Shifting the perspective of icon

Wojciech Stawarz, Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas,

JP2 Studies 2023/2024

The contemporary Christian believer, having been brought up in a post-secular

reality faces a certain struggle in trying to recieve the heritage of european christian
culture, and at the same time is confronted by the need of interpreting the
phenomenon of a proceeding equalisation of christian art with its secular counterpart.
The tradition of christian art is being taught to the modern man in the process of
formal education, and by that it is meant a mostly secular environment. In that case
there appears the risk of blurring the lines between religious, sacral and secular works
of art, which may result in an equal blur between the realities of sacrum and
profanum, further leading to the corrosion of the former. It seems necessary then to
try to recollect the context necessary for christian art to work in its most natural
context, to be a place of meeting God's act and presence. The matter seems to be
quite urgent, as one of the central teachings of the Church is being lost to cultural
revolutions. Let us just remind the teaching of the Second Council of Nicea, where it
is stated that christian art is an integral art of a living tradition and teaching of the
Church and by itself is one of the sources of the Revelation (by the way, it has to be
noted that the explicit appearance of the term ”revelation” does not happen until Saint
Thomas Acquinas, the council does not use this word in its canons).
To reach the goal of a certain rehabilitation of art in our Church, we need a
proper language. In that case it might be useful to bring up a formulation by Jean-Luc
Marion in the first chapter of ”God Without Being”. According to Jean-Luc Marion,
we can distinguish two manners of interaction with an object, (specifically a piece of
art) that are accessible to man. Those are the ”idol” and ”icon”. We encounter an idol
in the case when an object grabs our attention and binds us to itself, when it
correspondes with our needs and desires. Conversely, the icon sends us further away,
gazes at us; becomes a window to a certain mysterious reality which exerts from us a
certain stance, confrontation with a reality which the icon itself unfolds.
 In correspondence to those two concepts shortly presented above, let us risk
forming a certain conclusion: the same piece of art may function in completely
different ways in different environments. This statement seems problematic if we try
to connect this to a certain tendency present in the tradition of the Church, the
thomistic notion of binding the ”ways of being” of the objects to the objects
themselves. We can cite John Paul II here, who in his letter to artists writes that sacral
art has as its goal the direction of human mind to God. In that case, art is a certain
carrier of theological content, which in the thomistic school is ”beauty”, which, of
course, is rooted in the piece of art itself as its metaphysical quality, for he source of
all beauty is God himself.
Another question sprouting from this distinction is as follows: Are idol and
icon intersubjective terms? It seems that they must be purely subjective, as we often
encounter completely incoherent interpretations of the same piece of art. For some,
the paintings in the sistince chapel relate to a certain spiritual reality, for others they
are just a pretext to admire the technical skill of the painter, the fairness and of the
bodies depicted, the depth of perspective encountered on a flat surface. And at the
same time we have Kandinsky's early abstract canvas, for the common man seen as
just a "gathering of neat shapes", which are "pretty-or-ugly", while in fact they are
supported by a quite compound reflection of the painter, who speculates in his texts
about the possibilities granted by abstract art to point at immaterial, unknown
realities.
The distinction provided by Marion provokes another question: Can any piece
of art be an icon? If it is so, we find ourselves dangerously close to Duchamp's
"ready-made" pivot in art; we put the author and the admirer of art in the same
category, as "creators of context", as contemporary artists see themselves. It is not
necessary to prove the problems which arise from this interpretation as the possibility
of any explicitly "christian" art would in that case be simply incapable of forming a
stable connection to the objectivity of the events of christian Revelation.
Another doubt that rises is that Marion's distinction, although elegant in the
way of promising a clear line between mirror-idol and window-icon, loses its charm
when we confront it with the plurality of contexts, real contexts in which works of art
thrive; as we choose any of these contexts, we find a mosaic of contradictious
images, opinions, shady judgements – doxa is in its prime here. However, there might
be hope here if we gather these images and interpret them just as different realisations
of idolatry. Only then opens for us a chance to assess the icon's possiblity, and we
must refrain from any stronger conceptualisation, if we want to escape the risk of
confusing icons with idols.
We state that, for a certain inaccessability in which we are introduced to while
meeting with the icon, we are not really able to make statements about a certain being
and the way it functions in the world. The distinguishment of idol and icon does not
lead to any distinguishments in the real world. Here we are talking about an
experience which engages the human person at a deeper level than just the
consciousness, therefore we have no real criteria to state (or maybe it would be more
precise to say ”articulate”), if a certain being (a work of art in particular) leads us to
any ”higher reality” or just to our imagination. It may be that it's just a question of
trusting one's own means of perception; anyway, it might be more prudent here to
