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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Modern people make horrible contemplators of icons. This is not only because we have excised icons from the venues in which they were originally deployed, hanging them on the walls of this-or-that National-Gallery-of- Art. It has also to do with the way we see things. We trust sight in a way pre-modern people never could. Consider the contact lens: Small convex pieces of silicon we place over our pupils to refract light more precisely onto our retinas. We put them in and we forget about them—until our eyes begin to burn. But even then we rarely think of contacts as mediators that decisively affect our capacity to trust in sight. Or consider the television. With a tap of a button it comes on, bringing us images from … where? New York, Hollywood, London—one, two, three thousand miles away. This is mediation, and we trust it so much that we have forgotten to experience it as such. The relevant question is, Why?
1 For a good account both of the modern obsession with measurement and univocity as well as of some recent attempts to resist it, see Dunne, Joseph, Back to the Rough Ground: ‘Phronesis’ and ‘Techne’ in Modern Philosophy and in Aristotle (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993)Google Scholar. See also Nussbaum, Martha, ‘The Discernment of Perception: An Aristotelian Conception of Private and Public Rationality’, in Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 54–105.Google Scholar
2 See Ward, Graham, ‘The Displaced Body of Jesus Christ’, in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, edsjohn Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward (London: Routledge, 1998), 163–181.Google Scholar
3 Turner, , The Darkness of Cod: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially the fourth and fifth chapters, ‘Inferiority and Ascent: Augustine's De Trinitate’ and ‘Hierarchy Interiorised: Bonaventure's Hinerarium Mentis in Deum’
4 See for an extended analysis of this claim, Williams, Rowan, Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000).Google Scholar
5 This, for instance, is the view of Michel Quenot, who maintains in The Icon: Window on the. Kingdom (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1991Google Scholar) that The bond between the icon and its prototype does not mean that they look exactly a like, or must be identical. It depends quite simply on the representation of the Person, whose name is inscribed on the icon, so that “the honor rendered to the image goes to its prototype” (Nicaea II)’, p. 40.
6 CD 11/1, 75.
7 CD 11/1, 224.
8 John of Damascus, On the Divine Images: Three Apologies Against Those Who Attack the Divine Images, trans. Anderson, David (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press: 1980), 16.Google Scholar
9 See Sahas, Daniel J., Icon and Logos: Sources in Eighth-Century lconoclasm (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 8, 9.Google Scholar
10 Hans Belting says, ‘If we are to believe Didron, [the icon] did not develop; it was set apart from the life of Byzantine society. If we listen to Byzantine theologians, the icon appears as almost a divine revelation.’ See Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art, trans. Jephcolt, Edmund (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1994), 26.Google Scholar
11 Belting, , Likeness and Presence, esp. 26–29.Google Scholar
12 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 2: The Dramatis Personae: Man in God, trans. Harrison, Graham (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1990), 317–318.Google Scholar
13 von Balthasar, Theo-Drama2, 324.
14 See von Balthasar, Theo-Drama2, 327–8, n. 37.
15 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V.16.1, 2, in Roberts, Alexander and Donaldson, James, eds, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995), 544.Google Scholar
16 According to Belting, Likeness and Presence, 145.
17 Belting, 145.
18 John of Damascus, On the Divine Images, 73–5. See also Belting, 145.
19 von Balthasar, Theo-Drama 2, 328.
20 Zizioulas, , Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1997), 99.Google Scholar
21 Zizioulas, , Being as Communion, 76.Google Scholar
22 See Greer, Rowan A., The Captain of Our Salvation: A Study in the Patristic Exegesis of Hebrews (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1973)Google Scholar and Clark, Elizabeth A., The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), ch. 2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
23 Origen, On First Principles, III.4.1.
24 Greer, 8, 13. There is here no reason to assume that Origen thought Christ revealed some ‘meaning’ more determinative of our destiny than himself. Indeed, Origen called Christ ‘autoalelheia’.
25 Origen, On First Principles 1. 2. 6.
26 I concentrate on Damascene, whose argumentation in these matters is more complex than Theodore's. While it can be argued that Theodore's refutations of the iconoclasts are more coherent than Damascene's apologies, Theodore attempts to render discursive and systematic elements in Damascene's arguments that resist discursivity. A prime instance of this is Theodore's attempt to distinguish between icons and idols. Whereas Damascene suggests that we all use icons, but put them to different uses, Theodore nails down an a priori theoretical distinction between icons and idols that has practical consequences: ‘What person with any sense does not understand the difference between an idol and an icon? That the one is darkness, and the other light? That the one is deceptive, the other infallible? That the one belongs to polytheism, whereas the other is the clearest evidence of the divine economy?’ See On the Holy Icons, trans. Roth, Catherine P. (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1981)Google Scholar, 27.1 assume Theodore did not think John was a person without any sense, although such an implication might indeed be drawn.
27 Sahas, , Icon and Logos, 8–9.Google Scholar
28 See Aquinas, ST IaIIae.Q40.al, Q54.a2 and IIaIIae.Q17.a2, Q18.a2.
29 John of Damascus, On the Divine Images, 14 (§2).
30 On the Divine Images, 16. See also footnote 10.
31 On the Divine Images, 20.
32 See John's taxonomy of kinds of images, On the Divine Images, 74–8.
33 On the Divine Images, 20–1.
34 On the Divine Images, 18.
35 On the Divine Images, 19.
36 See Sahas, , Icon and Logos, 7.Google Scholar
37 On the Divine. Images, 40.
38 On the Divine Iviages, 78.
39 On the Divine Images, 15.
40 On the Divine Images, 30.
41 On the Divine Images, 77.
42 On the Divine Images, 38.
43 Damascene also quotes Basil in this regard: ‘Bless the martyrs heartily, that you may be a martyr by intention. Thus, even though you depart this life without persecutor, fire, or lash, you will still be found worthy of the same reward’ (38). Clearly, Basil understands the impossibility of imitating the saints' lives identically. Whether John finally agrees with him in this regard remains unclear.
44 On the Divine Images, 37.
45 On the Divine Images, 36.
46 On the Divine Images, 36 (my emphasis).
47 Cf. Ford, David F., Self and Salvation: Being Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 50–51.Google Scholar
48 Thanks to Stanley Hauerwas, Louis A. Ruprecht Jr, and Geoffrey Wainwright for their generous aid in this essay. See Ruprecht's ‘Icons and Incarnation: Situating the Christian Debate About Representation in Mediterranean History’, (currently unpublished essay available from the author, Spring 1999) for further investigation of some of the themes discussed here.