Icon and icon veneration

The domestic edition of the book (M., Krutitskoye Patriarchal Compound; “Russian Way.” 1996) reproduces the Parisian edition without any changes. In a brief preface to this publication, the famous religious publicist and writer N. A. Struve writes: an essay by Fr. Sergius on the icon “has the peculiarity that it represents the first attempt, after almost twelve centuries (!) since the VII Ecumenical Council, which approved the veneration of icons, to dogmatically comprehend how an icon is possible and what it depicts. ...The icon as a work of religious art was gradually revealed again at the beginning of the 20th century. Before the revolution itself, its deep speculative meaning was revealed by Evgeny Trubetskoy. In lectures from the early 20s, published only half a century later, Fr. Pavel Florensky gave a brilliant analysis of the special language of the icon, which deliberately deforms reality to convey the highest meaning. But oh. Sergius Bulgakov was the first (and still remains almost the only one) who approached the icon from a theological point of view, trying to establish and understand its fundamental antinomy - as an image of the indescribable. Iconoclasts argued that, while depicting the flesh of Jesus Christ, the icon does not convey His Divinity, and therefore it is impious to worship it. As Fr. shows. Sergius and the fathers of the Ecumenical Council who answered them rightly defended the describability of Christ, but remained captive to the phraseology and concepts of their opponents, only intuitively approaching the essence of the question: “The icon of Christ depicts His human image, in which His Divinity is also imagined.” This irresistible dogmatic formulation of Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and establishes the veneration of icons as genuine worship of God. Art has always played a significant role in Bulgakov's spiritual destiny. As a child, he was captivated by the beauty of worship. His return to faith was facilitated by the sight of Raphael's Madonna. Picasso's paintings aroused metaphysical fear in him. During his emigration, theological and priestly period, with his thoughts about the icon as creativity, with his liturgical inspiration, he determined the revival of icon painting” (pp. 4–6). I thank E. M. Vereshchagin, P. D. Sakharov, D. E. Kharitonovich for their help in compiling the following brief commentary. (This commentary by I.B. Rodnyanskaya, marked *, is given by us for ease of reading at the end of each corresponding page under the main commentary by Father Sergius) I. The dogma of icon veneration in its history The veneration of icons is legalized in the Church by the definition adopted in Act VII of the VII Ecumenical Council. In this definition, confirming the teaching of the first six Ecumenical Councils, the fathers establish: “We inviolably preserve all church traditions, approved in writing or non-written. One of them commands to make picturesque icon images, since this, in accordance with the history of the gospel sermon, serves as confirmation that Christ truly, and not ghostly, became man, and serves for our benefit. On this basis <...> we determine that holy and honest icons should be offered (for veneration) in the same way as the image of an honest life-giving cross, whether they be made of paints or (mosaic) cells or some other substance, as long as they are made in a decent manner, and whether they will be in the holy churches of God, on sacred vessels, on walls and on tablets, or on houses and roads, and whether they will be icons of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, or our immaculate Lady, the Holy Mother of God, or honest angels and all saints and righteous men. – The more often with the help of icons they are the object of our contemplation, the more those who look at these icons are awakened to the memory of the very prototypes, acquire more love for them, and receive more incentives to give them kisses, veneration and worship, but not that true service, λατρεία, which, according to our faith, is befitting of the divine nature alone <...> the honor given the icon, refers to its prototype, and the one who worships the icon worships the hypostasis of the person depicted on it.” As can be seen from the text of this definition, it does not contain any doctrinal definition about icons or dogmatic justification for their veneration, but only legitimizes the use of St. icons and establishes the image of their veneration (worship and veneration, - τιμητική προσκύνησίς, but not service, - λατρεία). According to this lack of dogmatic definition in the oros, 1 - ὄροξ of the VII Ecumenical Council, it is sealed not by anathematisms, but only by church-disciplinary punishments (deposition for bishops or clergy and excommunication for laity or monks). True, further, at the same meeting, along with other general and personal anathemas, anathema is proclaimed for those who do not accept holy icons. However, this already belongs to the conciliar ritual, but was not introduced and could not even be introduced into the definition itself due to the lack of doctrinal content in it. Thus, it should first of all be established that from the VII Ecumenical Council we have only a canon on the veneration of icons, but not a dogma about what an icon actually is as a fact of dogmatic significance. This absence follows both from the general course of affairs at the council and from its character, which was more “economic” than dogmatic. In addition, he was extremely short and hasty (which follows from his well-known historical setting). 3 It lasted only about a month and had only 8 meetings (of which only two, 6 and 7, were devoted to the actual essence of the issue, and even then not in the form of discussions, but only the hearing of one report, probably by Patriarch Tarasius himself, in the form of criticism of the provisions of iconoclasm). Thus, we can say that, although the Church legalized the veneration of icons, it did not reveal a dogma about it, and the question of the dogmatic meaning of icon veneration still remains a subject of theological discussion. Of course, for this we already have a whole centuries-old history of dogmatic struggle for and against icon veneration, although it did not lead to indisputable dogmatic results. There are a number of patristic writings devoted to the same issue and requiring respectful and serious discussion. They must, of course, be taken into account in the dogmatic investigation of the issue. We must first of all turn to the history of icon veneration (of course, within limited limits, as far as this is required by our dogmatic task). In the history of icon veneration, we are faced, first of all, with the basic fact that the icon first appears in paganism. The entire pagan world is full of icons and icon veneration. This is sufficiently evidenced by the monumental church building and sculpture of the East and Egypt, and the irresistible beauty of the art of Hellas, as well as the prose-imitative art of Rome. All paganism was pictorial, and Israel at all times of its existence was surrounded by its religious art. However, it was essentially pagan, for it stemmed from the worship of false and imaginary gods. Therefore, their icons were idols, that is, they were icons of false gods and in this sense false icons, or they were simply fetishes, in which the very difference between the image and the depicted, the image and the prototype, the icon and the deity was lost, and therefore they rendered divine worship, λατρεία. Both the image of pagan icon veneration equally led away from serving the true God and was therefore a religious temptation, the more dangerous the more seductive its artistic faces were. Israel was surrounded by it, and it constantly succumbed to it, according to the testimony of the sacred books, historical and prophetic. In this sense, in its religious coefficient, pagan idolatry was an abomination before the Lord, spiritual fornication, with which physical fornication was often combined. The attitude of Judaism to idolatry, which was first transmitted to early Christianity, 4 could only be expressed in a struggle, irreconcilable and intense. However, this does not change the fact that it was in paganism that the problem of the icon as a sacred image was first raised, and, as far as was possible within its limits and given its religious limitations, resolved as far as possible. Paganism comes from the immediate conviction, as if self-evidence, that the Divine is depictable, that it can have images, if not directly adequate, then in any case containing a symbolic commemoration of it. Thus, paganism silently rejected the apophatic idea of ​​the indepicability of the Divine, as ugly and invisible, which has always been and remains one of the main foundations of iconoclasm. And from here comes a further conviction, which constituted the second basis for pagan iconography: it consists in the fact that the image characteristic of the Divine can be known to man and depicted by him, that is, that in a certain sense he is human. This does not necessarily mean that these pagan icons always represented an image of a person; on the contrary, we know that pagan temples were full of non-human images: nightmarish images of the animal and the natural world in general oppressed human consciousness. However, these were images made by man, passed through the prism of human consciousness and, in the end, still humanized. Therefore, of fundamental importance for pagan iconography are not these monstrous idols, in which the essence of the image is obscured, but human, anthropoid icons that reach their peak in Hellenic creativity. The Hellenic gods in their human form represent the pinnacle of the artistic theology and anthropology of paganism and at the same time are its true revelation. Just as Greek philosophy in its highest achievements revealed Christianity before Christ, and on this basis became the natural language of Christian revelation and theology, so the revelation of ancient art in iconography was in a certain, albeit limited, sense Christianity before Christ and is the indisputable prototype of the Christian icon. The pagan, and most of all the Hellenic, world revealed human godlikeness, capturing it in the ideal images of natural man as a perfect form of corporeality. And these phenomena of beauty were so irresistible in their persuasiveness that after them there was no need to again find or prove the possibility of an icon. On the contrary, this latter was perceived from paganism as something known and, as it were, taken for granted by the Christian church, which, of course, changed the content of icon images, but adopted the very principle of the icon. The bridge connecting pagan iconography with Christian art was art. Through the icon, art was elevated to a religious height similar to that to which ancient philosophy was elevated through Christian theology. Pagan iconography has clearly demonstrated that art has its own visions and visions, which contain religious revelation. Religious art supplemented theology with the pagan world, and therefore iconographic theology in its inception already belonged to paganism. At the same time, ideal images of pure humanity, which were also needed for the Christian icon, were already found in pagan art. This does not mean, of course, that these images were simply repeated by Christian iconography - the latter put its own stamp on them. However, this does not detract from the fact that pagan iconography is, so to speak, a natural Old Testament for Christian iconography, just as pagan philosophy is the same Old Testament for Christian theology. Of course, these genuine revelations of pagan religious art 5 were complicated and clouded to the last degree by paganism, that is, by all its religious ambiguity, and even outright demonism. Pagan art needed exorcism, which was produced by Christianity. Directly from this exorcism, art as such lost, but it ceased to be possessed. For Christian theology, pagan iconography already raised a general question about the nature of the icon of the Divine and its possibility, as well as about the ways of art as a special image of the knowledge of God. Nevertheless, paganism was so dangerous for the chosen people precisely because of its religious seductiveness that the attitude towards all pagan art in the Old Testament was determined by religious and pedagogical motives. The latter simply remained under a religious ban for Israel, and any passion for idolatry was already a religious fall, which was committed by kings who began to serve pagan gods. The psychological image of a pious Jew in this regard is shown to us by St. Paul, who, being in Athens, face to face with the highest achievements of Hellenic art, only “was troubled in spirit at the sight of this city full of idols” (Acts 17:16). He saw nothing here except idols. The making of idols or “any likeness” was prohibited by the second commandment, in connection with the first, in the general law of true worship of God, and at the same time all fine religious art was prohibited, perhaps except for architecture and church decoration (a deliberate gift of the Holy Spirit to Beseliel 6 and his assistants: Ex. 31, 1-10). The denunciations of the prophetic books, a kind of satire in the description of idolatry in the non-canonical book of the Wisdom of Solomon (chapter 13) 7 only confirm this general observation. The expediency of such an attitude is vitally confirmed by the fact that the Jews, at every opportunity, actually fell into crude religious fetishism, into real idolatry, and the objects of idolatry did not rise above the level of crude emblematic images: such is the copper serpent, allowed by Moses as a memory of a miracle, but turned into a fetish and therefore destroyed by the pious king Hezekiah (2 Kings. 4, 18), golden calf, teraphim. 