Theology Of The Icon

by Leonid Uspensky

English (translation)Original French, Russian

Genres: Theology, Nonfiction, Christianity, Religion, Catholic, History, Faith

194 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

Reviews

[Sharon Barrow Wilfong · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am not Orthodox and I have never fully understood the significance of the icons in their church. This book, helped uncover some of the mystery for me or at least informed me of the origins and the church's reasoning regarding the use of them in worship.

Some, but not all. Quite a bit of their argument in defense of icons, was based on unsubstantiated inferences drawn from the Bible, or usually from church tradition, a source that can not be traced earlier than the 8th or 9th centuries, A.D. and quite often never prior to the Renaissance.

The argument that the absence of any mention of icons in the Bible is dismissed with the claim that the New Testament was not written back then either. This argument is also used by the Roman Catholic church to defend beliefs and practices that are never mentioned in the Bible.

I counter that reasoning with the fact that the New Testament was entirely written by eye-witnesses of the life and work of Jesus Christ and they wrote down what they saw and also their instructions to the contemporary Church, which was always supported by the Old Testament. While the instructions, admonishments and exhortations are quite detailed in how Church worship should be exercised, they do not include venerating saints, or Mary, or anyone other than God in His three persons.

To claim that Peter was the first pope and all succeeding popes have equal authority is false. Only Peter was an eyewitness to Christ, no other pope can claim that.

The argument the Orthodox church makes according to the author is that, even though one of the first commandments of the Decalogue was to forbid graven images, Jesus Himself made an image of His own face on a cloth, thereby nullifying the original command. This is nowhere mentioned in the New Testament. Why did the eyewitnesses to Christ and His works, who wrote the New Testament fail to mention something so crucial to Christian worship, if indeed such an image ever existed? And where is it now?

What I found valuable in this book was the history behind the icons, what the church actually believes about them. As far as I can tell, and please correct me if I'm wrong, the church holds icons indispensable in operating as mediators between the worshiper and the Saint being prayed to.

The design of Orthodox churches are precise and filled with symbolism. I visited an Orthodox church and was impressed with how lovely it was. There is a wall dividing the place where the Priest performs ritualistic worship on behalf of the congregation with an arched opening, from which he and the altar boys travel back and forth. Everyone is singing ancient chants (in English, at least at the church I attended) while the Priest does this.

On the wall separating the two rooms are painted the saints, Mary and Christ. Mary is even bigger than Christ, but I believe that is because they believe her function is to serve as the primary mediator between people and God.

The Priest represents Christ mediating as he goes back and forth. The Priest at the service I attended gave a really good sermon that discussed how Christ's righteousness covers our sinfulness when we receive Him as our Savior, which is completely Biblical and true.

The people were also very helpful and friendly. They immediately recognized my husband and me as newcomers and provided us with a booklet so we could sing along (everyone else sang from memory) and when the Eucharist was served, several people approached us with blessed bread so we could participate, even though we weren't members (the sacrament was a different loaf).

I would also like to note that the room was crowded and the majority of people were young families, which was impressive since there are no chairs or pews and everyone, including the children some of them quite small, had to stand.

The demographic of the church was interesting to me because so many Protestant churches are bemoaning the fact that they are losing their youth and are contriving to attract them with "contemporary" services. As a result, worship has become a rock concert in a dark room. The sermon has become a superficial overview of Scripture, with the aim of making everyone feel loved and accepted, rather than maturing them into a closer relationship with God by increasing their knowledge and wisdom through in depth study of scripture. Maybe that strategy is not as effective as church administrators think.

This book was the first of two volumes and mainly provided historical background and the basis for icons in the church. A number of chapters was devoted iconoclasts and also the Roman Catholic church and why they are against icons. I do find it a little funny that each Church uses the same reasoning for any lack of Biblical support for their traditional beliefs, while disavowing that same argument when the other Church uses it. (The Orthodox Church sees no Scripture to support Peter as anything other than a presiding Bishop and certainly not the succession of Roman Bishops as Pope who infallibly speaks for Christ. Like wise the Roman Church denies the use of Icons.)

