Irina YazykovaCo-creation of the image. Theology icons

One of the greatest discoveries of the 20th century, both artistically and spiritually, is the Orthodox icon. Recall that this “discovery” happened on the eve of historical upheavals: the First World War and subsequent revolutions and wars, on the eve of “a whole thunderous period of world history, which will reveal to the world horrors hitherto unseen and unheard of,” E. Trubetskoy wrote in 1916 . It is during this “stormy period” that the icon is revealed as one of the greatest treasures of world art, for some as a legacy of the distant past, for others as an object of aesthetic admiration; for the third, this “discovery” prompted them to comprehend the icon, in the light of it, to comprehend the ongoing events. And one must think that the long process of its gradual “discovery” is being providentially drawn up to this time. If a deep spiritual decline has affected the oblivion of the icon, then the spiritual awakening caused by catastrophes and upheavals pushes us to return to it, to understanding its language and meaning, brings it closer, makes it feel: it not only opens up as the past, but also comes to life as the present. . To characterize it, there are already completely different words. A slow penetration into the spiritual meaning of the ancient icon begins. A spirit was discovered in her, immeasurably higher than one's own, acquired in "enlightenment". It is no longer perceived only as an artistic or cultural value, but also as an artistic revelation of spiritual experience - “speculation in colors”, also manifested in years of confusion and disasters. It is during these days of sorrow that modern upheavals begin to be understood in the light of the spiritual power of the icon and comprehended by it. “Mute for many centuries, the icon spoke to us in the same language as it spoke to our distant ancestors.”
And “again, an amazing coincidence between the fate of the ancient icon and the fate of the Russian Church. Both in life and in painting the same thing happens: both here and there the darkened face is freed from age-old layers of gold, the soot of inept, tasteless writing. That image of the world-encompassing temple, which shone before us in a purified icon, is now miraculously reborn in the life of the Church. In life, as in painting, we see the same undamaged, untouched for centuries image of the Cathedral Church. However, these fates of the Russian Church, having led her out of "worldly splendor" and "well-being", directed her to the path of trials on the cross.
With the establishment of Soviet power, a new worldview is being introduced, generated by the same de-churched culture, but shedding the guise of Christianity. Worldview? it becomes state. In the eyes of the state, all beliefs, including the Church, are reduced to the general concept of "religion", and this "religion" is perceived as a "reactionary ideology", "deception", "opium for the people." This last formula "is the cornerstone of the Marxist view of religion." The church is regarded as a foreign body in the state, alien to it, as the bearer of a worldview hostile to it. The state takes care not only of the material well-being of the people, but also of their upbringing, "the formation of a new man." On the one hand, "... Soviet legislation on freedom of conscience is imbued with the spirit of ensuring the right of citizens to profess any religion or not to profess any"; on the other hand, "an uncompromising struggle against religious views incompatible with the materialistic worldview, social and scientific and technological progress, is the most important prerequisite and decisive condition for the formation of a new person. Thus, the fight against religion is waged in the name of the principle of freedom of conscience, and this freedom is exercised by a series of prohibitions. In particular, any acquaintance with religion outside of worship is prohibited as religious propaganda, and "the teaching of the dogma [...] in churches, prayer houses and private houses to persons who have not yet reached the age of 18 is prohibited."
Both in the Church and in the icon there is a process of purification: everything that was connected with it by obligatory ritual service falls away from the Church. Everything that was layered on the icon is also swept aside. Mechanical production also disappears, which, as we have seen, neither the members of the Committee, nor even the emperor himself could cope with. Icon-painting enterprises of the factory and handicraft type are also being liquidated.
Since religion is understood as an obsolete past that has no place in the new society, everything that was created in this past is accepted only as a cultural heritage and only as such is subject to preservation and study. Everything that has been preserved in churches, including icons, becomes state property, and already in 1918 the state takes it under its care. State restoration workshops are opened, private collections of icons are nationalized, and exhibitions are organized. And at the same time, the hostile attitude of the dominant worldview towards the Church encompasses everything related to it, including the icon. And if in XVIII-XIX centuries vandalism came from indifference and misunderstanding, now the mass destruction of churches and icons is already happening for ideological reasons. The work of an icon painter becomes, from the point of view of the dominant ideology, not only useless, but also harmful to society.
After centuries of oblivion and retreat from the icon, on the one hand, it is subject to destruction, on the other hand, its discovery goes far beyond the borders of Orthodoxy, into the very world whose heterodoxy and culture caused the enlightened society to depart from it and its oblivion in Orthodoxy itself. The colossal work done by the restorers, who brought the ancient icon back to life, is currently accompanied by an unprecedented number of illustrated publications in different languages, scientific and theological, Orthodox authors, non-Orthodox and atheists. And the penetration of the icon itself into the world of Western culture is proceeding on an extraordinary scale through the mass export of icons from Orthodox countries, their appearance in museums, the distribution of private collections and permanent exhibitions in various cities of the Western world. The Orthodox icon attracts both believers and non-believers. Interest in it is extremely diverse: a fascination with antiquity or in general collecting, the main thing is the craving for the icon in terms of religion, the desire to understand it, and through it to understand Orthodoxy. “For our strongly visually oriented epoch,” writes E. Benz, “it is recommended [...] to turn to the eye, to look at the image. This path to understanding the Eastern Orthodox Church is all the more appropriate because in it the figurative representation of the world of saints, the icon, occupies a central place. And further: “The significance of the icon for Orthodox piety and its theological justification opens the way to the most important points of Orthodox dogma. Because the concept of an icon is a dogmatically central concept that recurs in all aspects of theology. In the eyes of ordinary non-Orthodox believers, an icon is perceived consciously as evidence of Orthodoxy or as an expression in art, outside of a conscious confessional context, of true Christianity in practical prayer terms: in contrast to the distortion of this side in the Roman Catholic image, the icon “induces prayer.” “In icons, everyone will find peace for their soul; they can tell us, Westerners, an infinite amount of things, and they can produce in us holy conversion to the supernatural. Here the boundaries of time are erased, and interest is shown in the ancient icon along with the later and even modern, albeit for the most part eclectic in nature, but still not deviating from the canonical system. Because the Orthodox icon is the only art in the world that, at any artistic level, even a craft one, bears a revelation of the enduring meaning of life, the need for which is awakening in the modern world.
It is in this respect that the question of the icon was raised more officially by representatives of the Anglican Confession in connection with their attitude to the Seventh Ecumenical Council. At a meeting with the Orthodox in Rymnik (Romania) in July 1974, the question was put by the Anglicans in its true theological context. At the same time, the hope was expressed that the dogma of icon veneration would be expressed by the Orthodox in application to modern reality, since “a deeper understanding of the principles of icon painting, which reveal the truth and consequences of the incarnation of the Word of God, can today help Christians to more correctly assess the Christian teaching about man and the material world. ".
This very formulation of the question testifies to the fact that in our “visually oriented era” there is an urgent need, both for the heterodox and for the Orthodox themselves, to delve into the essence of the dogma of icon veneration and its significance for modern Christianity. In the West, the dogma of the Seventh Council has never penetrated into the consciousness of the Church, and in Orthodoxy itself, during the decline of the icon and the loss of understanding of its theological content, its understanding has become dulled and its capital significance has, as it were, faded away. After all, entire generations of Orthodox were brought up on art, which, hiding behind the dogma of icon veneration, in fact did not correspond to it in any way. Let us recall once again that already in the 17th century, all the doctrinal content of the image was excluded from the Synodic of the Triumph of Orthodoxy. And in our time, on the day of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, one can only, as an exception, hear in a sermon about the connection of this holiday with the icon. In the dogma of icon veneration, the conciliar consciousness of the Church condemned the rejection of the image as a Christian heresy, and the image retained its place in church life; however, its vital significance was no longer perceived in all its inherent fullness, and this gave rise to indifference to its content and role.
In our time, to delve into the essence of the dogma of icon veneration means to comprehend the icon itself not only as an object of prayer and decoration of the temple; it means comprehending what it carries within itself, understanding its consonance with modern man, comprehending the testimony of spiritual experience transmitted from the depths of Orthodoxy, the enduring significance of Christian revelation.
Meanwhile, not only in heterodoxy, but also in the Orthodox environment, one has to face a view that, even in those cases when it is completely well-intentioned, directs the understanding of the icon on a false path. It boils down to the following: the Seventh Ecumenical Council, which revealed the dogma of icon veneration, did not determine the nature of the image, and “the theology of the defenders of icon veneration does not contain dogmatization of style.” In other words, the Church has not canonized any style or kind of art. For a person of modern culture, who often does not have a clear consciousness of the Church, such a view gives reason to believe and even argue that, in addition to the canonical icon, allegedly associated with a certain era and culture, other types or styles of art can exist in the Church, reflecting other eras. .
This attitude is greatly facilitated by contemporary art history. Science pronounced its verdict: iconography, a product of the Middle Ages with its obsolete worldview, ended in the 17th century. Medieval culture has disappeared, and with it the icon has gone into the past. This position, contrary to evidence, is the main one in modern science, which, like the science of the 19th century, sees in the icon a certain stage of cultural development (Byzantine, Russian ...). At the same time, it is curious: the new worldview is considered to be different, breaking the obsolete old one, and the new art generated by this new worldview is incomprehensibly considered to be the development of the old one, from which it allegedly proceeds in the order of succession. Science, free from dogmas, having introduced the icon into the stream of global art, fixed its creativity in the realm of culture and tore it away from the Church. It must be said that already in the age of enlightenment, the Church succumbed to the suggestion that artistic creativity was not her element, and dutifully agreed with this, betraying art to secular culture. But after all, for three centuries the icon survived and continues to live, of course, not because of adherence to medieval culture, but precisely as an expression of faith.
For centuries, the Church has been the creator and bearer of culture. Since theology dominated all areas of life, faith was a common property, and the whole life of people was comprehended and directed by this faith. Art was the expression of this faith, that is, the revelation that the Church brings and which formed the worldview corresponding to it, giving rise to church culture. Revelation remains the same now; our faith remains the same. Church culture continues to exist. But what an icon contains, what it carries, does not depend on even church culture. Culture provides only means of expression, revealing the correspondence of the icon to the Gospel. In this sense, it is characteristic that the Oros of the Seventh Council concludes with the same plan “whether it be the Gospel, or the image of the Cross, or icon painting, or the holy remains of the martyrs.” After all, neither the Gospel, nor the Cross, nor the relics of the saints have anything to do with culture. Consequently, icon painting is also regarded as a sacred property, worked out in the depths of the Catholic Tradition of the Church: “Icon painting [...] is an approved statute and tradition of the Catholic Church, for we know that it is the Holy Spirit living in it” (Oros). And during the period of iconoclasm, the bloody struggle was not only for the right to depict God and the saints, but for the image that carries and reveals the truth, that is, precisely for a certain style of art that expresses conformity with the Gospel, just as confessors went to battle for the same truth. torment for the sake of the words that express it. From the beginning, the artistic language of the icon developed by the Church becomes the property of the Christian peoples, beyond any national, social or cultural boundaries, because its unity is achieved not by a common culture and not by administrative measures, but by a common faith and worldview. At the time of the Seventh Council, the artistic language of the Church was the same as later, although still insufficiently refined and purposeful. The style of the icon was the property of the entire Christian world for 1000 years of its history, both in the East and in the West: there was no other style. And his whole path is only the disclosure and refinement of his artistic language, or, on the contrary, his decline and retreat from it. Because this style itself and its purity is determined by Orthodoxy, a more or less integral assimilation of Revelation. And this language, of course, is subject to changes, but changes within the iconic style, as we see it throughout its almost two thousand years of history.
The attitude to the icon as a legacy of the past and only one of the possible forms of art in the Church contributes to a large extent to the fact that for the majority of believers, the clergy and the episcopate, no discovery of it actually happened. True, it must be said that there was actually nothing to open from a church point of view: there were icons in churches (although most of them were written down, but there were and are also not written down) and people prayed in front of them - so it would be more correct in this case to talk about conversion to the icon. The veneration of the icon has been preserved. Its place in worship and church life has also been preserved. But the doctrinal side of the icon, that is, the Orthodox relationship between the image and the dogma, expressed in conciliar definitions, patristic writings and divine services, disappeared from church consciousness. Therefore, the teaching of the Church applies to any image of a religious plot. Such an attitude towards the icon, characteristic of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, froze in its inviolability, just as another era froze in the Old Believers. The image itself in its Orthodox appearance is used not to be seen and not even to be interested in it. And the appeal to this image after centuries of decline occurs, paradoxically, especially slowly, we repeat, precisely in the ecclesiastical environment. And in itself, the slowness of this appeal to the meaning and content of the icon testifies to the depth of separation from it. “In the meantime, believers and those who belong to the Church diligently look for psychological and other aids to Orthodoxy and empathize with El Greco, Chekhov, and anyone else. If only not to focus on the fullness of the church. And quite conscientiously they are aware of this. But what is surprising here, when until quite recently the eyes of people were simply completely closed to church art ”(from a private letter from Russia). "Just not to focus on the fullness of the church" - that's the point. One of the main reasons for the insensitivity of the icon as an image of the Revelation, and, moreover, of the Revelation perceived by life, is an equally profound insensitivity and misunderstanding of the Church. For many, the Church itself is one of the cultural values ​​(or even spiritual values); it is a kind of appendage to culture and must justify its existence as a stimulus for artistic activity, a factor in achieving social justice, and so on. In other words, here is the same temptation about the "Kingdom of Israel" to which the Apostles fell.
The path of a modern enlightened person to the realization of the Church is the same as to the realization of the icon. And there, and here the same stages of searching, delusions and, finally, insight (speculation in colors). To paraphrase Archpriest A. Schmemann, we can say that in order to feel in the icon something more than a work of art or an object of personal piety, “it was necessary to see and feel in the Church itself something more than a community of believers.”
A believer, even if he is fascinated by an icon, often hesitates: he is not sure that not a pictorial image, but a canonical icon is an expression of what he believes in. He sees icons in museums, and it seems to him that if the temple is decorated only with iconography without paintings, then it has been turned into a museum (we have heard this). Moreover, for the majority, the difference between an icon and a religious painting is often defined as the difference, again, in style: old - new, even Old Believer - Orthodox.
In addition to the above point of view, for which the icon is only one of the possible styles of church art, we note another, which, in fact, is the rationale for the first; it is so widespread that it is reflected in the materials of the pre-conciliar meeting. The approach here is imbued with doctrinal and pastoral care. “Icon painting is an expression of Orthodoxy with its dogmatic moral teaching [...], the revelation of life in Christ and the mysteries of God’s dispensation about the salvation of people.” It's hard to say exactly. But further: “The pictorial realistic direction is a verbal mammal for common people". This setup raises a number of perplexing questions. First of all, the division of the church people along cultural lines is incomprehensible and strange. Is it not the task of the Church to reveal the secrets of God's dispensation to all its members, both civilized and uncultured? After all, Revelation is addressed to a person regardless of his cultural level; in the same way, independently of him, he perceives this Revelation and grows spiritually.
Further: if icon painting “reflects Orthodoxy most fully and exhaustively in all possible depth and breadth”, then, therefore, the “painterly realistic trend” does not possess such properties, that is, it is not a “disclosure of life in Christ”, or, in any case , damages it. Does this mean that “the secrets of God's economy about the salvation of people” are not for the “common people”? But has the Church ever damaged or reduced its teaching to the level of understanding of this or that stratum of the people, introducing people to the mysteries of salvation to a greater or lesser extent? After all, the pictorial realistic trend, being a product of an autonomous culture, is an expression of the autonomous existence of the visible world in relation to the divine world, an expression of life “according to the elements of this world”, even if idealized by the artist’s personal piety. Being limited by the humanity of Christ, it, like any other art in general, except for the canonical icon, cannot reveal life in Christ and indicate the path of salvation. After all, the way to save man and the world does not in any way consist in accepting their current state as normal and conveying it in art, but in revealing how the fallen world differs from the Divine plan about it, what is the salvation of man, and through him and peace. “For if a saint (as he is depicted in a realistic direction) is in everything like himself (that is, a believer), then what is his strength? How can he help a person immersed in his worries and sorrows? The author of these words, an art historian, approaching practically, argues in terms of simple logic, which suggests the right decision(although in his eyes the icon is the "image of the legend", "fiction"). The author understands the difference between the content and meaning of the icon and the pictorial image more accurately than many believers and the clergy. And it is impossible to dissuade here that logic is one thing, and faith is another. After all, an icon is not made for God, but specifically for a believer, and simple logic is not a hindrance here. When St. Basil the Great says that “he who raises the lying one must certainly be higher than the fallen one,” then this is also simple logic, and it refers specifically to spiritual life. After all, the pictorial image is the fruit of that free creativity, not bound by the dogmas of the Church, which the innovators of the 17th century so strenuously sought. If in terms of faith it does not express the Orthodox teaching about salvation, then in terms of spirituality, the work of the artist, autonomous from the Church, based on his idea of ​​​​spiritual life, that is, on his imagination, can be destructive. But here we will give the floor to persons more competent in this area. “The ability of the imagination,” says Bishop Ignatius (Bryanchaninov), “is in a special development among passionate people. She acts in them according to her mood, and changes everything sacred into passionate. Paintings depicting sacred faces and events by famous but passionate artists can convince us of this.
These artists endeavored to imagine and depict holiness and virtue in all its forms; but full and saturated with sin, they portrayed sin, one sin. Refined voluptuousness breathes from the image in which the brilliant painter wanted to depict chastity and Divine love unknown to him [...]. Passionate spectators admire the works of such artists; but in people anointed with the spirit of the Gospel, these brilliant works, as imprinted with blasphemy and the filth of sin, give rise to sadness and disgust. The artist-creator in the modern sense of the word, adds priest P. Florensky, “depicting chastity and Divine love unknown to him,” can even be guided by pious intentions and feelings. But using only semi-conscious memories of the icon, such artists “mix the statutory truth with their own self-creation, take on the most responsible work of St. Fathers, and, not being such, self-proclaim and even bear false witness. Another modern icon is a crying perjury publicly proclaimed in the temple. And the point here is not only in the personality of the artist, but in the fact that this art, borrowed from Roman Catholicism and alien to the dogmatic premises and spiritual experience of Orthodoxy, applies its means of expression to what they cannot convey, applies them in areas where they are not applicable. . The introduction of this art into Orthodoxy was the result of spiritual decline, and not the result of a distortion of dogma; in relation to the latter, it remained a superficial element, a foreign body, cut off from Tradition and, consequently, from the spiritual heritage of the historical Church. And this art, a product of a de-churched culture, which not only cannot be justified by the Seventh Council, but generally falls outside the scope of its definitions, was proposed, under the name of a milk, to legalize conciliarly in the Church on a par with an icon!
A serious argument in favor of the existence of the pictorial style, along with iconography, is the presence of miraculous images in it. "Both types of church art are acceptable for the expression of Christian truths in Orthodoxy on the basis of the phenomenon of miracles in both types of church iconography." So, if the pictorial style does not express the fullness of the truths of salvation, then this is, as it were, compensated by the presence of miraculous images. This argument raises a basic and fundamental question: can miracles be considered a guiding principle in the life of the Church, whether in her whole, or in any of her manifestations (in this case, in her art)? Are miracles the criterion here? This question, as we have already noted, arose in the 17th century, but in the reverse order: miracles were rejected as a criterion in relation to canonical icon painting, moreover, precisely by supporters of a new, realistic trend in art.
In a miracle, the rank of nature is conquered; the order established by God is violated by Him for the salvation of man. Miracles happen by the mercy of God and within the framework of the commandments and canons, they also happen in violation of the Divine commandment and church canons. God can work miracles besides icons, just as He acts “unworthy”, just as He works miracles with the forces of nature. But a miracle, by its very definition, cannot be the norm: it is the miracle that goes beyond the norm.
The foundation of the entire life of the Church is undoubtedly the decisive and everything-determining miracle for her: the incarnation of God and the deification of man. “It is a marvelous miracle in heaven and on earth that God is on earth and man is in heaven.” This miracle is precisely the norm of life of the Church, enshrined in its canon, which is opposed to the present state of the world. It is precisely on this that the entire liturgical life of the Church is based: its annual cycle is determined by the stages and aspects of this main miracle, and by no means by private miracles, even those performed by the Savior Himself. The Church lives not by what is transient and individual, but by what is unchanging. Is it because miracles have never been a criterion for her in any of the areas of her life and this life has never been equal to them? And it is no coincidence that conciliar decrees prescribe to paint icons based not on miraculous models (because the miracle-working of an icon is an external temporary, and not its permanent manifestation), but as the ancient icon painters wrote, that is, according to the icon-painting canon. This, we emphasize, refers to the Orthodox canonical image, that is, to the full expression of "the mysteries of God's dispensation for the salvation of people."
As for the pictorial style, how can an image become ecclesiastical if it does not express the teachings of the Church, an image that does not carry the “revealing of life in Christ”, and how, by virtue of its miraculous work, does it become acceptable for expressing “Christian truths in Orthodoxy” and is placed on the same level with the image that expresses them? Such an image, if, of course, in its iconographic plot it does not contain a contradiction to the Orthodox dogma, that is, it is not heretical, can serve as the basis for the emergence of a new type of canonical icon (provided, of course, that the miracle is authentic), that is, be churched.
When applied to modern reality, the dogma of icon veneration has significance not only in terms of creed, but also in terms of non-religious. On the one hand, acquaintance with Orthodoxy and the return to the origins of Christianity, so characteristic of our time, inevitably leads to a meeting with an image, an icon, and this means
- to a meeting with the original fullness of the Christian Revelation in word and image. On the other hand, the testimony that an Orthodox icon bears is consonant with the problems of our time, because this problematic is of a pronounced anthropological nature. The central question of our time is man, led into a blind alley by the secularized humanism that has risen on Roman Catholic soil.
The decay of culture and a number of scientific and technological revolutions have led the world to the fact that the question is already being raised about the preservation of man's very humanity, moreover
- about the preservation of humanity itself. Scientific and technological progress is aimed at the benefit of man, at releasing his creative energy, and this progress is marked by hitherto unprecedented achievements. But at the same time, paradoxically, in this world of unprecedented development of science and technology, in the world of modern ideologies, also aimed at the welfare and progress of mankind, there is an irresistible craving for external and internal savagery; instead of the spiritualization of animal life - to the bestiality of the spirit.
A person turns into an instrument of production, and his main value is not in his personality, but in his function. AT Everyday life human domination of falsehood and ersatz, fragmentation, reaching decomposition in all areas, leads a person to a loss of spiritual and physical balance, the search for an artificial paradise, up to drugs. “Humanity, which we observe and which we are, is a broken humanity. It is broken first of all in each of us [...]. We are upside down, and there is no center that would pacify all this. Divided within ourselves, we are divided among ourselves...” This man, divided in himself, turns out to be the measure of all things in the modern world, and this exaltation, as Archpriest A. Schmemann notes, is paradoxically combined with a belittling of man himself, with a distortion his calling and God's plan for him. The era is anthropocentric, and man, its center, is petty and insignificant. The autonomous man of modern, that is, humanistic, culture has refused to be likened to his Archetype, has not accepted the image of Glory, revealed in the humiliated body of Christ. And with the renunciation of this image of ineffable glory, our [...] civilization began, it began with what, by theological analogy, should be called the second fall into sin. By cutting down his humanity, man has violated the hierarchy of being and thereby perverted his role in relation to the surrounding world, subordinating himself, instead of the Divine will, to the material nature over which he is called to dominate. Having renounced the Creator God, man, declaring himself the creator, creates other gods for himself, more greedy for human sacrifice than the pagan gods were.
On the spiritual plane, open and hidden theomachism evokes a reaction of faith, disintegration and decay - the search for unity, falsehood - a gravitation towards authenticity. In this world of decay, when the question is raised, how can one believe, in whom and what, for what purpose to believe, a person is looking for the meaning of his existence.
And here again there is an amazing coincidence between the fate of the Orthodox Church and the fate of the Orthodox icon. If in the synodal period the leading role belonged to the Russian Local Church, associated with a powerful state, now none of the Churches is in such a position. The rapid development of a dechurched culture has led the Church to limit the means of its influence. But just suppressed by active atheism or heterodoxy, weakened by schisms and discords, Orthodoxy comes out. Today, in the order of mission, it is no longer one or another Local Church, and Orthodoxy as the revelation before the world of that Revelation, which is the Church herself and which she brings to this world. The very nature of the mission is also changing; it is no longer only the preaching of Christianity to unenlightened peoples, but, mainly, opposition to its dechurched world with its decaying culture. Orthodoxy is opposed to the culture of decay and falsehood as its antithesis, as truth, unity and authenticity, because the very nature of the Church, her catholicity, is the opposite of separatism, disunity, division, individualism.
The Christian Revelation brings a major revolution in the relationship of man with God, on the one hand, and the existing world order, on the other; it brings the restoration of the Creator's plan for the world, or otherwise, the abolition of the inconsistency of the world with the Divine plan about it. “For My counsels are not, as your counsels are, as my dear ones are lower than your ways, says the Lord. But as heaven is separated from earth, so is my way from your ways, and your thoughts from my thought” (Isaiah 55:8-9).
Christianity is not addressed to this or that category of people, class, society, institution, national or social group; it is not an ideological means for improving the fallen world, for establishing the "Kingdom of God" on earth. It is the revelation of the Kingdom of God not in external conditions, but within man himself. “Repent”, that is, “turn” - metanoiete - in the sermon of John the Baptist requires the rejection of the old path and the perception of the new, the opposite of sinful. Whoever is in Christ is a new creation. The old has passed away, now everything is new (2 Cor. 5:17). The entire thrust of the gospel sermon (all the parables about the Kingdom of God, the Sermon on the Mount, etc.) finds its expression in opposition to the paths of the fallen world. The evangelical perspective, as an expression of the very essence of Christianity, is a denunciation of the situation that considers natural the decay and decay that reigns in the world. As a reality, truth and the way of salvation, it is opposed to the law of the prince of this world, to that sinful state that is considered normal, is understood as natural, inherent in the creation of God (“such is nature” - the usual justification). But the world, as a creation of God, is good; sinfulness and corruption, division and decay are not his essence, but a state imposed on him by man. Therefore, Christianity does not bring a denial of the world, but vice versa: through a person, healing him, bringing a person himself and the world around him to unity with the Creator. The world of evil, violence and bloody turmoil is opposed to the image of the world transformed in the Humanity of Christ, in other words, its comprehension in the perspective of its final destination.
