From Idol to Icon

The Case for Christian Schools Part 9

What’s the Difference?

Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we, with our unveiled faces reflecting like mirrors the brightness of the Lord, all grow brighter and brighter as we are turned into the image that we reflect; this is the work of the Lord who is Spirit.

2 Corinthians 3

I used to moonlight as a sci-fi writer, basing my works in the cosmic horror universe of H.P. Lovecraft. In my living room, I had a little bust of the evil tentacled god who made Lovecraft’s Mythos famous: a plastic idol of Cthulhu. On another shelf is an icon of Christ. So what’s the difference?

Some would say that there isn’t one: that any image of the supernatural is an idol to be despised. They might draw on Old Testament prohibitions to back up their case, citing the Levitical law which strictly forbids the making of graven images.

This case was made in the eighth century, when the new Islamic expansion was threatening the Byzantine Empire. The Muslim armies were so successful that Emperor Leo III wondered whether God was on their side. Perhaps the Muslims’ absolute prohibition of religious images was right, and God was punishing the Christians for the resplendence of their churches. Just in case, Leo gave the order for iconoclasm, the destruction of the images, and you can still see some churches in this sparing style preserved in Turkey today. Recall the extent of feeling about the 2019 fire in Notre Dame and you will have some idea of how the Christian faithful must have felt to have their churches desecrated like this - sentiments which would be echoed almost a millennium later at the vandalism at the extremes of the Reformation.

Ironically, it was a priest called John, living under the comparative safety of Muslim rule in Damascus, who had the freedom to write criticising the Emperor’s decision. He defended icons by arguing that the Bible depicts God in images all the time, just verbal ones rather than pictorial, but we cannot help picturing them in our minds: and surely, that is what they are for. Moreover, the divine Word had become flesh in Jesus. In the Incarnation, the invisible divinity had become visible and therefore representable. The immaterial enters and blesses matter. Jesus was baptised in created matter: the water of the Jordan. Jesus was himself a woodworker, a craftsman of matter, and died on created matter. He lived and moved and had his being in created matter, by his presence he blessed matter, and through matter, through the wood of the Cross, he redeemed matter.

St John of Damascus argues that this reveals matter itself as a kind of icon. In short, matter matters: because it is only through matter that God participates in us and we can participate in God. The universe of passing things is itself a window which God has given us that we might glimpse eternity. And what could be more fitting than representations of the carpenter in icons, invariably painted on wood?

John built his arguments on the Platonic philosophy which was the intellectual currency of his time. In this philosophy, all that is visible and physical is an impression of the spiritual and invisible. An icon, viewed as such, does not circumscribe the subject it portrays, but rather guides the one who contemplates it beyond the icon itself and into the presence of Christ in his saints.

The idol does the opposite. Take its etymology. It comes from the classical Greek noun eidolon, related to the verb oida “I know.” These words come from the Indo-European root wid, which implies not only “knowledge” but “sight:” the Latin verb video, “I see,” is a cognate.  So, the eidolon is something which is known when it is seen. To see it is to know it. If you see the idol of Cthulhu, you know what Cthulhu is, and having grasped it, you worship it. To paraphrase the Catholic philosopher Jean-Luc Marion in God without Being, the idol stops the gaze of the viewer and traps it. You think that what you are looking at is the totality. This is the absolute opposite of the icon, which does not invite the viewer to think of as the divinity itself, does not limit the gaze, but rather draws it further and reflects it.

Now, idols of things like Cthulhu, which we know are made up deities, are spotted easily enough. Likewise the idols of ancient pagan deities. And even if we looked at a Christian icon and thought that by seeing it, we saw God in his essence and completely grasped and comprehended him as he truly is, we know that we would be committing idolatry. As St Augustine said, “if you understand it, it is not God.” The Latin word Augustine uses for “understand” is comprehendis, which also means “grasp.” Unlike an idol, God is incomprehensible, ungraspable: pace Jacob, as soon as you think you’ve got hold of him, he escapes your grip. 

But the more subtle idols are not made of wood or stone. They are conceptual idols: ideas which make us believe, wrongly, that we have in fact grasped and understood the incomprehensible mystery of the Divine. There is a venerable tradition of Christian Platonic thought which maintains that no concept we apply to God, in fact no statement we make of God, is ultimately true. All statements about God risk being idolatrous. For if God is truly beyond all comprehension, if God’s ways are higher than our ways, then anything we say of him cannot but be false. Even to call God “God” is to put God into the category of gods, which is a mistake: because God is quite definitely not a god. Thinking of God as a bearded old man, even calling God “just” or “almighty,” carries the risk of idolatry if we think that these terms mean exactly the same of God as they would if we applied them to people or things in the created order. The most we can say of a given name is that it is less inappropriate than others. Even the names directly revealed by God are mediated by human language.

