{"id":10050,"date":"2024-10-02T14:38:02","date_gmt":"2024-10-02T14:38:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=10050"},"modified":"2024-12-29T22:55:04","modified_gmt":"2024-12-29T22:55:04","slug":"seeing-and-unseeing-the-icon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2024\/10\/02\/seeing-and-unseeing-the-icon\/","title":{"rendered":"Seeing and Unseeing the Icon"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Seeing and Unseeing the Icon<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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The long tradition of the icon in Eastern Christianity has sometimes baffled Western thinkers, but a sacramental understanding of the link between image and reality can shed some light on the mystery.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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By Jordan Parro
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Photo by Liviu Florescu on Unsplash<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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\u201cDivinity remains hidden even after its revelation, or to speak more divinely, it is hidden in the revelation; for the mystery of Jesus is hidden, and may be uttered by no word or mind, but even when spoken, remains unsaid, and when conceived, unknown.\u201d
\u2014 Dionysius the Areopagite, Celestial Hierarchy<\/em> 2:5<\/p>

\u201cThe past is never dead. It\u2019s not even past.\u201d
\u2014 William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Icons are symbols. Late-ancient conceptions of the symbolic are quite far afield from the contemporary colloquial usage of the term. Symbols, in the ancient near-eastern philosophical register, especially that out of which Christianity was born, were not mere mnemonics, as if they were simply there to direct the memory to previously learned truths. A \u201csymbol,\u201d as its etymology suggests, brings two things\u2014two realities\u2014together. Usually, this combination of realities is asymmetrical; that is, it takes some lower or seemingly arbitrary thing and saturates it with the higher. For late-ancient Christians, there was nothing arbitrary about the relationship between the symbol and that which is symbolized. This is perhaps seen most acutely in how Christians, both ancient and modern, have revered the sacraments of the Church. Leaving aside for the moment extreme cases, Christians have largely agreed over the centuries that converts should be baptized in water, the eucharist should be confected of bread and wine, ordination should include a laying on of hands, etc. The material elements of the Church\u2019s sacramental life do not exist as mere object lessons, though they can perform this pedagogical function as well. Water, as an example, hearkens back to the primordial and chaotic deep of Genesis 1, against which God created the heavens and the earth; the seas through which God\u2019s people passed from slavery toward promise; and the very, shall we say \u201cdamp,\u201d experience of birth itself. The water of baptism, into which Christ himself was baptized, becomes the means by which a person is reborn.<\/p>

Similarly, the conciliar Church\u2019s sacred art of iconography is not merely art (though it is not less than this). After a series of synods and counter-synods, conciliar Christians met in Nicaea (787) to affirm not the beauty or pedagogical efficacy of Christian iconography, but its theological necessity. The making of icons, the council affirmed, was a dogmatic consequence of the incarnation itself. The Church could no more dispense with iconography than it could with the affirmation of Christ\u2019s full humanity and divinity. The incarnation of the Logos sanctified not only Christ\u2019s individual body and humanity, but the entire sensible and intelligible cosmos. Icons, then, could not be reduced to mere paint on wood, or treated as the idols of the pagans, any more than the water of baptism could be reduced to the mere consequence of rainfall. Icons beckon the viewer into a dialogue. They are an invitation to engage their own beauty and then to pass beyond it with the eyes of the heart to an eternal reality: that the invisible and uncontainable God is seen and contained within the body of Christ.<\/p>

As profound as this reality can be, it does not answer with any clarity why<\/em> it is that humans make images. It was the twentieth-century theologian Sergius Bulgakov who first brought to my attention a particular historical anomaly. In his work Icons<\/em>, he asks what theological impetus there might be for the phenomenon of image making more broadly and what separates it from the images prohibited by the decalogue. He notes in this work that the hierarchs at Nicaea (787) canonized a liturgical, rather than dogmatic, teaching, since neither iconoclasts nor icondules, as the advocates of icons were called, denied the incarnational doctrine on which the theology of icons is based. His fundamental intuition was that there was something deeper left for the Church to say on the matter.<\/p>

There is a certain antinomy between the production of icons and the Christian affirmation of a transcendent God. Christians affirm with the great pseudonymous saint called Dionysius the Areopagite that even to say that God is good, or righteous, or that he even exists, is a failure. Gregory of Nyssa anticipated this when he wrote in On Virginity<\/em>, \u201cAnyone who tries to describe the ineffable Light in language is truly a liar\u2014not because he hates the truth but because of the inadequacy of his description.\u201d With this commitment to God\u2019s total otherness from the visible world, how does it come to be that the Church sees icons as a theological necessity?<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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The image is as much reminder of the reality of loss as it is a reinstantiation of a past reality of wholeness.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Photo by Maria Lupan on Unsplash<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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It is not my goal to reproduce Bulgakov\u2019s entire thesis here, but I would like to think with him as a starting point. Bulgakov speculated that the true essence of iconography was not simply a human phenomenon that might pass away, but that it is already realized personally within the divine life of the Trinity. \u201cIconicity,\u201d as he called it, is the very principle of divine life as the Son is the very image (\u03b5\u1f30\u03ba\u1f7c\u03bd\/icon<\/em>) of the Father (Col 1:15). But for Bulgakov there is nothing that belongs to the divine life that does not manifest within its creation. Since Christ is the Wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:24) and it is in this divine Wisdom that God created the world (Ps 104:24), St. Paul can truly say it is within the divine that we have our very being (Acts 17:28). All of creation then, is implicated in the divine life. The dynamic iconicity of the Trinity is the true proto-icon of all creation. To put it more simply, humans make images, have artistic impulses, and create because they are themselves images of the God who not only creates the world but has image-making as a fundamental aspect of his very nature. We are images of an imaged God.<\/p>