And in our time, with the emergence of Orthodoxy into this world turned upside down, there is a meeting of two radically different orientations of man and his creativity: secularized anthropocentrism, non-religious humanism and Christian anthropocentrism. On the paths of this meeting, one of the main roles belongs to the icon. The main significance of its discovery in our time seems not to be that it has come to be valued or more or less correctly understood, but in the testimony that it bears to modern man: evidence of the victory of man over all decay and decay, evidence of a different plane of being, which puts a person in a different perspective in relation to the Creator, in a different direction in relation to the world lying in sin, gives him a different knowledge and vision of the world.
Turning to the Seventh Ecumenical Council, it must be said that, in essence, it did not reveal anything new; he only captured the original meaning of the Christian image. Here we will only briefly note those of its main provisions that are directly related to various aspects of modern problems.
Both in the oros and in its judgments, the Council connects the icon primarily with the Gospel, that is, with theology in its most primary sense, revealed, in the words of St. Gregory Palamas, "The self-truth of Christ, Who is the eternal God, became a theologian for us."
Here we are first of all confronted with the Christian concept of the image and with its meaning in theology, and, consequently, with its meaning in the life of a person created in the image of God. “Since man is verbal, that is, in the image of the Word, the Logos, then everything that relates to the destinies of man - grace, sin, redemption by the Word of God, which became Man - everything should also relate to the theology of the image. The same can be said about the Church, about the sacraments, about the spiritual life, about sanctification, about the ultimate goal. There is no area of ​​the study of theology that can be completely separated from the problem of the image without the risk of separating it from the living tree of Christian Tradition. It can be said that for any theologian of the catholic tradition, both in the East and in the West, if he is faithful to the basic principles of patristic thinking, the theme of the image (in its double meaning: the image as the principle of Divine Revelation and the image as the basis of man's relationship with God) must be inherent in the essence of Christianity. “God-enrichment, which is the basic dogmatic fact of Christianity, links theology and image so closely that the expression “theology of the image” seems almost pleonasmic, provided, of course, that theology is understood as the knowledge of God in His Word, which is the consubstantial Image of the Father.”
So, since in the incarnation the Word and Image of the Father is revealed to the world in the one Divine Person of Jesus Christ, theology and the image constitute a single verbal-figurative expression of the revealed Revelation. In other words, figurative theology and verbal theology represent an otological unity and thus a single guide on the paths of accepting the revealed Revelation by man, on the paths of his salvation. Consequently, the image is included in the creedal fullness of the Church as one of the fundamental truths of Revelation.
Justifying the icon by the Incarnation, that is, the Christological dogma, the Council stubbornly and repeatedly refers to the existence of icon veneration since apostolic times, that is, to the continuity of the Apostolic Tradition. True, modern man (with his faith not so much in science as in the infallibility of science) is inclined to be skeptical about this statement, especially since references to antiquity often served as proof of authenticity without sufficient grounds. But in this case, the Fathers of the Council were not based on the data on which modern science is based, but on the essence of Christianity: on the appearance in the created world of “the Image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation” (Col. 1:15 - reading on the day of the icon Not Made by Hands Spas). When God the Word became flesh, says St. Irenaeus, "He revealed the true image, since He Himself became what was His image [...] and restored the likeness, likening man to the invisible Father." This Image of the invisible God, imprinted in matter, evidence of the “true, and not imaginary God of the Word (oros of the Cathedral), opposes, on the one hand, the absence of the image of God in Old Testament, on the other hand, a false image in paganism - an idol. In contrast to this false image of God, created in the image of man, Christianity brings into the world the image of the Creator, that archetype covered by the fall, according to which man was created. This image lives in Tradition, which “is the internal, charismatic or mystical memory of the Church. It is, first of all, “unity of spirit,” a living and uninterrupted connection with the mystery of Pentecost, with the mystery of the Upper Room of Zion.” Hence the stubbornness of the Fathers of the Council in referring to the Apostolic Tradition. Since Christian Revelation was from the beginning revealed in a double way, in word and image, the Council, “following the teaching of St. Our Father and the Tradition of the Catholic Church” (oros), affirms the original existence of the image and not only its necessity, but its natural belonging to Christianity, arising from the incarnation of the Divine Personality. Therefore, iconoclasm, despite its also original existence and opposition to the image, which arose on the basis of the Old Testament prohibition and in the spiritualistic currents of the Origenist direction, ran into an insurmountable obstacle and served only to reveal and affirm the truth of Revelation.
For our time, the importance of the Seventh Council lies primarily in the fact that in response to open iconoclasm, he for all time revealed the icon as an expression Christian faith as an integral part of Orthodoxy. And the dogma of icon veneration is the answer to all heresies (iconoclasm is "the sum of many heresies and delusions," says the Council), by which this or that side of God-manhood and God-manhood itself as a whole, and thereby Christian anthropology. With the dogma of icon veneration, the Fathers of the Seventh Council protect Christian anthropology, that is, the relationship between God and man, manifested in the Person of Christ, and place the center of gravity not on theoretical constructions, but on the concrete experience of holiness. Because "if the incarnation of God's word, as the realization of a true Man, is primarily an anthropological event, then the revelation of the Holy Spirit and His presence in man is also an anthropological event." Therefore, in the victory over iconoclasm, the conciliar consciousness of the Church affirmed the icon as the triumph of Orthodoxy, as the Church's testimony to the revealed truth, because Christian anthropology found its most vivid and direct expression precisely in the Orthodox icon. After all, it is in it, which reveals the “truth and consequences of the Incarnation,” that the Christian doctrine of the relationship between God and man, man and the world is most fully and deeply expressed. Therefore, to exclude the image from Christian anthropology means not only to exclude the visible evidence of the incarnation of God, but also the evidence of man's likeness to God, the reality of economy, that is, to damage the testimony of Orthodoxy about the truth.
Since the icon is an image of the person to whom given name(whether it be the Divine Person of Christ or the person of a person), then the truth of the icon is determined primarily by its authenticity, historical authenticity because “the image is a likeness with distinctive features of the prototype”, and charismatic authenticity: God, indescribable according to the Divine, unites “inseparably and inseparably "(Chalcedonian dogma) with the described humanity. Man connects his describable humanity with the indescribable Divinity.
As we have already noted, the image of the Person of Christ, as evidence of the Incarnation, for the apologists of icon veneration is thus evidence of the reality of the Mystery of the Eucharist. Consequently, the authenticity of the image and its content is revealed in its correspondence to the Sacrament. The faith of the Church differs from all other faiths in that it concretely, physically participates in its object. And this faith in concrete communion becomes vision, knowledge, community of life with Him. This community of life is realized in the Eucharist. Prayer in front of the Chalice is addressed to a specific Personality, because only through an appeal to a Personality, through communication with It, it is possible to partake of what this Personality carries, what is incarnated in it. And this appeal itself requires an image because it does not refer to some imaginary Christ, not to an abstract Deity, but precisely to the Person: “Thou art truly Christ, this is thy Body" In the Eucharist, bread and wine are transmuted by the Holy Spirit into the Divine Body and Blood of Christ resurrected and glorified (Christianity knows no spiritual resurrection outside the body), salvation has taken place and is taking place through the body "The Eucharist itself is our salvation precisely because it is the body and humanity." Therefore, the image of the Person of Christ corresponds to the Sacrament only if it represents a body over which death no longer has power (Rom. 5:8-9), that is, the Body of Christ resurrected and glorified. Thus, the reality of the glorified Body in the Sacrament of the Eucharist is necessarily combined with the authenticity of a personal image, because the body of Christ described in the icon is the same "Body of God, shone with Divine glory, incorruptible, holy, life-giving." Here the image, as evidence of the incarnation, is combined with eschatology because the glorified Body of Christ is the Body of the Second Coming and Judgment. Hence the warning of Canon 3 of the Council of 869-870.” "If anyone does not honor the icon of the Savior Christ, let him not see His sign at the Second Coming." In other words, only the double realism of the image, which combines the pictorial and the unpicturable, is conjugated with the Sacrament of the Eucharist. And this correlation of the Sacrament with the image excludes any image that reveals only a servile specter or an abstract concept.
Just as the truth of the icon of Christ, so the truth of the icon of a holy man, its authenticity, lies in its correspondence to its prototype. And since the personal experience of deification consists in the union of the described humanity with the indescribable Divinity, when, according to the word of St. Ephraim the Syrian, a person, “having enlightened the eyes of the heart, always sees the Lord in himself as in a mirror” and in “the same image is transformed” (2 Cor. 3:18), then he is also described not according to the image of corruptible flesh, but according to the image and likeness of the glorified Body of Christ.
A caveat should be made here. Theology does not deal with abstract concepts, like philosophy, but with a concrete fact given in Revelation and transcending the ways of human expression. Iconography faces the same fact. Since the Christian Revelation transcends both words and images, neither its verbal nor figurative expression in itself can express God, communicate an adequate concept of Him, His direct knowledge. In this sense, they are always a failure, because they are called upon to convey the incomprehensible in the comprehensible, the inconceivable in the pictorial, to convey something different, alien to the creature. But their value lies precisely in the fact that both theology and the icon reach the heights of human capabilities and turn out to be insufficient. After all, God is revealed by the Cross, that is, the ultimate failure. It is through this very failure, inconsistency, that both theology and the icon are called to testify and make tangible the presence of God, comprehensible in the experience of holiness.
In this area, V. Lossky said in his lectures, both in theology and in icon painting, there are two heresies that are opposite to one another. The first heresy is "humanization" (immanentization), the reduction of Divine transcendence to the level of our worldly concepts. In art, the Renaissance can serve as an example; in theology, rationalism, which reduces Divine truths to human philosophy. It is theology without failure and art without failure. This is a beautiful art, but it limits the humanity of Christ and in no way reveals the God-man. The second heresy is the deliberate inclination to failure, the rejection of all expression. In art, this is iconoclasm, the denial of the immanence of the Deity, that is, the very incarnation. In theology, this is fideism. In the first heresy, we have impious art and impious thought; in the second, impiety is covered with the appearance of piety.
These two positions, opposite in their manifestations, have the same anthropological premises as their starting point. If “in the Eastern patristic perspective, participation in the divine life is what makes a person human, not only in the final accomplishment, but from his very creation and at every moment of his life”, then “Western theology traditionally considers it proven that the very act of creation presupposes that man is not only other-natural to God, but that he is given an existence that is autonomous as such: God-seeing may be the goal of the individual experience of some mystics, but it is not a condition for the true humanity of man. There are two fundamentally different understandings of the purpose of a person, his life and creativity: on the one hand, Orthodox anthropology, understood as the realization by a person of God-likeness, which is revealed in an existential, vital, creative way and thereby determines the content of the Orthodox image. On the other hand, there is the anthropology of Western confessions, which affirm the autonomy of man from God; man, although created in the image of God, but, being autonomous, does not correspond with his Prototype. This is the basis for the development of humanism with its autonomous from the Church, already de-Christianized anthropology of modernity, where the difference between man and other creatures is conceived only in natural categories: man is a “thinking animal”, “social”, etc.
As we have already noted, with the introduction of the Filioque and, in the future, with the belittling of the personal principle, along with the doctrine of the creatureliness of grace (see the previous chapter), a different, non-Orthodox relationship between man and God, man and the world is affirmed. The autonomy of man from God affirms the autonomy of his mind and other aspects of his activity. Already Thomas Aquinas recognized natural reason as completely independent and independent of faith. And “it is from Thomas Aquinas that the break between Christianity and culture must be led, which turned out to be so fatal for the entire Christian culture of the West [...], the entire tragic meaning of which has now been revealed with full force.”
As for artistic creativity, already the Caroline Books, in contradiction with the Seventh Ecumenical Council, tearing it away from the conciliar experience of the Church, affirmed its autonomy and thereby predetermined its entire future path. The essence of the provision of the Seventh Council, which affirmed the icon as a path of salvation equivalent to the word of the Gospel, was completely incomprehensible to the Frankish theologians of Charlemagne, alien and therefore unacceptable. Formally, Roman Catholicism recognizes the Seventh Ecumenical Council and professes the dogma of icon veneration. But in essence and in practice the position expressed in the Caroline Books is his official position to this day.
If in the West back in the 12th and partly in the 13th centuries the image correlates with Christian anthropology, then its gradual distortion leads art to a final break with it. Autonomous from the Church, art is limited to what does not exceed the natural properties of man. Since there is no penetration of the uncreated into the created, then grace, as a created gift of God, can only improve the natural properties of man. The transmission of the illusion of the visible world, from which Christianity resolutely turned away from the beginning, is now becoming an end in itself. Since the inconceivable is conceived in the same categories as the visible, the language of symbolic realism disappears and Divine transcendence is reduced to the level of worldly concepts; what Christianity brings is minimized, adapted to human perception. The temptation of good luck "living likeness" floods art in the Renaissance. And with the enthusiasm for antiquity, instead of the transformation of the human body, the cult of the flesh is being established. The Christian doctrine of the relationship between God and man is being led to the wrong path, and Christian anthropology is being undermined. The whole eschatological perspective of man's cooperation with God is cut off. “To the extent that the human takes root in art, everything is petty and profaned; what was a revelation is reduced to an illusion, the sign of the sacred is erased, a work of art is already only a means of pleasure and convenience: a person in his art has met himself and worships himself. The image of revelation is replaced by "the transient image of this world." And the lie of "living life" lies not only in the fact that the traditional image is replaced by fiction, but also in the fact that with the preservation of religious themes, the boundaries between the visible and the invisible are erased, the difference between them is abolished, and this leads to the denial of existence itself. spiritual world. The image is deprived of its Christian meaning, which ultimately leads to its denial and open iconoclasm. "Thus, the iconoclasm of the Reformation is justified, justified and relativized because it refers not to a genuine sacred art, but to the degeneration of this art in the medieval West."
In this art, which affirms the existing world order, the laws of optical or linear perspective are developed, which is considered not only normal, but also the only scientifically correct method of transferring the space of the visible world, just as the visible state of this world itself is considered normal. This perspective, as priest P. Florensky showed, appears “when the religious stability of the worldview decays, and the sacred metaphysics of the common national consciousness is corroded by the individual discretion of an individual with his separate point of view [...]. Then the perspective characteristic of a detached consciousness appears. This happened in the West during the Renaissance, and in the Orthodox world in the 17th century. This same perspective, in turn, is decomposing in our time, when the humanistic worldview that gave rise to it is decomposing, and with it the culture and art generated by it are decomposing.
Having made church art dependent on the artist, and himself dependent on the era and fashion, the Roman Catholic “Church never considered any style to belong to it, but allowed, in accordance with the nature and conditions of the peoples and the needs of various rites, that typical of every era. "So, there is no religious style or ecclesiastical style." In relation to art, the Church is only a patron, as in other areas of cultural activity. As a result, the meaning of the image as an expression of the conciliar experience of the Church of Christian Revelation turned out to be closed to Western confessions. As is known, the Seventh Ecumenical Council adopts the establishment of iconography to the Holy Fathers, led by the Holy Spirit. “The saints [...] left their biographies for our benefit and salvation, and they handed over their deeds to the Catholic Church through pictorial narratives.” These "feats of salvation" are a vital expression of the correspondence of the icon to the gospel sermon. This is the testimony of St. Fathers "the power and the right to express or formulate the experience and faith of the Church" is the power of teaching. Roman Catholicism, on the other hand, removes the power of teaching from St. Fathers and Doctors of the Church and gives it to the artist. “You artists,” says Pope Paul VI, receiving American artists, “you can read the Divine Gospel and interpret it to people.” Thus, in fact, the development of a person's natural qualities (in this case, artistic abilities) is sufficient to make him a "bearer of the divine gospel." This is the same position as in the general direction of theological thought, since Western “modern theology is mainly concerned with discovering God in human experience as such; this leads to the humanization of God and immediately contradicts the patristic knowledge.” By virtue of its fundamental position, Roman Catholicism, following the variability of autonomous culture, accepted, just as in its time, the vitality of the Renaissance, and modern art, which, destroying to the ground old world forms and concepts, came to fragmentation, resulting in decomposition, and sometimes in blasphemy and open demonism. “Contemporary art shows us an image of the world being carried away to a new lot and, as it were, corroded by a thirst for renunciation in order to accelerate its transition into the future [...]. The dizziness of emptiness and the languor of non-being, which for our spirit is absurd, are the echoes of those topics that modern philosophy of existentialism, in particular Sartre, addresses.
And at the moment of the irreversible collapse of this art and the environment that gave birth to it, the icon enters this world of decay and decay as the banner of Orthodoxy, as an appeal to the free will of man, created in the image of God. As evidence of God's incarnation, the icon contrasts genuine Christian anthropology - the anthropology distorted in Western confessions, and the anthropology of de-Christianized modern culture.
As opposed to revealing the properties, even if they are higher, of the spiritual-soul-bodily composition of an autonomous person, the icon, like the word of the Gospel, has the original and constant function of Christian art: the disclosure of the true relationship between God and man.
And just as from the beginning the upheaval introduced into the world by Christ in the flesh, who came, was perceived as a temptation and madness (1 Cor. 1:23), so at the present time in the world, “which did not understand the wisdom of God” (ibid., 21), the icon goes into the world of deceit and self-delusion as a “violence of preaching” (ibid.). It bears in this confused world evidence of the authenticity of the reality of a different being, other norms of life relations introduced into the world by the incarnation of God and unknown to man, subject to biological laws, a different gospel of God, man and creature, a different perception of the world. It shows what a person is called to, what he should be, puts him in a different perspective. In other words, the icon carries a denunciation of the ways of man and the world, but at the same time it is an appeal and a call to a person, showing him other ways. The perspective of the visible world is contrasted in it with the Evangelical perspective, the world lying in sin is a transfigured world. And the whole structure of the icon is aimed at introducing a person to the Revelation that is revealed to the world in Christianity, to reveal in visible forms the essence of the revolution he has brought. And the expression of this revolution requires a special construction of the image, its own special means of expression, its own style.
In this system, with its so-called reverse perspective, “first of all, it strikes a number of features of the form, which sometimes seem like an unsolvable riddle” for a person of new European culture. Therefore, usually these features of the form are perceived as deformation. But this deformation exists only in relation to the eye, accustomed to direct or linear perspective, and in relation to that perception of the world, which in our time is considered normal, that is, in relation to the forms that express our contemporary vision of the world. In fact, this is not a deformation, but a different artistic language - the language of the Church. And this deformation is natural and even necessary in the content that the icon expresses: for the traditional icon painter, both in the past and in the present, this structure of the icon is the only possible and necessary. Growing out of the liturgical experience of the Church (together with other types of church art), it is the opposition of the conciliar experience of the Church to the "separate consciousness" of an autonomous person, the individual experience of the artist with his "separate point of view." Neither linear perspective nor chiaroscuro are excluded from icon painting, but they cease to be means of conveying the illusion of the visible world and are included in the general system, in which the reverse perspective dominates. Here, first of all, it must be said that in this conditional technical term “reverse perspective”, the concept of reverse is incorrect, since there is no direct opposite, a mirror image of the linear perspective. In general, there is no reverse perspective system analogous to the linear perspective system. The rigid law of linear perspective is opposed by another law, as a different principle of constructing an image, which is determined by its content. This principle includes a whole system of techniques, thanks to which the image is (depending on the meaning) either in a position opposite to illusoryness, or otherwise in relation to it. And this system, multi-variant and flexible, and thus free enough for the artist, is carried out steadily, expediently and purposefully.
According to modern science, “it turns out that we don’t see up close the way Raphael painted [...]. Up close, we see everything as Rublev and the ancient Russian masters painted. Let us clarify this position somewhat. Raphael painted differently than Rublev, but he saw the same way, since the natural law of visual perception operates here. The difference is that Raphael passed the natural properties of the human eye through the control of his autonomous mind and thereby deviated from this law, subordinating the visible to the laws of optical perspective. Icon painters, however, did not deviate from this natural property of human vision, because the meaning of what they depicted not only did not require, but also did not allow going beyond the natural perception of the foreground, to which the construction of the icon is limited.
Let us try to illustrate this correspondence of the construction of the icon with its content by several examples.
The spatial construction of the icon differs in that, being three-dimensional (the icon is not a flat art), it limits the third dimension to the plane of the board, and the image is turned to the present space. In other words, in relation to the illusory construction of space in depth, the construction of the icon shows the opposite. If the picture, built according to the laws of linear perspective, shows a different space, in no way connected with the real space in which it is located, in no way correlated with it, then in the icon it is the other way around: the depicted space is included in the real space, there is no gap between them. The image is limited to one foreground. The faces depicted on the icon, and the faces coming to her, are combined in one space.
Since Revelation is addressed to man, the image is also addressed to him.
Building in depth is, as it were, cut off by a flat background - light in the language of icon painting. In the icon there is no single source of light: here everything is permeated with light. Light is a symbol of the Divine. God is light, and His incarnation is the manifestation of light in the world: “Thou hast come, and thou hast appeared, O unapproachable Light” (kontakion of Theophany). But, as St. Gregory Palamas, "God is called Light not by His Essence, but by His energy." Therefore, light is Divine energy, and therefore we can say that it is the main semantic content of the icon. It is this light that underlies its symbolic language. Here it is necessary to make a reservation: the meaning of the symbol of light does not depend on the background color of the icon, but its most adequate image is gold. Although gold is alien to colors and is not comparable with them, nevertheless, the use of colors for the background - light - does not contradict its meaning, which remains the same, although the colorful background, in comparison with gold, reduces its significance. Gold gives, as it were, the key to understanding the background as light.
The glitter of gold is a symbol of Divine glory, and this is not an allegorism and not an arbitrarily chosen similitude, but an adequate expression. Because gold radiates light, but at the same time its luminosity is combined with impenetrability. These properties of gold are related to the spiritual being it is meant to express, or to the meaning of what it is meant to convey symbolically, that is, the properties of the Divine. “God is called light, not according to His essence,” because this Essence is unknowable. “We affirm,” says St. Basil the Great, - that we know our God by actions, but we do not promise to get closer to the Essence itself. For although His actions reach us, His Essence remains impregnable. This impregnability of the Divine is called darkness. “The darkness of God is this unapproachable light, in which, as it is said, God dwells” (1 Tim. 6:16).
So, impregnable light is "darkness, which is brighter than light," blinding, and therefore impenetrable. And so gold, combining blinding brilliance with impenetrability, symbolically adequately expresses the Divine light - impenetrable darkness, that is, something essentially different from natural light, which is opposite to natural darkness.
In relation to what is depicted, this light is the action of God, that is, the energy of His Essence, the revelation of God outside. And “one who participates in the Divine energy, in a certain sense, becomes light itself,” because “the energies bestowed on Christians by the Holy Spirit are not an external cause, but grace, an internal light that transforms nature by adoring it.” When this Divine light shines on the whole person, according to the word of St. Simeon the New Theologian, “man unites with God spiritually and bodily; because neither his soul is separated from his mind, nor his body from his soul. God enters into union with all man. And man, in turn, becomes a carrier of light for the outside world.
Thus, light and its action are comprehensible and cognizable, and therefore representable; its source remains incomprehensible and unknowable, covered with impenetrable light-darkness. In accordance with the meaning and content of the icon, we allow ourselves to assert that this property of the background of the icon must be understood as a symbolic expression of the thesis of apophatic theology about the perfect unknowability of the Divine Essence, which remains inaccessible, that is, as the limit set by the creature in the knowledge of God. The Divine Essence always remains beyond the scope of human cognition and understanding, and these frameworks of knowledge and understanding are the result not of dialectical reasoning, but of the experience of Revelation, participation in the uncreated light.
According to the teachings of St. Fathers greatness of man lies not in the fact that he is a microcosm, a small world in a big one, but in his purpose, in that he is called to become a big world in a small, created god. Therefore, everything in the icon is focused on the image of a person. A person autonomous from God, closed in himself, having lost the integrity of his nature, is opposed in it by a person who has realized his god-likeness, a person in whom decay has been overcome (in himself, in humanity and in all visible creation). To the little man, who has lost his unity with the rest of creation, lost in the vast and sinister world, the icon opposes the big man, surrounded by a small world in relation to him, a man who has restored his royal position in the world, who has transformed his dependence on him into the dependence of the world on the Spirit living in him. And instead of the horror that a person inspires in the creature, the icon testifies to the fulfillment of its aspirations, its deliverance from the “slavery of decay” (Rom. 8:21).
Divine energy - light, uniting and shaping everything, overcomes the barrier between the spiritual and the physical, between the created world (visible and invisible) and the Divine world. The whole world depicted on the icon is imbued with the life-giving power of uncreated light. The creature is not closed in itself; but here there is no confusion of the created world with the uncreated. The difference between the two worlds, the Divine and the created, is not abolished (as in the art of living likeness); but vice versa is emphasized. The visible and pictorial world and the intelligible, Divine, inconceivable world differ from each other in techniques, forms, colors. And the penetration into the created being of the light of the other-natural and uncreated brings overcoming the temporal-spatial categories, unites and includes what is depicted in a different plane of being, where the creature is no longer subject to the conditions of being of the fallen world. This is the "Kingdom of God which has come in power" (Mark 9:1), that is, a world that participates in eternity. It is not some unearthly or imaginary world that is depicted, but precisely the earthly world, but brought to its hierarchical order, rank, renewed in God by the penetration into it, we repeat once again, of the uncreated Divine grace. Therefore, both in the construction of the whole and in the details, the methods of constructing an icon exclude any illusory nature, whether it be the illusion of space, the illusion of natural light, human flesh, etc. From the point of view of a believer, there is no breakage of space and distortion of perspective, but on the contrary, there is a correction of perspective, because the world is seen here not in the perspective of a “separated consciousness” and many points of view of an autonomous artist, but from a single point of view of the Artist-Creator , that is, as the fulfillment of the Creator's plan for the creature.