Only that last couple of chapters dealt with the significance and function of Icons in worship. This will be dealt with at greater depth in Volume Two, at least I hope so.

[Sharon Barrow Wilfong · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a continuation of volume one, which gave more of a historical background of icons.

This volume provides a more detailed explanation of the function of icons, the precise requirements for an icon to be considered authentic and also a history of the corruption of icons.

Icons are mediators between the believer and a particular saint. One prays to the icon, while viewing it as a type of conduit connecting the prayer with the saint. The saint then serves as an intercessor between the believer and Christ, who ultimately intercedes for the believer to the Father God.

The writer discusses iconoclasm briefly since it was discussed at greater length in the previous volume. This volume discusses corruption of the icon within the church. In the beginning Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholic church both produced appropriate icons in the middle ages. These are where the subjects are painted in stiff, other worldly postures and facial expressions. The background was gold.

Starting in the 14th century, realism took over the fashion of painting in the west. The author of this book laments that secular styles of painting defaced the icons and rendered them unusable because they amounted to false images and idols. Therefore it would be idolatry to pray to them.

He also rails against Russian artists who personalized the icons or worse, had the audacity to create religious scenes from stories in the Bible. This is all rendered anathema to the Orthodox Church.

The author provides examples of correct icons and false icons.

My review is a gross oversimplification of what the author has said, but my review would go on for pages if I addressed everything he mentions. I have attempted to provide a nutshell version.

I am not Orthodox and do not attribute supernatural properties to icons, however, I found the description of this theology to be enlightening.

[Costangeles · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very good treatise about the theology of icons, maybe one of the best I ever read. I really liked his theological arguments and the fact that he exposed other perspectives as well and tried to give arguments for every single one of them, together with relating the history behind everything that he sustained. Remember, Leonid Uspensky was once an atheist.

[Debbi · Rating 4 out of 5]

hard-to-find book on the history and theology of icons. Excellent book.

[William Bies · Rating 5 out of 5]

In addition to his classic The Meaning of Icons coauthored with Vladimir Lossky (see our review here), the Russian expatriate iconographer Leonid Ouspensky has an independent history entitled Theology of the Icon, published in two volumes by the St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, which we now undertake to review. Compared with the previous work, this one is less ahistorical and more complete; it starts with the art of the early Christian centuries as preserved largely in frescoes and catacombs, then recapitulates main lines of the subsequent developments up to the time of writing in the twentieth century. Ouspensky’s highlights from the early period:

According to the Fathers, the very name ‘Church’ [ἐϰϰλησία] signifies a calling together, an assembly of all people in communion with God. Thus the people who are called from the world into the Church bring with them their culture, their characteristic national traits and their creative abilities. The Church then chooses from this contribution all that is purest, truest and most expressive and creates its sacred language. The first Christians had a eucharistic prayer which was very characteristic of this process: ‘As this bread, which at one time was scattered over the hills, has now become one, let Thy Church similarly be gathered from all the corners of the world into Thy Kingdom’. This process of integration by the Church of those elements of the pagan world which are able to be Christianized is not a penetration of pagan customs into Christianity, but their sacralization. In the realm of art, this is not a paganization of Christian art and, therefore, of Christianity itself, as is often thought; but on the contrary, it is the Christianization of pagan art. (p. 87)

In this formative period of sacred art, there were two essential artistic trends, the roles of which were decisive. There was Hellenistic art, which represented the Greek spirit in Christian art, and the art of Jerusalem and of the Syrian regions. The use of these two highly contrasting trends illustrates well the selection process by which the Church elaborated the most adequate forms of its art. The Hellenistic trend was that of the Greek cities, particularly Alexandria. It had inherited the beauty of antiquity with its harmony, moderation, grace, rhythm and elegance. On the other hand, the art of Jerusalem and Syria represented historical realism, sometimes even a but naturalistic and brutal (as, for example, in the Gospel of Rabula). The Church adopted from each of these art forms that which was most authentic. It discarded the sometimes coarse naturalism of Syrian art, but retained its truthful iconography, faithfully preserved in the very places where the biblical stories took place. From Hellenistic art, on the other hand, it rejected the somewhat idealistic aspects of iconography, but retained the harmonious beauty, the rhythmic feeling and certain other artistic elements, such as, for example, the ‘reverse’ perspective. (pp. 87-88)