8 Of the general prohibition that weighed on religious art, there was only one exception. Namely, God himself commanded (Ex. 25, 18–22) to make two cherubim with outstretched wings from gold over the lid of the ark of the covenant in the tabernacle, and this was also done by Solomon in the church along with various images on the doors and walls (1 Kings 6, 23–32). This was, of course, an incomprehensible exception from the point of view of the Old Testament, which in the eyes of iconoclasts, ancient and modern, did not abolish the general rule. However, in essence, it abolished it, thereby giving it only conditional pedagogical significance. This image of two cherubs, to which apologists of icon veneration usually refer against the Judaizing iconoclasts who insist on the letter of the second commandment, of course, is already a fundamental recognition of both the rights and possibilities of religious art and the depictability of the spiritual world through the latter’s means and in its images, although it is pedagogically limited in quantity. In addition, it must be admitted that the admission of icons of angels did not yet mean icon veneration here. Why and in what sense does the Old Testament allow for the depiction of angels? We usually do not find an answer to this question in the theological teaching about icons, both among their defenders and their opponents. The Christian Church inherited from Judaism, as something self-evident and having the force of law, the prohibition of religious images, and in this sense it was at first defined rather iconoclastically. There were also more than sufficient religious, moral or pedagogical grounds for this: Christian communities were small islands in a sea of ​​paganism, which enveloped them with its influence from without and from within. For Christianity, the fatal demonic possession of paganism, with its idolatry, was clear. And it is in these religious positions that, first of all, Christianity meets paganism, as its primordial enemy, with which it can have nothing in common. This determines the character of early Christian apologetics, with its intransigence towards paganism, and in particular towards idolatry. It is interesting that this same attitude is completely reproduced by apologists of icon veneration in the era of iconoclastic disputes (St. Patriarch Nicephorus, 9 St. Theodore the Studite). 10 For us now, when the fight against idolatry has only historical significance, the difference between idols and icons is much less visible than the commonality between them, which can be taken out of the bracket; namely, the recognition of the depictability of the divine world in the images of the human world (with the expansion of this area even towards the animal world and the entire creation in general) by means of art, as well as the venerability of these images. Paganism left to Christianity the already identified idea of ​​the icon, as well as the basic principles of icon painting (plane image with reverse perspective, 11 image techniques, ornament, etc.). In this light, it becomes natural and understandable that the icon appears in the Christian Church and takes its place, despite the prohibition of the second commandment and, as if in spite of this prohibition, accepted by Christianity, silently and inconspicuously, as something taken for granted. One can, of course, see in this the direct influence of paganism or the “acute Hellenization” of Christianity, just as it is seen in the development of Christian dogma (Harnack). 12 In fact, Christianity from the Greco-Roman culture chooses and perceives its own, that which belongs to it, as “Christianity before Christ” in the pagan world, just as a magnet attracts iron filings to itself. Here we should speak not about the influence on Christianity, but about the influence in Christianity of that which was natural to flow into it, through the power of internal affinity. Thus, the icon has powerfully taken its place in church life and has already become a fact of church tradition before dogmatic reflection on this fact arises along with doubts regarding the depictability of the Divine and the admissibility of icon veneration: the Old Testament prohibition is first abolished by the force of a fact, and only later this fact is dogmatically noticed and begins to cause bewilderment. The history of icon veneration provides expressive illustrations of this. The earliest images (from the Roman catacombs) have a timid and primitive allegorical-symbolic character (anchor, lamb, dove, fish, vine), they are also joined by some typical images on the themes of the Old and New Testaments (Noah’s Ark, Daniel, Jonah, Moses bringing water out of the rock, the good Shepherd carrying a sheep, the wise and the holy fools virgins and so on), as well as the image of Christ, the Mother of God, and saints. Gradually, icon painting and icon veneration had already become so widespread by the 4th century that the fathers of the VII Ecumenical Council (and even earlier, St. John of Damascus) could already cite a long series of testimonies from various Church Fathers (St. Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria, Nile Sinaite, etc.), which contain part of the instructions about the presence of the use of icons is partly a fundamental recognition of this custom. Apparently the wave of veneration of icons coincided with the artistic upsurge in the art of icon painting in the 5th–7th centuries. Historians also note a number of superstitions associated with icon veneration, and in some cases, especially in barbarian countries, its closeness to idolatry. Iconoclast emperors, in addition to direct heretical bitterness and political calculations, could be led in the fight against icon veneration by, so to speak, “enlightened absolutism,” a kind of écrasez l'infâme of the 13th era, and first of all it was directed against the extremely numerous and generally uncultured monasticism, which bore the defense of icon veneration. 14 However, no matter how great the influence of the imperial power in the persecution of icons (just as surely as it cannot be diminished in the restoration of icon veneration), this does not weaken the basic fact that in the Church itself there was a certain doubt, bewilderment and, in any case, uncertainty regarding the legality of icon veneration, and on this basis a fierce dogmatic struggle arose, the outcome of which was far from self-evident. Iconoclasts could cite in support of their view some evidence from church tradition not in favor of icon veneration and even, together with the unrepealed ban of the Old Testament, the ban on icons in churches at the Council of Elvira at the beginning of the 4th century. 15 The most important thing, of course, was that the iconoclasts put forward a number of serious dogmatic objections to icon veneration, and created an entire iconoclastic theology. It, of course, has not survived to us in its entirety, but even as far as can be judged only from the passages cited for the purpose of refutation, it required great efforts of theological thought for its refutation. The very fact of the iconoclastic council of 754 (the acts of which also have not survived), with the participation of 348 bishops who unanimously accepted its definition 16 (oros), speaks of the degree of influence, prevalence and influence of these ideas. To combat iconoclasm, the efforts of such theological writers as St. John of Damascus, St. Patriarch Herman, even before the VII Ecumenical Council, but this council did not completely overthrow the heresy. It again raised its head not only politically (under Leo the Armenian, under which there was a second iconoclastic council in 815, which again confirmed the Oros of 754), but also theologically. The dogmatic defense of icon veneration turned out to be necessary even after the VII Council, and was carried out with the same energy in the works of St. Theodore the Studite, St. Patriarch Nicephorus, and, moreover, one can have different opinions about the degree of success with which they waged this struggle. The phenomenon of iconoclasm in general turns out to be historically very complex and not fully explained. But whatever the reasons behind it (for example, the indirect influence of Islam and imperial self-will), it cannot be denied that there is sincere theological thought on both sides, as well as legitimate theological bewilderment. Therefore, in the iconoclastic dispute one must see the expression of a necessary moment in the historical dialectic of the dogma of icon veneration. Equally, in iconoclasm there was also a rightful desire to counteract the barbarism and superstitions that arose here and there in connection with incorrect icon veneration, although it itself fell into the fraternal extreme of Doukhoborism (for examples, see Hefélé - Leclercq, Histoire de Conciles, 17 vol. IV). But, leaving this task to historians, 18 let us ask ourselves what was the dogmatic essence of the question of icon veneration, where is the main line that runs through all the particulars of the dispute? If you look through the eyes of Orthodox apologists for icon veneration (in particular, the Holy Patriarchs Herman and Nicephorus, St. Theodore the Studite), then first of all one might think that iconoclasm was an essentially Christological heresy, namely, associated with the belittlement or denial of the truth of the Incarnation. The main argument of these apologists, constantly perpetuated by them, is that if Christ truly became man, then, therefore, He can be depicted, and His image is venerable; whoever rejects the depiction of Christ, and at the same time the veneration of His icon, rejects the incarnation of God, falling into docetism 19 or other Christological heresies. However, if we turn from this stylized image to historical reality, although not sufficiently known to us due to the fragmentary nature of the material, we will see something completely different and find among the opponents of iconoclasm an involuntary or tendentious (for the sake of simplifying the issue) deviation away from its very edge, a kind of ignoratio elenchi. 20 And first of all, external history testifies that historically iconoclasm cannot be confined to any specific heretical trend in Christology 21 and is not a Christological heresy at all. On the contrary, it dogmatically justifies itself with the motives of the struggle specifically for Orthodox Christology, and it is impossible to indicate even in the polemical considerations of iconoclasm any direct evidence where it would actually be brought into direct connection with heretical Christology. Thus, the dogmatic opposition between icon veneration and iconoclasm occurs within the framework of Orthodox Christology and on its basis, although it is associated with its different understanding. The question that faced Orthodox dogmatic thought was this: how is the imageability of Christ possible and is it possible at all? And further: within what limits is it permissible to venerate the icon of Christ? (In this regard, the question of the veneration of other icons was also resolved, although it was little discussed on its own.) The answer to these questions was not at all one of the self-evident things that actual icon veneration had become. This was a completely new question in dogmatics, requiring independent discussion, which began in the dogmatic reflection of iconoclasm. In general, we have the argumentation of iconoclasm systematized in the VI Act of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, where Bp. Gregory of Neocaesarea defines the iconoclastic false council of 754, as well as in the polemical work of Patriarch Nicephorus against the treatise of King Constantine Copronymus, from which, however, only excerpts are given. Perplexity about the possibility of an icon of Christ was expressed already in the 4th century by Eusebius Pamphilus, bishop. Caesarea, in a letter to Empress Constantia. He, as is known, was an Arian, but, however, in this reasoning one cannot see the direct influence of Arianism. Here 22 we have the first and, of course, only preliminary disclosure of the dogmatic problem of the icon: will we depict Christ as God through the image of His flesh? Is the glorified body of Christ depictable at the Transfiguration and after the Resurrection and Ascension? The main idea of ​​the iconoclasts is precisely this: with the Orthodox understanding of the Incarnation, Christ as the God-man is indescribable: His deity is indescribable (1 John 4:12), and humanity, even if it is describable, then it alone does not provide an image of Christ. If we take the image of Christ’s human flesh as the image of Christ himself, then we assume one of two things: either that the flesh can be separated from the Divinity and depicted in such separation, or that the Divinity is inseparably fused with the flesh, so that God is also depicted in the depiction of the flesh. But both assumptions include the main Christological heresies - in the first case of Nestorianism, dividing natures, in the second - Monophysitism (the teaching of Dioscorus, Eutyches and Severus, this also includes Arius in a certain sense), merging natures. “So the painter made an icon and called it Christ, and the name Christ is the name of God and man. Consequently, the icon is an icon of both God and man, and, consequently, he merged an unfused union and fell into the unholy delusion of fusion. Those who worship icons also tend to blasphemy” (D. 226). “Icon worshipers separate the flesh from the deity and present it as having its own hypostasis, assigning to the flesh a special face, which, according to them, they depict on icons. By this they show the addition of a fourth person to the Trinity, transform it into a quaternary, and, moreover, that which is deified through perception, they depict as undeified. So, thinking of painting an icon of Christ, they are forced either to consider the divine describable and merged with the flesh, or to consider the flesh of Christ undeified and separate (from the Divinity) and recognize the flesh as a person having its own hypostasis, and in this case become, like the Nestorians, fighters against God” (D. 230). Thus, the iconoclasts act precisely as zealots of the purity of Christological dogma, which is allegedly violated by icon veneration. This dogmatic argument is their main one, in relation to which the biblical (in particular, the still weighty indication of the prohibition of images in the second commandment in the Old Testament, which is by no means weakened by the reference to the image of the cherubim in the tabernacle), historical, patristic, liturgical, etc. are of secondary and only auxiliary importance. The anathematism of the council of 754 is stated accordingly: first Here the Orthodox teaching about St. is protected. The Trinity and about the face of the Lord Jesus Christ and His two natures, and then His depiction in the icon is rejected. 