What the icon shows is realized as the firstfruits in the Eucharistic essence of the Church. “Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” is the exclamation with which the liturgy begins. This kingdom is different from the kingdom of Caesar and opposite to the kingdom of the prince of this world. Worship, on the other hand, is the entry of the Church into a new time, a new creation, where the disintegration of time into past, present and future is abolished; temporal-spatial categories give way to another dimension. And just as the space depicted on the icon is connected with the present space, so the event that took place in the past tense is united with the present time. The action depicted on the icon and the action performed in the divine service are one in time (the Virgin today gives birth to the Most Substantial...”, “Today the Lord of creation and the King of glory is nailed on the Cross”), the present here is conjugated with the timeless eschatological reality: “Suppers Your Secret today [...] accept me as a communicant.” There is no temporal-spatial gap between the depicted communion of the Apostles and the communicants in the temple. Through communion with the Body of Christ, resurrected and glorified, which the icon shows, the Body of the Second Coming, the Church, visible and invisible, is united, and in a multitude of personalities, living and dead, the unity of blessed nature is realized in the image of the Divine Trinity.
The content of the icon determines not only the methods of its construction, but also the technique and materials. As priest P. Florensky notes, “neither the technique of icon painting, nor the materials used here can be accidental in relation to the cult [...]. It is hard to imagine, even as a formal aesthetic study, that an icon could be painted with anything, on anything, and with whatever techniques you like.” Indeed, just as the authenticity of the image is connected with the Eucharist, so is the authenticity of any substance included in the cult necessarily connected with it. “Your from Yours I bring to You ...” - these words are taken from David’s prayer over the materials collected by him for the construction of the temple: “For Yours is everything and from Yours I give to You.” The Church has preserved this principle, which received in it the fullness of its understanding in the Eucharist: the matter redeemed by the Incarnation of God is drawn into the service of God. Therefore, in the icon, the question of substance is not only a question of strength and good quality, but, first of all, a question of authenticity. In other words, the icon is included in the whole complex of the offering of a person, by which the purpose of the Church is carried out - to sanctify through a person and transform the world, heal a sin-stricken substance, turn it into a path to God, into a way of communication with Him.
As we tried to show, the structure of an icon, its purposefulness and vitality are entirely determined by the content of the image, just like the material used in creating the icon. And “icon painting itself is both a feat of art and a religious feat, full of prayerful tension (which is why the Church knows the special order of saints - icon painters, in whose person art is thus canonized as a way of salvation).” And since this path of salvation is a vital involvement in the depicted reality, it can be argued that it is precisely this involvement that determines the superiority of the icon over the art of modern times in the wealth of ways to express the system of its construction, developed by masters who did not know either the laws of visual perception or the geometry of multidimensional spaces.
Only an Orthodox icon bears witness to the fullness of the Revelation of the trinitarian economy, because the knowledge of God in the incarnate Word, which is the Image of the Father, that is, the economy of the second Hypostasis, receives its revelation only in the economy of the third Person of the Holy Trinity, in the light of the mystery of Pentecost. All the artistic creativity of the Church after the iconoclastic period was directed towards this, and its peak was the revival of hesychasm.
Until recently, ecclesiastical artistic creativity was perceived in art history as “bound by the dogmas of the Church”, subject to a strict canon. And the canon is conceived as a certain sum of external rules, council prescriptions, originals, etc., imposed by the church hierarchy, enslaving the artist's work, requiring him to passively submit to existing models. In a word, the free art of painting is opposed to icon painting bound by canons. Meanwhile, if we talk about rules and regulations, then the opposite is more true: after all, it was in realistic painting that the sum of the rules that the artist had to obey and that he was taught in schools (perspective, anatomy, interpretation of chiaroscuro, composition, etc.) .d.). And it is curious that the artists obviously did not feel this system of rules at all as connectedness and subordination; they used them in their free creativity, which they tried to serve the Church. The icon-painting canon not only does not know such rules, but even such concepts; and yet it was from him that they sought to free themselves. Progressive artists, fascinated by the West, began to perceive the canon not only as an obstacle to their creative freedom, but as oppression. As we saw in the last chapter, it was precisely from the Church, from her dogmas, that they sought liberation, they sought to be excluded from her conciliar work. They were freed not so much from faith, but in the order of dechurching consciousness. For an autonomous artist, the Church, its canon (by the way, we emphasize - unwritten), its concept of freedom, became oppression from the outside. Creativity becomes individual and thus isolates itself. Since the alien began to be depicted in the categories of the natural, the content of the canonical icon becomes incomprehensible; her symbolic language and her creativity become incomprehensible and alien.
And so the chaotic innovation of our contemporary trends in art with their cult of historical novelty, in the icon, is opposed by traditional forms of Orthodox art; the isolated creativity of an autonomous artist is opposed by a different principle of artistic creativity, the individual - by the cathedral. In the Church, everything is determined not by style, but by the canon: all creativity, in order to be ecclesiastical, is inevitably included in the canon. “The canonical is ecclesiastical, the ecclesiastical is conciliar,” says priest P. Florensky. In other words, the artist's work is included in the same evangelical perspective. Because Revelation is not a one-sided action of God on man; it necessarily presupposes the assistance of man, calls him not to passivity, but to an active effort of cognition and penetration. Man, created in the image of God, in his work, as a worker of God, is valuable only as the bearer and executor of the Divine plan. And the creativity of a person is carried out in a combination of his will with the will of the Divine, in the synergy of two actions: Divine and human. And in this perspective, the artistic language of the Church, as an expression of the Christian faith, is determined in its character by the norm developed by the conciliar mind of the Church - the icon-painting canon in the proper sense.
This norm is the found form of the most adequate expression of Revelation, in which the creative relationship between God and man is clothed. And the canon presupposes not isolation, but precisely inclusion in the conciliar work of the Church. In this conciliar work, the personality of the artist realizes himself not in the affirmation of his individuality, but in self-giving; and its highest manifestation here is that it suppresses in itself the traits of isolation.
The concept of freedom is included in the same evangelical perspective. The Church does not know the abstract concept of freedom, just as she does not know abstract constructions in general. Freedom may not be in general, as such, but from something specific. For the Church, it consists in liberation from the distortions of human nature generated by the fall. A person ceases to be in subjection to his nature, but possesses it, subjugates it to himself, becomes "master of his actions and free." On this path, creativity in the canon is perceived by the artist not as an expression of his individual perception of the world and faith, but as an expression of church faith and life, as a service. He expresses the life in which he participates, that is, he includes his life and work in the totality of other areas of church life, guided by the canon. And in order to be authentic, his work must be in harmony with them, organically included in them. "The Church has many languages, but each of them is the language of the Church only insofar as it corresponds to other true expressions of the Christian faith." In various areas of church life and creativity, the canon is the means in which the Church clothes the path of man's salvation. In the canon, icon-painting tradition fulfills its function as the artistic language of the Church.
So, the icon-painting canon is not a rigid law and not an external prescription or rule, but an internal norm. It is this norm that puts a person in front of the need to participate in what is depicted. This communion is carried out in the Eucharistic life of the Church. Here the unity of revealed truth is combined with the diversity of personal experience of its perception. Hence the impossibility of enclosing the icon-painting canon within the framework of the definition. Therefore, the Stoglavy Cathedral limited itself to the prescription to follow the ancient icon painters and the rules of morality. This canon (norm) ensures the transmission of truth to any degree of participation in it, even if the communion is only formal. The canon is followed by both the artist-creator and the craftsman, both in the past and at the present time. Therefore, the canonical icon is a testament to Orthodoxy, despite the empirically often encountered inconsistency of the bearers of truth, the Orthodox themselves (the canon, we repeat, protects the icon from this inconsistency). At any spiritual and artistic level, and even at a low craft level, the canonical icon, both old and new, testifies to the same truth. Conversely, that part of art that freed itself from the canon, regardless of the talents of artists, never reached that height of artistic merit, not to mention the spiritual height at which iconography stood; it ceased to be a witness to Orthodoxy altogether.
As we have already noted, the Seventh Ecumenical Council did not reveal anything new: it only imprinted the faith of previous Councils in the dogma of icon veneration; because the dogmatic disputes of the past, Christological and Trinitarian, all presuppose the question of the relationship between the Divine and humanity, that is, they concern Christian anthropology. For Orthodoxy, the dogma of icon veneration is the eternal truth of the Christian faith and teaching, enshrined in the Ecumenical Council. Therefore, in the icon we must see the same thing that the Fathers and Councils saw in it: the triumph of Orthodoxy, the testimony of the Church about the truth of the Incarnation. But in iconoclasm, we must also see what the defenders of the icon saw in it: not just the rejection of the image and its destruction, but a force that opposes Christianity, “Christoclasm,” in the words of St. Patriarch Photius. Because if the roots of ancient iconoclasm go back, as Archpriest G. Florovsky showed, to Hellenism, which has not been outlived in Christianity, then its essence was not in the particular case of the struggle with icons: its “basis was that in essence it was about Orthodoxy itself”, that is, the Church. Direct iconoclasm, which was the end of the heresies of the Christological period, led to the opposite: to its condemnation by the catholic consciousness of the Church as a heresy of disincarnation and to the establishment of icon veneration. After the Triumph of Orthodoxy, this seemingly quiet heresy smolders all the time and pours out into all subsequent centuries, changing its mask, changing its forms. After all, iconoclasm can be not only malicious and open: taking advantage of misunderstanding and indifference, it can also be unconscious, unintentional and even pious (after all, the ancient open iconoclasm fought for the purity of the Christian faith, just like later Protestantism). The distorted Roman Catholic image, as we have seen, led Protestantism to a pious rejection of the image, that is, to the rejection of the visible, material evidence of the incarnation, to the "image of the void." This "image of emptiness" has contributed to contemporary theomachism within Christianity itself. At present, "many, especially from the liberal part of Protestantism, consider it indifferent to the existence of Christian preaching whether Christ was God or not, whether His resurrection is a historical fact or not." Such a position naturally ends with "the theology of the death of God," that is, sheer nonsense for both the believer and the atheist.
In Orthodoxy, from contact with heterodoxy in the past, it was the image that turned out to be the most vulnerable. Misunderstanding and indifference to its content led to the fact that during the synodal period, Orthodox icons were thrown out and destroyed from churches as “barbarism”, and replaced with imitations of the non-Orthodox, but enlightened West. Borrowed pictorial realistic trend, "justified" by "semi-conscious recollection of the icon", introduced "perjury", in the words of the priest P. Florensky, perjury about Orthodoxy. This perjury could only confirm unbelievers in unbelief, and inspire believers with a distorted understanding of Orthodoxy and contribute to the de-churching consciousness. Let us recall that for the same reason and in the same period, the intellectual work that nourished Orthodox iconography during its heyday was “destroyed like an infection and destruction,” in the words of Metropolitan Philaret, suffered persecution and was accused of heresy.
So, overt or covert, deliberate or even pious, any iconoclasm, in whatever form it manifests itself, contributes to disincarnation, undermining the dispensation of the Holy Spirit in the world, de-churching the Church. Thus, in essence, we are always talking about Orthodoxy itself. And the struggle for the image of God has never stopped, and in modern times it is especially aggravated because iconoclasm manifests itself not only in the deliberate destruction of icons and in the rejection of them in heresies of the Protestant type; it is also reflected in the desire to destroy the image of God in man, in the most diverse economic, social, philosophical and other ideologies.
The present position of Christianity in the world is usually compared with its position in the first centuries of its existence. “Is not the godless non-believing world of our time, in a certain sense, precisely this pre-Christian world, renewed in all the motley interweaving of pseudo-religious, skeptical, or God-fighting moods?” But if in the first centuries Christianity had the pagan world before it, then today it stands before the de-Christianized world, which grew up on the soil of apostasy. And now, in the face of this world, Orthodoxy is “called to witness” - the testimony of the Truth, which it bears with its worship and icon. Hence the need to realize and express the dogma of icon veneration as applied to modern reality, to the needs and quests of modern man. The awareness of the image as an expression of one's faith is, first of all, the awareness of Orthodoxy itself, the church unity given in Christ. As an expression of the common faith and life of the Church, the icon stands above the empirical divisions of the life and activity of the Orthodox. And the figurative evidence of this unity is important in our time both in the face of the world external to Christianity and in the face of heterodoxy, because the verbal form of expressing Orthodoxy alone is not enough to answer contemporary problems. Namely, "now, more than ever, the Christian West stands in expanded perspectives, as a living question addressed to the Orthodox world." And this question concerns ways out of the impasse in which the Christian West, in particular Roman Catholicism, has found itself. “The Roman Catholic Church,” writes Prelate K. Gamber, “only then will overcome modern errors and come to a new flowering when she manages to join the main forces of the Eastern Church: her mystical theology, built on the great Fathers of the Church, and her liturgical piety [ ...]. One thing seems certain: the future is not in approaching Protestantism, but in internal unity with the Eastern Church, that is, in constant spiritual communion with her, with her theology and piety. And in our deep conviction, it is the dogma of icon veneration and the introduction of the icon into heterodox confessions that will help overcome the main vices of Western confessions, the main differences and inconsistencies with the Orthodox dogma: the doctrine of the creatureliness of grace and philioquisism. Because the icon necessarily presupposes the Orthodox understanding of the individual and the Orthodox confession of the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, and consequently Orthodox ecclesiology.
And it is not at all accidental that in our time the icon is penetrating into the non-Orthodox world. The icon begins to enter the consciousness of a Western person, and if the infection of Orthodoxy by Western art was introduced in a Roman Catholic guise, now the opposite is true: the icon is being introduced into Roman Catholicism and Protestantism as evidence of Orthodox dogma, as an expression of the Christian faith and the path of salvation. “The Christian must,” writes G. Wunderle, “get comfortable with the realism that the icon presents to him; otherwise he will never get close to her secret, and she will be for him only a soulless scheme. For the one to whom it is given to contemplate the Divine in a holy icon, it becomes an unmistakable path to transfiguration in Christ.” In terms of prayer, a believing Christian, regardless of his confession, the icon causes a direct reaction. Due to its clarity, it does not require translation into another language, like a sacred text.
But it is especially important that the revival of the icon begins in Orthodoxy itself, and this revival is a vital necessity of our time. Meanwhile, just like the discovery of the icon, it still goes beyond theological thought and liturgical piety, goes, so to speak, outside its context. If in theology there is nevertheless a gradual liberation from scholasticism, then in relation to the image and its understanding, the inexhaustible heritage of past centuries still affects. As far as liturgical piety is concerned, this inexhaustible heritage is especially evident here, because for many the Tradition of the Church has come to be identified with simple conservatism.
The revival of the icon, we repeat, is the vital necessity of our time. Because no matter how valuable the works that led to the discovery of the icon, what is revealed in it comes to life only in its life realization. In the Church, everything is renewed, and the icon is also renewed. “The Church, always alive and creative, does not at all seek protection for the old forms as such, does not oppose them to the new ones as such. The ecclesiastical understanding of art was, and is, and will be one thing: realism. This means that the Church, the pillar and ground of the truth, requires only one thing - the truth. An icon not only can, but must be new (after all, we distinguish icons from different eras precisely because they were new in their time in relation to the previous ones). But this new icon must be an expression of the same truth. The modern revival of the icon is not an anachronism, not attachment to the past or folklore, not yet another attempt to “revive” the icon in the artist’s studio, but an awareness of Orthodoxy, an awareness of the Church, a return to a genuine artistic transmission of patristic experience and knowledge of Christian Revelation. As in theology, this revival is conditioned and characterized by a return to patristic Tradition, and “fidelity to Tradition is not fidelity to antiquity, but a living connection with the fullness of Church life”, a living connection with patristic spiritual experience. This revival bears witness to a return to fullness and holistic perception doctrine, life and creativity, that is, to that unity, which is so necessary for our time. As an expression of the everlasting truth of Revelation, the modern icon, like the ancient one, bears witness to salvation “prepared before the face of all people”, the vital realization of the revolution that the appearance of the Church in it brought into the world - “the light for the revelation of tongues and the glory of people” of the new Israel . Revelation addressed to man is given to the Church and the Church is being carried out. She is the revelation to the world. And the image of revelation that she brings to this world is the image of the glorified Body of Christ - the image of the Church, the testimony of her faith and holiness, the testimony of the Church about herself. And the whole structure of the Orthodox icon is aimed at pointing out the possibilities, and the paths, and the limits of Christian knowledge, to reveal and comprehend the existence of man in history, his purpose and the path to the ultimate goal.
Trubetskoy E. Two worlds in Russian icon painting. Contemplation in colors. Paris, 1965, p. 111
Ibid, p. fifty.
Trubetskoy E. Russia in its icon Paris, 1965, p. 161
Sedulin A. Legislation on religious cults M., 1974, p. 6
Ibid, p. 46
Ibid, p. 41 See also Zots V. Invalid Claims M.1976, p. 135-136
SU Ukrainian SSR 1922 No. 49, Art. 729 Op. according to A. Sedyulin. Op.cit., p.32
Decree “On registration, registration and protection of monuments of art and antiquity” See. Antonova V.I., Mneva N.E. Catalog of ancient Russian painting of the Tretyakov Gallery. M., 1963, v. 1, p. 26.
Benz E. Geist und Leben der Ostkirche. Hamburg, 1957, S. 7.
In the same place, from 21.
For a critical review of the German edition of L. Uspensky and V. Lossky's The Meaning of Icons, see: Catholic Thought. February 14, 1953, No. 75-76 (in French).
In France, in Paris alone, there are at least six icon-painting schools, some with several decades of experience, including the school of the Jesuits, who at one time made especially great efforts to destroy traditional icon painting.
Report of the subcommittee "Authority Ecumenical Councils// Bulletin of the Russian Western European Patriarchal Exarchate. Paris, 1974, No. 85-88, p. 40. This question continued to be discussed by the same subcommittee in 1976 in Zagorsk.
So, to the question of a Protestant theologian about the significance of icon veneration in Orthodoxy, an Orthodox bishop answers: “We are so accustomed to it” ... From the 18th century. iconography passed into the jurisdiction of a secular artist, free from the dogmas of the Church, and then the study of the icon passed into the jurisdiction of a science free from the dogmas. Only the pious habit of praying in front of an icon was really left to the share of church people. But it happens even worse (this is from private conversations): “Listen to you, one might think that Orthodoxy cannot exist without an icon,” says the Orthodox bishop. “The image belongs to the very essence of Christianity,” writes the Protestant pastor (see: J. Ph. Ramseyer, La Parole et Ílmage, Neuchdtel, 1963, p. 58). As you can see, roles sometimes change: what you expect to hear from an Orthodox bishop is understood and said by a Protestant pastor, and vice versa. Thus, the age-old separation from the image led the pastor to an Orthodox understanding of it. The age-old distortion of the image led the Orthodox bishop to a Protestant attitude towards him.
True, over the past centuries, the Orthodox hierarchy was generally, as we have seen, freed from the need to know anything in the field of church art, the secular authorities and the Academy of Arts decided for it.
In spiritual Church archeology is taught in schools; the creedal content of the image has not yet been taught. For the first time, a course in iconology as a theological subject was introduced at the Seminary of the Western European Exarchate of the Moscow Patriarchate in Paris in 1954. The clergy have to draw information about the content of the image in scholarly works on the history of art, sometimes with unexpected digressions into “theology.” This, of course, does not mean that we deny the value scientific works in the field of knowledge of the icon. On the contrary, we consider them a useful component in the education of the clergy. But they are only secondary and auxiliary material. The basis of knowledge should be the creed content of the image. It is not necessary for anyone to know the history of art; but to know what a person believes in, to know whether the image to which he prays conveys his faith is the duty of every believer, especially the clergy.
If in the 19th century an intellectual was “ashamed to believe”, now “a real intellectual is ashamed to go to church. A lot needs to be cleared in the Church, updated, reorganized so that it becomes accessible to modern consciousness” (priest Dudko D. On our hope Paris, 1975, p 155) The intellectual believes, but wants to adapt the faith of the Church to “modern consciousness”, not to understand the Church, but to adapt it to his own misunderstanding and thereby even save her. we have already noted (see the previous chapter, note 118), by no means a product of our time. As early as the first half of the 5th century, St. Vincent of Lerins wrote “They are not satisfied with the traditional rules of faith adopted from antiquity But day by day they want novelty and more novelty They are always eager to add, change or abolish something in religion” (Commonitorium XXI, French ed. Namur, 1960 , p. 97) So, “whoever speaks and says, this is new, already is in the places that were before us” (Ecclesiastes, 1, 10)
Schmemann, A. Introduction to Liturgical Theology Paris, 1960, p. twenty
See Journal of the Moscow Patriarchy, 1961, No. 1
It is curious that if earlier iconography, as the art of the “common people”, was considered “lack of culture”, now, on the contrary, it turns out that it is intended for the cultural layer, while the “picturesque direction”, which is called “milk for the common people”, is considered lack of culture.
If the Church in her history observed gradualness in communion with the mysteries of God's dispensation, then this was in no way connected with the concept of "common people" and concerned people who were preparing to receive baptism, catechumens
Kornilovich K. From the chronicle of Russian art M-L, 1960, p. 89
Creations Ed. 3rd, Sergiev Posad, 1892, part 4, p. 76
Bishop Ignatius (Bryanchaninov) Works Ed. 3rd corrected and supplemented St. Petersburg, 1905, Ascetic experiments, vol. 3, p. 76
Florensky P. Iconostasis // Theological Works. M., 1972, No. 9, p. 107 (on painting by Vasnetsov, Nesterov and Vrubel).
We note an amusing attempt to present the introduction of Roman Catholic art into Orthodoxy as a “gradual modification of Byzantine art”, and it turns out that Baroque and Rococo were successful for “the majority of the population of Russia”, that Russian masters “did not leave [...] the accepted Orthodox tradition”, expressing a Franciscan type of Christianity. This instructive digression into the history of art ends with the advice "to learn from the era that had the privilege of grace" (that is, from the age of "enlightenment"? from the Franciscans?). (See: J.P. Besse. Affinites spirituelles du baroque russe // Contacts, Paris, 1975, 91, o, 351-358.)
Materials of the Pre-Council Meeting // Journal of the Moscow Patriarchy, 1961, No. 1.
See Art of the 17th century. Ch. fourteen.
Abba Falassius On Love, Temperance and Spiritual Life to Presbyter Paul. Paragraph 98 // Philokalia M., 1888, v. 3, p. 319
It must be said that, in general, the range of miracles in qualitative terms is very large, along with genuine, blessed ones, there are “miracles” based on mental neurosis, on innocence, “miracles” are also known that are simple deception, as well as miracles of devilish origin (see Mt. 24:24; just as now they are performed outside the Church
Clement O. Questions sur I'homme Paris, 1972, p. 7
Schmemann A. Is it possible to believe being civilized? // Bulletin of the RSHD, Paris, 1974, No. 107, p. 145-152
For Israel, the coming into the world of the expected Messiah turned out to be a temptation because the promised kingdom of the Son of David turned out to be a kingdom not of this world, and even a kingdom inside a person, the path to which lies through the cross
Cit. by Archimandrite Amphilochius (Radovich) The Mystery of the Holy Trinity by St. Gregory Palamas of Thessaloniki, 1973, p. 144 (in Greek)
Lossky V. Theology of the image, p. 123 (in French)
Ibid., p.129
But if the word ceases to correlate with the visible image, a gap occurs between them, various ways of expressing the truth are separated, and the fullness of Revelation is damaged. The name "theology in colors" or "speculation in colors", which is customarily attributed to an icon, is applicable only when it corresponds to theology in its patristic understanding - as theology, communion with God. Otherwise, patristic terminology can be applied to the image by virtue of a simple phrase, we already encountered this in the 17th century
Against heresies, V, 16, 2
Florovsky G Theological passages//The Way, Paris, 1931, No. 31, p. 23
Both the word and the image live only in Tradition. Outside of Tradition, the Gospel turns, as it happened, into a historical monument of the first centuries of Christianity, the Old Testament into the history of the Jewish people, and the Church dissolves into general concept religion, because "the denial of the significance of Tradition is, in essence, the denial of the Church as the body of Christ, insensitivity and belittling of her" (see G. Florovsky, Father's House // Put, Paris, 1927, No. 27, p. 78)
German summary of the book by Archimandrite Amfilochius (Radovich) “The Mystery of the Holy Trinity according to St. Gregory Palamas” see ibid., p. 231
John of Damascus The first word in defense of the holy icons, ch. 9
We note a rather peculiar interpretation of the icon and Oros of the Seventh Ecumenical Council in the book L "An de grace du Seigneur - Un commentaire de l" annee liturgique byzantine par un moin de ÍEghse d "Orient Beyrouth, 1972, t. 2, p. 169 "Recall here , - says the author, - some basic concepts about icons First of all, an icon is not an image, a likeness ”However, according to patristic teaching, an icon is precisely a portrait and precisely a likeness of a prototype, from which it differs in its nature. If an icon is“ not an image and not a likeness ”, then how, according to the author himself, does it still have as its theme “The Person of Christ, the Mother of God” and saints in general "Further, the author tries to convince the reader that "the role of the icon in Christian piety should not be exaggerated. The Church has never obligated believers to have icons in their homes or give them a certain place in personal prayer or piety. But the Orthodox Church never “obliges” anything (the very concept of “obligation” is not characteristic of Orthodoxy, but to Roman Catholicism), it makes determinations for the benefit of its members. So, in the Oros of the Council it says “We determine to believe in God's churches, on sacred vessels and clothes, on walls and on boards, in houses and on paths, it is more honest to honor holy icons with kisses and reverent worship "
See the chapter "Great Moscow Cathedral and the Image of God the Father" See also Meyendorff and Christ in Byzantine Theology Paris, 1969, p. 260 (in French)
Christianity not only does not “dematerialize matter, but, on the contrary, it is extremely materialistic.” From the very beginning, it not only rehabilitates the body, but affirms its salvific ability, affirms the transfiguration of human nature and its resurrection in the body in matter “I do not worship matter,” writes St. John of Damascus, “but I worship the Creator of matter, who became matter for my sake and through the medium of matter made my salvation, and I will not cease to honor the matter through which my salvation took place (First word in defense of the holy icons, chapter XVI and Second word, chapter XIV)
Meyendorff I. Decree. op.
VII Ecumenical Council // Acts of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Kazan Theological Academy Kazan, 1873, v. 7, p. 538
See chapter Post-iconoclastic period
Psalter, or God-thought reflections M., 1904, paragraph 51, p. 107
Meyendorff J. Philosophy, Theology, Palamism and “Secular Christianity” // St. Vladimir's Seminary Quarterly, Ns. 4, 1966, Crestwood N. Y., p. 205
Zenkovsky V. Basics Christian philosophy Frankfurt am Main, 1960, vol. 1, p. 9 and 10
Onimus J. Reflexions sur I'art actuel. Paris, 1964, p. 80
Clement O. Un ouvrage important sur I'art sacre // Contacts, Paris, 1963, no. 44, p. 278.
Florensky P.A. Reverse perspective // ​​Proceedings on sign systems III Tartu, 1967, p. 385.
The Constitution of the Second Vatican Council on Divine Liturgy. Ch. VII Sacred Art and Religious Objects, paragraph 123. French ed.: Paris, 1966, p. 100.

