The different meanings of icons encompasses the whole person, all mankind and what has been revealed to us in the Holy Orthodox Church. The first image, the archetype of created images, is God. Metropolitan Hilarion reminds us that the icon of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, is “an icon of God,” a theosikon. The holy fathers like St. John Chrysostom and John of Damascus have outlined how an icon can bear the image of the first image through the name. From the beginning, the incarnation of Christ works to save the whole of mankind. Anthropology is a scientific field that studies human behavior and society by assuming that methodical observation and formal analysis reveals the deepest truth about our nature. The Church, however, teaches us that humanity’s nature is reversed and improved because God became man – the ultimate revelation of God. Icons reveal our transfigured nature and our relationship to the saints and the Holy Trinity.
To better understand iconography’s primary purpose and working principles, the previous chapters have built on the foundations of the creation account in Genesis, the theological distinctions laid out in the writings and councils of the church fathers and the history of Russian iconography. The veneration we give to the type passes to the archetype in a real and symbolic way. What is seen in various forms on earth relates to the divine realm and to the Holy Trinity by participation. The word icon comes from the Greek verb meaning “to be like, to befit,” eiko. What was made good on earth is like what exists in the heavens. Images also call to mind thoughts so that icons can help Christians remember our relationship with God in our heart and mind and body. The Orthodox iconographer, Baker Galloway, reminded us in his presentations that images are never neutral. We continually contact them through daily encounters with our eyes or with our memories and thoughts, our inward eyes. St. John of Damascus taught that “an image is a reminder.”
The Seventh Ecumenical Council sums up the theological meaning of icons that many have tried to grasp and articulate later in the Orthodox Church: The uncircumscribed Word of the Father became circumscribed, taking flesh from thee, O Theotokos, and he has restored the sullied image to its ancient glory, filling it with the divine beauty.
The restoration of all things, the great reversal of deification and repentance, the gifts of asceticism are all focused on making the image beautiful again through Jesus Christ, and the Most Holy Mother of God helps to save us through Her Son. The resurrection reveals our anthropology because Christ’s defeat of Hades now deifies us and resurrects us after we die in our body. Icons teach us what to believe and think. Even though the resurrection of Christ is a dogma of the Church, there is no traditional icon called “The Resurrection Icon” or “The Harrowing of Hades.” Even “The Descent” only tells half of the story. There is an anthropological way to paint this event and name this dogmatic icon. Based on Church tradition and the liturgical services of the Octoechos and Lenten Triodion, the proper title should be “Christ’s Departure from Hades.” These words describe how we worship mystically and what we believe about paradise and hell. With inscriptions, words, chant, and paint, the liturgy teaches us that Christ left Hades as the Conqueror, that the victory was given to all people, that all might be saved.
In 1978, Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave a speech at Harvard warning that Western cultures have forgotten God like the Soviets did in Russia. He warned that disasters would follow if forgetfulness continued on its own path. Icons help Christians not to forget who God is and who we are and where we are all going in the end. When we venerate icons, we also pray to God and request help from the saints and the Theotokos. Metropolitan Hilarion points out that “icons are incarnate prayer” (Zenon, Conversations, 22). To inherit transfiguration, the Church gives us ascetical disciplines that are circumscribed on the icons of the saints. They point the way to life like St. John the Forerunner points to Christ. The iconographic human body of Orthodox saints employs a range of light and illumination unlike those of ordinary paintings or Renaissance arts that show a much more realistic, naturalistic, and oily kind of flesh that still finds its main resources and inspirations from this earthly orientation. There is a degree of skill, virtuosity, and natural elegance involved in Renaissance paintings, but its morality and mystical elements have been occluded from our view with the result that transcendence cannot be nourished through self-denial and prayer. Eventually people lose sight of spiritual symbolism while all the focus is funneled into the materiality of existence and a rationalism that ever approaches the peripheral. Humanism has a different anthropology than iconography; humanists tended to emphasize the image over the archetype. Orthodoxy teaches that a Christian will receive his or her body back, the image given by God, but we will be in “the semblance of light.” The humanistic philosophies do not strive for this divine light to transform the body or soul together in the same way. The Enlightenment was not the Light of the Holy Trinity that is given graciously through asceticism, repentance, and prayer. The Age of Reason has had its own justifications, methods, and consequences. If our thoughts, our memory, our degree of indulgence or asceticism, our view of humanity and the cosmos are interrelated fundamentally to the enlightened lessons of iconography and miraculous veneration of holy icons, then to exchange that truth visually and conceptually for some other image and idea will influence morality and the ability to discern mystery and wonder in life. It will influence the assumptions we make about the universe and its purpose. It will establish whether we see sacredness in our own bodies and in our neighbors. Orthodox music during liturgical worship relies on our bodily sacredness, primarily the human voice, not mechanical instruments. The next section investigates the common tradition of singing and chanting in the Orthodox Church.