Curious Christian

Reflections on culture, nature, and spirituality from a Christian perspective

Icons and Incarnation

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Matt Stone

2006-09-01

Since I have such a huge icon collection on this blog I suppose some of you may occasionally wonder about about my own thoughts on the subject, if I have a theology of icons, how I would critique them, etc?

Then again, maybe you don’t. But in any case, after recently responding to an enquirer here I though I may as well make my thoughts a little more public. Here’s how I responded:

For what its worth, IMHO the iconic scenes I’ve gathered are of more value than the iconic portraits when it comes to incarnating the word.
Why? Well the scenes always bring you back to the stories. Irrespective of how culturally idiosyncratic the figures in the scenes are depicted, you can always say ‘Ahh! This one, despite its alien appearance, is actually telling us the surprising story of the woman at the well,” and do so without being an expert.

The portraits, on the other hand, can very easily degenerate into exercises of artists recreating God in their own image. This is most clearly evident with my collection of esoteric icons. Some artists have taken classic depictions of Jesus and romantically imported all sorts of Gnostic, Pagan and New Age concepts into them. What did Jesus and Mary and the Apostles really look like? Well, we don’t know. So facial features alone don’t make them authentically Christian! Not by themselves anyway. What is more important than the facial features is the subtle symbology – the colours, the hand gestures, etc, which express the understandings of the artists – and when you change those symbolic cues to express non-Christian concepts, well what you’re looking at is no longer a Christian icon even if it superficially looks like a familiar Jesus image.

In this respect my favourite artist in the collection is He Qi. His icons are a riot of colourful scenes. They always deeply reflect his culture, lending them an exotic appeal to cosmopolitan westerners like me, yet always draw me unmistakably back to the essential stories of the faith. And for those astute enough to pick up on it, there is Christian symbology woven through them which further serves the stories. This embodiment of the evangelion is what makes an icon actually incarnational.

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3 responses to “Icons and Incarnation”

fernando

2006-09-01

Matt, thanks for that. Please post more on this. I was pretty illiterate about iconography until a few years ago, when I had the chance to be introduced to orthodox icons by a few colleagues in London. Since then, I have a lot of curiosity, but not a lot of answers. Your post is a lot of help to me to people like me with a very piecemeal understanding of the topic.

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Matt Stone

2006-09-02

Fernando, well I won’t claim my understanding is anything other than piecemeal either!
I was educated at a Catholic school so I had some early exposure to iconography (what with stained glass windows, stations of the cross, pictures of the sacred heart and the like) but to be truthful the symbolism was rarely explained to us beyond a superficial level. It was tradition and we were expected to follow it; understanding it was secondary. As you may suspect, that tended to encourage iconoclasm in a questioning guy like me.
But all was not lost. In exploring mystical and esoteric traditions I became sensitised to symbolism in other traditions such as Eastern Orthodoxy and the occult, and in exploring missional anthropology I discovered semiotics which has really helped to round out my understanding. But I’ve only just begun to integrate all this and much unexplored territory remains.
Helpful in the integration process has been the writings of N T Wright which resonate very strongly with me. In his book, “The Challenge of Jesus” you will find a chapter dedicated to “The Challenge of the Symbols,” detailing the challenges Jesus levelled at his culture at a symbolic level. Symbols have power. And Jesus used this power to communicate. What must be understood however is that symbols, signs and icons communicate at a far more subtle and even subconscious level than text and speech. It requires patience to bring to awareness how they are acting on you. And there are levels of subtlety in this process so I’m not sure if I can ever expect to truly arrive.
To begin the process though – did you notice the symbolism present in these icons? What about the peacock for instance? Did you see it? What is it saying? What stories is it subtly drawing on that enhance the more obvious images? And what about the gestures of the yogi?
Consider the importance of symbolic literacy for discipling in symbolically astute circles. On many occasions I’ve found evangelical Christians can miss half the conversation I’m having with esoterics and had to debrief them afterwards on what was actually being communicated. Its not just Christian iconography we must become cognisant of but also Pantheistic symbolism. The Matrix movie was a classic in this respect. I’ve found many Christians only recognised the Christian symbolism, whilst many alt. spirituality devotees only recognised the Gnostic and Buddhist symbolism. You’d think they were seeing different movies. A communication gap begging to be bridged. Same goes with many of the icons I have collected. I’ve posted Golden Dawn stuff to try and provoke a discerning response and never received a single comment.

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Steve Hayes

2006-09-02

A colleague of mine in the missiology department of the university where i was teaching a few years back once showed me two pictures ib Orthodox ikon style, showing Gandhi and Steve Biko, and asked for my comments.
I said that Orthodox Christians would reject the one of Gandhi because he wasn’t a Christian, and the one of Steve Biko (who was a Christian, though not Orthodox, i think he was Anglican) got it all wrong. It showed heavy prisonj bnars in the background. An Orthodox ikon would have shown him holding the prison bars in his hand, lightly, as St Catherine holds the wheel on which she was tortured.

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