One of the principal exponents of this tradition is the pseudonymous 6th-century monk who went by the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, though the English stiff upper lip sometimes reduces his name to Denys. Dionysius influenced St John of Damascus, who used his works to defend the iconographic tradition against Emperor Leo, and he would posthumously exercise an unparalleled influence on the theology of the great mediaeval theologian, St Thomas Aquinas. Refining the idoloclastic Platonic tradition of naming, Dionysius surprises us by arguing that the names which seem least appropriate to us can in fact be the least misleading: the simile of God as a giant waking up with a hangover in Psalm 76, for instance, can help wake us from our complacent and domesticated (which is to say, idolatrous) imaginings of the Divine. For Dionysius, all speech about God - whom he calls “Being beyond being” - is at one level false. The least inappropriate use of words towards God is the language of adoration and praise, which he calls “hymning.” This properly and truly establishes the due relationship of creatures to their source. Liturgical prayer is the highest use of language. 

Six centuries later, St Thomas Aquinas would differ from Dionysius in one key way. Both worked on doctrines of Divine Names, trying to establish if not what name is best for God, at least what name is the least wrong. For Dionysius, the least inappropriate name for God is “the Good.” Before anything else, before even Being, God must be described as good, for it is only because of his goodness that there is any being, and God himself is beyond all being.  God’s goodness is prior to God’s being, if it is even proper to speak of God in terms of being at all.

Aquinas carefully considered Dionysius’ priority of the Good over Being, but concluded with St Augustine that Being must come first, for without God being, there could be no Good. God has to be, to be good. Now, Aquinas did not see God’s being as some static “thing,” but rather as act: the “Act of Being,” expressed as the Latin infinitive esse, “to be.” But from God as Being, all things which are take their being.

There is a subtle but vital distinction to be made here. St Thomas was resolutely not saying that when we speak of created things as being and God as being, we are using the verb “to be” in exactly the same way. For instance, when we use the third person singular of the verb “to be” to say “this dog is” and “God is,” we are not using the word “is” in exactly the same way. To suggest that the dog’s existence is in the same category as God’s would be to place unacceptable bounds on God, reducing him to an object that we can grasp: we might say, a conceptual idol.

Nor, however, was Aquinas saying that the word “being” has two completely different meanings depending on whether we apply it to created things or to God, because then the word would have no meaning at all. We might as well say that “apples” means “giraffes.”

Rather, he argued, our use of language about God is analogous. Being as it is understood in a creaturely sense is neither exactly the same nor entirely different from the incomprehensible being of the divine and uncreated, but rather the being of creatures participates by analogy in the Act of Being which is God. The “being” of creatures is not exactly the same, not entirely different, but analogous to the “being” of God. The entire created universe, everything which has being, is therefore a theophany, a manifestation, one might go so far as to say an “icon” of the uncreated Creator.

For the first millennium of Christian thinkers, influenced like St John of Damascus by a mixture of the Platonic thought of the ancient pagan world and the contemplative prayer of monastic communities, the whole universe was like an icon of the mind of God; the world was creation, as an ongoing gift from God in which anyone could glimpse something of God through contemplation – but which was fully revealed only in the self-giving sacrificial love of Christ Incarnate, Crucified, Risen and Ascended. The idea of somehow separating creation from creator, seeing the world as sufficient in itself was alien to their mindset. The world was a gift, iconic of its giver.

For Aquinas, who inherited this tradition and philosophised in dialogue with works of the great Jewish and Muslim thinkers of the day, Christians can therefore say with non-Christians that the beauty of the cosmos reveals a fundamental goodness, that this goodness is absolutely real and true, and that whatever is good and true is also beautiful. But, he would insist, it is the Christian revelation of the Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ which gives the closest we can come to the content of that truth: because there, God is revealed very specifically as self-giving love.

Cross as Canon

“Man is the measure of all things.”

Protagoras’ words of some 2500 years ago have never been taken more seriously than they are today. So we might also heed Plato’s riposte to him, put into the mouth of Socrates in the dialogue Theaetetus:

“How are we so ignorant that we should go to school to Protagoras, if each of us is the measure of his own wisdom?”

Or, to put Plato’s objection into modern terms, “if the pupils can teach themselves, why bother with schools?”

Nonetheless, Protagoras’ teaching certainly worked for him, earning him the best living of any philosopher of his time. Socrates’ teaching earned him death by hemlock. Teachers of truth, be warned! The idea that each of us can make up the truth for ourselves sold then just as it sells now.