23 The main argument of the iconoclasts, revealing the aporia of icon veneration, can be presented in the following diagram: A) Theological argument: The ugliness of the Divine, and therefore His indescribability and invisibility. “God is nowhere to be seen” (John 1:18). According to Divinity, Christ has no image, - big premise, - pr. major. B) Christological argument: Given the inseparability and unfusion of natures in Christ (Chalcedonian dogma) 24, the image of His flesh is not in any sense an image of His Divinity and therefore is not an icon of Christ, - small premise, - pr. minor. Conclusion: The Icon of Christ contains a three-fold theological-Trinitarian-Christological heresy (the depiction of the indepicable God, the quadrupling of the Holy Trinity and the denial of the Chalcedonian dogma). Iconoclasts put such a dogmatic fork, consisting of two arguments: (I) apophatic and (II) cataphatic, to the defenders of icon veneration, asserting the inevitability of violating the provisions of general theology and Christology along this path, revealing a dogmatic aporia. This aporia can be eliminated in two ways: either by its complete rejection by rejecting both premises, maior and minor, in the sense as they are set out by the iconoclasts, the consequence of which is a change in the very formulation of the question about icons, μετάβασίς είς άλλο γένος, 26 or by an attempt to evade from her, however, with the acceptance of a large package. Defenders of icon veneration have actually taken the second route: they want to overcome the aporia, so to speak, not from the outside, but from the inside, accepting the large premise as self-evident, but trying to evade the small one. Let's see to what extent they succeed. First of all, regarding the VII Ecumenical Council, where this task is carried out in objections to the theses of the iconoclasts, read by Deacon Epiphanius, but, apparently, belonging to the spiritual leader of the council, Patriarch Tarasius himself, 27 we have to say that he completely fails. 28 To the Christological argument against icon veneration, which consisted in reducing it to Monophysitism or Nestorianism (minor premise), the following answer is given. First, the assertion of the iconoclasts is recognized in full force that “Christ is indescribable and invisible according to Divinity, but describable according to humanity,” and “that in one and the same Christ both the indescribable and the described are contemplated.” At the same time, the general doubt that follows from this regarding the very possibility of the icon of Christ is not weakened in any way. Further, the main objection of the iconoclasts against the icon-worshippers, consisting in the fact that the latter reproduce either the diphysitism of 29 Nestorius, or the monophysitism of Eutyches, Severus, etc., is refuted as follows: “The heresies of Arius, Dioscorus and Eutyches, like Nestorius, are opposite, and they mutually defeat themselves, although they are equally wicked <...> If we admit that, according to them, the Church followed Nestorius, then they lie when they say that she is of the same mind as Eutyches and Dioscorus. If, on the contrary, we agree that she is of the same mind with Eutyches and Dioscorus, then in this case they will turn out to be liars, because Nestorius and Eutyches disagree with each other in impiety, and thus this syllogism of theirs turns out to be unfounded. (D. 223–24). And this is the only argument, essentially, of course, evasive and completely insufficient. Instead of a direct refutation, an indirect refutation is used here, moreover, entirely based on ignoratio elenchi, on evading the essence of the issue. Indeed, all these heresies, disagreeing with each other in one respect, can and do turn out to agree in another, and precisely in the violation of the true relationship of the divine and human natures in Christ, in reality inseparable and unmerged. In Nestorianism it is violated through separation, in Monophysitism through fusion. And this similarity in one is not at all destroyed by their difference in the other. Therefore, it is not surprising that even after the VII Ecumenical Council, the theological work of dogmatic defense of icon veneration, begun even earlier by St. John of Damascus, had to continue as before, because there the main dogmatic argument of the iconoclasts remained without refutation and was not even truly heard. What do we find in these subsequent defenders of icon veneration? - Rev. Theodore the Studite and St. Patriarch Nicephorus? On the part of the defenders of icon veneration from the beginning, along with auxiliary and secondary evidence and in any case not dogmatic (the meaning of icons is commemorative, edifying, educational, etc.), the truth of the Incarnation is put forward as the main dogmatic argument and through this a Christological formulation is given to the question. This was the case even before the Iconoclastic Council of 754, and before the VII Ecumenical Council. Already St. Patriarch Herman 30 puts the depiction of the Lord Jesus Christ on the icon in direct connection with the truth of His incarnation and appearance in the flesh. 31 The same argument is found in St. John of Damascus, 32, although for him it is complicated by a number of considerations of a different order (about which below), we find the same in Pope Gregory II (D. 18) and in George Kiprianin. 33 However, this Christological argument is presented here only in a general form, without regard to the specific formulation it received in the hands of the iconoclasts at the Council of 754. Therefore, more important for us are the judgments of later apologists, who had before them the iconoclasts’ objections to the imageability of Christ, based precisely on the dogma of the Incarnation and therefore having a Christological character. It became impossible to be satisfied with accusing the iconoclasts of denying the incarnation or docetism (which, by the way, can be completely compatible with the recognition of the imageability of the flesh of Christ, even if illusory) after the iconoclasts expressed a decisive confession of the Orthodox dogma of the incarnation established at all Ecumenical Councils, and accused their opponents of betraying this dogma. Therefore, it was necessary to enter into an analysis of the Christological argument in favor of icon veneration in essence and thereby accomplish what, as we have seen, the fathers of the VII Ecumenical Council did not do (and, of course, they could not do due to the short duration of the council - about a month - and the haste of the work). After the canonical establishment of icon veneration, it was necessary to also give its theology. This befell the lot of the later fighters of Orthodoxy already in the 9th century, St. Patriarch Nicephorus and Rev. Theodora Studite. What do we find with them? Let's start with Rev. Theodore the Studite (759–826), great confessor of icon veneration. He wrote three refutations of the iconoclasts, seven chapters against them, a number of letters of dogmatic content, and so on. What answer do we find in him to the main argument of the iconoclasts, which consisted in pointing out the indepicability of the being of God and the inseparability of the depictable human being from it in Christ? To our surprise, we not only do not meet with Rev. Theodore refutes this argument, but we find full recognition of both its premises, both major and minor. First of all, he himself and with all his strength establishes the unknowability and ugliness of the Divine. Christ “according to His Divinity remains indescribable”; in Him “the union of the incompatible, the mixing of that which is not mixed, the indescribable with the describable, that which has no image with that which has an outward image, has been completed.” 34 Thus, Rev. Theodore fully accepts the first theological argument of the iconoclasts about the indescribability of God, by which he, together with them, means His ugliness, the absence of any form, and generally understands this in the purely apophatic sense of all nonsense, ά privatium. 35 However, while the iconoclasts, not without consistency, drew conclusions from this about the indescribability of Christ in the icon, St. Theodore draws the opposite conclusion, namely, that “Christ, who came in the flesh, is described by the flesh” (I. 132). “The property of the Divine is indescribability, incorporeality, absence of external appearance and form. The property of humanity is describability, tangibility, measurability of three kinds. If Christ consists of two natures, then, of course, He is both indescribable and describable” (I. 159). “If our Lord Jesus Christ undoubtedly appeared in human form and in our form, then he is rightly written and depicted on the icon like us, although in the Divine image He remains indescribable <...> And if He were not describable, He would cease to be a man” (II. 325). The Monk Theodore further develops his thought mainly towards the describability of the human nature of Christ. He points to the authenticity of His body, 36 from which follows His imageability. The latter is also associated with the individual character of the Lord’s body, which is not a body in general, but has its own specific features. 37 Thus, Rev. Theodore the Studite first of all himself sharpens the antinomy of describability and indescribability in Christ, testifying that “Christ remains indescribable even at the time when He is depicted on icons,” “Christ is indescribable, although He is God, made man,” but at the same time, “Christ is describable, although He is not a simple man.” 38 Descriptibility of Him as a man Rev. Theodore connects with His genuine, natural corporeality, 39 and concludes: “So, an artificial image of Christ is possible, with Whom it has a resemblance” (I. 177), and the possibility of an icon of Christ is thus derived from what he calls the describability of His human nature. If we compare this theology of St. Theodore the Studite with the already known to us teaching of opponents of icon veneration, we can easily verify that it does not advance the issue one step forward and remains, in essence, in the dogmatic position of the iconoclasts, although with less consistency than them, it draws a conclusion in favor of icon veneration. In fact, Rev. Theodore, even more forcefully than they, sharpens the basic antinomy of the icon, which constitutes an as yet unsurmounted aporia in the theology of icon veneration: Christ as God is indescribable and indescribable, although we can describe and depict according to His corporeality. From this antinomy, the iconoclasts concluded: therefore, an icon of Christ or, in general, any image of Him is impossible. By depicting what is depicted in Him, His human corporeality, and passing off this image as an icon of the integral Christ himself, who has a single hypostasis in two natures, we thereby separate these natures, and the image of only human nature, more precisely, the external image of His body, is passed off as the image of Christ, i.e. We are accused either of the nature-dividing diphysitism of Nestorius, or of the monophysitism of Arius, Eutyches, Severus. Rev. Theodore, without embarrassment, poses an antinomy in order to step over it, without eliminating or overcoming it. He is also helped in this by the ambiguity of the concept of the describability of the body of the Lord with which he operates. Namely, it is indisputable in the sense that the living body of the Lord in His earthly life could be visible, tangible and, therefore, could be described as such: this is how He was seen not only by believers, but also by unbelievers, not only by disciples and myrrh-bearers, but also by high priests and the soldiers who crucified Him. However, from this it seems impossible to conclude that the body of Christ is depicted on the icon - not in His physical corporeality (as in the anatomical atlas), but in His concrete spirituality, i.e., as the body of Christ himself. One can even say that this task would be more likely to be possible for those who do not believe in Him, for for them it would be no different from the general task of depicting a person in general. But such an image of just a person, or more precisely, the human body, would be completely inconsistent with the image of Christ as God and man - inseparable and unmerged. It was this discrepancy that the iconoclasts affirmed. Therefore, the concept of describability and indescribability in the sense of depictability and indepicability contains the property of the meanings of the same term being substituted for one another (quaternio terminorum). 