break open the limitations of rationality, allowing the Revelation of God to change the conditions of manifestation and thus allow for the possibility of what for us is impossible.46 Marion, having by now established a philosophical precedent of placing priority on the given and not the rules we bring to it, will of course choose the latter. If it would be possible for God to appear in the world, he would surpass every possible limit we have, and thus this phenomenality would be structured as the saturation of all of our categories. Christ would be the paradigm for such a case: an unforeseeable event, unbearable to the gaze, escaping ordinary spatiotemporal relations in his flesh, and irregardable except through accepting his prior call to me to be his disciple. What else would we expect of God becoming man, after all, except that he subvert our expectations in ways that we would not be able to predict according to standards we built to describe well-behaved objects? Would he be worthy of being called a God if he did anything less? Before this extraordinary phenomenon, one can also assume that our reception must take on a special character, that the displacement of the subject would be maximally heightened before the maximum saturated phenomenon of God, although Marion does not elaborate upon this here. Marion’s brief comments on the phenomenality of God in Being Given are still a philosophical matter, one that remains in the realm of possibility. His 2014 Gifford Lectures, published as Givenness and Revelation (2016), gave an initial sketch of a new phase of thought which has culminated in D’ailleurs, la Révélation (2020), which now develops his phenomenological insights through an openly theological stance.47 This extensive and rich study has much to offer, but what is most critical to our purposes here is that in this work Marion raises explicitly the question that was never clearly resolved in the iconoclastic controversy: what does it mean to see the face of the God made man in the flesh? What kind of visibility would Christ have? Drawing from the New Testament, Marion argues that when 46 47

BG 234/ED 383–84. As the English translation of D’ailleurs, la Révélation is not yet available, I will cite the shorter English draft, Givenness and Revelation, then refer to related passages in the final French text.

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confronted with Christ, there is no middle ground between the two possible stances we just saw, which Marion lays out more clearly, and more starkly, than before. (1) We can see from the point of view of the world, organizing the visible according to our finite activity and receptivity. While crowds of people saw the face of Christ, while they had all the same information and heard all the same parables, they nevertheless were unable to see him as anything more than a perplexing man or an intriguing one, annoying, perhaps inspiring, or blasphemous. No one from this worldly point of view can know God, but will remain in the “prison of his organization of the visible, which is not only finite, but above all closed.”48 However elaborate our hermeneutic strategy, however learned our scholarship or however aesthetically rich our images, any approach to God that begins from a finite, anthropocentric view is unable to escape idolatry. But if we do not have to play ventriloquist for a voiceless experience, neither do we have to play ventriloquist for a voiceless God. For (2) we can see from the point of view God has of himself, the only point of view that can do justice to God. Only from this stance could we recognize the face of Jesus as the Christ promised to Israel, and also as the true Icon of the Father. As this is completely beyond the farthest reach of our finitude, it would require a “complete anamorphosis,” following a new horizon that must be given to us from beyond our native abilities.49 Marion will fill in what this means for the believer by tracing out the Trinitarian dimensions of the “icon,” following Basil in On the Holy Spirit.50 An icon, from the phenomenological point of view, implies a visible with a “double effect,” showing itself but also something beyond itself, something that would be otherwise invisible.51 The visibility that the icon lends to this invisible is not based on likeness, for “between the visible and the invisible there is no continuity, image, or resemblance.”52 We will not see Christ’s identity as the Son of the Father beginning from his visible features or human actions. To see him as such, to recognize the double visible, we need more than hermeneutics; we need “grace, which is to say, to have at the same time the gift, the art, and the secret of taking it into view.”53 This is strictly 48 49

50 51 52 53

GR 108, AR §2, §13–14. GR, 83; AR unfolds this anamorphosis through extensive scriptural analysis, through the epistles of Paul in §12, especially 308–9, 323–25; in the Synoptics in §13, notably 358–64; and in the Gospel of John, §14, especially 384–86. GR, 101–107; AR §17, which develops at length some of his earlier insights in GWB and CV. GR, 102–103; AR 480; see also GWB 8–9/DSE 15–16. GR, 86; AR 400–401. GR 113, AR 485; see also SP 318 n4/LS 33 n1.

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impossible from the human alone. God, however, is not bound to our possibilities. The hermeneutics of rightly “seeing-as,” to see the “icon as such,” is given by God the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is none other than the Gift of Love54 that alone can open the field of phenomenality in which Christ gives himself to be seen as God, that is, to be seen as Love.55 If God’s Revelation is not available to the merely anthropocentric accomplishment of our hermeneutic understanding, this does not mean it is passive imposition upon a passive screen of an ego. “Revelation manifests God insofar as he gives himself. But, in giving himself, God thus manifests himself, he takes on the flesh of a phenomenon and requires that we receive it. Whence comes the question”: “Who do you say that I am?” (Mt 15:16).56 To receive this vision, it must be given, but we also must accept to hear this call, which means to be able to bear it and allow ourselves to be transformed by it. Only those who have accepted the gift of the eyes to see it, who choose to love, can bear what is presented. And he who does not chose to love, or praise, will be “by that very refusal be blocked from understanding.” This results in what Marion suggests is indeed a “hermeneutic” difficulty, but of a very unique variety, for it arises from a “spiritual refusal.”57 To refuse the invitation is to remain blind. We see a theological and phenomenological tightening here of the questions raised by Marion in his earliest texts. God does manifest himself; he does show up for the world of phenomenality. But God’s manner of phenomenality, Revelation (ἀποκάλυψις), has its own proper way of showing itself, which is not the same as the objective way of self-showing of worldly things (ἀληθεία).58 To see him requires we receive the right kind of hermeneutic, if we decide to receive it; the gift of the Holy Spirit places us at the anamorphic point which allows us to see the invisible Father in the human face of Jesus, which we now can recognize as that of the Son. As the driving force of my investigation seeks answers at a more elemental philosophical level, I will set aside Marion’s deeper development of these Trinitarian 54 55 56 57 58

GR, 108. AR 485–87. See also “The Impossible for Man – God” in Transcendence and Beyond, eds. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 17–43. GR, 80, 105; AR 473–77. GR 117. SP 14/LS 32; Ch 3, esp §19; see also AR 303–305; Steinbock, Phenomenology and Mysticism, 36–38. GR, 45, 60; a fuller development of these terms can be found in AR §1 and especially §10. While Marion is focused on Divine Revelation in this recent work, the term “ἀποκάλυπψις,” which Marion translates literally as “uncovering” (découvrement), can also be a way that things of the world are revealed, such as saturated phenomena. Marion nevertheless maintains a distinction between “revelation” of the world and the “Revelation” that is God himself, as he does in BG 242/ED 396–97.

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dimensions of the icon in what follows. This is not to dismiss their importance or their relevance to a full theology of the icon, but to insist such an examination be left the full space and expertise it merits. However, it is worth noting that Marion’s reading of Basil here perfectly reflects a theological maxim repeated among Ouspensky’s students: that the best iconography of the Trinity is not the famous “Hospitality of Abraham” by Andrei Rublev, but any icon of Christ. For in Christ we see the Father, through the vision given by the Holy Spirit.59 Divine Phenomenality as a “Philosophical” Icon By way of summary, we can see that Marion has thus raised the problematic of the phenomenality of God throughout his work. In his early writings, he argues that God’s self-showing would be impossible within the limits of narrow philosophical reason, whether under the sway of metaphysics or fundamental ontology. Then, in his phenomenological work, he proceeds to reconsider the conditions of phenomenality as such, which opens a non-idolatrous way of speaking about the appearing of things, one in which we must decide whether or not to see what surpasses our control and comprehension. This allows us to claim that phenomenality as such bears a structural similarity to the question of the manifestation of God; it “rhymes” with Revelation.60 Now instead of natural appearances giving us mere carnal sensations masking the spiritual invisibles (as iconologists feared), we have a world of visibility open to the mystery of its contingency, for those of us who have agreed to abandon our narrow rational limits as the anchor of all reality. By dissolving this duality, and divesting ourselves of our stance of mastery, Marion suggests we can clear a way to describing the extraordinariness of phenomenality in general. The givenness, receptivity, openness, self-dispossession required to bear saturation is not necessarily love in its fullest flourishing. But it would be short-sighted to say that it does not bear the seeds of loving, or that loving does not lead us there more deeply and fully. The givenness of the world is not yet the phenomenality of God, but it opens the door. By restructuring the sovereign subject as a dative who is open to a call from beyond him, Marion clears the way for the appearing of God in a way that confounds one’s grasp. While Marion does not deny 59 60

I thank Grégoire Aslanoff for bringing this to my attention. GR 117; admittedly, this is not an exact translation of Marion’s (unpublished) French, where the decision to accept the anamorphosis of Revelation “retrouve” – rendered here “rhymes with” – “the fundamental phenomenal structure of the event and of every phenomenon.” The insight is nevertheless apt.

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the importance of hermeneutics and imagination (and certainly his own work is a virtuoso display of both), he insists that these efforts would be in vain if not grounded in a prior gift of what we could never ourselves accomplish. The hermeneutic that would recognize God’s self-revelation in phenomenality can only be given as a gift of personal relation from an absolute elsewhere, a gift that is only manifest in our response to accept or reject it. This is something philosophy can neither confirm nor deny. But it is also a decision that no philosopher can escape from. It is a question of life or death, posed to each person. Only in our answer, only in a response of faith, a response to commit to love rather than hate the truth that challenges us, could we begin see. Does Marion then rule out mediation for the case of God? It sometimes seems so. If God always comes from elsewhere, from a new horizon, we well might well wonder how Marion could allow God to be “mediated” through a painted image. Even in Marion’s explicit writing on the religious icon, this question is not so easy to answer.

3.2  The Painted Icon Appearing shortly after the beginning of his phenomenological deepening, Marion’s The Crossing of The Visible is a series of essays concerning art, including two which explicitly engage with the icon as a sacred image.61 Marion grants as a starting point the definition of John Damascene that icons are “types of that which has no type and figures of what is most without figures” (τῶν ἀτυπώτων οἱ τύποι, καὶ τὰ σχήματα τῶν ἀσχηματίστων).62 An icon is an image that claims to reveal the truth of Christ. The key question for Marion is: how? In what manner is this relation to a mysterious prototype accomplished? Mimesis vs. Fidelity The most obvious and common answer is that this connection occurs in likeness, mimesis; the icon is linked to its prototype as a copy of the visible appearance of Christ. Marion rejects this mimetic formulation. For, he 61

62

This book was published in French in 1991, but it gathers essays reprinted on prior occasions. Sketches of work on painted icons are also found much earlier, for example “Fragments sur l’idole et l’icône,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 84:4 (1979): 433–445. Marion’s more recent “Seeing, or Seeing Oneself Seen,” already mentioned above, again considers the sacred image in relation to the icon, this time as it is spoken of by Nicholas of Cusa in his De visione Dei. JD I.11; PG 94, 1241b.

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argues, this will result in an immediate logic of competition between original or image. Suppose we place the weight on the original over the image that refers to it. This is the approach of dogmatic metaphysics of Plato and Hegel, claims Marion, who each state in their own ways that artworks are only temporary mediating filters between the mind and intelligible being.63 The image may continue to retain importance, despite this, as a “concession” to our “weakness” as sensible creatures, but these terms indicate that the mediation bears an ineradicable trace of iconoclasm: whatever is possible for us now, it would be better to get beyond the image to have the invisible intelligible more directly. Or, we may instead prioritize the type over the prototype. In the tradition of nihilism described by Nietzsche, the image outshines and distracts from whatever original it aims at to the point that there need be no original at all. While metaphysics at least understood the negated image to be dependent on an inaccessible transcendent origin, here the image is linked to nothing except the spectator who sees it.64 With an eye to the entertainment industry, Marion observes that when the image is solely governed by the conditions of our reception of it, these conditions, too, guide the production of images. Without any transcendental truth to point to, the only function of images is to please us, to satisfy our desire to see. The path of prioritizing image over original thus leads directly to “self-idolatry.” After a study of Gadamer, we must immediately take issue with these two extreme and polarized views of art. Gadamer’s aesthetics clearly offers us a third option where the mimetic image is not simply an object competing with its original, but an appearing which becomes part of the truth of the phenomenon’s self-showing. The original is not eclipsed but enriched in this complex interplay of manifestation. Why, then, does Marion waste his time with such extreme straw-man positions? In fact, Marion does articulate a position very close to Gadamer’s in his book on Gustave Courbet (1817–1877), the realist painter who broke the conventions of the Romantics and thereby opened the way for impressionism. In his discussion of Courbet’s work, Marion argues that painting can in fact increase the visibility and thus the reality of the original without any rivalry.65 In contrast to the Salon artists, who painted fanciful scenes from their subjective imagination, the realism of Courbet and Cézanne is thoroughly grounded in attention to the given, which leads Marion to call such 63 64 65

CV 80/CdV 142–43. CV 81/CdV 143. CP 24–25, 44, etc.

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paintings “ἀχειροποίητα,” or unmade by human hands, a word usually reserved for icons miraculous in origin.66 Is this 2014 book an invitation to rethink his claims on religious art from the late 1980s and 1990s and recast painting as able to give a mimetic representation of Christ? The answer is a definitive no. First, drawing from the more abstract aesthetics in Marion’s middle work on saturation, we can affirm that despite its cynicism, the nihilistic approach to mimesis in fact recognizes something that Gadamer’s phenomenological aesthetics also affirms: the relation of the painting and its original is essentially linked to the one who takes it up. And whoever takes it up has only a finite intentionality, or conceptual aim.67 It is the perfect example of what Marion phenomenologically defines an “idol”: the effectiveness of the mimetic image is only as good as the measure of the viewer’s understanding, the limits of her desire. (“Name your idol, you will know who you are.”68) Even if we bypass the straw-man account of mimesis, to define the icon by what appears still means we define it against the reach of our gaze and the scope of our desire, this yielding only a mirror image of our finite selves. This is not to say images have no worth. They may help us to see the truth of the world more clearly and even understand ourselves. Yet the icon aims at something quite different: its prototype is the invisible, incomprehensible, uncircumscribable God.69 This requires a much more radical approach: we must completely abandon this system of reference, or “release the icon from the logic of the image” altogether.70 A second reason furthers this point. Marion proceeds to explicitly disqualify the painting from serving as “icon” for this reason: “What is missing is not so much the glory of God (which bathes painted creation) nor that 66 67

68 69

70

Ibid., 197. I discuss these icons in Section 6.3. Most notably in CV, BG, and “What We See and What Appears,” trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner, in Idol Anxiety, ed. Josh Ellenbogen and Aaron Tugendhaft (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 152–68. IE 61/DS 73. There is much more to say here about Marion’s particular ideas on aesthetics, and how the visible image relates to different levels of “invisibility,” but my interest is strictly in the kind of image that can serve as an icon; for more discussion on these questions see Peter Joseph Fritz, “Black Holes and Revelations: Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion on the Aesthetics of the Invisible,” Modern Theology 25:3 (July 2009): 415–440; Brett David Potter, “Image and Kenosis: Assessing JeanLuc Marion’s Contribution to a Postmetaphysical Theological Aesthetics,” International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 79 (2018): 60–79; Gschwandtner, “Art and the Artist,” in Degrees of Givenness, and especially Ciocan, Cristian, “Entre visible et invisible: les paradigmes de l’image chez Jean-Luc Marion,” Jean-Luc Marion: Cartésianisme, phénoménologie, théologie: actes du colloque international, les 19 et 20 mars 2010 à Budapest, ed. Sylvain Camilleri and Adam Takacs (Les cahiers de philosophie de l’Institut français de Budapest, 2010), 93–113. IE 58/DS 70.

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God should take a face in visibility (Christ has definitively given his invisible face), but the very possibility of painting a face.”71 That is, refusing painting from iconography is not simply a question of how a visible painting could capture the invisible God, but how a visible painting could capture the other person at all. Obviously, one can recreate with paint the visible features of the human face; painters have done so for millennia!72 Yet even in Gadamer’s aesthetics a portrait is not a straightforward heightening of the visibility of a person, but at best an idea of someone, a public image or general type. What is important for Marion, following Levinas, is that one cannot paint what is most essential about human appearing: the countergaze, or “counter-intentionality.” Marion’s name for this phenomenality, again, is the “icon.” This is why Marion says that even the best truthmanifesting paintings cannot be “icons” and echoes Rothko’s reluctance to do “violence” to the human form by “crushing it” into the mere visibility of the canvas.73 To see a painting is to see a depthless “façade,” whereas to encounter a “face” is to find oneself seen.74 The appearing of a painting cannot allow it to serve as an “icon” because it will never see me back. The icon is a painted image, but when we come to it as an icon, we are not primarily interested in it as a dazzlingly beautiful artwork. We come before it as before a person: to enter more deeply into the real and living relation with the God who truly sees us. Visual similarity may be trapped in the finite limits of my recognition, but these finite horizons could be yet interrupted by the reversal of intentionality, in the prior initiative of God, a “counter-gaze” arriving to pierce through the viewer’s limited horizon.75 “To see an icon amounts to seeing oneself seen by it” – what makes it an icon is not that I see the visible likeness of Christ; but that through it I recognize that Christ sees me.76 The painted gaze of the icon already upon us symbolizes this phenomenological structure of preexisting invitation, identified above as a “call.” 71

72

73 74 75 76

CP, 195–96, translation and emphasis mine. See also Jean-Yves Lacoste, “Visages: paradoxe et  gloire,” La Revue Thomiste LXXXV:4 (Oct–Dec 1985): 561–606, Jean-Louis Chrétien, L’arche de la parole, trans. Andrew Brown as Ark of Speech (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 160 n88 [147 n1]. Milbank is clearly right on this point, “The Gift and the Mirror” in Counter Experiences: Reading the Work of Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Kevin Hart (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2007), 307–308, although he fails to recognize that this is not what Marion is contesting. IE 76/DS 92; compare also to BG 267/ED 434, where Marion suggests “the portraits painted by Cézanne or Picasso close men’s faces by leading them back to mineral or animal nature.” IE 56–61, 113–119/DS 68–73, 136–143; see also AR 288. GWB 7–24/DSE 16–38. “Seeing Oneself Seen,” 314, 325/“Voir se voir vu,” 17, 29; CV 65, 83–84/CdV 115, 147–49.

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Yet, as we discussed above, even if a call preexists us, it is not immediately visible. It can only become manifest in our response to it. The response that allows us to see the invisible call or gaze of the icon Marion identifies as “veneration.” This is why the possibility of moving from “the visible to the invisible” is not a function of the kind of image and its mimetic logic, but a path that only opens through prayer or veneration.77 Marion says very little about this act here, focusing most of his attention on the image, and less on the person who prays. He does indicate it may require more than a simple decision on the part of the viewer, such as a preparatory practice of the “purification of the gaze.”78 We will return to this idea of prayer later, but we can note for now that Marion argues for a strange reversal of the Patristic iconophiles: while John Damascene and Theodore Studite assumed veneration as the consequence of any image claiming a link to a divine prototype, Marion is claiming that only if we actually pray before an image as believers could it phenomenally open up to the one it depicts. Once the need for visual similarity is eliminated between type and prototype, the link between the two becomes “fidelity,” the crossing of gaze and counter-gaze. The purpose of the icon is not to serve as an aesthetic experience, but to be a “site of reciprocal transition,” an “instrument of communion.”79 The icon is not a specialized reference tool or a magical talisman; through the icon, I choose to enter a prayerful relation with the God who is already gazing upon me. This alone can single out the icon, and what it means to those who pray to it, in its truly unique phenomenality. Yet we are also left with a question: what remains of the visible image? If the icon is defined by the invisible countergaze, which requires prayerful acceptance of it, can we say anything about it at all? Doesn’t it matter that the icon portrays a face that seems to have a visual likeness to Christ or his mother? Would one even need an image at all to have an “icon”? Marion gives us very little on this point, and what he offers is mostly negative: seeing a painted face is not enough to show us the gaze of God. “[T]here is nothing to see on the face of God but his gaze” and thus “to see this invisible gaze can mean only to respond to it.”80 77

78 79 80

CV 75/CdV 133. Without recognizing this possibility, the icon as a divine counter-gaze and icon as painting cannot be united, as in Ruud Welten’s, “Toward a Phenomenology of the Icon,” Aesthetics as a Religious Factor in Eastern and Western Christianity, ed. Will Van den Bercken and Jonathon Sutton (Leuven: Peeters, 2005), 395–403. CV 43/CdV 77. CV 86/CdV 152. “Seeing Oneself Seen,” 325/“Voir se voir vu,” 29; see also ibid, 311/14, Manoussakis, God after Metaphysics, 12.

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The Window: Marion’s “Icon” A Doubly Iconoclastic Icon?

At a few strategic moments, Marion does introduce a few positive requirements for an image suited to be an icon: Since the icon is defined by a second gaze that envisages the first, the visible image is no longer a screen; on the contrary, it permits itself to be transpierced; but two gazes cross there. Thus the visible surface must, paradoxically, efface itself (s’effacer), or at least efface within it every opacity that would obfuscate the crossing of gazes [la croisée des regards]: the icon dulls the image in it, in order to there prevent any self-sufficiency, autonomy, or self-affirmation. The icon inverts the modern logic of the image: far from claiming its equivalence with the thing while flaunting itself in glory, instead it removes the prestige of the visible from its face (elle démaquille sa face des prestiges du visible), in order to effectively render it an imperceptible transparency, translucent for the counter-gaze. The icon does not expect one to see it, but rather gives itself so that one might see or permit oneself to see through it.81

The image, in other words, must undergo a purification to make room for the invisible. Marion’s words for this process are stark: “défaite, affaiblie, bref transpercée” – it “dulls” itself, and “effaces [se défasse] its own visibility in order to allow itself to be pieced by another gaze.”82 The icon thus becomes a “useless servant,”83 “never ceasing to transgress itself.”84 Marion concludes starkly: “The icon, therefore, is derived from the kenosis of the image.”85 The term “kenosis” is of course taken from the scriptural hymn of Philippians 2, where Christ, though Divine, “emptied” (ἐκένωσεν) himself, or “poured out” of himself by taking human form in the Incarnation, even to the point of death on the Cross. Marion further explains that the Cross is an icon par excellence: like the image, the Cross is a type which bears a relation to the prototype which is “the holiness of the Holy.” If neither icon nor Cross functions by visible imitation, this is particularly evident in the latter. Marion says this not for the obvious reasons (that the Cross gives a symbol rather than a human figure), but because the Cross symbolizes an event where the disjunction between the visible world and the glory of God is at its greatest possible height. Marion associates this disjunction with the “mark” of the human rejection of God’s advance. The Cross thus appears “not [as] a sacred image imitating the divine … but the 81 82 83 84 85

CV 61/CdV 109. CV 60/CdV 109. CV 78/CdV 139. CV 78/CdV 139. CV 62, 86–86/CdV 111, 152–53.

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imprint paradoxically received by the invisible in the manifest wound that the invisible imposes on it.” In other words, we recognize the Holy One on the Cross only by seeing the marks of violence left by our refusal of it. In a few dense and cryptic sentences, this relation also is extended to justify the icon: “Just as Thomas recognized his Lord in the very type [τύπος] that offered the trace of the nails, so also the faithful can recognize their Lord in the visible types that are drawn by artists.”86 Thus, just like the kenosis of Christ on the Cross, the image must empty itself to reveal God: “The image extricates itself from idolatry by constantly destroying the screen of its visibility, in order to become impoverished, as the pure sign of that which marks it.”87 As we see Christ’s kenotic love in the wounds of his crucifixion, so we will recognize Christ’s love in an impoverished, selfeffacing image. If Marion avoids obvious idolatry, it is not so evident he has escaped the charge of explicit iconoclasm, and this on two counts: (1) What does it mean that an image must “efface itself” to open to the divine counter-gaze? (2) And, by extension, what becomes of the subject who seems to be emptied of all creative initiative before the divine? Both seem to blatantly reduce mediation of God into a broken seashell, whose natural finite being must be destroyed or shattered in order to meet the infinite ocean it tries to carry. First, consider (1) the icon itself, which is the primary target of this investigation. Despite Marion’s insistence that this is the way out of iconoclasm, his words here seem to suggest the opposite: “transparency” is ideal for the windshield of a fast-moving vehicle, but it seems to be in direct conflict with what it means to be an image, leading to the weakening and ultimately the destruction of its finite capacities. John Milbank will call it out bluntly: “Marion’s account of the icon is in fact iconoclastic.” That is, “beauty does not mediate in its visibility the invisible, but rather forecloses a world of idols or of the merely visible and radically finite as reduced to our representing awareness.”88 Comparing Marion to the iconophile Fathers, Byzantine art historian Charles Barber echoes this claim: Marion’s icon “becomes a vehicle by which we might be seen, but, ultimately, it does not permit us to see.”89 And in this, Marion undermines the humanity of Christ, “collapses the iconic economy envisaged by the iconophiles of Byzantium, and in doing so becomes an iconoclast.”90 86 87 88 89 90

CV 75/CdV 133. CV 86–87/CdV 152–3. John Milbank, “The Gift and the Mirror,” 272. Charles Barber, “Defacement,” The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 56 (2010): 115. Ibid., 107.

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Graham Ward agrees in terms that are nearly as strong: Marion’s “[b]ypassing mediation pertains to Gnostic logic.”91 Any icon seems to be “founded upon and produces fissures, ruptures and violence in creation. It works in and through dualisms, struggling to attain a point beyond them, a point beyond the phenomenality of the world.”92 Ward points out that this moment of rupture is related to what he calls a “Barthian” connection Marion draws between the icon and the Crucifixion, which according to Ward leads necessarily to Docetism, Nestorianism, or Gnosticism. Essentially, it is a denial of the full truth of the Incarnation by iconoclastically denying God’s entry into the world.93 The icon is the sole exception from this idolatrous closure of visibility for Marion only because of the kenotic self-effacement of its image. Ward overlooks the source of Marion’s appeal to the Cross, which was neither invented, nor of Barthian origin, but was in fact taken directly from dogmatic justification of iconophilia, the horos of the Second Council of Nicaea, which does indeed justify the veneration of the icon alongside the veneration of the Cross.94 Marion interprets this to indicate that, like the icon, the Cross is not holy because of what it shows, but because of how it approaches the prototype. It is not holy because of what it makes visibly available, but because it gives itself “with such little reservation that the immediate radiance [éclat] of its glory is thereby abandoned.”95 Yet the authoritative source for Marion’s comparison of icon and Cross does not mitigate Ward’s argument. For while Marion takes the words of the council, he has neglected their historical context, which places him uncomfortably close to the camp of the enemy. Recall the iconoclasts of the eighth century had rejected images of Christ, fearing a visible image would be a lie in purporting to show the invisible, infinite God who could not be circumscribed in finite line and color. Yet they were strongly devoted to the Cross, which, as a sign, could appropriately symbolize Christ without claiming to show too much.96 By setting the veneration of icons in parallel to the veneration of the Cross, Nicaea II was not making an abstract theological point, but securing icons a place alongside a practice undisputed by either iconophile and iconoclast Christians. Instead of recognizing this as a pragmatic confirmation of two practices, Marion passes over this context 91

92 93 94 95 96

Graham Ward, “The Beauty of God,” 52; also Graham Ward, “The Theological Project of J­ ean-Luc Marion,” Post-secular Philosophy, ed. Philip Blond (London: Routledge, 1998), 232; Bruce Ellis Benson reinforces this critique in Graven Ideologies, 222. Ward, “The Beauty of God,” 49. Ibid., 40–41 n 7, 49. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 135–6; Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum, n. 600. CV 73/CdV 130–31, translation modified. See Charles Barber, Figure and Likeness, especially Chapters 3–4.

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to make crucifixion essential to the theological definition of what the icon is and why we venerate it, which is what leads to such troubling results of the image effacing itself. His position is not the same as the iconoclasts, but it is also quite different from the Church Fathers who find the theological justification for the icon instead through the Incarnation.97 This leads to our second question, (2) what results for the subject. After all, what would it mean for an inanimate painting to “efface itself” in the first place? First, using quasi-agentive language for inanimate objects is not uncommon in phenomenology, as a strategy to break out of naive subjectivism and better attune ourselves to modes of givenness. Yet is also true that some of these expressions are less forceful expressions than in Smith’s English translation. Perhaps most notably, s’effacer means “to fade” or “to move aside” rather than to violently blot oneself out. However we read it, we can only conclude that if the icon is described as undermining itself in any way, it is not merely denying itself, but denying us, denying our gaze. Indeed, we have seen that the actions which Marion attributes to the viewer of the icon also have a kind of character of denial or self-effacement. While he does not use this language explicitly, we might begin to suspect that in addition to the kenosis required for the image, there is a kenosis required for the one who receives the icon, too. After all, to encounter an image as an icon, we must pour ourselves out in reverence before the icon, empty ourselves of our usual control or security by the fulfillment of our intentions, and instead consent to be looked at by a gaze that we can never grasp or master. Does this not undermine human freedom and spiritual practices?98 Is the human being reduced to pure passivity before God, as a mere object?99 Why then would we bother to have icons at all, or any other concrete mediations? Why not merely hold

97

98

99

The iconoclasts are still operating in a mimetic mode, where the visible is in competition with the invisible, intensified by their very narrow and totalizing view of the image. Marion, by contrast, leaves the mimetic plane, and thus the visible neither effects iconicity nor prevents it. In short, Marion seems to be uninterested in the visibility of the image, while the iconoclasts demand its destruction. In Marion’s favor, there is a more complex theological case to be made for the identification of the icon and the Cross following St. Theodore Studite. See Maximos Constas, The Art of Seeing. Paradox and Perception in Orthodox Iconography (Los Angeles: Sebastian Press, 2014), especially 106–108, where he concludes, that indeed, “in a certain sense” every icon can be said to be of Christ crucified. See Tamsin Jones, “Dionysius in Hans Urs von Balthasar and Jean-Luc Marion,” Modern Theology 24:4 (October 2008): 743–754; Anthony J. Steinbock, “The Poor Phenomenon: Marion and the Problem of Givenness,” Words of Life: New Theological Turns in French Phenomenology, ed. Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba, 120–131 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), and Christina M. Gschwandtner, “Eucharist and Sainthood,” in Degrees of Givenness, 146–169. Joeri Schrijvers, “On Doing Theology ‘After’ Ontothology: Notes on a French Debate” New Blackfriars 87 (2006): 302–214; Kathryn Tanner, “Theology at the Limits of Phenomenology” in Counter-Experiences, 201–234; Brian Robinette, “A Gift to Theology? Jean-Luc Marion’s ‘Saturated Phenomena’ in Christological Perspective,” Heythrop Journal 48:1 (2007): 86–108.

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out in silent waiting for something that would arrive from beyond without warning? By his elimination of mimetic competition, Marion seems to have only definitely confirmed the necessity of competition at a more pervasive level: now it is not a competition of appearing, but a competition of finite being and the infinite God. Rather than freeing us from the iconoclastic “­modern logic of the image,” Marion seems to have plunged into a wholesale iconoclasm that diminishes the worth of all of finite being. All things seem to be seashells, discardable before glory of the original, and the world of visibility – with all finite things – is definitively closed to God except through its self-destruction.100

3.3  Transparency and Kenosis The core of this critique rests on the strong rhetorical descriptions of the image’s transparency and self-effacement and their conceptual thematization as “kenosis.” As to the former, despite Marion’s bold words, a careful read of this text yields very little information about what he actually means in the concrete. He even admits this lack openly: “It remains to be seen how the theological paradigm of a kenosis of the image translates into aesthetic principles.”101 As to the latter, the term “kenosis” has been present from Marion’s earliest publications, and appears throughout his work, but he does not addresses it directly until a 2015 article for the French Communio, later developed in §19 of D’ailleurs, la Révélation.102 To understand what Marion is really trying to say about the icon, we must develop a much more rigorous understanding of this term. Kenosis of Christ The word “kenosis” comes from the well-known hymn in Philippians 2:6– 11, which states that Jesus: 100 101 102

Milbank, “The Gift and the Mirror,” 307–308; Tanner, “Theology at the Limits of Phenome­ nology,” 224. CV 62/CdV 111. “À partir de la Trinité,” Communio XL:6 (2015): 23–38. It is worth nothing that several others have written on Marion’s use of kenosis and its relation to the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, even if they do not discuss these recent engagements of Marion on this topic. See Tamsin Jones, “Dionysius in Balthasar and Marion,” 749; Andrew Prevot, Thinking Prayer: Theology and Spirituality amid the Crisis of Modernity (Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 2015); and Potter, “Image and Kenosis.”

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though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God something to be grasped (ἁρπαγμόν). Rather, he emptied (ἐκένωσεν) himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness, and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

The key to this passage, according to Marion, is not the word kenosis in itself, but the contrast set up between “emptying” (ἐκένωσεν) and “grasping” (ἁρπαγμόν), which mark two different modes of relation to God. As Marion observes, variants of the latter are used throughout the scriptures, in contexts of robbery, rape, and spoil. Ultimately, the term designates what one “seizes with violence in order to possess it by force, and to keep it in this possession as long as one has the power to do so.”103 Christ was equal to God. The kenotic hymn affirms this. But as Marion argues, the question is not of knowing whether he was equal with God. The question is understanding how.104 The Pharisees grasped their relationship with God in this way as children of Abraham (Jn 8: 33, 40, 55), claiming their rank as a right, a possession, and an accomplishment. His disciples, too, try to grasp positions in the kingdom of God, whether the privilege of sitting on his right and on his left (Mt. 20:20–21) or of earning the title of the “greatest” (Mark 9:33–34). But Christ “did not count equality with God something to be grasped” (Phil 2:6). In fact, Jesus continually counters the idolatrous logic which seeks to master God: the kingdom of God is not gained by possession, but dispossession. The greatest in the kingdom must make themselves the servants. It is not an accident, as Marion points out, that everywhere else it appears in the Scriptures the verb κενόω means a “radical failure.”105 The kenotic attitude is one which does not attempt to earn, claim, or possess a relation to God, but like the one who loses his life to save it (Lk. 9:24), it wholly abandons oneself to receive whatever relationship the Father would give. Thus Jesus’ equality with God is not something he grasps by saving himself and establishing his glory, but something given by his perfect abandonment to the Father, even unto death. This is precisely what manifests the perfection of his relation to the Father as the Son. The first point we can recognize here is that for Marion, kenosis is a 103 104 105

Marion, “Trinité,” 28; AR 534. Marion, “Trinité,” 28; AR 532. Marion, “Trinité,” 23; AR 544.

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(1) manner of relation to God, one open to receive what the Father gives, rather than attempting to seize it violently. Building from this, Marion emphasizes that it is a mistake to locate kenosis primarily in the event of the crucifixion, whereby Christ makes a choice to empty himself of his divine life and power to the agony of a violent death. This would lead to the theologically troubling consequences of either removing Jesus in his negation from his divinity, or putting such negation of life in the heart of the Trinitarian God.106 But understood as the way Christ already relates to the Father, kenosis simply becomes the ultimate manifestation of Trinitarian life: through the total abandonment of the Son to the Father, the Son receives the Father’s absolute self-gift in the Spirit.107 The result of this is that the kenosis of the crucifixion is not a deep, dark wound in the heart of these loving Trinitarian relations, it is the heart of these loving Trinitarian relations introduced into the world’s darkest, deepest wounds of sin. Thus, the second point which we must observe here is that (2) kenosis is not self-destruction, but simply the way that God is: loving self-gift. There is an apparent destruction associated with kenosis, which is a final point of clarification necessary to understand the icon: (3) this violence does not arise from the kenosis itself, but from the idolatrous refusal of kenosis, the opposing attitude of possession which tries to grasp infinite Trinitarian love. “Crucify him!” was our own command; God has not demanded anyone’s evisceration. Yet even if kenosis is not defined by the Cross, we might still say that the Cross is the clearest manifestation of it, as the kenotic hymn declares. It demonstrates the extent of Christ’s abandonment to the Father, in a way farthest outside of any patterns of worldly possession, this gift of himself without reservation into the hands of those who hated him, even to the point of being “a worm and no man,” unrecognizable in his suffering (Ps 22:6). Yet, for Christ, the relation of dispossession is not a lessening of himself, but the truest expression of who he is as the Son of the Father.108 It is because of the kenotic love that accepts obedience unto death that Christ also appears in glory in the Transfiguration and Resurrection. Such kenosis is one and the same, separated in appearance only in the prism of a world torn by idolatry. 106 107 108

Marion, “Trinité,” 25–26. Ibid, 33; a more extensive development can be found in AR §18. This is hinted at in CV, but in a few lines that are very dense and cryptic, CV 84–85/CdV 148–50. Marion, “Trinité,” 36; AR also discusses Sonship through the concept of “sacrifice,” see for example 515–516.

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Kenosis and the Image Through these three characteristics of Marion’s understanding of kenosis, we can work out more concretely what it means to apply the term “kenosis” to the image. First, we can observe that (1) this same polarity of possession and dispossession is at play in the icon, appearing on nearly every page of The Crossing of the Visible. The kenotic, dispossessive image is never set in contrast with art as such, but with “the modern tyranny of the image,”109 which bombards us daily with images manufactured to manipulate us and captivate our attention by giving us exactly what we want to see and training us what to desire. I have suggested terming these images “spectacle,” calling to mind here blockbusters, pop idols, advertising, clickbait, and pornography, all of which provide an easy high of stimulation to our inert, addicted gaze.110 We can imagine what short work these kind of images might make of a divine revelation – whatever could overwhelm us with special effects, cloying emotion, or miraculous drama. They would aim to put the Divine on call for our viewing pleasure, to bring before our passive gaze an appearing that would possess and confirm in itself, without doubt, effort, or struggle, the immediate content of the God we always expected to see. It is in contrast to this kind of image that Marion discusses the “selfeffacement” of the icon. The icon does not attempt to possess revelation, to overwhelm the viewer with an experience of the Divine initiated by the sole impact of its dazzling spectacle or aesthetic glory. Rather, an icon must allow its viewer the space to recognize a relation to God which is freely offered and must be consented to freely. This “transparency” or “self-effacement” is thus not a refusal of visibility as such, but simply the refusal to be like the rest of these possessive visibles that purport to conjure and contain God as immediately accessible.111 This is clearer when we read beyond the most extreme statements that have been targeted by critics. When Marion says the icon “dulls” itself, he immediately qualifies it: the icon must dull whatever in it would give the impression of self-sufficiency or autonomy, whatever would hinder the communion between the believer and the God she adores by focusing on the visibility and glory on itself.112 Just like Christ did not refuse equality with God but an equality gained by possessive force, the “aesthetic asceticism”113 of icon does not refuse 109 110 111 112 113

CV 58/CdV 104. CV 54, 80–83/CdV 98, 142–146 CV 61, 78/CdV 109, 139. Or at least he does in its first mention, CV 60–61/CdV 109, if not the second, CV 78/CdV 139. CV 76/CdV 136.

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appearing as such, but only “whatever opacity would obfuscate the crossing of gazes,” the communion of the believer and the Divine. This helps us to say more concretely what becomes of the visible image. If we adopt the mimetic model and rank appearances by their ability to dazzle and delight, the icon’s kenotic refusal of this would seem to result in its becoming a very poor image, a punctured seashell. Thus follows the iconoclastic assumption that idols are beautiful, while icons must be ugly and unpleasant (if we keep them at all). But this only holds if we are still clinging to the idolatrous assumption that beautiful or desirable images can only be defined by manipulation. If we follow Marion’s suggestion and abandon the mimetic paradigm that places dazzling as the be-all and endall of images, we are freed from such a conclusion. Beauty is certainly captivating to attention, but not everything that catches our attention need be possessive and self-referential; beauty quite often directs us beyond itself and thus can serve as a powerful icon. And ugliness can sometimes be totalizing, false, and self-confirming, thus serving as an idol. So there is no need to rule out images that are beautiful or striking or even delightful in appearance from being icons, only images that claim self-sufficiency of appearance. Once again, Marion does not want us to place too much importance in the aesthetics alone: an image is suitable as an icon if it makes its relation to God clear, that is, if it reveals its dependence on revelation beyond itself, and invites us to come through it to communion with God. It is an idolatrous image if it tries to manipulate us into believing it grasps the Divine through its own devices and merits its own glory. To rely too much on aesthetics or to strip all aesthetics away both confirm the idolatrous attitude that assumes it is only a matter of the material tools. From the architecture of Gothic cathedrals, to Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Reubens, and Rothko, Marion’s own examples of iconic art once again testify that beauty is compatible with kenotic art.114 Thus we can confirm the second point, that (2) kenosis is not destruction, but the way that the icon operates as an image. If kenosis does not mean destruction of the image, it may yet be the case that, like Christ, the icon’s self-gift exposes it to the violence of our idolatry and hatred of a world that is not always open to the gift. The icon “bears the mark where the invisible Holy is given with such little reservation that the immediate rupture of its glory is there abandoned,” a mark which “takes the shape of the Cross.”115 It is here that Marion’s most iconoclastic 114 115

CV 63/CdV 112–13. CV 73/CdV 128.

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language comes. The problem is that the language used to highlight the similarity of the icon and the Cross risks setting up a false parallel. To be precise, these are two very different modalities of action, for in one violence is an evil action which is accepted, and in the other it is sought out. Christ accepts the violence performed by us, “receives” the “murderous mark that the visible inflicts on the invisible that loves it.”116 The image, on the other hand, is described as committing violence against itself as a condition to let God speak through it; it “effaces itself,” “dulls itself,”117 “destroying the screen of its invisibility.”118 Second, the same word “violence” is used for very different actions, in fact, for the polar opposites of the kenosis hymn. The violence suffered by Christ is that of our grasping possession against the holy. The other is the “violence” to oneself, which in fact looks violent if measured by the standards of grasping possession and autonomy, but is really a kenotic dispossession toward love which is the opposite of violence, as we saw above. Thus, (3) it is not the icon’s kenosis, but the idolatry of the world that cause wounds of rejection and misunderstanding. Marion’s dense and difficult rhetoric here is aimed to highlight the paradoxical similarities between the icon and the Cross, but by neglecting to point out the critical differences he risks misleading his readers instead. If we take care to read more deeply than the apparent contradictions above, the larger context can guide us to Marion’s primary point, which remains an important one. The source of violence towards the icon is never the kenosis itself, and never the command of God that creatures efface themselves to receive him. The violence originates in a world of grasping, possessive images that cannot tolerate kenotic love. But God was born a vulnerable infant in the visible world to invite us to a relation freely, rather than forcing us to our knees under his raw theophanic power. In keeping with this free gift of revelation, the icon opens a space to respond to its invitation in dispossesive freedom. In fact, this openness redoubles the icon’s revelatory value: it is not only a question of what it presents to us (Christ, a saint, an angel), but the very way it presents. Its kenotic appearing models for us the true gift of love, which even bears the cost of being exposed to hatred and trivialization for the sake of inviting all toward God’s love. This is the connection Marion means to establish between the icon and the Cross. 116

117 118

CV 74/CdV 130. Here Marion’s language approaches the idea of the “wound” of the image spoken of by Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image ouverte: Motifs d’incarnation dans les arts visuels (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2007) and Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy. CV 60–61/CdV 109. CV 78/CdV 139.