A strong point of the present work is its extensive discussion of the iconoclastic controversy of the eight and ninth centuries. The controversy broke out in response to certain abuses (p. 103) and the intervention of Islam also played an important role (p. 104). Ouspensky goes into some detail on the teachings of the iconoclasts (pp. 122-132), but ultimately they proved insufficient due to an inadequate understanding of the christological doctrine of the council of Chalcedon. The following quotations summarize Ouspensky’s take on why the iconodule party eventually prevailed (apart from their theoretical position, which is better recapitulated in The Meaning of Icons):

In the eyes of the Church, therefore, the icon is not art illustrating Holy Scripture; it is a language that corresponds to it and is equivalent to it, corresponding not to the letter of Scripture or to the book itself as an object, but to the evangelical kerygma, that is, to the content of the Scripture itself, to its meaning, as is true also for liturgical texts. This is why the icon...has the same liturgical, dogmatic and educational meaning. (p. 139)

The icon participates in the holiness of its prototype and, through the icon, we in turn participate in this holiness in our prayers. (p. 162); The icon does not represent the divinity. Rather, it indicates man’s participation in the divine life. (p. 166)

It would be of some interest to compare Ouspensky on the iconoclast controversy with the secular historian Peter Brown (see the chapter ‘A Dark Age crisis: Aspects of the Iconoclastic controversy’, pp. 251-301 in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity), but space does not permit us to do so here. There is not much to say about the spiritualization of Byzantine art during the post-iconoclastic period. Medieval developments – the Paleolagan Renaissance and hesychasm of Palamas in the 14th c. – do possess more intrinsic interest. Here is how Ouspensky describes what was at issue in the controversy and its upshot:

By denying the suprasensory, immaterial nature of the Taboric light, the ‘humanists’ could neither understand nor accept the Orthodox spiritual experience represented by the hesychasts, who claimed that man, through purification of mind and heart, might be sanctified by the divine uncreated light. What was questioned in the fourteenth century and was to be given dogmatic definition, was the full demonstration of Christianity as man’s union with God. This union, this synergy of man with God, presupposes that the human being remains undivided. What is united to God is the totality of the spiritual-psychic-bodily composite. In the fullness of his nature, man is not divisible; the human being, as a totality, shares in sanctification and transfiguration. For the hesychasts, the integrity of human nature was self-evident. No part of this nature was viewed in isolation….Not only the mind, but also the soul and the body share in His union. The spiritual joy which comes from the mind into the body is in no way corrupted by the communion with the body, but transforms the body and makes it spiritual. Because it then rejects all the evil appetites of the body, it no longer drags the soul downwards, but rises together with it. Thus it is that the whole man becomes spirit, as it is written, ‘He who is born of Spirit, is spirit’ (John 3:6-8). (pp. 240-241)

The most substantial part of the remainder of the work is devoted to the fate of the icon in Russia, the author’s home country. Orthodox theological thought became ‘paralyzed’ as western influence, both with regard to sacred art proper and with regard to scholastic theology, gained ground in Russia during the seventeenth century under the sponsorship of the state. As a result, symbolical modes of artistic representation which, as we have seen, are not acceptable to a strict Orthodox, came into currency. Ouspensky on the decline:

The bondage to which the Church had been reduced, the anti-canonical order which had been imposed upon it, the lack of freedom and of independence of its spiritual power, all this led the Church to resemble a mere ritual institution. The educated circles thus moved away from the Church, seeing in it a hotbed of obscurantism and superstitions, an obligation imposed by the state. A true betrayal of the Church took place, beginning with the upper classes of society, followed by the majority of the educated and ‘free-thinking’ population. An educated man ‘is ashamed of being a believer’, wrote Leskov; ‘In this past century, the entire history of the Russian intelligentsia was marked by a religious crisis’. This crisis was often externalized by a movement from passionate faith to atheism, and a fight against God that was equally passionate. The absence of faith in educated circles and their indifference contributed to the spread of sectarian movements among the people….It was a period of disintegration, divisions, of imbalance and distress. (p. 429)