700. The Council considers the image of the "Fatherland", representing the Father, the Son in the form of a child in His bosom and a dove between Them. Meanwhile, as the material that has come down to us shows, this iconographic plot was far from being limited to the version analyzed by the Council. If we look at how the iconography of the "Fatherland" has developed since the beginning of its appearance, we will see that over the centuries there have been fluctuations in this iconography. And, what is especially characteristic, these fluctuations reflect the search not for the most correct expression of a certain iconographic content (as happens in other themes), but the search for the very content of this image, its very essence - who exactly is depicted as the main person. And here we see that iconographically and according to the inscriptions, this main person is presented in different ways: 1) On some images, this is the Old Denmi, represented in the image of Christ (such is the miniature illustrating John of the Ladder, XI century [Vatik. gr. 394, fol. 7], a Greek illustration of a 12th-century Gospel in Vienna [gr. 52, l. 1]). 2) In other images, the main person is the Savior in His usual form of a mature husband: for example, on the embroidered shrouds of Sophia Papeologue of 1499 (with the inscription lC XC) and Solomonia Saburova of 1525 (with the inscription "Lord of hosts"). 3) In some cases, with the inscription IC XC, an old man in gray hair is depicted (a fresco in Kastoria of the 12th-14th centuries, and here is another inscription - Father, Son, Spirit). Simultaneously with these images of the Trinity, there are also images of the Two with the same iconographic features and inscriptions (for example, miniatures of the Codex of the Athos monastery of Dionisiou 740, 11th century, the Serbian psalter of the 14th century in Munich, the Bulgarian Tomichev psalter of the 14th century in Moscow, etc.). In all these images, both binary and trinitarian, in the bosom of Christ the Old Denmi or simply Christ is the youth Emmanuel (in some both with cross-shaped haloes). In some cases, not a youth, but an adult Christ of reduced size is depicted on the knees of the Old Denmi (Viennese Gospel of the 12th century, gr. 52, frescoes in Kastoria and Grottaferrata). In all these images of Christ the Old Denmi, or simply Christ, the hypostasis of the Savior is doubled both iconographically and according to the inscriptions. What does this image mean? Gerstinger, for example, believes that since the depiction of God the Father is contrary to Orthodox dogma, the depictions of Christ as the pre-essential Logos (Old Denmi) can be associated with heretical Gnostic circles. Moreover, if in the Old Denmi you need to see the pre-essential Logos, i.e. e. Christ as God, then, therefore, in the youth Immanuel one should see Christ in His incarnation. In this case, the image of His two natures is obtained separately from each other, which is Nestorianism. Since the Son of God can be depicted only in His incarnation, then, Gerstinger continues, as the eternal Logos He can be depicted only symbolically - in the form of the Old Denmi. But the Old Denmi, both in the vision of Daniel and in the Apocalypse, as we have seen, is the Christ of the Second Coming, that is, the Bearer of His two natures - Divine and human, just like the youth Immanuel. Despite the presence of a dove, neither in that nor in In another case, the image of the Trinity is not obtained due to the absence of the Father's Hypostasis (See Gerstinger H. Uber Herkunft und Entwicklung der anthropomorphen byzantinisch–slavischen Tnmtatsdarstellungen des sogenannten Synthroni–und–Paternitas Typus // Festschrift W Sas–Zaloziecky Sum 60, Geb, Graz 1956 ) And finally, 4) The old denmi is reinterpreted as the image of the Father and the inscription is "Father", "Lord of hosts" or "Heavenly Father" (the inscription "Fatherland", we repeat, we have not seen anywhere) The same hesitations regarding the main depicted person occur and in the Western iconography of the “Fatherland” until the 14th century inscriptions do not allow us to see unanimity and uniformity in his understanding. Fluctuations in the image of the “Fatherland” also occur in relation to the place where the symbol of the Holy Spirit is placed - a dove. In Russia, they did not stop even in the 17th century (in Western iconography, these fluctuations are stronger than in eastern) In the eastern iconography of the “Fatherland”, a dove is either between an elder and a youth, or in the bosom of a youth, the Great Moscow Cathedral concerns only the first option, which seems to I.N. decree. op. , With. 3) In any case, the place of the dove reflects the doctrinal understanding of the procession of the Holy Spirit. Thus, Heymann believes that his place between the Father and the Son “best of all corresponds to the Catholic dogma that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son” (op. op. , p. 47) If he is placed in the womb of the Son, then this “corresponds Orthodox faith where the Holy Spirit proceeds only from the Son "(so") (ibid., p. 40) On the contrary, L. S. Retkovskaya sees in the room a dove between the youth and the elder, the fight against the propaganda of the Catholic understanding of the procession of the Holy Spirit - with the Filioque The author considers it possible, that the place of the dove in the womb of the child was understood as the expression of the Filioque. A.N. Grabar also interprets this place of the dove (see Cahiers archeologiques, t. XX, Notes de lectures, p .237)