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Ultimately, if destructiveness arises in kenosis, its source is not the kenosis itself, or the Father’s demand that the seashell be punctured. Its source is always the violent actions of the possessive and grasping attitude that cannot tolerate kenotic love. For violence will arise, Marion warns, when something comes from elsewhere, when something threatens to break the self-satisfied circle of autonomous self-sufficiency.119 Kenosis of the Person This reading of kenosis will also illuminate the role of the person who venerates the icon. Just like the disciples, scribes, and Pharisees try to secure their relation to God as an established possession, so do those who expect their holy images to conform to their desire to see. God cannot be had by those who try to idolatrously seize him on their own terms, only by those who approach in the abandon of self-gift. God freely offers us a relation to him; the only thing that could limit our reception of this gift is how far we are willing to pry open our grasping fists to receive it.120 (1) Kenosis thus marks this openness of relation. If kenosis is relating to God through self-gift, (2) our identity would not necessarily be destroyed by kenosis. However, autonomy (along with any sense of identity grounded on it) necessarily would be. We can understand kenosis as an extension of the logic of the gift Marion has already described at a philosophical level in Being Given, where the transcendental ego must accept the receiving stance of the adonné before the given. In order to receive the given, or any gift, the receiver must renounce the full self-possession of autonomy, which claims in pride, “I don’t owe anything to anybody.”121 He must instead give himself over a relation which admits his radical dependence and the permanence of his debt to the other by his inability to repay. Any attempt to restore this balance, offering something in return, is in fact to appropriate the gift into a mere economy of exchange, destroying its gratuity as gift.122 Kenosis magnifies this dynamic as the stakes push us to our ultimate limits before the divine, concerning one’s very self: he who saves his life – that is, tries to possess it autonomously  – will lose it and he who loses his life will save it  – that is, by 119 120 121 122

Marion, “Introduction,” GR 1–7; AR 44–49. Marion, “Trinité,” 31 ; AR 537–38. BG 108–109/ED 180–81. BG/ED Section 3.2. See also “The Ego or the Gifted,” in SP/LS and Ch. I in Certitudes Négatives, trans. Stephen E. Lewis as Negative Certainties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

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giving it over to the Father who alone can save (Lk. 9:24). While kenosis will collapse our autonomy, it does not minimize or degrade us. In fact, the free abandon of kenosis allows us to become more than we could ever have hoped for on our own: “This is the law of idolatry: I always become what I intend and possess; if I intend less than God I will become less than him, therefore less than myself.”123 And, by agreeing that a relation to God is not something determined by the excellence of our activities, this kenosis extends universally, in principle, to all human beings. Just the icon can be beautiful or ugly, so this relation to God can be given when we are at our worst, even for those who seem to be the poorest of the poor in the eyes of the world. The greatest power is not our strength but our poverty before God that will allow us to receive the relation given to us from beyond us.124 It is hard to deny this anarchy of the gift is much more troubling when it comes to the self than in the case of the icon. It may be felt as selfdestruction or look like a loss of identity, especially for those of us who are accomplished and intelligent and “strong” according to worldly categories.125 Rigorously speaking, it is only a violence to us if we assume our natural state is an identity secured without God.126 Yet we do often assume this idolatrous attitude, trying to possess who we are from our own ground, on our own strength. This is where the violence of idolatry enters. Rather than accept the challenge to become more than who we are now, we prefer to cling to our comfortable self-possessed identity, and suppress, reject, or kill the source of light that knows our limitations.127 It is thus (3) our violent and idolatrous grasping which crucifies, not God’s, who even in the most painful moments of illumination freely offers us a place of relation to him, as loved, if we would only accept it. 123 124 125

126

127

SP 124/LS 177–78. AR 358–61. This point has been articulated by Tamsin Jones, “Traumatized Subjects: Continental Philosophy of Religion and the Ethics of Alterity,” The Journal of Religion 94:2 (April 2014): 143 and Joseph Carew, “The Threat of Givenness in Jean-Luc Marion: Toward a New Phenomenology of Psychosis” Symposium 13:2 (2009): 97–115. For this reason, I object to Natalie Carnes’ characterization of Marion as advocating “negation” or “iconoclasm,” in Image and Presence: A Christological Reflection on Iconoclasm and Iconophilia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017). I do not object to the nuance of Carnes’ larger project, where such “iconoclasms of fidelity” are not in fact the destruction of icons, but only an attack against idols. However, her choice of words seems to suggest creatures as such are first autonomous, and so the relation to God is a destruction to what they originally are. I am suggesting that Marion’s strength is in assuming the opposite stance, that the transparency of iconic identity is the recognition of what creatures truly are, as fully dependent on God. AR 352-54; SP 124–36/LS 178–182; see also Marion, “The Invisible Saint,” Le croire pour le voir, trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner as Believing in Order to See: On the Rationality of Revelation and the Irrationality of Some Believers (New York: Fordham University, 2017), 144–152.

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One further point merits explicit consideration. Marion does not elaborate in great detail the actions and practices performed in the kenotic veneration of the believer before the icon, but it is a mistake to conclude that he opposes the importance of practice. It would be a poor reading of his texts to think he is advocating passivity or quietism, for as we saw in the case of receiving givenness, he continually affirms that to receive is very difficult and “active” work, as we must be able to bear or “resist” its challenge, choosing to accept and even interpret it as a gift.128 As Marion writes, “The invisible admittedly does not deliver itself in a visible spectacle to everyone, directly and without the mediation of a hermeneutic, but it does give itself to be recognized through a certain visible, which it invests overabundantly and as the sign of its mark without remainder.”129 Framed positively, Marion explicitly recognizes that the invisible does give itself to be recognized in the visible, but it is mediated by a hermeneutic, for to see the holy demands we first accept it, and this demands our choice. It is not that we do not see anything at all, but that we must accept to not see what is essential to it “at first” or “head-on,” that we must agree not to “object to what it welcomes.” The broken body of Christ is not anything remarkable to look at in a first glance; we must come to understand how to take it up. Our kenosis is a condition for recognizing the kenosis of God. Only the hermeneutic of love will allow us to recognize that the holy “gives itself over to us with such little reservation that the immediate radiance [éclat] of its glory is thereby abandoned.”130 Marion has cleared a space for a hermeneutics, but does not himself give a detailed elaboration of how this hermeneutic would work. From what he has said we might expect it would look less like mastery of a technical skill and more like the slow development of a deeper capacity of action. He suggests that the experience of viewing certain kinds of art, for example, can help free our gaze from the manipulative, possessive patterns of the spectacle, which is a necessary first step to preparing to receive an image as iconic.131 And a repeated praxis of regarding images can develop “a new way of behaving,” or habitus, that can dispose us more consistently toward the right attitudes.132 There is certainly more that can be said here, and nothing in Marion would oppose such an extension of his ideas, provided 128 129 130 131 132

BG 112/ED 186. CV 73/CdV 130. CV 73/CdV 130–31, translation modified. RD 43. See Ian Rottenberg, “Fine Art as Preparation for Christian Love,” Journal of Religious Ethics 42:2 (2014): 243–262. “Seeing Oneself Seen,” 308/“Voir se voir vu,” 10.

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that we do not consider the practices themselves as sufficient to enact an iconic experience. This would lead back to the logic of ἁρπαγμόν, which attempts to earn and possess on its own devices, while missing that the one thing needed is the full abandonment of the self to God. For Marion, God remains the primary imitator of iconic communion: “I can very well say that I see God, but that can only be if God, this God who remains a hidden God, grants it to me … to see the face of God, it is necessary that God first turn his face toward those who gaze at it.”133 For the image as well as for the believer praying before it, this deepened understanding of kenosis still does not leave us with a concrete sense of how God would be mediated. And yet, it is clear that Marion’s stark language does not immediately lead us to our deepest fears, that an image or person destroy itself before God. In fact, he turns the tables. To fear that kenosis is self-destructive betrays an idolatrous assumption about what it means to be a self and what it means to be destroyed. If all things are in a relation of gift to God, then kenosis is simply the acceptance of God’s gift of love freely offered. Finite being is only in danger if we try to extract it into an autonomous seashell existing apart from God’s oceanic love.

3.4  Transparent Mediation By his unflinching examination of the paradoxes, confusion, and blinding excess that we find at the limits of our understanding, Marion has provided a way to consider how the spark of the Divine touch radiates through finite experience. Marion does not shy away from the limitations of the finite mind’s inability to grasp God; he continually reminds us that the farthest extent of our best concept, image, or idea remains only an idol. Yet, Marion suggests, God is free to show himself on his own terms. What is needed is not more elaborate intellectual achievements, only the openness to receive and respond to God’s gaze which always arrives upon us prior to our turning to recognize it, from a center outside our possible grasp. If the “icon” comes to mean the gaze of the other, the encounter with the Divine Other marks its highest possibility, ending finally with a revelation of the Trinitarian God. As Marion’s work primarily hovers at the frontier of foundational possibilities, it is easy to get the impression that none of this has anything to do with everyday life, everyday images, everyday practices and the ordinary activity of human beings. I have argued that Marion is not negating the possibility 133

“Seeing Oneself Seen,” 315–16/“Voir se voir vu,” 18–19.

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of God’s mediation through such finite moments, only clearing a negative space of possibility that would allow further development without flattening the mediation of God into an idolatrous horizon. Marion’s move away from the image, in other words, is not a move toward iconoclasm, but toward the deeper roots of the question of the icon’s possibility. If this does not resemble the rich symphonic resonation of truth we saw in Gadamer’s aesthetics, it need not be dismissed as a denial of mediation. In fact, Marion’s work has opened up a new way of thinking of what mediation could be. From Resonance to Window The Byzantine icon has been proudly hailed as a “window into heaven,” but I suggest this title would be more fittingly transferred to the kenotic transparency of divine mediation which Marion has explicated above. Consider this description of a window by St. John of the Cross: A ray of sunlight shining upon a smudgy window is unable to illumine that window completely and transform it into its own light. It could do this if the window were clean and polished. The less film and stain are wiped away, the less the window will be illumined, and the cleaner the window is, the brighter will be its illumination. The extent of the illumination is not dependent upon the ray of sunlight but upon the window. If the window is totally clean and pure, the sunlight will so transform and illumine it that to all appearances the window will be identical with the ray of sunlight and shine just as the sun’s ray. Although obviously the nature of the window is distinct from that of the sun’s ray (even if the two seem identical), we can assert that the window is the ray or light of the sun by participation.134

This passage was originally written in the context of contemplating creatures in mystical prayer, but drawing out the logic of this image will clarify both the strengths and limitations of Marion’s “icon.” First and most importantly, in this description, the sunlight is not encountered as an object, or even as the form of a friend or stranger on the other side of the glass. It remains mysterious, invisible, and unable to be grasped directly, too bright for us, just as the gaze of God remains beyond the full powers of our comprehension. Certainly the Incarnation was an encounter with God as seen, and the icon may present us with a likeness of this human form, but this visibility will not guide us to a clear and unambiguous 134

John of Cross, “Subida del Monte Carmelo,” II.V.6, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez as “Ascent of Mount Carmel,” The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross, Washington, D.C,: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 2017). This image of the window illuminated by sunlight, which is quite close to Florensky’s, Iconostasis, 64–65, also echoes a Patristic image often used by John Damascene, of the iron which seems to become one with the fire.

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knowledge of who God is. Even if its origin is far beyond our reach, we are nevertheless able to recognize his counter-gaze upon us, just as we can still sense the rays of sunlight that warm our faces through the window. Second, the transparency of the glass is not a matter of self-negation, but of the basic openness necessary to join the illuminating activity of the light. An image that is too bogged down in its own visibility, that dazzles and captivates our attention, is like a smudgy window that blocks the full sunlight, obstructing our view of what calls to us through it. When it is clean, a window can be perfectly united with the light from the sun, just as the purified icon is permeated with the invisible counter-gaze. In the same way, kenotic transparency is not destruction for Marion, but the positive condition for serving as the vehicle of communion. A further meaning arises when we expand the original context of St. John’s description of the window. For he himself did not design this description for images, but for persons: “The soul upon which the divine light of God’s being is ever shining, or better, in which it is always dwelling by nature, is like this window.”135 I may also find that I am myself a dirty window, full of too many smudgy attachments and stains of possession that block transmission of sunlight. As Marion has explained, the only limits on the gift God offers are the barriers that I myself erect against it, especially my idols of self-possession and self-definition; kenosis clears me of these obstacles to become transparent to the reception of God’s loving gaze. The idea of a “transparent image” may still evoke the impression of iconoclasm, so it is important to emphasize this point. Strictly speaking, transparency is not negation, but a negative description: it means to not obstruct the light, to not grasp and possess what God freely offers. This openended character of transparency is not a flaw; it is essential to Marion’s account of the icon. Because God’s Revelation is not tied to a specific image of appearing or a particular human practice, because Marion relates it to kenotic openness or dispossession, God can be potentially mediated through everything. Marion has used the specific theory of holy images to defend how all creation could reveal the invisible God. The transparency of the icon allows it to be a universal possibility. Further, this universal potential of mediation is not scattered randomly through the world in isolated objects, and this is where Marion’s thought requires we advance St. John’s window analogy into a new key. This transparent mediation links together to form what I would call an isomorphic chain of iconicity that ripples outwards through creation. We 135

Ibid, emphasis mine.

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see this most clearly in The Idol and Distance, the only place where Marion makes an explicit connection between “icons” (in the broad sense) with the word “mediation,” the latter term adopted from Balthasar’s reading of Dionysius.136 Explaining again through our analogy, it is the window’s kenotic transparency that allows it to be united with the sunlight, which is the same action that transmits this light to others. Thus, communion with the light is one with communication of it; to receive the gift of God’s love is one with its expression. This explains why the icon does not only depict Christ, but also the saints, whose transparency to the light of God make them living “icons” of his love. By consequence, to receive this light ourselves, we, too, must respond in kind, becoming transparent to the love that is offered. To the extent that we succeed we, too, will pass on the light to others. The shape required to receive the gift of charity is the very shape of passing it along. The gift of God’s revelation is not an object to be transmitted, but the very action which cannot be received or recognized except by taking on this same isomorphic stance of kenosis, as the tiers of a fountain, where each level continues to receive by overflowing into the next. As Marion explains, “to receive the gift amounts to receiving the giving act, for God gives nothing except the infinite kenosis of charity.”137 Through this metaphor of the window, we can recognize that Marion’s work translates a Patristic iconophile vision of the world into a phenomenological key, echoing its strengths and weaknesses. (1) Christ is the true icon of the Father. (2) Other finite things pattern themselves after this one Icon. (3) How mediation functions in concrete cases is underspecified.138 136

137 138

“Immediate Mediation,” ID/IeD §15. This title was first used by Remi Brague in “La structure de l’apostolicité: la médiation immédiate,” (with J.-M. Vignolles), Résurrection n. 45 (1975): 59–77. This isomorphic framework also supports an Orthodox belief that the icon has a kind of “­hypostatic” or “exemplary” character in its action that exists in parallel to the holiness of the saint. See Tsakiridou, Icons in Time, 13, 18. ID, 166/IeD 212. Marion’s explicit use of a Dionysian-inspired model of mediation is even more apophatic than the Patristic tradition. According to Vladimir Lossky’s landmark study of Dionysius, “La notion des ‘analogies’ chez Denys le Pseudo-Aréopagite,” in Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Litéraire du Moyen-Age 5 (1930): 279–309, each creature mediates according to its “analogy,” or “measure” which God has given it: a rock would mediate by its ways of being, a bird by its many ways of being as well as living, a human by being, living, thinking, etc. Thus, we might think it would be possible to say that an icon mediates by its particular ways of appearing. Marion explicitly rejects this possibility in a concise footnote in ID, 158 n38/IeD 246 n36, where he claims Dionysius’ use of “analogy” was meant in its scriptural context, and refers exclusively to the free gifts of faith (Rom. 12:6), not to creaturely particularity or capacity. He continues in his text: “Only the openness of the participant limits and measures the scope of his participation in the distance of goodness,” ID 158–59/IeD 204. Once again, the question of the particular is transposed to the question of the underlying conditions of possibility and the initiative of God.

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The fact that Marion leaves the details of iconicity undefined, even in his work on the sacred image, is simultaneously the major advantage and the major limitation of his account. The advantage is first in its universality, as this can help us understand not just the possibility for the Byzantine icon to bring us into communion with God, but the possibility for anything finite to mediate God. Because of its transparency, the kenotic “icon” allows God’s love to ripple out all the way down and a cosmic chain of iconic isomorphism. Further, this refusal to define the icon by its concrete aesthetic functions also serves as a check against pervasive temptation to idolatry. Too much focus on the positive attributes of a particular, finite thing may inadvertently rule out mediation in cases like the suffering face of Christ who “had no majestic bearing to catch our eye, no beauty to draw us to him.” (Is. 53:2).139 Marion’s indifference to the individual excellence in qualities like beauty or ugliness may be a contrast from Gadamer’s aesthetic mediation, but it also affirms the ambiguity central to the way God reveals himself: Christ appears in the light of Mount Tabor, but also in the dust of Golgotha, and in the everyday appearing of a man like any other. The one thing that is certain is that God does not present himself before us in obvious, indisputable, comprehensive evidence. This is not because God is stingy in doling out his revelation but because he gives himself so unreservedly that he exposes himself to our love as well as our hate; that is, he chooses to arrive in freedom, not force, so that we may respond in kind.140 Marion’s potentially problematic identification of the icon with the Cross reinforces this emphasis on the freedom of finite creatures to choose how to take up God’s initiating call. However, while Marion’s universalized icon broadens the possibility of encounter with the divine and warns us away from the many temptations of idolatry, we must also admit that a full philosophical examination of the Byzantine icon simply demands more than Marion is willing to offer. A window cleared of dust is exchangeable, as transparent as any other, yet we know there are many unique ways for things to be kenotically open to God. There is also a real significance to the different kinds of strategies by which an image might become transparent to God’s counter-gaze; some 139

140

See a visual exploration of this in Grégoire Aslanoff, “Sans beauté ni éclat (Is 53:2): La représentation du Christ mort dans l’art Byzantin,” La beau et la beauté au moyen âge, ed. Olivier Boulnois and Isabelle Moulin, 321–331 (Paris: Vrin, 2018); see also Jean-Louis Chrétien’s discussion of this problematic in The Ark of Speech, 101–105 [144–149]. This theme is even more pronounced in Jean-Yves Lacoste, “Dieu connaissable comme aimable,” in La phénomanlité de Dieu: neuf études, 87–110; trans. Oliver O’Donavan as “The Knowledge and the Love of God” in The Appearing of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 68–90.

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are better suited than others. Our experience before a religious icon does involve positive dimensions of activity, allowing us access to the Divine because it is showing something in particular, and in a particular way. When I pray before an icon, I encounter Jesus Christ, or the Theotokos, or St. Geneviève, through what the image shows me. And I do not passively await God’s coming like a thunderclap, but I take the painted eyes as God’s gaze on me; I bow and kiss and cross myself. Is there a way to talk about a particular this, the uniqueness of this counter-intentionality through a particular image and through a certain set of practices, without reducing it to merely a worldly mechanism? Marion has demonstrated little interest in answering such questions. His account of mediation is still framed as a nega­tive condition: the icon doesn’t block us from relating to God. Until we see more positively what the icon does, as an icon, it sounds very close to saying that what the icon itself does remains inconsequential.141 By extension, we assume the particularities of any other mediation are inconsequential. So is the rest of creation. Everything appears replaceable and exchangeable.142 We know Marion’s philosophy does not strictly require any iconoclastic move, and even discourages it. But it does mean that without a further development, Marion’s philosophy of the icon is incomplete. While neither Gadamer nor Marion can give us a satisfactory answer of how the icon can mediate God, they have both refined the framework of the question, by enriching our understanding of the image and rooting the question of mediation within the deeper challenges of the phenomenality of God. Armed with the greater conceptual clarity that these phenomen­ ologists provide, it is possible to develop a new answer, turning our attention to the thing itself. 141

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Note that I am not asking whether each thing has a particular action, but whether such actions matter or not for God’s revelation. This is not the same as the very common argument that Marion makes finite things “passive” before God. Concerns about Marion’s generality or “formal emptiness” are not uncommon: see, for example, Claudio Majolino and Stéphane Desroys du Roure, “The Other, or How to Dispose of it. A Prolegomena to All Future Alterology that Would Like to Present Itself as Phenomenology,” Santalka. Filosofija 17:3 (2009): 5–16; Brian Rogers, “Traces of Reduction: Marion and Heidegger on Phenomenology of Religion,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, 52:2 (June 2014): 184–205; Adam Graves, “Before the Text: Ricoeur and the ‘Theological Turn,’” Studia Phaenomenologica XIII (2013): 359–385.

chapter 4

Representation

The Icon and Artwork

How does the icon mediate the infinite God? A rich theory of mediation would grant that a finite thing can facilitate an encounter across the impossible distance to the Divine specifically through its unique capacities and limitations rather than by destroying or bypassing them. After establishing a phenomenological foundation for these questions through Chapters 2 and 3, we can now explore in detail the icon itself and the unique way it is encountered by those who claim it can serve as a mediation of God. Gadamer’s aesthetics will guide our explanation of the features of aesthetic experience which the icon presents to us. At the same time, we know that the icon claims to be more than a painting alone, and so we will also be attentive to Marion’s claim that the key to unlocking this “more” will not be found in the painting itself, but specifically by its opening to a relation to something from beyond it. My study is divided into four parts, capturing four different aspects of the icon’s modes of givenness: as representation (Chapter 4), as presence (Chapter 5), as substitution (Chapter 6), and as performance (Chapter 7). To begin, let us turn to the most obvious, the icon as a representational image. The truth of an artwork, as Gadamer demonstrated, is not comparable to the truth of a scientific formula, logical proposition, or textual description. It is not enough to understand it as a pictorial reference like a passport photo, nor is it summarizable by a simple name, as Theodore the Studite might lead us to believe. Rather, an artist must deliberately select, heighten, and pass over certain possibilities of what is shown in order to better lead us towards the truth of experience. In what way, then, does the icon accomplish this?

4.1  Representation, Recognition, and Paradox Early in the icon’s popularity boom in the West, museum curators sometimes believed it was essential to an icon’s “sacredness” to surround it with an aura of impenetrable esoteric mythology. A festal icon from a 1970s exposition catalog, for example, was described as follows: “All the visions 133

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of the dream world of the Russian miniature (ikon), mingled with Asiatic influences, liberate the imagination, leaving it free to roam in the realms of the Orthodox belief.”1 This fanciful description fails to understand that mystery is essential to the icon, but not mystification. To the contrary, the subject matter of the icon depicts a specific theological meaning that is clearly recognized by those who come before it without any ambiguity or confusion. In Gadamer’s words, the icon is a representational painting with concrete, identifiable, mimetic content, which is apprehended in a cognitive and imaginative manner in interactive play. One can enjoy the icon as a beautiful image by itself, but it is not a hermeneutical free-for-all like this curator seems to believe. The icon shows us the truth and thus gives something to be known. We can classify the content of an icon into two basic categories: portraits and narrative events. Events depicted in an icon include major events of the Scriptures, especially those surrounding the life of Christ, but icons may also depict events important to the history of the Church, such as the First Council of Nicaea. Portraits may show Jesus, angels, or saints. Sometimes icons combine both styles, in “hagiographical” or “vita” icons that show the portrait of a saint framed by images of key events of his life (see Figure 4.1).2 An icon cannot be made to depict just anyone, however; all icons must show primarily Christ, his angels, or his saints. Let us take a moment to consider the logic of this predetermined content. As with any portrait, the saint’s icon involves an extra level of imaging. A saint is a public figure in Gadamer’s sense, and thus in addition to her imageb shown in the icon, she possesses an imagea. I argued that this imagea of someone’s public image is more than the heightened visibility of a private person (whose reality grounds but exceeds this narrower Gebilde of the public image), for this visibility is linked to the heightened visibility of a value, an office, a role, a dramatic personage, or something for which this person is publicly known. This public visibility does not always in itself bear a significant revelatory value. Just as an imageb can be a copy, brand logo, or photoshopped propaganda, so it is with an imagea: it could be celebrity for celebrity’s sake, infamy, duplicity. From my specific example of a hero, Mother Teresa, I suggested that a person can publicly manifest as something more than this, something “heightened,” akin to a work of art. Through her life, this Albanian woman carved out from the 1 2

John Stuart recounts this anecdote in Ikons (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), 24 n3. For a in depth study of this form, see Nancy P. Ševčenko, “The Vita Icon and the Painter as Hagiographer,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 53 (1999): 150–165.

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Figure 4.1  Vita Icon of St. George, first half of the eighteenth century, Cretan School. Petit Palais, Paris. Photo: Paris Musées.

infinitely many possibilities before her a vivid shining that opens up the world in a new way, in her generosity to the outcasts of society. However, a saint is a public figure of a special kind. Mother Teresa is certainly a hero, but she is also a saint, and thus she makes something else clearly visible, something more than a mere role, or persona, or ideal: in her public image Christians see Christ. And like Christ in person, his image in the saint may be challenging, ambiguous, or “incognito.”3 Yet the love that Christ has for the “least of these” in the Gospels shines in her eyes for those with eyes to see it, and, manifests itself through her care for the forgotten and unwanted. We can find here the same doubled asymmetry we saw in Gadamer. Like a painting of the Alps, this image could have been otherwise; not only could Mother Teresa have lived her life otherwise, but we do not need her to come to know Christ, who we can come to understand by other saints, by the 3

See Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Alastair Hannay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 419, 422–430; Marion, “The Invisible Saint.”

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Gospels, by the faces of the poor who ask for a cup of water or some spare change on the metro. But like the painting, we might also say that this life, this saint, can help us to recognize the original more clearly, and that we may never have known Christ in this way without her. And just as an artwork does not try to copy all of the details of the original, a saint does not need to literally repeat the infinitely many details of Christ, but like an artist, to recognize and express the essential in the finite patterning or form of her own life.4 This understanding of the visibility of the saint is reflected in the way that icons represent this imagea. Icons are concerned with historical persons, and before the advent of photography people would copy images of holy men and women during life so that they could create faithful icons of them after they died. Yet while icons are interested in resemblance and recognizability, they are not interested in recounting saints’ lives in their full historical details or recreating photorealistic images of their faces. Their goal is rather to depict the saint as a type of Christ. Each saint is given particular facial features and hairstyles, so that many can easily be identified at a glance, while their physical postures and dress strictly follows generalized types based on their roles: bishop, ascetic, soldier, and so on.5 This logic is clearly shown as well in certain vita icons, which frame the saint’s portrait not with the historical events of his life (as is usually the case), but with episodes showing a universalized “type” of holiness taken from Scriptures (healing the sick, picking up venomous snakes without being harmed, etc.). The existence of such icons demonstrates clearly that the point of the icon is not first of all to know this historical person, but to see Christ imaged in him. The result of this logic is clear: whether the imagea of a saint or the imageb that depicts him, all icons are ultimately images of Christ. We will turn again to saints in later chapters, and confront here the more difficult question: what does it mean to have an image of Christ who is claimed as both God and man? How can an image of his face depict the truth of who he is? As we have seen, both patristic and contemporary theologians justify the icon by appealing to the Incarnation: Jesus is the true icon of the Father, and as Jesus became circumscribed in flesh so the artist can circumscribe him in line and color. At the same time, the Incarnation is not so much a solution, but only the problem at its height, as Jesus was not always recognized as God. Marion addresses this problem by arguing that only the Holy Spirit can bring us to the anamorphic point that will allow us to recognize Christ as Son of the Father. Following Gadamer, we know that all images are selective in what they show and omit in order to heighten the 4 5

See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Herrlichkeit I, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis as Glory of the Lord Vol. I: Seeing the Form (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1982), 135–250. For more on these types and their significance see Grabar, Christian Iconography, 60ff; Maguire, The Icons of their Bodies.

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truth of the original. How then do icons select the truth of an infinite and inexhaustible God, manifesting the visible as well as the invisible, that which our eyes see and that which cannot be known without a gift from the Father? What, in other words, do we actually see in the image? First, despite the loud protestations (from both iconophiles and iconoclasts) against the representation of the invisible God, we must admit that icons do dare to figure the invisible God – symbolically. Andrei Rublev’s “Trinity” is the most famous example, depicting God in the form of the three strangers that visited Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 18. Icons can also portray the pre-incarnate Son, as Christ Emmanuel or Holy Wisdom, and the (albeit controversial) tradition of “Lord Sabbaoth” or “Paternity” icons depict God the Father as a Jupiterian old man.6 The voice of the Father can be symbolized as rays of light reaching from the sky, and the Spirit is portrayed as a dove (e.g. Lk 3:22). Thus, it is simply not true to say that the ineffable God is never “represented,” given a broad use of the term. But it is of critical importance to recognize that such portrayals of God are never presentations of direct visibility (which would be impossible by definition), but only symbolic, indirect, or figurative, using forms that are already always found in the words of the Scriptures. That is, all portrayals of God in the icon are those that attempt to illustrate what is considered to have been first revealed by God himself, never human invention alone. Human invention nevertheless has a part in finding images to give voice to this revelation, as in Rublev’s inspired reworking of the older iconic traditions of the Hospitality of Abraham to provide a profound Trinitarian theology. In the case of the incarnate Christ, however, we have an exception. God is not only painted symbolically, but figured directly. Let us consider at length one of the most important Christological icons, the eschatological image of Christ in Glory, which appears in the center of the Deesis (see Figure 4.2). The icon, which was partially inspired by the tradition of imperial images, along with the icon of the Pantocrator or Christ the teacher, shows Christ holding a scroll or book, with his right hand raised. Sometimes one can see the throne that he is seated on, but other times only the top half of this icon is shown, as on the dome of Eastern Christian churches. The background of the image has very little importance other than to bring the figure of Christ forward. To begin with, the image shows us several subtle 6

It is not necessary to take sides here, but only to observe that this icon, whether orthodox or heretical, emerges from the iconic tradition, and was originally meant not as a direct representation of the invisible Father, whom “no one has ever seen,” (Jn. 6:46) but as a symbolic portrayal of the Father as a visible “father,” not unlike his symbolic portrayal as an angel in Rublev’s Trinity. The Western tradition continued to make images of a father as well, clearly declared by Trent to be “symbolic,” without meaning to be a direct depiction, but this escalated into a very serious conflict when it became clear that the faithful understood it in a literal way. See Boespflug, “Images,” 669; also Dieu dans l’art.

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Figure 4.2  Deesis Christ, or Christ in Glory, c. 1580, Russia. Museum of Russian Icons, Clinton, Massachussetts. Photo by author.

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visual paradoxes about who is portrayed. The face of Christ, for example, has at the same time a certain foreign severity as well as a great tenderness. Following a long tradition, which is perhaps most dramatically pronounced in the Sinai Pantocrator (Figure 1.2, p. 15), icons often give each side of Christ’s face a different expression.7 In the present case, the effect is subtle: the right side of the face is higher than the left, which creates tension as well as a feeling of compassion and interest. We find this same tension in the majesty of Christ enthroned and surrounded by his heavenly hosts. They seem to be a whirl of rushing wings, more energy than substance, but when we turn our attention to them, we catch glimpses of enigmatically peaceful and joyful faces amidst the teeming motion. Meanwhile, in his left hand, Christ holds a book or scroll, a symbol of his divine power and a reminder that Christ is the Word of the Father. Christ is himself the interpretive key to Revelation in the Scriptures, and by parallel in the image. Different icons may display different verses of Scripture. Here Mt. 25:34 has been chosen, reinforcing Christ’s eschatological role as final judge: “Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” If Christ comes to judge the world, he also comes to save the world, as the image makes clear, for he is shown in rhythm and elegance rather than force and terror. Invisible and visible, stern and gentle, just and merciful, word and image, the icon does not pick just one symbolic language, but visually emphasizes paradoxical extremes to communicate the mystery of Christ.

4.2 Glory Thus far, the paradoxes discussed operate through a perfectly visual aesthetic of a symbolic representational art. However, the icon has other visual devices of paradox that begin to subvert the very nature of imaging itself, working at the same time in two directions that seem at first to be opposed. The icon both appears in a glory greater than painting, and consents to be far poorer than painting’s accomplishments. Gold A first excess of the icon over representation and recognition is apparent in the use of gold, the only precious metal used in the painting of the 7

Maximos Constas discusses the tradition of such images, focusing on the Sinai Christ in “The Face of Christ in a Sixth Century Icon from Sinai” Art of Seeing, 37–79. See also Dagron, Décrire et peindre, 181–191.

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icon.8 Materials rarely enter into a phenomenological analysis of art, for the importance is placed on the appearing of the work, not its material support. After all, despite some subtle differences in color and texture, reproductions of paintings can continue to have virtually the same appearing, and thus the same effect on us, even if they are displayed with pixels or printed with ink instead of original egg tempera paint.9 However, gold is an exception to this rule. Most pigments used in icons are made from ground-up minerals, and even luminous materials like silver can be blended with pigment to some extent. Gold on the other hand refuses to mix with any other color. It always stands apart, as if on another plane, and it is not so much marked by color as by its radiant light.10 Whether it appears dark brown, olive green, yellow, or blazing like the sun depends on its relation to both us and the light source. This makes the icon a remarkably difficult medium to reproduce or put on display; one must often choose between two extremes, on one end capturing the painted hues, neutralizing the gold to an even yellow color, or on the other end capturing the gold flashing with light, dulling the pigments into a dark and indistinct mass. But, in fact, this very interplay, what Rico Franses calls the “reflection-absorption binary,” is a critical part of the composition and structure of the icon.11 Despite our tendency to neutralize this reflective glare, thinking it to be a distraction from the image, it is in this dynamic interplay of shine and shadow that the gold appears most truly as it is. And this is how the icon appears in its primary context of a Byzantine liturgy, where the gold of the icon gleams in the flickering light of candles and the 8

This is not to be confused with another use of precious metals, the riza, a plate usually made of tooled silver, embedded with gems, and fitted after the icon is made to cover everything but the hands and faces – see Ivan Drpić, Epigram: Art and Devotion in Later Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 9 BG 41/ED 70. This is why I do not comment here on the frequently mentioned cosmological symbolism of the materials in iconography, which brings in all creation, mineral and vegetable pigment, egg yolk and animal-hair brush, the human painter and angelic prayers. This is a beautiful symbolic interpretation, but as Sendler notes, there is no evidence to indicate that this interpretation was a part of the iconographic tradition until recently, Mystères, 290. In addition to the symbolism of material one can find symbolism of the process of iconography that links the artist’s creation to God’s creating activity, which is especially developed in Evdokimov and Bulgakov, and contemporary iconographers like Vladislav Andrejev, “Creativity and the Meaning of ‘Image’ from the Perspective of the Orthodox Icon,” Theology Today 61 (2004): 53–66. Some traditions even paint the image in imitation of, a real human body (for example, painting first the skeleton, then the flesh, then the clothes), Sendler, 293; see also Oleg Tarasov, Icon and Devotion, 182ff. I leave these practices aside here as they have no direct phenomenological bearing on the experience of the one who prays before the icon. 10 Sendler, Mystères, 161; Florensky, Iconostasis, 123. 11 Rico Franses, “All that is Gold does not Glitter: On the Strange History of Looking at Byzantine Art,” in Icon and Word: The Power of Images in Byzantium, eds. Antony Eastmond and Liz James (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 13–24.

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day’s changing light.12 Gold refuses to be tamed by the gaze or assimilated into the rest of the colors, but always breaks out of our vision of it. This is surely why gold is used to symbolize the otherworldly light of divinity. Most commonly, we see gold in the halos of the primary figures represented. The gold halo of the saint radiates with the same light beyond the spectrum of color and the limits of earthly vision, the light of divinity. It indicates that this person is imbued with Divine life, the theological definition of redemption and the hope of all the faithful, through the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ, following the famous formula of Athanasius, “Christ became man so that we might become God.”13 At the same time, the saint is not Christ, and the icon shows this as well. The halo of a saint is simple gold, while Christ’s Divinity is visually distinctive as crossed and marked with the Divine Name. In many traditions of iconography, the halo doubles its excess over the pigment with a spatial excess, overflowing the inner frame or indentation in the icon panel where the image is painted.14 Gold thus surpasses the color spectrum as it can surpass the spatial frame of representation. It is a visual demonstration that the colored representation is governed by something that we cannot get a grasp on, which we can only apprehend in a dazzling array of fragmented presentations which react to light sources often not in our control. And, where icons of the Pantocrator show Christ robed in red (to symbolize his humanity) with a blue cloak (to symbolize his divinity), often times he is clothed in a white robe with gold assyst, or lines of gold which spark through his garments, bringing him dramatically forward from the dark background. Assyst is reserved for things intimately connected with Divinity, usually Christ himself, but is also often used for the book of the Gospels, altar vessels, and other earthly beings believed to be intimately connected to Divinity, including the robes of Mary, thrones, church domes, and imperial documents.15 Finally, the background field of gold (although colors like yellow ochre or red are also commonly used) is referred to in Russian simply as “light,” recognizing that the Divine presence penetrates all things. Enhanced by the golden hues of the olipha varnish, this heavenly light permeates the figures of the image from within and without.

12 13 14 15

In addition to Franses, “All that is not Gold,” see Bissera Pentcheva, “The Performative Icon,” The Art Bulletin 88:4 (Dec. 2006), 631. I return to this point in Chapter 7. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, trans. John Behr (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012), 54, 3; PG 25, 192b. Sendler, Images of the Invisible, 90. Ibid., 16; Florensky, Iconostasis, 125.

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If gold is one way an icon stretches the limits of aesthetics, its portrayal of space and time is another. All paintings have a certain temporal freedom compared to time-bound performances like music or film; while the eye needs time to absorb the image as a whole, pass over each of its parts, and return again to the whole, we are left free to do so in our own way and in our own time, following the directives of the lines of vision. But the icon is marked by a second kind of temporal freedom, a temporal freedom within the world that it shows. With its field of gold, there is no explicit light source or shadow in the icon, no natural light or sky that would allow us to place it in any earthly time. Figures are often shown in multiple places in the same image to indicate an ongoing story, or are portrayed at anachronous times in their lives. Children are painted as little adults. The buildings have bizarre openings or structures that would seem to have no purpose or logic for any human use, and the action of the icon always takes place outside of the buildings, as if to say that the event is outside of space and time, and at the same time immediately present to us (see Figure 4.3).16 Further, the icon has a particular way of organizing space, which may appear as a certain geometrical strangeness. The plane of the icon is mostly flat, keeping the image at its surface and not projecting backward to a distant vanishing point like the common perspectival schemes that have been in use since the Renaissance. The icon lacks any single universal viewpoint as direct perspective does, and thus refuses the viewer any comprehensive objectifying knowledge of the world of the painting. Where the icon does feature clear perspective lines, they often converge in front of the painting, aiming at the viewer’s heart. The logic of this “reverse perspective” suggests that we are not the masters of the vision offered by the icon, but the contrary: we are the ones being looked at, it is we who are being measured up.17 As we see for example in Christ’s throne in Figure 4.2, one line of perspective moves toward the left, while the throne’s base reverses this movement to the right, resulting in a dynamic energy that pushes it forward. 16

17

Evdokimov, 127–37; Ouspensky, Meaning of Icons, 40. Henry Maguire gives examples of architecture contributing to the symbolic meaning of an event in Nectar and Illusion: Nature in Byzantine Art and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2012), 135–165. Oskar Wulff was one of the first to point out this phenomenon, “Die umgekehrte Perspektive und die Niedersicht. Eine Raumanschauungsform der altbyzantischen Kunst und ihre Fortbildung in der Renaissance,” in Kunstwissenschaftliche Beiträge August Schmarsow gewidmet zum fünfzigsten Semester seiner akademischen Lehrtätigkeit, ed. H. Weizäcker (Leipzig: K. W. Hiersein, 1907), 3–42. Pavel Florensky also elaborated upon this important aesthetic strategy in his 1919 essay “Reverse Perspective,” although this essay was not widely published until much later.

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Figure 4.3  Annunciation, second half of the sixteenth century, Russia. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Inversion of direct perspective is one of the icon’s strategies, but not the only one: icons use many different points of perspective, or blends of styles of perspective including both inverse and direct perspective, as well as vertical perspective.18 By eschewing any systematic viewpoint, the icon confounds any attempt to find the objective center of the painting. Instead, viewers are invited to share in a larger reality which embraces 18

Sendler provides a helpful illustration of different schemes of perspective in Images, 115–125. It is important not to overemphasize the icon’s use of reverse perspective, however striking its symbolism may be. To take reverse perspective as the single organizing feature of iconic space is not only inaccurate, but it lacks the radicality of a multi-perspective system: a reverse perspective alone would still preserve the Western ideal of three-dimensional direct perspective, as inverted. Thus Florensky, in “Reverse Perspective,” 208, argues that icons aim at a “liberation” from or “denial” of the authority of subjective perspective rather than merely an inversion of it. See Clemena Antonova’s overview of the state of research on iconographic perspective, which she describes as in a “deep intellectual mess,” precisely because of its overemphasis on this one perspectival strategy. See “On the Problem of ‘Reverse Perspective’: Definitions East and West,” Leonardo 43:5 (2010): 468. Antonova also provides an extensive analysis of different theories of perspective in Space, Time, and Presence in the Icon. Seeing the World with the Eyes of God (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010).

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them, along  with the other persons and things depicted there, creating movement and relationality. Each thing or person depicted has its own unique orientation of perspective; each thing must be encountered for in the way it gives itself, rather than subjected to a predetermined order. As Constas explains, the icon’s refusal to adopt a singular normative unifying structure serves as a way “to liberate the world from the totalizing specifi­ city of space and time” and invites its spectators to enter into this “new creation and reality.”19 Iconographer George Kordis also considers this interplay of different perspectives as a way of creating a forward-moving “relational” space, and suggests that a similar effect is enacted by the icon’s use of color and light. The icon preserves a careful balance between lighter colors which push forward and the darker colors that hold back. Thus color, rather than shadow, is the key to rendering form (a technique known as “colorism”).20 Traditionally, the iconographic method does not proceed by applying shadows to a base color, but begins from the darkest shades and builds from light to light, interspersed with transparent floats of color. These highlights bring volume and texture to the image, not in relation to a single spectator or light source, but simply by the logic of manifestation: to maximally reveal each shape for what it is. This is particularly evident in the garments, where, aided by the line, the folds shine brightest along the shape of the body.21 In the use of color, like in the use of line, the icon communicates a world set apart from everyday patterns of space and time. Mandorla A final way in which the icon breaks outside the plane of recognition can be found in the mandorla. Meaning simply “almond” in Greek, after the pointed oval which is one of its common forms, the mandorla is an illustration of the radiance that surrounds Christ revealed in his glory in icons such as the Transfiguration, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and so on, and occasionally for icons of Mary bearing Jesus. The mandorla of the Deesis Christ, seen in black and white in Figure 4.2, features several interlocking geometrical shapes of different colors that are interpreted with a theological significance. The red squares represent the 19

20 21

Constas, “Icons and the Imagination,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, 1 vol. 1 (Spring 1997): 121–123. See also Gary Gurtler, “Plotinus and Byzantine Aesthetics,” The Modern Schoolman LXVI (May 1989): 279. Kordis, Icon as Communion (Brookline: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2011), 40, 45, 50–51. Florensky, Iconostasis, 118–120, 148.

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Figure 4.4  Ascension icon with Mandorla. Early fifteenth century. Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens. Photo by David Hendrix.

earthly and the circular represents the heavenly, interpenetrating through the Incarnation.22 Four animals appear on each corner of one square, those named in Ezekiel’s throne vision (Ezekiel 1:1–28), which in Christian art symbolize the four Evangelists. The throne of Christ is thus lifted up by the four Gospels, and is spread outwards toward every corner of the earth. It is united to a second square, the new earth, the redeemed earth, by an oval which is blue, the color of the heavens and the transcendence. In other icons, such as this icon of the Ascension (Figure 4.4), Christ is surrounded by a blue oval with different shades that give the effect of radiating light, but in a strange way, brightening in the opposite direction from any light we know on earth. The center is the darkest shade, a blue 22

Kordis, Icon as Communion, 49; Andreopoulos, Metamorphosis, 70, 146, further develops the relation between these images of square and circle relating to: chaos and order, earth and heaven, and circumscribed and uncircumscribed; he also suggests an important connection here to historically important mathematical problem of trying to square the circle, in order to find the center of circle as the ultimate balance of all things.

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which almost appears black, although icons reserve true black only for caves and tombs. The circles become lighter as they become more removed from this origin, reaching their brightest stage in the outermost circle. This visual paradox shows us what it means to see the blinding radiance of God. Or, we might say, it is a precise illustration of a saturated phenomenon. Both Marion and the iconographic tradition have been deeply inspired by Dionysius the Areopagite, who described the paradoxical meeting of creature and Creator as “brilliant darkness.”23 As the most intense light blinds us, and thus might be similar to the experience of a darkness where our eyes cannot see, the divine presence is a mystery that lies utterly beyond what we can take in, saturating our understanding to the point where we become blind. The darkening circles of the icon thus indicate to us a mystery which human eyes cannot penetrate, the vision of God. Further, as we saw in Marion, seeing God is never like seeing an object from a safe distance, for we are always met with the all-seeing gaze already upon us. Thus, it is no accident, as Andreopoulos observes, that the mandorla is often painted in a way that it resembles a Divine Eye transfixing the viewer, as it has in the icon of the Ascension shown here.24 Through the mandorla, the world of the icon shows itself to be surpassed in its own ability to make visible; it appears beyond our everyday world. This is not because of a lack of information, or darkness which is a lack of light, but because the manifestation and glory so exceeds our ability to take it in and we are blinded. Analysis Thus we see with its use of gold, spatial dimensions, and the mandorla, the icon visually disrupts the relation of recognition, demonstrating for us our inability to fully understand, control, or reabsorb the icon into our world. The tension of color, darkness, light, and space invite us to enter the icon not just as a world that extends and clarifies the many possibilities within the finite horizon of our existence, but one that has been radically transfigured, where all things are bathed in the brilliance of God’s love that surpasses the limits of human understanding, just as the visual paradoxes challenge the concepts we could try to place on them from the dimension 23

24

Dionysius, Mystical Theology, I; PG 3, 998ff. Tamsin Jones gives an extensive analysis of this influence in Apparent Darkness: A Genealogy of Marion’s Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). Andreopoulos, Metamorphosis, 252.