40 The great fighter for icons and confessor of icon veneration, St. Theodore served him with his life, a feat of faith, but he did not overcome the theological arguments of the iconoclasts, and the question remained hanging in the air. From the provisions of Rev. Theodora does not at all follow imageability, but it follows precisely the inimaginability of Christ, who in his Divine hypostasis unites two natures, of which only one is describable, the other indescribable. The Venerable himself cannot help but see this aporia. Theodore, who tries to evade it by distinguishing the image from the prototype (more on that below). However, before any such distinction, the very imageability of Christ in the indivisible and unmerged unity of two natures, of which one is imageable and the other is not, must also be proven. The situation is no different with regard to the second fighter for the veneration of icons, who spoke out after the VII Ecumenical Council, namely St. Patriarch Nicephorus. In general, we do not find any new points in the development of the dispute. He also affirms the indescribability of the Divinity, 41 with the imaginability of human nature. He, like Studit, connects the depiction of Christ with the authenticity of His human flesh: “The icon of Christ is His likeness, similar to His body, gives us an image of His body, represents His appearance, shows through imitation much of how He acted, taught and suffered.” 42 “What say you, who proclaim the indescribability (of the body of the Lord) and admit the absurdities of docetism? Wrapped in swaddling clothes, reclining in a manger, staying in a cave, is it described or not? Is the one who is circumcised, baptized, crucified, and finally imprisoned in a tomb limited to this and embraced or not? The indescribable is not in space, and if it is not in space, then it is not a body; if not a body, then certainly not a person. So, Christ did not become man, did not assume a fallen nature, and was not subject to those sufferings that are usual for our body... I ask you: can we describe what is being described or not?” “If Christ was incarnate, then He dwells in space and is describable, for space serves as the limit of content.” 43 “We depict Him not because He can be described, but because His nature is subject to depiction.” 44 “Following Paul and confessing in Christ two images that show us two natures, we recognize a passionate person like ourselves, having an external appearance that is describable.” 45 “Why, then, cannot be thought of as applied to him (to the face of Christ) as the antithesis of the describable and the indescribable?” 46 “The Word not only cannot be described when the flesh is described, but it is not described even when present in the body, which is essentially and inseparably united with it.” 47 “Since the Word economically adopted the suffering of the body, and since this body is called the body of God the Word, then the icon and likeness of His received body relates to Him as His own.” 48 These and similar judgments are not so much developed as they are repeated in the treatise of Patriarch Nicephorus. In general, the question remains in the same position for him as for the Monk Theodore the Studite. From the works of St. John of Damascus (before the VII Ecumenical Council), along with other very valuable thoughts, we also find the same thought about the indepicability of God, and when explaining His image on icons, he falls into conscious anthropomorphism (or psychologism), i.e., deprives them of ontological significance: “Icons are the visible of the invisible and without an image, but physically depicted for the sake of weakness of understanding (but iconoclasts are precisely against this weaknesses and struggled!), for Divine Scripture ascribes images to God and angels, and the same Divine man (Dionysius) teaches about the reason for this. For in one thing only - in adaptation to us - who cannot rise to rational contemplation and need appropriate and understandable means, one can indicate the basis for the fact that images are rightly attributed to those who have no image, and forms to those who have no form.” 49 In the image “there are presented types, and forms, and outlines of the invisible and incorporeal, depicted bodily for the sake of the weakness of our understanding of both God and the angels, since we cannot contemplate the incorporeal without images corresponding to us. For in one thing only: in adaptation to us, who cannot directly rise to rational contemplations and need appropriate and understandable means, one can indicate the basis for the fact that images and forms are rightly attributed to those without form.” 50 There is no doubt that in this relativism, if only it is taken as the only basis for the veneration of icons, lies an argument rather against icon veneration than for it. The educational pathos of the iconoclasts lies precisely in the fight against such concessions in adapting to weakness and in defending spiritual religion. Damascus’s second argument also does not achieve its goal: “In ancient times, God, incorporeal and without form, was never depicted. Now that God has appeared in the flesh and with human beings, I depict the visible God. I do not worship matter, but I worship the Creator of matter, who became matter for my sake and was pleased to dwell in matter and through matter brought about my salvation. I do not honor him as God. No, for how can that which has existence from being be God? But the body of God is also God.” 51 Here St. John of Damascus makes the same assumption that the iconoclasts accused the icon-worshippers of: namely, having first reduced the body simply to matter (which, of course, is also not entirely true), he further accepts that “the body of God is God.” Such an, of course, imprecise and ambiguous expression can most naturally be interpreted as Eutychianism 52 - the doctrine of the absorption of the Divine and the dissolution of human nature in itself. However, this does not exhaust the teaching about icons by St. John of Damascus. It also has other, stronger sides, which we will touch on below. We come to the general conclusion that the defenders of icon veneration did not achieve a theological victory over their opponents. This did not prevent it from triumphing, having been attested to its truth by the Seventh Ecumenical Council, which was recognized as such, albeit after a long struggle and hesitation, by the entire Church. But just as before the VII Council, icon veneration entered into the practice of the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, but without a dogmatic definition, so it remained in essence after the VII Council, and remains even to this day. The Byzantine East seemed to have exhausted its strength in the centuries-long struggle with the iconoclasts and never returned to this issue, either in church definitions or in theology. Now he appears before us again. It is remarkable that the same fate turned out to be this issue in the West. During the centuries-long period of brilliant flowering of scholastic theology, in which numerous issues of both paramount importance and absolutely insignificant importance were discussed, the question of icon veneration was not raised or discussed at all, and this indifference of Western theology to the question of the dogma of icon veneration is a striking fact, which, we think, has its deep roots in the peculiarities of Catholic theology. But even in Protestantism, which again raised the banner of iconoclasm (as well as in sectarianism), we do not find a dogmatic deepening of the issue. Protestantism, in its attitude towards icons, remains on the Old Testament basis of the prohibition of icons and, in general, rationalistic, abstract Doukhobia. He does not rise to the level of iconoclastic theology of the 7th century, seeing in icon veneration simply a kind of idolatry and superstition. And in the Catholic reaction, in the Counter-Reformation, we do not find an attempt to dogmatically advance the issue (just as in Catholic manuals of dogmatics 53 it is usually left without attention). The Council of Trent 54 confirmed the need for icon veneration, but in its dogmatic explanation it went not forward, but backward compared to the VII Ecumenical Council. We will touch on this definition 55 below. The time has long come to raise this issue again for dogmatic discussion. It should begin, of course, by checking its original formulation. Until now, the dogma of icon veneration has been considered entirely on the basis of Christology, as one of its conclusions. However, within the limits of Christology, as we have seen, it turned out to be essentially unsolvable, for it leads to hopeless aporias. It must be transferred to the soil of general theology and anthropology in their mutual relationship, and this connection is provided by sophiology (which includes, to a certain extent, Christology). It is therefore necessary, first of all, to show that in essence the dogma of icon veneration is a sophiological problem. We have seen that the main difficulty in the doctrine of the icon lies in the simultaneous recognition of the ugliness, and therefore the undepictability of the Divine, on the one hand, and His “imagination according to us” through the incarnation of man, and therefore the imaginability, on the other. It turns out to be a kind of antinomy. And this real or imaginary antinomy further leads to real or imaginary aporia in the doctrine of the icon, which remained unresolved and not overcome in the dogmatic disputes about the veneration of icons in the 8th–9th centuries. The iconoclasts, from the presence of this antinomy they pointed out, drew a negative conclusion - against the admissibility of the icon in general; The icon-worshipers, putting the primary emphasis on the incarnation, made an affirmative conclusion in favor of the depictability of the flesh of Christ, and through this the icon of Christ himself. If we accept both of these premises, leading to an antinomy, then it is not the icon-worshipers, but the iconoclasts who are right, for dogmatic logic is clearly on their side. Icon venerators could avoid obvious aporia only at the cost of obvious inconsistency and one-sidedness, and in fact, indeed, in their teaching, the balance regarding the inseparability and non-fusion of both natures in Christ, according to the Chalcedonian dogma, was upset in the direction of mono- or diphysitism. Depicting the human flesh of Christ as an icon of the Savior and at the same time recognizing the absolute ugliness and indepicability of the Divinity, they thereby took pars pro toto, 56 part for the whole. In other words, they accepted as an image the entire Christ, the God-man, uniting in Himself both divinity and humanity, an icon of His humanity alone, if only it could be separated from His divinity at all. And in this situation, the attack of the iconoclasts remained irresistible, as clearly evidenced by the unabated dogmatic turmoil for two centuries, both before and after the VII Ecumenical Council, both in the East and in the West. And it was not completely eliminated, but only calmed down, ceased to focus attention on itself, giving way from the 9th century to new dogmatic disputes on issues dividing the Eastern and Western churches (i.e., mainly about papal primacy 57 and about the filioque). 58 In addition, the political situation in the East was becoming more and more alarming; the kings were no longer interested in dogmatic disputes, and the West, in essence, was never interested in the dogma of icon veneration. Of course, in the Church, moved by the Holy Spirit, the truth won, namely, practically icon veneration triumphed. However, this does not at all mean that with the adoption of this practice by the church, the dogmatic teaching on icon veneration, which was developed in this era equally by both its supporters and opponents and which actually had an iconoclastic origin, was also accepted by the church. We repeat, the Church has a canon on the veneration of icons, but it does not know the generally accepted dogma of icon veneration, and has not defined the dogmatic teaching about it, which therefore could not be introduced into the oros of the VII Ecumenical Council. For the wisdom of the Church, moved by the Holy Spirit, is more perspicacious than its individual members, and in particular the theologians of icon veneration of the 8th–9th centuries, and even the fathers of the 7th Council themselves, generally manifested in the difference between theological opinions and church decrees. And we are not at all obliged to accept these opinions, for they, indeed, consistently developed, lead to iconoclasm, and, moreover, are untenable in themselves. This is what needs to be shown first of all in order to then turn to a positive solution to the issue. And above all, the original antinomy is incorrect, which is accepted without criticism by both sides. It consists in the opposition between the invisibility, and therefore the ugliness (formlessness), of God and the visibility and, therefore, the imagery of man, which is the antithesis of the definition of the relationship between God and man. It can be shown that such an antinomy does not exist at all, since both terms, here juxtaposed as an antinomy, are not actually on the same logical plane. They belong to different thought series, and therefore do not constitute an antinomy, and should not be compared at all. The first term of the imaginary antinomy belongs to general theology and is included in the theological antinomy; its second member belongs to cosmology and is included in the cosmological antinomy. To combine them in one antinomy means to add arshins to pounds, on the sole basis that both are measures, although in completely different ways and in different ways. This will become clear if we take a closer look at the theological antinomies of different orders that are mixed here. The first member of the antinomy of the icon, the statement about the invisibility and ugliness of God, belongs to the so-called apophatic (negative) theology, 59 developed by the Neoplatonizing Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, but characteristic of all patristic theology. His thought is simple and