(cont...)"The four types of icon" by Vladislav Andrejev
2) The second type of “icon”—the “iconological icon”
This is the Trinity’s Essential Image of Action contemplated in the Prosopon, the Image of the Revelation of God, the Uncreated World of divine ideas, qualities, and names of Light.
“Created beings are ‘images and likenesses’ of divine ideas.” The original “ideas” are “logoi of uncreated things, which are contained within the divine Mind [within the Prosopon].” The many appellations of God, which are relative, are names and terms for the qualities of God, not for His Essence. But we should not understand the “names” as abstract concepts, in the way that we give such names as Peter or Paul to people. The names of God are real powers (dynameis) and actions (energeiai) of God, and their symbolizations are keys which open the iconological Power and Beauty of God. In these creative actions, the God whom we contemplate is termed Godhead or Divinity (theiotes).
“Iconology” signifies the teaching about the uncreated Image of God, in which God depicts Himself in Essence. The trueness of the Image allows us to be filled with knowledge of God and to approach the Fire of His Essence. We cannot comprehend God’s Essence not because of a prohibition (there are no prohibitions within God’s love), but due to the inherent danger of a created being touching this Fire. However, in the somewhat “more accessible” Prosopon, God icon-paints Himself by the uncreated energies, showing Himself as the Icon of God-Revelation by means of outpourings. His uncreated Icon contains His Forethought and His Oikonomia. This Icon is written by the energies in accordance with the canon of God’s Light, Wisdom, and Love. In the “iconological” Icon, the Being of the Hypostatic Trinity is depicted as the Beauty and Life of the living God.
In addition, all the logoi, idai, and eide are contemplated within this, God’s Icon, as the Archetypes according to which created being is formed. “Not in all respects is an image like its arch-image; rather, one is ‘representation,’ and the other is ‘that which is represented’. The Prosopon contains “the pre-eternal and unoriginate Counsel of God in which lie the predeterminations of God. Within His Counsel is drawn and depicted all that which is predetermined by Him and which will undoubtedly come to fulfillment.” The uncreated powers, the energies of the Prosopon, do not mingle with created things, but are the “foundations and life-creating principalities: these are the Arch-Images, Predeterminations, Logoi and Volitions to which creation has only communion.”
It is not the divine Will alone that participates within the oikonomia of the relationships of God and man. It is necessary to distinguish the following within the general modus of oikonomia: Logos—the call, the catechism, the vocation; Idea—the hearing, the desire for union; Eidos—the execution of vocation, the union. The Forethought of God is His house-building. “Oikonomia is the will of God, by which everything that exists is governed in a proper way,” and we can say “is icon-written” in addition to “is governed.” The world is icon-written by God despite all of its deviations from the Divine Canon. Three actions of volition are distinguishable within this icon-writing:
a. The Predetermination of God—an action of Divine Will. Within the predetermination lies our virtue, which is given by God along with our nature. “God created man man, endowing him with His Grace, through which He made man a communicant with Himself.” Thus the Theotokos and Virgin Mary was “predetermined within the pre-eternal and fore-knowing Counsel of God [within His Prosopon], presented and foreshadowed by various images and words...”
b. The Forethought of God—an action of the correlation of two wills: Divine and human. The pure iconographic path to Divinization is to allow the uncreated to depict itself within the created, and so the icon-writer must possess a clear and pure consciousness, and cannot use vague notions and guesswork. As an example of this, “Grace” (Hebrew Anna) gave birth to “Mistress” (Maria), who became a holy and marvelous Icon of God.
c. The Foreknowledge of God—an action of the will of creation, free will. “The choice of deeds lies within our power, but their result depends upon God.” God has foreknowledge of all things, but does not predetermine all, leaving a free will to man.