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of color and space. These are all exemplary visual symbolizations of what Marion would call saturated phenomena: the icon grants us visible intuitions which cannot be submitted to our intentions, but which continually play outside of them and call us to return to approach them again and again, even if we will never synthesize or master them. Our full aesthetic recognition is deliberately disrupted in the icon. At the same time, unlike some of Marion’s examples of the saturated phenomena, we need to actively symbolize this relationship for it to hold. Even in its attempts to defy our limits, the icon is not made to become something so “other” to our experience that we can’t recognize it, to become utterly jarring and unsettling.25 The icon does not literally blind us. We still see the shades of darkening blue or the changing shine of the gold; we do not wince at a heavenly light. Nor are we necessarily shocked or surprised by a different distribution of space; while it takes its distance from ordinary representational painting, other artistic traditions do the same. The saturation is symbolized, rather than directly enacted. That is, the icon shows us that we cannot see, not by refusing to show, but rather by showing us indications of how our vision breaks down. After all, to base the worth of an aesthetic tradition on how transgressive it is to our sensibilities is to put an expiration date on the work of the art. We can and do learn from what originally was shocking, eventually absorbing it into the normative and mundane. The icon refuses to operate only by shock value, just as it refuses a perspective that is merely the inversion of my domination; both are still only defined by my subjectivity. But in addition to these strategies of exceeding the limits of painting, there are other dimensions of the icon which reach in the opposite direction. If the icon has strategies to appear more glorious than common representational art, it also has strategies that seem to fall short of what art is capable of.

4.3 Poverty It is not uncommon to hear the icon described as “impoverished,” but this word is usually used in very different ways than I mean here. Often it is taken in contradistinction to some other aesthetic, whether that be realism or technological overstimulation. The former position, most commonly found in those who study the theology of icons like Ouspensky, recognizes 25

This is true even if, as Sendler suggests, certain styles of icons deliberately strove for ugliness as a counteraction against a culture with immoderate expectations of aesthetic beauty. Mystères, 21–23.

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that realism was a very real temptation from within the later history of iconography, almost crowding out the traditional styles and forms. And yet, it would be anachronistic to continue acting as if realism is really opposed to the iconographic tradition, whether as the dominating ideal of aesthetics today, or some kind of inherently universal ideal for aesthetics (see Section 1.3). Gadamer would remind us that realism is only one path among others, and this is inescapably evident to anyone living after the developments of twentieth century art. As to the latter position, it is certainly true that we live in in the age of the image, a world of flashy, dazzling spectacles, and that we may pass over the icon as extremely dull compared to the brilliant advertisements competing for our attention.26 But if we are overstimulated, this would lead us away from the entire tradition of art, not icons alone. In this case, the icon would not be singled out from the rest of aesthetics, and the real impoverishment would be that of our badly formed tastes. That fact that we might be particularly unaccustomed to iconic style, too, would not make the icon an exception in aesthetics, for Gadamer would remind us that many traditions of art may be initially foreign, and thus require us to grow before we can engage them fully. Thus, the icon may certainly appear as an impoverished image for these reasons of historical and contemporary aesthetic culture. But the icon is also marked by a deeper poverty that challenges the tradition of images at a fundamental level. Predetermined Content First, as we have already indicated, what the icon shows is predetermined. Both Eastern and Western Christian traditions acknowledge the importance of the didactic function of images, particularly for the illiterate. But while Western religious art tolerates a wide range of creative interpretations of what to show and how to show it, icons are very strictly limited in what they represent. One does not just paint anything in iconic style, not even any theme with religious or moral content. Icons may portray a certain set of persons and events as drawn from the Scriptures and historical moments relevant to the life of the faithful. New icons can and do develop, particularly with new saints, but these decisions are not made at the discretion of the individual artist, only as authorized by the tradition. For unlike Western religious art, icons are believed to have an authoritative dogmatic 26

Constas reflects on this in greater depth, Art of Seeing, 14–35.

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content.27 They are not merely illustrations or reflections but carefully formed expressions of faith. The icon is deeply concerned with its cognitive content, and aims to impart a specific theological knowledge, not an abstract impression of holiness. High levels of ambiguity are discouraged, because the icon’s task is to communicate this dogmatic content. On the one hand, a theology that must include art has intriguing implications, as it would preclude any reduction of truth to propositional form or logical adequacy. On the other hand, linking it so closely to a clearly defined didactic content is clearly a diminishment of the full capacities of aesthetic imagination. The iconographer’s role is not to reimagine God or portray new scenes from the Scriptures in order to show them in a more vivid way, but must continually return to the same theological events and persons. Formulas of Style As an intensification of this point, the way in which a particular content will be shown is determined well in advance. One does not paint Christ in any way, one paints him according to certain forms. We have already seen models of the Pantocrator, Christ in Majesty as he appears in the Deesis (Figure 4.2) and the half-form of Christ Teacher (Figure 1.2). Other forms of Christ include Christ the Bridegroom, Christ Emmanuel, and Holy Wisdom, or the many forms of the infant Christ held by his mother. One will also find icons of Christ depicting events from Scripture: the Transfiguration, the Nativity, the Resurrection, and so forth. As mentioned above, each saint is painted with stylized facial features and hair, and their spiritual state or ecclesial role is depicted according to general conventions, whether ascetic, soldier, martyr, evangelist, and so forth, through their age, clothing, hand positions, or degree of movement, abstraction, or molding.28 A veiled woman with a dark red cloak bearing 8-pointed stars on her forehead and shoulders is Mary. A man with a short white beard and a yellow cloak over a blue robe is Saint Peter. Bishops wear their vestments and carry the gospels and martyrs hold crosses. These basic codes have been preserved for over a millennium. The above conventions are fairly simple and straightforward, and many serve as simple referents, what Gadamer would call “signs.” However, many iconic conventions are more complex, communicating their meaning as “symbols,” which are taken directly from Scriptures or which have been developed to communicate theological meaning. Even if determined in 27 28

Lossky, “Tradition and Traditions,” Meaning of Icons, 9–22. Maguire, The Icons of their Bodies, 16–17.

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advance, such conventions provide a rich source of theological reflection for those who contemplate the icons. For example, in some icons of the Annunciation, the Virgin Mary is knitting as the angel greets her. As Constas explains, this image comes from the Protoevangelium of James, where Mary is weaving the temple veil at the angel’s visit, symbolizing both the weaving of Christ’s flesh as well as his mortality; for readers of the Gospels know that temple veil will be torn in two as Christ breathes his last.29 The composition of the icon can also deepen the theological significance of what is communicated. In some icons of the Annunciation, Constas observes, the Virgin’s distaff and spindle create the form of a cross, amplifying this reference to Christ’s death. Similarly, while images of the Virgin and Christ have clearly defined conventions concerning who appears and how they are dressed, Constas points out that some icons depict the infant Jesus in a distorted position, with an outstretched neck, which creates a visual theological allusion to Christ as the sacrificial lamb.30 A particularly brilliant study in the theological significance of composition is found in Rublev’s Trinity. While adapting the traditional icon of the Hospitality of Abraham, Rublev’s composition omits the figures of Abraham and Sarah and rearranges the position of the angels to communicate a Trinitarian theology. The circular arrangement of the three angels indicates their equality, while the deferential bows to the angel on the left simultaneously confirm the priority of the Father. Meanwhile, the negative space between the outer angels creates the form of a chalice, identifying the inner angel representing Christ with the cup on the table in front of him holding the lamb: thus at once evoking the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Eucharistic sacrifice.31 Despite Didron’s impression that the Greek artist is “slave of the theologian,”32 these examples indicate that if the iconic code is faithfully passed on, this does not mean it is slavishly transcribed. This is true at the most basic mechanical level, since every iconographer’s hand is unique. More importantly, the icon’s predetermined content includes a set of basic visual conventions, as well as the more nuanced language of symbolic forms which has room for meaningful development. It is true that the icon is understood to be theology, and as such it is regulated by the teaching authority of the Church and the iconographers and saints who are 29 30 31

32

Constas, Art of Seeing, 108–112. Ibid., 102–108. Constas also suggests these images originate in the event of the Presentation in the Temple, where Simeon foretells the Passion (Lk 2:34). For more theological and aesthetic background on this icon see Anita Strezova, “The Icon of the Trinity By Andrei Rublev,” in Hesychasm and Art. The Appearance of New Iconographic Trends in Byzantine and Slavic Lands in the 14th and 15th Centuries, 173–231 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2014). Didron, Manuel d’iconographie, ix.

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understood to be speaking for it. Yet, in its health, the iconographic tradition is passed down living from master to student with room for natural variation and creative development of this theological vision.33 The rigid adherence to written iconographic canons as Didron imagined occurs only in the (near) death throes of a tradition. Thus we see that the icon occupies a strange place as a representational image. It is not a mere copy, nor is it a novel “original.” Because it is bound in fidelity to a predetermined theological tradition and conventional language, it falls short of the full glory of an aesthetic masterpiece according to the terms Gadamer has laid out. While some innovations are possible in iconography, they are modest and always determined by the boundaries of the theological tradition that has come before it. Naming The importance of recognition and familiarity does not stop with these codes, for all icons include the inscription of the person’s name or the title of the event in the local liturgical language. A name, like a portrait, gives us the basic reference necessary for objective knowledge. That is St. John. This is Mary the Mother of God. Our primary example in this chapter, the enthroned Christ in Figure 4.2, gives us an image of one who bears a name abbreviated in Greek as IC XC: this stands for Jesus, the human son born of Mary in history, and the Christ, the Messiah, the anointed one promised by God to redeem his people.34 According to a common tradition it is at the point when the iconographer inscribes the name that the image becomes an icon.35 To lack a name, and to lack the proper honorifics of sainthood (“saint,” ἅγιος, свѧтый, etc.), is to fail to be an icon. 33

34

35

See Mihail Alpatov, in Weiztmann, ed. The Icon, 240. Again, the iconographic canons Dionysius of Fourna were only written down in the eighteenth century, and were probably meant as a guideline rather than the strict law Didron made it out to be. Even for someone as severely opposed to Western aesthetics as Ouspensky, iconography was meant to be a living reappropriation of tradition. His own aim was to innovate on the past in order to develop an iconographic style fitting for Orthodox Christians within the Western culture he had immigrated to, and he would expel from his workshop students who could not progress beyond accurate duplication. Karen Boston, “The Power of Inscriptions,” Icon and Word, 42. Boston includes some analysis here of how the historical emergence of this title has a complicated history as a visual response to heretical and iconoclastic Christologies. See also Robert S. Nelson, “Image and Inscription: Pleas for Salvation in Spaces of Devotion,” in Art and Text, 100–102. The twelfth-century patriarch Dositheus of Jerusalem even reprimanded the Latins for performing additional rites of consecration over images; for the Eastern Christians, the name itself was more than sufficient to ensure the fittingness of an image for sacred ritual (Dagron, Décrire et peindre,

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From the standpoint of aesthetics, this again seems crude or heavyhanded. The artwork, too, is titled (even if “Untitled Composition No. 11”), and this often guides our understanding of the work. While this information is considered important enough to be displayed in museum exhibits, it is usually kept visually separate, placed next the piece to allow the work as an image to speak for itself. But here in the icon we have a label within the image which seems to crudely repeat and cut off what the image was already trying to say. Is this not extraneous to the artwork, a cheapening of it?36 We begin to see here that the admittedly often pretentious use of the verb “write” to describe the creation of an icon may not be entirely an accidental feature of Greek and Russian (γραφώ and писать mean both writing and painting). With the formulaic modes of identification and the necessity of the written name, the icon does approach the textual more than most paintings, and seems to keep the image subjected to the power of a word. However, the icon of Christ is more transgressive still. Lest we think that historical human name and a traditional Messianic role lets us off safely from making knowledge claims about the infinite God, the icon immediately pins us down with a third name, inscribed inside his crossed halo: ὁ ὤν, the Septuagint translation of the “Divine Name” (or, rather, the mistranslation of the Hebrew’s refusal to give a name, in Ex. 3:14), rendered in English as “I am.” There is no mistaking that Jesus is the one who is portrayed, the one was historically born of Mary, and there is no mistaking that he is claimed as the very God who revealed himself to Moses. In theological discourse, one is strictly forbidden to speak of God in terms of adequation, so language often seeks strategies of subversion. We may omit or cross out letters (G-d, G𐌈d) or use reverential capitalization. We may alternate between the kataphatic and apophatic statements,  or

36

68–72), even if many Eastern Christians perform additional prayers of consecration over icons today; see Sendler, The Icon, 204; Bulgakov, Icons and the Name of God, 84. This was not always the case. Pre-iconoclastic Christian images sometimes lacked names, which, as Henry Maguire explains, indicates they were unnecessary based on an understood context, but which also served to lend them a broader range of interpretive and symbolic possibilities, more like the richness of aesthetic meaning as we understand it today. See “Eufrasius and Friends, on Names and Their Absence in Byzantine Art” in Art and Text, 139–160. However, it is clear that by the end of iconoclasm, the inscription of the name became a very strong requirement for an icon. It was thus a scene of great scandal at the beginning of the eleventh century when ἅγιοs was effaced from an icon of St. Symeon, leaving only the earthly name; to remove the honorific was itself considered to be an act of iconoclasm. Charles Barber, “The Trial of Symeon the New Theologian,” in Icon and Word, 28. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, “Vision’s Resistance to Language,” in Beyond Piety: Critical Essays in the Visual Arts 1986–1993 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 41.

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transcend the two in the hyperbolic language of praise, recognizing that for whatever likeness our words truly claim about God, there remains a greater, even infinite unlikeness.37 What then are these names doing here, and what is this image trying to claim with them? But we must be more precise. The word given here is not a treatise, or even strictly speaking a predication like one finds in analogy, which would speak of God as Goodness, God as Love, God as Life, and so forth, to be infinitely deferred after acknowledging a finite likeness.38 The word here is a special kind of language: it is a name, which aims not at predication but at identification. This offers a very particular kind of recognition. Naming is a deictic, not a definition. It gives a basic reference that allows us to single out one individual from every other person who ever lived, to identify the uniqueness of this temporal event and spatial presence from every other point in history and every other worldly location. At the same time, such reference tells us almost nothing. Take the name of an event, such as “World War I,” or perhaps “the Transfiguration.” Marion would classify such things as saturated phenomena, as they will always exceed whatever we say about it. The more history progresses the more it has to offer, and the more we understand its significance, the more we multiply our explanations39 The name of a person tells us even less. It gives us a reference but no real answer to the question “who?” This question, which delves into the mystery of the person, cannot ultimately be given in an objective analysis of psychological profiles. It cannot be found in a portrait, which as Gadamer made clear never really reaches the private person, nor even a life narrative, which would still omit and heighten and result in the double asymmetry of an image in Gadamer’s sense. It is not that such things are lies, but that the intimacy and mystery of personhood can only really only be approached by entering the long and slow path of personal acquaintance, and it is always partial and subject to new changes. And even, then the more that is uncovered, the more the mystery is deepened. For Marion, it is this infinite undefinability which is the unique privilege of human beings, being created in the uncircumscribable image of God.40 37 38 39 40

Fourth Lateran Council, Canon 2, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils: 230–31; Dionysius, Divine Names; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia.13.2–3; IE/DS ch 6, etc. See my “Icons and Analogy: Expanding our Language Game” New Blackfriars. 100:1087 (2019): 308–319. BG 229/ED 375. Marion, Negative Certainties, §7; see also Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 24–25, 197–98 [23–24; 211–212].

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For Gadamer, art is true if it is authentic, and false when it is empty and does not live up to itself; Marion as we saw said something similar in the context of Courbet’s critique of the Salon painters who worked according to a set of rules and not from the thing itself. The icon in its impoverishment flatly contradicts both of these ideas of art, for it must live up to a standard from outside of itself, the theological tradition. These directives include not only conceptual criteria, but also aesthetic ones. Even if it is true that the icon is not a purely slavish copy, it is clear that the icon is not meant to be primarily a work of religious imagination, nor an aesthetic “shining” in itself. It is held to the same theological rigor as doctrine, as it is claimed as an extension of the revelation of the Scriptures, God’s own self-communication.41 One of the most important functions of the icon is thus to offer us knowledge, leading to what Gadamer would call recognition. Like all paintings, the icon is not something that can be merely replaced with words. The knowledge it gives is not of the order of predication, logical adequacy, or scientific certainty. To understand it, we must enter into its play, reflecting on what it offers to us. To recognize its meaning will take time and reflection, and most of all, the patience to let the icon show itself on its own terms, rather than immediately absorbing it into ours.42 At the same time, the icon is far more insistent in right recognition than ordinary paintings, even representational ones. It pushes familiarity almost to the point of banality. Unlike Marion’s aesthetic masterpiece, it never strives to shock or excite our attention, or create never-before seen invisibles. The icon has no interest in new invisibles. Rather than seeking out something new, it continually seeks to enter into the same truth, the same tradition. Any aesthetic masterpiece merits revisiting, as Gadamer and Marion both remind us, but the icon seems to demand revisiting at a level far beyond what aesthetics alone could tolerate. One is not surprised by which icons one will find in an Orthodox church, and creative innovations are possible only after an iconographer has so thoroughly digested the history of this aesthetic tradition that he can speak it as his native language.43 This lack of interest in novelty is not the mere conservatism of a culture seeking to preserve its identity in a changing world. Rather, this repetition can also be seen as a way of 41 42 43

Florensky, Iconostasis, 90. Constas, Art of Seeing, 15–18. Andrei Rublev of course did this in the fifteenth century and more contemporary iconographers have been innovators in deep dialogue with the tradition. We see this for example the more subtle revival of ancient icons found in Ouspensky (Figure 7.8, p. 235) and Kroug (shown on the book cover and in Figure 6.1, p. 200), as well as the more dramatic developments of George Kordis.

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confessing its insufficiency, hyperbolically stretching discourse to its logical limits. Rather than kataphatically express everything that is possible to say about God, or apophatically refuse expression altogether, the icon continues to express the same things over and over. We are in danger when we try to say too much and in danger of trying to say nothing at all, so perhaps we can accept to repeat again and again to enter into a truth more and more deeply: it is we who must change before it. Such extreme repetition marks a non-economic, non-pragmatic relation, even beyond the ways that aesthetic tradition seeks to transcend this paradigm. Thus, the formulaic codes of the icon show us the heightened role of recognition and familiarity, the minimizing of individual novelty, and preference of growing into a shared vision rather than adjusting images to one’s personal tastes. The icon offers a content to be known and recognized, but these conventions can serve as strategies to subvert ordinary forms of cognition. The name, meanwhile, emphasizes the importance of the individual person shown in the icon, confirming that this knowledge is not objective or aesthetic but relational. These all make the icon “impoverished” by the standards of aesthetics, yet to this point the icon has not left the aesthetic tradition.

4.4  Exceeding Aesthetics Is the icon a painting? So far we have concluded this: the icon is a special and strange kind of painting, which seems to want something more than ordinary paintings do, by aiming to be both greater and lesser. It may be tempting to stall our investigation here, digging our heels deeper into aesthetic exploration of the icon’s symbolism. This position should seem familiar: it was the second half – the more interesting one – of Ouspensky’s defense of the superiority of the icon, that advanced him into a territory more creatively daring and more dangerous than his more banal claim that “theology says so.” What after all is being defended so zealously by Orthodox thinkers like him, if not the particular aesthetic language of painting that they pray with, which is unique and seems so instantly recognizable? This temptation exists for many devout Orthodox as well as for outsiders who wish to defend the uniqueness of this tradition – and it holds at least as long as one avoids looking at the messiness of history, the ambiguities of genre, and the holes in logic that follow the absolute division of icon from other paintings, which I briefly sketched out in Chapter 1. After this initial investigation of the icon as a representational painting, and through the aid of our phenomenological foundation, it is now possible to address this point more concretely.

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The icon is unique, yes, and its aesthetics is a part of what it is, but the icon is not primarily a matter of aesthetics. What makes the icon different is not based on any kind of aesthetic characteristic that creates a definitive rupture between it and other paintings. The icon subverts the norms of ordinary representational painting through its paradoxical strategies of glory and poverty, but other paintings can confound our perception as well, sometimes taking inspiration from the Byzantine icon for noniconic purposes: Francis Bacon was more daring in visually surpassing our notions of temporality and perspective, Paul Klee, too, used words in his paintings, Gustav Klimt used gold alongside color, Andy Warhol pushed repetition of familiar faces to an even greater extreme. Every feature of the icon mentioned above can and has been repeated elsewhere in art. The icon thus cannot be set apart on aesthetic terms alone. If I insist on this point, it is because the majority of contemporary philosophers who have discussed the icon hold the opposite. Trading Ouspensky’s theological grounding for a phenomenological frame, for example, Emmanuel Falque rests the entire weight of the Byzantine icon on its phenomenality as a visible image (what Marion would call the “idol”), as anchored around the finite perspective of the spectator, and thereby neglects the transcendent and relational dimensions of the phenomenality of God’s self-showing in it (what Marion would call the “icon”).44 There is no need to deny that the aesthetics of Byzantine icons is significant, but to identify what makes the icon unique for believers will require more than an account of its visibility as an image, just as to recognize what is unique about the Scriptures requires more than appreciation of Hebrew poetry. This error also comes into play in a more subtle way among those who define the icon by a paradoxical play of visibility and invisibility, straining at the limits of conventional aesthetics in opposing directions. Georges Didi-Huberman has recognized the icon’s extremes of spiritual subtlety and material weight, not unlike the Archimandrite Vasileios’s description of the icon as combining “humility and magnificence.”45 Similarly, Jean-Luc 44

45

This argument emerges from the discussion of whether the sacred image which Nicholas of Cusa calls an icona in his De visione Dei should be translated as “painting” or “icon.” Falque insists on the former, based on elements of Cusa’s description which he deems incompatible with Byzantine aesthetics. Incidentally, beyond the primary error of reducing the icon to its aesthetic criteria alone, it is worth pointing out that the particular aesthetic criteria Falque uses (omnivoyance, reverse perspective, etc.) are neither necessary to the Byzantine icon nor unique to it. The argument thus fails twice over. “The All-Seeing: Fraternity and Vision of God in Nicholas of Cusa,” trans. by Kyle H. Kavanaugh and Barnabas Aspray, Modern Theology 35:4 (October 2019): 760–787. Compare Didi-Huberman’s L’image ouverte and his article “Les théologies entre l’idole et l’icône,” Encyclopédia Universalis-Corpus (Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis, vol. III, 1989), 65–73, with Archimandrite Vasileios of Stavronikita: “In both [the icon and the saint] life wells up behind an

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Nancy will say that the sacred is precisely what one cannot touch, that by preserving the distance a painting does not hide the sacred, but allows for exactly the way that we have access to the sacred, lets the sacred “cross” to us.46 This echoes and develops the insight of Gadamer that art has an innate sacrality, but now, for Nancy and Didi-Huberman, the icon is no longer based on simple visible strategies, but the very paradoxical tension of appearing and refusing appearance. These views come closer to what makes the icon significant to believers, and they can enrich our understanding of what is unique about the icon as a visual representation. Yet, if the icon’s paradox is only a matter of transgressive aesthetic style, we have still not explained what makes the icon unique compared to other paintings. We must refine our thinking still further. The icon, if it is a paradox, is a special kind of paradox, not unlike the form of parables, apothegmata, or koans. Unlike the 1970s art curators, with their fanciful “dream world,” Jesus did not delight in esotericism or mystery for its own sake. He always gave answers to the intellectuals and scholars in the Scriptures. Yet these answers were always in the form of parables or perplexing sayings. A parable is not an aesthetic work like a poem, for it does not “shine” vividly. Its meaning is obscure at first, and is not accessible by scholarship or analysis. It opens only through a careful, personal reflection, a struggle with its contradictions, which demands personal appropriation. In a similar vein, C. A. Tsakiridou compares the icon to the “word” or apothegm given by a desert father, whose speech was like “a form of spiritual surgery.”47 Like the parable and the apothegm, the icon presents us with some knowledge, but refuses to make itself immediately available or to shine with all the capacities of a painting. Its richest fruits initially appear as paradoxical, and are only available when we let the icon work on us, through our patient and careful attention to what is shown for us at a personal level.48 It is not the icon which must find expressions to adapt to our tastes and our understanding, it is we who must adapt to it. In this vein, Maximos Constas describes the icon as a hermeneutical “stumbling block,” encountered as a sign of contradiction.49 The icon may

46 47 48 49

outward appearance of motionlessness, and there is a ‘hidden beauty’,” from Hymn of Entry: Liturgy and Life in the Orthodox Church, trans. Elizabeth Briere (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984), 84. Nancy, Ground of the Image, 2–4 [11–13]. Tsakiridou, Icons in Time, 318, further explores the connection between the enargeia or “liveliness” of icons and that of Zen art, which she argues have a similar spirit; see also 306. Sendler suggests something along these lines: “The icon surpasses the faculties of the human mind and is only open to it in contemplation,” Mystères, 16 (translation mine). Constas, Art of Seeing, 31; see also 18, 23.

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be difficult to interpret first at an aesthetic level alone, as we come from an initially disparate aesthetic world, but Constas suggests that the heart of this difficulty rests on something more than merely cultural difference. He compares the challenge of interpreting an icon with interpreting difficult passages from Scripture or the Church Fathers. Our lack of understanding is not an indication of the weakness of the text, but the weakness of our own understanding. The icon, like these texts, thus serves as an instance of decentering of the sovereign ego and its imperial interpretive reign, for it resists easy categorization according to our imagination. The “contradiction” Constas is explaining can be understood in Marion’s Augustinian terms as the “ordeal” of facing an “accusing truth.” It reveals our darkness and blindness to what it offers, and thus it calls us to change before it. Such moments of contradiction are deeply personal. We are tempted to respond in violence and rejection. Thus, according to Constas, the icon does not merely offer a play of abstract intellectual contrast, but a truth which contradicts us, and which can only be tolerated by those who love the truth enough to bear the change that it demands of us. Thus, while the icon may have a paradoxical appearing, as Nancy or Didi-Huberman recognize, this is not only a clever subversion for its own sake. At least if we follow contemporary Orthodox thinkers like Tsakiridou and Constas, the initially contradictory character of the icon is a demand that we change before it. Art, too, issues a challenge (“You must change your life!”), but the icon requires something more: in order to face what it offers we must undergo a change in orientation, a conversion. As Constas affirms, the icon’s purpose is not to satisfy our vision but to free it, “using images to overthrow the power of images” and “confronting it with the invisible” not merely for its own sake, but in order to “summon the eye to a new mode of vision, by opening it up to infinite depth.”50 And yet, even here, we are still in the finite realm of aesthetics, if a paradoxical one, that demands more of us, and that claims to offer more. Tsakiridou and Constas understand this. The primary aim of their work is to flesh out the aesthetic character of the icon, not to limit the icon to such aesthetic terms alone. Their work can serve as a corrective to the totalizing claims of Ouspensky, and enhance our appreciation of what the icon is as a painting. Yet the real uniqueness to the icon’s character as a painting, the reason for its paradoxical character, the reason it asks for our conversion, and the reason it 50

Ibid., 22.

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seeks to free our gaze from the visible is neither in the character of the image or the character of the one who views it: it is in the uniqueness what – or, rather, whom – the icon aims to present. The gap that the icon is gesturing towards is not the space between visible and invisible in the literal sense, or between what I see and what I can’t see. Rather, the gap lies between my gaze and the gaze of the one who sees me, between my finite aim and the counterintentionality that is always already embracing it. The icon’s purpose as a painting is not to represent God, but allow believers to enter into a relation of personal communion with him. We can now see more concretely the value in Marion’s refusal to let the image itself be the point of what the icon is. It was not about denying the importance of visibility, but recognizing that the icon’s goal simply cannot be understood within an aesthetic framework. Unless we recognize the role of this personal relation we have not yet left what Marion would call the plane of idolatry, because we are still anchored to the base of the self, what it sees or doesn’t see, and however it grows or changes it is still rooted to its own starting point. Phenomenologically speaking, any “icon” defined by reference to aesthetic capabilities or even the expansion of one’s own gaze alone remains locked in a finite horizon. It will thus remain a self-referencing idol. If this is obvious in Falque’s version of an icon, which offers us only the phenomenality of line and color, a prime aesthetic idol, it is even the case if we expand to the phenomenality of an aesthetics paradoxically stretching from the depths of humility to the heights of magnificence. Whether one bifurcates art into a duality of “carnal images” versus “spiritual images” (Ouspensky, Florensky, Falque), or renders all art essentially spiritual in its paradoxical challenge (Gadamer, Didi-Huberman, Nancy), it is still a question of the phenomenality of the visible image, still bound to the finite realm of the spectator’s aim. Nor is it enough to stop at the point of recognizing the icon as a hermeneutical “stumbling block,” like parables or monastic apophthegmata that challenge and expand our vision, for there are other riddles or hermeneutical stumbling blocks that are only this, or at best forms of self-improvement. While the ordeal of truth is central to the icon, it demands not merely the negative motion of a decentering of the ego from itself (thus displacing the self to some other new and better center), but a positive motion, a kenotic surrender towards a personal relation. The icon, in the strictest sense, aims to present us to the phenomenality of God’s self-showing, which, as Marion explains, cannot be accessed on our own initiative, through a third-person concept or representation of a distant thing. This phenomenality which surpasses our limits can only be

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received as a gift from beyond our native horizon. The icon invites us to meet, through its painted gaze, this divine counter-intentionality which lies utterly beyond color and visual perspective, and this cannot be received as an object, but only as a relation. In order to see this call, we must be willing to respond to this invitation to personal communion. The icon will not open itself in these infinite dimensions without the freely made choice to enter into this relation. The icon does not operate by mimesis, but veneration. Simply put, only prayer completes the meaning of the icon. It is our next task to understand what this means. From Paradox to Prayer The icon does not aim primarily to represent God, but to serve as an occasion for placing oneself in his presence. Thus, we can understand that the recognition offered by the icon as a representational image may involve a renewed and joyful understanding of our entanglement in the world, but the paradoxical character of the image hints that the icon aims to express more than this. For the icon strains at the limits of representation on both sides, reaching for a glory which surpasses the limitations of the aesthetic alone (through the use of gold, perspective, and the mandorla), and consenting to an impoverishment of aesthetics, well beneath what images are capable of (the submission of the painting to a prescribed word, in content, style, and name). The art of the icon exceeds our expectations while preserving a familiar recognizable content, a person identified by name. To understand what makes the icon an icon will require the recognition that it serves as God’s self-showing, which, following Marion, cannot be achieved from any human standpoint. It is God’s free initiative to reveal himself, and a finite human being can only enter that revelation by finding himself before God’s gaze. Only in prayer can the icon be encountered in its truly unique phenomenality which is not so much a matter of aesthetics but communion. And yet, to accept Marion’s argument on this point does not mean we must stop here and abandon the concrete details of the paradoxical aesthetics outlined above. Far from it! If the icon offers an invitation to communion, and indicates its desire to belong to a different logic, it does so by making use of the resources available to it from the aesthetic sphere. Turning a detailed attention to the aesthetic elements of this invitation in the way that they relate to the concrete action of prayer will give us an even richer understanding of the icon in all of the nuances of its mediation.

chapter 5

Presence

The Icon and Prayer

5.1  Manners of Presence Despite its paradoxes of glory and banality the icon is also not, strictly speaking, an experience of mysterious absence or the dazzling darkness of overabundant presence. The icon presents us with knowledge readily ­available to the believer, repeating the basic content of the faith which in turn allows for the aesthetic functions of anamnesis and recognition. For the icon brings something – or someone, rather – to presence in prayer. But what kind of presence? I deliberately passed over an ambiguity e­ arlier in Gadamer’s account of presentation in aesthetics. I spoke about Gadamer’s idea of self-presentation primarily in terms of the artwork ­vividly ­showing forth the original, and through it discussed all a­ppearing as a kind of self-presentation (Selbstdarstellung), for “being is ­ self-­ presentation.”1 However, Gadamer first mentions this term in the context of play, as players ­giving themselves wholly over to the game in order to achieve their ­self-­presentation. This might at first have seemed like a clever sleight of hand. After all, who is presenting here? Is it a question of the artwork presenting itself to us? Or is it a question of our own self-presenting to the play of art? For Gadamer, we already have the answer: it is both, caught up in the event of “aesthetic language” that happens between us. The subject is not closed off from the world but inextricably entangled in it. Any encounter of understanding is ek-static in the Heideggerian sense, a “standing out” into what is being unconcealed; one must place oneself there (“stellt dar” for Gadamer, linked to Darstellung, or representation), or set oneself before (English follows the Latin prae-sentare) what makes itself available. It would be mistaken to claim a third-person overview of this relation when I am always caught up in the middle of it, but nevertheless we can say that in understanding I must make myself present to this experience and the artwork must make itself present to me. 1

TM 500/WM1 488.

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Of course, if all presentation is presence, not all presence has the same intensification as presentation (prae-ens, being before, is not pre-sentare, placing before). This will nevertheless serve as a preliminary sketch of presence: an encounter of self-giving from both sides.2 Presence of Things, Paintings, Persons Husserl reminds us that there are many different ways that phenomena can be present to us, and something can begin to catch our attention in different ways. At the level of a thing, presence depends exclusively on how our attention opens to it, whether it is the direct intentional focus or more broadly apprehended as the background of something else.3 The thing present need not necessarily be physically in front of us; memory and anticipation also bring things to presence in their physical absence. But this presence certainly requires some interest or affection, a “particular pull” that something can exercise on us, an openness to what it gives.4 This can happen with a deliberate act of attentiveness, as when I turn to the book I would like to begin to read, whether out of delight or discipline. It can also happen against my will, as when the loud construction in the apartment upstairs makes reading impossible. In both cases, there must be at least a minimal prior openness of interest or attention. The construction upstairs would not be present to one who was deaf. But some things don’t exactly follow this model, for their presence is always much more striking than the simple everyday objects which Husserl spends the majority of his time considering. Marion has challenged Husserl on this point in great detail, sketching out the “saturated phenomena” which would overturn any attempt at such objectification. Art remains one of the most important examples of this resistance, for the painting (the saturated phenomenon of the “idol”) subverts our mastery over the visible by mastering our attention, capturing and fascinating our gaze, and overwhelming any intentions we have for it (Section 3.1). Gadamer has also discussed this intensified presence of the artwork, using the idea of the “sacred” or an “ontological increase”; there is always more in an artwork than what can be reduced to the paradigm of thingliness 2 3 4

Here I follow the lead of Jean-Yves Lacoste from “La présence et la demeure,” in L’intuition sacramentelle et autres essais (Paris: Éditions Ad Solem, 2015), 29–57. Ideas I, §37; Erfahrung und Urteil, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks as Experience and Judgment (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), §§ 17–20. Husserl, Analysen zur passiven Synthesis, Hua XI, and Aktive Synthesen, Hua XXXI; trans. Anthony Steinbock as Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), §32, §50.

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(Section 2.3). We are of course free to walk away from a painting and leave the room, or, equally easy for scholars, to neutralize it under our analysis. Tsakiridou warns explicitly against the intellectual’s “unwillingness to see aesthetically, as if this way of approaching the world and art (and God) is too basic, too innocent and uninteresting to minds that are overflowing with words and ideas. Why stand still when one can run?”5 But when we turn to receive this striking aesthetic presence, to listen to it in the patient attentiveness that it demands, we do so by giving ourselves over or making ourselves present to its play. More importantly, as we have seen with Marion, closely following Levinas, a person who is present to our interest in a more intensified way than both things and art, immediately striking us with a counter-gaze. Contra Husserl’s description, it is not merely a neutral alteration in judgment when I realize that this mannequin is in fact a man.6 Suddenly my relation to the environment is underscored with the vivid presence of the other person; even in his silence his being here speaks to me. Of course, this presence can be minimized, as when I am lost in my thoughts in a crowd or when I have a mechanical interaction with a sales clerk. Even then he remains a person and is free to react to the withdrawal of my interest from his presence, whether by speaking or by breaking the predictable script. He can also try to minimize his presence to me. If he may decide to speak and show himself very deeply, he can also decide to dissimulate and say nothing at all, or ignore me. A person can never completely hide this presence simply by the fact of being an embodied being, which is always meaningfully expressive as well as visible.7 However, a person has the ability to present himself to greater and more intense degrees than a thing can, and the freedom to modify this presence. On the other hand, I am also free to be more or less open to this showing. This is true on some level with things, but even more so with persons, for the greater the degree of presence, the greater the degree to which we can close ourselves to it. I may decide to welcome his presence by listening very carefully, or I may close off this presence by deciding I already know what he is saying, or attend to his presence in a similar way to my focus on 5 6 7

Tsakiridou, Icons in Time, 316. Experience and Judgment, §78. Jean-Paul Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, 282 [331], and Emmanuel Levinas, in Totality and Infinity, further develop this idea in different ways. Edith Stein, Zum Problem der Einfühlung, trans. Waltaut Stein as The Problem of Empathy (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1989); Max Scheler, Wesen und Formen der Sympathie: Die deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart, trans. by Peter Heath as The Nature of Sympathy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008).

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an object: interacting with him as a tool to accomplish my tasks, measuring him up by his clothing choices or social graces, or classifying him with armchair psychoanalysis. And of course the reverse is also possible, that I am the one who speaks (or refuses to) and he is the one who listens (or ignores me). In both speaking and listening, then, the presence of the another person takes place in its richest form when he, in his freedom, chooses to make himself present to me, and I, in my freedom, choose to make myself present to him. This involves a communal relation of presence. At the same time, this relation is asymmetrical, for I will never be able to get above him or around to the other side of his direct experience. Thus, in all presence, and especially with the encounter with a person, both self-showing and the openness required to receive it are forms of being present. This is not unlike the condition of visibility. To see one must be inscribed already in the visual field; to touch one must be touchable.8 To be present (even if we can modify the degrees) is both to give ourselves over to manifesting ourselves and to give ourselves over to the attention demanded to receive the other’s manifestation, deepened according to the degree that it gives itself. Layered Presence: Persons in Pictures Now that we have considered the presence of a thing, a painting, or a ­person, we can think about a more complicated case, the presence of a person in a picture. As we have seen in Gadamer, pictures allow something they show to come to presence in its physical absence by presenting the appearing of the original. Yet we have also seen that this appearance has its limits, particularly when it is a picture of a human person. First of all, it is fixed in a structure that is ontically independent of the person. Unlike the mirror image or live video, which retain at all times their dependence on the original, a picture is an independent being, which allows it a greater stability at the same time that it prevents it from ­replicating the full spontaneity and freedom of immediate presence. Some particularly powerful works of art may give us a more vivid appearance than the immediate presence of the original. But 8

Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie II, Hua IV, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Book II, (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 153, 175–78. This is taken up as well by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis as The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1979), 273 [218].

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in the case of a person, we feel a lack especially deeply, as a personal ­presence is ­exponentially deepened by spontaneity, even more so than the ­spontaneity of things. Second, even if it is an aesthetic masterpiece or “idol,” a picture can never fully enact the countergaze, which is why Marion speaks of the impossibility of depicting a person.9 At the same time, a picture of a person can manifest the vividness of a presence which is more heightened than an ordinary object, particularly when it is an image giving the direct gaze of a person actively making herself present to us. In such cases the picture almost seems to speak for itself, as “something that commands its own reality.”10 Consider for example the refugee in Steve McCurry’s famous photograph “Afghan Girl,” whose extraordinarily vivid eyes enact her presence of attention, even through a fixed image. This picture does not only offer us the presence of a thing (though we can take the photograph as an object), nor a presence of merely a work of art (although we can see it in this way as well), but offers to our gaze the image of a personal presence, even far removed from the occasion of this original photograph. This example leads us to a final point. Different kinds of pictures can have different kinds of personal presence. The “Afghan Girl” has a gaze that strikes us more than other pictures, but we still receive this photograph as something like a portrait, which, according to Gadamer, means that we see her as a type of a young girl, perhaps a public image for the refugee’s plight, rather than the individual, Sharbat Gula, whose name wasn’t even known until the fame of the photo led the photographer on several ­expeditions to track her down seventeen years later. The photograph as an imageb displays a person according to a certain public image, imagea. However, if a photo or painting attempted to show a person that we knew and loved as a private acquaintance, Gadamer observes that it would no longer be experienced as an artwork. She would come to presence through such an image in a different way. Photos of family members and loved ones, as we have mentioned, are something closer to “mementos.” Similarly, we may take pictures of meals, places, or things not so much because we want to remember what these things looked like, or because we want to delight in their heightened aesthetic visibility (although p ­ hotos may do both of these things), but primarily because looking through ­photos makes these moments vividly present again and because we want to share these experiences with others. People also display photos of loved ones not because 9 10

Marion, CP, 195–96; IE, 76/DS 92; BG 267/ED 434–444. Tsakiridou describes the image as almost “a living thing, a life-form in art,” Icons in Eternity, 18.

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they want a vivid appearing or secondary familiarity with the essence of the original, but because they want to be surrounded by the presence of their loved ones in their absence.11 Presence and the Icon What kind of presence, then, is given by the icon? The icon, as we have said, is always a painting of persons. As a painting, it first has an aesthetic presence, sometimes even a masterpiece that draws our attention to its captivating visibility. And particularly in portrait icons, it is also experienced as giving a personal presence, although as a picture it is obviously lacking in full spontaneity. Yet this personal presence of the icon differs from that of aesthetic masterpieces. First of all, unlike the portrait, the icon is not interested in p ­ resenting any general type. As mentioned in the prior chapter, an icon must always present Christ: either directly, or through his living types, the saints. All human beings are said to be made in God’s image (Gen. 1:27), but according to the Patristic tradition this image has become tarnished ­ through sin. The icon shows that saints are precisely “those in whom the divine likeness has been restored,”12 the holy men and women who, as John Damascus claims, have “become likenesses of God as far as possible.” According to this theology of theosis, or deification, “God dwells in them” so that they are “called gods, not by nature, but by adoption, just as redhot iron is called fiery, not by its nature but because it participates in the action of the fire.”13 The result is a further theological justification for our earlier observation that in a saint’s imageb, it is not just the public imagea of the saint, but Christ himself who comes to presence for us more vividly than before. At the same time, imaging Christ does not overwrite a saint’s individual existence, for, unlike a portrait, the icon emphasizes the particularity of the person represented (image0) even to the point of requiring an inscription of her proper name. Second, an icon is not the same as a simple case of representational painting, as its unique origins tell us. An important part of the iconic 11

12 13

I take this suggestion from Paul Moyaert, “Touching God in his Image,” Heythrop Journal 56:2 (Mar 2015): 192–202, which I will discuss at greater length in the following chapter. Images in the world of social media become quickly more complex and involve a number of motivations blurring personal relationships with public images and advertising, and I will not attempt to untangle them all here. Yet the role of “personal presence” still remains more central to such private photographs than in the case of photographs considered as artworks. Parry, Depicting the Word, 98. JD III.33, PG 94, 1352b.

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tradition emerged from the Egyptian and Greek funeral portraits, which early Christians adapted into their own cult of the saints. They painted icons because they desired to keep in memory their beloved dead and to be inspired by their good deeds, particularly those whose lives manifested holiness.14 While this certainly included the saint’s public role that dictated their showing, it also included a desire to keep their loved ones close in their absence, like the memento painting we saw earlier. But in here, the memento character is not limited to a private circle of family and friends, but the universal Christian community. Meanwhile, the second i­ mportant influence on the iconic tradition, the Imperial portrait, extended the power of the Emperor to the far corners of the realm where he was rarely, if ever, present in person (pp. 19–20 above). This image was certainly a heightened aesthetic visibility of a public figure as Gadamer describes, but also more than this, for unlike the portrait of Gadamer’s statesman, this painting itself exercised political power. While both these cases of painting make use of the features of aesthetics to preserve and heighten the visibility of the person depicted, in both cases the aspect of personal presence is heightened beyond that of an ordinary work of art. This presence is not explicitly an aesthetic feature. It is not only because of the uniqueness of the persons being represented, but also because it emerges from a particular context in which these images were created and displayed, combining both a motivation by personal absence (like mementos) as well as a public function (like portraits). Nevertheless, even if it differs from the general case of representational paintings, such presence in the icon remains a natural possibility for images and is not enough to account for the icon’s uniqueness. For as we have already claimed, what makes the icon distinct from these other ­phenomena is manifest when we come to it in prayer. To pray before the icon is to take up this presence in a new way, to place oneself before the gaze of the icon as before this person’s living personal presence.