clear: the Divinity as the Absolute, that is, irrelatively, is alien to any correlation, distinction, definition. It is not who, nor what, nor what, it does not even exist, for being is already a relation. It remains beyond the distinction between subject and object, person and state. It cannot be expressed otherwise than by the negation of any definition, NOT, α privatium, as if by a silent mystical gesture. About this Divine Nothing it is said: “No one can see God anywhere” (John 1:18 - 1 John 4:12 - 1 Tim. 6:16). And, what is especially important here, Divine Nothing is not God either, for God is already a correlative concept that presupposes the world. Divine Nothing is, so to speak, absolute God in Himself and for Himself, Who is completely inaccessible to objectifying thinking, proceeding from the opposition of knower and known, subject and object, in general from some kind of conscious distinction or relationship. It is thought, so to speak, artificially, through a certain, in Plato’s expression, illegitimate judgment; it is posited by thought not through judgment, but through negation alone. This, mathematically speaking, imaginary idea is the generation in thought of metaphysical abstraction, and in life - of mystical dying through immersion in the mystical night. But this is by no means a religious connection, religio, 60 relationship. Every religion, including the revealed one - both Old and New Testament - knows God, who reveals himself to the world and relates to it. Divine Nothingness is the Absolute outside of creation and outside of religion. At the same time, the postulate of apophatic theology about the unthinkability and ineffability of the Divine forms, as it were, a necessary background for the idea of ​​God. It contains silent evidence that He is not only God, i.e. absolute - relative, but also Divinity in Himself, Absolute above all relationships. This expresses the unsearchable and inexhaustible nature of God’s being, the bottomless ocean, the impregnable light and the incomprehensible darkness of the Divine. However, with this absolute NOT of the Divine the absolute YES is antinomically combined, with the absolute irrelevance the relation in the Absolute itself is connected, i.e. absolute relation, distinction, definition. This expresses the life of the Absolute, which is not abstract, like our concepts, but lives concretely. God as an absolute relation in Himself is St. Trinity, trinitarian Person, divine trinity. Negative, or non-relative, Absoluteness is as unconditional and primordial in the Divine as the absolute relation. Such a relationship between NOT and YES is antinomic for the mind as the identity of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum). Here lies an impassable border for the mind, the fiery sword of the Cherumite blocks the path of thought, testifying that this place is holy: take the boots from your feet. 61 It would be wrong and impossible to rationalize and remove this ideal-real antinomy (for in God everything is ideal-real), resolving it in the process, in the formation that supposedly takes place in the Divine, developing in some ontological sequence. As a result of this rationalized antinomy, it is replaced by genesis, and the result is the history of God in Himself, which comes down to the origin of God from a certain pre-God or super-God, ontologically preceding God. The Divine Nothing, instead of the apophatic-negative, is replaced by the positive, understood as Something, or as some kind of divine μή ὄν, which can and must be determined, emerge from the meonal state. In NOT, YES arises, the Divine Nothing turns into the First God (Ur-Gottheit) or First Freedom, which through self-determination becomes God, into the Holy. Trinity of beings. Thus St. The Trinity is understood here as a personalistic moment in the impersonal First Godhead. Such reasoning has nothing to do with apophatic theology. Following Plotinus, German mysticism in the person of Eckhart and especially J. Boehme and his followers in this matter take this path of a kind of mystical rationalism that removes the antinomy. The same thing in the field of metaphysical rationalism represents the teaching of Hegel and, in a certain sense, Schopenhauer and E. F. Hartmann. But the absolute relation in God, i.e. St. The Trinity does not arise in the Divinity as His secondary self-determination, but it is as original and absolute in the Divinity as its absoluteness. We can say that Ur-Gottheit and Gott are equally primordial and eternal, mutually inclusive and identical. In the Divine there is no process, but there is life, that is, eternal actualization, eternal act, actus punis in the eternal mobility of the Absolute. This is the first theological antinomy in our thought about the Divinity: God in Himself as the Absolute and, therefore, irrelatively, and as the Absolute Relation - God, alien to any definition, and God, in the Holy. The Trinity exists. The most dogma of St. The Trinity stands at the forefront of the original theological antinomy. However, she is the first, but not the only one. Let's move on to the next, cosmological antinomy. God has an absolute relationship within the Absolute, that is, he is holy. Trinity. But it also has an absolute-relative relationship. The latter is the existence of God outside Himself, in His relation to the world, to creation. The self-existent God is both the Creator of the world and its Provider. This relationship in God for our thought also leads to antinomy. In fact, God in St. The Trinity has all the fullness of life in Himself; He is all-blessed and self-sufficient in the sense that this fullness cannot be replenished in anything and has nothing outside of itself. God does not need anything and cannot accept anything into Himself that He does not have, and in this sense there is no place in God for any process. But at the same time, the fullness of the absolute relationship includes God’s relationship not only to Himself, but also to something other than Himself, that is, to the world. But since there is not and cannot be anything that would be related to God and would not be God, then this relative existence of the world is also divine existence, which is only posited by God outside Himself, i.e. into nothingness, in absolute nothingness, ούκ ὄν, 62 called into existence by the power of God, i.e. in creation. (Creation is nothing, which, therefore, has been filled with Divine existence.) This establishes an absolute-relative relationship in God, namely, as the Creator to creation. Obviously, the Divine authenticity of this relationship in the Godhead requires that both members of this relationship have full reality and originality, that is, not only the Creator, but also the creation, not only God, but also the world. God is relative to the world and, therefore, to the extent that He presupposes the world, not for His completion, but as the object of His love (John 3:16): “God so loved the world,” 63 that “the lamb of God was destined before the foundation of the world” (1 Pet. 1:20), i.e. in eternity. Within the framework of the doctrine of God as an absolute relation, a new antinomy is thus outlined, no longer between the Absolute and the Absolute-Relative, but also within the Absolute-Relative, in two images of this relationship. Namely, on the one hand, God in Himself, in the Holy One. Being a Trinity, He is above any relationship outside Himself, He is filled with Himself and is closed in Himself. On the other hand, God proceeds from His fullness outside of Himself, posits Himself as the Creator who creates the world and thereby plunges Himself into the flow of becoming, temporary, emerging existence. Due to the authenticity of this world and the world process, God himself, as the Creator and Provider, is becoming together with the world (“the becoming Absolute” according to V. Solovyov). God, in the fullness of his trinity, does not need the world and has nothing to accept from its life, but at the same time, God, out of His love for the world, creates it, looking for other, created hypostases in it in the union of holy love. Trinity. Thus, it turns out that God does not need peace, but God seeks it by creating peace. The first position is logically incompatible with the second, resulting in an antinomy, which, however, ontologically means self-identity. It is important to keep in mind that the first antinomy cannot be considered as a basis for the second, and, conversely, the second is not a consequence of the first: no causal relationship can be established between them. The doctrine of God's creation of the world leads us to the doctrine of the revelation of God in the world. And on this further path we encounter another new antinomy, sophiological. This is what it consists of. There is an impassable gap between God as Creator and the world as creation, making their direct relationship impossible. The creature cannot bear its Creator, see His Face, endure His approach. “And you cannot see My Face, because man cannot see Me and live” (Ex. 33:20), God says to Moses. The creature remains hopelessly and completely closed in its creatureliness and separated from God by its insignificance, from which it was created by God, its existence is outside the Divine. And at the same time, it exists only by the power of God, and, therefore, in God: “In Him we live and move and are” (Acts 17:28). Outside of God, she would again return to her non-existence. “You take away your spirit, and they die and turn to dust. If you send forth Your spirit, they will be created” (Ps. 103:29–30). The creature thus resides in extra-divine divine existence (pan-en-theism), simultaneously different from God and not different from Him. That mutual entry of God and the world, which is revealed and realized in the deification of the world and the incarnation of God, represents with equal force both of these poles of the relations of creation: the world is a non-God existing in God, God is a non-world existing in the world. God posits the world outside of Himself, but the world has its existence in God. The metaphysical “place” of creation is, therefore, the actual mutuality and equally actual difference of God and the world, determined antinomically. The nature of antinomy is that it not only juxtaposes two positions that, upon abstract examination, seem to be opposite, but it establishes their actual identity. If we measure it by the yardstick of rational logic (which does not exhaust the logos of being and the world of reality, but only describes it in its own way), it leads to a contradiction, that is, to unthinkability, to a logical dead end, before which logic retreats in bewilderment and only states the hopelessness of this situation. Antinomy testifies to the equivalence, equivalence, and at the same time the inseparability, unity and identity of contradictory provisions. In this sense, the antinomy itself is a logical leap over the abyss, but thereby it becomes a kind of bridge over it. It expresses the connection between God and the world in their differences, but also in their unity, a certain divine μεταξὺ 64 (as Plato puts it): God in creation, who is the Divine Sophia. God addresses the world with His Wisdom: “Thou hast created all things by Wisdom” (Ps. 103:24). “The Lord had me (Wisdom) as the beginning of His ways, before His creatures from time immemorial” (Prov. Sol. 8:22). Sophia is Divine life in its eternal content as self-revelation and the glory of God, Deus revelatus 65 in relation to Deus absconditus. 66 It does not differ from the consubstantial nature of the Divine, it is this very nature, not only as an act, but also an eternal divine fact, not only power, but also its action, not only breadth, but also depth. In it, God knows and sees Himself, and loves Himself, loves not with the personal love of reciprocity, which is the eternal love of the three hypostases, but loves His own, His Divinity, 67 His Divine life, as worthy of love. Sophia, therefore, is the Divinity of God or the Divinity in God, and in this sense she is also the divine world before its creation. For creation, God is Sophia, for in her and through her He is revealed both as a personal Trinitarian God and as the Creator. The world was created by Sophia or in Sophia, for there is no other beginning of being and there cannot be. Consequently, the world is Sophia, but becoming, created, existing in time. The world created on the basis of Sophia is destined for the fact that in it “there will be all God in all,” i.e. that he will become completely sophic. However, this completeness refers only to completion. Thus, on the one hand, the world does not arise, for it is pre-eternally inscribed in Divine Wisdom, having in it a higher, heavenly reality, “prototypes”, προορισμοί (according to the teaching of the Fathers of the Church). And we can say that the sophic nature of the world is an axiom of cosmology. But, on the other hand, just as real is the asophy, and even the anti-sophy, of the world, immersed in itself, in its half-being. The world is sophisional and antisophic at the same time, and this is its antinomy, which expresses its life. There is nothing truly existing in the world that is not a sacred hieroglyph of the heavenly prototype. The Apostle Paul speaks about this: “His invisible things, his eternal power and Godhead, have been visible from the creation of the world by looking at the creation” (Rom. 1:20). But at the same time, the world has its own life, it exists in its own way, differently from its eternal prototypes in the Divine world, in the Divine Sophia. And this antinomy is resolved in movement and in the world process; we can say that it itself is a process (Hegel’s main intuition: der Wiederspruch ist Fortleitende). 