Praying With

Your Eyes
A l e ct ur e g i v e n a t A l l S a i n ts A ng l i c a n Ch ur c h , R o me

Ian Knowles, Director of the Bethlehem Icon Centre

23rd February, 2017

The icon is about something beyond the artist or the viewer. It is art of a living,

transfigured world.
Icons are an integral part of the Orthodox Tradition. It is hard to
imagine an Orthodox church and service, or an Orthodox believers
home and life without them. In birth and death, departing on a long
journey or beginning a new enterprise, he or she is accompanied by
these holy images, icons. Images appeared in Christian art from the
very beginning, but the icon developed together with the liturgy and
dogmaThe Orthodox Church regards icons not merely as a form of
church art, albeit the main one, but as the visible expression of the
Orthodox faith.1

The icon is something lived, not simply looked at. It is an art in context, not a museum

piece.
The images leave us with an impression of darkness and brightness,
incense and candles, deep voices chanting, and icons. The pictures
are not there just to be looked at as though the worshippers were in
an art museum: They are designed to be doors between this world
and another world, between people and the Incarnate God, his
Mother, or his friends, the saints.2

During the Soviet era many icons were placed in cultural museums, but since society

opened up the faithful come and venerate them, thus transforming a secular museum into

1 A History of Icon Painting, Moscow 2007, The Theological Principles of Icon And Iconography, Irina
Yazykova & Hegumen Luka, p.11
2 Lynette Martin, Sacred Doorways - A Beginners Guide to Icons, Paraclete Press p xiv & p.5
 a place of worship.
Based on the communion of the entire earthly congregation with the
triumphant Church, it expresses the complete liturgy, the one that
takes place on earth and in heaven at the same time. In a typical
Orthodox church building, the icons of the iconostasis connect
(rather than separate) the sanctuary and the nave, as a window that
connects earth and heaven, the spiritual and the material. 3

Icons are thus for worship, for communion, for transfiguration and to varying degrees

they embody these things in themselves.

a. Objects for veneration, much like relics,

St.Basil: the adoration of the icon passes to the prototype, that is to
say to the holy person represented. They embody what they convey
visually. An object of worship the icon is not merely provoked or
inspired by the Liturgy: together they form a homogenous whole. The
icon completes the Liturgy and explains it, adding its influence on the
souls of the faithful. The contents and the meaning of the icon and of
the Liturgy are the same, and this why their form, their language, is
also the same. It is the same symbolism, the same sobriety, the same
depth in content. This is why, as everything in the Church, sacred art
has a double dimension: Its very essence is unchangeable and
eternal since it expresses the revealed truth, but at the same time it is
infinitely diverse in its forms and expressions, corresponding to
different times and places.4

2. The liturgy is about proclaiming the Gospel, about encountering God in Jesus

Christ, about the faith which has matured within the Christian Church over the past

2000 years, but not as a history lesson but as a continuous living stream.

An object of worship the icon is not merely provoked or inspired by

the Liturgy: together they form a homogenous whole. The icon
completes the Liturgy and explains it, adding its influence on the
souls of the faithful. The contents and the meaning of the icon and of
the Liturgy are the same, and this why their form, their language, is
also the same. It is the same symbolism, the same sobriety, the same
depth in content. This is why, as everything in the Church, sacred art

3 Andreopoulos, A. (2005). Metamorphosis: The Transfiguration in Byzantine Theology And Iconography.

United States: St Vladimirs Seminary Press, U.S. p.36
4 Leonid Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, SVP, Vol 1, p.9
 has a double dimension: Its very essence is unchangeable and
eternal since it expresses the revealed truth, but at the same time it is
infinitely diverse in its forms and expressions, corresponding to
different times and places.5

1. A sense of the holy.

the images intended to lead us on to divine speculation, the being
and things represented are transfigured into the forms and shapes of
a world which resembles ours and yet is different from it, a kind of
mystical intercession between the intelligible world and the
perceptible world.6

2. Incarnational fruit.

2.1 Material things bearing spiritual realities. As St John

Damascene put it,

I do not worship the creation rather than the Creator, but I

worship the one who became a creature, who was formed as I was,
who clothed Himself in creation without debasement or departing
from His divinity, that he might raise my nature in glory and make it
a partaker of His divine nature.7

2.2 Extensions of Christ being made man: Christ as Icon.

St Paul speaks of God who has shone in our hearts gives the light of
the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. 2 Cor.4:6,

and again describes Christ who is the image of the invisible God
Col.1:5.

The letter to the Hebrews makes it quite explicit that in the human
person of Christ we have an icon/image of God the Father - Christ is
the brightness of the Fathers glory and the express image of his
person. Hebrews 1:3,

This is something which Jesus Himself makes clear in talking to the

disciples:

he who has seen me has seen the Father Jn 14:9.