5.2  Presence of Prayer: A Response to the Call But before we think of prayer before the icon, we must first ask, what kind of presence is given in prayer? We can fill out the general comments of Marion from Chapter 3 with the aid of two other phenomenologists 14

Belting, Likeness and Presence, 78–101. He notes that even early Christians preserved a visual distinction between mere memorial pictures of the dead and cult images, which were reserved for those considered saints, ibid., 82. See also Cormack, Painting the Soul, 65–75; Grabar, Christian Iconography, 61, 66–67, 84–85; Mathews, Dawn of Christian Art.

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very close to his position who have explored the structure of this ­phenomenon in detailed studies: Jean-Louis Chrétien, who examines prayer as a response to a prior call, and Jean-Yves Lacoste, who discusses possibilities of “­liturgy,” which begins from but makes a break with a Heideggerian model of the world. The latter will be especially helpful as we navigate the departure the icon takes from Gadamer’s model of aesthetics.15 Chrétien lays out this simple and direct definition: “prayer is the act by which the person praying stands in the presence of a being in whom he believes, but whom he cannot see, and makes himself manifest to that being.”16 If it is a meeting of personal presence, we can affirm first of all this presence must be freely offered on both sides. Prayer is not ­automatic, nor can it be forced; we must choose to expose ourselves to God. Nor can our prayer have any manipulative force over God, who must also be free to be present to us. However, we must also recognize immediately that if there is a sense of freedom on both sides, it is ­radically unbalanced. As Lacoste suggests, unlike the mutuality of the visual field, where the one who sees can be seen, we will never be in a perspective to look at God like a spectator, as we will never be in a position to talk about him truly in his absence.17 Following Levinas, Marion reminds us that asymmetrically occurs before any other person, whose presence will always arrive prior to any ability to objectify, and who thus serves as an “icon,” piercing my ­subjective command over the world. The other already demands I renounce my self-possession and give myself over to his presence (whether I obey this demand or not). But the a­ symmetricality of this presence is deepened in the case of prayer with the more radical impossibility of ­getting a grasp on God.18

15

16 17 18

I will focus especially on Jean-Louis Chrétien, using primarily “Wounded Word” from The Ark of Speech and the titular chapter from Call and Response, and Jean-Yves Lacoste, Expérience et Absolu: Questions disputées sur l’humanité de l’homme, trans. Mark Rafferty as Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). Note that by “liturgy” Lacoste is not speaking of a concrete religious practice like the one we will explore in Chapter 7. As he clarifies in the 2015 Modern Theology issue centered around his work, the word “liturgy” was chosen to free a philosophical study from the baggage brought in from other terms; it was not meant in a full theological sense, “Response to Gschwandtner, Hart, Schrijvers, and Hackett,” 677. For further engagement with these thinkers on prayer, especially within their background context of Heidegger and Hans Urs von Balthasar, see Andrew Prevot, Thinking Prayer. Chrétien, Ark of Speech, 19 [26]. Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, 150–151 [181–82]; SP 19–20/LS 38–40. SP 18–19/LS 37–38.

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This is because first of all, while we have some sense of the other in his corporeal presence, this is not the case with God, whose presence to us remains invisible or at the very least ambiguous. For, as Marion insists, God can only be present unknowably, echoing Augustine’s famous words, “Si comprehendisti, non est Deus” – “if you have understood it, it is not God.” For Marion, the absence of the dark night, like the ineffable radiance of the mystical experience, is not a matter of lack of intuition but a surplus of it, even if it appears as a confusion that seems like absence. Lacoste discusses this apparent absence or “desert” in much more detail in his analyses of boredom, restlessness, and night.19 The ultimate result of this asymmetry of presence is what Chrétien calls the first “wound” of prayer, the gap in its visible achievement, which ensures that my own presence, words, and actions come to rebound upon me like an echo in a closed room. That is, what is most visibly present to me in my prayer is myself and the sound of my own voice, the experience of my own actions, for even if I still hold my conviction God makes himself present I have no confirmation of it.20 In this sense, as Lacoste suggests, prayer is first a manifestation of man, not of God.21 At the same time, even if I hear my words most clearly, to pray is not to turn my words or attention to myself in an inner monologue. The intended subject of address is not my own self-presence, but another person who is absent. Nor is prayer to behave as if, whether acting, pretending, imagining, wishing, or symbolizing. All of these actions intend something that is not fully available in present intuition, but all of them intend it as absent, as irreal. To pray is a different structure of activity, which refuses this negation, and in fact negates that what is here and now must define the full reality. To pray thus requires that we abandon our intentionality or consciousness as the measure, for in Marion’s words, these are still defined by us and the extent of our finite reach.22 Nothing experientially assures us that God indeed exists, or is present, nothing confirms that our prayer is anything more than our imaginative projection, however much we may desire it. But if prayer has renounced the measure of intentionality, it is thus not an act that demands unambiguous confirmation for its

19

20 21 22

Jean-Luc Marion, John P. Manoussakis, and Richard Kearney, “Thinking at its Limits: A Dialogue with Jean-Luc Marion,” Philosophy Today 48 (2004): 24–25; Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, §55 and elsewhere. Chrétien, Ark of Speech, 21 [29]; Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, §55. Chrétien, Ark of Speech, 18 [25]; Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, 149 [180]. SP 18–19/LS 37–38; also Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, §56; Chrétien, Ark of Speech, 27 [38].

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completion. As Chrétien has said, prayer only demands that we expose ourselves or make ourselves present to the holy, in the conviction and hope that the holy is already making itself present to us.23 Prayer thus demands a ­conviction or “knowledge” of this personal, benevolent holy one listening, and Lacoste insists that despite our inability to verify this knowledge here and now, it is essential to the structure of the activity of prayer which is available to anyone.24 Thus, while the one at prayer truly believes any words spoken are not in vain, it is no longer possible to have a clear self-possession of them. In prayer one must give oneself over along with any self-measure or sense of one’s success. If the asymmetrical gap is the first wound of prayer, Chrétien also emphasizes a second dimension of this wound: I always begin from my radical inadequacy, failure, and unworthiness to pray. If we had to wait to achieve a rightly ordered relation to God to pray, we would be deprived of the only condition that would allow for this rightly ordered relation, and praying would never begin; as Chrétien writes, “One can be turned toward God only by praying, and one can pray only by being turned to God.”25 A leap is necessary to enter this liturgical circle. Because of this infinite gap or distance in achievement, prayer thus requires a far more radical exposure than other forms of presence.26 We must always give ourselves over to be present to another person, but prayer demands a total self-dispossession. Marion has argued at length that in order to receive the gift as truly a gift, we must abandon autonomy’s anthem, “I don’t owe anything to anyone,”27 and give ourselves over to a relation of indebtedness and inability to repay, now or ever. Without this, it will not be a gift. To try to seize the gift as possession, to pluck it out of the order of giving, leaves it to wither and die in the lifelessness of the economy. As a gift is defined by what is constantly flowing from elsewhere, like water from a tiered fountain, only our constant openness to receive it will allow us to receive what is poured out, a full measure, pressed down, running over; to appropriate the gift is to destroy it along with the ­conditions of receiving it. One cannot receive except by passing it on, as the fountain basin can only continue to receive water from above it by continually emptying itself to give over to the level below it. It is only 23 24 25 26 27

Chrétien, Ark of Speech, 19–28 [26–40]. Experience and the Absolute, 143 [173], where Lacoste also equates this with faith. See also Chrétien, Ark of Speech, 22–23 [30–32]. Chrétien, Ark of Speech, 24 [34]. Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, §§ 25, 56. BG/ED §10.

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by giving that we receive, and as we give our whole selves in prayer so we receive ourselves and the gift of God’s presence.28 Thus only the dispossession of self in a giving act is able to cross the infinite distance demanded of prayer without collapsing it. To cling to autonomy, to refuse to give oneself over, is to refuse the gift as a gift; it is also to refuse the truth of our existence as one that is fundamentally poor and needy. This poverty is a simple philosophical fact, but as Lacoste suggests, this poverty is heightened still further in the loving intimacy of prayer to God, on whom we are wholly dependent for our very existence, before whom we can offer nothing but our own nakedness, lacking even the capacity to pray as we should. Our presence to God is thus more like being a thing in God’s hands than being a person in a face-to-face conversation.29 The more one uses the address “my God,” Chrétien observes, the more one “belongs, without reserve, to the one addressed.” Yet it is precisely this state of total, dispossessive emptiness and dependence, which we might call “kenotic,” that allows us to receive abundantly, without measure.30 Prayer is thus a clear example of the call and response structure discussed earlier. If I can make myself present to God, and God to me, this relation cannot be achieved through my own effort. My response, while it may appear at first to be a choice arising from me, can only come as a response through God’s prior initiative and will to be present to me, since in my finitude I am powerless to arrive at the divine on my own. If I raise my voice in prayer, it is because something calls me first, if I gaze on the icon it is because God has already gazed upon me; prayer demands reversal by which my efforts are always a response lagging behind. The presence of God is always before me as a dialogue, and when I make myself present it is always in relation to his prior words, as a response to his call. It is obviously foolish to determine the success of a conversation based on how articulately one has made one’s own points; a true encounter even with a human other requires us to be present as listening. All the more so does prayer, in the ambiguity and unavailability of God’s presence, require us to hold ourselves open in listening, especially when we do not always hear his words. Thus I cannot unambiguously confirm prayer’s success, nor ought I do so. To try to achieve success at prayer is to reappropriate it as my activity, my possession, to make of it an idol. My own actions, 28 29 30

ID 158–59, 162/IeD 203–204, 207; SP 124/LS 178. Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, §35, §57; Chrétien, Ark of Speech, 21 [29]. Chrétien, Ark of Speech, 26 [37]; see also 32 [45–46].

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what I do or do not do, what I am experiencing or not experiencing, may be a sign of my own presence, but on their own are simply not a measure of prayer. We have now spoken in general terms about how the icon presents itself as a pictorial personal presence, and considered how the divine presence is encountered in prayer. To bring them together, we can conclude that prayer in its simplest sense is responding to the call. If “call/response” is the general structure, we can also reformulate this language through the particular kind of call most relevant to our case: the call of the gaze of the other, which Marion called the “icon,” in its philosophical sense. Our definition thus becomes: prayer before the icon means to expose oneself to the countergaze of God. It is now time to consider how the icon’s visibility as a personal presence will serve as an anchor relating us to this Divine initiative.

5.3  Prayerful Presence of the Icon This point marks a deliberate, critical shift. We must take measure of it before we move on. Much can be said about the icon as a historical artifact, as an aesthetic achievement, as part of a cultic game. And all these perspectives can be illuminating. Yet, insofar as the icon has been painted to invite believers to pray before it, observing it from a cognitive distance would fail to engage with its most significant way of appearing. Believers do not receive the icon as a work of art or a piece of liturgical furniture, but as a personal presence to be encountered in prayer. To acknowledge this is not a matter of subjective feeling or personal belief, nor is it theology; it is a matter of phenomenological rigor. We must attend to how the thing shows itself from itself, which in turn requires we account for the operations by which this showing is received. Prayer is an action structurally distinct from any form of pretending, desiring, wishing, or magical thinking, and must be analyzed seriously as an intelligible form of experience. There is nothing proven here; nothing guarantees believers are right to do so, especially as we have just seen how prayer lacks experiential confirmation of its own success. We do not need to be believers to recognize that the “anamorphic” point of the icon as a mediation of God, the way it maximally reveals itself from itself, is found within this prayerful stance. Thus, if we are serious about phenomenology and want to understand the icon, regardless of our native convictions, we must investigate with rigor what unique experience is offered to believers through the icon in this possibility of prayer.

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How the Icon Presents Itself to Us The relation of prayer, like all forms of presence, is both asymmetrical and communal, enacted in both directions. This suggests two moments of investigation: how the icon is present to us, and how we present ourselves to it. Let us begin with the former. The one at prayer does not find before the icon a presence face-to-face in the flesh, with the full spontan­eity of solicitude; the icon does not offer the immediacy of a “window into heaven” in a literal sense, and nevertheless a presence is given. In the previous chapter, we have already seen key elements of iconic representation that bend towards relationality which is taken up prayer. Consider the icon’s extreme coherence and repetition. I have already suggested this must be seen as more than a strategy of cognition, a practice subverting ordinary, worldly modes of human communication when engaging in discourse about the Divine. Strictly speaking, it must be understood as an instinct for prayer and not simply paradox, an instinct of fidelity, a desire for conversion. In tirelessly repeating the same thing, the icon performs in an aesthetic key the same logic that turns verbal discourse into the hyperbolic repetition of the “Jesus prayer.” There is a long tradition of prayer by repetition which is not limited to merely the vain racking up of requests. It mirrors the fidelity of the believer who takes up the prayer day after day, regardless of what he feels or doesn’t feel, like the woman begging before the dishonest judge (Lk 18:1–8). Such extreme repe­ tition exceeds any economic or pragmatic logic. Nor is repetition limited to moments of intercession, for it is a key feature of praise: as the Trisagion of the liturgy and the angelic host in the book of Revelation share the threefold acclamation, “Holy, holy, holy.” We also saw that the icon’s strategies of perspective and color do not aim to open up the visible for the spectator’s gaze to traverse the depths of the painting’s space, but to use all of its artistic devices to push forward into our space and immerse us in its light-filled world of relational p ­ resence. Rather than expand our world by making new visibles, the icon offers us a name and a familiar, identifiable image – exactly enough information to invite us into a relationship with a personal presence. For icons need to be recognized, if one is to pray to them. A recognizable image itself is one important aspect of this, as laments a woman in a sixth-century icon miracle story: “How can I ­worship Him, when He is not visible and I do not know him?”31 31

Zacarias Rhetor, Historia ecclesiastica Zachariae Rhetori vulgo adscripta, XII, 4, in Mango, Art of the Byzantine Empire, 114.

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The  name  then confirms which person is shown in order to ground this recognition of the image. This can be seen in the oft-cited complaint of Gregory Melissenos, a fifteenth century Christian from Constantinople sent to Western Europe: When I enter a Latin church, I do not venerate any one of the saints there because I do not recognize them. Perhaps I only recognize Christ, but I do not even venerate him. For I do not know how it is inscribed, but I will make my cross and I will venerate . The cross that I make, I venerate, and nothing else of the things seen by me there.32

Without names, Gregory does not recognize the saints, and thus he ­cannot pray to them. While he certainly underestimates the power of images, this passage is significant because it clearly shows that the ­recognizable content of icons is not primarily a matter of ­theoretical or aesthetic ­knowledge, but to orient the one at prayer. As Lacoste points out, even in the most tenuous forms of prayer (“God, if you exist, if you are ­listening, …”) one does not pray to a stranger, but to one who is known, who is listening and benevolent.33 Lacking experiential confirmation of prayer here and now, the name allows believers to open themselves to a personal relation which they believe remains nevertheless possible.34 While a name in the third p ­ erson can serve as an objectifying conceptual grasp, a name used in an address inverts this potential idolatry into iconicity, transferring ­initiative to the one who is prayed to. I can call out the name of someone I don’t know in a crowd, but I am powerless to make him appear; only the one who bears the name is able to present himself to me, which he does under his own f­reedom. The recognizable content of the icon, in image and name, is e­ ssential to its use in prayer. Yet, to this point, we have not left the simple matter of referential function, like the passport picture. The icon mediates this personal presence in a much richer way still, encouraging and ­communicating relationality in the very movement of the image itself. We see it first of all in the rhythm of line, perhaps the most recognizable feature of iconic aesthetics. Rather than enforcing a static symmetry, the

32

33 34

From Vitalien Laurent (ed.), Les “Mémoires” du Grand Ecclésiarque de l’Église de Constantinople. Sylvestre Syropoulos sur le concile de Florence (1438–1439) (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1971) IV., 46, 250, lines 24–28. Translation by Annemarie Weyl Carr, in her analysis of this recognition through names and figures: “Labelling Images, Venerating Icons in Sylvester Syropoulos’s World,” in Sylvester Syropoulos on Politics and Culture in the Fifteenth-Century Mediterranean. Eds. Fotini Kondyli, Vera Andriopoulou, Eirini Panou, and Mary B. Cunningham (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate: 2014), 79, 82–85. Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, 141 [170–71], also Chrétien, Ark of Speech, 17 [23]. Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, 142–143 [172–73], 185–186 [222–223].

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strong, pliable transversal lines create tension and balance which push the image forward.35 Architecture, nature, and especially clothing undergo an intricate geometrical, almost crystalline faceting within this rhythm, and the human figure is elongated, weightless, carried with a strong yet fluid poise.36 We have also noted that the spatial plane of the painting has a very limited depth. Things do not recede behind the panel, but are projected outwards from it in this living but peaceful energy. Again, we have seen the same effect in the color schemes, highlights which push figures out toward us. This creates a harmonious balance of color and an added tension for the eye as it tries to place the form. The flesh of the person is unique in the icon, for while remaining in harmony with the whole it alone retains a smooth line and colors that are blended softly and naturalistically, without geometrical faceting. The facial features are stylistically refined, showing a transformation of the five senses: the nose is longer and thinner, the mouth small, and always closed, while the ears and eyes are larger, indicating that the person is uniquely receptive, listening and looking. This is particularly true in portrait icons. The face is not always shown in a strictly frontal view, which would result in a static figure with eyes fixed on a distant point behind the viewer. Rather, a tradition developed in iconography to show faces as transversal: the face is turned slightly to one side, with the eyes and hair turned slightly in the other direction, a dynamic interplay which results in the effect of a gaze that seems to follow us wherever we are in the room.37 The person then seems to be already listening attentively to us, as if waiting for us to speak. Even in icons of events, where figures are interacting with each other rather than directly gazing at viewers, they rarely break off their relation to the viewers completely, as they are rarely depicted in profile. To show one’s profile is “the beginning of absence,”38 a gesture of closure that we perform when refusing to engage, and icons most commonly reserve it for the figures of demons or the wicked. Perhaps this is to show us that the very nature of evil is closure of encounter. Perhaps to spare us from a personal relation with someone with evil will. The gaze was not always benevolent for Byzantine culture which created this convention; they shared with their neighbors the belief in the power of 35 36 37 38

Kordis, Icon as Communion, 49. Sendler explores these proportions in detail, Images, 103–112. See an illustration in Kordis, Icon as Communion, 20–21, 72; see also Ouspensky and Lossky, Meaning of Icons, 29. Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, 187; see also Demus, Byzantine Mosaic Decoration, 8; Manoussakis, God After Metaphysics, 24–26; Constas, “Icons and the Imagination,” 117–121.

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the “evil eye,”39 a look of envy capable of calling down harm upon others through demonic assistance. Even without adhering to this ancient belief, the gaze remains central to the icon, and even without evil intent an eye can be experienced as unsettling. The power of the painted gaze is historically evident in the scars that icons bear. Iconoclastic defacement was targeted first and foremost at the eyes. For the “eyes held the key to the living,”40 as Robin Cormack explains; to deface them is to remove their power. We do not need to appeal to any belief in magic or superstition to feel this effect. We can find it in exceptional paintings or photos, like the striking eyes of the Afghan girl. The icon may or may not possess the same aesthetic power, but in prayer, it presents itself to us as a living gaze, of one who we believe really is listening to us. When we expose ourselves to the countergaze of the divine, it is not we who judge the icon, but the one in the icon who judges us. Nikolaos Mesarites describes an icon of Christ Pantocrator as follows: His eyes, to those who have achieved a clean understanding, are gentle and friendly and instill the joy of contrition in the souls of the pure in heart and of the poor in spirit … such are the eyes to those who have a clean understanding; to those, however, who are condemned by their own judgment, they are scornful and hostile and boding of ill, the face is wrathful, terrifying, stern and filled with hardness, for the face of the Lord is of this fashion for evildoers.41

We discussed earlier the aesthetic paradox of mercy and judgment in the face of Christ as reflecting conceptual or theological imagination; for Mesarites we can see that, if we come before it as a living presence in prayer, this changing appearance is not merely theoretical, but reflects our personal relation to the one depicted there. While the figure in the icon itself never speaks, nor opens its mouth, language is nevertheless symbolized in gesture. In the icon of St. George (Figure 4.1, p. 135), a heavenly hand reaches out through a mandorla to give Christ’s word of blessing; at other times a heavenly hand symbolizes the Father’s voice. In the icon of the Annunciation (Figure 4.3, p. 143), the angel raises his hand in an ancient rhetorical gesture used at 39

40 41

Henry Maguire, “From the Evil Eye to the Eye of Justice: The Saints, Art, and Justice in Byzantium,” Law and Society in Byzantium, Ninth-Twelfth Centuries, ed. Angeliki E. Laiou and Dieter Simon (Washington, D.C., Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1994): 217–39. Cormack, Painting the Soul, 87–88 and Figure 8. “Nikolaos Mesarites: Description of the Church of the Holy Apostles at Constantinople,” ed. and trans. Glainville Downey in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 47:6 (1957): 869–70.

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Figure 5.1  Orans. Protection of the Mother of God, sixteenth century, Novgorod, Russia. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

the beginning of an oration, indicating his famous words to Mary, “Hail full of grace!” Despite being thrown to the ground by the unbearable glory of the Transfigured Christ (Figure 7.9, p. 239), Peter yet lifts his arm toward the blinding light, to indicate his question of whether he should make three booths for the three holy men. The icon also gestures to us. One of the most common gestures of the icon is the orans position, the open palm held out, and often raised, an ancient gesture of prayer that predates Christianity, and indeed seems to communicate something at the most basic human level (see Figure 5.1). It can be interpreted as receiving, giving, pointing out, praising, beseeching, or perhaps all of these at once. This gesture embodies the ambiguity of interpersonal presence: that to make myself the most present to someone is to give myself over to receiving him, either the words I say or the attention with which I listen, or both. But more than that, it suggests the incarnation of interpersonal presence in prayer, the place where giving and receiving blends together in the isomorphism of overflowing generosity.

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This is a wonderful visible illustration of the gift of love, “infinite kenosis of charity.”42 This orans posture of exposure and openness, mingling giving and receiving, shows us the essence of this act of prayer, surrendering to the overflowing excess that is offered by giving it over, and giving oneself. It is at the same time to admit our total poverty, that the center of belonging is outside of us. Evdokimov writes that the orans position “represents the proper attitude of the human soul, its inner structure in the form of prayer.”43 At the same time, this orans gesture is also a movement of identification, aimed in a certain direction. In isolated icons the palm is usually directed straight forward or straight up, but in icons designed to be placed in relation to an icon of Christ, the figures bow and hold out their palms toward the center. In their offering, receiving, and giving, icons direct all attention to the Giver. Icons of Christ usually depict him with his left hand holding the Gospels, and the right hand held up, index and middle finger straight, with pinky and ring fingers bent toward the thumb. This gesture originally was designed to impart knowledge, whether the proper Trinitarian doctrine (three persons of the Trinity, two natures of Christ) or to spell out the name of Christ in Greek. But the believers who prayed to these icons did not interpret this gesture as a cognitive reminder, but a personal communication to them. Without denying its cognitive import they interpreted it as imparting a blessing. This relationality of prayer soon became a part of the meaning, and this shape of the hand is still used in priests’ blessing today.44 In its compositional movement and style, as well as the manner of personal presence portrayed, and the person’s actions, the icon enacts a personal presence already open to us, already prayerful, loving, and attentive, from within a world that projects towards us. The icon does not show the God of a disinterested imagination or distant promise, but a Christ who calls us into relation, who in Mesarites’ words is “leaning and gazing out as though from the rim of heaven … like an earnest and 42

43

44

ID 165–69/IeD 210–15; Jean-Luc Marion, Questions cartésiennes: Méthode et métaphysique, (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1991), 135–145, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky, John Cottingham, and Stephen Voss as Cartesian Questions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 87–90. Evdokimov, Art of the Icon, 16. Ouspensky notes the liturgical connection to the priest whose makes this gesture during the liturgy, linking it to intercession and sacrifice, Theology of Icons, 28. Kroug interprets it rather as intercession, a call for grace, linking it to the prayer of Moses during the battle with the Amalekites (Exodus 17:8–16), Carnets d’un peintre d’icônes (Lausanne: Editions l’Age d’Homme, 2019), 146. Sendler, Mystères, 30–31; see also Robert Nelson, “The Discourse of Icons, Then and Now,” Art History 12:2 (1989): 143–157.

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vehement lover.”45 If we are to take up this invitation to speak to the listening presence, we, too, must make ourselves present to this relation, expose ourselves to the attention of the other who offers presence there. How We Present Ourselves to the Icon As the icon is first a painting, we engage by entering into its play. This means to set aside all utilitarian purposefulness to give ourselves over to the aims of the play as a whole, following the movement of the painting. But if we can easily define the aims of play in baseball, what exactly are the aims of play in a painting? Gadamer says nothing about this explicitly. I suggest we begin by recognizing that paintings strike us differently. Each painting has its unique “style.” That is, it directs us in a certain way; it can be fierce, joyful, sluggish, calm, and the particularity of style is central to its meaning as a work of art. I suggest that it is this “style” Gadamer means by the aims of play in aesthetics. Plato and Aristotle were talking about this play when they discussed how music can help inspire and shape our activities and emotions, and, if this is true, it is not difficult to admit it might be able to even hone virtues or vices.46 Similarly, the aesthetic style of the icon also engages us in a particular manner of play, which can help further confirm and illuminate its purpose. The style of the icon may be intricate, but it is usually not “busy.” Unimportant details have been removed and all of the elements have been ordered toward the form of the whole, from the individual details of a figure to the larger forms within the icon, and sometimes at a more global level, across the range of icons in their placement in a church, for example. The composition is guided by a strong sense of proportion and geometry: circles, triangles, parabolas, grids, and crosses are basic forms prescribed by the subject matter or story being portrayed.47 The result, however, is not a simplistically calculated symmetry, but a balance of different interacting elements across a central structure that gives a dynamic, harmonious, and often beautiful clarity. Kordis observes that the icon is described as hieratic or spiritual in quality, “mainly due to clarity of line.”48 Everything in an icon is outlined, and while different schools of iconography may blend the lines into the color to some degree, they share the same style of strength, 45 46 47 48

Nikolaos Mesarites, “Description of the Church of the Holy Apostles,” 869. Plato, Laws, II, 654aff; Republic III, 411e–412a; Timaeus 47d-e; Aristotle Politics VII, 1339b–1340b. Sendler illustrates a number of these forms of compositions in Images, 85–102. Kordis, Icon as Communion, 13; see all of 6–17.

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fluidity, rhythm, and clarity, “with all the springiness and pliability of sheet metal.”49 The composition is freed from any internal conflict, closed lines, or autonomous pieces, resulting in the purity, openness, and fluidity of the image. Curved lines are used, but often a sweeping motion is broken up into series of shorter composite lines spiraling outward from a center. We see this particularly in the folds of garments.50 This rhythm is further enhanced by the color, which is sometimes chosen for symbolic reasons, and sometimes according to polychromy, ensuring the composition’s careful balance across the color wheel.51 Thus, the icon is harmonious, balanced, peaceful, yet dynamic. The more we gaze at an icon, the more we enter this play, the more our disposition imitates or takes on these harmonious movements. While some artworks’ play is bursting with energy, torn by violence, or burdened with lethargy, the play of the icon calms emotions, lightens the spirit, and focuses the attention of an overzealous mind. With few exceptions, the figures in icons display no strong or explicit feelings.52 Even in the case of martyrs suffering death, the face is calm, open, receptive. As Archimandrite Vasileios notes, the face of Christ has the same expression at the Transfiguration, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection, always with the same “divine serenity.”53 Florensky names this serenity as the goal of prayer and goal of the spiritual life: “that unassailable, transworldly peace which is ceaselessly flowing into the immortal depths of perfect love.”54 The aesthetic play of the icon brings a state of stillness which we might compare to liturgical chant. Just as flowing phrases of chant can swell and fall outside of the strict temporal constraints of meter, whether by leaving open spaces between phrases or a persistent drone line to anchor the rising and falling voice, the icon seems to embed a kind of stillness within its lively activity.55

49 50 51

52

53 54 55

Ibid., 17. For an illustration, see ibid., 12. According to Sendler, Images, 141ff, 152, the consistency of color schemes across ancient icons suggests that there was a rigorous color symbolism, but like many techniques of ancient iconography the full meaning has been mostly lost. There are rare and well-known counterexamples, such as the frescoes by Michael Astrapas and Eutychios in the Church of the Virgin Peribleptos in Ohrid. During the Palaeologan Renaissance artists created icons that were much more expressive. Archimandrite Vasileios of Stavronikita, “The Icon as Liturgical Analogy,” 88. See also Ouspensky, Meaning of Icons, 27. Florensky, Iconostasis, 84. See Nicholas Lossky, Essai sur une théologie de la musique liturgique: perspective orthodoxe (Paris: Cerf, 2003).

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Figure 5.2  Iconic Peace. Icon of St. Ignatius of Antioch, c. 1750. Church of the Dormition of Mary, Plataniotissa, Greece. Photo by Linda Theodorou.

Perhaps it is not an accident that the two art forms have been often preserved and developed by monks who devote themselves to practices of contemplative prayer, an intense form of stilling oneself to listen. In the words of a monk, “Silence is precisely that quality of listening that enables us to savour God without the necessity of saying new things.”56 The more we deeply engage with the icon, the more we are drawn into this same space and attitude of attentive openness, to enter that quiet of the heart where prayer begins according to important Eastern Christian traditions: “Tabor shines, but only silence discovers it.”57 We can see concretely 56 57

Carthusians of Parkminster, Wound of Love: A Carthusian Miscellany (Leominster: Gracewing Press, 2006), 64–65. Evdokimov, Art of the Icon, 236. This is particularly important in the tradition of Hesychasm, a spiritual practice of repeated prayer with the goal of stilling the heart (ἡσυχία means peace or rest) from all thoughts and passions in order to place it fully open before the working of the Holy Spirit, to render oneself as receptive as possible to the possibility of mystical union. As a gift, of course, this union could not be attained by any human means, but in order to be open in this way, one

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how the use of an icon is not necessarily in tension with contemplative, imageless prayer, just like silence of the heart is not inherently in tension with chanting. Its play as an aesthetic object it helps to prepare us to enter this listening presence of prayer, a prayer which the icon also reminds us is in the presence of someone. That prayer is a personal presence, as we have said, is essential to the tradition of those who pray with icons. No genuine personal encounter can involve talking only; we must also make room for the other to speak to us. Thus, whether it is prayer before the icon, anguished cries, or joyful shouts of praise, all prayer must do more than voice one’s own expression. The icon’s peaceful play helps us to still our hearts to prepare us to prayerfully listen for the holy to speak to us. It also helps prepare us with the patience to endure what may be experienced as the boredom of prayer’s apparent failure.58 Particularly because of its aim towards this silence, the icon’s style of play may look like a poverty at times in the eyes of contemporary aesthetic creativity; it does not make use of the full range of human experience and the boundless possibilities of aesthetic play. But we must also recognize that the dramatic play of emotions, if brought into prayer, may still be a form of earthly manipulation, trying to grasp an experience of God, perhaps revealing a doubt that God can really come freely. Stillness of listening, on the other hand, holds in firm conviction that God is free to come in his time, in his way, whether I know it or not.59 Emotion can also signal the intrusion of earthly cares and modes of relating that pull us away from an attention to God, where stillness brackets our worldly projects and frees us up to place priority on our relation to God, in whatever way

58 59

must prepare oneself to be able to receive it. See Gregory Palamas, The Triads. In Defense of the Holy Hesychasts, ed. J. Meyendorff, trans. Nicholas Gendle (New York: Paulist Press, 1983). The connection of hesychasm to the icon has been discussed in numerous places, including the authors I primarily draw from here, especially Andreopoulos, Metamorphosis, particularly 209ff; Tsakiridou, Icons in Time, 8, 18, 21; Evdokimov 137, 183–188, 232–238, 300–307; Florensky, Iconostasis, 55–59; Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, chapter 12, etc. For a scholarly historical review of this relationship, see Ivan Drpić, “Art, Hesychasm, and Visual Exegesis: Parisinus Graecus 1242 Revisited,” Dumbarton Oakes Papers 62 (2008): 217–247. Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, 148–49 [179–80]. While it is prevalent in many forms of worship today, both Lacoste and Marion caution us about forms of prayer which prioritize emotional “highs” or “religious experiences” as evidence of authentic prayer. In Marion’s terms, it binds God to our subjective capacity, rejects the gift as freely offered by grasping it, neutralizing it into an idol. Schleiermacher has been the most forceful thinker to root prayer to experiential feeling, in Der Christliche Glaube, ed. G. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stuart as On the Christian Faith (London: T&T Clark, 1999). Lacoste provides a strong rebuttal of this position throughout Experience and the Absolute, not through a denial of experience and emotion (indeed, his later work will discuss the importance of affection in prayer, in the broad phenomenological sense), but simply to refuse it priority as the norm or justification for prayer.

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God chooses to come.60 On the other hand, this play of harmonious stillness is not necessarily a suppression of emotions, either. It is the absence of forceful direction upon us, letting us be, and only gently directing us to the receptive listening attention of the one it gently offers. Thus, rather than trying to overwhelm us into a certain kind of experience or feeling, the icon offers itself as receptive, and invites us towards a peaceful, receptive attitude which will allow us to freely make ourselves present to the absolute God who first presents himself to us. Ultimately, this style is not a question of appearing less, dimming one’s colors before the invisible, but taking up one concrete possibility of aesthetic appearing that patterns us. Sendler is wrong to say that the sacred character of icons is exclusively a matter of content and revelation, and not style; there truly is something in the aesthetic play that bends itself towards the sacred.61 For those who do not wish to place themselves before God, for those who desire an overpowering aesthetic experience, one may (or may not) find something lacking in the stillness that the icon brings us toward (Archimandrite Vasileios goes so far as to call the icon an “illegible script” for those who do not pray before it62). Yet rather than mere “lack,” this style is actually a rich enactment of its goal: to invite believers toward prayer, to take up the image as a manner of placing oneself before God. As Ouspensky concludes, “So the icon is both the way and the means; it is prayer itself. Hence its hieratic quality, its majestic simplicity and calmness of movement; hence the rhythm of its lines, the rhythm and joyfulness of its colors, which spring from perfection of inner harmony.”63 Evdokimov echoes this as well: “The icon is prayer; it purifies and transfigures in its image those who contemplate it. It is mystery and teaches us to see in it the inhabited silence, heavenly joy on earth, and the brilliant shining of the beyond.”64 In the stillness of its presence, the icon becomes a “kind of theology,” Tsakiridou affirms, one not of words and concepts, but the lived communion with God “conveyed by a saint, a man or woman for whom holiness is a way of life.”65 In short, iconic play gives us a concrete and non-iconoclastic illustration of Marion’s “kenotic” image which brings 60

61 62 63 64 65

The idea of ἀπαθεία, or freedom from care, has been of central importance for the tradition of prayer. For a discussion of “care” in early monasticism and its relation to a phenomenological approach, see my “The Ascesis of Ascesis: The Subversion of Care in Jean-Yves Lacoste and Evagrius Ponticus,” The Heythrop Journal 58:5 (2017): 780–788. Sendler, Mystères, 293. Archimandrite Vasileios of Savronikita, “Icon as Liturgical Analogy,” 81. Ouspensky, Meaning of Icons, 40. Evdokimov, Art of the Icon, 188. Tsakiridou, Icons in Time, 8.

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all its capacities into play to clear the way for the divine gaze to grasp us, in contrast to the manipulative, “idolatrous” aesthetics which tries to grasp at God. Of course, the harmonious peace of iconic play is not a sufficient condition of prayer. We could still enjoy the icon without a religious commitment, merely as a reflective aesthetic experience, or a way of relaxing, as many people enjoy listening to Gregorian chant as a calming soundscape, perhaps even appreciating it for its “sacred” feel. It is worth noting that well-curated museum exhibitions often treat icons differently than other artworks, making use of lower lighting and playing liturgical music in the background, creating a “sacred” mood or atmosphere. But Lacoste would be quick to remind us that the feeling of the “sacred,” even when it can be distinguished from the “aesthetic,” does not necessarily have anything to do with God. After all, Heidegger freely spoke of this feeling of “sacredness” without any Divinity who would transcend our worldly experience.66 And Marion also warns us that the sacred can be the most powerful idol of all, seeming to give us the Divine while firmly shutting him out.67 Nor must we claim that style of harmonious play in the icon is the necessary condition to help us into prayer, as if there are no other forms of play or art. There may be other styles of art that aid us in the listening self-giving of prayer in very different ways. The icon in itself offers no inherent refutation of other forms of painting, much less other mediations; each must be tested on its own terms. Rather, this is simply to say that this iconic style of play is neither magical nor arbitrary, for it can be a great aid to our prayer if we take it up in this way, and yet it is no guarantee, for it can be taken up in other non-prayerful ways as well.

5.4  Real Presence and Iconic Presence One of the great advantages of phenomenology is that “presence” is not a one-size-fits-all concept, but as we saw above it recognizes that the presence of a person is of a different kind than the presence of a painting or a thing. Similarly, while the icon does bring the holy to presence for the one at prayer, we must not assume that there is only one form of “presence” of the holy. The presence of the icon must be distinguished from another kind of presence, the “real presence” of Christ in the Eucharist. I leave a 66 67

Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, 198–99 n20 [25–26 n1]. GWB 28–29/DSE 41–43

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thorough phenomenology of the Eucharist for others,68 but particularly given the deep confusion between the mediation of the icon and that of the Eucharist during the time of iconoclasm, it is critical to say a few words about this difference. First, let us acknowledge the striking similarities in some of the practices of prayer that each mediation calls for. We see this especially in the Latin Catholic tradition of Eucharistic adoration, where the host is displayed for silent prayer. In adoration, just as in prayer before the presence of the icon, the faithful strive to make themselves present before the listening gaze of a God who is free to come. The parallel of these two traditions is perhaps not an accident. Roman Catholics often have private devotions to images, but have never developed a formalized practice of prayer before the image, as Eastern Christians have never developed a practice of Eucharistic adoration. Thus we might say these two mediations, while different, can serve to fulfill a very similar need for the faithful at prayer.69 At the same time, there are critical differences between these mediations, beginning with their mode of presence; the Fathers of the Church would distinguish between the “hypostatic” presence of the icon and the “substantial” presence (i.e. in οὐσία) of the Eucharist. Consider the function of visibility in each case. In adoration, the Eucharistic host is displayed in a gold monstrance, which is at times itself an eye-catching work, often with rays that seem to originate from the host at the center, sometimes elaborated with figures, like seraphim, clouds of the holy presence, and so on. Yet even the most elaborate monstrance is only a visual embellishment, any figurative modeling is only an accessory meant to direct us to what it shows at the center. To display a monstrance for its own sake occurs only when it has lost its function, and has been reduced to an aesthetic object in a museum. The Eucharist itself does not show what it is, but symbolizes it in the language of bread and wine. More than this, it is believed to be a transformation – even “transubstantiation” – of the bread and wine into the very real presence of God, body, blood, soul, and divinity (a “substantial presence”). The practice of Eucharistic adoration which gazes at the host from a 68

69

Robert Sokolowski, Eucharistic Presence: A Study in the Theology of Disclosure (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1994); Jean-Yves Lacoste, Présence et parousie (Paris: Ad Solem, 2006); Donald Lee Wallenfang, Dialectical Anatomy of the Eucharist: An Étude in Phenomenology (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017). This link is made explicitly in the Western Rite service book used by American Antiochan Orthodox Christians: “Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament in the West parallels devotion to the icon in the East. Both devotions are based upon the same Incarnational theology, and the same desire of the faithful to ‘come and see,’ to have a devotional point of contact with Jesus.” Saint Andrew Service Book (Whittier: The Antiochan Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, 2005), 103–105.

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distance is meaningful only as a prolongation of this sacramental meal, for the consecrated bread is a mediation that is meant for consumption. The icon on the other hand is not a monstrance directing us towards an unremarkable visible, nor even the invisible gaze of this unremarkable visible. It is first an aesthetic object, and thus presents us with a visible that is meant to absorb all our attention. Precisely because of its unique visible features, the icon is able to serve as an anchor that allows us to expose ourselves to the counter-gaze of God. The icon aims at something more than its own visibility, what Marion would call the counter-gaze or “reverse intentionality,” or what the Fathers call the “hypostatic presence.” But it does this only by letting us first dwell on it in its visibility, thus allowing the holy come to presence in its painted gaze and not outside it. Both iconic presence and Eucharistic presence are figures of call and response; they are received as a countergaze from God before the one who opens to them in prayer. “[B]oth attest to Christ’s living connection” and “real presence” in the world, as Bulgakov affirms.70 But they do this in different ways. The icon is not this invisible gaze of God, but directs us to it by what we see. The Eucharist is held to be the gaze of God, but gives us very little to see: a white round piece of bread.71 Both make clear their limitations. Neither claims totality; to be the reality in the flesh and to make visible the reality would claim too much presence, and become the ultimate idol.72

70 71

72

Bulgakov, Icons and the Name of God, 92. Given this difference, we might note that much of Marion’s language about the icon is really more fittingly applied to the mediation of Eucharist adoration, coming before the invisible countergaze of God, which he speaks of as central to his theological formation. See La rigeuer des choses, trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner as The Rigor of Things. Conversations with Dan Arbib New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 27–28) [52–54]. Gschwandtner has done very interesting work tracing this thread through Marion’s entire philosophy in “Jean-Luc Marion’s Spirituality of Adoration and its Implications for a Phenomenology of Religion,” Breached Horizons: The Philosophy of Jean-Luc Marion, eds. Rachel Bath, Antonio Calcagno, Kathryn Lawson, and Steve G. Lofts (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 188–217. At the same time, I object to her characterization of Eucharistic adoration as a purely private prayer. Pure silence in an adoration chapel is rare, interspersed with the quiet rustling of other human beings coming and going, and it is always permeated by the awareness of the community praying alongside one another. For Heidegger shared silence is also a mode of Mitdasein. Even if adoration is possible with only one person, the exposed host must not be left alone, which means that adoration always structurally assumes a whole community at prayer, one ready to take up where the other leaves off. This points to the more important theological meaning, that Eucharistic adoration is understood as an extension of the Mass and in union with the Masses said throughout the world, not as an isolated practice of devotion. CV 77/CdV 138. See the basic shape of these historical debates in Ouspensky in Meaning of Icons, 32 n4.

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*** In the first two chapters of this study, we have spoken of the icon in its qualities as visible image. It gives us a representational content which stretches at the nature of an aesthetic image on both sides, paradoxically embracing glory and poverty. But the full force of the icon’s visual language and style are not meant as the communication of truth through a picture. Rather, they are employed to bring us into an encounter with the listening presence of a person who is recognized. This primary aim of the icon comes to full fruition only for the one who comes to the icon in prayer, with the conviction that the words and actions spoken are truly communicated to the person who is visibly represented. If the concrete aesthetic features alone are not able to make a painting function as icon, they do serve to anchor and shape our practice of prayer, both in depicting an attentive, listening presence and in refusing to promise us anything more. Rather than seizing and directing our emotions or claiming to serve as God’s answering word, the icon preserves the gap that is necessary for the free relation of authentic prayer. The icon takes on a critical structural difference for those who come before the icon in prayer, and this prayer is encouraged and enhanced by what the icon shows and how it shows it, using aesthetic devices to communicate something more than the aesthetic. To those who pray, the icon offers us still more. For the icon gives itself not only as an image to be seen, but as a body to be venerated, to be touched, to be kissed.

chapter 6

Substitution

The Icon and Veneration

6.1  Image and Gesture Seeing is often considered the most abstract of the senses, the farthest removed from our corporeal being. The advent of digital reproduction and virtual reality has shown us that the phenomenality of the artwork does not depend essentially on a particular kind of material support. Neither Marion nor Gadamer speaks at length about corporeality in connection to art. Yet if we think more carefully about the conditions of art’s givenness, as MerleauPonty does, we must admit the essential character of a painting’s corporeal dimensions. First, because the very act of seeing requires our bodily movement beginning with that of the eyes and including the full scope of our motor possibilities.1 A painting must be displayed for us to engage with it, which means it is presented in a space which we can enter, from a certain distance, at a certain angle, which is made explicitly evident by anamorphic paintings. Second, only a body could create a painting, only a being capable of gestures can create images, for a painting is an inscription of a gesture.2 This is perhaps why we are so attached to original masterpieces, and are suspicious of their reproduction – not necessarily because of what we see (which can be duplicated in other places), but because they maintain this embodied connection with the artist’s hand. We are essentially manual beings, as Jean-Louis Chrétien will emphasize, for whom “hands think and thought handles,” and in this lies “all of our human dignity.”3

1 2

3

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit, or “Eye and Mind,” The Merleau-Ponty Reader, Eds. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 353–354. See Schmidt, Between Word and Image, 133–4; This is as true of classical painting methods as it is of digital ones. As anyone who has suffered from tendinitis or arthritis is painfully aware, it is impossible to set word or image to page or computer screen without a transcription of physical gesture – even in dictation, which operates through the physical movement of speech. Jean-Louis Chrétien, Corps à corps: à l’écoute de l’oeuvre d’art, trans. Stephen E. Lewis as Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 124–25 [119–120].