68 The sophiological antinomy is consistently and completely revealed in the Christological one. The main Christological dogma of the IV Ecumenical Council about two natures and a single hypostasis in Christ (in relation to which the definition of the VI Ecumenical Council about two wills and energies 69 is only a partial expression of the same general thought) is expressed antinomically and represents the disclosure of sophiological antinomy as applied to Christology: in Christ two natures are united in one person inseparably and unmerged, inseparably and incongruous. This means: the Creator and the creation, eternal and temporary, the uncreated, divine Sophia, and the created Sophia are united in one being and in one life, moreover, in such a way that each retains its independence and all the metaphysical distance (unmerged) from one another and at the same time the mutual connection (inseparably) arising from ontological identity. Here we have a new coincidentia oppositorum, a combination of principles that mutually deny and exclude each other (for the Creator is not the creation and vice versa) and at the same time coexist in Christ. The Christological antinomy here expresses with utmost clarity the general sophiological antinomy - the unity and ontological identity of the different and opposite principles of the Divine and created: the Creator descending into creation - the Nativity of Christ, the Incarnation - and the creation ascending to the Creator - the Ascension of Christ with the flesh and the Seating at the right hand of the Father. The basic sophiological antinomy is further expressed in a whole series of particular antinomies in the general doctrine of God. Thus, eternity and time are antinomic: God is eternal and in this sense supertemporal, but for the world God is revealed in time, just as the coming of Christ in the world and the ascension from it took place in time. Further, superspatiality and all-spatiality or the omnipresence of God are antinomic - the freedom of the Creator from any limitation and externality of space, and the spatial conditionality of God’s action in the world, in particular, and in the appearance of Christ. 70 For clarity, here is a diagram of the above three antinomies in their sequence and relationship. I. Theological antinomy (God in Himself) THESIS: God is Absolute, therefore, pure NOT, Divine Nothing. (Apophatic theology). ANTITHESIS: God is an absolute self-relation in Himself, St. Trinity. (Cataphatic theology). II. Cosmological antinomy (God in Himself and in creation) THESIS: God in St. The Trinity has all completeness and bliss, is self-existent, unchangeable, eternal and therefore absolute. ANTITHESIS: God creates the world out of love for creation, with its temporary, relative, becoming existence, and becomes God for it, correlates with it. III. Sophiological antinomy (Wisdom of God in God and the world) THESIS: God, consubstantial in the Holy Trinity, reveals himself in His Wisdom, which is His Divine life and Divine peace in eternity, completeness and perfection. (Sophia the Uncreated - Divinity in God). ANTITHESIS: God creates the world with His Wisdom, and this Wisdom, which constitutes the Divine basis of the world, remains in temporal-spatial formation, immersed in non-existence. (Created Sophia - Divinity outside of God, in the world). A particular manifestation of the general sophiological antinomy is the antinomy of the icon, which combines the unimaginability and imageability of God and, in particular, the Lord Jesus Christ, the God-man. This antinomy lies at the very basis of the dogma of icon veneration and it must first of all be properly revealed and shown. The nature of the antinomy consists in the identity and inseparability of the opposite, coincidentia oppositorum, and the antinomy of the icon consists in the fact that God is indescribable, for He is inaccessible to the knowledge of creation, transcendental to it, and at the same time God is depictable, for He is revealed to the creature, His image is inscribed in it, and “His invisible” essence is “visible” in it, as the apostle speaks with God-inspired courage antinomian theology of St. Paul. This visibility of the invisible, the imaginability of the unimaginable, is the icon. Before we turn to further consideration of the doctrine of the icon, let us return once again to the initial position common to iconoclastic and iconoslavic theology, to the opposition of the indepicability and ugliness of God and the imageability and “describability” of man (more precisely, the human body), on the basis of which some argued the impossibility of the icon of Christ, others - just the opposite. Do we have here a real antinomy, in which both terms are not just adjacent, but also internally connected, inseparably and unmerged, like a coincidentia oppositonim? No, and that's the whole point. Here we have not an antinomy, but a simple contradiction, a combination of two mutually alien positions that do not belong to the same logical series. The first position relates to negative theology and states that God is unknowable and indescribable, in other words, there is Divine Nothing, absolute NOT apophatic. As we know, it belongs to the first theological antinomy. It can be compared and combined into an antinomy only with its own antithesis. But it cannot be compared with anything else except this antithesis, which is the doctrine of God as the Absolute Person, St. Trinity. Moreover, the apophatic NOT, the Divine Nothing, cannot be directly put into relationship with creation (in particular, with man), because from it there is no mental path to creation. We must, in a series of antinomies, go through the cosmological antinomy and reach the sophiological one, which actually expresses the relationship of the Creator to creation. Meanwhile, the second part of the antinomy of the icon in the theology of iconoclasm and iconoclasm, its antithesis, belongs to the cosmological antinomy: it means creation, human nature, in its relation to God, revealed in creation. Thus, in the argument, two positions are combined as the thesis and antithesis of one antinomy, while they belong to two different antinomies. They are therefore incomparable with each other and represent an external juxtaposition of two incoherent thoughts, from which no conclusion can be drawn. It doesn't work. In fact, if we dwell on the first thesis of negative theology, we will have to admit that human nature has nothing at all to do with the Divine, and, consequently, with His image, and the iconoclasts turn out to be right. God and man are not congruent, and there is not and cannot be an icon of the Divine in human form. The error here consists not only in the comparison of incomparable and completely different things, but also in the fact that the thesis of apophatic theology, which is purely negative and does not tolerate any comparison in its all-consuming negativity, is here applied as positive, that is, it is precisely compared with the second. The fallacy of accepting the apophatic NOT as a special kind of positive existential determination, precisely as the expression of a state that precedes any particular being, has already been shown by the example of the teachings of Boehme and Hegel. But here, in a different way, the same mistake is repeated. The pure NOT of apophatic theology, God in the apophatic definition, has no relation to the world, and therefore there is no connection between the two premises of iconoclastic theology, and from this no conclusion can be drawn - neither for nor against icon veneration. The apophatic is NOT a topic in which all images are extinguished, and therefore only the Old Testament prohibition remains in force: do not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness, and therefore no image. But don’t the representatives of iconoclasm also have the testimony of the Word of God on their side? Do they not refer (in a strange way, together with the icon-worshippers) to the text: “No one has seen God anywhere” (Ιο. 1.8)? And doesn’t it have a completely apophatic meaning, as they understand it? However, the whole point is that they cut off this text in half, as a result of which even the first part they cite loses its true character, namely antinomian. In fact, the text completely reads like this: “No one has seen God anywhere, the only begotten Son (variation: God), who is in the bosom of the Father, has revealed (έξηγήσατο).” Τ. That is, we do not have here the abstract apophatic into which this text turns, being only half quoted, but it expresses a third, sophiological antinomy, which consists of two contradictory, but mutually related positions: thesis: God (in Himself) is invisible, antithesis: God (in space) is revealed by the Son. We have a similar antinomy, although not so clearly expressed, in 1 John. 4, 12: “No one has ever seen God,” thesis. “If we love one another, God abides in us” is an antithesis. (The initial words of the message also belong here, to the antithesis: “We have heard, we have seen with our own eyes the Word of life 1, 1.). 71 Thus, in the Word of God we find not an apophatic teaching about the unknowability of the Divine, but an antinomian assertion at the same time of His invisibility and His visibility, namely, that “what is invisible to Him from the creation of the world through works is known” τὰ ἀόρατα ϰαθορᾰται. (Rom. 1:20). This sophiological antinomy, which goes further into the Christological (and even further into the pneumatological), is the exact formula for the revelation of God in the world. Revelation presupposes, on the one hand, what is revealed as a certain inexhaustible mystery that exceeds knowledge, and on the other hand, its continuous disclosure, the visibility of the invisible, the imaginability of which exceeds all images, the word of the ineffable. Moreover, both members of the antinomy are necessary for the idea of ​​revelation: if there is no mystery and depth, if the object of revelation is knowable and exhausted to the bottom by a one-sided act of cognition, then we have knowledge, not revelation. But, on the other hand, if the secret is not cognized, does not appear, is not revealed, it simply does not exist for a person, for the unknown of the secret in revelation is correlated with its knowledge. The transcendent becomes immanent without losing its transcendence, just as, conversely, the immanent penetrates the transcendent without overcoming it; this mutual input of them, this transcendental-immanent relationship is the antinomian formula of the sophic nature of the world. The One Divine Sophia, the pleroma of the world, is in the eternity of God and constitutes the entelechy, the purposeful cause of the world, shines in it and forms it. One Sophia in motionless eternity and in temporary formation: τὸ ὄντως ὄν καὶ τὸ γνγνόμενον, 72 given and given, beginning and end. Apophatic theology, accepted as the main premise of the doctrine of the icon, of course, eliminates its possibility. This conclusion was the strength of the iconoclasts, as well as the weakness of the icon-worshippers, who tried to evade its inevitability. In fact, if the Divinity is generally above any image and is absolutely indescribable, then it is obvious that any image of the human body, in particular, the flesh of Christ (even if it is indeed imageable), has no relation to the icon of Christ as the God-man, and He, as God, although made man, remains indepictable. An apophatic argument completely destroys a counter, positive argument. The image of the flesh in its light simply has no relation to the image of the Divine, as the iconoclasts pointed out: icon veneration would indeed be replaced here by sarcolatry (worship of the flesh), that is, in essence, idolatry, prohibited in the Old Testament. Now, after this critical excursion, which leads us to a completely negative conclusion regarding the iconoclastic and iconoslavic theology of the 8th–9th centuries, let us turn to consideration of the issue on its merits. What is an icon? Is an icon possible? And how is it possible? An icon is first and foremost an object of art. Therefore, the question of the icon is a particular part of the general problem of art as a special image of God and revelation. God is revealed not only through thought in divine wisdom and theology, but also through beauty in the vision of God, in art. Iconoclasts naturally turned out to be art fighters as well. At the Iconoclast Council of 754, not only iconoclasm was condemned, but also art (and this is, perhaps, an even more harmful side of this anti-Sophia doctrine than iconoclasm itself). Here it was proclaimed: “It is blasphemous against the most necessary dogma for our salvation, that is, the economy of Christ. the art of painting has no basis in it, and these six holy Ecumenical Councils assembled by God are undermined by it.” (D. 221). In response to this, it was stated at the VII Ecumenical Council in a message read by Deacon Epiphanius: “None of the right-minded will disgrace art if through it something useful is prepared for the needs of this life; you only need to keep in mind the purpose and image in which a work of art is made: if it is for piety, then it should be accepted, but if it is for something shameful, then it is hateful and should be rejected” (D. 223). Thus, the VII Ecumenical Council, while protecting icons, was forced to take art under protection. However, the fathers of the council limited themselves to this passing judgment, paying no more attention to religious justification and understanding of art. However, in order to understand the icon, which, after all, is, first of all, a work of fine art, it was precisely with this clarification that one had to begin. So, what is art, what does it actually do and what is it based on? By its most preliminary definition, fine art deals with the image (είκών) that it reproduces. Therefore, what is this image or “icon” in the most general sense? An image, obviously, is a correlative concept: it is correlated with what it is an image of, i.e., a prototype or original. And to understand the nature of