The Greek word for “measure” or “rule” is canon. We speak of a rule of life, or a canon of Scripture or literature. In both usages, we are taking a measure of what belongs within, and what, like the limbs of the guests of Procrustes, needs to be excised. The idol of relativism makes the individual will the sole determinant of truth and so the sole arbiter of canon. Each individual is indeed the measure of all things.

The Platonist repudiates this claim entirely, maintaining that there is a real truth, goodness and beauty beyond the exercise of individual wills. No matter if every rational being left in the world believes that it is right, say, to exterminate an entire race on the basis of their blood or skin colour, this can never be true and can never be good. It is not one “lifestyle choice” among others. There is a transcendent goodness which stands beyond this, and that this goodness is true, whatever people may or may not believe.

The first millennium of Christian theology, far from overthrowing Plato’s pagan wisdom, claimed that God’s self-revelation perfects this basic understanding of reality which was shared by pagans, Jews and Muslims alike. As St Thomas Aquinas puts it, paraphrasing Dionysius, “grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it.” Where Neoplatonists could find something of the truth of reality through contemplation of the beauty of the created order, Christians found a very specific locus for the culmination of that truth: the Cross.

On the Cross, Christ reveals God as absolute self-gift, life lived entirely for others. The Cross is an icon which gives a glimpse of divine reality not as some isolated and other “being,” but as fundamentally and essentially consisting in relationship. This reality finds further expression in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, where God’s oneness (or better, “uniqueness”) consists in his threeness, his fundamentally communal life of other-orientation into which all created beings are invited.

So, the Cross becomes the measure of all things - both icon and canon. Icon, in the sense of standing not as an idol, which simply demands and asserts its own self-will, but as a window into the paradoxical will for self-giving love which constitutes transcendent goodness; canon, in the sense of the pattern, mould or image to which all reality is called to conform.

The canon of the Cross is not, however, what Protagoras and his ilk might fear, and rightly resist: the arbitrary imposition of divine authority upon more or less willing subjects. For in Christ, the Law once written on tablets of stone is now transferred, almost tattooed, onto the human heart, precisely as self-giving love. One of Jesus’ last two commandments to his disciples the night before he died was to love one another, not in any generic understanding of the word “love,” but precisely “as I have loved you:” by giving your life for others, living life for others.

Yet this is something which humans cannot achieve by our own merits and actions. So, the same night, Jesus gives a second commandment: “do this in remembrance of me.” Through the gift of the Holy Spirit, Christ continues to nourish his followers to this day with his body and blood given for the world, only now under bread and wine. So, through the Eucharist, we participate in Christ’s self-sacrifice on the Cross, and are conformed more closely to his image. In the words of the fourth century St Athanasius, “God became man so that man might become divine.” The transcendent Good invites us into participatory, mutual indwelling.

In the worldview which I am calling “iconic,” all creation to some extent participates in God, bearing his “image” - which, in Greek, is “icon.” Christ, as the one who is both human and divine, bears the divine image par excellence, in fact, absolutely. There is, said Archbishop Michael Ramsey, nothing un-Christlike in God. It is through participation in him that we come to bear the image more closely. The Platonists illustrate this concept with the word “character,” which is Greek for a “stamp” or “impression.” Think back to primary school, and cutting shapes into potatoes to make prints of stars or flowers. In words I never thought I would write, Christ is the potato. The image he bears reflects his Father perfectly. It was stamped upon our first parents, Adam and Eve. Thanks to the Fall, that image has been distorted, its edges blurred. As it passes through the generations, the shape gets less and less recognisable. Baptism and the Eucharist are the means for us to be restamped with fresh paint and sharpened edges. Through these sacraments, the blurred outline of Christ’s character, the icon of communal, self-giving Trinitarian love which beats at the heart of all reality, is given greater resolution and definition. Grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it: and in Christ, the divine became human so that humanity might become divine. 

So, in Christian tradition, the Cross is the canon, the measure of truth, goodness and beauty, defined as other-focussed, self-giving love. And the Cross stands fast while the world turns. But it does not stand alone.

Tradition as Deuterocanon

If we think that we have grasped God through seeing the Cross as icon of self-giving love, we must be careful: because if you grasp it, it is not God, and we may end up with an idol again. But icons proper do not allow such ready comprehension. Rather than closing the gaze, we recall, they must open the gaze. And just as the divine consists in relationship, so does the icon, and so does the Cross.

Take this icon of the Cross, suspended since September 2018 in the chancel of Lichfield Cathedral. Imagine that you are coming to it as an alien visitor from another planet, totally unaware of its cultural and religious context. You would be quite unable to read it. It would not be readily apparent even that it is an instrument of death, and if you worked that out, you would be left wondering why such a thing were hanging in the centre of a vast and ornate building, clearly meant to inspire awe and worship.The use of gold leaf would indicate that the community which had commissioned this image ascribes value to it. The leaves and flowers growing from it would be lost on you, though you would recognise them as flora and signs of life. The red and blue lines pouring from the man’s side would mean nothing, nor the letters above his head.

