Posted by from Fr. Steven Kostoff (dcalvert) on 10/16/2007, 7:41 am
Dear Fathers, Parish Faithful & Friends in Christ,
At yesterday's Divine Liturgy we commemorated, honored and celebrated the "Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council." This sacred assembly, called by the Byzantine empress Irene to meet in Nicea in 787 and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, restored the icon to the Church after the imperially-sanctioned iconclastic ban on the icon had threatened its very existence for about half of a century. This restoration by the Fathers of the Council was based on a solidly articulated theological defense of the icon as a witness to the Incarnation and the capacity of matter to be a vehicle of divine revelation and presence. St. John of Damascus, the great defender of the icon in his three treatises On the Holy Icons combines these themes in an important passage:
Of old God the incorporeal and uncircumscribed was not depicted at all. But now that God has
appeared in the flesh and lived among humans, I make an image of the God who can be seen.
I do not worship matter but I worship the Creator of matter, who for my sake became material
and deigned to dwell in matter, who through matter effected my salvation. I will not cease from
worshipping the matter through which my salvation has been effected. (On the Holy Icons, I, 16)
The Incarnation embraces all of human endeavor, and that includes the vocation of the iconographer and the possibility of a sacred art that reveals divine beauty to the world as it witnesses to the Gospel. Centuries later, Dostoevsky (+1881) would say that "Beauty will save the world," and he probably meant the beauty that reveals something of the divine and heavenly realm within a world often distorted by sin and ugliness. If the icon is indeed
"theology in color," then it is a glimpse of the perfect union between the divine and human in the Person of the incarnate Son of God; and of humankind transfigured by the deifying energies of the Holy Spirit as the fruit of that union. The icon is the image and presence of its heavenly Prototype. Jesus told Philip: "He who has seen Me has seen the Father." (JN. 14:9). When we gaze upon the icon, we are "seeing" our Lord (and through Him, the Father), just as when we hear the Gospel, we are hearing the words of the Lord spoken directly to us: 'He who has ears to hear let him hear." (LK. 8:8) In "words and images" the Church witnesses to the Gospel, and though Protestant Christianity in America has an iconoclastic (and anti-sacramental) strain running throughout it - an object of biting irony in the writings of the Roman Catholic Flannery O'Connor (+1964) - this witness is of great importance in a society surrounded by the "anti-icon."
The "anti-icon" is "everywhere present and fillest all things" within a fallen world reduced to the one-dimensional realm of sensory perception. In other words, on every screen or facade available to public or private viewing - the television, computer, billboard, sign, etc. - there is a bewildering and endless array of images that entice us toward some form of consumeristic enjoyment that promises that elusive "happiness" that at this point in time must be a distortion of what the Founding Fathers were attempting to articulate in the Declaration of Independence! (Although even their celebrated homage to every human being's right to the "pursuit of happiness" has always seemed a bit ill-defined to me). That image can be of a frolicking and smilingly handsome/beautiful young person in a pair of breath-deprivingly tight jeans; of a roulette wheel enticing one to the casino right across the river, where you can make a fortune or mortgage away your entire family's future in one fateful evening of "fun;" or to overdosing on so much (unhealthy) food and drink, that this unrestrained consumption would all but guarantee an unwanted "cardiac episode" - if not to a premature departure from the land of the living.
Basically, the anti-icon of today's world is the use of the human face and body to drive us toward "the passions," those impulses that grow to dominate the soul and enslave us to our baser desires. This drive only further accelerates the seemingly ceaseless and intertwined activities of spending and consuming. Simplicity, restraint, discipline, and charity, are not-so-subtly relegated to a quaint but antiquated worldview. Thus, the advertising industry, to use but one example, is more than aware of the power of the image, but here distorted once again, into the anti-icon that ignores the world as belonging to God. Not to give this industry more credit than it deserves, but it promotes a kind of popular atheism, because it essentially reduces the human person to what we are biologically. Of course, religious/spiritual values are not the concern of the advertising industry, but it nevertheless presupposes a view of human nature that limits us to our physical needs and desires. A certain "give them bread and circus" cynicism lurks beneath the smiling faces. We are then pulled in that direction except for our brief excursions into church on Sunday morning. How essential the Liturgy is in reminding us of who we actually are, from where we actually come, and to where we hope to be eventually moving!
If any one of us were to be a figure included in an icon, would it be the actual icon of the Church, or the anti-icon of the world? Meaning, does our face "fit it" more naturally with one of those intense faces, let us say, that appear in the background of the icon of the Raising of Lazaurus, The Decent Into Hades, or the Dormition of the Theotokos, gazing at the Lord or the Mother of God with awe and humility? Or would we be more at home on the television screen fast-talking the latest line of clothes, furniture or cars? What "icon" essentially captures our truest and deepest image? Who am I - really? According to the vision and teaching of the Scriptures, further expanded upon by the Fathers and Mothers of the Church, we are created "in the image and likeness of God" (cf. GEN. 1:26-27), destined for eternal life with God - the theosis of the saints. If we seek to fulfill our vocation and transform the image into the likeness of God we will truly honor the memory of the Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council who understood, assumed and taught that we the icons of the "Icon/Image of the invisible God." (COL. 1:15)
Fr. Steven C. Kostoff
Christ the Savior/Holy Spirit Orthodox Church
http://www.christthesavioroca.org
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