The word "icon" is of Greek origin. The Greek word eikon means "image", "portrait". During the period of the formation of Christian art in Byzantium, this word denoted any image of the Savior, the Mother of God, a saint, an Angel, or an event in Sacred History, regardless of whether this image was a sculptural monumental painting or easel, and regardless of what technique it was executed. Now the word "icon" is applied primarily to a prayer icon painted, carved, mosaic, etc. It is in this sense that it is used in archeology and art history. In the Church, we also make a certain difference between wall painting and an icon painted on a board, in the sense that a wall painting, fresco or mosaic, is not an object in itself, but is one with the wall, enter into the architecture of the temple, then like an icon painted on a board, an object in itself. But essentially their meaning and meaning are the same. We see the difference only in the use and purpose of both. Thus, speaking of icons, we will have in mind the church image in general, whether it is painted on a board, executed on a wall in fresco, mosaic, or sculpted. However, the Russian word "image", as well as the French "image", have a very broad meaning and refer to all these types of images.

First of all, we will have to briefly dwell on the differences that exist in the question of the origin of Christian art and the attitude of the Church towards it in the first centuries. Scientific hypotheses about the origin of the Christian image are numerous, varied and contradictory; they often contradict the point of view of the Church. The view of the Church on this image and its emergence is one and only and unchanged from the beginning to the present day. The Orthodox affirms and teaches that the sacred image is a consequence of the Incarnation, it is based on it and therefore inherent in the very essence of Christianity, from which it is inseparable.

The contradiction to this ecclesiastical view has been spreading in science since the 18th century. The famous English scholar Gibbon (1737–1791), author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, stated that early Christians had an irresistible aversion to images. In his opinion, the reason for this disgust was the Jewish origin of Christians. Gibbon thought that the first icons appeared only at the beginning of the 4th century. Gibbon's opinion found many followers, and his ideas, unfortunately, in one form or another live to this day.

Undoubtedly, some Christians, especially those who came from Judaism, based on the Old Testament prohibition of the image, denied the possibility of it in Christianity, and this is all the more so since Christian communities were surrounded on all sides by paganism with its idolatry. Given all the destructive experience of paganism, these Christians tried to protect against the infection of idolatry, which could penetrate it through artistic creativity. It is possible that iconoclasm is as old as iconoclasm. All this is very understandable, but could not have been of decisive importance in the Church, as we shall see.

The aversion of early Christians to art is based, in modern scholarship, on the texts of several ancient writers who are named in such cases Church Fathers and who are allegedly opposed to Christian art. Here it is necessary to make a reservation: since the church term is used (Church Fathers) then one should not deviate from its meaning. But, despite the respect with which she treats some of the ancient authors who are fundamental to the arguments of scientists (,), she does not consider them to be completely Orthodox. In this way, the Church is ascribed what it does not consider to be its own. Even if these authors fought against Christian art, their writings cannot be considered as the voice of the Church, but only as their private opinion or as a reflection of certain currents within the Church hostile to the image. These writers cannot be considered Holy Fathers, and the point here is not in words. Those who name them Church Fathers, thereby identifying their position with the position of the Church, whose voice they supposedly are. Hence the conclusion is drawn that she herself struggled with images out of fear of idolatry. “Christian art was born outside the Church,” we read, “and, at least in the beginning, developed almost against her will. that came out of Judaism was natural, like the religion from which it came, hostile to all idolatry. Hence the conclusion: “Thus, Christian art was created not. Apparently, she did not long maintain an indifferent and uninterested attitude towards him; having adopted art, she undoubtedly regulated it to some extent, but it owes its appearance to the initiative of believers. The penetration of the image into the Christian cult is considered here as a phenomenon that occurred at best due to the indecision and hesitation of the hierarchy before this "paganization" of Christianity. If art appeared in the Church, then it happened against her will. “We will probably not be mistaken if we attribute the general upheaval in the position of the Church in relation to images to the period between 350-450,” writes T. Clausers. So, in the eyes of modern scientists, identified with the hierarchy and the clergy, is opposed to believers, and it was these latter who imposed the image of the hierarchy. But such an identification of the Church with a hierarchy alone contradicts the concept of the Church, as it was in the first centuries of Christianity and as it remained in Orthodoxy. It is the clergy and the laity that together make up the body of the Church.

But these theories also contradict material monuments. After all, the existence of murals in the catacombs is known from the very first centuries, moreover, it was precisely in the places of gathering where worship took place, as well as in places (such as the Roman catacomb of Callista), where the clergy were mostly buried. Thus, these paintings were known not only to ordinary believers, but also to the hierarchy. It is difficult to assume that the clergy, when performing divine services in front of these paintings, did not notice them and, if they were hostile to art, did not take any measures to put an end to such a delusion.

The iconoclastic position of several ancient authors and the prejudice against the images of some Christians of our time (namely Protestants) led to the identification of the Christian image with the idol, and this confusion was easily attributed to the Ancient Church, for which the alleged Old Testament prohibition of the image remained valid. But no Orthodox believer can put up with such an identification of an icon with an idol. And we know that throughout its history it has drawn a very clear line between them. There is a lot of evidence for this in the works of ancient writers, and in the lives of ancient saints, and later.

As for the ancient writers, even if we admit that they really fought against images (like, for example, Eusebius), the very fact of the confrontation proves both the existence and the important role of images in Christianity, for one cannot fight against something that does not exist, and there is no need to fight against what does not matter. But most of the authors cited, protesting against images, have in mind definitely pagan images. So, who is considered the most irreconcilable among them, writes: “Art deceives and seduces [...], captivating, if not to love, then at least to respect and veneration of statues and paintings. For the same is true for painting. You can praise this art, but let it not deceive a person, posing as truth. So, Clement speaks only of images that deceive and deceive, posing as truth, that is, he fights against false images. In another place, he writes: “We are allowed to have a ring that serves as a seal. The images engraved on it should preferably be a dove, a fish, a fast ship under inflated sails; you can even depict on it the lyre of Plikrat or an anchor, like Seleucus; finally, a fisherman by the sea, whose appearance will remind us of the Apostle and the children taken out of the water. All of the above images are Christian symbols. So, it is clear that in the eyes of Clement there are two completely different kinds of images: one is useful for Christians, the other is false and unacceptable. Clement himself confirms this by condemning Christians who depict pagan gods on their seals, swords and arrows of the goddess of war, glasses of Bacchus and other objects incompatible with m. All this shows Clement's wise and cautious attitude towards art. True, he speaks only of the secular use of the latter, without mentioning its cult role, and his attitude towards it is unknown.