I fear that it is not only alien visitors from other planets who would stand before the icon so illiterate and perplexed, but even many British people educated within the last forty years. For even if the Cross is the unwritten canon of truth, it stands within a network of knowledge which we might term a secondary or “deutero”-canon, without which it can give not even a glimpse of understanding. And that deuterocanon has been excised from our nation’s collective memory.

For the hundreds of years now called the Dark Ages, the West lost access to ancient Greek wisdom of the philosophers while the Muslim universities kept studying them. Starting about fifty years ago, the Anglosphere started to repeat this history of collective amnesia. This time, though, we have been doing so deliberately and systematically, with the political imperative of airbrushing out the dead, white males. We are putting ourselves and our children at a great disadvantage in understanding the world by stripping them of their own intellectual inheritance. Already, despite a few outlying noble efforts to preserve it, the West is entering a new Dark Age of decline. The rest of the world is realising that our leaders and opinion-makers no longer have anything of value left to say. It is up to the Church and her schools to guard the wisdom that makes the Cross decipherable.

What is the body of knowledge, or curriculum, needed to read the Cross? To recognise that the Cross is a sign of God the Divine Word self-emptying to conquer death and give eternal life to the world; to connect the flowers on the Cross to the tree from which Adam and Eve took the forbidden fruit which invited death into the world; to recognise the blood and water streaming from Jesus’ side as signs of his dual divine and human nature, replicated in the rituals of the preparation of the chalice at Mass; to read the Latin initials above his head as “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews;” and then to make some sort of sense out of this? Clearly, there will be different levels of detail and understanding, but already, this one icon alone is giving us questions which might suggest a “curriculum” of the Christian faith.

To reach his level of understanding, St John of Damascus needed a detailed knowledge of the Christian and Jewish scriptures, of Christian theology and of pagan Greek philosophy. This would include the work of the early Church Fathers, the Creeds and Canons of the Church. With the resources available to him twelve centuries ago, he would doubtless be able to write a considered volume just on the symbolism of the Lichfield icon, were he alive to see it. These ancient works need to be studied still today. They comprise the backbone of Western philosophical and religious tradition, without which the twelve centuries’ worth of literature, music, poetry, hymnody, architecture and art which followed the Damascene cannot be understood. These too need to be studies.

Aquinas saw that the pagan, Islamic and Jewish scholars with whose work he engaged were working towards the one and same Good which is God, albeit lacking the resources of Christian revelation he thought ultimately necessary to get them to their destination. To that, nowadays, we might add the insights of other non-Christian theologies and philosophies, but must remain locally rooted as we do so in the traditions of our own place. It is no good presenting a culturally deracinated youth with a supermarket of philosophical “options” to choose from. They need instruction first in how to read the signs. It is only fluency in their own tradition that will allow them any chance of insight into others. Paradoxically, it is by being thoroughly “parochial,” aware of our local inheritance, that we have a chance of global understanding. The traditions of church organisations and guilds of acolytes, vergers, choirs and organists add to a living tradition of some 3000 years, stretching all the way back from the folk memory of ancient Jews, mediated right from biblical times by an international and multi-cultural network of the faithful and philosophical, all the way to the collective memory of every little English parish. To cut ourselves off from our local lore and culture is to sever the ties which link us to the rest of humanity.

In the end, I suppose, to know the truth of the Cross fully one would have to know the truth of everything, for in the Cross all things are ultimately reconciled, things in heaven and things on earth. And that, need I say, is beyond our capacity. We see in a glass darkly. Since the Good is boundless and infinite in its self-gift, it necessarily exceeds the capacity of our merely finite minds. The Cross may be the most luminous revelation of reality, but we approach it always blindly, groping towards the truth through the miasma of our distance from God. This distance from God is as true and absolute as our intimate participation in him. The transcendence of God and his immanence are balanced in a delicate paradox.

The Cross is the canon of divine self-gift, which impresses the character of Christ on us even as we approach it, limping unshod, through the cloud of Sion and the darkness of the Good Friday eclipse. Church schools owe it to the nation to restore the curriculum of the Cross to the British collective memory, not as an historic relic or symbol of a quaint belief of yesteryear, but as the grounds of truth, the truth myth which lends its truth to the mythoi of the world. We cannot know the divine Love so much as live it, or more properly, let it live through us as we participate in it. To know God is to love God and so love as God. It is to have the Law written on our hearts for all to see and read. The role of the Christian educator is to ensure that it is written there, that the pupils may see and trust and believe. It is to become an icon of Christ, who alone is the true Teacher.