The ancient theology of the icon:

The ancient Theology of the Icon affirmed the goodness of God's material creation, the merely dependent nature of created matter, and the Biblical Creator-creature distinction which it asserted in place of the "Scale of Being" or Greek metaphysics which linked both "God" and creation in a sort of pantheistic continuum. Biblical iconology clearly distinguished the mere image from its referent or "prototype".

"The iconoclastic theory of the image as consubstantial to its prototype had its origin in a magical eastern understanding which makes no distinction between divinity and its image, which identifies the image with divinity, so that the image becomes an idol. It is natural that with such an understanding of the image, an icon, for a Christian conscience, must have appeared to be an idol, and its veneration--idolatry" (Leonide Ouspensky, _Theology of the Icon_, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1978, p.155).

"The contemplation of the Church is distinguishable from secular sight precisely by the fact that in the visible, the Church sees the invisible; in the temporal she sees the eternal, which she reveals to us in her worship. The icon is a part of this worship, and like worship it is a revelation of eternity in time. This is why in sacred art a portrait of a man is only a historical document. It cannot replace the liturgical image, the icon...The image, as we know, expresses the same thing as the word, and this is why we can say that, just as the saints left us descriptions in verbal images of the Kingdom of God which they carried inside themselves, so also other saints have transmitted the same descriptions to us, but in visible images, by using forms, lines and colors, a language of artistic symbols, and their evidence is just as truthful. It is the same theology, but it is in images instead of words" (L. Ouspensky, pp.198-199).

We could say that Protestant rejection of visual imagery conflated with idolatry, generally interpreted as a reaction against the abuse of art in the pre-Reformation Church, is a subtle form of gnostic repudiation of God's good creation which, were it consistent, would repudiate the Bible also, in its visible and material aspects. The Hebrew Scriptures' prohibition of graven imagery, mental or material, is a repudiation of idolatry, not a rejection of visual imagery with which the Bible has no difficulty and uses extensively. (See St. John of Damascus, _On the Divine Images Three Apologies Against Those Who Attack the Divine Images_, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1980.) [Orthodox contemplation is not simply "theoria", not simply "ocular metaphor", for there is also the "hearing" of the Word, etc.]

Contemplation in inverse perspective:

[Implying (also) that "ocular metaphor" has its place in the scheme of things]

"...In the system of inverted perspective...the formal fractures of every sort, the distortions of forms in comparison with what we would see from a single point of view, are irrelevant, but in return it is particularly important that the impression we actually have of an object viewed from various sides be conveyed...The ancient artist could not (or did not attempt to) simply depict a table, inasmuch as this table is actually located in a space which surrounds it; rather, the artist had first and foremost to represent this entire space itself (and here a dynamic visual position assisted him) and by so doing, to place the viewer, as it were, inside the picture...What is correlated, first and foremost, is not some fragment of the picture with an object which corresponds to it in reality, but the whole world of the picture with the real world...The position of the ancient painter is primarily an INTERNAL rather than EXTERNAL one with respect to the representation: he depicts first and foremost not the object itself, but the space surrounding this object (the world in which it is located), and consequently, places himself and us as it were, within this represented space. It is as if we (i.e., our glance, the glance of the viewer) were to enter the picture, and the dynamics of our gaze follows the laws governing the constructuon of this microcosm" (Boris Uspensky, _The Semiotics of the Russian Icon_, Lisse: The Peter De Ridder Press, 1976, pp.32-35).

Inverse perspective as anagogy:

This anagogy (Heavenly ascent) is as if being lifted up above the world into a new relational space (the Communion of the Saints) from which vantage point one ventures forth into the world (enters into the picture). When the circle of inversion to this "supra-temporal" (but not apart from time) transcendence point is the celestial sphere or the circle of the heavens, the experience of Election (being called out before the foundations of the world into the Heavenly Places) can take on cosmic proportions of great expansiveness and beauty.

There is a hint of this in Northrop Frye's observation that literature written from the anagogic perspective "imitates the total dream of man, and so imitates the thought of a human mind which is at the circumference and not the center of reality...nature becomes, not the container, but the thing contained, and the archetypal symbols, the city, the garden, the quest, the marriage, are no longer the desirable forms that man constructs inside nature but are themselves the forms of nature. Nature is now inside the mind of an infinite man who builds his cities out of the Milky Way...Anagogic criticism is usually found in direct connection with religion, and is to be discovered chiefly in the more uninhibited utterances of the poets themselves. It comes out in those passages of Eliot's quartets where the words of the poet are placed within the context of the incarnate Word..." (Northrop Frye, _Anatomy of Criticism Four Essays_, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957, pp.119,122) [I would read "heart and mind" for "mind".]

Inverse perspective as open embrace by (being taken up into) the "space" of God
(with plenty of room for that "great cloud of witnesses")

["Athanasian" space] is "...a differential concept that is essentially open-ended, for it is defined in accordance with the interaction between God and man, eternal and contingent happening. It is treated as a sort of coordinate system (to use a later expression) between two horizontal dimensions, space and time, and one vertical dimension, relation to God. In this kind of coordination, space and time are given a sort of transworldly aspect in which they are open to the transcendent ground of the order they bear in nature. This means that the concept of space which we use in the Nicene Creed is one that is relatively closed, so to speak on our side where it has to do with physical existence, but is one which is infinitely open on God's side. This is why frequently when Byzantine art sought to express this ikonically it deliberately reversed the natural perspective of the dais upon which Christ was represented. The Son of God become man could not be presented as one who had become so confined in the limits of the body that the universe was left empty of His government. He could not be represented, therefore, as captured by lines which when produced upwards met at some point in finite space, but only between lines which even when produced to infinity could never meet, for they reached out on either side into the absolute openness and eternity of the transcendent God..This is surely characteristic of the concepts we use in Christian theology..." (Thomas F. Torrance, _Space, Time and Incarnation_, Oxford / London / New York: Oxford University Press, 1969, 1978, p.18).

St. Gregory Palamas, also:

Vladimir Lossky, _In the Image and Likeness of God_, London and Oxford: Mowbrays, 1975, Chapter 3: _The Theology of Light_, p. 58. Palamas ref.: *Against Akyndynos*, P.G. 150, col. 823. Lossky also has a good discussion of Orthodox *apophatic* theology in his book.)

A key point to note:

It is a key point to note that Orthodox negative (apophatic) theology is in no way an abstract intellectual exercise (at least in a modern sense of abstraction), for it culminates properly in this personal, experiential, whole-person, direct encounter with the Uncreated Light. The negativity of apophasis is a falling away of that which is lesser (but positive and affirmative -- cataphatic -- in its own right) in the face of an overwhelming Trinitarian Presence. Terms such as "essence", drawn from the various philosophies, become redefined in the Light of this Presence, and not vice versa. They become recognized as mere *transcendentals*, *limiting concepts*, apophatic pointers to a surpassing reality they will never completely pin down and capture (and can only really begin to encounter in humility, through Divine Revelation). [ Thomas F. Torrance, _The Ground and Grammar of Theology_ (Belfast / Dublin /Ottawa: Christian Journals Limited, 1980) provides an insightful introduction to the problem of making down-to-earthly language subserve transcendent theological purposes.] (Rudolf Arnheim, _Visual Thinking_, University of California Press, 1969, p.153.)

April, 1996

mmm

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