What makes icons different from idols for Bulgakov, besides the fact that icons are not worshipped in the Christian traditions that continue the practice, is that until the full revelation of God in Christ, there was no visible prototype. All image making, whether idolatrous or artistic, had only a fallen creation as its reference. Christ\u2019s was the first perfect humanity ever glimpsed, outshining even the unstained prelapsarian Adam, and establishing the condition for the possibility that iconography can, within the context of the life of the Church, raise us, the faithful, to Christ\u2019s own divinized humanity.<\/p>

Now we set Bulgakov aside to consider another bittersweet question. Christ\u2019s human body joined ours in a fallen condition, subject as it was to real suffering seen no more acutely than in the passion. Christ\u2019s resurrected and glorified body triumphed over suffering but did not erase its historical scars. The resurrection valorized history and made Christ\u2019s scars the very tokens of his triumph\u2014a difficult thought to bear especially amid our own sufferings, to which the promise of future relief is often a poor salve. As much as icons are a witness to both historical and spiritual truths, icons serve as well to obscure. The people kiss, venerate, process, and anoint icons, but the icons are not the prototypes, the realities hoped for. Anyone who has been absent from loved ones for any duration can understand this. Out of loss or absence we may find ourselves kissing the image of our loved one, not mistaking the image for the person but hoping that by some inexplicable means, the love we show that image might pass from paper and ink to the one depicted. The image is as much reminder of the reality of loss as it is a reinstantiation of a past reality of wholeness. That former reality might remain lost but for its continued presence as an image.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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It is within something divine that we live, and move, and have our being.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Photo by Ruth Gledhill on Unsplash<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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To return to the point with which I began, icons are symbols. They are no substitute for that which they depict, but nevertheless participate in the very reality they present. And as much as they obscure that reality\u2014being only painted wooden blocks, mosaics or what have you, formed in stylistic dissimilitude to their referents\u2014it is only within this obscuring, this hiding of reality, that it becomes present. Iconographic artistic motifs may intentionally distort human proportions, but they do so to emphasize spiritual matters\u2014icons are less life-like than photographs, but perhaps more true.<\/p>

I have been married for fourteen years. As much as I would like to say that I know my wife, and I know her more deeply than almost anyone else does, my mind cannot circumscribe her. As much as we come to think like one another, anticipate one another, enjoy similar things, and raise a family together, there nevertheless remains an infinite surplus of being. Something about her remains perpetually hidden from me. This, I suspect, is one way in which she images the divine. As manifest as she may be to me as a living breathing reality, and as much as that reality is constitutive of her experience, she cannot be reduced to the sum of her atoms, nor the aggregation of her experiences. She is infinite. And yet, without the sum of her material existence, I would not be able to say that I know her at all. It is only because she is hidden from me that she is revealed.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

When I first held our newborn son, I suddenly found myself confronted by what seemed like a present and living truth: He will die someday. What I felt was not terror nor sorrow but rather a feeling of weight. It was, simply, gravity.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

And yet, insofar as he is the image of a hidden glory, the very foundation of his existence is saturated by the mystery of the invisible yet imaged God. And just as an icon may be damaged or destroyed, so too might my son suffer physical or emotional damage in his life. Many icons in the most ancient churches date back to Christianity\u2019s earliest days. I have seen some of these icons myself. My son will not endure like those mosaics do. But he is the icon of an unutterable word. He and I both share the same source. One day he will be taken from me, or I from him, but our lives cannot be reduced to our lifespan or our history. Our lives are not only in this material existence. It is within something divine that we live, and move, and have our being. We are symbols, awash in a reality that is more than ourselves.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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All photos from Unsplash<\/em>
<\/strong><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Jordan Parro<\/strong> is a doctoral candidate in the History of Christianity with a minor in Systematic Theology at Boston College. Jordan\u2019s research interests include theologies and mystical traditions of the late antique Eastern Mediterranean, as well as issues pertaining to modern philosophies of religion. He and his family of four (so far) live in Boston, Massachusetts, where they enjoy all the normal Boston things, like Dunkin’, Red Sox games, and being best friends with Matt Damon.
<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The long tradition of the icon in Eastern Christianity has sometimes baffled Western thinkers, but a sacramental understanding of the link between image and reality can shed some light on the mystery. By Jordan Parro<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":10051,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"ocean_front_end_style_editor":"no","ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[48,10,90],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives","category-essays","category-issue-32-treasures-on-earth","entry","has-media"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/farefwd.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/Photo-by-James-Coleman-on-Unsplash.jpg?fit=864%2C576&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10050"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10050\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10103,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10050\/revisions\/10103"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/me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