An icon is an image, but an image which is meant
to be a statement of faith. It is a statement of faith in line and colour as
definite, as completely rooted in the faith and experience of the Orthodox
Church as any written statement and in that respect icons must correspond to the
experience of the total community, and the artist who paints them is only a
hand, only one who puts into line and colour what is the faith and the knowledge
of the Christian body in the same way in which a theologian is the expression of
his Church, and the Church has a right to judge him. That explains why one of
the rules given to icon-painters when they learn their trade is that they should
neither copy slavishly an icon painted before them, nor invent an icon. Because
one can not identify slavishly with the spiritual experience expressed by
another person, on the other hand, one cannot invent a spiritual experience and
present it as though it was the faith of the Church.
Now, an icon is a proclamation of faith
primarily, in the sense that an icon of Christ, an icon of the Mother of God or
of saints is possible only since the Incarnation because they all relate to the
Incarnation and its consequences. The Old Testament taught us that God can not
be represented because indeed, the God of the Old Testament was the Holy One of
Israel, He was a spiritual Being that has revealed Himself but had never been
visibly present face to face with anyone. You remember the story of Moses on
Sinai when he asked God to allow him to see Him and the Lord answered, “No man
can see My face and live.” And He allowed Moses to see Him moving away from him,
as it were, from the back but never meet Him face to face. It is in Incarnation,
through the historical fact that God became man, that God acquired a human face
and that it became possible by representing Christ, the incarnate God to
represent indirectly God Himself.
Now, there is one thing which is absolutely
clear to all of us is that no-one knows what Christ looked like. So an icon is
never meant to be a portrait, it is meant to convey an experience and this is
different. The difference between, perhaps I should have used the word
“snapshot” rather than “portrait”, any attempt at saying, “this is what Christ
looked like” is fantasy. We have no likeness of Christ, but what we know is that
from the experience of the Church and of the saints, Who He was and this “Who He
was” can be expressed in line and in colour. And this is why so many icons do
not aim at beauty, at comeliness, we do not try to represent Christ in the
Orthodox tradition as the most beautiful, virile man whom we can imagine. We do
not try to represent the Mother of God as the most comely and attractive young
woman, what we try to represent or to convey through the icon is something about
their inner self.
And this explains why certain features in an
icon are underlined out of proportion while other features are just indicated.
If you look at an icon, a good icon, not the kind of thing which you find
commonly, say in Russian or in Greek churches, but icons painted by the great
painters of Orthodoxy, you find that certain things are singled out — the brow,
the eyes that convey a message, while the cheeks or the mouth are just indicated
as common features. And the aim of an icon is not to present you with a likeness
of the person but with the message, to present you with a face that speaks to
you in the same way in which a portrait is different from a snapshot. A snapshot
is a very adequate image of the person photographed at a given moment. It’s
exactly what at that given moment the person was, but it leaves out very often
most of the personality of this particular person, while a good portrait is
painted in the course of many sittings that allow the artist to look deeply into
the face of a person, to single out features, which are fluid, which change,
which move but which, each of them, express something of the personality. And so
that the portrait is something much more composite, much more rich and much more
adequate to the total personality than a snapshot would be although at no moment
was this particular face exactly as the painter has represented it on the
portrait. It is not an attempt at having a snapshot in colour but of conveying a
vision of what a person is.
Now, this being said, we treat icons with
reverence, and number of people in the West think that to us icons are very much
what idols were in older times for pagan nations. They aren’t. They are not
idols because they do not purport or even attempt at giving an adequate picture
of the person concerned. This I have already mentioned abundantly but I will add
this. Whether it is in words, in theological statements, in doctrinal
statements, in the creeds, in the prayers and the hymns of the Churches, no
attempt is ever made in the Orthodox Church at expressing, at giving a cogent, a
complete image of what God is. Already in the IV century St. Gregory of Nazianze
wrote that if we attempted to collect from the Old Testament, from the New
Testament, from the experience of the Church, from the personal lives of saints
their sayings and their writings, all the features which reveal to us what and
who God is and try to build out of them a completely coherent, a complete
picture of God, what we would have achieved is not a picture of God, it would be
an idol because it would be on our scale, it would be as small as we are indeed,
smaller than we are because it could be contained in our vision, in our
understanding.
(To be followed)