It should, however, be borne in mind that science has never stood in relation to Christian art on the same point of view, and along with the stated judgments there were others. So, a well-known art historian, based on the same texts of the mentioned ancient authors, as well as on the writings of the holy and holy Athenagoras, comes to the following conclusion: “Consequently, the answers of the apologists say nothing about the fundamental prejudice of Christians against images, but only testify to the lack them at that time." And indeed, if Christians did not accept, in principle, any images, then we would not have monuments of Christian art of the first centuries, which were found just in the places of meetings of Christians. On the other hand, the spread of images in subsequent centuries would be an incomprehensible and inexplicable phenomenon if they did not exist earlier.

But there is another text that is invariably cited as proof of the Church's hostility to images. This is the 36th rule of the Local Elvira (Spain) around 300. This rule reads. Please us that there are no picturesque images in the church and that what is revered and worshiped is not depicted on the walls. (Placuit picturas in ecclesia esse non debere, nequod colitur et adoratur in parietibus depingatur). However, if we reflect without prejudice on the meaning of this text, we will see that it is not at all as unassailable as it is made out to be. As we can see, we are talking only about images on the walls, that is, about monumental painting, which is one with the building of the temple, but nothing is said about other kinds of images. Meanwhile, we know that at that time in Spain there were many other images, for example, on sarcophagi, on sacred vessels, etc. If the Council does not mention them, then we can conclude that its decision is dictated by reasons of a rather practical nature than by a principled rejection of sacred images. It should not be forgotten that the Council of Elvira (the exact date of which, by the way, is unknown) took place shortly before the persecution of Diocletian. Should we not see in his 36th canon rather an attempt to protect the sacred from desecration? On the other hand, the Council of Elvira had as its goal the cessation of all sorts of abuses. Could they also be in the veneration of images?

In the eyes of the Church, the decisive factor is not the antiquity of this or that testimony for or against the icon (not a chronological factor), but whether this testimony agrees or disagrees with Christian Revelation.

The rejection of the image in some currents of the first centuries of Christianity is apparently due to some ambiguity in relation to the image, as well as the lack of a clear and adequate theological language, both verbal and figurative. In order to answer all the reservations and the diversity of attitudes towards art, the Church will have to work out such an artistic language and such verbal formulations that will no longer leave room for any misunderstandings. Essentially, in the field of art, the situation was the same as in theology and worship. All obscurities, indistinctness and lack of unity of expression came from the difficulty with which the created world perceived, assimilated and expressed what transcends it. In addition, it must be borne in mind that the Savior chose the Jewish and Greco-Roman world for His incarnation and the first preaching of Christianity. In this world, the very fact of the incarnation of God and the mystery of the cross were a temptation for some, madness for others. Consequently, the image that reflected them was also a temptation and madness. But it was precisely to this world that the preaching of Christianity was addressed. In order to gradually prepare people for the truly incomprehensible mystery of the Incarnation, at first she addressed them in a language more acceptable to them than a direct image. This seems to us the main reason for the abundance of symbols in the first centuries of Christianity. It was, in the words of the holy Apostle Paul, liquid food, characteristic of childhood. The iconic nature of the image was very slowly and with great difficulty assimilated by human consciousness and art. Only time and the needs of different historical eras gradually revealed this sacred character, this iconic image, led to the abolition of the early Christian symbols and cleansed Christian art of all kinds of alien elements that obscured its content.

So, despite the existence in the Church of some currents that had a negative attitude towards images, there was also its main line, which affirmed the image, which, without any external formulation, more and more dominated. The expression of this main line of the Church is its Tradition, which affirms the existence of the icon of the Savior during His lifetime and the icons of the Mother of God that appeared after Pentecost. This tradition testifies that in the Church from the very beginning there was a clear understanding of the meaning and meaning of the image, that the attitude of the Church to the image remains unchanged, that this attitude follows from her teaching about the Incarnation. According to this teaching, the image is inherent in the very essence of Christianity, for there is a Revelation not only of the Word of God, but also of the Image of God, revealed by the God-Man Jesus Christ. teaches that the icon is based on the very fact of the incarnation of the second Person of the Holy Trinity. And this means that the Christian image not only does not mean a break, or even a contradiction with the Old Testament law, as the Protestants understand it, but quite the opposite - it is its direct implementation and consequence. For the existence of the image in the New Testament is presupposed by its very prohibition in the Old Testament. Oddly enough for stranger, but for the Church itself, the existence of an image follows directly from the absence of a direct image in the Old Testament - this is its consequence and completion. The ancestor of the Christian image is not a pagan idol, as is sometimes thought, but the absence of a direct, specific image before the incarnation and an Old Testament symbol, just as the ancestor of the Church itself is not the pagan world, but ancient Israel, the people chosen by God to accept His Revelation. It is quite obvious to the Church that the prohibition of the image given Holy Scripture in Exodus (20, 4) and in Deuteronomy (5, 12-19), there is a temporary pedagogical, educational measure that applies only to the Old Testament, and not a fundamental prohibition. “Give them commandments that are not good” (Ezek. 20:25), because of their hardness of heart, - explains the reason for the prohibition of St. . For while forbidding a direct and concrete image, Scripture at the same time conveys God's command to make symbolic images, such as the tabernacle and the objects in it. They had a transformative, symbolic meaning, and their device was indicated by God Himself to the smallest detail.

The teaching of the Church about the image and its attitude to the Old Testament prohibition are expressed with particular clarity by St. in his wonderful "Words in Defense of Holy Icons", written in response to the iconoclasts, who denied icons precisely on the basis of the Old Testament prohibition and confused the Christian image with an idol. Rev. reveals the meaning of the Old Testament prohibition and, by comparing biblical and gospel texts, shows that the Christian image not only does not contradict the biblical prohibition, but, as already mentioned, is its completion, since it comes from the very essence of Christianity.

As for the ban on the image of the creature given by God through Moses, this ban had only one goal: to prevent the chosen people from worshiping the creature instead of the Creator: "Don't bow down to them, don't serve them"(; Deut. 5, 9), since with the inclination of the people to idolatry, both the creature itself and its image, of course, hid the danger of deification and worship them as God. For after the fall, the human race was subjected to corruption, and with it the whole earthly world. Therefore, the image of this person corrupted by sin or any other creature could not bring a person closer to the one true God, but, on the contrary, could only move away from Him, drawing him to idolatry. This image was unclean and in any case could not be constructive. Therefore, it was necessary at all costs to refrain from a direct, concrete image.

In other words: no image of the creature can replace the image of God, which the people did not see when "the Lord [...] spoke in Horeb." Therefore, before God, the very creation of any “likeness” was lawlessness: “ Do not be lawless, and do not create for yourself the likeness of a vayanna, any image of the likeness of a male or female. ”(Deut. 4, 16).

The fact that the Old Testament prohibition of the image is precisely a protective measure, associated with the service of the chosen people, shows the command of God to Moses to arrange “in the image shown on the mountain” the tabernacle and everything that was in it, including sewn and cast cherubim (and 31). This command to make cherubim points, first of all, to the possibility of depicting the spiritual created world by means of art. In addition, cherubim can not be made as many as you like and anywhere, because the Jews could fall into idolatry before their image, as before any other. But cherubim could and should have been depicted only in the indicated number and only in the tabernacle, as servants of the true God, that is, in a place and position that emphasized their ministry.

This contradiction to the general rule shows that the rule itself was not of an absolute, fundamental nature. Therefore, “Solomon, who received an outpouring of wisdom, depicting the sky, made cherubim and the likeness of lions and oxen,” he says. The fact that the creatures were depicted at the temple, that is, where the worship of the one true God was paid, undoubtedly excluded any possibility of their deification.

For the construction of the tabernacle "according to the indicated image", God appoints people, and people who can not just do what was shown, according to Moses, by virtue of their natural abilities. No. The Lord says: "Perform it(Veseliela) By the Spirit of God wisdom, and thinking, and knowledge, understand in every matter. And further on Bezleel's helpers: “I have given meaning to every one with a sense of heart, and they will labor, and they will do everything, the tree of the commandments to you”(and 6). Here is a clear indication that the art of serving God is not art in general, as such: its basis is not human ability or wisdom, but the wisdom of the Spirit of God, the spirit of thinking and the spirit of knowledge, bestowed by God Himself. In other words, the very principle of liturgical art is inspired by God; By this, Scripture draws a clear line between the art dedicated to worship and the art outside of it.

This is very important for us, since this isolation, inspiration of liturgical art is peculiar not only to the Old Testament, but to the very principle of this art. So he was in the Old Testament, so he remained in the New Testament.

But back to the explanation of Rev. . If in the Old Testament direct Divine Revelation to people was realized in the word, then in the New Testament it is realized both in the word and in the image, for the Invisible became visible, the Indescribable became describable. Now it is revealed to people not only in the word, through the prophets: He Himself appears to them in the Person of the incarnate Word, He "abides with people." In the Gospel of Matthew (13:16-17), St. , The Lord, that is, the One Who spoke in the Old Testament, says, pleasing His disciples, and with them all those who live their lives and follow in their footsteps: “But your eyes are blessed, as if they see, and your ears, as if they hear. Amen, I say to you, as many prophets and righteous women desire to see, even you see, and not seeing, and hear, even though you hear, and not hearing ". Indeed, when Christ tells His disciples that their eyes are blessed because they see what they see, and their ears are blessed because they hear what they hear, this clearly refers to something that no one has yet seen and did not hear, since people have always had eyes and ears to see and hear. These words of Christ do not apply to His miracles either, since the Old Testament prophets also worked miracles (for example, Moses, Elijah, who raised the dead, closed heaven, etc.). These words mean that the disciples had already directly seen and heard the incarnate God proclaimed by the prophets. "God is nowhere to be seen anywhere, - says the Evangelist John the Theologian, Only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, That confession " ().

A distinctive feature of the New Testament is that in it the word is inseparable from the image. Therefore, the Fathers and Councils, each time speaking about the image, emphasize: “As I heard, so I saw”, quoting Psalm 47, 9: “As I have heard, so I have seen in the city of the Lord of hosts, in the city of our God”. What a person sees is inseparable here from what he hears. But what David and Solomon heard and saw were only prophetic words, prophetic images of what came to pass in the New Testament. Now, in the New Testament, man receives the Revelation of the coming Kingdom of God, and this Revelation is given to him both in word and in image by the incarnate Son of God.

The apostles saw with their bodily eyes what was only foreshadowed in symbols in the Old Testament. “The incorporeal and formless was once not depicted in any way. Now, when God has appeared in the flesh and has lived with men, I depict the visible side of God. This is the fundamental difference between the Old Testament visions and the New Testament image: then the prophets saw with their spiritual eyes an immaterial, immaterial image that predicted the future (Ezekiel, Jacob, Isaiah ...). Now, with bodily eyes, a person sees the fulfillment of their providence - God in the flesh. The holy Evangelist John expresses this with great force in the opening words of his First Epistle:

“So,” continues the Rev. - The apostles saw Christ in a bodily way, saw His sufferings, His miracles and heard His words. We strongly wish to see and hear [...]. They saw face to face, as He was bodily present. We, however, because He is not present bodily, as if through books we listen to His words and sanctify our hearing, and through it our soul, and consider ourselves blessed, and worship, honoring the books through which we hear His words. So, through icon painting, we contemplate images of His bodily appearance, and His miracles, and His sufferings, we are sanctified and completely satisfied, and rejoice, and consider ourselves happy [...]. And we honor and bow to His bodily image. And contemplating bodily appearance Him, we ascend, as far as possible, to the contemplation and glory of His Divinity [...] ". Therefore, just as through sensible words that we hear with bodily ears, we also understand the spiritual, so through bodily contemplation we come to spiritual contemplation.

This interpretation of our holy father is neither an expression of his personal opinion, nor some addition to the original teaching of the Church. The doctrine of the image is organically part of the Christian doctrine, just as, for example, the doctrine of the two natures of Jesus Christ or the veneration of the Mother of God. Rev. only systematized and formulated in the VIII century what existed in the Church from the beginning. He did this in response to a situation that required great clarity and precision, just as he had to formulate the teaching of the Church on the Orthodox faith as a whole - in his wonderful work "An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith."

So, the Old Testament prototypes proclaimed the coming salvation, the appearance of God in the flesh and the communion of man with the Divine being, what the Fathers expressed with a clear and precise formula: "God became Man, that man might become God." At the center of the work of our redemption stands Christ, who became a Man, and right next to Him, the first person who achieved deification is the Mother of God. All the diversity of Old Testament images, both historical and expressed through animals or objects, is concentrated on these two Persons. So, for example, the sacrifice of Isaac, the lamb, the bronze serpent prefigured Christ; Esther, intercessor for the people before the king, a stamen containing heavenly bread, Aaron's rod and others prefigured the Mother of God. The fulfillment of these prophetic prefigurations is expressed in the New Testament Church by two main images that occupy a central position in our worship: the images of the Savior - God who became Man, and the image Holy Mother of God- the first human being to achieve complete deification. Therefore, the first icons that appeared simultaneously with Christianity are the icons of Christ and the Mother of God. Approving this with his Tradition, he bases all his iconography on these two images.

The fulfillment of the vow given by God to man sanctifies the whole creation, including the people of the Old Testament, including and uniting them in a single redeemed humanity. Now, after the Incarnation, we can already depict both the prophets and the forefathers of the Old Testament as representatives of humanity, already redeemed by the blood of the incarnated Son of God. The images of these people, as well as the New Testament righteous, can no longer lead us to idolatry, “since we received from God the ability,” says the saint, “to distinguish, and we know what can be depicted and what cannot be expressed through Images. For the law is our nurse in Christ, that we may be justified by faith [...]. Faith that has come is no longer under Esma's tutor"(. This connection of Christianity with the image explains the fact that the image appears in the Church from the beginning, as a matter of course, and takes its proper place in it, despite the Old Testament prohibition and some opposition.

A person involved in icon painting regularly has to deal with a special iconic mythology - a complex of prejudices, stereotypes and pseudo-pious fantasies, sometimes bordering on superstition, and even occultism.

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I will not sin against the truth if I say that almost all popular literature devoted to icon painting cultivates this mythology in one way or another. Who has not heard about the special "spiritual" technique of Orthodox icon painting, which is opposed to the "fallen" Western European realism, or about the so-called. reverse perspective, about enlightened faces that “have no shadows”, but “glow from within”? Some kind of beautiful and esoteric-sounding stamps. And although the works of professional art historians and restorers create a completely different picture, mythology lives its own life and even claims the proud title of "theology of the icon."

I, as an icon painter, constantly have to answer various, mostly of the same type, questions related to this very “theology”. In search of the original source - both questions and the stereotypes that give rise to them - I almost always came, in the end, to the same fairly well-known names, whose authority is now almost not questioned. But one of these names is perhaps the most famous ...

Today it is difficult to find a monograph on the theology of the icon that does not mention the name of the priest Pavel Florensky or that does not use his ideas. They are so deeply rooted in the understanding of the icon, which is now dominant in the literature on icon painting, that it is impossible to underestimate the importance of Florensky's works (1) .

Another question is about the qualitative results of this value.

In this article, I would like to consider the ideas of Fr. Pavel Florensky, his methodology and specific worldview in the context of the Orthodox icon. life path and tragic fate religious philosopher we will not touch upon in this essay.

Theology and "theology of the icon"

Paradoxically, theology, etc. "theology of the icon" - these things are not at all identical. In essence, patristic theology defines, what exactly shown on the icon. The question is how exactly depicted (i.e., the issue of icon-painting technique), concerns theology to a much lesser extent.

But it is precisely this subject that is considered by the "theologians" from the icon as the key one, it is in this subject that the main near-icon myths took root, and it was this subject that Florensky himself attached special, almost sacred significance.

The opinions of the priest Pavel Florensky are reproduced mainly from his work The Iconostasis (1922), however, we also used his other works, directly or indirectly related to the icon: Reverse Perspective (1919), Temple Action as a Synthesis of Arts (1922) and Heavenly Signs. (Reflections on the Symbolism of Flowers)" (1922).

So, the word to Fr. Pavel:

“In the consistency of the paint, in the way it is applied to the corresponding surface, in the mechanical and physical structure of the surfaces themselves, in the chemical and physical nature of the substance that binds the paints, in the composition and consistency of their solvents, as well as the paints themselves, in varnishes or other fixatives of the written work and in its other “material causes” that metaphysics, that deep worldview, is already directly expressed, which the creative will of the artist strives to express in this work as a whole” (2).

In other words, the artist's attitude, according to Florensky, is expressed not so much by what he writes, but by what he writes it and how he writes it. Further, an image, in order to be an icon, must be painted with special materials and in special ways. Without these conditions, the icon cannot be real, or, in the words of Fr. Paul, it will not correspond to the “spirit of icon-painting technique” (3). In this sense, the technique of icon painting, according to Florensky, is not something secondary, but, on the contrary, the most necessary condition for creating a “correct” Orthodox icon. This is exactly what is now most often understood in popular literature by the concept of "icon-painting canon".

This topic is most fully revealed by Florensky in his program (in relation to icon painting) work "Iconostasis".

For an unprepared reader who is not familiar with the technical side of painting, reading Florensky is quite difficult. His presentation of icon-painting technique is a heap of information gleaned from various, often unequal sources, generously seasoned with the author's remarks and mystical-romantic digressions. It is often fascinating to read Florensky, but, firstly, he is extremely subjective and usually does not bother to substantiate his own theses (here it is appropriate to quote the words of Archpriest Georgy Florovsky, said about another program work of Father Paul - "The Pillar and Ground of the Truth", but very suitable and for this occasion: “The Book of Florensky intentionally and deliberately subjective… He always speaks for himself. He remains subjective even when he would like to be objective. And therein lies its ambiguity. He presents the book of personal elections as a confession of conciliar experience” (4)).