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Yet the icon will intensify the corporeality of painting still further. It is not only made to be seen, but to be kissed and touched. Let’s admit it: this may strike us as very strange or archaic. Even if we can appreciate the desire to see the image of Christ, or to speak words of love to Christ, it is another thing to kiss an image of him. Is this not crude, superstitious, or pagan? But it is wise to treat such suspicions with caution. If we consent to place the world of such practices beneath our Enlightened contemporary culture, we simultaneously agree to place the icons high on the church walls with the second wave of iconoclasts. They, too, accepted images that were paid respect or honor, τιμή as long as they were out of the reach of anyone’s veneration, προσκύνησις, a word which indicated a physical gesture of bowing, genuflecting, or full prostration.4 Such compromises were staunchly opposed by iconophiles like Theodore Studite. If we do not wish to be condemned as iconoclasts, we ought to try to understand why the iconophiles are so emphatic on this point. Where after all does our resistance to such practices come from? If we trace our discomfort to its root, we may find ourselves asking if a “spiritual” image should really be so “corporeal.” But the fact is, our sensibilities as to what is “natural” or “fitting” have been often already shaped by centuries of spiritual and intellectual traditions that have often downplayed the body as gross, material, unrefined, or sinful. Such dualism ultimately locks us back in a model of seashell mediation: the body is assumed to be a mere shell to transport a spiritual meaning from one interiority to another; it in itself is discardable and replaceable, and does not enter into the process of transmission in any meaningful way. Phenomenology is one of several revolutions of contemporary philosophy that renounces such assumptions, daring to claim that we cannot sift out spirit from body, that we are incarnate through and through. The body is thus not a mere container for our meanings and expressions. Rather, it is intimately intertwined with meaning at every level.5 If neither Marion nor Gadamer spend time developing this point at length, it is not to say that they do not recognize its importance. Gadamer especially gives a succinct account of embodied mediation as “gesture.” Like the symbol, which shows us its meaning through itself rather than pointing elsewhere, gesture expresses something precisely “there,” and 4 5

TS II.12, PG 99, 360a; II.27–28 PG 99, 372a; Drpić, Epigram, 135. See Richard Kearney, Touch: Recovering our Most Vital Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021); Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor, eds., Carnal Hermeneutics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015) for a range of other perspectives on this position.

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nowhere else. A gesture is “wholly corporeal and wholly spiritual at one and the same time,” a meaning that is both openly available to everyone, and hidden in its fullest depths.6 There is no “inner meaning” behind it or beyond it; the interiority of anger is present precisely in the furrowed brow and nowhere else.7 This is echoed by other philosophers. Wittgenstein argues that there is no private pain; Scheler insists that I can really see your joy.8 Corporeal expression is thus not an afterthought or redundant repetition of an “interior” idea or feeling. Gesture is the communication of the most interior depths of soul. With Merleau-Ponty, we can push this idea to its natural conclusion: gesture is the foundation for any other level of meaningful expression. Our gestures emerge from and reflect a larger world of meaning at the most primordial level of experience, even if we can reach more precise or refined forms of meaningfulness in speech.9 The corporeal thus serves as a real communication of the spiritual, and, indeed, it serves as the foundation for all human expression, from which word and image bubble forth. This means that, contrary to what we might be tempted to assume, the body is more important, not less, when higher forms of communication break down. For the more we lack words, the more the body communicates in spite of itself, as when struggling to communicate in a foreign language, we cannot help but gesticulate wildly, as if our flailing fingers can compensate for a limited vocabulary. An unspeakable grief is manifest in the numbness and heaviness of limbs. A joy too deep to name emerges in the light energy of movement, in brightening eyes, in an uncontrollable grin. The deeper it grips us, the more an experience evades concepts and the more it strives for incarnated expression. As Dennis Schmidt writes “gesture is always found at the edge of the human,” at its foundation, at its completion, and at the very edge of what we can express.10

6

RB 79/GW8 327–28, Schmidt unpacks this idea in much more detail, Between Word and Image, 131–34. See especially Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” and “On the Phenomenology of Language,” from Signes, trans. R. McCleary as Signs, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 39–97 [49–122]. 7 TM Appendix VI, 525. 8 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §268–71; Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, 260 [257–58]. 9 Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, trans. Colin Smith as Phenomenology of Perception (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 214ff [230ff]; see also RB 79–81/GW8 327–330, Schmidt, Between Word and Image, 134. 10 Schmidt, Between Word and Image, 133.

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Indeed, for phenomenology, all experience naturally strives for c­ orporeal expression. According to Edith Stein, an experience is not fully completed until “unloaded” physically: “Experience and expression are so closely associated that when one occurs it pulls the other after it.”11 This relation is not a mechanical function, as if we could decide to feel angry at whim and decided to be placated just as easily. We can, however, confirm and strengthen our initial feeling of anger if we act it out by shouting or slamming a fist on the table. We can also diminish it, by channeling our expression through imagination alone. And if we refuse to express it or indulge it at all, keeping our bodies still and our tone even, this will weaken our anger’s initial strength. A full elimination of expression, however, is not easily or immediately accomplished. Except in the case of very seasoned liars, the body will betray our real feelings even if in a quick microsecond before we force ourselves into a complacent smile. Following this, we can conclude that the embodied expression that we act out in turn has real consequences for shaping, strengthening, or weakening the original motivating feeling. Keeping our voice even will subdue our rage, and breaking out into a laugh will amplify our joy. Expression is thus more than a one-way movement: it reaches back to change the character of the experience that provokes it. By extension, acting out an expression in the body can even begin to instill an experience that was not there before, or which only existed in thin traces. Smiling makes people happier, and a squinting scowl against the sun produces a shadow of irritability in our moods where it did not exist before.12 Corporeal expression is thus the natural terminus for experience, and can reach back to affect its origins. Gesture is thus at once the foundation of higher forms of expression and an essential component of a full human experience. If we take a phenomenology of the body seriously, there is no reason to see the body as inherently less spiritual than the intellect; if anything the body is almost more spiritual, or at least, better able to harbor the truth of the unspeakable than other refined forms of verbal discourse. And refusing the corporeal expression of spiritual meaning is not a neutral position, but a way to weaken any experience into abstract detachment. Even more boldly: a belief that is not expressed in the body is not a belief at all. Making ourselves present 11 12

Stein, Empathy, 22 [23], 51–54 [56–60]. This is confirmed in psychological studies, and further established in tests with patients with Moebius syndrome, Botox injections and other instances of facial paralysis. Joel Krueger, “Phenomenology and the Visibility of the Mental,” 現象学会編 Annual Review of the Phenomenological Association of Japan, 29 (2013): 15–16.

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to God will necessarily be an embodied action, as Chrétien observed. The question is not whether we will pray in our bodies but how: standing or sitting, hands raised or folded? In a cold, defensive stance, or, in our case, looking or bowing or even kissing?13 If this is the case, we should not be so hesitant to use gestures alongside words in the act of prayer. Perhaps not everything from Byzantium is so irredeemably foreign, as our Eastern Christians contemporaries who venerate icons would be quick to remind us. John of Damascus launches this sarcastic challenge at those who think they have no need of such actions in their prayer: You perhaps, are superior to me, and have risen so far above bodily things that you have become virtually immaterial and feel free to make light of all visible things, but since I am human and clothed with a body, I desire to see and be present with the saints physically …. God accept my longing for Him and for His saints.14

These words addressed to iconoclasts may as well be applied as a corrective to our own twenty-first century Western snobberies. Clothed in bodies as we are, we should not resist the idea that the visible and physically embodied character of the icon can heighten its spiritual significance. The only question, then, is how?

6.2  A Phenomenology of Substitution As If Recall that the painting, for Gadamer, stood at the halfway point on the scale of representation. On the one end, we had the thin reference of the sign, like a traffic signal or room number, which merely direct our ­attention towards that which they reference. On the other end of the scale was the symbol, a very rich way of representing, which Gadamer explains through the examples of a crucifix, a uniform, or a flag.15 As he was primarily interested in discussing paintings, Gadamer does not ­discuss how symbols function or consider the difference between the diverse examples he groups under this name. To target more precisely the strongest cases on this scale, I will set aside the broad word “symbol” and limit myself to the other name Gadamer gives: “substitution” (Vertretung). This word shares 13 14 15

Chrétien, Ark of Speech, 19 [26–27], Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, 8 [8–9]; see also Manoussakis, God After Metaphysics, 123–142. JD, Florilegia to Oration I, 37, PG 94, 1264c. TM 154–155/GW1 159–160.

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some conceptual and historical overlap with the word “representation” (Repräsentation), but from a different direction than the visual presentation or representation (Darstellung) of Chapter 4. To “represent” or “substitute” in the former sense is embedded in its history of juridical usage, when someone takes another person’s place in court.16 While the masterpiece painting stands between sign and substitution, the icon would stand at the far end of the scale. We can consider what this means first by remembering its origins. We have seen that the representational content of the image and its aesthetic style direct us towards an attentive presence, which already exceeds the aesthetic function and enters the realm of the personal, even if it is only completed in prayer. We used the historical origins of the icon in funeral portraits and imperial portraits to begin to account for this excess, and compared them to the presence of personal photographs. But these images were never merely something to be displayed as memories, but already something to be venerated, depending on who was shown there.17 A cult of images thus developed around the graves and funeral portraits of the dead who were considered to be manifestations of holiness, images of Christ. We see this especially in the image of the emperor, which was also given the same honors as one would give to the emperor himself, with processions, incense, candles, prostrations. To fail to honor the image in this way was to fail to give honor to the emperor himself. As mentioned in Chapter 1, this was such a commonplace in the Roman Empire that it became one of the most frequent arguments used by iconophiles to defend veneration of the icon of Christ: as honor to the emperor’s cloak passed to the emperor, so any honor given to the image passed naturally to the prototype.18 These Imperial images, along with the closely related images of pagan gods, produced the basic forms of the solemn portrayal of Christ and his Virgin Mother, accompanied by similar practices of veneration.19 Beyond political reverence, another kind of rhetoric was also used to discuss such behavior: romantic love. Thus, John Damascene compares veneration for the icons to “embracing the garments [of the beloved] with their eyes and their lips as if the garment were the beloved one.”20

16 17 18 19 20

TM 175–76 n59/GW1 146 n250. See above, p. 77 n80. Belting, Likeness and Presence, 78–82, 93; Mathews, The Dawn of Christian Art, 13, 27. Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit, XVIII, 45, PG 32, 149c. Belting, 36–41, 58–59, 103; Mathews, Dawn of Christian Art, 13, 19, 22, 26–27, 153ff; Grabar, Christian Iconography, 69–71, 78–80. JD III.10, PG 94, 1334b; Basil, Letters on the Holy Spirit, XVIII.45, PG 32, 150bff.

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What accounts for these practices? As we have seen, many Patristic thinkers have a quick and easy answer to this, based on a property of the icon as a special kind of blessed image: we honor the icon because it participates in the original, and later iconophiles might specify that it participates because of its miraculous origins or because of a special naming or consecration.21 This answer is not very satisfying to philosophers who are suspicious of top-down metaphysical theories. Worse, as I argued in Section 1.3, the separation of icons from other images seems to perpetuate a separation of worlds: classes of images that are divine and utterly irrelevant to classes of ordinary images. By trying too hard to protect the holy from the ordinary, we only risk dooming God to irrelevance. This is not to deny theology its right to investigate such claims on its own terms, only to refuse any overwriting of ordinary experience with a theological a priori. We must not pass so quickly over our many secular practices of substitution and transposition, beginning most simply with autographs, memorabilia, and historical artifacts. Such phenomena are not first a matter of aesthetic experience, and not a matter of prayer, and yet they have a clear relation to the question of the icon as a physical representation. Chapters 4–5 have already explored the icon’s significance as an image without resorting to metaphysical theories that appeal to what lies outside of what it gives to us in experience. Can we do the same for practices of veneration? Might this not serve as a complement and fortification of a traditional theological understanding? To this point, only a handful of anglophone philosophers have thought to address this question. Nicholas Wolterstorff raises several permutations of practices parallel to iconophile veneration and ultimately explicates veneration as a form of “counting as,” but by denying the truth-bearing value of the iconic appearance, he is left with the icon as nothing more than an arbitrarily chosen prop.22 Terrence Cuneo insists on non-metaphysical terms that icon veneration is “organic” to our behavior in other contexts. But after a long effort trying to establish the authority of icons as divine speech acts, he has very little to say about veneration other than the blunt assertion on the last two pages of his article that “it follows” from the ­feeling of gratitude, or at least that it is not absurd.23 Paul Moyaert takes

21 22 23

Evkodimov, Art of the Icon, 195; Florensky, Iconostasis, 70–71; Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, 128. Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Would you Stomp on a Picture of Your Mother? Would you Kiss an Icon?” Faith and Philosophy 32:1 (2015): 24. Terrence Cuneo, “If These Walls Could Only Speak,” Faith and Philosophy 27:2 (2010): 141.

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up where Cuneo left off, parsing out “organic” practices similar to veneration, which he calls “symbolic.”24 The latter leaves us with the most helpful starting point. Take once again the example of personal photographs. While we can keep photos stored away for later viewing, we also display them in our homes and places of work, to surround ourselves with their presence. In situations of particularly strong emotion or desire, however, we may do more than merely look at the photo. Moyaert describes the affection with which one might carry around a picture of a loved one or even caress it, or the hatred with which one might destroy the image of an enemy.25 We do not today light candles before loved ones, at least not in Western culture, but we understand what it means if a grieving husband kisses a picture of his deceased wife, or a mother lovingly cradles a picture of her absent child.26 No one believes that the photo in the frame is in fact the wife or child in the flesh. But they do see in this picture a substitute for the original which is currently absent. Their action is meaningfully linked to this person, a wishful transposition that accompanies a substituted object. Thus, we might define substitution as what takes place when we act toward an object in place of or as if it were the presence of an absent original. This does not carry the conviction of the presence of the person in the flesh. For when the person is present, this so overshadows his presence in these substituted objects that he fades to the background. Nor do we directly replace all of our habitual actions toward the person with the actions toward the object. We may kiss or cradle a photo, but we would not make it dinner, speak and expect to be spoken to, and tuck it into bed at night. We remain fully aware that the substituted object is not the

24

25 26

Paul Moyaert, “Touching God in his Image,” and “In Defense of Praying With Images,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 81:4 (2007): 595–612. For a more extended engagement with these authors, see my “Longing in the Flesh: A Phenomenological Account of Icon Veneration,” International Journal of Philosophy and Theology. Vol 81, no. 5 (2020): 466–484. Paul Moyaert, “Touching God in his Image,” 192 We can see this intensification with the greatest clarity in another image: film, which so often communicates to us in language we already speak without having realized we do, and which can thus be an excellent source for phenomenological instruction. As film transforms human relations and actions into structure, it is forced to “see” our physical comportment in the world more clearly, in order to present it to us in enhanced meaningfulness. Thus, film often shows us the force of personal presence and substitution in the way it employs pictures. Kitschy portraits of the Sacred Heart or a portrait of a frowning relative can become key characters in a scene’s silent dialogue. Characters often relate to images as a way to inform viewers of their relationship with a person, without the cheapening force of a line of dialogue which would strike us as unlifelike or unreal. Incarnate action can bear witness to a truth more genuinely than words in this case can.

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original, and remains only a thing; we remain fully aware that our actions toward it are only as if, possessing a “symbolic” character. And actions can be but are not necessarily a literal transposition of my desire. I may deliberately aim to kiss the lips of the person in a photo, wishing I could kiss his lips here and now; or I may kiss to express my general affection for him. Structure of Substitution Let us break down the structure of this activity of substitution more systematically. 1) It presumes some kind of personal knowledge of an absent person. This person may be someone we know intimately, like a child, a lover, a brother, or a friend. It may be someone we know only from second or third-hand accounts, like a legendary philosopher or sage. But it matters that it is a particular person, and this person must be absent. In the presence of the person intended, the substitution becomes superfluous and the personal presence in another object is overshadowed (if not always erased). 2) We desire the relational presence of this absent person. It was not by accident that all of the primary examples mentioned above were relations of intense love or hatred for an absent original: that of a lover or mother or sworn enemy. One could add to this list other kinds of modifications of interest beyond intimate desire, like admiration in the case of distant philosophical heroes or literary inspirations. And to powerful hatred we could also add instances of jealousy, anger, or fear. Nevertheless, it remains some form of interest or desire related to this person, that is, an opening toward this particular person that allows his presence to be felt in the things of their world. It is only to the degree that a person has captured my affection or interest that her presence can arise as a substituted thing which bears a connection to her. 3) The person comes to presence in a substituting thing. We need not claim that presence and absence are absolutes. Experience shows us otherwise, that presence consists in degrees and kinds. Someone can be fully physically present before us but his attention far away, just as another can be very close in our thoughts even though she now exists only in memory. The traces of someone’s presence often emerge in things. It is possible that we choose an object for substitution by a decision of convention, which forges a more or less arbitrary link of meaning between a thing and a person, which then is taken up by a person or community, like the case of a flag, and begins to stand for a presence through brute force of habit. More likely, this relation of presence occurs spontaneously, prior

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to any thought of substitution. We have seen already how personal presence emerges through likeness, as in a photo or painting. We surround ourselves with photos of those who we love to make them present to us. And as Moyaert points out, the fact that we may carry pictures in our wallet indicates that this visual presence naturally extends to a kind of corporeal presence. Substitution is not limited to images. It can also very commonly occur through a preexisting corporeal connection between this person and a thing. Because things are not isolated objects, but always bound up in the world of meaningful relations into which persons are always ecstatically projecting themselves, a thing can meaningfully make a person present to us.27 For example, the glass a loved one drank scotch from, the corner table in the pub where a literary inspiration used to read his early drafts to his friends, or the pipe a favorite philosopher used to smoke. While most things I encounter relate to the corporeal presence of persons in some way, very few of them will bring someone to presence, even if I know who is connected to it and how. There is a difference between a table at the diner down the road and the table at the Eagle and Child where the Inklings used to sit. Once again, this substitution takes place in the context of desire. It is only in the context of desire for the relational presence of this absent person that substitution presents itself here, and these objects come to stand in the place of this person. No substitution will emerge when a person is not close enough to my interest to come to presence for me, or when his presence is accessible enough to me that I have no need for a substitution in his absence. Note that to this point, we have no need to do anything for substitution to happen. There is no choice. It simply arises in our ­experience. Think of how the presence of a high school sweetheart leaps out with visceral force in a trivial thing like his pencil or textbook. There is no decision to see the beloved there, he simply arises in this ­corporeal extension of himself, taking one by surprise. 4) Corporeal expression is the natural result of this intensified desire, and a further motivation for substitution. The basis of substitution has already 27

Moyaert speaks of the importance of belongings based on physical environment, “In Defense of Praying with Images,” 611. I am further suggesting that the significance of environment is based on the intensity of corporeal presence, particularly as it is transformed into a religious practice. We can see for example Roman Catholics classify “degrees” of relics based precisely on corporeal proximity: a first class relic is the remains of the body of a saint, a second class something that the saint wore or used, a third class relic are things directly touched to a first class relic. See Belting, Likeness and Presence, 59–60, where he discusses the origin of saints’ images as logically linked to their graves; for more on the development of the cult of relics in the west, see Leslie Brubaker, The Sacred Image East and West, 11–16.

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been established, but it takes on its most vivid possibilities depending on the ways we act out this desire, which comes into play at this fourth step. In the simplest modes, this may be visiting St. Étienne-du-Mont where Blaise Pascal is buried (rather than merely knowing he used to live in Paris), having a pint at the Inklings’ table at the Eagle and Child (rather than recognizing the name as we walk by), or displaying the scotch glass of our departed friend (rather than simply letting it drift to the back of the cabinet). So while substitution is in part naturally motivated, it is also an interpretive possibility that must be chosen as something to act upon or as something to dismiss and ignore as best as possible. Why would we choose to respond to substitution by such actions? Recall that according to Stein, physical expression is the completion of a feeling, and its meaning remains incomplete without being unfolded in an embodied way. So then if we find ourselves with strong feelings of affection, this meaning naturally demands to be expressed corporeally. In a person’s presence this could be simply communicated through the warmth of a smile, a touch on the arm, friendly words. But when this person is not present, or we might say, in the very heightened presence of this person’s absence, we might find ourselves longing to express the bittersweet ache, a strong feeling of affection and desire for intimacy despite the withholding of this full possibility here and now. The person is not here, and yet this person’s physical traces present themselves as an occasion to meaningfully express this affection. Thus, is not only that the mother first discovers the picture to be a corporeal substitution of her child, and therefore decides to kiss it or hold it lovingly. Rather, it is also her need to express her affection for her child that finds this possibility most meaningfully in this picture, his tiny shoes, or his blanket, which in the physical absence of the child serves as the best substitute to express his intimate presence in attention and affection. These examples show the common case of a personal need to express a strong feeling and the broader practice of substitutional practice. There may also be cases of a formal practice of substitution, as the Romans ­honored the emperor’s image and patriotic Americans salute the flag. In this case, the appropriate actions are not necessarily decided by an ­outpouring of personal expression, but have been formalized as ­meaningful actions that express for ourselves and our community that we give proper honor and respect to the country that p ­ rotects our freedom. At no point in these stages have we needed to posit a prior metaphysical ­relation of ­identification to discuss the m ­ eaning of the iconic veneration, nor explain it as a special property that Byzantine

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icons alone have.28 Rather, it is both our affective openness to the original and our need to express this meaningful relation physically that allows the corporeal connection it shares with this person to take on a meaning as substitution, to stand in place for the one who is absent in the flesh but vividly present in our affection and attention.

6.3  Icon and Substitution If substitution is operative in ordinary cases of making the absent p ­ resent, should it not be possible to raise this to a practice of prayer? And should it not be only natural that the embodied believer demand a practice of prayer that allows him to express his love in a bodily way? The Legend of the Acheiropoieton Indeed, believers preserve many substitutions in prayer, particularly relics and holy places, because of the need to keep a corporeal relationship with the holy, because they desire and love the holy in its corporeal absence, because they need to praise the holy in the flesh. As a painting, the icon will substitute first through its visibility rather than corporeality. In another sense, the icon also takes on a dimension of tactility, for all icons are relics, at least symbolically. Consider the legendary origin of the first icon, the ἀχειροποίητον or “image made without hands,” commonly called the Icon of Edessa or the Mandylion. John of Damascus recounts the story in two different places. It is not the oldest version of this legend, nor the longest, but it is the first version with a vested in interest in the image as such.29 His first recounting is in the Florilegia to his First Oration: An ancient story has come down to us about Abgar—I mean the ruler of Edessa—who heard all about the Lord, and a godly desire was kindled in him. He sent some messengers to ask the Lord to come and see him. Should the Lord refuse, they had to paint his likeness (ὁμοίωμα) as an artist would. As the Lord knows and is aware of everything, and can do everything, he took a piece of cloth and held it to his face—his image (χαρακτῆρα) was imprinted onto the cloth and has survived to our own times.30 28

29 30

Thus the cloak of the emperor or the beloved (the standard Patristic example) need not intrinsically participate in his being. I suggest that they bring him to presence in his absence above all because of our intense affection or respect for him, but also in our need to express this. See Mark Guscin, Image of Edessa (Leiden: Brill, 2009), for a study of these narratives. JD, Florilegia to Oration I, 35, PG 94, 1261b. Translation is from Guscin, 152.

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Figure 6.1  Mandylion, Gregory Kroug, 1960. Private collection, Paris. Photo by Lydie Aslanoff.

In a second retelling of the story, in De Fide Orthodoxa, he adds a reason why the artist was unsuccessful: Abgar the king of the city of Edessa, sent an artist (ζωγράφον) to paint the Lord’s image but could not do so because of the shining brilliance of his face (τοῦ προσώπου λαμπρότητα). The Lord therefore placed a large cloth on his divine and life-giving (ζωοποιῷ) face and wiped his own imprint onto it. He sent this to Abgar in answer to his request.31

As John Damascene tells the story, it is not out of intellectual ­curiosity or philosophical daring that Christians first began to make images of Christ. Rather, it was out of a desire to see Christ in the flesh in his absence that the ruler Abgar sends messengers to bring Christ to him, or as a last resort to at least make a portrait of Christ’s face. The artist is unable to do so, 31

De Orthodoxa Fidei, IV, XVI, PG 94, 1173a. Translation is from Guscin, 152; see also John Damascene, Writings, Fathers of the Church, vol. 37, trans. Frederic H. Chase (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc, 1958), 372–73.

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Figure 6.2  Icon Veneration at the 944 surrender of the “Image of Edessa” to the Byzantine Empire, thirteenth century. Chronography of John Skylitzes, cod. Vitr. 26–2, folio 131a. Photo: Madrid National Library.

however, because Christ’s face is too radiant. So Christ presses a cloth to his face, leaving an image on it, and sends this first image back to Abgar.32 Compare this to Pliny’s account of the origin of painting. While the exact details remain unknown, he explains that the general consensus holds that painting originated by “tracing lines round the human shadow (umbra hominis lineis circumducta).”33 After giving an account of what is known historically, he transitions into his account of other plastic arts by giving a mythical legend of the origin of painting: Enough and more than enough has now been said about painting. It may be suitable to append to these remarks something about the plastic art. It was through the service of that same earth that modeling portraits from clay was first invented by Butades, a potter of Sicyon, at Corinth. He did this owing to his daughter, who was in love with a young man; and she, when he was going abroad drew in outline (circumscripsit) on the wall the shadow of 32

33

See Graham Ward’s excellent analysis of this passage, “Beauty of God,” 35–65. While I follow Ward on many points, I am proposing a way of seeing the icon that does not immediately appeal to an external theory of “participation” or “analogy” as Ward does. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham, W.H.S, Jones and D. E. Eichholz (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2014), XXXV.5.

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Substitution: The Icon and Veneration his face throw by a lamp. Her father pressed clay on this and made a relief, which he hardened by exposure to fire with the rest of his pottery, and it is said that this likeness was preserved in the shrine of the Nymphs until the destruction of Corinth by Mimmius I.34

We can see immediately that both forms of art are traces that emerge from a similar motivation: not Gadamer’s joyful recognition of familiarity and belonging to the whole, but a desire to preserve the presence of a beloved person in his absence. In other words, both share a ­substitutional character. However, the painting begins in the presence of a beloved with whom the artist shares an intimate relationship. The icon, on the other hand, begins with a desire from a greater distance. Abgar is not ­completely ignorant; he has heard of Christ, even if he has never personally ­encountered him. The distance of this knowledge is part of the motivation for the desire for the image. But this distance is paradoxically heightened still further in Christ’s presence, for the artist remains all the more unable to receive or copy Christ’s image even before his very face. Unlike other visibles, distance is heightened in proximity; invisibility is only heightened with its visibility. When it comes to the resulting image, however, this proximity of the desired reverses. The painting is a trace of absence. It is modeled after visual similarity, but shows its difference at an extra level of remove by not being a visual record of the lover’s face. Rather, it is already a copy of the lover’s absence, the sketch of his shadow, later a clay relief, which although touchable is also created at a distance.35 The icon, on the other hand, claims a more intimate connection: it is a trace of presence. The image on the veil is the impression of a living body, through touch, the most intimate of the senses, becoming thus a visible relic, which can also be touched, kissed, or pressed to one’s own face, as Abgar does in other versions of the legend.36 The way ancient authors describe icon creation 34 35

36

Ibid., XXXV.43. Here we are reminded of Heidegger’s discussion of images in his lectures on Kant’s schematism, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, GA 3, trans. by R. Taft as Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 63–64. Heidegger’s primary example of the image is not an innocent picture of a tobacco box or a red roof of a house; he chooses a photograph of a death mask: that is, an image of an image of the ultimate absence. While this lacks the personal intimacy of the woman of Corinth, the doubled absence remains a feature of visual representation. This distance was even further removed from touch for the pagans’ stories of miraculous statues of gods, which, legend tells, were not made by hand, but διιπετής, cast down from heaven by the gods. See Belting, Likeness and Presence, 55, 495–98. Note that another variant of the story emerges in the twelfth century, where the image is the imprint of Christ’s face in the garden before the Crucifixion. This is closer to later Western story of the Veil of Veronica, where it is the suffering Christ who imprints his image. The second story hints (but

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retains this language of τύπος, type, trace, impression, which is used of images in many contexts as a way of expressing a more general relation of dependence, but here it is quite literally an imprint. Finally, the first painting is fashioned by the initiative of the woman who desires to preserve the presence of her beloved, drawing from her resourcefulness and creativity to capture the shape of his shadow, and her father follows her lead. While we must not read too much into words, it is telling that the verb used for capturing this form is “circumscribere,” which as we saw was a critical motivation for iconoclasts in the eighth and ninth centuries: they rejected the icon’s supposed claim to “­circumscribe the uncircumscribable,” that is, to give a comprehensive grasp of the incomprehensible God. The initiative of the icon similarly begins with the desire of the king, provoked in part by knowledge of Christ, but the artist is power­less to carry out this desire because he is blinded by Christ’s radiance. It is Christ himself who must provide the image in response to this desire. The Greek shows this reversal well: the activity of the artists, ζωγράφεω (painting life) is turned back before the activity of the Divine ζωοποιέω, (creating life), which makes them possible. This story makes it clear we do not circumscribe God in his icon; if anything, he “circumscribes” us. In contrast to Acts 19:26, which states that “gods made by human hands are no gods at all,” this icon was legitimated by God himself, the God who made the human hands which make. The icon thus is a created in a relational way; it is neither the artist securing the image with his own skill, nor Christ producing it unprovoked, nor the one who ultimately desires to pray to the image demanding its production. Rather, it is the working of all three, those who pray, those who paint, and Christ who gives the image at the request those who desire to know him.37 This tripled agency is critical to the meaning of the icon. On the one hand, and most importantly, the icon is Christ’s self-revelation. If this is

37

does not necessitate) that the visible trace might not be a miraculous touch of glorious flesh, but the physical marks of his suffering, blood, sweat, and dust. This can lead to the association of the image and wounding or death, as in Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, Didi-Huberman, L’image ouverte, and Marion in CV 62/CdV 111. Yet this is not so directly case in the Eastern legend of the Icon of Edessa (with rare exceptions: see Guscin, 153). Perhaps the cloth foretells the burial shroud, but the image itself is more properly understood as the mark of Christ’s brilliant glory. It remains interesting that the motif of the holy one miraculously impressing an image through touch continues beyond this early legend and extends to later Western Christianity with the Shroud of Turin and Our Lady of Guadalupe, which are both held to have been created from the direct impression of the touch of the holy. Graham Ward emphasizes this point, “Beauty of God,” 38, 53. See also Marion, “Fragments sur l’idole et l’icône,” 443.

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the case, the icon can be placed to some extent as a parallel or extension of the Scriptures, which are believed to be God’s Word. The artist in this story, on the other hand, does nothing but show up with his canvas and recognize his inability to carry out the task. This is not a specific action of art, but still a deliberate action: that of receptive presence to whatever God offers, the action proper to prayer. And ultimately, both the artist and Christ are motivated by Abgar’s loving desire to know the person of Christ through his image. On the other hand, while this story assumes the first icon to be the direct self-manifestation of Christ, it was told at a time where numerous copies of the original image had already been transmitted throughout the Christian world by the artistic talent of other human beings. This does not thereby return the power of depiction to human initiative, first because these copies ground their legitimacy on this original legendary image. This justification of divine initiative reaches beyond the “Icon of Edessa” type to icons to other types of Christ, which means that the authority is not a question of merely creating accurate copies of the original visibility of Christ’s face. One also finds this same logic in other icons, even for the saints, through legends which claim for these icons their own acheiropoietic origin.38 These legends may have once served as a matter of confirming visual, historical accuracy, but today we can better understand archeiropoeitic authority as a matter of painting in the same spirit of the original artist, recognizing one’s own inability to capture God and openness to the initiative of divine self-manifestation. This self-manifestation is no longer by direct trace of Christ’s face (and few people today believe the legend itself is historically true), but first of all through the fact of God’s self-manifestation to visibility, the Incarnation, and his communication through the theological tradition.39

38

39

We find examples of this in the Life of Nikon, Life of Athanasius, and Life of Saint Stephen the Younger, the Life of Irene of Chrysobalanton, among others. See Henry Maguire, Icons of their Bodies, 5–15; Paroma Chatterjee, “Problem Portraits,” 223–247; Thomas Mathews, Dawn of Christian Art, 131–151; Grabar, Christian Iconography, 63; Belting, Likeness and Presence, 47–59; and Dagron, Décire et peindre, 74–77. There are even accounts of iconographers “stealing” the image of saints by having them painted in secret, as in the Acts of John XXVI– XXIX, The Apocryphal New Testament, trans. Montague Rhodes James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 232–34. Some legends explain acheiropoietic images self-replicating on other images (thus forming a miraculous acheiropoietic chain), as in the Life of St. Paul of Latros. See Leslie Brubaker, “Image, Audience, and Place,” in Sacred Image East and West, 214–215, 220 n54. See Kroug, Carnets d’un peintre d’icônes, 45, 57. My point here supports in a different way Cuneo’s primary claims in “If These Walls” and Lossky’s “Tradition and Traditions.”

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To be true to this self-manifestation, the iconographer must receive and pass along what was given by Christ through the tradition. To faithfully carry out this task is more demanding than waiting for God to miraculously actualize his image on the gesso like in the legend; iconography requires a high degree of artistic mastery and not just sincere devotion.40 Yet the aim of iconography is unlike other forms of art marked by self-expression or aesthetic creativity. Just as it was Abgar’s desire that prompted the artist to attempt the first icon, it is the prayer of the believers that motivates the making of icons, not first the artist’s vision. And if it is necessary that the artist who paints first see what is given, how could a work bearing witness to Divine revelation be made by someone who does not “see” it, by “someone who is alienated from true spirituality?”41 Thus, in addition to a competence in their craft and a faithfulness to the theologically prescribed content, iconographers are also asked to allow room for the initiative of Christ’s self-manifestation by praying and fasting as they work. The expectation that iconographers live a holy life has sometimes been enforced very strictly.42 As the icon is made to be approached in prayer, it is also created in prayer and symbolically located as originating from divine initiative in response to the prayer of desire of those who will pray before it. We can see this belief expressed in a tradition of icons showing the iconographer saint guided in their work by angels, for example, this icon of St. Luke (Figure 6.3), who according to a legend from the eighth ­century, painted the first icon of Mary.43 To sum up, the legend of the acheiropoieton shows us that the icon is held to be a self-manifestation of Christ, who left a trace of his tactile presence in response to human longing when human ingenuity failed. Regardless of its historical truth it serves not only as an etiology of the tactile character of icons but also of our powerlessness to capture God on our own terms, showing the essential substitutional origins of the icon 40

41 42

43

Moyaert’s description of iconographers as “blind vehicles” (“Touching God,” 201) with “dulled” senses and intellect “burned” away (“Praying with Images,” 612) sounds a little too close to Didron’s “animal instinct.” It must be challenged first on a practical level, as any iconographer knows that the craft requires real skill and not just piety. Second, theologically, it seems to suggest an “iconoclasm” of the human being not consonant with an Orthodox understanding of tradition or inspiration. For a more nuanced view of the iconographer see Florensky, Iconostasis, 70–98; also Evdokimov, Art of the Icon, Chapter 21; Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, 170–74. Florensky, Iconostasis, 92. “In the most precise sense of the word, only saints can be iconographers,” ibid., 88; also see Evdokimov, Art of the Icon, 213–217; Sendler, Mystères, 293ff. I will return to this point in the following chapter, especially Section 7.4. See Cormack, Painting the Soul, 44–46; Grabar, Christian Iconography, 84.

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Figure 6.3  St. Luke the Proto-Iconographer, Vladislav Andrejev, 2005. Photo by Iconographer.

in the relation of love that desires across a distance and awaits God’s free response, or prayer. Similar to what we have seen in the visibility of the image, the icon seems to begin from the ordinary situation of aesthetics but pushes it toward limits that open it in faithfulness to Divine initiative. This causes the icon to stand apart from not only a Gadamerian understanding of art, but also from the ordinary role of substitution. But this legend, as we have said, is etiological and symbolic. Its full meaning must be borne out in experience. Let us see how what we have learned in this legend functions in the concrete practices of substitution before the icon. Practices of Prayerful Substitution From our previous analysis, we can recognize that there is nothing unusual about the practices performed towards an icon, which include both personal gestures such as bowing and crossing oneself, kissing, lighting candles, or touching one’s forehead to it, as well as communal gestures such

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as processions, mock burials, and decoration with flowers. What makes iconic substitution unique is not any of these actions, but that they are performed as prayer.44 As discussed in Chapter 6, prayer changes the mode of personal presence into a communal presence, even if it lacks full confirmation of this relation. This structurally modifies each step of ordinary substitutional practice. The legend of the acheiropoieton can help us understand how this works. 1) The icon presumes personal knowledge of an absent, holy person. As we have seen with the icon of Edessa, the kind of affection we show to the icon begins at a greater removal, for we are not born with an intimate relationship with Christ. Rather, we begin like Abgar, hearing about Christ from other people or written accounts, rather than through a direct, faceto-face encounter in the flesh. We do know enough to desire to know him more closely.45 We have read the stories in the Scriptures and lives of the saints. The teaching elements of the icon enrich this knowledge as well, for not only do we know his name (IX XC as well as ὁ ὤν), but we see Christ in action in the icons that depict the events of his life, or simply in his face depicted as a listening, peaceful, attentive, and majestic presence. 2) We desire a personal relation to this absent person. Like Abgar, we may find that we are struck with an earnest desire for a greater personal acquaintance and the proximity of Christ’s corporeal presence. Yet as we have seen, the presence of the holy differs from the presence of our human loved ones, and any personal relation to this holy one will be of a radically different kind than toward our children or wives or fathers. God’s distance paradoxically increases with our proximity, whether in the brilliant radiance Abgar’s artists saw or the dark night of dry prayer. There is simply no angle of approach which allows us the “presence” of God in a way that we can fully know or understand. If we truly desire God as God (and not merely as a domesticated “idol” of our imagination), we must allow our act of desire to be radically transformed beyond any simple human affection, desire, or attention. Like the artists before the face of Christ, we must let go of our finite human initiative. To desire an authentic personal relation to God is always to lose our bearings as a mutual knower, to renounce intentional fulfillment as a measure of success.46 44

45 46

Even John Damascene supports this point, saying that for example the cloak of the emperor does not become honorable until one venerates the emperor, so “matter is filled with divine grace through prayer addressed to those portrayed in images,” in JD, Florilegia to Oration I, 36, PG 94, 1264b. Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, §39. Ibid., 150–151 [181–82].

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This step is not always fully recognized in the historical approach, ­ articularly among those that focus on metaphysical or e­pistemological p explanations of relation between image and original.47 Yet there are ­notable exceptions. Some have come to recognize the role of desire, including the particular importance of πόθος, or bittersweet affection, in the Byzantine experience of the icon. Yet unlike human substitution, the desire for the personal presence through the icon is more than an ­unrequited ache for what is not present. Ivan Drpić recognizes the way that this loving desire for the holy one in her absence is transformed by prayer, which he describes as an intimate, personal relation to “an approachable and responsive ­companion.”48 These words were spoken of icon v­eneration in the past, but they can be transferred to the faithful who pray before icons today. Yet, I insist we must go a step further. Prayer before the icon involves a kind of presence that requires much more from us than affection alone. That is, because of the uniqueness of the absent one, the character of our interest must be radically transformed, becoming no longer a simple human affection, longing, hatred, or attention, but the radical exposure of total self-gift. This heightened exposure of dispossession requires we renounce any right to fulfillment on our own finite terms. The result is that the actual feelings may differ in their visible strength without altering this underlying relation of total self-dispossession toward God. Lacoste reminds us firmly that any analysis of the concrete activities of prayer says more about us than about God’s presence to us.49 3) The absent person comes to presence in some way in the thing to be substituted for him, whether convention, likeness, or corporeal trace. The holy one comes to presence in our prayer first visibly through the painted face which opens us to the counter-gaze of the holy. At the same time, the icon also makes the holy present as a body. The legend of the acheiropoieton legitimates the icon as the visible inscription of a gesture, both of the artist whose hand must be trained to trace this line, and of Christ who gives us his visible imprint in response to our own desire for physical proximity. One immediate indication of the character of this corporeal trace is that (contrary to what the iconophiles often claim) an icon that is too damaged to serve as an image is not discarded without ceremony; while it is no longer useable as an icon and must indeed be disposed of, it is done in a ritual way befitting its substitutional relic character (burning or burying). 47 48 49

See Elsner, “Iconoclasm as Discourse,” 379, who calls idolatry a “mistake” of an epistemological order, confusing creature for Creator. Drpić, Epigram, 395. Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, §20.

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The tangibility of the visible presence was particularly heightened in Byzantine sensibilities, as Robert Nelson argues, under their optics of “haptic extramission.”50 That is, unlike our current understanding that seeing occurs when our eyes receive rays of light reflecting off visible objects (“haptic intromission”), Byzantine philosophy reversed the source of action, conceiving sight as actively projecting rays that illuminated objects. The result, argues Nelson, is that “vision was haptic as well as optic, tactile as well as visual.”51 Because of this, the senses cross over, as Liz James suggests, and “touching an icon becomes a form of seeing and vice versa,”52 and both are taken up in prayer: John of Damascus exhorts us to “embrace [holy images] with the eyes, the lips, the heart.”53 This tangibility of vision may have motivated the texture and moulding that became such an important part of Byzantine aesthetic, as Bissera Pentcheva proposes.54 On the other hand, this strong interpretation of the “touch” of sight may be reading too far into the texts, taking as philosophical theory what was simply a matter of rhetoric and a reference to a practice, as Roland Betancourt argues.55 Whether literal or figurative, this rhetoric of the touch of the gaze reveals something at work in the believer’s experience before the icon. We are not at a distance from the image, for our looking reaches out to touch it. And if our eyes touch the icon, its painted eyes also touch us. We remember all of the stories in the Gospels of Christ’s healing touch, and all of the legends of the saints who shared in this gift. In fact, other legends of Edessa hold that it was in order to be healed that Abgar sought Christ, and that the icon resulted in his miraculous healing when he pressed it to his own face.56 The Life of St. Symeon the Younger intertwines the senses of sight and touch even more clearly in the story of a woman “who for fifteen years had had a constant discharge of blood.” She resolves to see St. Symeon’s miracle-working icon, saying, “If only I see his likeness, I shall be saved.”57 As Nelson observes, this story forms an explicit parallel to the woman who is healed by touching the hem of 50

51 52 53 54

55 56 57

Robert S. Nelson, “To Say and to See”; compare to Merleau-Ponty, who talks about the intertwining of visibility and tangibility, albeit in a different way, in Chapter 4 of The Visible and the Invisible, 130ff [170ff]. Nelson, 153. James, “Senses and Sensibility,” 528. JD, II.10. Pentcheva, “The Performative Icon,” 636. She makes a connection between this practice and the significance of the Image of Edessa. In the iconoclastic debates, too, “circumscribability” was as much a question of corporeality and touch as visibility, in addition to being “made by hands.” Betancourt, Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium. See Guscin, Image of Edessa, 142–43. Life of St. Symeon the Younger, chap 118, ed. P. Van den Ver, La vie ancienne de S. Syméon Stylite le jeune (Brussels, 1962), 98, cited in Mango, Art of the Byzantine Empire 134.