speak about the icon's ”possibility” than about its real existence.
Is an icon even possible then? Before we try (or not) to answer that, our
intellect demands that we take a look at a certain presupposition that the icon carries,
which is hid in the idea of the way how the icon ”functions”. We cannot form
statements about ”ways of functioning” of real beings. This way we cross the line of
the domain of interpretation, where statements are constructed mostly regarding the
way of functioning of the world in the context of a specific being which is thehuman
person. To put it differently: an object's factual input in its relation to man (or maybe
to Dasein) must be uniform and not ambigious; if that is not the case, we comply to a
certain optical illusion, confusing reality with its interpretation.
The problem shown above presents itself also on a different, more empirical
level. If it is right to limit the manifestation of idol and icon to the platform of human
culture (and specifically, its artifacts), then we are obliged to say that both of
Marion's concepts must somehow relate to the human person, and specifically –
always appear in at least one stable causal relation with the creator of the artifact,
which artifact realises itself as icon or idol. Natural phenomenons do not present this
type of relation to us. We are not allowed to state that the elements of nature, present
on, let us say, an uninhabited island have any degree or even chance of functioning as
idols/icons. This problem exerts from us a reflection about the possibility of natural
signs – which requires further study. However if we do believe that meaning rises on
the basis of civilisation, then regardless of a certain unintuitiveness we are obliged to
say that all phenomenons and objects to which the ancient cosmologies referred were
not – and could not have been – icons nor idols.
So let us come back the former question asked but not answered; Is icon even
possible, is it possible to form any kind of statement regarding to it? What can be
said, is that it seems necessary to try to find the real conditions that could narrow the
scope of possibility of an icon's manifestation (As a side note, it seems that it is not
really possible to make us of negations at this point – stating what icon is not simply
doesn't suffice anymore). In the first place we should focus on defining the realities
apparent in the human perspective of the interior; We should not try to explain the
influence of exterior conditions on the person–object interaction, however it shall be
noted that they are always present in some way, shaping the unrepeateble
phenomenon that every single event is.
The present sketch will refrain from solving this problem in its entirety; It shall
focus only on proposing an initial condition, which may be crucial to an icon's
possibility. We could call it ”openness”. It implies that the epistemological encounter
of a person with an object should not be charged with any former presuppositions
towards the object. It is obvious that we are not capable of getting rid of some initial
beliefs regarding the categories in which we understand said object. Those categories
however stand aside in the moment we encounter the object; we could say that there
is a step in this encounter which, if only it is lived consciously, gives us an
opportunity to apply our presuppositions to the object. This moment is crucial,
because without it we are not able to relate the object to our categories of
understanding. However, it might be the case that the idea of icon demands that we
leave the concept of "understanding" aside. This presents a certain potential in the
context of the contemporary critique of western christianity by the orthdox, by which
western catholicism reduces christian art to a form of presentation of discursive truths
about faith. This critique is not entirely unbased, as we can find notions of this
reduction in the first concepts of revelation, presented by Thomas Acquinas in
Summa Theologiae, where it is written that Revelation is a "source of divine
knowledge". Hopefully though, we are now able to untangle this problem by
phenomenological means, the proof of which we can see in modern concepts of
revelation, for example those proposed by Jean-Luc Marion himself.
Let us see in addition what does the orthodox tradition propose in lieu of this
reduction. To use the words of Jerzy Nowosielski, an important orthodox painter and
scholar: „The charismatic act of painting as an important element of God's glory (...),
is, for the orthodox, an anticipation of reality which will have passed the trial of the
fire of the Second Coming [of Christ]”. This proposal is verbalised in the context of
orthodox sacral paintings, but it can as well be extrapolated and adapted to the
context of christian art and promoted as an inspiration. The person of an artist in this
perspective is percieved as a person with a gift of a charisma, a certain ability to act
for the good of the Church. This type of action may be a fundamental intuition
necessary for icon (in the sense of Jean-Luc Marion), to be formed,
Hence we repeat a doubt already formed: it may be that at this point of our
reflection we leave phenomenality for a certain anthropocentrism, while it is not clear
if it corresponds with Marion's intention. On the other hand, if we are studying the
way how being function and not the being in itself, the anthropocentrism point of
view might be inescapable, maybe even desireable. Thus hopefully we have replaced
the idea of an object ”functioning-as-icon” with a perspective of a man ”living” an
icon. Although a thorough study of conditions of this ”living” seems to be a
monumental task, we have limited ourselved to providing a simple suggestion of
”opennes” – and however banal this concept may seem, it is just a beginning of a
longer meditation.