And secondly, the author appeals more to the emotions than to the logic of the reader. One of Florensky's critics, B. Yakovenko, expressed this in a peculiar way: Florensky’s theoretical centers, all aimed at emotionally striking, capturing, enticing, previously and incidentally entertaining attention with a mass of excerpts and borrowings from and from sacred books, and from theological interpretations, and from philosophical sources, and from individual sciences, especially linguistics and mathematics, as well as the endless repetition of the same insufficiently ordered and in some kind of whirlwind of thoughts and experiences.

The icon according to Florensky and the icon in reality

So, to the icon of St. Pavel Florensky makes a number of demands:
1. Materials. The icon is written on a board covered with cloth and gesso (primer based on chalk and glue). For the letter itself, egg tempera is used. The finished icon is covered with drying oil.
2. Actually technique. The icon painter moves from shadow to light. First, the contours of the future image are covered with dark paint, over which lighter layers are successively superimposed.
The way the paint is applied also matters. In particular, when writing faces, the modeling of the form occurs by manipulating liquid paint spilled over the surface (the so-called melt). This method (for those who are interested) is described in detail, in particular, by the nun Juliana (Sokolova) (6). Writing with strokes or in any other way is unacceptable (7).

But let's try to look at Florensky's statements in the light of the actual data on icon painting:

Novgorod tablet icon. 1484–1504

Materials.
In fact, wood has never been the only material for an icon. Recall, for example, the so-called. the tablets are Novgorod icons of the 15th-16th centuries. They were written on canvas, heavily primed on both sides. The resulting tablet was enclosed in a wooden frame. Unlike icons painted on wood, the tablets were more fragile, but they did not warp like a wooden board.

Egg tempera was also not the only icon painting technique. The first icons were painted in, in which the paint was kneaded on wax, and not on egg yolk. Wax painting existed until the 12th century (8). At the same time, we are now talking only about painting with paints and do not even touch on such a technique as mosaic.

The covering layer of the icon in the same way was not always drying oil. Actually, under the "linseed oil" in Russia they understood a fairly large range of materials - both oil varnishes and drying oil itself. And, by the way, this same drying oil was far from the best coating for the icon: unlike Byzantium, the Balkans and pre-Mongolian Russia, starting from the 13th century, Russian icon painters began to add so-called desiccants (9) to the oil base (auxiliaries to speed up the drying process ), which meanwhile contributed to the rapid darkening of the drying oil, sometimes to such an extent that the image itself on the icon could no longer be distinguished.
Technique.

The method of applying paint (from dark to light), described by Florensky, is endowed with a special meaning. One of the main ideas about Paul is the opposition of the medieval eastern icon to the realistic western painting. Sometimes it looks like an obsession.

So, if there is a certain phenomenon in realism, then in the icon, according to Florensky, everything should be exactly the opposite: “The artist goes from light to shadow, or from illuminated to dark ... there is also a reverse philosophy, and therefore, there must be the corresponding art. Right, if iconography did not exist, іl faudrait l "inventer [it would be necessary to invent it (fr.)]. But it exists - and is as ancient as humanity. The icon painter goes from dark to light, from darkness to light "( ten).

In this statement, Florensky's methodology is clearly manifested: it is not the facts that are the basis on which the conclusions are built, but, on the contrary, first an idea is born, then the facts are adjusted to it (“it would be necessary to invent it”).

In reality, however, the method of writing described by Fr. Pavel, was also not exceptional in icon painting.

The most typical example is face painting. Florensky, in fact, describes the so-called. sankir method of writing: “A sankir or sankir is the main paint composition for laying the face ... Next comes the melting of faces ... The bright places of the personal - the forehead, cheeks, nose - are covered with liquid flesh-colored paint, which includes ocher or, in icon painting, vohra; hence this whole part of iconography is called vokhrene” (11).

Savior not made by hands. Domongolian Rus. XII century. Bessanky writing technique

However, this method of writing appears no earlier than the 13th century, and only in the 14th century did Russian icon painting finally adopt it (12). Until that time, the so-called sankir-free method was used: “A layer of “flesh-colored” color was applied over white ground ... After the first drawing, over this layer (and not under it, as some authors claim) with paint resembling sankir in color ... they painted shadow areas ”( 13).

As you can see, the method of writing so denied by Florensky (from light to dark) is quite classical and even more ancient than that described by him.

Can an icon be realistic?

In discussions about Paul about icon painting, you can find a number of other categorical statements. For example, about the fact that the icon image should be flat, that the shadow in the icon is impossible, that the icon painter must avoid any closeness to nature, any “living likeness”, etc.

Opinion versus facts

At the same time, the works of professional researchers of medieval icon painting provide a huge amount of facts that do not fit into the framework of such categoricalness.

Compare.

Florensky:“In icon painting, a brushstroke is impossible, glazing is impossible (14), just as there are no halftones and shadows” (15).

Art critic:“The character of writing in the Sinai icon from the point of view of artistic techniques is the development of a transparent, glazing method of applying strokes in layers in strict accordance with the deep, three-dimensional construction of the relief” (16).

Sinai icon of the Savior. 6th century

"Faces - rounded, sculpturally convex - are molded with wide planes of color and delicate transparent glazes" (17). “Transparent thin glazes are multi-layered, they are executed with the finest color gradations” (18). “The contrasts of chiaroscuro become the leading means in the formation of a cast, as it were carved, or ideally rounded volume” (19).

"Free painting technique, using delicate halftones." “Faces are processed with light, transparent shadows” (20).

Yes, oh Pavel put forward and defended the idea that in icon painting the volume is allegedly conveyed not with the help of light and shadow (as in "Western painting"), but is depicted "by the light itself" (sic). Moreover, this light is not external, but “internal”, as if emitted by the very subject of the image: “Modeling ... volume through enlightenment” (21).

It certainly sounds beautiful. And if we compare it with the Light of Tabor, spiritual enlightenments, insights and the like, then the thesis will look even more “spiritual”. But in fact, the idea does not stand up to scrutiny. In this case, the same far-fetched antagonism between medieval icon painting and realistic painting takes place: “The painter wants to understand the subject as something in itself real and opposed to light; by his struggle with light - that is, shadows, with the help of shadows, he reveals himself to the viewer as a reality. Light, in the pictorial sense, is only an occasion for the self-discovery of a thing. On the contrary, for the icon painter there is no reality other than the reality of the light itself and what it will produce” (22).

Florensky opposes any naturalism. The icon, in his private opinion, a priori cannot depict the real appearance of the object, but is intended to be only a symbol of spiritual realities. And even such a seemingly earthly object as the folds of clothes must also avoid all sorts of realism. Here is what Florensky says about this in the context of the “secularization” (in his opinion) of 17th-century icon painting: instead of serving as a symbol of the supersensible” (23).
But what if entire generations of Byzantine icon painters, long before Florensky criticized the 17th century, by no means avoided “nature”, illusoryness, including in the folds of clothing: volume, there is no hint of enlargement or stylization in the interpretation of fabrics - they are completely illusionistic, “life-like” (24).

Exactly the same story emerges with the famous “reverse perspective”, from which Fr. Pavel Florensky brought out a whole theory.

He has a separate work of the same name devoted to this topic. The main idea, again, is the obsessive opposition of icon painting to realism. And if in realism the rules of linear (direct) perspective apply (objects decrease proportionally as they move away from the foreground), then in icon painting everything should certainly be the other way around.

Of course, it would be strange to say that medieval masters struggled with a phenomenon that had not yet been discovered (and the discovery of a direct perspective, we recall, occurred only in the 14th century in Italy). If we consider the construction of space on the icons of different eras, it will be obvious that there is, of course, no perspective as a system (direct or "reverse"). Meet various options constructing space - for example, axonometry and even elements of direct perspective (in its medieval sense, of course) (25).

Reading Florensky, you feel a certain cognitive dissonance - the real icon is so different from everything that Fr. Paul. It seems that he is describing some other phenomenon, talking about some other icon.

What is the reason? We will talk about this in the second part of our article.

Dmitry Marchenko

Notes:
1. In fact, the "unconditional authority" of Fr. Pavel Florensky became not so long ago and not for everyone. This is one of the most controversial thinkers of his time. Estimates of his work have always been quite polar - from enthusiastic to derogatory. For example, Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) expressed himself quite sharply: “Either I don’t understand anything else in philosophy, or this is just Khlyst’s nonsense!” (S. A. Volkov. P. A. Florensky. Quoted from P. A. Florensky: proetcontra. St. Petersburg 1996. P. 144).
2. Florensky P. Iconostasis. In the collection: Priest Pavel Florensky. Works in 4 volumes. T. 2. S. 473.
3. Ibid. S. 507.
4. Prot. Georgy Florovsky. Ways of Russian theology. M., 2009. S. 626.
5. Yakovenko B. Philosophy of despair. Quoted from P. A. Florensky: proetcontra. SPb. 1996. S. 256.
6. Nun Juliania (M. N. Sokolova). The work of an icon painter. Holy Trinity Sergius Lavra. 1998.
7. Florensky P. Iconostasis. In the collection: Priest Pavel Florensky. Works in 4 volumes. T. 2. S. 473, 505.
8. New encyclopedic dictionary of fine arts. St. Petersburg, 2004–2009.
9. Grinberg Yu. I. Painting technique. M., 1982.
10. Florensky P. Iconostasis. In the collection: Priest Pavel Florensky. Works in 4 volumes. T. 2. S. 510.
11. Ibid. S. 507.
12. Grinberg Yu. I. Painting technique. M., 1982.
13. Ibid.
14. Glazing - the technique of applying translucent paints over the base color.
15. Florensky P. Iconostasis. In the collection: Priest Pavel Florensky. Works in 4 volumes. T. 2. S. 505.
16. Kolpakova G. Art of Byzantium. early and middle periods. SPb., 2010. S. 239.
17. Kolpakova G. Art of Byzantium. late period. SPb., 2004. S. 32.
18. Ibid. S. 40.
19. Ibid. S. 130.
20. Lazarev VN History of Byzantine painting. M., 1986.
21. Florensky P. Iconostasis. In the collection: Priest Pavel Florensky. Works in 4 volumes. T. 2. S. 510.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid. pp. 489–490.
24. Kolpakova G. Art of Byzantium. late period. SPb., 2004. S. 102.
25. See for example: Raushenbakh B.V. Spatial constructions in ancient Russian painting. M., 1975.

Foreword

It is recognized by all that the Russian Orthodox icon is one of the highest achievements of the human spirit. Now it is difficult to find such a church in Europe (Catholic or Protestant) where there would not be an Orthodox icon, at least a good reproduction on a board made of processed wood, placed in the most prominent place.

At the same time, Russian icons became the subject of speculation, smuggling, and forgeries. It is amazing that, despite the many years of plundering such a heritage of our national culture, the flow of Russian icons does not dry out. This testifies to the grandiose creative potential of the Russian people, who have created such great wealth over the past centuries.

However, with such an abundance of icons, it is quite difficult for a person to figure out and understand what is a truly spiritual creation of religious feeling and faith, and what is an unsuccessful attempt to create the image of the Savior, Mother of God or saint. Hence the inevitable fetishization of the icon and the reduction of its high spiritual purpose to an ordinary revered object.

When getting acquainted with the icons of different centuries, we need explanations from specialists, similar to the story of a guide who will show us, examining the ancient cathedral, the differences between the ancient parts of the building and later extensions, pay attention to subtle at first glance, but very important details characteristic of a particular time. or style.

In the study of icons, in an effort to better understand these creations of the human spirit, the experience of people who combine professional art history education with a significant length of life in the Church becomes extremely important. This is what distinguishes the author of the book offered to the attention of a respected reader. In a lively and accessible form, the book tells about the first Christian images. Initially, these were symbols: a fish, an anchor, a cross. Then came the transition from a symbol to an icon, if we recall the image of the good shepherd with a lamb on his shoulders. And finally, early icons appeared - a synthesis of ancient painting and the Christian worldview. The explanation of the meaning of the icon image from early Byzantine to Russian helps to understand what an icon is, what its style, symbolism, and artistic language are. Knowing this language, we can understand true value genuine masterpieces and distinguish them from failed attempts at imitation.

Today Russia is again called to spiritual revival. Awareness of the best and most valuable in the Christian, and especially in the Orthodox tradition, is absolutely necessary to create a fruitful atmosphere in which the revival of old and the emergence of new paths in religious art will become possible.

Archpriest Alexander Borisov

Preface to the second edition

In the Orthodox tradition, the icon occupies an exceptional place. In the minds of many people around the world, Orthodoxy is identified primarily with Byzantine and ancient Russian icons. Few are familiar with Orthodox theology, few people know the social teaching of the Orthodox Church, few go to Orthodox churches. But reproductions from Byzantine and Russian icons can be seen both in the Orthodox, and in the Catholic, Protestant and even non-Christian environment. The icon is a silent and eloquent preacher of Orthodoxy not only within the Church, but also in a world alien to her, and even hostile to her. According to L. Uspensky, “if during the period of iconoclasm the Church fought for the icon, then in our time the icon is fighting for the Church.” The icon fights for Orthodoxy, for truth, for beauty. Ultimately, she fights for the human soul, because the salvation of the soul is the purpose and meaning of the existence of the Church.

Much has been written about the theology of the icon to date, and it is difficult to say anything fundamentally new on this subject. The “discovery” of the icon at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when ancient images began to be removed from their frames and cleared away, gave rise to an extensive literature: among the most significant icon studies works of the first half of the 20th century, one should include “Three Essays on the Russian Icon” by E. Trubetskoy and "Iconostasis" of St. Pavel Florensky. In the second half of the 20th century, "Russian Paris" gave a fundamental study "The Theology of the Icon in the Orthodox Church", written by L. A. Uspensky. Among the most significant works on the theology of the icon that appeared in the last decades of the 20th century, one should also mention the brilliant study of Cardinal Christoph Schönborn "The Icon of Christ", the book by Hieromonk Gabriel Bunge "The Other Comforter", dedicated to the iconography of the Holy Trinity, and the "Conversations of the icon painter" by the archimandrite Zeno (Theodora). In the same row is the brilliant study of I. K. Yazykova “Co-creation of the image. The Theology of the Icon”, which is now in its second edition.

The book by I.K. Yazykova was written as a textbook for theological schools and came out in a large edition, which has already sold out, since this book turned out to be in demand by icon painters, students of secular educational institutions and just people interested in Orthodox art. And reader interest in it does not dry out. If ten years ago attention to the topic was due to the reader's need to fill in the lack of spiritual information, today the interest in the topic of the icon is already explained by reasons of a deeper order. Every year there is a growing understanding of the need to preserve traditional Christian values ​​that the world is losing. Along with this, there is a growing understanding of the significance of the Church and church culture for Russia. But modern man needs a guide to the world of tradition, the language of which, like any language, must be mastered before accepting the wealth that Orthodoxy has accumulated over two millennia of its history. In this great heritage, the icon occupies a special place.

The Holy Fathers called the icon the Gospel for the illiterate. Today, our compatriots, despite the fact that almost all of them are literate, do not always understand what the Gospel is talking about, they experience difficulties when reading biblical texts. The icon helps in revealing the deep meaning of the Holy Scriptures.

Of course, the icon cannot be taken as a simple illustration of the Gospel or of events in the life of the Church. “The icon depicts nothing, it reveals,” says Archimandrite Zinon. First of all, it reveals to people the Invisible God - a God whom, according to the evangelist, “no one has ever seen”, but who was revealed to mankind in the person of the God-Man Jesus Christ (John 1:18). And in this sense, the icon-painting, appealing not only to the mind, but also to the heart of the viewer, is designed to help, through the contemplation of the image, to get closer to the Prototype. The images of the icon accustom our eyes to seeing not only physical things, but the mind is tuned to the contemplation of the mountain world.

Orthodoxy understands the icon as one of the types of theology. So, E. Trubetskoy called the icon "speculation in colors". In the icon, with the help of artistic means, the main dogmas of Christianity are transmitted: about the Holy Trinity, about the Incarnation, about the salvation and deification of man. It reveals what is inaccessible to the understanding of rational consciousness, but opens beyond words.

The icon is liturgical in its purpose, it is an integral part of the liturgical space - the temple - and an indispensable participant in worship. “In its essence, an icon… is by no means an image intended for personal reverent worship,” writes Hieromonk Gabriel Bunge. “Her theological place is first of all the liturgy, where the gospel of the Word is supplemented by the gospel of the image.” Outside the context of the temple and the liturgy, the icon largely loses its meaning. But sometimes it is the icon that helps modern man to enter the temple.

The icon is mystical. It is inextricably linked with the spiritual life of a Christian, with his experience of communion with God, the experience of contact with the heavenly world. At the same time, the icon reflects the mystical experience of the entirety of the Church, and not just of its individual members. Through the contemplation of an icon, a person joins the prayerful experience of the saints and learns to pray himself, and prayer, even the simplest, is ultimately communion with God. “An icon is an embodied prayer,” says Archimandrite Zinon. “It is created in prayer and for the sake of prayer, the driving force of which is love for God, striving for Him as perfect beauty.”

I. K. Yazykova's book tells about these and many other meanings of the icon. The book is addressed to the widest readership and is written in a language understandable to a modern person, because the Good News, expressed in an icon, is intended not for a narrow circle of theologians, but for all mankind. The task of the Church at all times is the same - to convey the Word about God, the message of salvation, the truth about Christ to everyone and everyone.

The second edition of the book reminds us that our world today is looking for a way out of those spiritual problems and dead ends that are commonly referred to as "postmodern". In difficult times, a person seeks answers to his questions, but they often lie outside this world, which, according to the Apostle, “lies in evil” (1 Jn 5:19). The icon, being a window into another world, can help our contemporaries understand themselves and their destiny in the world. Each icon carries a powerful moral charge, reminding modern man that in addition to the world in which he lives, there is another world; in addition to the values ​​preached by non-religious humanism, there are other spiritual values; in addition to the moral standards that a secular society sets, there are other norms. By discovering the world of the icon, the reader, even the most inexperienced in theological matters, will discover for himself the world of love, beauty, holiness, which means he will see the light that can transform himself.