The Gospel, i.e. Christ, is a visible, perceivable reality: Blessed are

the eyes which see what you see! Luke 9:55.

5
Leonid Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, SVP, Vol 1, p.9
6 Andreapoulos, p.5

7 St. John Damascene. On the Divine Images iii,41

 2.3 Matter matters - transcending and transfiguring the material world

giving a renewed sense of the ecological value of Creation.

3. Icons in the Liturgy.

Sometimes icons are described as windows into eternity. But the

analogy of the door or gate is more powerful and more appropriate.
Through a window we gaze upon the landscape from a distance; but,
passing through a door, we no longer gaze from a distance but
ourselves become part of the landscape. And that exactly is the
essential point about the icon: it brings about participation,
encounter, communion.8

1. Icons and Scripture:

Scriptures and icons are parallel ways of disclosing the mystery of
Revelation, so that the icon in some way functions as does Holy
Scriptureas a place of encounter between the Word of God and
humankind. 9

The principle of Orthodox theology lies not in proving the Truth but
in bearing witness to it.10

2. Proclamation
The parallel between the Scriptures and icons goes deeper, for
both are ways of setting forth the event of Gods saving history sand
the figures involved in it: Christ, the Mother of God, and the saints;
they are means of proclamation of the gospel, but as such they stand
in need of interpretation. Interpretation of the Scriptures and
interpretation of icons would seem, then, to be significantly parallel.
Just as writers of the works contained in the Scriptures draw on
rhetoric, narrative technique, metaphor, and symbol so too the icon
painters developed painterly means of expression suited to what they
were seeking to express in the icon. In doing this, they drew not just
on artistic techniques that had developed in their milieu but also on
visual analogies to the literary forms of expression found in the
Scriptures. Art historians have noted how the icon tradition develops
what can only be called a rhetoric.11

8 Metropolitan Kalistos Ware, Foreward to Aidan Harts Techniques of Icon and Wall Painting, Gracewing
(May 20, 2011)
9 Andropoulos, p.12
10 A History of Icon Painting, Moscow 2007, The Theological Principles of Icon And Iconography, Irina
Yazykova & Hegumen Luka, p.11.

11 Andreopoulos: Foreward, by Fr Andrew Louth, p.11.

 4. Bringing theology alive through symbol

What is the basis of the symbolism in the churches? Christian life is

based on two essential realities. One is the redeeming sacrifice of
Christ, the need to participate in this sacrifice, to partake of
communion in it in order to be saved. The other essential truth is the
goal and the result of this sacrifice: the sanctification of man, and
with him, of the whole visible world, resulting in peace between God
and the world. This second truth is the main subject of Church
symbolism, which points to the forthcoming universal Kingdom of
God. 12

C) Iconographic aesthetics

1. The challenge of honesty

How tempting it is to call spiritual those images - those soul-

confusing soul-absorbing, soul-consuming dreaming - that first
appear to us when our soul finds its way into the other world. Such
images are, in fact, the spirits of the present age that seek to trap our
consciousness in their realm. These spirits inhabit the boundary
between the worlds; and though they are earthly in nature, they take
on the appearances of the spiritual realm. When we reach the limits
of the ordinary world, we enter into conditions that (like the
ordinary) are continuously new but have the patterns which differ
entirely form those of ordinary existence. Here then we enter the are
of our greatest spiritual dangerwhat happens, at such an encounter
of the boundary, is that the seeker is engulfed in lies and self-
deceptions13

2. An ascetical vision

a. Humanistic optimism

the human figure, always the focal point of the painting, becomes
the means of attaining sublime aims of a purely spiritual order 14

b. A new way of seeing beyond the outward shape

the images intended to lead us on to divine speculation, the being

and things represented are transfigured into the forms and shapes of

12 Ouspensky, p.21 Vol 1

13 Florensky, p.45-6
14 Chatzzidakis p.5
 a world which resembles ours and yet is different from it, a kind of
mystical intercession between the intelligible world and the
perceptible world. p.5

3. Transcending emotionalism

Most religious art, what we could call devotional art, appeals to the more

immediate emotions, while icons create an emotional space for prayer

and communion. It is art of the deepest places of the heart.

4. Theology for the artist

Behind your hand there must be present thousands of powers that

move it Those mysterious things that are inside us, and which want
to find expression, are not all ours, but also of those who preceded us
and transmitted them to us. This is called tradition.

Tradition is good for those who experience strongly the eternity that
is within themselves Tradition is a foundation and power for living
souls. Neither tradition nor anything else can rescue and enliven
dead souls. 15

15 Photos Kontoglou, Fine Art and Tradition 2004, p.32 & 37