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Jesus’s robe (Mark 6:25–34), “only now the touching is with the eyes, not the hand.”58 Believers thus come before the icon not to look, but to be looked at, to be healed, as the Israelites were healed before the sight of the bronze serpent (Num. 21:4–9).59 The painted gaze sends out healing rays to touch those who come before him.60 The Psalms often beg God for the mercy of being gazed upon, “do not hide your face from me,” (Ps 27:9) or “let the light of your face shine on us” (Ps 4:6). By making the painting a symbolic body to our touch, corporeal substitution redoubles and enhances the icon’s visual presence as a power that can touch us. This confirms that we need not deny the visibility of the image with the advent of touch or substituted actions.61 Far from opposing touch and vision, the icon brings both together as a doubly motivated substitution, which makes it a particularly striking phenomenon. We have already discussed the intensified visuality that faces have over other visibles; our eyes naturally drift towards a face rather than the golden reliquaries. A face, even a painted one, catches our wandering eye almost immediately, and the icon’s gaze which always fixes on us invites us to recognize that the holy is not an abstract force in a distant place or time, or even a historical event or narrative. We more easily enter into personal relationality and substitution when confronted with the visibility of a face than when reading a text or listening to music. One of the key virtues of the image is that it reminds us that the holy one is a person, one who became human flesh and blood and who offers a relation to us here and now. And while the icon is materially a board, the gestures of icons incarnate their speech in a relational embodiment to us, addressed to us or with us, in prayer and blessing. Compared to photos or blankets, the doubled visual and corporeal substitution allows the icon to serve as a particularly powerful phenomenon for substitution. But in the final step the presence of an icon is heightened further still. 4) Corporeal expression results from and motivates substitution. To this point, iconic substitution differs from ordinary practices of substitution in the character of the person we desire and the nature of our relation to 58 59

60 61

Nelson, “To Say and to See,” 154. JD, Florilegia to Oration I, 44–45, PG 94, 1276b–1278b; Theodore the Studite, “A Homily on the Veneration of the Precious and Life-Giving Cross,” Orthodox Tradition XX:3 (2003): 9–13, PG 119, 692b–700b. Nelson, “To Say and to See,” 154–5. Moyaert’s rightful insistence on the importance of the icon’s touch sometimes moves to a denial of the icon’s importance as visible: “Icons do not address the gaze, but approach the believer haptically,” “Praying With Images,” 603. His later article serves as a corrective to some extent, but by putting icons fully under the category of relics he seems to once again neglect the image function of the icon, “Touching God,” 194–195.

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him. Now we come to another major difference: the way we act out our expression. We do not kiss or bow or touch simply in affection, but in prayer. The prayerful attitude of iconic substitution transforms the ‘as if’ of ordinary substitution beyond the mere interpretive possibility found in the other forms of natural substitution above. (a) The strongest forms of substitution, we saw, emerged as a personal, spontaneous expression that completes a meaningful experience by embodying it a physical gesture. We have spoken of kissing, touching, and bowing, but we could include a wide range of other gestures, including for example the Byzantine practice of devotional gift-giving, embellishing icons with jewels or inscriptions, as a way of tangibly communicating personal devotion.62 Yet the gesture itself is not the primary source of the difference of iconic substitution. In ordinary substitution, I may desire strongly the absent person, but it is out of my need that I express this desire through a substituted thing. A departed friend, absent child, or philosophical inspiration is unaware of my actions toward them and in this sense directly unaffected. In prayer, this meaning is modified from the substitution of simple personal expression, for believers really hold that the holy can receive our actions.63 Regardless of whether we experience strong affection or boredom, those who pray before the icon believe that it is not a simple private matter of spontaneously expressing feelings, for now has become a matter of real communication and not an unrequited longing. This structurally changes the character of our words in a non-trivial way. Prayerful substitution retains its character “as if,” refusing any identification that would collapse the distance between the icon and the holy one. The icon is not Christ, even though it gives us the opportunity to communicate to him. We do not intend the wooden board itself in our kiss, which would be the crudest idolatry, making the icon-object itself a magical totem.64 Nor do we believe that the icon is itself the living flesh 62 63 64

Drpić, Epigram, 295; see also Bissera Pentcheva, “Epigrams on Icons” from Art and Text in Byzantium, 120–238. This is my most significant departure from Moyaert, who despite his illuminating analysis of icons as substituting symbols, never discusses the believer’s conviction that this is a real communication. Glenn Peers goes too far by suggesting that the key to understanding icons in the Byzantine world is to imagine them as personified objects, having a “neediness” for affection. “Sense Lives of Byzantine Things,” in Knowing Bodies, Passionate Souls, 16. At the same time, Paul Moyaert is perhaps a little too optimistic that certain levels of animistic identification are not and never were a real temptation for human beings, “In Defense of Praying with Images,” 607. Certainly we could grant to both that this possibility would not suggest itself to us without a certain context of practice of speaking to images in the belief the holy can hear us.

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of the holy, as if the Word became board and dwelt among us. Nor do we hold the slightly more refined idea that the holy inhabits the many painted boards that picture it. This is animism. Nor is it a kind of “voodoo,” a fabricated body that maps on to the original as a near equivalent source of corporeal sensation. Our physical acknowledgement of the holy in the icon is none of these things. One does not identify the icon literally with the flesh of the original; one venerates it with symbolic gestures as a place where the original can come to presence yet which remains at a distance. At the same time, iconic substitution is not the same as wishful transposition acted out toward a shared likeness or corporeal extension, like the mother kissing the little shoes of her absent child. Because of the belief in a communication, veneration is not in the same genre as “counting as,” like a child playing make-believe, like an actress performing in a play or the audience watching her, like pledging allegiance to flags or kissing war memorials. The one who kisses the icon in prayer thus intends to perform a real act of communication to the holy one who is actively and attentively present in prayer through the image, who thus receives the communication of this kiss, even if it may not be the literal transmission of a physical sensation. We have no confirmation of this presence, but believers hold this in hope, which fundamentally modifies the structure of the activity. Just as one prayerfully addresses the icon in belief that the holy is really listening, one kisses the icon in belief that the holy really receives our affection and honor. This difference between veneration and substitution is not a private matter, only apparent in the attitude of those who perform it. It is also phenomenally evident for those who observe them. We speak differently when we believe we are communicating. This can be understood in other contexts: we do not need the other side of a telephone conversation to tell if someone is speaking to an automated service or a human being. We hear it directly in their tone. We do not act or speak to machines like we speak to people who we take to be listening to us.65 We kiss an icon differently if we really mean to honor Christ and when we are simply performing a symbolic gesture. (b) Following from this character of substitution as communication, we can expand on the motivation for substitution. It is no longer exclusively out of our own need to corporeally express what we feel, because it is now a live communication to another person. As the legend of Abgar tells us, we do create icons because we have the need to touch and kiss in 65

See Lacoste, L’intuition sacramentelle, 55–56.

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our praise, and we may experience this need with an intensity equal to human situations of substitution. However, since our actions are prayer, we are no longer limited to performing practices of iconic substitution only when we keenly feel this need. As a communication to someone who hears us, the most important motivation in substitutional prayer is not a gesture of intense feeling, but of fidelity. The desire for God may be felt viscerally or not; believers often experience such feelings as fluctuating. Whether we feel full or empty, whether the desire is burning or coldly distant, in boredom and in affection, we can still choose to make ourselves present to the holy in the icon, we can still kiss it and cross ourselves. The bodily gesture enacts a meaning of my intention and desire, even if it is experienced as empty, even if it is at the bare minimum my desire to desire as I should.66 As soon as we extend iconic substitution beyond spontaneous expression and into the expression of fidelity, we open the single action to the meaningful possibility of repetition. A repeated chain of actions takes on a new significance as a practice, which leads us to add a fifth step. 5) Extension into practice. Prayer of substitution before the icon, when repeated as a practice, transforms the way we encounter the world. Recall that in our brief account of gesture in communication we saw that it is not only that a meaningful feeling seeks expression physically for its completion, but the physical expression can feed back into the initial experience. Refusing a feeling physical expression weakens its initial strength, and adopting a different physical expression can actually create a feeling where none existed before it. If we faithfully enact these gestures of substitution with ­ genuine meaning, not as a robotic motion, they return to alter our initial ­ ­experience. This transformation begins as soon as we begin to act toward the icon relationally, in prayer before the image. As Nicaea II declares, “The more frequently [icons] are seen in representational art, the more are those who see them drawn to remember and long for those who serve as models, and to pay these images the tribute of salutation and respectful veneration.”67 By our embodied expressions of our meaningful relation to the holy, we intensify the relational presence of the icon. A single act of prayerful substitution may still feel artificial and forced for those who begin outside of this tradition of prayer. However as this single action is extended into a sustained practice, the effects begin to shape us. Because 66 67

Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, §15, 17. Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 1: 136.

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we often stop to bow before this icon, because we intensify our physical relation to it with kisses, because we use it as an occasion to express our love for this holy one who is present here, and our longing to see him face to face, we begin to regard it as a place of the personal presence of another. Even after we finish praying, we can still feel his holy gaze upon us in the background as we attend to our other work. Thus, through the practice of prayer before the icon, the iconic gaze becomes a holy presence that enters into the space which it inhabits, sanctifying it, shaping our attitudes and experiences even when we are not directly engaging in prayer.68 The more we pray, the more vivid the call or counter-intentionality becomes. This is why Evdokimov states, “The icon is a powerful and methodical spiritual exercise program.”69

6.4  Limitations of Substitution By embodying a prayerful relation to the icon, we can begin to experience and engage in it more intensely, as a fuller mode of making ourselves present in this relation of prayer, and opening up its presence to us. At the same time, even in prayer the substitutional character of the icon insists on preserving the distance to the holy. As we have seen, the icon is still only a substitution, and not an identification with a full corporeal presence like animism or voodoo. One kisses the icon, and in certain liturgical contexts performs other symbolic substitutions, like processions and burial rites, but these acts do not extend to more literal behaviors of transposition (expecting it to eat our food and drink). This distinction helps embody Nicaea II’s differentiation between the veneration of the icon, προσκύνησις, and the worship due only to God, λατρεία; even though one prays to Christ, one does not act toward the icon in the same way as one would treat Christ in the flesh. Of course, this in itself guarantees nothing. It is still possible for us to commit idolatry through limited acts of substitution, just as it may be possible to avoid ­idolatry even in more literal acts. Nevertheless, the iconic practices of ­substitution aim to expose to us clearly the gap between what it is and what it is not. Similarly, the icon declares a strict limit in the body it offers: it will give us the visibility of a body in an image, but it refuses to corporeally imitate 68

69

Alexej Lidov speaks about the spatial and environmental character of the icon as “hierotopy.” See for example “Hierotopy: The Creation of Sacred Spaces as a Form of Creativity and Subject of Cultural History.” Evdokimov, Art of the Icon, 11.

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a body. The icon is a flat surface, a wooden board or a wall. While there are exceptions, including a tradition of relief carving and some historically significant statues, Byzantine aesthetics often had a resistance to threedimensional models of the body. The presence in a statue seemed to give too much, and thus seemed to pose a greater risk for believers to forget the distance between what it is and what it makes present. Whether or not the same risk holds in our aesthetic context, those who pray with icons today continue to preserve this resistance.70 Once again, the icon insists on clearly manifesting its limits to keep us always aware of its incapacity to claim ultimate presence. This can help us understand the meaning of the essential distinction between veneration and worship. To lack this distinction leads, quite rightly, to iconoclasm. Worship is given directly to God alone. Veneration is the honor given to God’s presence through other things or people which are themselves not God. One is right to venerate the icon, but one must never worship it. Substitution is a clearly form of veneration, and not worship, for it retains this “as if” character. To kiss the icon is a meaningful communication of our love for the holy, but not a literal one; I still kiss a board, and not the body of Christ. By contrast, one does worship the Eucharist, which is not a substitution and is not merely treated “as if.” The host is believed to be the living body of Christ in his real presence, even if it does not give his full visibility. The host is handled, tasted, eaten, digested, becoming a part of the believers’ bodies, maybe even within ritual practices that share surface similarities to iconic veneration,71 but one’s physical comportment towards it is different, manifesting that one does 70

71

It is true that this resistance has often been exaggerated by contemporary believers. Nancy claims the prohibition against the idolatry of “graven images” from Judaism was meant particularly for sculpted images, not painted images, for precisely this reason: they claim too much of presence, Ground of Image 30–32 [62–67]. Nevertheless, there is no warrant for a definitive iconoclasm of statues; the potential for “presence” of any aesthetic form is always relative to an aesthetic culture and practice. We see this in Western Christianity. Most post-Renaissance paintings in Western churches are used only for aesthetic purposes, to create a representation of a biblical scene or saint’s life, to remind and teach believers, to allow them to imaginatively enter a spiritual world. Statues, on the other hand, more often approximate the iconic prayer of Eastern Christianity in Catholic devotion, even if there is no comparable systematization of the practice. It is statues that are often used by Western Christians in their relational iconic prayer, making present and substituting for the original. Roman Catholics perform many of the same practices before statues that Eastern Christians perform before icons: lighting candles, crossing themselves, processing with them, and touching or kissing the feet or hands (the famous statue of St. Peter in Rome is not the only one to have been physically worn down under the litany of prayerful touches from believers’ prayerful substitution). Béatrice Caseau discusses Patristic accounts of a Eucharistic devotion of touch prior to consuming the host, “Byzantine Christianity and Tactile Piety,” in Knowing Bodies, Passionate Souls, 214.

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not see the bread as a “what” but a “who.”72 The icon brings a “who” to presence and we communicate to the “who” through it, but is not itself this “who.” The gestures of a believer will manifest this difference of worship and veneration. *** Corporeal substitution in the icon is thus an intensification of the presence that arises from our desire and our prayerful comportment toward what is shown there, and takes us even farther beyond the border of mere aesthetics. Not only do we prayerfully relate to the presence of the icon through sight or imagination, but through our entire bodies, our gestures. The icon offers itself to us as a thing to kiss, touch, and display, as well as a painted presentation of a body which gestures meaningfully to us and gives us the symbolic trace of an original presence. All its resources as a visible and tactile body are deployed to better anchor our attention on the holy, which is enhanced when we elevate practices of meaningful substitution to the level of prayer, which exposes us more intimately to the Divine counter-gaze that comes to presence in the painted panel. The more we allow this prayer to be expressed through our whole bodies, the more easily the icon comes to manifest this call to us. It is fidelity that directs our practice of prayer, more than feeling; yet our habits of veneration carve out meaningful channels of understanding that open us to the presence of the holy through our bodies, our feelings, and our minds. At the same time, the icon is not a superstition, for it preserves a gap in meaning to respect its distance from the original. The icon refuses full identification with what it represents, both by its symbolic rather than literal substitutional practices, and by the refusal of a full corporeal reproduction of the original. While we venerate the icon in order to show our love and fidelity to Christ, we also make clear in our actions of substitution that we do not believe the icon is itself  Christ, a contrast to our prayer before the Eucharist. Especially when we recognize the corporeal dimension at play in the icon, we can no longer consider prayer as a merely private activity. As embodied, it is manifested, and as manifested, it calls for a community of others who pray along with me.73 This community of worshippers shares with me in my time of prayer before the icon, and this liturgical experience shapes the way the icon is given and the meaning of practices of iconic prayer. 72 73

Lacoste, L’intuition sacramentelle, 55–56. See Chrétien, Ark of Speech, 33–34 [47–49].

chapter 7

Performance

The Icon and Liturgy

7.1  The Event of Liturgy Multiplying Mediations It was always in the Divine Liturgy that the encounter with the icon was at its height. In the glory of post-iconoclast Byzantium, the visual and tactile dimensions of the icon were enhanced by the context of the liturgical event that engaged all five senses. Those who came together to pray were enfolded by the sonic shimmer of bells and polyphonic chant that reverberated off walls teeming with painted angels and saints. Candlelight danced across the gold of the panel icons at eye level, evoking a play of light and shadow that almost seemed to make the holy faces come alive.1 Clouds of incense formed a theophanic front between invisible and visible, disintegrating harsh divisions of earthly structure in a fragrant haze that wavered in the sunlight streaming from high windows.2 As the gold glittered on the mosaics of the grand domes above, one might truly feel that here heaven came to earth, that the glorious excess of the invisible poured over all of the senses now at the height of their aesthetic capacity. We recall the famous words of the Russian messengers after their first encounter with the liturgy of Hagia Sophia in the 10th century: “we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations.”3 To look at the icon in its full liturgical context thus 1

2 3

Pentcheva, “The Performative Icon,” 631–32; Glenn Peers, “Real Living Painting: Quasi-Objects and Dividuation in the Byzantine World,” Religion and the Arts 16 (2012): 451–52; Mathews, The Dawn of Christian Art, 190–92. Florensky, Iconostasis, 60–61; Tsakiridou, 247–48; I am also grateful to Rick Moreno for his reflections on this point. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text, trans. and ed. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbewitz–Wetzor (Cambridge, Mass: Medieval Society of America, 1953), 111.

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immediately plunges us into music, poetry, s­ cripture, ­architecture, priesthood, and the whole embedded context of prayer and its related mediations that touch upon all of the senses.4 Adding such layers of mediation quickly becomes an exponentiation, as in the event of the liturgy each interacts with and enhances the others’ meaning. Bissera Pentcheva has even suggested that the Byzantine liturgy attempted a kind of holy “synesthesia,” a crossing over of the senses before the radiant excess of unearthly beauty. The synesthetic experience of liturgy, according to Pentcheva, aimed to be a “saturated phenomenon” (with a deliberate nod to Marion), stretching the limits of experience to dazzle us into awe and reverence, as an aid to prayer.5 At the same time, if we hope to understand what iconic mediation is today, we must recognize that contemporary believers may well experience the event of liturgy differently. In the twenty-first century we have grown accustomed to more powerful stimulants to our attention. Even where the liturgy possesses all the same mediations, and all the same synesthetic possibilities, it may strike us as lacking in the aesthetic force that so impressed the Byzantine world.6 This is no cause for alarm. If, as I argued in Chapter 4, the icon is more than aesthetics, this distinction of glory and poverty is less important than it seems. The icon is not p ­ rimarily about a kind of experience, but the act of prayer, and prioritizing any other aim reduces it to an idol. This is as true for us today as it was true for the ancient Byzantine world, at least insofar as they genuinely prayed. Even in the grandeur of the liturgical event, they, too, recognized that every ­presence was still shot through with absence, that the fullness of the encounter they sought was not available for them here and now.7 Neither glory nor p ­ overty, on its own, is sufficient to the icon, and either could be the ­occasion for an icon to become an “idol.” It is easy to delight in the glory of a liturgical 4

5

6 7

Ouspensky, Meaning of Icons, 30–31. For an scholarly overview on the history of the Byzantine liturgy, see Nancy Patterson Ševčenko, “Art and Liturgy,” Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies, ed. Elizabeth Jeffreys, 731–740 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); for a contemporary phenomenological perspective on the multiple mediations of the liturgy, see Christina M. Gschwandtner Welcoming Finitude: Toward a Phenomenology of Orthodox Liturgy (Fordham University Press, 2019). See Pentcheva’s articles “The Performative Icon”; “Glittering Eyes: Animation in the Byzantine Eikon And the Western Imago,” Codex Aquilarensis 32 (2016), 209–236; and “Performing the Sacred in Byzantium: Image, Breath, and Sound,” Performance Research 19:3 (2014), 120–28. Constas, Art of Seeing, 16. Barber describes the icon as offering “a directed absence,” unable to make present what it represents, but serving as a starting point for the believer’s contemplation, in Figure and Likeness, 121. Betancourt, too, marshals and analyzes notable texts from this time which emphasize the longing, emptiness, and absence that remains before an icon, a representation which could only be fulfilled eschatologically, in Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium, 238–239.

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experience taken for its own right, to be swept up in the elegance of the icons, the dramatics of the liturgy, and the richness of the cantors’ voices. It is also easy to be absorbed by an impoverished liturgical experience, to become occupied with the imperfection of the aesthetic forms, the noise of a restless child, or our own concerns and projects which continually draw our attention away from the moment. To fear either possibility is to take the icon as an end in itself, an idol. It fails to enact the one thing necessary: the encounter with the counter-gaze. It is not sufficient, then, to consider the liturgy as an aesthetic performance or as a context for the icon’s sensible amplification, for any such “saturation” along these lines remains at the level of the idol, defined by the finite capacities of the spectator’s gaze. What is significant is this: if prayer is to expose oneself to the counter-gaze, the Divine Liturgy is the most essential context where this takes place, the primary event where this practice is formed and extended. To understand the full dimensions of the icon’s mediation, we must turn from private prayer to that of the community gathered together to perform their response to the Divine gaze. Time, Space, Community Let us begin by expanding upon an insight from the previous chapter: that the icon transforms the world of those who come before it in practices of prayer. Drawing from Gadamer’s phenomenological sense of “world,” this will necessarily include relations of (1) space, (2) time, and (3) community. Each of these three intertwining dimensions are key to the aesthetic experience, for by setting itself apart in festival time (2), and sometimes a unique architectural space (1), art renews our relation with the whole, transforming our world and bringing us into deeper belonging with each other and with ourselves (3). The icon, too, is displayed in special times and spaces and forms the community that gathers around it. We have already spoken of the significance of the organization of time and space within the painting itself, and how it creates a certain relation with the viewer (Section 4.2). From the aesthetic world of the painting itself we now turn to the world in which the painting is encountered. To begin with (1) the space of the icon, we can first point out the historical link between icons and their geographical location, as notable icons were often named for the cities where they are housed, and local communities developed certain practices of prayer towards them.8 But space is more 8

Belting, Likeness and Presence, 14; Brown, “Dark-Age Crisis,” 19–22.

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than a question of geography. The icon creates a certain space where it appears, projecting out to the “real space in front, where the beholder lives and moves.”9 This extends into the many spheres where icons are displayed, often in continuity with everyday life, as in the home, where they are often displayed in a particular corner, sanctifying everyday space. They can also transgress ordinary boundaries by encroaching onto the space of public affairs, as in the temporary processions that consecrate a city.10 The most significant space for icons, however, is the church, an architectural structure fashioned for the purpose of hosting the event that marks most significant time of encounter with the icons: the communal celebration of liturgy.11 Traditional churches were designed to maximize the luminosity of the sun. The quality of light, which differs by geographical location and by time of day, thus made time and space integral to the viewing conditions of the icons found there.12 In this sense, the liturgy never leaves its particular space and time. And just as liturgical space takes on a symbolic meaning, so does liturgical time. Liturgy is characterized by what Gadamer called “festival” time (2), for believers leave their individual projects, their earthly cares, to gather in a shared public event of prayer. Upon entering a traditional Byzantine church, believers would find themselves surrounded by icons of the festal cycle of twelve key events from the life of Christ celebrated in the Church calendar, immediately linking the icon with this liturgical time.13 In fact, all icons claim a relation to liturgical temporality, for each portrait icon of a saint corresponds with the liturgical feast that celebrates his life, along with a related set of prayers. This is made clear in calendar icons (Figure 7.1), which display in miniature the icons of the feasts corresponding to each day of a month, or sometimes the entire church year. All icons thus represent liturgical events, whether they depict a narrative found in the scriptures or celebrate the life of a saint through a panel icon. The liturgical context indicates that through the icons, God’s saving actions are made available to us in the festival time we enter, each time in a new way. 9 10 11 12 13

Demus, Byzantine Mosaic Decoration, 13. Lidov, “Hierotopy: The Creation of Sacred Spaces,” 44. Evdokimov, The Art of the Icon, 175–76. Tsakiridou, Icons in Time, 244–48. These Great Feasts are as follows: The Nativity of the Theotokos (Sept 8), The Elevation of the Holy Cross (Sept 14), The Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple (Nov 21), The Nativity of Christ (Dec 25), Theophany, or the Baptism of Christ (Jan 6), The Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Feb 2), The Annunciation (Mar 25), Palm Sunday (the Sunday before Easter), Easter, Ascension (40 days after Easter), Pentecost (50 days after Easter), The Transfiguration (Aug 6), and The Dormition of the Theotokos (Aug 15). See Gschwandtner, Welcoming Finitude, 31–34.

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Figure 7.1  August Calendar Icon. Second half of eighteenth century, Novgorod, Russia. Petit Palais, Paris. Photo: Paris Musées.

Gathering together in the same church space at the same time confirms these first two elements of space and time. It also confirms (3) the dimension of community, first in our belonging to the others gathered here for liturgy, yet this community is broader than a single congregation. The sturdy architectural structure of the church recalls those who have created this space in the past and structurally anticipates those who will gather there in the future, while the event of liturgy performed here also confirms our belonging to those across the world and across history who join in our same prayers. The icons displayed in this church space further unite this community on an aesthetic level, serving as a powerful agent of transformation into a shared vision. If the consistency of iconic aesthetics may be a challenge to individual taste or artistic creativity, this should not be understood as a negation, but an initiation into a vast community across time and place, of those whose world was also formed by this theological and aesthetic vision, who stand at what Marion would call the same “anamorphic” point. Those who pray know the effect of entering deeply into this harmonious aesthetic world of light and its rhythms of line and color, understand a certain vision of humanity and relationality depicted there. This aesthetic tradition preserves a continuity across a very broad community but also has room for a degree of personal difference, as it is passed

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down and appropriated by different cultures and organically adapted to different geographies, incorporating locally available pigments and adapting architecture to the regional quality of the sunlight. Many Western churches slowly accumulate art over centuries, and thus ancient cathedrals very visibly bring us into the progression of history. Icons can do this too, and can be located as originating from a time and culture based on their visibility, but more often there is a continuity in the aesthetic scheme of the church, for icons are not created to be single-standing images. They are created in implicit reference to the many other images that will fill the church.14 Each image has its own internal unity and logic, but it also is created to serve the balance of the whole from its own interior logic or rhythm. Such coherence of an aesthetic whole in a church is only possible when artists consent to serve the common forms of a tradition rather than their own subjective creativity, when each icon within a space trades individual autonomy for belonging to one whole which it communicates.15 This parallels the community which is created when we give up what cuts us off from others, and allow ourselves to enter into harmony with the whole. This does not mean to dull our individuality, as indeed icons strive to preserve individual facial features and a unique stylistic character and balance for each icon. As Kordis states, it is a matter of personal integration, rather than self-effacement: “The more [the icon] is purified from its ‘passions’ (internal fragmentation that is caused by opposing energies exerted by the component parts), the more free it becomes to move and to be joined to the viewer, to whom it owes its very existence.”16 Thus, icons as a coherent aesthetic form can tell us something about the nature of the community that prays before them. We also see this same affirmation of both individuality and community in the two kinds of icons displayed in a church. Panel icons of local saints and current feast days are placed in the open to be venerated, while large mural icons or frescoes adorn the walls on all sides. If the panel icon gives itself tangibly to the unique intimacy of each person who comes before it to bow and kiss, the mural icons visibly give themselves to the full community all at once. In their spatial dimensions which either maximize visibility or maximize tangibility, icons preserve both the individual and the communal, inviting both a personal relation with every believer at the same time as it relates to the community as a whole. The shape of 14 15 16

Demus, Byzantine Mosaic Decoration, 3. Ouspensky, Meaning of Icons, 40; Kordis, Icon as Communion, 54 Kordis, Icon as Communion, 56; Gschwandtner, Welcoming Finitude, 46.

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the church building further opens up possibilities of this intercommunal relation, as the curved surfaces of niches and domes break the Euclidian plane, and create new possibilities of triangulating relations between paintings and paintings, paintings and persons.17 When we unite to pray with icons in the event of liturgy, our world is transformed, first of all simply at the aesthetic level. We identify ourselves with a tradition of images that heighten the personal as well as the communal in the context of this festival time and space, and we find ourselves brought together with the others who share in this same event.18 If we enter the aesthetics of the icon together in liturgy, we all return to the world and to each other with a renewal of a shared vision. All of this can be expressed in terms of Gadamer’s aesthetics. Yet, in another sense, the icons’ use in liturgy begins to indicate that all of these categories must be surpassed and exceeded.

7.2  Liturgy and Eschatology This is most evident through the dimensions of community (3). The community of the liturgy is not just with those who also gather in a church for these events. For those who pray, it is a communion with God and a communion with angels and saints, for the Divine liturgy is a share in Divine life, joining us to the Body of Christ.19 If we want to take icons seriously, we must attempt to understand what this means. That the fate of paintings and saints are linked has been clear from the beginning, where the early, less subtle iconoclasts wanted to eliminate prayer before painted images as well as devotion to the saints, feeling that such finite things were obstacles to true worship of God. Those who defended the painted images defended saints as well, multiplying the forms of finite mediation as much as possible. Unlike the case of an icon of Christ, here we have a more complicated set of relations, for another person is introduced into the structure of prayer. Prayer to an icon of a saint creates a communion between me, God, and the saint, and whatever relation can be triangulated around these three elements. (a) As we have discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, saints are public images of Christ, and so the icons painted of them, their imageb, brings Christ to us in their visibility. (b) The saint also brings us to Christ, in a sense, by interceding with God 17 18 19

Demus, Byzantine Mosaic Decoration, 9–10. Sendler, Mysteries, 281, 284. Kordis, Icon as Communion, 49

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Figure 7.2  Intercession. Prince Vladislav introduced to Christ by the Virgin, Fresco on the south wall of the Church of the Ascension. c. 1225, Mileševa, Serbia. Photo: Miodrag Markovic.

for us. Some icons show this intercession explicitly. In the fresco shown in Figure 7.2, for example, the Virgin Mary leads a suppliant by the hand to introduce him to Christ, who responds with his blessing.20 This perfectly illustrates the saint’s “παρρησία” or her uninhibited familiarity of speech in addressing God, which is a key character of sainthood, and the key motivation for our prayer to saints. To be a saint is to be a patron saint, as Drpić suggests.21 They mediate our prayers by their close relation to God. These first two dimensions are the most commonly recognized, but we need to go still further, for there remains a third and fourth dimension: our love for the saint as such strengthens our relation to God. While the saint’s familiarity with God is the most frequent way of explaining intercession, John Damascene also offers a new way of understanding it: 20

21

Nancy Ševčenko, “Close Encounters: contact between holy figures and the faithful as represented in Byzantine works of art,” Byzance et les images, eds. A. Guillou and J. Durand, 257–285 (Cycle de conférence organisé au musée du Louvre, 1992; Paris: Musée du Louvre, 1994), reprinted in The Celebration of the Saints in Byzantine Art and Liturgy (Farnham; Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Variorum, 2013). Drpić, Epigram, 328, is speaking specifically of Byzantium, but his words equally apply to those who pray before icons today.

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“When someone prays with faith, offering his petition in the name of such a favored friend, the King receives it, through the intercession of the faithful servant, because He accepts the honor and faith which the petitioner has shown to his servant.”22 In other words, we are brought closer to God by sharing his love for this saint, as two strangers suddenly find themselves on intimate ground upon discovering a deep shared love of a mutual friend. By this same logic, (d) a relation is created to other believers who pray to this same saint, to this same God. Our shared love for these holy men and women depicted in icons once again leads us deeper into the liturgical community. Theologically speaking, this community formed by sharing in acts of love and objects of love would lead us to the heart of Trinitarian theology, for God who is a community of love embraces all loves. Leaving this lofty investigation to the care of theologians, we may nevertheless conclude that the saint’s complication of our relation to God echoes my original question: is this not one more finite thing in between me and God? This human person in the icon, however saintly, is also finite, so does she not dissimulate and water down the original truth embodied in Christ? The logic of icons thus far insists on the opposite, that the relation to Christ is aided and enriched by its mediation in these finite forms. Indeed, as we take into account the role of the icons of saints in the liturgical community, we can observe that the icon shows itself to be a form of mediation that insists on multiplying mediation as much as possible. Not only do we have different levels of mediation within one icon (painted icons of saints, who are the living icons of Christ, who is the True Icon of the Invisible Father), but icons are also numerically multiplied across these mediations (in that we do not have one icon, but many, in churches as well as homes and private spaces). Human beings and angels, like their images, multiply the layers of mediation between us and God, and this is not seen as something to be feared but something to be embraced. As George Florovsky writes, “Christ is never alone. He is always the head of his Body. In Orthodox theology and devotion alike, Christ is never separated from His Mother, the Theotokos, and His ‘friends,’ the saints. The Redeemer and the redeemed belong together inseparably.”23 The nature of this heavenly community is affirmed in (1) the aesthetic use of space. We see this in the classic architectural symbolism used by Eastern Christian churches since the ninth century: a square base (sometimes a square cross) topped by a circular dome (sometimes 22 23

JD III.33, PG 94, 1352b. Georges Florovsky, “The Ethos of the Orthodox Church,” The Ecumenical Review 12.1 (1960), 195, cited by Ouspensky in Theology of the Icon, 279.

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Figure 7.3  Inner Narthex Dome. Early fourteenth century, Monastery of Christ at Chora, Istanbul. Photo: Tudor Rebengiuc.

several domes), indicating, as in the mandorla, the unity of earth and heaven.24 We have already seen the iconic perspective and strategies of line and color suggest a space no longer organized by any earthly viewpoint, a relational space which reaches out to meet us, and the prayer of believers who hold that this presence is a living, listening one. This relational space is enhanced in the church by the entire throng of saints and angels who populate the church walls alongside the events of Christ’s life, reaching out to embrace the people who gather there 24

Demus discusses in great depth this organization of icons in churches and how it is dependent on the architecture of Byzantine churches in Byzantine Mosaic Decoration. See also Thomas E. Mathews “The Sequel to Nicaea II in Byzantine Church Decoration,” 14, Kordis, Icon as Communion, 49; Evdokimov gives a more thorough account of the significance of the church space and the role of icons in it, The Art of the Icon, 143–160; see also Gschwandtner, Welcoming Finitude, 62–64. Contemporary churches may of course deviate from this traditional ideal, especially if due to restrictions of size, space, or resources. The oldest existing Byzantine churches, on the other hand, used fewer images, focusing instead on a sophisticated manipulation of light through the differently angled of tiles in the golden mosaics to communicate the shared holy space. Lidov explains how this functioned in the Monastery of Chora as well as Hagia Sophia: “Iconicity as a Spatial Notion: A New Vision of Icons in Contemporary Art Theory,” IKON 9 (2016), 1–12.

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Figure 7.4  Dome Mosaic of Christ Pantocrator, Inner Narthex Dome. Early fourteenth century, Monastery of Christ at Chora, Istanbul. Photo: David Hendrix.

for liturgy and who hold in prayer that Christ and his saints are living and present there.25 And although the icons covering the walls are too far away to venerate physically, their large size enhances their spatial, corporeal relationality, which is given in a meaningful order. On the central dome of the Church appears an icon of the Pantocrator, Christ the creator of all (Figures 7.3–7.6). His location and enormous size has a “staggering” effect, enhancing the majesty and importance of the image’s appearing, as do the angels that surround him. In the great churches, we crane our necks upwards and barely take it in. Nichephorus Gregorian (c. 1290–1360) describes this experience in terms that indicate another experience of saturation which pushes our understanding to its limits: “when one looks up [at the Pantocrator mosaic] from below, one is unable [to apprehend] by sight its true proportions and transmit them to the mind.”26 This is further magnified by the sunlight which is channeled by the architecture and the stones of the mosaic in such a way that it dazzles off the dome and seems to make Christ the origin and center of light. At 25 26

Demus, Byzantine Mosaic Decoration, 13–14. Kordis, Icon as Communion, 48; Constas, 206ff, discussing the liturgical interpretations of Symeon of Thessaloniki; Gschwandtner, Welcoming Finitude, 71. Demus, 30–32; Kordis, Icon as Communion, 49–50; Robert S. Nelson, “To Say and to See.”

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Figure 7.5  Cathedral of the Annunciation in the Moscow Kremlin. Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Photo: Andrew Gould.

the same time, despite his majesty, Christ is not thereby removed from the events taking place there; recall Nicholas Mesarites’ description of the icon of the Pantocrator as “leaning and gazing out as though from the rim of heaven … like an earnest and vehement lover.”27 Once again the glory and magnificence of the image does not preclude the intimacy of a personal relation among believers, as Christ leans down to make himself present to those gathered there. The four evangelists appear on the pillars supporting this heavenly dome, indicating the importance of their proclamation of the Word of God. The Great Feasts of the year often appear at the top of the walls, and below them the saints. The Platyêra icon, known as the “Virgin of the Sign,” an image of the Theotokos at the Annunciation, appears on the small dome above the altar, linking the Incarnation to the Eucharist. In some cases, the bottom level of the wall painting is not filled by icons, but left open, decorated only with organic motifs representing the earth. This open space can be an invitation for the faithful believers to corporeally enter relation with the symbolism of church design, serving as a bottom level of icons. In other words, the community of believers at prayer are welcomed as themselves living icons, invited into this cosmic unity and 27

Nikolaos Mesarites, “Description of the Church of the Holy Apostles at Constantinople,” 869.

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Figure 7.6  Church of Saint George. 1688, Mogosoaia, Romania. Photo: Tudor Rebengiuc.

the story of God’s revelation that has taken place in human history and is made present here in the liturgy, further confirmed by actions that take place within the liturgy.28 Glenn Peers in a historical account of icons in the liturgy could very well be describing liturgy today: The painted figures determined, inflected, patrolled, the human participants before it around them. They showed how to pray, to stand, to process; they taught them what to say, in their painted words – like the worshiping hierarchs in many Byzantine apses where the dress, attitude, and word to the painted hierarchs matched, always proceeded and explained the human priest celebrating in that space …29

Those who come to pray together before the icons are taught theology, formed aesthetically, and invited by the icons into a liturgy shared by both heaven and earth. The community who prays before the icon is thus revealed 28 29

Mathews, “Byzantine Church Decoration,” esp. 14. Peers, “Real Living Painting,” 452. While discussing the ancient Byzantine world, his words could just as much be applied to liturgy today.

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as not only the human beings who belong to this aesthetic world, who gather in this space and other spaces, this time and other times. But that we here and now are met by the very community of heaven, a ­community shared ultimately with God himself who reaches out to us. As the classic Byzantine church design immerses the congregation in a community of icons, so we can say that all of us are invited into this community of saints, those who radically surpass our human limits, in the eschatological hope that we, too, will one day be fully transfigured into living images of Christ.30 The nature of this liturgical community is thus also transformed by (2) the nature of liturgical time, which will bring us far beyond an aesthetic event. While the liturgy is a festival time, it is an eschatological one, anticipating the heavenly liturgy, which is both “already” begun and “not yet” realized in its fullness. The Divine Liturgy of the Eucharist is theologically held to be the most intimate meeting place of heaven and earth.31 But at the same time, it is not the fullness of parousia. As Lacoste reminds us, even if the church is more than a museum, it is not a pagan temple: it does not host the sacred as a definitive presence we can joyfully recognize and belong to, but aims at an eschatological unity which though already begun is not yet fully realized.32 The icon taken up in its liturgical context embraces us within this eschatological time explicitly. It shows us, as art does, “This is you!” But while in aesthetics, this “you” is a member of an earthly community, in the icon it is member of a heavenly one (3). That is, a “saint.” English speakers usually assume the word to mean “canonized saint,” but the Greek ἅγιος means more generally, “holy.” In the Byzantine liturgy it is used of both the consecrated bread and wine, which the priest elevates, and the congregation who are about to consume it: “Τὰ Ἅγια τοῖς ἁγίοις!” “Holy things for the holy!” The liturgical community is the saintly community. But the full meaning of this community is not centered around its earthly here and now, as the icons of saints remind us. This imperative of “You must change your life!” that we see by the example of saints’ lives is intensified beyond what a painting shows, for the saint displays for us the fullness of the eschatological identity that is the ultimate goal of prayer for all believers. Simply put, the saint shows us not just who Christ is, but who we should be, who we will become if we accept to give up belonging to ourselves and to join this eschatological identity of the liturgical community. Similarly, while art tells us “You must change your life!” the icon’s exhortation is 30 31 32

Gschwandtner, Welcoming Finitude, 53. Archimandrite Vasileios of Stavronikita, “The Icon as Liturgical Analogy,” 82–83. Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, 37 [45].

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even stricter: “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect!” In being invited into a heavenly community we are reminded all the more keenly of the distance that separates us from what we desire. This is not only the limits of our finitude, but also our failure, the ways we are closed off from the relation offered to us, the ways we thus fail to be who we should be. This distance does not exempt us from praying. Recall Chrétien’s observation that prayer operates something like the hermeneutic circle: we must simply begin from where we are. Just as we cannot expect perfect understanding before reading the text, we cannot wait until we are perfect to pray, but must always stumble into prayer from our failure.33 As a result, when we place ourselves in liturgical community, in this eschatological place and time, we receive ourselves back in a certain way, if not as merely refreshed and more deeply rooted in our sense of the meaningfulness of the whole, as in art. Liturgy does return us to the world we have bracketed, but it denies us the comfort of dwelling fully in a transformed world where we belong. When we take up again our private projects, as we must, they are not fully restored to us. They remain bracketed, for prayer encourages us to “now lay aside all earthly cares, that we may receive the King of All,” to place everything as secondary to “the one thing needful.”34 We receive ourselves back as belonging not to this world, but a community “in exile,” belonging to the kingdom offered but yet fully come, possessing an identity we cannot understand, part of a history beyond the confines of worldly narrative, and a destiny beyond our imagining. We have already seen this movement of total exposure and self-dispossession in prayer in previous chapters, where we must refuse to grasp at our identity, but allow it to be given from elsewhere, from a center from beyond ourselves, as a gift from the Father. But now the icons of the church insist on the communal character of this dispossession in liturgy. We give up our self-belonging not in order to enter a purely isolated relationship with God, but always from the broader context of the present and eschatological community. To enter liturgy is to allow the rupturing of our self-control and self-belonging, but alongside others who accept to renounce control of themselves towards the same center. Our belonging to the world becomes nomadic and our belonging to each other remains mysterious, but in our dispossession we are united alongside the others who pray with us here, who hold out toward the same relation to God. 33 34

Chrétien, Ark of Speech, 24 [34]. The first citation comes from the Cherubic Hymn, which is sung before the Eucharistic prayer in Divine Liturgy. The second evokes Lacoste’s reference here to the parable of Mary and Martha. See Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, 51 [62].

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Admittedly, this rupture of identity which is claimed as an elevation beyond human capacity may at times be experienced as a violence, as we are reminded by both Lacoste and Marion, for it undermines the things we might take to be essential, our self-possession and our belonging to the world. In the liturgy, we can no longer deny that to live otherwise is possible, and this bright light accuses our darkness. For some, the pain of separation between who we are and who the liturgy demands that we should be is unbearable and provokes rejection. To accept this demand requires we abandon the illusion of autonomy, but this does not necessarily mean that who we really are is thereby lost or erased. For both Marion and Lacoste, this kenotic identity is in fact the truest expression of who we are, for by renouncing possession of ourselves we can accept a belonging that is given only by God.35 Icons can help direct us in this sense of identity, in their gestures of surrender, the loving-giving dispossession that is the heart of prayer. Their style of play attunes us to this same disposition that helps us better give ourselves over to a listening presence. Liturgy tells us that the world is not the ultimate horizon, and even if as in aesthetics we never truly leave the world of experience, icons invite us to always hold out for a relation that brings us to exceed it, if in intention and desire and not in fulfillment in the present.36 Gadamer, too, acknowledges that aesthetic traditions can be very difficult to enter at first, and perhaps only through the long, slow work of the hermeneutic circle. We can assume this hermeneutic work will be grounded in ethical work of courage, patience, humility, perseverance, and so on, in addition to intelligence, although this is not made explicit for Gadamer. Yet, however difficult it may be, Gadamer insists that a bridge to any aesthetic community is always possible to construct because of its location in the evidence of shared human experience which reaches through all of history. When it comes to liturgy, however, this approach alone will not be not sufficient. Any bridge to an eschatological community could not be of human making. If to pray means to accept that success does not follow from our own efforts, then prayer demands more than a mere hermeneutic adjustment, and even our best ethical action. While liturgy opens us to a more profound community than aesthetics can offer, it also in that very process opens a more profound rift, as it is one we cannot bridge. Yet no 35

36

See also Evdokimov, Art of the Icon, 15. In this way I find Gschwandtner’s articulation of self-​ dispossession insufficient, as it moves primarily towards a human community; I suggest a liturgical community must be first and foremost centered around God himself; Welcoming Finitude, 45–6, 164. Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, 51, 139 [62, 168].

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human effort or logic could prevent God from bridging the gap for us. The icon is never a guarantee to make this happen, but as we have seen it uses its full resources to try to indicate to us this divine initiative, in the images of the heavenly community pushing into our space, the gaze of Christ already resting on us, attentive to our response in prayer, presenting a body to be touched and kissed.