From out of the Prosopon, God calls man to discover his “image,” and if man engages in such icon-writing of the self, God chooses him to be a “hypostasis” “according to His likeness.” Man, the created representation of the “Icon of God,” the Prosopon, has lost his pattern of symbol. As a result of the fall, he became instead a “painting” of the cosmos, and the World of the Prosopon is no longer reflected in him. Christ the God-Man turned man back onto the road of icon-writing by means of the triple union of the noetic, the material, and the uncreated. Icon-writing is a journey of ascent blessed by Christ. The “iconological” type of icon exists: we confess the Living God, and His Being is disclosed and icon-written by the Essential Life of the Prosopon. A person that has assimilated the idea of the uncreated Icon turns his attention inside himself and corrects his image in accordance with the canon of this Prosopon Icon of
the Hypostatic God.
(3) The third type of “icon”—the “anthropological icon”
This is man—a living icon created by God, contemplated through imitation and service, the image of Revelation of the life-creating Trinity.
Through holy man, God is depicted, “imaged” within the created world. To be depicted means to be in action. All of the cosmic beings that are incapable of penetrating the mystery of the Tri-Hypostatic God can look to man and see God the Creator in him, but only holy man knows God the Father. For God isn’t only depicted in man as “eidos,” isn’t merely established by internal meaning as “idea,” and doesn’t simply enlighten as “logos”: the entire Hypostatic Trinity comes to dwell within man. Being an “image of the Godhead,” man worships the invisible God; being a hypostatic “likeness,” man serves the Tri-Hypostatic God.
The iconographic canon comes to its realization in man, and constitutes the Tradition of the Church in its symbolic form. Any violation of the symbolic form of the canon leads to a distortion of the actual faith of man. Within the Church, no point is small enough and insignificant enough to be ignored and distorted. As Saint Basil writes, “out of all the dogmas and preachings which the Church keeps, some have come down to us through written instruction; others we have received in secret. Both are equally significant for our righteousness. For if we begin to denounce unwritten customs as bearing little significance, we will without noticing do damage to what is most important in the Gospel.”
Through the principle of icon-writing, “man, having reason and freedom, received the privilege of being in unceasing union with God.” Man as a whole—not some part of man—represents and is termed “icon.” The icon painted on wood consists of a triad: the depiction, the idea, and the spiritual presence; and likewise, within man, the triad of body, soul, and spirit constitutes the “Image of God.” The Prosopon Archetype of Light, Wisdom, and Love should be active in man’s entire triad, and only in such a case is the person called a saint and an icon of God. The body of man is an image of the soul and reveals the soul within the physical plane of life. The soul is the mystical heart of man and the image of the mind, uniting the noetic dimension with that of sensation. The mind is the image of the Spirit of God, the image of God’s Presence, and is thus frequently termed “spirit” as well. This is why it is said man has been created “according to the Image of God”—that is to say, “according to the Prosopon”—in the form of a triad.
By contrast, angels, though they are called “spirits” as well and stand near the Godhead, do not represent a triad and are monads—”minds” which have neither body nor soul. They are hypostatic and spiritual beings by nature, and therefore have been created “according to the Likeness of God,” and not “according to the Image.” However, in man, noetic essence and the essence of sensation are united together, and “this union is evidence of the Creator’s highest wisdom and generosity.” God created man as “a sacred icon of the union between that which is above and that which is below,” and in this union gave him the right of kingship, for God breathed His uncreated and life-creating Spirit into him. Man will in a sense excel above the angels, for in addition to the “image” allotted to him, he will gain also “likeness” in the Age to come, which is to say he will gain a full consciousness and a personal creative freedom of serving God in the Spirit. Thus, in the Divinization of the future Age, man will gain a real and true (as opposed to a nominal, as now,) hypostasis, in which the divine reflections of Logos, Idea, and Eidos will be harmoniously united. “God creates through thought [through Idea], and this thought, brought to fulfillment by the Logos and carried out by the Spirit, becomes deed [becomes Eidos].”
Man is destined to be a real symbol uniting “intelligent heavens and sentient earths.” A person that considers himself belonging to the Church ought to study iconographic symbols and to penetrate their Christian significance, for within the Church, “all is symbolic.” St. Dionysius says as well, that we Christians “must righteously penetrate into sacred symbols instead of having an ordinary [superficial] opinion about them; we cannot be irreverent to them, for they are the work and depiction of Divine patterns and are the visible images of unspoken and lofty contemplations.”