the image follows, first of all, from its relationship to the prototype. Between the image and the prototype, there is simultaneously a certain identity and a significant difference, as a result of which similarity is obtained. The apples drawn by Apelles, which, due to their striking resemblance to the real ones, seemed to fly in to peck, obviously stupid birds, will never become real, being only an image of them. The line that distinguishes the image from the prototype is the reality of the latter and the ideality of the former. Things can have real and ideal existence in image and reality. And everything that exists has its own images, is endlessly reflected in them, as if photographed, and in these impressions can be read in the memory of the world (Akasha-Chronik 73 occultists). These images are not a repetition of existence, which remains one and only - reality does not repeat itself - but they are its ideal repetitions. His ideal mental image is reproduced, and there are no boundaries for this reproduction, so much so that, one might say, each thing speaks about itself to the whole world, imprints its image in countless repetitions of it throughout the entire universe. Everything in the world, that is, in real existence, has its own ideal mental image and is therefore naturally displayed (moreover, photography of any kind, which is probably still at the very beginning of the development of its capabilities, is only visual evidence of this universal display of things, their ideal self-repetition). Real being attaches a thing in space and time, but an ideal mental image is free from this attachment and is not limited by space and time. About him, as having an ideal being, we can say that he is not, but has significance (in German: gilt). Now we need to take the next step in revealing the image. Its ontological lack of independence consists not only in dependence on reality, or the original, but also in dependence on the subject, or the bearer of the image. The fact is that, although the “natural image” belongs to a thing as its word about itself, its image of itself, this word nevertheless sounds and this image is depicted in someone or for someone as its owner or subject. The image appears in its bearer, so to speak, in its addressee, for an addressless image does not exist. The subject reflects the image in itself; it is that living screen on which the rays sent by the thing fall. This is the inevitable subjectivity of the image. It does not mean that the image does not have an objective basis in the thing - its objectivity is not diminished by this - but that the image necessarily presupposes an ideation that is associated with the subject as its creative bearer. The image becomes visible to the seer in whom it lights up. But who is this seer? Such a subject of ideation in the world is man, the logos of the world, and in this sense we can say that all images of being that find themselves in man are thereby human, not in the sense of “weakness and adaptation,” i.e., bad anthropomorphism (like Damascene), but due to the dominant position of man in the world as the eye of the world, its ideal mirror, therefore in the anthropological sense. 74 One can also add that angels know the world in its ideal prototypes; this is determined by their general attitude to the world, 75 as well as to man, i.e., their angelic humanity. So, man is a being who sees images, ζώον είκονικόν, as well as creating them, ζώον ποίητίκόν. A person, first of all, takes into himself the images of being and, so to speak, reflects them as far as they themselves ask him to, but he also creatively acquires and reproduces them. Therefore, a person’s mirroring in relation to images cannot be understood in the sense of passive, indifferent reflection. Man actively participates in this iconization of being (just as he actively and creatively carries out knowledge of it, or logization). In himself and through himself he finds icons of things, for he himself is in this sense the all-icon of the world. Everything that has reality is depictable for a person, in a person and through a person, who not only finds in himself the mental images of everything that exists, but also has the ability to express these images, reproduce them, give their ideal existence a certain reality, in a word, create icons of the world. This creative ability not only to see, but also to reproduce ideal images of the world in “matter” (whatever it may be: paint, marble, copper, fabric, etc.) is fine art; human artistry is manifested in it. As a ζώον εικονικόν, man is an artistic being, and every icon of a thing, that is, a reproduction of its image, is a work of art that creates icons of the world and man, the world-man. That is why the debate about icon veneration essentially contains a recognition or rejection of art, and pronounces a verdict on art as well. The nature of the icon depends on the nature of the art. Every individual art as τέχνη (technique) has its own special laws, but we are talking here not about these features of individual arts, but about the basic attitude that determines its task, and about those ontological prerequisites that make art possible. The very first temptation in defining the tasks and nature of fine art is to understand its task naturalistically or photographically, in the sense of Apelles’ apples, which give the possible power of the illusion of reality (“as real,” “as alive”). But the naturalism of photography of any kind is not yet art. To the extent that it contains its elements, art here is expressed in the image of taking the thing depicted or photographed, that is, in a certain or deliberate stylization. Naked naturalism is already overcome in it. Or photography is like a protocol record, material so that art can use it, but it itself is not yet art. As for pure naturalism in art, it is first of all a utopia, because art can never (and, of course, should not) overcome the gap separating the ideal image of a thing from its reality. The 10 thalers in Kant's famous example will never become real, no matter how well they are drawn. At best, we have in naturalism either a fake, that is, deception, or self-deception, that is, a hallucination, accompanied by a loss of the sense of reality, a darkening of the basic intuition of being, as a result of which mental images are equated with reality. In addition, in naturalism the main task of art as the iconization of being is replaced, and thereby abolished: art does not seek to fill reality or create a new being next to it (this would be fruitless Luciferism), it wants to reveal its word, idea, mental image. Consequently, his task lies not in the realm of the real, but of the ideal, - not of being, but of meaning. Further, the task of art in the understanding of naturalism is contradictory and anti-artistic. In fact, naturalism means the fidelity of art to the subject, the accuracy of its reproduction in a given state. But such a single natural image of an object simply does not exist. It decomposes into an endless cinematic tape of images, and even that natural image that we see with the eye is always a synthesis that we make unconsciously, an image of images. The lighting changes, the shape in the perspective changes, depending on the capture, the color changes depending on the relationship with surrounding objects, on the inevitable limitations of visual means, in a word, everything flows in the visual image of things. Therefore, in the path of orthodox naturalism itself there appears inevitable artistic arbitrariness, stylization, taking, in a word, not the passive mirror reflection that naturalism boasts of, but creativity, albeit flawed, that is, art. It can be said that naturalistic fidelity to a thing would mean self-blinding of that eye, which should see the ideal mental image of a thing, and yet is limited only by the matter that expresses it; naturalism is slavery to the matter of a thing, which is a denial of creativity, and not art. 76 Of course, there may be a whole area of ​​fine art that obviously does not belong to art, but pursues certain practical goals. Their main task is possible fidelity to nature, naturalistic accuracy, with outright schematism: such, for example, are our anatomical, botanical, biological, zoological, etc. atlases, all sorts of drawings and projections. But this is not art. Art penetrates the skin of things in order to see behind it their mental images, the ideal form that shines through their entire existence. Their natural image simultaneously shows, reveals, and realizes this form, is a direct image of its real existence, but at the same time it obscures it, because the real image of things is not adequate to the ideal form, it is not their artistic image. Art seeks to reveal things in their true being, to give them a more artistic expression than they have in reality, in nature. Such a claim would be an absurd claim if art did not have a basis for itself in the special relationship of things inherent to it. It is in the icon of this thing that art, creating an ideal image, frees it from reality, as it were, isolates it from natural existence, and through this highlights the pure, unalloyed, and not reflected image of the thing. (Art in this sense is also an artistic interpretation of the world, similar to the scientific one, for similar operations are carried out in science - with the help of abstract concepts and artificial experiment, a phenomenon is isolated from the complexity of the world.) So, art is, first of all, a certain vision of the idea of ​​a thing in the thing itself, its special vision, which is realized in a work of art, or in an icon. Therefore, the basis of the icon is the ability of intelligent vision. What does it see and where does it look? It looks at the thing, but through the thing and behind the thing. It sees in a thing its super-thing or primary thing, its intelligent image, or idea. It perceives the cryptogram of existence, turning a thing into a certain hieroglyph of meaning, and thereby artistically generalizes it. For ideas are general and in this sense logical, but things, as realities, are individual and illogical. But, of course, in order to understand the task of art in this way, you need to believe it, that it knows this world of intelligent beauty, ideal prototypes of things. In relation to these prototypes, the thing itself is already only an icon or a cast, although from this cast and, so to speak, in connection with it, icons in the proper sense arise. This is precisely how we must understand what is often repeated by Sts. the fathers’ judgment that all prototypes have their own images, or the even more penetrating word of Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite: 77 “In truth, visible icons are the visible of the invisible.” “They (sacred symbols) are the work and image of divine traits and visible images of ineffable and sublime contemplations.” 78 According to the definition of St. John of Damascus, 79 “every image is a revelation and demonstration of what is hidden.” If these images and intelligent vision did not exist, art would be pointless and meaningless, or would be limited to copying by hand. Kant's well-known position that things without concepts are blind, concepts without things are empty can be modified here in the sense that things without prototypes are blind (naturalism), prototypes without things are empty or abstract (schematism). Every thing is concrete, there is a fusion of the prototype with “matter” - ΰλη. Being a natural icon of the prototype, it is at the same time the prototype of its artificial icon. The creative act of art in the iconization of a thing consists, firstly, in seeing its prototype through it, and, secondly, in expressing it through the means of art. In this way, art expresses the meaning of a thing, its name, its idea. An icon of a thing in this sense is a hieroglyph of its ideal prototype, not in the sense of a repetition or copy of a given thing, but as an imprint of a real prototype that has a real existence in the world in the thing depicted. This thing, although it is the original for its icon, is, strictly speaking, not its prototype itself. The artistic appearance of a thing (original) testifies to an ideal prototype that exists not in world reality, but above it. He speaks not only about the temporal-spatial, material existence of a thing, but also about the ideal. In a word, if we express this thought in the language of the history of philosophy, then we are, of course, talking about Platonic ideas as smart, heavenly prototypes of all creation, which are not abstract concepts abstracted from things (Aristotelian κοινά επί πολλών), but concrete, real thought images that have in themselves the energy of being and in it realize themselves as internal purposeful causes of things (their entelechy). At the same time, of course, the main aporia of the doctrine of ideas arises, revealed by Plato himself: do all things have their ideas, and does that which belongs to non-existence have them? What is the relationship between the ideas of the abstract and the concrete, of man and Socrates, etc.? It is not our path to answer this most difficult question of philosophy here. For our purpose, it is enough to confine ourselves to pointing out that everything depicted, i.e., every icon of all things, expresses the idea of ​​a thing, or at least its ideologicality, i.e., its relation (even if negative) to true being, for both evil and non-being are an ontological parasite of good, i.e., ideological being, belongs to it as a shadow (and even darkness itself exists only in relation to light). 