7.3  Iconostasis: Closed Door or Open Window? This brings us to a further point which illustrates well what is at stake. One of the most historically significant placements that developed for icons, and today the primary place where icons are designed to be displayed together, is the iconostasis (see Figures 7.7 and 7.8). This tradition originated in the fifth century in conjunction with the templon, a barrier around the altar of the Eucharistic liturgy, serving as a Christian variant of the Jewish veil before the holy of holies. Icons were first placed on the columns of the templon, and then merged with it to become a full screen of icons between the congregation and the sanctuary which is used today in traditional Eastern rite churches. While this wall is permeable, containing doors which priests and acolytes use during the liturgy, the iconostasis has developed in some traditions to fully obstruct the congregation’s view of the altar where the Anaphora, or Eucharistic Prayer, takes place.37 My ultimate question is whether the icon, as finite, is some kind of barrier between us and God. We have already discussed the difference between the monstrance, which directs us toward the host, and the icon, which focuses all our attention on and through it. But where in the Western liturgy, the priest raises the host after he utters the words of institution so that everyone can see it, in the Eastern rite icons visually block the congregation from seeing the most sacred mysteries of the faith. Has the icon here symbolically become an idol, a screen between the believers and God himself? If we understand what an image is, however, the iconostasis hides nothing. For the Eucharist by itself does not show us what this mystery 37

In addition to the Christian adaptation of Jewish symbolism, it is possible that the templon was inspired by architecture of the theater. The appropriate structure of the iconostasis is currently much debated: must it be a full wall of icons, or is it meant to be a minimal structure that does not block the altar? I will refrain entering this question here. For more background and history see Belting, Likeness and Presence, 225ff; Hugo Mendez, “‘Overcoming Divide’ as a Motif in Eastern Christian Liturgy” Studia Liturgica 43 (2013): 281–302; Mathews, The Dawn of Christian Art, 171ff, 201; and “Revelation as Concealment: Towards a Theology of the Icon Screen,” Chapter 4 of Constas, Art of Seeing, 201–237.

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Figure 7.7  Iconostasis at Stavropoleos Monastery. Early eighteenth century. Bucharest, Romania. Photo by Tudor Rebengiuc.

means, even if we see it openly on the altar in the Western rite. According to the logic of the icon, the images do not block the view of the altar, but paradoxically join us more closely to what is transpiring there, helping us to see it more clearly.38 We can see this first of all in what it shows, for the iconostasis itself is a Gebilde, a coherently structured whole made from other icons. It presents us with the events of God’s saving acts in human history, in feasts and the lives of the saintly men and women transformed by his love. This story is both ongoing and continuous, one becoming the background for the other, as the chain of prophets and patriarchs carry forward the message to the apostles and saints, who bring it to us. The cycle of feasts reinforces this message, becoming a kind of “temporal iconostasis,” revealing in so many particular times and places the same central mystery of Christ’s saving action in the lives of his people. Though celebrated on different days, they are not meant as discrete historical moments, but as so many facets of the saving event of God’s love in the world, presented to us anew in its fullest meaning in each Eucharistic liturgy.39 This unity of meaning is expressed 38 39

Sendler, Mystères, 33. Archimandrite Vasileios of Stavronikita, “The Icon as Liturgical Analogy,” 90.

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Figure 7.8  Iconostasis, Leonid Ouspensky, 1966–1970, Notre-Dame-Joie-des-Affligés et Sainte-Geneviève, Paris. Photo by author.

in the icons themselves, which visually refer to and anticipate each other: the dark cave of the Nativity foretells the darkness of the tomb, while the Transfiguration visually anticipates the glory of the Resurrection. As icons are not isolated paintings but displayed together, and as feasts are not single festivals but united to the same liturgy, so God’s salvation is not individualistic but given whole through a community in all of history. The community of saints is unambiguous, aesthetically, about the center of this history, as they bow towards Christ on all sides, with the praising, giving, receiving, pointing gesture of the orans position. This echoes the way that their images are structured in an order of cosmological significance around the massive Pantocrator image on the height of the dome, an illustration of what Dionysius the Areopagite meant when he first coined the term “hierarchy.”40 Far from the abuses of clericalism and institutional violence that have been historically all too common in religious 40

Cf. Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy III.1, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 153, PG 3 164d; Mathews, “The Sequel to Nicaea II in Byzantine Church Decoration,” 17–19.

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communities, this word did not originally mean a system of power. It meant simply a “holy order” of the cosmos that brings all creation into community before God in Christ, at the height of the created world and its point of unity with heaven.41 In the words of the scriptures, we might say that each unique person is joined as a member of a body under Christ the head (1 Cor 12: 12–31), a body we enter in baptism. This is what it means to be a Church. In fact, the Orthodox liturgy enacts this vividly in the rite of “churching” that follows baptism, where the priest carries the child through the church and up to or through the iconostasis. The iconostasis can be said to show precisely the aesthetically heightened truth of what these mysteries of the Eucharist mean through the faces of Christ and the saints: to partake of the Eucharist is to become sanctified, to become Christ as a member of his body, the Church, to become one with God.42 The icon is thus not a barrier but a bridge, witnessing and embodying the truth of what the Eucharist is by showing what it means to share in the divine life. As Constas writes, it “corresponds to the enigma of the virginal body depicted on its central port: a threshold both radically sealed and yet radically open to the informing presence of the divine.”43 To know who Christ is, we must understand those who he loves, those who are members of his body, those who have been transformed more fully into his image. Everything points to Christ, but this pointing is enriched, and not watered-down, by a multiplication of places where we can find this pointing. This story of God’s action in history becomes richer as it travels through time and through different communities. The icon as an image of Christ is inseparable from the understanding of the saint as an icon of Christ, and from the recognition that we too are icons, and have the capacity to become better ones. The icon thus becomes a visual mediation for the more central sacramental mediation which it serves. But even if there is an order of importance, neither mediation claims to be everything, or to rule out any other forms of mediating. In the words of Ouspensky: “The function of the iconostasis at the very edge of the sanctuary is priceless to show what is not an image, but is real and by its very nature different from an image. Christ does not show Himself in the holy gifts: He gives Himself. He shows Himself in the icon.”44 Once again, as we saw in Chapter 5, the icon 41 42 43 44

Trubetskoi, Icons: Theology in Color, 32; Constas, Art of Seeing, 212–213; Brague, “La médiation immédiate.” Florensky, Iconostasis, 63. Constas, Art of Seeing, 236. Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, 283.

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preserves a distance from what it shows, just as the Eucharist preserves a distance by not showing. No mediation can claim to present the final revelation of God on earth, to end all striving and searching. Nothing can mediate God perfectly but God himself; only Christ is the true icon.

7.4  Transfiguration of Vision But there is a second way that the iconostasis serves our vision rather than blocks it, as Florenksy explains with a vivid analogy comparing the faithful to students in medical school. As the latter rely on injections of colored dye to help identify the different organs they are dissecting, so the former need the iconostasis as a colorful and vivid training tool for entering a relation with God.45 It helps them, as above, to understand who Christ is and what is promised by relation to him. And yet, as experienced doctors no longer need colored dye to identify nerves and arteries, we can also say that experienced believers no longer strictly need icons to be able to recognize God’s presence, for they can see it everywhere they look. The iconostasis’ visibility can teach beginners to see, but it is not because it is an exception from the rest of visible reality. For, as Florensky continues: the spiritual world of the invisible is not some infinitely far off kingdom; instead, it everywhere surrounds us as an ocean; and we are like creatures lost on the bottom of the ocean floor while everywhere is streaming upward the fullness of a grace steadily growing brighter. But we, from the habit of immature spiritual sight, fail to see this lightbearing kingdom.46

Through the training we receive from the iconostasis, we can begin to see the visible world as permeated with God’s presence. Florensky’s comments can be extended to all icons, which through our prayer can train us to see God mediated everywhere. Despite taking a different philosophical path, we find ourselves rediscovering Patristic insights: that the icon is linked to the capacity of the cosmos to reveal God. Through our engagement with it, the world ceases to appear as a flattened, a “mere appearance” and becomes instead a place where God is manifest, if we know how to receive him. Ouspensky, too, wanted to defend the spiritual vision offered in the icon, yet, as we saw above, problems arose when he located it as a feature of the icon’s metaphysical character or special aesthetic language which 45 46

Florensky, Iconostasis, 63–64. Ibid., 64; see also Sendler, Mystères, 59.

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bypassed “carnal” reality.47 By this point, we can now offer a corrective to this explanation while honoring his central insight. What Ouspensky at times describes as an isolated feature of the icon itself can instead be understood as a “spiritual sight” which is ripened in the practice of prayer before the icon, where the “lines, colors, and shapes co-inhere with acts of fasting, lighting candles, or standing for hours in vigils and quietly breathing the Jesus prayer.” This backdrop of prayer to a personal God, described here by Tsakiridou, eventually results in an openness “that is absent from a world in which this conversation has never taken place.”48 Gadamer also speaks of a transformation of our vision enacted by aesthetics. The work of art causes the world to “shine” in a new way, which enhances our understanding of the world and how we belong to it (“This is you!”), which may involve personal challenge (“You must change your life!”).49 As a painting, the icon changes the way we see at the aesthetic level, as we have discussed above. However, those who pray before the icon are seeking something further still: not just to see the world and themselves anew, but to see all things in relation to God. More properly speaking, the change sought by the practice of prayer before the icon is not merely a transformation of vision in the aesthetic sense, but a transfiguration of vision. The parallel in language to the Gospel event of Christ’s Transfiguration is not accidental, and we can use this story as a starting point to understand what believers mean by this language. Many phenomenologists have taken an interest in this event, as there is no other place in the Bible where the paradoxical entry of the invisible into the visible is so clearly manifested.50 It is also central to Eastern theology and has developed in intimate connection with the Transfiguration icon (Figure 7.9). As the account in Matthew 17 tells it: After six days Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them; his face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light. And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, conversing with him. Then 47 48 49 50

See pp, 46–48 above. Tsakiridou, Icons in Time, 317. See also Gschwandtner, Welcoming Finitude, 51–52. PH 104/GW8 8. See for example Richard Kearney, “Transfiguring God,” The God Who May Be (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 39–52; Jean-Yves Lacoste, “The Phenomenality of Anticipation,” Phenomenology and Eschatology: Not Yet in the Now, ed. Neal DeRoo and John P. Manoussakis, trans. Ronald Mendoza-De Jesús and Neal DeRoo (New York: Ashgate, 2009), 15–34; Jean-Luc Marion, “‘They Recognized Him; and He became Invisible to Them,’” Believing in Order to See, 136–143 and AR 251–254, 302, 357–66; Merold Westphal, “Transfiguration as Saturated Phenomenon,” Journal of Philosophy and Scripture 1:1 (2003): 26–35. See also Andreoupolos, Metamorphosis, 41–42.

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Figure 7.9  Transfiguration, Federico José Xamist, 2013, Chile. Photo by Iconographer.

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Performance: The Icon and Liturgy Peter said to Jesus in reply, “Lord, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” While he was still speaking, behold, a bright cloud cast a shadow over them, then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” When the disciples heard this, they fell prostrate and were very much afraid. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Rise, and do not be afraid.” And when the disciples raised their eyes, they saw no one else but Jesus alone. (Matt 17:1–8)

The change in visibility here may first strike us as something that occurs to Christ. However, in Eastern theology, the change is interpreted rather as the transfiguration of the disciples. As John Damascus writes in his homily, “Christ remained exactly the same as he was,” but made “what he was visible to his own disciples, opening their eyes and enabling them, who had been blind, to see” – not to see something new, but to see what had always already been there.51 This transfiguration of vision is also recognized to be the result of deification, the sharing in God’s life, something which is said to begin here on earth for the faithful and which awaits eschatological completion. This is amplified in the dialogue of Nicholas Motovilov, who asks St. Seraphim of Sarov if we can ever know of the presence of God in the Christian life. Suddenly, the saint begins to shine with a blinding light, echoing the image of Moses whose face shone after meeting God (Ex. 39:24–35), but unlike the Israelites, Nicholas feels deep peace. St. Seraphim calls this vision a grace from God, but explains that Nicholas is able to see his transfiguration only because he himself is also transfigured. Like sees like; to see God we become like God, and only in our becoming like God can we recognize the likeness of God in the world.52 What is being described here is clearly different than aesthetic transformation. Florensky and Tsakiridou indicate that this transfiguration is a real and possible experience available to anyone. Yet it is not achievable by our own efforts alone. It demands we take a stance of belief, engaging in a relationship of prayer over time, and the gift of God beyond our human capacities. To close this chapter, let us follow these indications to sketch out what this transfigured gaze would look like, for it will tie up several important threads of our investigation. 51

52

John Damascene, “Homily for the Feast of the Transfiguration,” in Light on the Mountain: Greek Patristic and Byzantine Homilies on the Transfiguration of the Lord (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2013), 221, PG 96, 564b. See also Gregory Palamas, Homily 34 in the same volume, 364, PG 151, 433b. Nikolai Alexandrovich Motovilov and St. Seraphim of Sarov, The Aim of Christian Life: St. Seraphim of Sarov’s Conversation with Nicholas Motovilov, trans. John Phillips (Cambridge: Saints Alive Press, 2010). For the relation of transfiguration to hesychasm, see Andreopoulos, Metamorphosis, 214–225; Florensky, Iconostasis, 145–46; Evdokomov, Art of the Icon, 237.

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First, the suggestion that transfiguration is something that happens to the disciples, and not to Christ, echoes a paradoxical structure we have encountered repeatedly throughout this investigation: the reversal. From the beginning, Marion has emphasized that what is most significant about the icon is not what we see, but that we are seen. The Byzantine icon reinforces this counter-gaze through the aesthetic language of the image, for ­example, in the faces always attentively gazing on us, the geometrical reversal of ­perspective, the flat plane which pushes the image forward into relation with our worldly space. We saw it as well in the legend of the a­ cheiropoieton, where the ­life-painting (ζωγράφος) artist is powerless to paint Christ, but instead is given an image from the life-giving (ζωοποιός) face. Echoing this same language in a cosmic fashion, Bulgakov describes prayer before the icon as the moment when Christ “sketches in the world and in man his own image.”53 In all of these cases, the one who would act becomes the one who is acted upon by God. We have also seen a second paradoxical move similar to reversal, that of an isomorphic collapse, whereby apparent differences become one thanks to their shared structure, which in turn ripples outwards in a chain reaction. In the open-palmed gesture of prayer, the initial ­opposites of giving and receiving become exchanged and finally identified, just as the kenotic abandonment of oneself to God is simultaneously the ­reception of the ­abundant outpouring of his love, and the transparent window in ­communion with the light is simultaneously a communication of it. Both of these paradoxical structures are at play in the transfiguration of vision which results from the practice of prayer before the icon. To begin with the reversal, recall Marion’s discussion of the gaze as a mirror.54 The idol, anchored from my point of view, serves as a mirror of my own desire. Even if amplified and expanded through Gadamer’s aesthetics, a work of art as such remains on this plane, for it remains a matter of a human starting point. In the icon, however, it is no longer my gaze which serves as the central pivot, for the reversal places the pivot around the one who gazes upon me. In this case I become a mirror who increasingly reflects this divine counter-gaze, transfigured from glory to glory (evoking 2 Cor 3:18).55 If we extend these results of this reversal to their logical conclusion, we find the isomorphic collapse: by opening myself to the iconic gaze, I become a mirror, and thereby become an icon for others who are now able to see this gaze in me. Transfiguration of vision thus enacts the reversal-collapse 53 54 55

See above, Section 6.3, and Bulgakov, Icons and the Name of God, 92. GWB 21–22/DSE 34–35. AR 401.

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whereby the one who is seen becomes the one who shows, and the one who shows is by that very logic the one who sees. Let us break down this dizzying convergence more slowly, following each of its elements. Following Gadamer’s aesthetics and in line with Florenksy’s initial comments on the iconostasis above, we have spoken of the saints as those who publicly image Christ for us, whose lives pattern for us the image of Christ more clearly, made all the richer by the variety of their personalities, cultures, and contexts. But now we add another dimension to this: if the saints are to be icons, they must also perform the counter-gaze on us, or enact the gaze of God through their human eyes. What the saints show is thus linked with what they see. As discussed above, this idea is deeply rooted within the iconographic tradition, which affirms that the saint, not the artist, is the true iconographer.56 “Only those who know from personal experience the state it portrays can create images corresponding to it” – only the saint fully sees and recognizes the holy in the visible, and then communicates this vision to the artists.57 Commenting on John Damascene, Andrew Louth explains, “Images, icons, disclose the world of God’s creating, the deified realm of the saints, only to those who look with pure eyes and pure hearts.”58 How exactly does one develop this “pure look,” this transfigured vision? According to Louth, it is “the fruit of a simple openness to God’s gift and grace that demands a life of sacrificial striving to love.”59 Using terms developed above, we could call it what results from a heart open in kenotic dispossession, which is the central shape of prayer. As is indicated by the continual reappearance of the reversal, to see in this way is not a simple hermeneutic choice. Although it may be developed over time and in patient practice, although we must desire it and accept it, and although choices are necessary along the way, it is a capacity that is sketched out within us, more than something that we sketch out for ourselves. With this “look,” the saint does not see a different world than the one we see, just as everyone sees the same image of Jesus Christ in the icon, just as in Judaea everyone saw the face of the same man. But for the saint, for the one whose heart is open to this love of God, we might say that the 56 57

58 59

Florensky, Iconostasis, 88–89. Ouspensky and Lossky, Meaning of Icons, 42. Or, as Lacoste says, the saint is the one who is able to consistently live in the openness to God, for whom “being-before-God constantly subverts his participation in the play of world and earth and the ambivalence that this play imposes on whoever participates in it.” Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, 98 [119]. Louth, St. John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 219, emphasis mine. Ibid.

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world “shines” in a new way, not first of all with beauty of aesthetic recognition, but with the recognition of the world in relation to God, the world as created.60 Louth concludes, “The defence of the icon, of the image, is not a matter of mere aesthetics; it is concerned with preserving and making possible a world in which meaning is mediated by reconciling love.”61 In this transfigured vision, which results from prayer before the icon (and certainly by other means as well), the world is seen as a gift of love and for love. To see the world as a Divine gift is more than an authentic encounter of the world as being, and even more than to recognize in gratitude the contingency of the phenomenological given. This transfigured vision, followed to its conclusion, speaks to the very meaning of the world as created, allows us to recognize the mystery of each being sustained at every moment by a loving giver, embracing their full glory and their full poverty. This does not mean that those who love God should expect to always experience a world bathed in light. As Tsakiridou warns, “theophany does not bring rupture and ecstasy” except to the novice.62 The biblical account of the Transfiguration does not allow the disciples to dwell in the vision of glory; Peter’s very suggestion of building the three booths is ignored and interrupted. Instead, the story ends when the disciples, still flat on their faces, feel the touch of Jesus, and they look up to see the man of Nazareth they chose to follow. This indicates that this kind of ordinary everyday intimacy, too, is part of the transfigured vision, along with the ambiguity that results from it, just as the icon embraces the paradoxical continuity of glory and poverty. Further, the episode of the Transfiguration is framed on both sides with Jesus’ foretelling of his crucifixion, a fact central enough to the event that it is frequently shown within the icon itself, on the left and right of Mount Tabor. Constas explains the deep theological significance of this fact: “to see the light of Christ in all creation also means to see the suffering of all creation embodied in the crucifixion, to perceive the paradox that Tabor and Golgotha are the same mountain.”63 This vision that cuts through glory and ambiguity and suffering is especially important for the poor and for the non-obvious cases, the dying on the streets of Calcutta, the faces of humanity in unrecognizable forms, the ugly or outcast or unwanted. It even extends to the greatest sinners. Evdokimov identifies this vision with the “merciful heart” described by St. Isaac the Syrian in his Ascetic Homilies as one of the most central features of the true Christian life: 60 61 62 63

Constas, Art of Seeing, 32–33. Louth, St. John Damascene, 219. Tsakiridou, 317. Constas, Art of Seeing, 33.

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Performance: The Icon and Liturgy It is the heart’s burning for the sake of the entire creation, for men, for birds, for animals, for demons, and for every created thing; and at the recollection and sight of them, the eyes of a merciful man pour forth abundant tears. From the strong and vehement mercy that grips his heart and from his great compassion, his heart is humbled and he cannot bear to hear or to see any injury or slight sorrow in creation. For this reason he offers up prayers with tears continually even for irrational beasts, for the enemies of truth, and for those who harm him, that they be protected and receive mercy. And in like manner he even prays for the family of reptiles, because of the great compassion that burns without measure in his heart in the likeness of God.64

Evdokimov characterizes the vision which Isaac discusses here with a beautifully precise phrase: it is a vision of “tenderness for being.” 65 In this “superabundant outpouring of love and compassion,” Isaac tells us, the saints “resemble God.”66 This merciful heart is thus a sign of being made in the image of God, whose own mercy “embraces the whole of creation,” and even to the extreme cases that seem least worthy of it.67 This is what it means to speak of a transfiguration of vision, which is held to be one of the ultimate results of the practice of prayer before the icon and the flowering of the Christian life: it is a love for all beings, for what they are, as created by God. This transfiguration of the gaze is held to be one of the key aims of prayer before the icon, if not exclusive to it. This new way of seeing the world as a “lightbearing kingdom” may begin with the transformation wrought by aesthetics, but it is clear by now that the “spiritual sight” Florensky and others speak of means much more than this. Although only a fully theological approach could trace out all its dimensions, I have given an initial sketch of the structure of this transfigured vision as a reversal-collapse. The saint we see painted on the icon is the one who shows us God, because it is the saint who looks out with God’s gaze. Similarly, the more we expose ourselves to the counter-gaze of God in prayer, believers say, the more it will be etched into our hearts, the more we mirror this glory, the more we see as God sees, the more we embody God’s gaze for others. *** In these chapters we have explored four primary modes of the icon’s ­givenness. First, the icon brings to bear its capacities as a representational 64

65 66 67

Isaac the Syrian, The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian (Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 2011), Homily 71, 491; Evdokimov cites it as Homily 74 (the Eastern Syriac notation) in Art of the Icon, 115. Evdokimov, Art of the Icon, 58, trans. modified. Isaac the Syrian, The Ascetical Homilies, Homily 71, 493. Hilarion Alfeyev, L’universe spirituel d’Isaac le Syrien (Paris: Cerf, 2019), 51.

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visual image in order to indicate the boundaries of our aesthetic finitude, and to open us to the possibility of something more. It invites us towards a personal relation of prayer with the holy one depicted, and when we choose to enter in prayer before the image, the visual presence is i­ ntensified into a communal relation by which we expose ourselves to the countergaze of God. This logic is intensified still further by the icon’s corporeal dimensions. Beginning from the natural activity of substitution we perform in the absence of a desired original, the icon in prayer becomes a symbolic extension of the trace of Christ’s corporeality as well as a site for our corporeal expression of this truth. Extending this prayer into a ­practice further changes the icon’s shaping power over our world, as we notice particularly in the spatiotemporal event of liturgy, which transforms our vision together and strengthens our belonging to the community who gathers there. The more we pray, the more our eyes begin to be opened to an encounter with God everywhere in the visible world. At all points, the icon refuses to claim total presence. It rejects adequate representation of God, forbids fully literal activities of transposition, refuses the full corporeal presence of a statue, and denies us a return to full belonging to the world. And while believers hope for a full transformation of vision, it is not something within our reach, as it must be given, and sometimes is given ambiguously. Yet the icon’s refusal is not a negation. Because it does not hide its limitations, there is no need for the icon to claim for itself the only or even the highest role of mediation. Thus, we are free to welcome other forms of mediating prayer. To embrace the icon naturally encourages embracing a multiplicity of other forms of God’s self-communication alongside it, whether the other aesthetic forms present at the liturgy, or those higher than it, like the central mystery of the Eucharist they all serve. Finally, it has a special place of honor for the lives of the many holy men and women that make up the eschatological body of Christ. Because those who pray before the icon renounce their full self-possession, they, too, are free to accept a kenotic identity. This brings them together with all those who come to liturgy, inviting them into an eschatological community, and not a worldly one. The saints depicted which publicly image Christ show the eschatological destiny hoped for by all believers. Nothing clearly and definitively secures Divine revelation for those who come before the icon, even those who come together at liturgy. There always remains a distance or space of ambiguity that refuses to give the whole, and the viewer is always invited rather than coerced into the space it offers. But the icon nevertheless directs the community that prays before it to hold out for more than the world offers, to hope for the gift of the God whose gaze is painted there.

chapter 8

The Love Letter Iconic Mediation

8.1  Defining Iconic Mediation Can a finite thing mediate God? If a mere creature cannot gaze upon God and live, could a finite image transmit the gaze of the living God without being crushed or blotted out by the weight of infinite glory? The icon, it was suggested at the beginning, claims to be able to do precisely that, and all the more audaciously in line and color, in touches and kisses, in the most corporeal dimensions of our humanity that we often fear are most inadequate to the task. Yet reconfiguring the primary question of mediation around the particular case of the icon was not a straightforward task to accomplish. Before discussing how an icon could mediate, it was necessary to clear up a number of difficulties. The possibility of a painted image of God has often been wrapped up first of all in a confusion about the nature of aesthetics, and second in a confusion about the nature of the world’s visibility and the kind of visibility of God. Rather than art history or patristic theology, I thus turned first to phenomenology, a tool well suited to clarify such questions of visibility and invisibility that necessarily underlie any account of the icon. Building from the abundant but worldly mediation of Gadamer’s aesthetics and the divine but thin mediation of Marion’s phenomenological “icon,” I then turned to the icon in the concrete. Through the last four chapters, I have developed key aspects of the icon’s mediation in order to ask how, precisely, this particular finite thing is able to direct us to God precisely through its unique capacities as a painted image. Through this examination of the Byzantine icon, we have seen that finite mediation of the Divine is indeed possible. Now it is time to bring this case study to bear on our primary question, gathering the essential structures from this particular example so that it can illuminate a general possibility. I do not deny that there may indeed be other ways of encountering God, like mystical union or direct illumination, but the kind at issue here is one that fully embraces, rather than bypasses, mediating ­layers of finite particularity. In honor of our primary example, I will call this 246

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iconic mediation. How does the case of the Byzantine icon allow us to understand “iconic mediation,” the possibility for a finite thing to facilitate an encounter with God through its unique capacities and limitations? Rich Referential Meaning If we want to understand how an iconic mediation can open to the Divine, the first step is to understand its ordinary modes of givenness. Whatever could serve as an iconic mediation must be capable of presenting the meaning of something in its absence, but only through our dwelling on what it is. A sign, which directs us immediately past itself, cannot be an iconic mediation. There may be other structures of mediation of the Divine that signs can enact, simple prompts that direct my attention to God like a bell ringing at the hour of prayer or a red candle near the tabernacle. Neither is an example of iconic mediation, which functions instead like a picture or a symbol, where we can only receive its meaning by attending closely to what it is. An artwork is an obvious case of rich mediation, but as I have suggested in my study of substitution, anything at all can have a rich referential meaning, under the right circumstances and relations: a cup, a table, a stone. Thus, anything at all can perform an iconic mediation. The fact that anything can in principle serve as iconic mediation does not mean that all iconic mediations are equal. The tradition of Byzantine icon is particularly fecund in its referential meaning, which includes first of all the aesthetic dimensions of a nuanced visual language with a peaceful and harmonious style of play. It also mediates through a didactic function, a highly developed symbolic theological content that teaches and interprets the Scriptures through what is represented. And this didactic function is not simply a matter of doctrines, but the teaching of an attitude, a way of life, a way of communicating and entering community. It offers the prayerful presence of Christ or a holy person that could be engaged not only through sight but also through touch in order to express and anchor devotion. This does not grant the Byzantine icon an exclusive claim to being an “iconic mediation” in my broader sense, but we can see why the the icon serves as a particularly strong example of it. Finally, unlike the sign, our engagement with a rich mediation will change us. Simply from the mediating function alone, an icon forms our attention, our intellect, our tastes and emotions, our desires and expectations, and begins to enter into our space in a certain way. It forms all others who come before it, too, drawing those who engage with it together in community from this shared theological and aesthetic language, and holds

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out in hope for an eschatological identity. All of these things begin at the level of rich referential meaning as such, although they require for their full development more than this alone. Prayer and Limitation For the icon is more than rich mediation; it is a rich mediation taken up in the relation of prayer. An image, even one with religious content, may not be an iconic mediation. If an image depicting Christ healing the sick moves me to reflection on who Christ was or a creative imagination of who he could be for me, it is representational art with religious content. It is not an iconic mediation and will not open up all its referential capacities until I decide to encounter it as a relation to a living person. Similarly, a souvenir may remind me of a pilgrimage, or I may develop a habit of kissing a cross or lighting a candle before a relic each time I pass, but as long as these actions are performed out of routine, superstition, or tribal identity, and are not taken into a context of prayer to a person, this is not iconic mediation. And if a mediation changes me by immersing me in a certain style of play, if I am brought together with the community of those who likewise enter its play, this is still only aesthetic appreciation. It is not iconic mediation until I expose myself to the counter-gaze, accept the exchange of my self-possession and sense of communal identity for a kenotic belonging to an eschatological center beyond my ability to grasp. An iconic mediation never becomes permanently grafted onto the original through its referential character, like a painting can for the Alps, for it depends much more radically on whether we will accept the call within it. The mediation of God is only possible if God has already taken the initiative to reveal himself. And I will encounter him only if I open myself to this relation, which has been present all along, freely offered for my acceptance or refusal. Prayer is precisely this openness. The most important step for the icon is that it becomes specifically an iconic mediation when I turn my attention directly to this encounter with God in prayer. This in turn is motivated by my desire for God’s presence, not academic curiosity, dutifulness, or selfsearching. That is, in coming before an iconic mediation, I am not primarily aiming to find knowledge, to confirm or improve my ethical standing, to be dazzled by an extraordinary experience, or to feel comfort and peace. These things may or may not take place, but my interest is in God and nothing less. This desire for God is why this mediation opens for me up as it does. In prayer, I believe God can hear me, even when I have no confirmation of this. Because of this, the iconic mediation becomes a site of encounter.

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If it must be taken up in a relation of prayer to God who has already taken the initiative to offer himself for me to encounter, the particular communicative qualities of an iconic mediation are not sufficient to determine it as such. Yet it is significant that the iconic mediation employs its rich symbolic referential capacities precisely to open and reinforce this path of prayer. It may do this in different ways. As we have seen, the tradition of Byzantine painting presents a visibility that reminds me of who it is that I seek, an image that pushes forward into my space, and a style of play that helps attune my attention. As a substitution it offers a body to be touched, kissed, cherished. At the same time, like in the Byzantine icon, it is critical that the iconic mediation does not try to cover over the distance that remains, but makes clear in its rich mediating language (visual, tactile, or otherwise) that God is beyond my possession of him, that I do not grasp him so much as he grasps me. An iconic mediation must therefore always include a space of silence and absence. This is not as a negation of what it is, a gap, or a self-effacing so that God has “room” to break through its obstacle of finitude, but a powerful way of mediating the reality of the Divine attention. To do this, it does not need to claim to be anything other than it is, or anything less than what it is – it only needs to make this initiating relation present to us. For prayer to be possible, we must be receptive to a voice besides our own, and an iconic mediation must be structurally open to that possibility. Because of this, the worth of an iconic mediation cannot turn on whether it can reliably push us into a certain feeling, or dazzle us in awe, or remain permanently foreign to us. Such moments may indeed help us enter the relation of prayer. Yet shock, bedazzlement, and emotional highs are usually short-lived, as human beings always learn, adapt, become habituated. If an iconic mediation is to endure as such, it must prepare to embrace the dazzling as well as the dull. Fragility and Failure Why does an iconic mediation break down? Let us assume the initiative of God is unfailingly constant. Failure may come first through the mediating element. It may present a false or misleading cognitive content, as in the late medieval trend of images of the Holy Spirit as a young man.1 Or, it may shut out any room for personal encounter, as in the case of images that manipulate and dominate our attention. There is no rule in advance 1

See Boespflug, Dieu dans l’art. 139–152.

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to decide which mediating elements will fail and which will not; each must be discerned in conversation and context.2 This is as it must be. If God is God, then nothing can definitively make a claim on his coming. We must accept the ambiguity of iconic mediation as absolutely essential, for it alone will preserve Divine freedom, as well as our own freedom to accept or refuse this invitation. By far the most common case is that an iconic mediation fails because we have taken it up wrongly. That is, the breakdown of an iconic mediation is primarily one of idolatry. This word indicates a failure not in our finitude, but in our fidelity, pursuing a devotion to something else in the place of God.3 The Scriptures affirm this constantly. The iconophiles knew it as well; John Damascene understood that the Old Testament prohibition against graven images was not a question of inaccurate pictures, but a remedy against Israel’s temptation to observe the practices of pagan statue worship, forgetting the uniqueness of God and breaking their covenant.4 The iconoclasts knew it too; their rejection of images came first and foremost from a fear of false worship. By extension, iconic mediation in the broader sense does not usually break down because of the failure of images, or words, or any other mediating element, but because of the failure to preserve a relation. Destruction and Resistance As a result of our frailty, any given iconic mediation is bound to fail. The critical question is how we respond to this eventuality. If the failure of iconic mediation mandates the destruction of the medium, its abandonment, and closure, this has an impact on all other forms of mediation. If a mediating element must efface part of what it is because aspects of its finitude makes it an obstacle to God, then all limits, including my own, must be considered obstacles to God. Iconoclasm in one case means iconoclasm in all cases, because once the logic of competition is opened, it spreads like a cancer to every corner of the finite world. This must be emphasized: to forbid iconic mediation is not a neutral position. It either despairs of 2

3

4

This is not unlike the Council of Trent deferring judgment on images to the discretion of the local bishop (above, 39–40). For John Damascene, only the idols specifically made for pagan worship could be banned in advance as anti-iconic by nature, JD I.25/PG 94, 1258d. Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry, trans. Naomi Goldblum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); see also Anthony Steinbock’s extended phenomenological analysis along these lines in his chapter “Idolatry” in Phenomenology and Mysticism, 211–240. JD I.8/PG 94, 1238d–1240b. See also Gabrielle Sed-Rajna, “L’argument de l’iconophobie juive,” Nicée II: 787–1987, 81–88.

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God’s revelation to us or his ability to reach us; it makes finitude a barrier that undermines relation to the infinite. It despairs in the intellect, the senses, and the community of the faithful. It cuts us off from cultivating an attentive relation to God by forbidding us from finding reminders in the world of everyday experience. It punishes us for trying to signal his presence in our lives, and trivializes the ordinary world that he made. And why? Essentially, because finite things couldn’t accomplish this relation by themselves, whether this be the authority of the image or my authority as the one looking for God in it. It’s true that not all iconoclasms come out of the same motivation, but when we push iconoclastic logic to its final conclusion, we must admit that the temptation of iconoclasm is much less pure, much more idolatrous than we might at first think; and much more dangerous. It is a logic that rests on what C. S. Lewis calls the “philosophy of hell,” which operates on atomic individuality and exclusion: “one thing is not another thing” and thus “[w]hat one gains another loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies … ‘To be’ means “to be in competition.”5 The pious rejection of mediation specifically in the case of material things often rests on the assumption that the brute sensible world is closed to the spiritual dimensions of Divinity. But really, the reason we hate a material mediation may be quite different: we hate it because it resists our will, because we do not have power to alter it as we desire, but that we must adapt to it. As Nathan Mitchell observes: We stumble against symbols the same way we kick against the body, ­history, culture, and world. We truly hate mediation (including s­ acramental ­mediation) because it resists, thwarts, sets barriers to our own prized project – that of dominating “the real,” of reaching “things as they are in themselves” without any interference from symbols.6

This is first because reality is not so clean and easily manipulated as a scientific, technological worldview would have us believe. Whatever unsettles the security of our current frame of understanding is always in danger of our fiercest rejection. If this is true in general for philosophical ideas (recalling the fate of Socrates), all the more is it true when it comes to God.7 Thus, we can establish a link between idolatry, ideology, and metaphysics which began to emerge earlier. Any way in which we try to 5 6 7

C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), XVIII. Nathan Mitchell, “Mystery and Manners: Eucharist in Post-Modern Theology,” Worship 79 (2005): 150. Augustine, Confessions X, 23, 34; cited by Marion in VR 141/VeR 177–78 and SP/LS §20; see also Constas, Art of Seeing, 25.

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control, secure, or permanently possess is a form of idolatry, of taking the place of God.8 Iconoclasm still clings to this ideal, but simply recognizes it is impossible. Both are aspects of this same way of thinking, which is to reject the fundamental poverty we share as human beings, to fail to acknowledge that we are not really masters of the world, that we do not truly possess ourselves, much less anything else. Repetition An iconic worldview recognizes this failure yet leads us to a different stance than iconoclasm does. That is, even knowing finite things cannot mediate God by their own capacities, we employ iconic mediations anyway to cultivate openness to him, responding and investing, transforming, transfiguring, while we wait for God to come. In other words, the failure of an icon demands not destruction but repetition, in two ways. First of all, fidelity. Despite our best intentions, we are bound to fall into idolatry. The proper response to this is not destruction which gives up once and for all. Rather, it is the repetition of fidelity, to learn from our errors and try again. This differs from aesthetic experience, where we return again and again to the painting because its beauty calls us and attracts us. The fidelity in iconic mediation is about continuing a relation, not about myself and what I experience. It may be beautiful and have an effect on me that makes me want to come back again. It may not. It may have results and implications in our lives, as our repeated actions may transform us, or it may not – at least not clearly and visibly. None of this is the ultimate end; the end is our relation to God. Fidelity’s goal is to preserve this openness, and to continue re-opening, even after every failure. Second, multiplication. Because the icon is a limited mediation, because it does not attempt to claim all the glory of adequation, because it devotes itself rather to a mission beyond itself alone, trying to open up to God, it has no place for exclusivity. It very naturally allows for other forms of mediation. Better, it welcomes and encourages them. We have seen that painted icons are rarely in isolation, but meant to be displayed together, in homes as well as in churches. We also see that icons in a church are naturally accompanied by other forms of mediation, such as music and bells, the play of light, the priest, and the Eucharist. Not all these iconic mediations are equal. None of them claim the whole, which would only be 8

This is a central theme of GWB. Andrew Prevot, following the spirit of this critique, links metaphysics and structural violence explicitly and extensively in Thinking Prayer.

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God himself. No particular icon is necessary, nor is it sufficient, yet we do need icons, and many of them. Without icons, we are led to despair and closure of relation. The response to finitude’s limitations is once again not destruction but repetition – try again, try more, try always. Not to mediate less but to mediate more, to open all the channels of God’s presence. This affirms the Patristic cosmological instinct, that once we have one icon, we open, in principle, the iconicity of the created world. Iconic mediation is not jealous or exclusive, but opens to see God mediated everywhere. And in principle, the more we dwell prayerfully with one iconic mediation, the more we should be able to recognize other iconic mediations outside it. Transfiguration of Vision For as repetition indicates, iconic mediation extends beyond a single event. As Florensky says, we in our “immature spiritual sight” need visible icons to train us how to recognize the visibility of the “lightbearing kingdom” streaming all around us.9 By our practice of praying before the icon, our vision is slowly transformed into a way of understanding that encourages us to see God in all things. The more we engage in forms of iconic mediation, the more we grow in this capacity for recognition. The more channels of iconic mediation we have, the more this mediation starts to train us to see differently the everyday world, creating even more channels still. This change is worked out over time, across all the textures and particularities of our lives. It is in part a matter of cultivating practices of openness or prayer. But those who pray also believe it is more than this; that God himself effects changes in us. By beginning with a strong iconic mediation such as Byzantine icons, more and more subtle iconic pathways are opened which may have been closed before when we were cruder and blinder. In other words, the more deeply we enter iconic mediation, the richer the world can become with iconic mediations of God’s love. *** Let us take a moment to gather up this sketch of iconic mediation. An “icon” of any sort does not need to violently undermine itself, to be less than it is, to open to God. Nor does it need to pretend to be infinite to be functional. Rather, through the creative uses of its limited resources, it helps remind us and orient us towards this personal presence, as for example in the Byzantine icon, which makes use of gold, naming, personal gaze, spatial perspective, and practices of substitution. But we cannot delimit 9

Florensky, Iconostasis, 64.

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such strategies in advance; there exists an endless range of other possible strategies through the multiplicity of other things that can serve as iconic mediations, most of them still waiting to be discovered. This means that an iconic mediation is not defined by aesthetics. Aesthetics alone is not an iconic question; the concern of the beauty or ugliness of an icon is secondary to the question of whether it opens us up in prayer. Similarly, an iconic mediation may give us rich theological, intellectual content, but it also may not give us much, if any. There are many possibilities here but this, too, is secondary. While we certainly would not want an iconic mediation to theologically misinform us, the key is that it helps us recognize who we are praying to, not prompt a relation of total otherness and alienation. This is even true of the role of imagination. Even though the icon in its strict sense helps form our imaginations within a certain shared vision, this, too, is secondary. The same is true of iconic mediations that introduce a radically new way of seeing God. It is not a matter of cultivating the same taste, or adding something new to what others have said. The point of the tradition of icons is not primarily a matter of seeing the same aesthetics, but praying to the same God. This is also true of corporeality. It may be worthwhile to embrace the embodied forms of religion in our extremely dualistic materialist culture, just as it may be important to emphasize intellectual forms at other times. But neither saves us from dualism or idolatry. The point is not how physical or abstract we are, or how paradoxically we balance the two. Rather, it is about how fully our heart is engaged. Body or mind, if not in relation to God, will lead to idols. Ultimately, any particular iconic mediation must remain by definition not necessary. There may be other forms better than it, there may be other forms different than it. Should a religious tradition focus on one form of iconic mediation as important, it is a meaningful choice that is not devoid of theological inspiration and historical grounding. Yet this is still a choice, and must not exclude the possibility of other or better iconic mediations. Similarly, an iconic mediation is never sufficient. The mediating element itself never determines the iconic relationship, and it does not try to hide this fact. It need not be self-destructive, but it must not be manipulative, trying to take up all our attention or give us an illusion of God’s total presence here and now. This general definition of “iconic mediation” thus serves as the first major result of this investigation, a positive one. To fully reap the benefits of what has been proposed, we must also attend to the negative result, which is the second dimension of my argument.

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8.2  The Seashell Problem Revisited We thus return a second time to our opening question: can a finite thing, in the poverty of its limitations, mediate an infinite God? Is this not as impossible as demanding a seashell carry the entire ocean? By now, it is possible to recognize that this is simply the wrong question. Framed through the model of the seashell, the question of mediation has already imported a series of assumptions which make error inevitable. If we stop even for a moment to question it, we will see that this metaphor is simply too crude, a mere straw man. Such obvious crudity was quite deliberate on my part, for even more sophisticated philosophies make use of poorly considered guiding images that pull us backwards into the same mental ruts. It is often philosophically salutary to bring out into the sunlight these weak and unquestioned assumptions that have been secretly shaping our philosophical instincts from the cover of shadows. Only then do they lose their force and power. This then is the driving force of the second aspect of my argument, the “image” of iconic mediation – seashell, resonance, window. Drawing out the explicit principles behind these metaphoric models will allow us to directly dismantle any remaining prejudices that block us from understanding a properly iconic mediation. The Seashell As I have suggested, the seashell model of mediation necessarily leads to the impasse of intrinsic competition which produces the idolatry/iconoclasm dichotomy. To be precise, it breaks down at each of the three primary nodes of relation: (a) the character of the mediating thing, (b) the character of the one who receives the mediation, and (c) the character of what is received. First, the nature of the mediating thing: a seashell does not have any effect on the water that it carries. It operates as a model of adequation, where the medium aims to present the original unaltered, without “noise” of its own. This technical term, “noise,” coined by media theorists, is exemplary seashell thinking, for it assumes that whatever is not the exact transmission of the original must be an unwanted interruption like radio static – the technological metaphor itself betraying the kind of mediation which is taken for a norm. Any difference introduced by the mediating element would be thus seen as a way of falling short. Where pure adequation is the goal of mediation, it is impossible to appreciate modes of mediation as unique. A medium offers nothing except a spatial “capacity,” the hollow of the shell. Because of this, a particular seashell is

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discardable, unimportant in itself. There is only one difference that matters, measurable by one axis only: how much can it perfectly transmit or contain? How little? Its value, in other words, is already implicitly mathematized along an axis of pure utility. One medium is easily compared to another as “more” or “less,” which justifies an attitude of exclusivity and singularity. In any given case there is always an easily identifiable “best” mediation: the one that carries the most. Given the chance, a lesser mediation would instantly be traded for a better one. One mediating thing is always replaceable and mediation aims towards the singular point of maximal adequacy. Second, this model has completely ignored the role of the person to whom the mediation is communicated, which indicates it is irrelevant. Mediation has no prior conditions. Any person could receive the same mediation as any other. The receiver is untouchable in authority and autonomy, untouchable by the truth communicated, remaining independent and unaltered, and for this reason as replaceable as the seashell itself. We should note that while the iconoclasts had a kind of seashell thinking when it comes to images, they do not share the same kind of thinking when it comes to the receiver. Byzantine iconoclasts, as well as iconophiles, always assumed a confessional context for images, immediately tied in with veneration and prayer. The fact that we rarely seem to pay attention to these aspects of the debates, that prayer might be a condition for receiving the icon, betrays how deeply shaped we are by this modern technological notion of a neutral, replaceable observer. Third, if a mediating thing is unable to contain the original, as the seashell is unable to carry the ocean, it is because its finite capacity is a restriction on its ability to mediate. In other words, finitude as such is inevitably a limit, thus a negation. It is this assumption that introduces the idea of a competition between created beings and their communication of an infinite God, which necessarily leads to idolatry and iconoclasm. It also assumes that whatever is being communicated is roughly the same kind of thing as the seashell, objective, divisible, extended, ultimately on the same plane. Through philosophical gymnastics we might try to keep the seashell framework and grant that the “ocean” here is not to be thought of as transmittable in separate pieces like a material thing, but a God who is simple unity. This means in turn that the seashell would have to contain all or nothing. To avoid limiting God, we would either have to destroy the limits of the seashell which are inherently blocking him, or prevent mediation altogether. But this has two consequences. Taking a particular example, an image could only mediate God if it disfigured its visibility as an image, which is to say, essentially, that images (in their proper sense)

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cannot mediate God. Yet the same logic immediately applies to the limits of our own minds: we, too, are finite, and we, too, must be destroyed to make room for God. The threat is all the more violent as it hits home. Either way, this model inherently opposes finitude to a limitless God, and thus relation to God can only be construed as a competition. In sum: seashell mediation is one of utility. (a) At best, a mediation will communicate the original adequately. For this reason, all mediations aim at maximizing capacity, and lesser mediations could be eliminated. The finite limits of mediation are seen as a negation or falling short. (b) The subject is independent, unaltered, and free from prior conditions. It is thus replaceable in its neutrality. (c) What is communicated is assumed to be a part of the same system. This leads to either imposing finitude on God, or breaking the seashell in order to try to capture Divine infinity. The result is that finitude is inherently set into a competition with the limitless God. This seashell model clearly will not work for iconic mediation, yet our use of it is almost instinctive until we stop to lay it out explicitly. It should come as no surprise if we feel natively attracted to such logic. This model is a deeply engrained norm for economics and scientism, technology and productivity. We are quite accustomed to seeing everything as replaceable and disposable; all things have their measure or price. This model works well for many functions of our everyday life, from financial transactions to reception of a wifi signal to looking up the train schedule. But it does not work for the many complex forms of mediation that resist being absorbed into a controlled system of exchange. We can still try to overpower this resistance – for example, when paintings are judged not by appreciation of their beauty, but by the appreciation of investors’ wealth. Yet this will not be sufficient to understand the mediation offered by aesthetics, and still less the mediation of God. I have argued that we need to move past this straw man mediation in two ways. First, we must move past the universe of objects. Resonance Gadamer has given us a new way of thinking about mediation, beyond this model where the medium is at best invisible, and at worst a failure, and I illustrated this through the model of sonic resonation. For a hermeneutic phenomenology, beings are the kinds of things that show or present themselves, and this self-presenting is precisely the way we meet beings.