The question arises: how can invisible beings that have no corporeal form be depicted, specifically in human form? God is invisible, indescribable, and incomprehensible, but He acts and lives in His Essential Image, in the Prosopon, and reveals Himself to creatures as an Icon, to the degree of the creature’s potential. Through His Intelligent Light, God not only speaks in “word,” but also reveals Himself by “appearance.” God, not wanting to leave us in complete ignorance, takes on forms of Light that correspond to the receptiveness of our human nature. For God alone is true Reality—all other things are symbols of Him, and their purpose is to facilitate the incarnation of the Reality and the contemplation of God’s Revelation.
“Divine Forethought prescribes figures and forms to things bodiless and having no figure or bodily appearance, to be a guide for our superficial and partial knowledge of them; through the forms, they are contemplated by the immaterial eye of the mind.” Images of God Himself, which were seen and passed on to us by the holy prophets, are mentioned in the Bible: Adam, it is said, saw God and heard the sound of His footsteps. Jacob as well saw God, and wrestled with him in the image of an Angel. Moses also saw the Angel, God, speaking to him from out of the unconsumed Burning Bush. Abraham saw three youths, a human-angelic Image of the Tri-Hypostatic God, and worshipped Him. And who was it that Isaiah saw, if not God in a human Image, sitting on the Throne? Daniel also saw God in the likeness of the Son of Man. God thus intended man to be an iconic symbol of His Essential Icon of Revelation. And so, everything that is invisible, both God and bodiless angels, both the souls of men and demons, occasionally appear to the mind’s eye of sentient man in forms that depend on the required meaning to be communicated and on the particular service of that person. They may appear as to a slave by nature, or as to a friend by election, or as to a son and heir by grace.
The fact that man is the “icon of the incarnation” of the uncreated Light, Wisdom, and Love of God is of great importance. In the Transfiguration, the God-Man opened the Icon for us once again, and icon-writing resumed. That is the point from which we acknowledge the true “first-appeared Icon,” for Christ is “the living Image and immutable Imprint of the invisible God.” And so, the moment at which the apostles fell to the ground, as if involuntarily bowing down before Christ whom they saw transfigured into the Icon of Glory, was the point from which the serving of demons ceased. Creation was enlightened by the iconographic rays of Light, for the Image of the Hypostasis shone forth among men. However, Christ reestablished only the natural will of man. The conscious, or gnomic, will still requires a journey of icon-writing. This journey has many stages, because it is liturgical. It requires, on every step of the ascent of body, soul, and spirit, the correct, conscious choice of the icon-writer’s canon over the self-will of the artist.
This is the third, “anthropological” type of icon, which addresses the topic of artistic prayer. For an “icon” is an “image of action,” an artistry. This artistry can be that of God in man, or that of man on his own, or finally, that of demons using man’s image as a garment.
(4) The fourth type of “icon”—the “cosmological” or “symbolic icon”
This type is contemplated on the icon board through material paint and geometric patterns.
An icon does not merely describe various holy people who lived throughout history. “The material image shows as well a certain incorporeal and mental contemplation,” for otherwise iconography would be the art of portraiture, and not a “theology.” Thus, this fourth type of icon can be subdivided into two aspects (symbolically, for the two are depicted simultaneously):
(a) The images of historically real people who reached fulfillment of holiness, and events from the lives of saints, church feasts, and so on.
(b) Theological, mythological, and allegorical ideas and themes, which are depicted in agreement with ecclesio-liturgical symbolism. Examples are: the myth about St. George and the dragon; the Burning Bush in the form of the Theotokos with Child (Moses, according to the story, did not see this); the depiction of St. John the Baptist with angelic wings; the underlying significance of the four main types of icon depicting the Mother and Child—the Annunciation, Eleusa, Hodegetria, and Oranta icons; the allegorical depiction of “old man Jordan” in the icon of the Baptism of Christ; in the icon of the Nativity, the figure of the cosmic spirit of the mountains standing before Joseph and tempting him; the icon of Florus and Laurus containing the wild and tamed horses (which can only be viewed within the context of a Christian mythology). These examples serve to show that in iconography, philosophical, mythological, and theological ideas live side by side with historical events and personages and deserve special attention on the part of the person contemplating the icon.