Concurrent with indifference and the absence of faith, a rebirth of the spiritual life took place. It began during the second half of the eighteenth century among the Athonite monks, and entered Russia via Romania. The end of the century and the beginning of the nineteenth were marked by the restoration of numerous monasteries...and the foundation of new ones. (pp. 429-430)

By the twentieth century, the eastern Orthodox had regained an appropriate appreciation of the icon and, what is most important, its doctrinal and theological underpinnings. Ouspensky treats this development in his final chapter on the icon in the modern world but, after what has gone before, it is repetitive and breaks little new ground.

A couple critical comments:

The author evinces a certain narrow-mindedness and parochialism with respect to western religious art, especially in chapter fifteen onwards; commits a petitio principii, akin to castigating French literature for being written in French. Why must the Byzantine tradition which reaches its full flourishing in Russia in the 14th to 16th c. be the only logically possible kind of Christian art? No stringent argument to this effect beyond personal taste is presented, needless to say. His off-the-cuff rejection of western influences on Russian art in the 17th - 19th c. reads somewhat like a literary critic who, in view of Shakespeare’s supreme accomplishment, dismisses Dante and Petrarch because they do not compose their verse in Shakespearean sonnets, or contrariwise who dismisses Shakespearean tragedy itself out of hand on the grounds that it fails to comply with all of the canons of ancient tragedy as set forth by Aristotle in his poetics.

Ouspensky misses thereby an essential point of criticism in aesthetics, that one ought to judge an artwork first of all in terms of its own internal standards. Granted, there is a frightful lot of kitsch in western religious art, especially after the invention of lithography in the nineteenth century made it into a lucrative commercial enterprise aimed at a mass audience, but whoever has gazed (as this reviewer has) at the medieval stained-glass windows at the cathedral of Chartres or in the royal chapel on the Île de la Cité in Paris will judge them capable of expressing a lofty illumination of the spirit. What about – say – Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, Hans Holbein’s Maria als Schmerzensmutter? Etc. Are all these religious artworks – without exception – as valueless as Ouspensky suggests merely because they observe another style than the strict Byzantine?

Ouspensky himself recognizes that many themes in western religious art stand in direct continuity with the iconography of the early Christian centuries and were ruled out for the eastern church only as late as the Quinisext council in 692 (such as the symbolical depiction of Christ as the Lamb of Revelation 5:6-14). To play the devil’s advocate – doesn’t Orthodoxy contradict itself here because it professedly deviates from the tradition of the early church? Couldn’t 14th-c. hesychasm be viewed as constituting an innovation (which in Orthodox theory must supposedly always be deplored)? This reviewer would not venture that far; indeed, as Newman explains, there can be doctrinal development that remains ever faithful to the timeless truth of revelation, for which he outlines several criteria by which to distinguish between genuine and false developments.

After all, there are good prima facie reasons for seeing in Palamas a religious genius on par with Francis or Dominic in the Latin west, but Ouspensky’s portrayal of Palamas’ humanist opponents is neither sympathetic nor very circumstantial; knowing how central the Corpus Areopagaticum proved to be to mystical theology in both the east and the west, on the face of it Ouspensky’s rejection of its Neoplatonism as a distressing pagan survival doesn’t make very much sense. Doesn’t Maximus Confessor amply and authoritatively dispose of objections of this kind in his Ambigua? The great controversy between Palamas and the humanists, decisive as it was for all future spirituality in the orbit of Orthodoxy, would make for keenly interesting study some other day, but clearly one would need to look elsewhere than Ouspensky to get anything like a balanced account.