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This means there is an intimate unity between the original and its mediation, as mediation becomes a natural avenue, even an enhanced one, for us to encounter the original. There remains a difference between the selfshowing of the original in the flesh and an indirect appearance, and some mediations are certainly better than others, but it is no longer on a simple scale of adequation. The ideal of adequacy itself is revealed as wrongheaded, a philosophical abstraction that fails to understand what the world is and how it gives itself to us, and also who we are, and how we receive it. For no single showing could claim to exhaust the truth of the original, whether this is a natural appearing or a mediation of it or some entanglement of the two. The result is that the endless possibilities of showing the truth demand a greater variety of mediations, rather than competition and exclusion, just like music is enriched by a variety of instruments. This plurality is not a weakening of a pure ideal, for it is through the many different instruments of a symphony that the texture of a song is created. Nor is it a weakening of truth. Just as we will find music nowhere other than in its resonation through an instrument, we will find the real nowhere other than in the context of its mediation, and just like the unique voice of each instrument, each mediation has a unique capacity to present the truth, not in spite of but because of its particular finite limitations, which in art bend all of their resources to show us more clearly what the original is. This leads us to the second node of mediation, which is no longer so clearly set apart from the first one, as the medium is no longer a void between the hermetically sealed endpoints of me and the original. We are no longer autonomous subjects, first of all, for mediation “has” us. We find ourselves to be “porous,”10 profoundly entangled with the whole of the world and its mediations. Just like sound requires reception by an ear attuned to its frequency, and art is an event that occurs between the painting and us, the medium is the “between” of our meeting, our touch touching the thing’s touching us. Second, the receiver is not replaceable. It is critical that as a part of the fabric of the world, this event of mediation is potentially available to anyone. Yet as finite, we all come from a particular perspective, which means that even if we receive the same truth, our reception will be unique. This is not a limitation but another form of possibility. Finally, we are not impervious. Mediation changes us. Our horizons fuse with what is mediated to us, and we are drawn into the community of those also shaped by it. Sometimes we may need to change before we can receive mediation, as our current 10

A word I borrow from Charles Taylor; see for example A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 35–41.

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limitations may not be capable of opening to what is ­communicated, and we may need further preparation to be receptive to it. Gadamer’s model of mediation thus corrects the seashell model of the mediated thing and the one who receives it, but it does not yet have much to say about the unique character of what would be received when it turns to God. By itself, a richer account of the finite universe is not enough to open any relation to the divine. We must still recognize that our knowing and mediating is not enough to ascend to God, as if all we needed was a specially designed tool, be it a “painting,” “analogy,” or “icon.” This would be to assume that God is in the world like anything else, intertwined in it as well. As it stands, this model could speak only of a “God” within a sophisticated ontotheology. In sum, where seashell mediation can be described as utility, Gadamer’s symphonic mediation is one of abundance: (a) Because the truth of things is inexhaustible by any one showing, mediations enrich and enhance our encounter with an original, often showing it even more vividly by their unique capacity of presenting it. A multiplicity of mediations is thus encouraged and demanded, and all are entangled together in the whole, as each instrument has its part in the greater symphony. (b) We who receive the mediation are also entangled in this whole, and our capacity for reception plays a critical part of this process, since mediation is an event that transpires rather than cargo to be transported. Who I am, in my unique and finite perspective, is critical in determining what I can receive. What I receive will change me, and demands I change further. (c) As it remains bound to the whole of finite being, this model does not offer any way of thinking about God. Gadamer has demolished any fear that limitations are a mere negation and introduced an idea of rich mediation. To be finite is not to be inadequate or in competition, but to be part of the texture of the symphony, to have one’s unique pitch and timbre organically united to a whole composed of infinitely many other finitudes, each part intertwined and entangled together in the whole that it reflects without exhausting it. Rather than the utilitarian materialism of the seashell’s “more” or “less” that leads to competition, we see an expansion of the many different capacities of finitude each contributing a unique voice to the symphonic whole. This model of mediation is ideal for discussing aesthetics and the particularity of representational painting, for mediation that enhances the truth.

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But to this point, the uniqueness is still defined by a capacity or activity which is valuable according to a scale defined by us, what it shows or produces for us. While it is far from the full crudity of utilitarian calculus, one can see a cold underside to this mediation. Yes, there is infinite room for excellence in aesthetic mediation. But there seems to be less of a place in this model to allow effective mediation from the ordinary, the dull, the everyday. Still less for the “least of these,” the weak and broken. It may work wonderfully to describe art in its “glory,” but it does not seem to appreciate the full range of iconic mediation, which embraces both glory and poverty. While the model of abundance greatly enriches our discussion of mediation beyond superficial utility, it is not yet the proper model for the icon, and does not yet tell us how to reach God. The Window However God would show himself, it would not be as worldly things do. Marion has insisted that the appearing of God must have its own conditions, which is why I have compared his mediating “icon” to a window illuminated by sunlight. This keeps the focus on the critical point: that the possibility of mediation hinges not on our initiative but on a God who has revealed himself to us first, as the window cannot will the sun to rise or set, but only respond to the rays of light streaming towards it. We can know God because of his prior call. This means that we can no longer take refuge in third party knowledge, as if we could know about God behind his back or without his awareness. For Marion, it is the second node of mediation, the one who receives, that is the primary variable in this mediation. If this relation to God is universally offered, it is not unambiguously, universally accepted. This takes us far from the impermeable subject of seashell mediation, and even beyond the horizon-expanding event of sonic resonance. For to open ourselves to an encounter with the divine demands prayer, self-dispossession, or accepting a kenotic identity, clearing our pane of glass from anything which would seek to resist this illumination offered from elsewhere. It demands we agree to exceed our more comfortable modes of knowing and possession, as the sunlight meets us but can never be tamed into a simple object of visibility, and this may be painful. The more we open to the gaze of God upon us, the more we become transformed into God’s image, becoming ourselves mediators of the light which shines through us. This means Marion alters the three-node model of mediation in two ways. First, in a reversal-collapse, the three-node model becomes a

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two-node model which endlessly propagates itself, for the mediating node is the same as the receiving node, considered under different angles. That is, to receive mediation transforms one into a mediator, as communion with God becomes a communication to others, or at least for those who also have the eyes to see it and the will to accept it. Whether the mediating person or thing has a rich character of its own or not, whether beautiful or ugly, excellent or mediocre, what matters is not so much the unique capacities of its finitude but whether we accept to be brought into a personal relation to God thereby. Second, while we began with the assumption that it would be the middle node that mediates between the receiver and God, for Marion this is only possible through God’s granting us the gift of vision to recognize him there. Paradoxically, it is not the icon who mediates between us and God, but God who mediates between us and the icon. God opens for us the anamorphosis that lets us see him in this finite thing, and God gives the icon the capacity to reveal his gaze to us. This should not surprise us if we recall the scriptural declaration that “there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim 2:5). It is God who allows this encounter between finite things to open to him, whose kenotic love serves as the medium that binds creation together. In sum, where Gadamer’s symphonic mediation was one of abundance, Marion’s window mediation is one of superfluity: (a) God is not a worldly thing at our command; but is absolute, freely coming from outside the world of finite originals and their finite appearing. (b) To receive this mediation is only possible through the kenotic self-dispossession of prayer, which recognizes our powerlessness to achieve a relation to God on our own. This position of receiving in turn makes us more like what we receive, and thus makes the receiver another mediator for this same divine relation. (c) A thing, as well as a person, can be a mediation of God if it has the structure of kenotic receptivity, making clear a relation to someone from outside of it. Its finite characteristics and individual capacities will not cause the success of its mediation, which comes as a gift from elsewhere, but nor will they cause its failure. Failure happens through a possessive grasping that seeks to contain and control mediation for itself instead of accepting it as a gift. Marion changes the structure of the metaphor by beginning from a different starting point, the character of the Divine which is communicated

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to us, which in turn sketches out new conditions for the receiver and what mediates it. This means that the key to a mediation of God is not anything that a mediation does or does not do; it is rather whether we allow ourselves to clear the way to receive to God’s call. From a surface perspective, this might look like a retreat to one feature of the seashell model, that each node is replaceable. After all, mediations are at best panes of glass before the rays of the Divine gaze, and the only variable is how receptive they are, or what extent they obscure these rays with the smudges of grasping self-possession. Worse, instead of rating things exclusively on their adequation to the original as the seashell model, Marion seems to have extinguished uniqueness even further, classifying everything as equally inadequate. And yet, this is to hold on to the precise view that Marion is trying to challenge. The window model makes it logically impossible to return to adequation and competition, for the finite capacities of the medium are not the grounds for its success and therefore no grounds for its exclusion or replacement. In fact, the only success of this model comes from elsewhere, a free gift of relation – a relation of love which is the strongest guard against replaceability. Indeed, super-fluere is literally “overflowing”: God’s love ripples across creation like a multi-tiered fountain. If it is judged “unnecessary,” it is because it exceeds the economic plane defined by such stingy measurements. The only measure of a gift is a full one, pressed, shaken down, running over. If Marion’s account of mediation has a different way of preserving uniqueness than Gadamer’s aesthetics, it also has a different way of encouraging a multiplicity of mediations: God can appear anywhere, without violation to the creature, if we choose to let him, and this appearing radiates outwards. Because of this, one could in principle make everything iconic, the poor and the rich alike. Finitude is not as such a negation; negation only comes in for a self-satisfied finitude that refuses to allow for anything opening beyond itself. A proper finitude is one that acknowledges its limits, but doesn’t result in idolatry, for it refuses to claim itself as autonomous. The only barrier between God and creature is the creature’s desire for self-possession. But once again, Marion has done very little to sketch out what this looks like, and his emphasis on abstract or negative conditions is often misunderstood as a refusal of the concrete and the positive. To adequately describe an iconic mediation we will have to add to the work Marion has begun. Drawing from both of these models of mediation, we can advance one step further, crossing the horizontally rich worldly mediation of art and the vertically revelatory but thin mediation of the window. More than a new series of claims, this task demands a new guiding image.

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As a metaphor for this rich iconic mediation which moves beyond utility and combines both abundance and superfluity, I suggest we consider the model of a love letter.

8.3  The Love Letter “Music I heard with you was more than music” – these simple opening words of Conrad Aiken’s love poem break out of the symphonic aesthetics of Gadamer. And why? Aiken answers only in the negative: that “now that I am without you all is desolate/all that was once so beautiful is dead.” In the case of love, it is not beauty or abundance of meaning, but you who make the difference. The “you” thus marks the most essential feature of a love letter: it cannot be accomplished on one’s own. The fact that it comes from a “you” outside, unprompted, unnecessary, is essential to its meaningfulness, as is the fact that it comes from outside to me. As I read, I find myself under the regard of another, just as in iconic mediation, I find myself before a God who reaches out to me, who gazes upon me first. The starting point of iconic mediation is thus not found in the creature but in the counter-intentionality of a God who seeks to communicate to us. A love letter is not a sign or thin reference, as a piece of information to be communicated more or less adequately. It is not a reminder or a discardable pointer to something other than it. The beloved cherishes the note, perhaps keeps it physically close to him. He may delight in its most brute material qualities, the color of ink, the choice of paper, the smell or the way it is folded. He memorizes the words and keeps them close to him. In this sense, what is communicated is a mediation of abundance, inexhaustible upon a first reading and thus inviting endless rereads. All of these details matter and go into the way of its mediation. Iconic mediation, similarly, is a rich one, where the particular capacities of the finite thing, in their aesthetic and intellectual functions, have a critical role, for it is only by dwelling on these details that the full meaning of the mediation can emerge. At the same time, as the “music was more than music,” the letter itself is not the point, nor are its mediating qualities. Nothing in the material anchors its meaning definitively. It is not a matter of whether the ink was black or green, whether the paper was expensive. The language used might be beautiful and poetic, but it could be humble and awkward. Rich or poor, none of these qualities about the letter can explain why it is cherished. The beloved would have accepted just as much a letter written with other materials, and using different words about other things. Similarly, we saw, for

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something to be an iconic mediation, it is not so critical whether the iconic mediation is a Byzantine painting, with all the richness of its theological and aesthetic reflection, or a Renaissance one, or even an amateur’s drawing. This is not to say there is not any significance to these differences, but that these differences alone are not decisive as to whether something can mediate God or not. We do not have to deny the abundance of meaning to admit this superfluity. In fact, the beloved holds them both at the same time, asymmetrically: every detail is cherished but this abundance can only be appreciated through the superfluity, as the latter emerges from the character of the relationship as originating from outside any of the abundant qualities themselves. Thus, it is not an appropriate critique of a love letter to say, “Your language was not beautiful enough.” A critique that would matter does not target the details but the counter-intentionality: “Your words were not genuine” or “You put no thought into it.” As the details of the love letter matter deeply because of, not in spite of, this superfluity as grounded in love, so the particularity of who receives it matters deeply. But in this case who I am, my perspective, my story, matters not so much because of where I come from or what I am able to know or accomplish, but because of this relationship, because I am the beloved of this lover who writes to me. It is also essential that this outside initiative has already been accepted as a relation of love. An unrequited and unwanted love letter will not mediate in the same way as one received and accepted. Similarly, iconic mediation is initiated freely by God, from outside the horizons of worldly logic and its causal necessity, and thus from outside of our perspectives and our individual stories, but it strikes through the details of our situatedness in place and time, in the context of ongoing relation, with a certain history. Whether this be a clear “first” moment where someone decides to accept God’s love, or a pattern of choices that one no longer remembers making is less important than the fact that one chooses to open oneself to what is given by the lover. This leads us to the further observation that while we can all read love letters, only the one who receives this relationship with love can see what is meant. Nothing in the material or intellectual content of the letter is sufficient for its interpretation. We can perform scientific tests on the materials used, ask whether the ink was of good quality or the pen was expensive. We can psychoanalyze the word choices or submit it to literary critique. It will not matter so much if we take a hermeneutically sensitive perspective instead of a detached textual analysis. It’s true that knowing the series of events that transpired between these people may help to decode some of the inside jokes or contextually bound references. We could even interrogate the

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lover, who, probably in mortifying embarrassment, could reveal to us the history of intimate conversations behind the seemingly simple words. Even then, we will not truly understand the note as the beloved does. These same words which deeply touch his heart will leave us cold. It isn’t a question of aesthetic sophistication. This is as true of the love letter written by an average person as it is of the love letters written by great artists and poets, which are just as cloying, embarrassing, exaggerated, unrelatable. In short, it is not for a rational failure on our parts, nor is it a limitation of the mediating qualities that block us from seeing what they mean. It is simply that the fabric that binds the mediation is a relationship of love, which alone gives these particular qualities their meaning. It is only when we approach this love, through our own love for one or both of the lovers and their shared bond, that we will begin to approach understanding. But even then, only the beloved and the lover will truly understand this note and what it means. To put this differently, the precondition for receiving this mediation is to be a part of this relation of love. As the “music I heard with you” which is “more than music,” the letter from one’s beloved is so much more than a letter. In sum, an iconic mediation is one of both superfluity and abundance, as grounded in a relationship of kenotic love. (a) It begins with counter-intentionality, the free initiative of God who offers a relation. The superfluity is essential to the movement of iconic mediation as it is central to the movement of love. (b) Particular finite qualities do not matter, in that they are not by themselves sufficient to prompt or guarantee an iconic mediation. And yet because they are received from the Lover, they matter deeply, cherished in all of their particularities. (c) Iconic mediation can only be received from within the relationship of love, which is profoundly personal, linked to our unique identity, and yet it remains superfluous, not dependent on what we have accomplished or where we come from. It only depends on whether we accept it. We cannot receive it as it is meant from outside of this loving relation. I have suggested that this metaphor helps frame a new way of thinking that fits the results of my phenomenological study of the icon, using the insights of Gadamer to supplement Marion’s thin account of the icon. The case of the love letter is different in some ways from iconic mediation, as we begin at a greater distance than the full flowering of this love. Yet our prayer desires and anticipates this point, and holds itself open for it in the fidelity of repetition despite our many failures.

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Some might argue that this model of the love letter still fails to satisfy. Certainly, we find here both abundance and superfluity, but there seems to be a lack of a clear meeting point between them. It essentially comes down to this: the details matter, and they don’t matter. Is this not to carry out the job only halfway, like beginning to simplify an algebraic formula but f­ ailing to factor out a final variable? By now we have become too well versed in the iconoclast-idolater gambit to think a solution lies in c­ hoosing one side over the other. Yet surely, one might argue, we can do better than this, and find a way to inscribe both aspects in a more ­balanced ­relation of mutual interaction, of causality or effect. For if we leave it at this ­fragile “and,” perpetuating an imbalance of two sides that are f­orbidden to meet, is this not to abandon the rigorous path of rationality and to deny ­philosophy? Am I not insisting we content ourselves with romantic fideism or devout escapism? Let us admit at the very least that there is certainly something that seems embarrassingly sentimental about anchoring the hard work of philosophy around the case of a love letter. It is critical to find an answer to these concerns. In fact, there is a longstanding precedent in philosophy that can help us elaborate my claim in a more rigorous perspective: far from sentimentality, or a mere leave-taking of the world of thought, love is a higher horizon of truth than rationality alone is capable of admitting.

8.4  The Horizon of Love Knowing by Heart It was Augustine who set us on the path of seashell mediation through his walk along the beach, as well as his own warning against trying to grasp the ungraspable Divinity: si cepisti non est Deus.11 And yet we wondered at the beginning whether there was a way of “touching upon” God that is not comprehensive. Augustine himself thinks there is one: love. “The only way to truth is by love [per caritatem]”12 or, “Give me a lover, and he will know what I am saying.”13 Beyond Augustine, this is a theme that runs throughout the theological tradition. Of course, we find it explicitly claimed in the Scriptures, as for instance 1 Jn 4: 7–12: “Everyone who loves 11

Augustine, Sermo 52. Contra Faustum XXXII, 18, PL 42, 507 trans. R. Stothert in St. Augustine, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. IV, p. 328.; cited by Marion in SP 134/LS 191. 13 “Da amantem, et sentit quod dico,” In evangelium Ioannis tractatus XXVI, 4, PL 35, 1608; trans. John W. Retting as Tractates on the Gospel of John, 11–27 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 263, modified; see GR 39. 12

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has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love … No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.” This Scripture passage resonates with a certain tradition of philosophy. “Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point”14: far from sentimentality or emotion, with these words Pascal placed the heart as the highest of the three orders of our understanding, higher than mind and body. The difference is not one of degree but dimension: each order has a broader horizon than the one prior to it, or an expanded aperture to receive what could not even be conceived of from the horizon of the previous order. The mind can understand what is grasped in the lower order of the body, using sense data to come to higher-order conclusions about the world and ourselves, but sense perception is incapable of science, geometry, or logic. Similarly, while the heart can understand and take up the advances of rationality as well as the body, the mind is at a lower level, blind to the mysteries that the heart sees. This does not mean that the heart is “irrational” or that it rejects reason. Far from it. There is no question of elimination here, as if the mind negated the need for the body, and the heart negated both. It is something more akin to sublation: reason takes up what the senses provide in order to understand the world in a deeper way, just as the heart takes up and expands upon both mind and body to understand in an even higher way. It is only from this higher horizon of the heart that we can recognize what is communicated by God. Thus Pascal can say: I know that [God] has wished [divine truths] to enter the mind from the heart and not into the heart from the mind …. Hence when speaking of things human, we say that we should know them before loving them – a saying which has become proverbial. Yet the saints on the contrary, when speaking of things divine, say that we should love them in order to know them, and that we enter into truth only through love.15

For Pascal, reason is powerless to receive knowledge of Divine things; such mysteries can only be revealed to the heart and its higher understanding.

14

15

Blaise Pascal, Pensées in L. Lafuma, ed., Oeuvres completes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1963), §397. Marion fleshes out the importance of this idea in Sur la prisme métaphysique de Descartes, trans. Jeffrey Kosky as On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution and the Limits of Onto-Theo-Logy in Cartesian Thought (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), 337 [359]; see the whole of §§23–25. See also Vincent Carraud, Pascal et la philosophie, second edition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2008). Blaise Pascal, “De l’art de persuader,” in J. Mesnard, ed., Oeuvres completes (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1992), 413–414. Translated by Emile Cailliet and John C. Blankenagel in “The Art of Persuasion” Great Shorter Works of Pascal (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1948), 203; see AR 195–98.

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These words are cited famously by Heidegger in Being and Time, who elsewhere gives due credit to Max Scheler’s extended attempts to integrate its importance into phenomenology.16 It was love, Scheler argues, and not mere sense perception or reason, that allowed the recognition of Christ as God: Not “everyone” saw Him when He spoke to Magdalena after rising: Magdalena’s love saw Him first. Some, however, didn’t see Him, because “God had closed their eyes.” Only the eyes of the loving were opened—to the degree that they loved Him.17

Marion’s most recent work on revelation furthers this idea, contrasting the phenomenality of worldly things (ἀληθεία) with the phenomenality of God’s self-manifestation (ἀποκάλυψις), where “knowing is the same as loving.”18 The drama of rejection in Marion’s encounter of darkness and light can be complemented by the “chiaroscuro” of the everyday in Jean-Yves Lacoste, who, taking up the insights of Pascal and Scheler, will discuss this less as a fierce clash and more as a subtle invitation, proposed rather than imposed. “Because it will not coerce us, love always runs the risk of a rebuff.”19 Both would affirm that “God gives himself to be known by giving himself to be loved … and love’s response to love is never necessitated. To be able to agree that God exists, we must decide freely.”20 It is no accident, then, that our logical sensibilities are nettled by the irreducible asymmetry between abundance and superfluity of iconic mediation. It signals a higher kind of phenomenality, a new way of access that reason cannot reach on its own. It is the mark of the horizon of love. For nothing can rationalize its way into mediating God; the method of analysis will destroy whatever it is trying to reach, as humor evaporates when one has to explain a joke. Florensky expresses this with eloquence: The single and integral object of religious perception disintegrates in the domain of rationality into a multiplicity of aspects, into separate facets, into fragments of holiness, and there is no grace in these fragments. The precious alabaster has been smashed, and the holy myrrh is greedily sucked in by the dry sands of the red-hot desert.21 16

17 18 19 20 21

Heidegger, Being and Time, §29 and, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik, GA 26, trans. Michael Helm as Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 134 [169], and §9. The key texts of Scheler are “Ordo Amoris” and “Love’s Knowledge” (“Liebe und Erkenntnis”). See Lacoste’s scholarly analysis in Appearing of God, 91–111 [111–132]. “Love’s Knowledge,” 157 [89]. GR 45; AR §1, 10. Lacoste, The Appearing of God, 96 [76]. Ibid., 88 [108]. Pavel Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy, trans. Boris Jakim (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), X, 234.

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That is, whatever aspects of iconic mediation could be graspable by reason alone are only fragments, like a smashed vessel or a psychoanalyzed love letter, and no longer have the integrity of what animated this mediation in the first place. We see this already in the case of the Byzantine icon, whether it is early art historians reducing it to a genre of art or a ritual artifact, or philosophers parsing out the hermeneutic implications of cult practices and their effect on our worldview; such things explain what can be understood of iconic mediation by the sphere of rationality alone. But if we allow the question to stop at that, we will only disintegrate what we are purporting to study, taking the shard of alabaster and forgetting the holy myrrh. The details matter, and they don’t matter. These two clauses are both true and do not necessarily lead from one or the other. To say otherwise would destroy the freedom of each side and their corresponding possibility of love. Only love can strike the balance between allowing for a mediation in the poor and the rich without counting. There alone can we understand the lovers’ relationship and the letter’s significance for them both; there alone can we understand what it means to say that believers’ experience before the icon is different when they come to it in prayer. Only the one who exercises the hermeneutic of love knows how to read a relation to God everywhere. This means, bluntly, that both iconoclasm and idolatry come out of a failure to love. Nothing in rationality alone will allow us to see what can only be spoken first to the heart. Iconic mediation cannot be received from the stance of intellectual power or the invulnerability of the autonomous subject; it can only be received when one opens oneself to the vulnerability of this relationship of love, like in the love letter. We can only truly engage with iconic mediation to the extent that we embrace the kenotic self-dispossession of giving and receiving that is the shape of prayer, which we can also recognize as the shape of love. A Final Confession “How could a finite thing in its limitations mediate an infinite God?” This is and always was the wrong question, or, rather, a question posed in the wrong spirit, for it was never finitude that was the real problem. And yet, could we ever settle definitively on the right one? Even after questioning the validity of the original question, and unraveling it piece by piece, there is still one more question that arises: why did we find such an obviously crude image so appealing in the first place? Or perhaps: why does it still continue to hold sway over us, even after so many attempts

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to intellectually deflate it? Let me confess: in the end I do not think it is an innocent mistake, nor an intellectual confusion, nor even a matter of a misguided imagination. It is a distortion, I suspect, that arises from a doubled sclerosis of the heart. First, from a deeply entrenched utilitarian view which seeks in mediation a justification for the goodness of creation based on what creatures can do, accomplish, or communicate of God. It is a manifestation of the disease of nihilism, which despairs of finite being’s ability to ground itself, which despairs of finite things having any value in the face of eternity. The fact that we are looking for an object or tool, that we are trying to base finite worth in adequation or particular activity, is to fear that creation has to prove itself in order to matter before God. Enriching mediation by a hermeneutical aesthetics will not solve this problem, only delay it. The more we immerse ourselves in our technical philosophical gymnastics the longer we can stave off the fearsome truth that we do not have any way to ground the value or power of any finite thing before the infinite majesty of God. But the tradition of iconic mediation in its superfluity affirms that the finite does not need to ground myself, and that I am never so distant from God that I need an image or anything else to connect me to him. The icon in the abundance of its finite capacities is an occasion to remind me of his presence in everything before me here and now, precisely by what it is. This is only possible after we recognize our mutual inadequacy, that this presence does not depend first of all on what it is or what I do. This first crack in the picture of mediation quickly produces another. The seashell problem seemed to concern an abstract relation of finite and infinite, with paintings and circumscriptions and finite mechanics. This is the second blind spot, lurking underneath the first: a desire to deflect attention from myself. To focus on the mediating element is a way to erect a screen between me and God, to think that who I am and how I approach the question is not essential to what will be communicated. It is also a way of rejecting or hiding from my own superfluity, of hiding my own nakedness from the gaze that pierces my every darkness and lays bare my inadequacy. Perhaps, too, I recognize the way it condemns my lack of love, perhaps because the superfluity reduces me to such a level of pure poverty before God that I find it difficult to bear. To the cynical despair of this deeply entrenched iconoclasm, which questions the worth of finite creation before an infinite Creator, there is only one answer, and it cannot be found within finitude: it is the look of love. It is the gaze of God, for whom “seeing is equivalent to loving,” who “sees insofar as he loves, and to the extent that he loves” – the icon, in

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Marion’s sense of the term.22 It is the look of the saint, who in his tenderness for being mirrors this divine gaze by seeing the working of God in all creation and in all relationality; “in a handful of humus, he sees the fiery trace of the Spirit who, at the beginning, sculpted from this humid earth the face of the first man, of him who was destined to welcome the light of the divine look.”23 It is the tenderness for being that sees everything as cherished in its particularity not because of its strength or glory, not for what it is or does, but because it is a communication from God who is Love.24 This means, in turn, that the only solution to our poverty that will not end in competition or destruction is to embrace it, to accept to have nothing so that we can be given everything. For the icon only matters for a God who communicates himself in love. The icon only makes sense for one who seeks to love him back in total abandon. 22 23 24

Marion, “Seeing Ourselves Seen,” 324 [34]. Evdokimov, The Art of the Icon, 95. Marion “Seeing Ourselves Seen,” 327–28 [33].

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Index

absence, 16, 61, 76, 161, 162, 164, 166–169, 175, 196–203, 208, 218 acheiropoieton, 199–206, 208, 241 adonné, 102, 103, 124 affection, 20, 162, 182, 195, 196, 198, 211–213 analogy, 153, 259 anamorphosis, 100, 106, 107, 136, 172, 221, 261 animism, 21, 212 apophasis, 96, 152, 155 appearance, 32, 33, 37, 49, 52, 57, 59, 60, 64, 68, 76, 78, 80, 83, 86, 108, 109, 120, 122, 157, 164, 176, 194, 237, 258 Aristotle, 1, 2, 179 as if, 169, 196, 211, 215 Ascension, 144, 145 Augustine, 1, 2, 103, 169, 266 autonomy, 70, 114, 121, 123, 222 of image, 27, 57, 63, 67, 79, 81, 82 of self, 65, 66, 124, 170, 232, 256 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 96, 118, 130 Basil of Caesarea, 26, 106, 108 belonging, 72–74, 91, 178, 202, 219, 221, 222, 230–232, 248 Belting, Hans, 19 Bible. See Scripture Bulgakov, Sergeĭ, 35, 41, 43, 186 Byzantine art, 10–20, 40, 45, 209, 215, 220 Byzantine empire, 13, 22, 39 Byzantine experience, 17, 208, 209, 218 call and response, 102, 105, 107, 108, 113, 160, 167–172, 174, 186, 214, 216, 248, 260, 262 Catholicism, 185, 197, 234 Chrétien, Jean-Louis, 102, 167–172, 188, 192 Christology, 24, 29 Church, 13, 22, 23, 42, 44, 150, 236 church building, 38, 179, 220–223, 225–231, 252 circumscription, 6, 25, 31, 116, 136, 201, 203, 255 competition, 5, 7, 58, 64, 110, 118, 250, 251, 255, 256, 258, 259, 262, 271 Constas, Maximos, 150, 157, 243

copy, 33, 34, 58, 63, 68, 76–77, 79, 80, 134, 136, 154, 202 counter-gaze, 112–114, 129, 131, 163, 186, 219, 241, 244, 245, 248 counter-intentionality, 160, 214, 263–265, See counter-gaze cross, 37, 42, 114, 116, 120, 122, 123, 180, 248 cult practice, 15–17, 19, 167, 269 Cuneo, Terrence, 194 death, 16, 31, 98, 114, 119, 150, 167, 180, 193, 202 deification, 50, 166, 240 Derrida, Jacques, 97 desire, 95, 100, 103, 110, 111, 121, 167, 192, 195–198, 200–208, 213, 232, 241, 247, 248, 265 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 156, 158, 159, 202 Dionysius the Areopagite, 97, 130, 146, 235 dispossession, 97, 108, 119, 121, 123, 129, 170, 208, 231, 242, 260, 261 economy, 115, 124, 170, 257 Edessa, Image of, 199–206, 209 emotion, 20, 121, 179, 180, 182, 187, 195, 247, 249 emperor, 16, 22, 26, 38, 193 eschatology, 218, 230–232, 240, 245, 248 Eucharist, 21, 30, 36, 77, 184–186, 215, 230, 233, 235–237, 245, 252 Evdokimov, Paul, 41, 243 extramission, haptic, 209 Falque, Emmanuel, 156, 159 familiarity, 151, 154, 155, 166, 202, 224 festival, 70, 219, 220, 230, 235 fidelity, 173, 213, 216, 250, 252 film, 195 finitude, 1–7, 19, 25, 67, 72, 73, 89–92, 95, 100, 106–107, 111, 112, 115, 116, 118, 127, 131, 136, 146, 153, 158, 159, 169, 171, 207, 223, 225, 231, 234, 245, 246, 249, 250, 253, 255–262, 265, 269–271

292

Index Florensky, Pavel, 41, 47, 144, 159, 180, 217, 237–238, 244, 253, 268 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 53–54, 62–93, 110–112, 131, 133–136, 148, 149, 151, 153, 154, 157, 159, 161, 162, 164, 165, 167, 179, 189, 192–193, 202, 219, 220, 232, 238, 242, 247, 257, 259 gaze, 95–97, 100, 111–114, 117, 121, 122, 143, 146, 159, 160, 162, 165, 167, 171–173, 175–176, 209, 210, 214, 219, 241, 244, 253 of God, 97, 113, 117, 127–129, 132, 159, 160, 171, 184, 210, 219, 242, 244, 245, 260–263, 270 of saint, 244, 271 transfigured, 240 gesture, 88, 176–178, 188–192, 206, 208, 210–214, 216, 232, 235, 241 gift, 107, 109, 120, 122–125, 127, 130, 160, 170–171, 211, 231, 243, 261, 262 givenness, 59–62, 98–99, 105, 108, 126, 244 glory, 111, 114, 116, 119, 121, 122, 126, 137, 139–147 Gregoras, Nichephorus, 227 Gschwandtner, Christina M., 102, 186, 232 hatred, 103, 122, 131, 195, 196, 208, 251 Hegel, G. W. F., 2, 11, 49, 57, 69, 110 Heidegger, Martin, 53, 59, 62–63, 72, 87, 94, 96, 98, 99, 104, 161, 168, 184, 268 hero, 81–83, 134 Hesychasm, 181, 240 Hieria, Council of, 21, 29–31, 47 horizon, 19, 91, 94, 103, 106, 112, 146, 159, 232, 264, 267, 268 Husserl, Edmund, 59, 62, 98, 99, 104, 162, 163 iconoclasm, 4, 45, 48, 110, 115, 129, 215, 256, 269, 270 Byzantine, 7, 13, 21–24, 37, 77 Iconoclasm, 250 iconographer, 42, 44, 149, 150, 154, 205, 206, 242 iconostasis, 233–237 identity, 6, 70, 82, 103, 106, 124, 125, 230–233, 245, 248, 260, 265 of image and original, 30–34, 77 idol, 94–98, 104, 184, 186, 218, 237 phenomenological, 97, 122, 127, 159, 171 as saturated phenomenon, 99–101, 159, 219 idolatry, 3–6, 21, 23, 25, 48, 54, 58, 97, 106, 110, 115, 120, 122, 123, 125, 131, 159, 174, 208, 211, 214, 215, 250–252, 254–256, 262, 269 image didactic, 39, 148, 207, 247 private, 16, 82–84, 134, 165 public, 81–85, 112, 134–136, 165–167, 223, 242, 245

293

imagination, 4, 6, 40, 57, 63, 68, 109, 110, 134, 149, 154, 169, 191, 207, 248, 254, 270 Incarnation, 22, 24, 25, 28–30, 37, 40, 50, 51, 93, 114, 116, 117, 128, 136, 137, 145, 150, 185, 204, 228 infinite, 1–7, 65, 67, 90–92, 96, 116, 118, 120, 130, 136, 152, 153, 158, 170, 178, 246, 251, 255–257, 269–271 intentionality, 60–61, 169, 186 reverse. See counter-gaze Isaac the Syrian, St., 243 Islam, 22 isomorphism isomorphic chain, 129, 131 isomorphic collapse, 177, 241 John Damascene, 21, 24–30, 33, 35, 37, 79, 93, 109, 113, 128, 166, 192, 193, 200–201, 209, 224, 240, 242, 250 John of the Cross, St., 128, 129 Judaism, 13, 16, 22, 85, 215, 233 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 8, 49, 57, 63, 64, 74, 76, 87, 99, 202 Kearney, Richard, 189, 238 kenosis, 114–115, 117–127, 129, 130, 178 Kierkegaard, Sören, 50 Kroug, Gregory, 41, 154, 178, 200 Lacoste, Jean-Yves, 112, 131, 162, 167–171, 174, 182, 184, 185, 208, 230–232, 238, 242, 268 language, 7, 30, 33, 43, 86–89, 97, 152, 176, 190 Levinas, Emmanuel, 96, 97, 101, 112, 163, 168 listening, 74, 163, 170, 171, 174–176, 179, 181, 182, 184, 185, 207, 212, 226, 232 liturgy, 37, 40, 140, 168, 180, 184, 214, 217–245 look. See gaze love letter, 263–266, 269 mandorla, 144–146, 176, 226 Marion, Jean-Luc, 54, 93–132, 136, 146–147, 153, 154, 158–160, 162–163, 165, 167–172, 182–184, 186, 188, 202, 218, 221, 232, 241, 260–263, 268, 271 Melissenos, Gregory, 174 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 188, 190 Mesarites, Nicholas, 176, 178, 228 metaphysics, 44–46, 52–54, 59, 62, 87, 94, 96, 103, 104, 108, 110, 194, 198, 237, 251 mimesis, 63, 75, 79, 109–113 mirror, 31, 73, 95, 97, 100, 111, 164, 241, 244, 271 Mondzain, Marie-José, 23, 202 Monophysitism, 29 Mother of God, 17, 31, 47, 141, 142, 144, 149, 150, 193, 206, 220, 224, 225, 228

294

Index

Moyaert, Paul, 194, 205, 211 museum, 12, 18, 75, 133, 152, 184, 185, 230 name, 32, 44, 119, 133, 141, 151–153, 166, 173–174, 178, 198, 207 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 157–159 narrative, 13, 16, 82, 134, 153, 210, 220, 231 Neoplatonism, 26, 46, 53, 54, 79 Nestorianism, 29, 47, 116 Nicaea I, Council of, 24, 134 Nicaea II, Council of, 13, 16, 21, 24, 39, 116, 213, 214 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 57, 94, 110 Nikephoros, Patriarch, 21, 25, 32 ontotheology, 92, 94, 259 orans, 177, 178, 235 Ouspensky, Leonid, 41–43, 46–51, 58, 108, 147, 154–156, 158, 159, 183, 234, 236, 237 pagan, 13, 16, 17, 19, 21, 31, 230, 250 Pantocrator, 15, 137, 176, 227, 235 parable, 106, 157, 159 paradox, 34, 99, 102, 137, 139, 146, 156–158, 176, 241, 261 participation, 44–46, 50, 201 Pascal, Blaise, 267, 268 peace, 180–183 perspective, 100, 142–144, 147, 160, 173, 226, 241, 253 phenomenon, saturated, 98–105, 111, 146, 147, 153, 162, 218, 227, See also idol photograph, 33, 68, 165, 195 Plato, 57, 71, 76, 84, 110, 179 play, 64–66, 68–70, 72–74, 134, 154, 161, 179, 184 style of, 179, 180, 182, 184, 232, 247–249 Pliny the Elder, 201 portrait, 12–13, 81–85, 112, 151, 153, 165–167, 200, 201 of emperor, 16, 26, 193 funeral, 167, 193 icon, 134, 136, 166–167, 175, 220 possession, 97, 119–121, 123, 124, 129, 170, 171, 232, 252 poverty, 52, 125, 147–155, 171, 178, 182, 252, 270 practice, 103, 113, 242, 245, 253 cult, 4, 5, 15–21, 31, 40, 54, 126, 185, 189, 193–196, 206–223, 227, 229, 238 praise, 27, 97, 107, 153, 173, 182, 200, 213 prayer, 16, 112–113, 160, 167–174, 176–186, 192, 204–214, 218–244, 248–249, 253, 256, 260, 265, 269 presence, 61, 161–187, 218, 237, 245, 253 hypostatic, 45, 185, 186 in image, 16, 62, 77, 78, 80, 162, 166–184, 193, 202, 208, 215

personal, 50, 83, 163–164, 166–184, 195, 198, 202–204, 226, 232 real, 77, 184–186, 237 substantial, 185 propaganda, 84, 134 Protestantism, 40, 92 prototype, 26, 27, 44, 109, 111, 113, 114, 116, 193 Quinisext, Council of, 22, 43 rationality, 105, 266, 267, 269 realism, aesthetic, 11, 46–47, 49, 110, 147 recognition, 71, 72, 75, 112, 139, 144, 146, 151, 153–155, 161, 174, 202, 243, 253 reduction, 60, 99, 102 relic, 39, 197, 200, 202, 208 repetition, 77, 154, 173, 213, 252–253 representation, 12–13, 31, 33, 60, 73, 111, 133–160, 166, 173, 192–193, 248 Resurrection, 120, 141, 144 revelation, 43, 49, 104–109, 121–123, 130, 137, 139, 154, 160, 203, 205, 229, 251, 268 reversal, 97, 101, 112, 171, 203, 240–242, 260 rivalry. See competition Romano, Claude, 86, 87 Rublev, Andrei, 108, 137, 150 saint, 27, 31, 39, 44, 130, 134–137, 166–167, 178, 220, 223–227, 230, 236, 242–244, 271 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 101, 163 Scheler, Max, 190, 268 scripture, 43, 119, 134, 136, 137, 139, 148, 149, 154, 158, 204, 207, 218, 220, 238, 247, 250, 266 seashell problem, 1–9, 25, 30, 48, 58, 67, 89, 115, 122, 255–257, 259, 260, 262, 270 self-effacement, 116–118, 121, 222 self-sufficiency. See autonomy Sendler, Egon, 41 Seraphim of Sarov, St., 240 space, 142–144, 146–147, 188, 214, 219–223, 225–230, 233, 241, 247 spectacle, 121, 126, 148 Stein, Edith, 191, 198 substitution, 77, 188–216, 245, 247–249, 253 symbol, 22, 46, 72, 77, 78, 91, 114, 137, 149, 169, 189, 192, 195, 196, 210, 214, 247 Symeon the Younger, St., 209 synesthesia, 18, 218 Theodore Studite, 21, 26, 31–35, 113, 189 theology, negative. See apophasis theosis. See deification time, 70, 74, 144, 219–223, 229–233, 235, 236, 238, 242

Index touch, 18, 202, 208–212, 246, 249 transcendental ego, 98, 99, 102, 103, 124 transfiguration, 47, 120, 144, 235, 237–244 Trent, Council of, 39, 40 Trinity, 26, 28, 32, 106, 108, 120, 137, 178, 225 Tsakiridou, C. A., 48, 157, 163 Vasileios of Stavronikita, 156 veneration, 7, 17, 19, 21, 26, 27, 31, 33, 35, 37–40, 44, 113, 116, 126, 188–216, 256

295

violence, 103, 115, 116, 119, 120, 122–125, 158, 232 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 30, 190 Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 194 world, 19, 47, 49, 59, 60, 63, 67, 68, 71–75, 78, 80, 85, 90, 92, 106, 107, 114, 116, 120, 122, 123, 125, 142, 144, 146, 173, 184, 196, 197, 219–23, 229–33, 237, 238, 241, 242, 245, 251, 258