Hilarion,

Metropolitan of Volokolamsk

Doctor of Philosophy, Chairman of the DECR

Introduction

The icon is an integral part of the Orthodox tradition. It is impossible to imagine the interior of an Orthodox church without icons. In the home of an Orthodox person, icons always occupy a prominent place. Going on the road Orthodox Christian according to custom, he takes with him a small marching iconostasis, or fold. So it has long been customary in Russia: a person was born or died, got married or started some important business - he was accompanied by an icon-painting image. The whole history of Russia has passed under the sign of the icon, many glorified and miraculous icons have become witnesses and participants in the most important historical changes in its fate. Russia itself, having once accepted baptism from the Greeks, inherited the great tradition of the Eastern Christian world, which is rightfully proud of the richness and diversity of the icon-painting schools of Byzantium, the Balkans, and the Christian East. And in this magnificent crown, Russia wove its golden thread.

The richness of icons often becomes a reason for exalting the Orthodox over other Christians, whose historical experience has not preserved the tradition in all its purity or rejected the icon as an element of cult practice. However, often modern Orthodox person his apology for the icon does not extend beyond the blind defense of tradition, vague arguments about the beauty of the divine world, and turns out to be an untenable heir to his wealth. In addition, the low artistic quality icon production that flooded our churches bears little resemblance to what is called an icon in the patristic tradition. All this testifies to the oblivion of the icon and its true value. This is not so much about aesthetic principles, as they are known to have changed over the centuries and depended on regional and national traditions, but about the meaning of the icon, since the image is one of the key concepts of the Orthodox worldview. After all, it is no coincidence that the victory of the iconodules over the iconoclasts, finally approved in 843, went down in history as the feast of the Triumph of Orthodoxy. The dogma of icon veneration became a kind of apogee of the dogmatic creativity of the holy fathers. This put an end to the dogmatic disputes that shook the Church from the 4th to the 9th centuries.

What did the admirers of icons defend so zealously? Not only beauty, but truth. They defended the opportunity to stand before God face to face. We can observe the echoes of this struggle even today in the disputes between the representatives of the historical churches and the apologists of the young Christian movements, which are at war with the obvious and imaginary manifestations of idolatry and paganism in Christianity. The discovery of the icon at the beginning of the 20th century forced both supporters and opponents of icon veneration to take a fresh look at the subject of the dispute. The theological understanding of the icon phenomenon, which continues to this day, helps to reveal previously unknown deep layers of divine Revelation and patristic tradition.

Recently, an increasing number of Christians have valued the icon as a common spiritual heritage. It is the ancient icon that is perceived as an actual revelation necessary for modern man. The icon as a spiritual phenomenon is increasingly attracting attention, not only in the Orthodox world, but also in the Catholic and even Protestant.

This book is the second and revised edition of a course of lectures given in many educational institutions, spiritual and secular, in Russia and abroad. The book is intended to introduce listeners into the complex and ambiguous world of the icon, to reveal the meaning of the icon as a spiritual phenomenon deeply rooted in the Christian, biblical worldview, to show its inseparable connection with dogmatic and theological creativity, the liturgical life of the Church.

Chapter 1
Icon from the point of view of the Christian worldview and biblical anthropology

And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good.

It is human nature to appreciate beauty. The human soul needs beauty and seeks it. All human culture is permeated with the search for beauty. The Bible also testifies that beauty lay at the heart of the world and man was originally involved in it. The expulsion from paradise led to the loss of beauty, the rupture of man with beauty and truth. Once having lost his heritage, a person longs to return it, to find it again. Human history can be presented as a path from lost beauty to sought after beauty, on this path a person realizes himself as a participant in the Divine creation of the world. Leaving the beautiful Garden of Eden, symbolizing its pure natural state before the fall, a person returns to the garden city - Heavenly Jerusalem, “new, coming down from God, from heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev. 21:2). And this image of the last book of the Bible is an image of future beauty, about which it is said: “Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, and it has not entered into the heart of man, which God has prepared for those who love Him” (1 Cor 2:9).

All of God's creation is originally beautiful. God admired his creation at various stages of its creation. “And God saw that it was good” - these words are repeated in the 1st chapter of the Book of Genesis seven times, and they clearly have an aesthetic character. This is where the Bible begins. And it ends with the revelation of beauty - the new heaven and the new earth (Rev. 21:1). The world is beautifully designed by God. The Apostle John says that “the world lies in evil” (1 John 5:19), thus emphasizing that the world (that is, creation) is not evil in itself, God did not create evil, but it, having entered the world, distorted it beauty. And at the end of time, the true beauty of God's creation will shine - perfect, redeemed, transfigured.

The concept of beauty always includes the concepts of harmony, perfection, purity, and for the Christian worldview, good is certainly included in this series. In Slavic, “kindness” means “beauty” and “good” at the same time. The separation of ethics and aesthetics took place already in modern times, when culture underwent secularization and the integrity of the Christian world view was lost. Pushkin's question about the compatibility of genius and villainy was already born in a divided world, for which Christian values ​​are not obvious. A century later, this question sounds like a statement: “aesthetics of the ugly”, “theater of the absurd”, “harmony of destruction”, “cult of violence”, etc. - these are the aesthetic coordinates that largely determined the culture of the 20th century. And in the 21st century, this is only getting worse. The rupture of aesthetic ideals with ethical roots leads not only to anti-aesthetics, but also directly to Satanism. However, even in the midst of decay, the human soul does not cease to strive for beauty. The famous Chekhovian maxim “everything in a person should be beautiful ...” is nothing but nostalgia for the integrity of the Christian understanding of beauty and the unity of the image. The dead ends and tragedies of the modern search for beauty lie in the complete loss of value orientations, in the oblivion of the sources of beauty.

Beauty in the Christian understanding is an ontological category, it is inextricably linked with the meaning of being. Beauty is rooted in God. The Bible teaches that there is only one beauty - True Beauty, God Himself. And every earthly beauty is only an image that reflects the Primary Source to a greater or lesser extent.

“In the beginning was the Word… through him all things were made, and without him nothing was made that was made” (John 1:1-3). The Word, the Inexpressible Logos, Reason, Meaning, etc. - this concept has a huge synonymous range. In the same row, the word “image” also finds its place, without which it is impossible to comprehend the true meaning of beauty. Word and Image have one source, in their ontological depth they are one.

The image in Greek is εἰκών (eikon), the Russian “icon” also comes from this word. But just as we distinguish between the Word and words, we should also distinguish between the Image and images, in a narrower sense - icons (in Russian colloquial speech, it is not by chance that the name of icons - “image” has been preserved). Without understanding the meaning of the Image, we cannot understand the meaning of the icon, its place, its role, its meaning.

God creates the world through the Word, He is the Word that came into the world, that is, it acquired the Image. God creates the world, giving an image to everything, it is no coincidence that in Russian it means - forms the world. He Himself, having no image, is the prototype of everything in the world. Everything that exists in the world exists because it bears the image of God. The Russian word “ugly”, a synonym for the word “ugly”, means nothing more than “shapeless”, that is, not having the image of God in itself, non-essential, non-existent, dead. The whole world is permeated with the Word, and the whole world is filled with the Image of God, one can say: our world is iconological.

All of God's creation can be imagined as a ladder of images that, like mirrors, reflect each other and ultimately reflect God as the Archetype and Antitype of everything. The symbol of the stairs (in the old Russian version - “ladders”) is traditional for the Christian picture of the world, starting from the ladder of Jacob (Genesis 28:12) and up to the “Paradise ladder” of John, the Abbot of Sinai, nicknamed the “Ladder”. The symbol of the mirror is also well known - we meet it, for example, in the Apostle Paul, who speaks of knowledge: "Now we see, as if through a dim glass, guessingly" (1 Cor 13:12), which in the Greek text is expressed: "as by a mirror in divination." So, our knowledge resembles a not very clear mirror, dimly reflecting true values which we can only guess. And God's world is a whole system of images-mirrors built in the form of a ladder, each step of which reflects God in its measure. At the basis of everything is God Himself, the One, Beginningless, Incomprehensible, having no image, giving life to everything. He is everything and everything is in Him, and there is no one who could look at God from the outside. The incomprehensibility of God became the basis for the commandment forbidding depictions of Him (Ex 20:4). The transcendence of God, revealed to man in the Old Testament, exceeds human perception, so the Bible says: "Man cannot see God and remain alive" (Ex 33:20). Even Moses, the greatest of the prophets, who communicated directly with Jehovah, who heard His voice more than once, when he asked to show him the face of God, received the following answer: “You will see Me from behind, but My face will not be seen” (Ex 33:23).

The Evangelist John also testifies: “No one has ever seen God” (John 1:18a), but further adds: “He has manifested the Only Begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father” (John 1:186). Here is the center of the New Testament revelation: God comes into the world, descends from heaven to earth, binds them. Through Jesus Christ we have direct access to God, in Him we can see the face of God that we could not see before. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth, and we seen his glory" (John 1:14). Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, the incarnate Word is the only and true Image of the Father - God the Invisible. In a certain sense, Jesus Christ is the first and only icon. The apostle Paul writes: “He is the image (Greek εικόν) of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature” (Col 1:15), and “being in the form of God, He took the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:6–7). The appearance of God into the world occurs through His belittling, kenosis (Greek κένωσις). And at each stage of being there is its own disclosure of the image that reflects the Proto-Image, thanks to this, the internal structure of the world is built. Christ as the image of God is the second rung of the ladder we have drawn.

The next step is the human. God created man in his own image and likeness (Genesis 1:26–27), thereby distinguishing him from all creation. And in this sense, man is also an icon of God. Rather, it is conceived as such and is intended to be so. The Savior told the disciples: “Be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Mt 5:48). This is true human dignity, revealed to people by Christ. But as a result of the fall, having fallen away from the source of Being, a person in his natural state of nature does not reflect God, like a pure mirror, he is not in a perfect image, he is really like a clouded glass through which light does not pass. To achieve perfection, a person needs to make efforts (Matthew 11:12), overcome the resistance of his fallen nature, strive upward. The Word of God reminds man of his original calling. This is also evidenced by the Image revealed in the icon. In everyday life, it is often difficult to find confirmation of this. Looking around and impartially looking at himself, a person may not immediately see the image of God in his neighbors and in himself. However, it is in every person. The image of God may not be manifested, hidden, clouded, even distorted, but it exists in our very depths as a guarantee of our being.

Process spiritual development this is precisely to discover the image of God in oneself, to reveal, purify, restore it. In many ways, this is reminiscent of the restoration of an icon, when a blackened, sooty board is washed, cleared, removing layer after layer of the old darkened drying oil, numerous later layers and inscriptions, until the Face eventually emerges, the Light shines, the Image appears. The Apostle Paul (long before the canons of icon painting were formed) writes to his disciples: “My children! for whom I am again in the throes of birth, until Christ is formed in you!” (Gal 4:19). This is how Christian asceticism understands the highest art. The Gospel teaches that the goal of a person is not just self-improvement, as the development of his natural abilities and natural qualities, but the revelation in himself of the true Image of God, the achievement of God's likeness, what the holy fathers called "deification" (Greek θεόσις). This process is difficult; according to Paul, these are birth pangs, because the image and likeness in us are separated: God planned to create a person in the image and likeness (Genesis 1:26), but created only in the image (Genesis 1:27), so the image was given to us, and similarity is given. Everyone receives an image at birth, and we achieve similarities throughout life. That is why, in the Russian tradition, saints are called “reverend”, that is, those who have attained the likeness of God. This title is awarded to the greatest holy ascetics, such as Sergius of Radonezh or Seraphim of Sarov. And at the same time, this is the goal that every Christian faces. It is no coincidence that St. Basil the Great said that "Christianity is likening God to the extent that this is possible for human nature."

The process of "deification", the spiritual transformation of a person is Christocentric, as it is based on likeness to Christ. Even following the example of any saint is not limited to him, but leads first of all to Christ. “Imitate me, as I am Christ,” says the apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 4:16). So any icon is initially Christocentric, no matter who is depicted on it: whether the Savior himself, who revealed the Father to us (John 14:9), whether the Mother of God, through whom Christ was incarnated, or one of the saints in whom Christ shone. Plot icons are also Christocentric, especially holiday icons, because they depict the event in which Christ was glorified. Precisely because we have been given the only true Image and role model - Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Incarnate Word. This image should be glorified and shine forth in every person: “But we, with unveiled face, as in a mirror, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:18).

A person lives on the verge of two worlds: above a person is the divine world, below is the natural world, it will depend on where the mirror of his soul is turned, up or down, whose image he will perceive. After the fall, human attention became focused on the creature, and the worship of the Creator faded into the background. The misfortune of the pagan world and the fault of the modern culture is not that people do not know God, but that “having known God, they did not glorify Him as God, and did not give thanks, but were futile in their speculations ... and they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image like corruptible man, and birds, and quadrupeds, and reptiles… exchanged the truth for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature instead of the Creator” (1 Cor 1:21-25).

Man is a created being and lives inside the created world. And this world also reflects, to its extent, the image of God, like any creation that bears the stamp of its creator. This is another rung of the ladder we are exploring. However, the image of God is visible in this world only if the correct hierarchy of values ​​is observed, just as through binoculars, when the correct focus is placed, objects remote from the eyes are visible. And the created world bears witness to God. It is no coincidence that the holy fathers said that God gave man two books for knowledge - the Book of Scripture and the Book of Creation, the first reveals to us the mercy of the Savior, the second - the wisdom of the Creator. We read the book of creation by "considering the creations" (Rom. 1:20). This so-called level of natural revelation, and it was available to the world before Christ. But in creation the image of God is even more diminished than in man, since sin has entered the world and the world lies in evil. Each lower step reflects not only the Archetype, but also the previous one; against this background, the role of man is very clearly visible, since “the creation did not submit voluntarily” and “waits for the salvation of the sons of God” (Rom. 8:19–20). A person who has corrected the image of God in himself distorts this image in all creation. All the ecological problems of the modern world stem from this. Their decision is closely connected with the inner transformation of the person himself. The revelation of the new heaven and new earth reveals the mystery of the future creation, for "the image of this world is passing away" (1 Cor 7:31). But one day the Image of the Creator will shine through the creation in all its beauty and light. The Russian poet F.I. Tyutchev saw this prospect as follows:

When the last hour of nature strikes,
The composition of the earthly parts will collapse,
Everything visible around will be covered by water
And God's Face will be displayed in them.

And finally, the last, fifth step of the ladder we have drawn is the icon itself, and more broadly, the creation of human hands, all human creativity. Ideally, all human creativity is iconological, should become a mirror of the glory of God. Today, only an icon can claim this. But it also becomes such only when it is included in the system of mirror-images described by us, reflecting the Proto-Image; in this case, the icon ceases to be just a board with plots written on it, but becomes a window to the heavenly world. Outside this staircase, the icon is incomprehensible, it does not fulfill its purpose, even if it was painted in compliance with all the canons. Misunderstanding of this spiritual hierarchy leads to distortions in icon veneration: some deviate into magic, crude idolatry, others fall into art veneration, sophisticated aestheticism, others perceive the icon simply as a tribute to tradition, without delving into its content. The purpose of the icon is to direct our attention to the Archetype - through the only Image of the Incarnate Son of God - to the Invisible God. On this path, we discover the Image of God in ourselves, we begin to see God’s plan in the world and in our lives, and then the Lord is glorified in our deeds and in everyday reality the features of the Kingdom of God appear, which, according to the Savior’s word, is among us.

But understanding the meaning of an icon and honoring an icon-painting image are not the same thing. This is where many see a stumbling block. But, as the icon-worshipping fathers emphasized, when we venerate an icon, we do not pay honor to the board and paints, but to the One Who is painted with paints on this board. The veneration of the icon is the worship of the Archetype, the prayer before the icon is the standing before the Incomprehensible and Living God. The icon is a sign of His presence. It does not in any way replace the Living God and does not claim to fully reveal the secret of the future age. The aesthetics of the icon is only a small approximation to the incorruptible beauty of the Kingdom of God, like a barely visible contour, not quite clear shadows and signs; contemplating the icon is like a person who is gradually regaining his sight, who is healed by Christ (Mk 8:24). That's why o. Pavel Florensky argued that an icon is always either larger or smaller than a work of art. Here, the inner spiritual experience of the future is of decisive importance. If a person is ready to hear, God speaks; if a person is ready to see, the Image will be revealed to him.

A person paints an icon, seeing the true Image of God, but an icon also creates a person, reminding him of the image of God hidden in him. A person tries to peer into the Face of God through the icon, but God also looks at us through the icon image. The icon teaches us to stand before God face to face. “For we know in part and we prophesy in part. When the perfect comes, then that which is in part will cease.<…>Now we see, as it were, through a dull glass, guessingly, but at the same time face to face; Now I know in part, but then I will know just as I am known” (1 Cor 13:9,10,12). The conditional language of the icon is a reflection of the incompleteness of our knowledge of the divine reality. And at the same time, it is a sign indicating the existence of absolute beauty, which is hidden in God. Dostoevsky's famous saying "Beauty will save the world" is not just a good metaphor, but the precise and deep intuition of a Christian brought up on a thousand-year-old Orthodox tradition of searching for this beauty. God is true Beauty, and therefore salvation cannot be ugly, shapeless. The biblical image of the suffering Messiah, in whom there is "neither form nor majesty" (Isaiah 53:2), only emphasizes what has been said above, revealing the point at which the belittling of God, and at the same time the belittling of His Image and His Beauty, comes to limit. But from the same point, the upward ascent begins, the restoration of a new Image and a new Beauty in all creation. After all, the death and resurrection of Christ in the Orthodox tradition is conceived as a descent into hell, which is the destruction of hell (as the limit of all ugliness) and the leading of all the faithful into resurrection and eternal life, into the Kingdom of God, from darkness into true and eternal light. “God is Light and there is no darkness in Him” (1 Jn 1:5) – this is the image of true divine and saving beauty.

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