The Shepherd, May 2008
Chancery
of the Holy Synod in Resistance
REPORT
The Holy Icon of the Resurrection
Basic Principles
for Overcoming an Unfruitful Dispute
I. The Language of Iconography as Depictional Theology
1. IT HAS been very aptly written that
Every Orthodox Icon expresses a truth which is, at the same time, a common experience of the One, Catholic Church. There is no place, here, for individual inspiration.1
2. CONSEQUENTLY, as the “Russian Kontoglou,” Leonid Ouspensky, observes:
[O]ne cannot consider every image, even one that is very old and very beautiful, as an infallible authority, especially if it originated in a time of decadence such as our own. Such an image may correspond to the teaching of the Church or it may not. It can deceive rather than teach. In other words, the teaching of the Church can be falsified by the image as much as by word [written or oral]. For this reason, the Church has always fought not for the artistic quality of its art, but for its authenticity, not for its beauty, but for its truth.2
3. THE ORTHODOX ICON, as depictional theology, constitutes a codified language, which—particularly with regard to events from the Old and the New Testaments—does not confine the meaning of the events to their historical place or the temporal instant at which they occurred, but transcends these factors in order to teach us a dogmatic truth, to wit, their real meaning.
• Thus, with regard, for example, to the architecture in an Icon, the building (or the landscape: the cave in the Icon of the Nativity of Our Savior, and also in the Icon of the Resurrection) indicates the place in which the event occurs, but
never encloses the scene; it only acts as a background, so that the event does not occur in the building, but in front of it.3
4. WE CAN OBSERVE, during the period of theological decadence in the regions of the Orthodox East (from the end of the sixteenth century through the beginning of the seventeenth century), a gradual loss of understanding of the language of iconography and, at the same time, the profound influence of Western models of thought and art.
• An immediate consequence of this loss was the prevalence of (at times unbridled) imagination and an effort to adhere to the historical place or the temporal moment of the events in question, which were henceforth presented in a completely naturalistic manner (and moreover, inside buildings or within landscapes), entirely stripped of their deeper theological essence— their iconographic meaning.
5. THE FOOTNOTES and comments of St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite in the Rudder4 that treat of the Holy Icons represent “a typical example of this development,” as Leonid Ouspensky remarks:
‘St. Nicodemus’ understanding of sacred art is permeated with western rationalism’; ‘the seven reasons [sic; St. Nikodemos actually cites only six reasons—Trans.] for the veneration of icons he enumerates lack all theological significance, and the essential one—that of witnessing to the Incarnation—is missing’; ‘the context of the general concepts of St. Nicodemus and those of his time [betrays the replacement of] the traditional Orthodox artistic language by the language proper to Roman Catholicism.’5
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