Primarily, only the deceased, i.e. the invisible souls of the saints, are depicted in icons, not persons who are currently living. Also depicted are the spirits of service—the angels. The Divine Presence of God is depicted either through light, or through “idea”: depictions of the angel-like Presence of God Himself are distinguished from depictions of regular created angels by means of certain symbols (ex: an eight-pointed halo, or special wing and garment colors). As a supplement, all that which directs toward salvation and deepening of faith is depicted as well. Everything that is invisible is capable of being depicted in image, but in the icon, an “idea” never exists on its own. This is to say there is never pure allegorical personification in the icon, but the “idea” always exists together with and within the saints, who exist in reality in the invisible dimension.
An icon-writer has subordinated his imagination to theological meaning and differs in this respect from the artist who draws up the ideas and allegorical characters for his paintings through the conceptions of his own mind. Theological ideas are essential to the icon, for even the lowest aspect of the mind, discursive thought, is not left behind in a state of ignorance during the contemplation of an icon. It also engages in thought about God, by means of earthly categories. For instance, who has physically seen Christ coming in Glory? The icon-writer, though, can depict the theological idea of it using symbolic methods. Even St. Gregory the Theologian says that “the mind, despite a great effort to renounce the bodily, is completely incapable of this.” And so, there is always a part of the icon that draws on logic, so as not to deprive the mind of participation in contemplation. Apostle Paul says as well: “for that which is invisible in God is clearly seen from the creation of the world through meditation on the things that are created, even His eternal Power and Godhead.” It is essential to depict the Godhead of God in the symbolic icon, for it is the real Arch-Image, and its imprint must be visible in the “image.” The principle of such representation, or “imaging,” must be viewed within the aspect of this formula: “everything stands removed from God, not in space, but in nature.”
To develop and show the nature of visible and invisible “ideas,” a nature that contains many intricate distinctions, is the task of the symbolic art of the icon, for the impetus for the incarnation of light within color, idea within form, is given by the God-Man Himself. Beings such as angels and the souls of men are created, and therefore basically have the potential to be depicted, but the meaning of such a depiction—its content and the Revelation which is read there—will vary depending on the given idea contained in the icon. “Not only that which is circumscribed by space and time is describable, but also that which is circumscribed by understanding.” An idea is always movement, and movement is the realization of potential. Icons are not a gallery of portraits, albeit holy portraits, but rather a live connection between the supplicant and the archetype. This connection can become a more and more conscious through the aid of the ideas and meanings which are symbolically and allegorically expressed in the icon. There are many levels of prayer, and therefore many levels in which an icon can express things; it can express something unique to each person gazing upon it, through allegorical supplement and parable. Of course, the supplement should not become a goal in itself in icon-writing, but must remain only a philosophical insert.
It is said: “all beings, not merely the ones whom we perceive by sensation, but angels as well, change, re-form, and are transfigured in manifold ways.” And the icon is a symbol of change and transfiguration: the darkness of un-knowing and the image of the knowledge of God. For the icon is mainly a “name” of God depicted within images and ideas. We must understand that God is always beyond any name that we can conceive of, but He is also the visible revelation within every name that is worthy of Him.
The “cosmological” icon, which is expressed by means of the substance of color, speaks of the archetypal Light of the Prosopon. It completes the entire hierarchical scale of God’s Revelation, and for this reason cannot be excluded from the realm of the knowledge of God. The icon holds its place within the iconological hierarchy of precious objects in the Church. Painted on wood symbolizing the Tree of Life, the hand-created icon continues even now to deflect the attacks of all manner of contemporary iconoclasts. The art of the icon is real prayer and will never be conquered by iconoclasm, for the basis of icon-writing does not lie in the suppositions of logical dialectic: its foundation lies within the miracle of God’s Revelation, made visible through paint and image.