In several pretty windy sections in chapter 17, Ouspensky veers perilously close to lowering himself to the level of the Protestant, who not being in possession of anything positive is defined solely by what he negates (much as the atheist is defined by the God whom he denies). It obviously induces a distortion to make anti-filioquism into the interpretive key around which all dogmatic theology revolves, as with Ouspensky here and with unfortunately all-too many Orthodox theologians in modern times, all the more so in that prior to the patriarchate of Photius, far from spurning it, the great church fathers of the Greek-speaking east were favorable towards the filioque doctrine, as David Bentley Hart points out in his remarkable eirenical essay ‘The myth of schism’ in his The Hidden and the Manifest (including the Cappadocians, see p. 275; Hart wryly remarks elsewhere, ‘it is something of a cottage industry in the Orthodox Church—especially among converts—to discover and “market” ever newer ancient differences between Eastern and Western Christian theology, morality, devotion, spirituality, politics, cuisine, or whatever else one can think of’). It is always a mistake to found a system of religion on resentment and individual pathological psychology, as does Luther.

Icons are the answer to everything wrong in modern times! (Cf. p. 477.) A simplistic cri de coeur such as this will not suffice to diagnose and resolve the spiritual crisis posed by modern secularism and atheism, absent detached and systematic analysis. A statement to the effect that any artist who fails to paint according to the rules promulgated by the Moscow synod in 1667 could only be de facto devoid of grace would be, for Ouspensky, definitionally true, but smacks rather of the ‘traditions of the elders’ Jesus himself criticizes in Mark 7:1-13 (cf. pp. 489-490). Is the icon eo ipso the mediator of grace, or not rather, Christ, whose freedom we are no position to circumscribe?

Five stars, to be generous on account of the excellence of the first half of the book and to overlook a good deal of tendentious nonsense in the second half. Anyone can discern, after all, in the traditional veneration of the iconodule church an estimable spiritual and mystical-contemplative practice, and we in the West must be grateful to our eastern Christian colleagues for having preserved and perfected it in a pure form all through the centuries.

[Luke T · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first volume of this is a slam-dunk five stars. You get a really interesting history of Christianity as seen from the perspective of its art. And, at least in Orthodoxy, the art has a huge impact overall in worship. Ouspensky pulls a lot from the Fathers, and scripture, to really describe the soteriological, incarnational aspects of the icon, and how the Church deepened its understanding of them in response to numerous heresies. The first volume is by and far the best. I got kind of bogged down in the second volume because of its extremely-detailed discussions of regional Russian councils which were more or less dealing with the same heresies that the early Church faced. One of these days I'll read through all of volume two. But volume one is an absolute keeper. A very valuable catechetical text (at least for myself).

[Nabil Hourani · Rating 4 out of 5]

Volume I of this Book covers the early history of the sacred art of Iconography and the theological / spiritual basis for the painting and for the veneration of Icons which are representations of the Christian teaching and worship. As St Basil wrote: "That which the word communicates by sound, the paintings shows silently by representation." This sacred art of the Orthodox Church has a spiritual significance as well educational for people through centuries who defended it against misunderstandings, heresies, and attacks. The icon is called "theology in images." The author, Leonid Ouspensky explains that the icon's role is not to bring us close to what we see in nature, but to show us a body which perceives what usually escapes us, the perception of the spiritual world.

[Nabil Hourani · Rating 3 out of 5]

The second volume of this Book is a detailed historical and theological presentation of the making, veneration of, and confrontation regarding Icons, especially within the Russian Church and society. The author covers the subject from the Post-Iconoclastic period to the Modern era, passing by the flowering then decline of this Russian sacred art. The author concludes : "To understand the meaning of the veneration of icons in our time is to understand the icon itself, not merely as a church ornament or as a help in prayer. It is to understand its message...the meaning of the Christian revelation."

[Christian Proano · Rating 4 out of 5]

2 or more typos, left out words or sentences. :(
The Spanish version did a better job.

The Spanish version has an appendix that the English edition does not bring.

[Christian Proano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un clasico, profundo, pero a la ves facil de entender, no tiene lenguaje complicado.
La version en Español tiene un apéndice no presente en la version en Ingles.