80 In theological language, the philosophical doctrine of ideas as prototypes of the world means the sophia of creation, which in the Divine Sophia, the whole organism of ideas, has for itself a prototype and a foundation, an idea and an entelechy. In the development of this teaching we can also rely on St. John of Damascus, who, following Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, brings the doctrine of icons into connection with the doctrine of prototypes (although he himself does not give this topic the necessary development). These are his words: “There are in God images and plans of what will be accomplished by Him, i.e. His eternal and always unchanging advice These images and plans (παραδείγματα) are the essence of predestination (προορισμοί), says St. Dionysius, for in His advice is written all that was predetermined by Him and unchangeably existing before their existence. Likewise, if someone wants to build a house, he first draws it in his mind and draws up its appearance.” 81 This is a special type of image, its special concept. 82 Unfortunately, St. John of Damascus, although he expounds specifically in his Words about icons, however, he himself does not further apply it to the explanation of the iconization of the world. Thus, fine art, i.e., the iconization of things, is rooted not in their subjective anthropomorphic adaptation to the weakness of human perception (as the defenders of the icon themselves accepted), but in the objective anthropocosmic foundation of the world, in those Sophian prototypes, according to which the world created by Wisdom exists. This implies the fundamental insufficiency of the naturalistic understanding of art and its symbolic and emblematic character. It testifies to the images of existence, and this testimony is not a deception, even if it is elevating, 83 - but it is a story in the language of the world about the supermundane being, a testimony of the created sophia about the uncreated Sophia. This evidence cannot be exhausted or limited to this or that work of art, and there cannot even be only one completely adequate expression of the idea. In other words, artistic evidence of the idea of ​​a thing cannot be completely identified with this idea, but remains only an icon of it, and not the prototype itself. Therefore, the same artistic theme or mental image can be expressed in different ways. The whole world is a palette for the artist in his search and expression of forms. However, while distinguishing between things and prototypes, naturam rerum and ideas rerum, 84 one cannot separate them. Prototypes, having an eternal basis in the Wisdom of God, exist in things. From here follows the recognition of a certain identity between the prototype and world existence, the uncreated and created Sophia. These are the essence of two images of the existence of a single beginning, in eternity and in time, in significance (Geltung) and in becoming. The icon of the thing itself testifies to this identity. It reveals the eternal prototype in the material prototype (original) by giving this ideal prototype a kind of independent existence next to the thing. And yet the icon is inseparable from the prototype, which exists in reality, both ideal and empirical. Thus, in iconization we distinguish not two, but three instances, that is, not only the original and the image, the thing and the icon of the thing, but moreover also the intelligible prototype, in relation to which the thing itself is an icon. Consequently, an artistic icon is an icon of a real icon of an ideal mental image. If there were no prototype of the ideal, things would be empty and would allow only a photographic mirror image, random and devoid of ideological content. If there were no prototype of the real, or original, then the ideal nature of things would remain transcendental, inaccessible to created vision. But the artist sees in a thing and through a thing its idea and precisely depicts it in true existence, unclouded by empiricism. In a thing he reads its name, or idea, and by means of artistic hieroglyphs he pronounces and repeats this name, so that it receives independent expression next to the thing, like an image of a prototype. In iconization, the ideation of a thing occurs. An image is the otherness of an idea, as if separated from its reality. A thing testifies to itself, speaks of itself not only in itself, but also in its other existence, in its images, which represent, as it were, a rolling echo of its existence in the world. This world echo sounds in man, who is the eye and ear of the world. All mental images of existence, its icons, before they are consolidated in the depiction of things, are contained in a person, in their multi-unity they are seen in him. A person sees them outside himself, but through himself, and in this sense finds them in himself and expresses them for himself. If knowledge is remembering (άνἄμνησίς), then art is a story about remembering. Man is a contracted world, an anthropocosmos. Icons of things are essentially human, like art itself. Analysis of the icon leads us to the idea of ​​all ideas - to humanity. What is humanity? IV. Divine prototype St. the fathers testify to the prototypes of the world in God, which, of course, do not remain in separate plurality, but are included in a single, all-encompassing, divine Prototype. How can one express his attitude towards the Trinitarian Deity himself? We know that there is a hypostatic Image in the Divinity itself, this is the Son, “the radiance of glory and the image (χαρακτήρ) of His hypostasis” (Heb. 1:3). He is “the Image of the invisible God, εικών τοῦ Θεοῦ αοράτου, born before all creation” (Col. 1:15). In this text, the relationship between the Father and the Son is defined as between the Prototype and the Image and, what is especially remarkable, the Image of the invisible God, therefore revealed and in this sense visible. 85 What is meant here by this manifestation or visibility of the Father in the Son, which is the type and archetype of all images? 86 God the Father and in St. The Trinity remains “invisible” (transcendent). He reveals Himself in the Son, the hypostatic Word, the Word of all words and the Image of all images. In Him the content of God's life is revealed, in Him all the possibilities of everything in God are shown, and then in creation, in the universe, in which He contains an ideal mental image. Therefore, it is said about Him: “all things were, and without Him nothing was made” (John 1:3), or (Col. 1:16–17): “For in Him (έν αύτφ) everything was created, everything was created by Him (δι' αύτοῦ) and for Him (actually: in Him - εις αυτόν) was created, and He is first of all, and everything stands by Him (actually: in Him – έν αύτφ). The relationship between the Father and the Son, the Prototype and the Image, remains as between the ineffability of mystery and the expressibility of revelation, both of which are identical and different: consubstantial and equally real, but different hypostases. That Word of the Father, which the Father has, for He Himself begets the Son, is His own Image, but hypostatic, is the begotten and begotten Son. Εικών, image, here means the revelation, revelation of the Father in the Word, the Thought of the Father, the Idea of ​​Ideas, which also has a hypostatic existence. Thus, the Divine Image has the similarity with any image that He reveals the Idea, the Word of His Proto-Image of the Father, is in this sense His ideal mental image. And just as the image exists inseparably from the prototype, so the Son is the Father’s image, showing the Father. 87 However, this image itself has a hypostatic Divine existence, its own reality, which is usually not characteristic of images. The Reality of the Image-Word in St. The Trinity is accomplished by the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father on the Son and resting on the Son. The Holy Spirit is the hypostatic love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father, and this love is a perfecting power. The Holy Spirit is the hypostatic life of the Father in the Son and of the Son in the Father, for Divine life is hypostatic love. The Holy Spirit is the perfecting, life-giving hypostasis, in Him and through Him the Son receives reality for the Father, and the Father for the Son, the Holy Spirit is the reality of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father, He is the hypostatic reality. 88 He realizes the Son for the Father, and through this for Himself, He reveals the Son to the Father. In this sense, He is sometimes called in patristic writing the image of the Son, and through this His participation in the revelation of the Father in the Son or in the imagery of the Son in relation to the prototype of the Father is determined: He completes the Father's Image in the Son, 89 and therefore the Image of the Father is not one Son separately, but the Son, overshadowed by the Holy Spirit emanating from the Father. In other words, the Father, the Primordial Prototype, is revealed in the Son and in the Holy Spirit, in this dual unity with hypostatic distinction. From the dual unity of the Image of God, in which the Father is revealed in the Son and in the Holy Spirit, 90 one should move on to the single imagery itself or to the content of the Image, for which God Himself is the Prototype, in the Holy Spirit. The Trinity exists. About this Image we must first of all say that ontologically, in essence, It does not differ from the Proto-Image: it is essentially identical to it, equal and equally divine. The One Image of the Trinitarian Deity is not a created or extra-divine principle, but belongs to the Divine, is its life, which is realized in the trinity of three separate hypostases. About this Divine Image, the icon of St. The Trinity in itself, we can say that it too is God (although only Θεός, but not ὸ Θεός), 91 for in God there is nothing non-or extra-divine. This icon of the Divine in Himself is His self-revelation, the absolute content of Divine life, in the Word of all words (“all that was”), performed by the life-giving Spirit. In this sense, the icon of the Divine is the living and life-giving Idea of ​​all ideas, in their perfect unity and perfect all-reality, and therefore it is the divine world, or the world in God before his creation. In other words, this divine icon of the Divine, His self-revelation in Himself, is what is called in the biblical language Chokmah, Sophia, the Wisdom of God (and in the patristic language less precisely, παραδείγματα and προορισμοί, prototypes and predestination of all creation). She herself testifies to herself by the Holy Spirit: “The Lord had me at the beginning of His works” (Prov. Sol. 8:22). But this Icon of the Divine, which is the Proto-Icon of all icons, is itself the Proto-Image in relation to the created world, which was created by Wisdom, that is, on the basis and according to Wisdom, and in this sense the world itself is a created icon of the Divine. The difference between the Icon of the Divine in the Divine, which at the same time is the Prototype for the created world, and this latter is that this Icon is completely adequate to the Divine. Therefore, there is no ontological difference in it between the Prototype and the Image, while the world is inadequate to its Prototype. The created world was created from nothingness and must still be perfected in its existence; it remains in the process of becoming, and the Prototype is realized in it in the process. At the same time, it is identical to its Prototype in its, so to speak, ontological theme. Ideas or prototypes of the divine world are implanted into the created world entelechy, that is, as both a basis and a goal, primordial and given, as an internal purposeful cause. The sophia of the world contains precisely this thought about the identity, and at the same time the difference between the Proto-Image of the world and its image. The created world is an icon of the Divine Sophia, drawn in non-existence and receiving reality only in becoming. This relationship between the Trinitarian God and His Image, the Wisdom of God, which is the Proto-Image of the world in the Divinity itself, and the relationship of the Proto-Image of the world to the world as its created image is generally the basis of all iconicity. It must run through the entire teaching about the icon. (This also corresponds to the distinction of St. Gregory Palamas between οὐσία, the hidden being of God, and ενέργεια, the revelation of God, His Sophia.) God reveals himself to the world in Sophia, which is the Image of God in creation. Therefore, God, correlative to creation, is not an ugly, invisible, unknown, and therefore indescribable God, but is revealed and has His own Image, and this Image of God is the Prototype of creation, which is inscribed in the latter. And in this sense, one must proceed in the doctrine of the icon not from the apophatic thesis about the invisibility and ugliness of God, but from the sophiological teaching about His imagery and the conformity of the world to this image. God inscribed His image in creation, and this image of God, therefore, can be depicted. 92 Through this, the main false premise of the iconoclasts about the ugliness and unimaginability of God, which the icon-worshippers, through carelessness and misunderstanding, also accepted, is eliminated. Let's move on. The world in man has a chapter for itself, that is, an ontological focus. Therefore, the creation of the world is the gradual creation of man, whose appearance on the sixth day, in the fullness of creation, completes and exhausts it. Man is the eye of the world, the contracted world, the microcosm, just as the world is the world-man, the anthropocosmos. It is in man that the image of God shines in the world. It follows from this that the prototype of the world, Sophia, is also conformable to man, human. In other words, the Divine Sophia is the pre-eternal, Divine Humanity. The idea that man bears the image of God contains, as its basis, the opposite thought, namely, that humanity is characteristic of the image of God. We have the true manifestation of earthly Adam in Heavenly Adam, in the Word of God, who could become human only by the power of this conformity of God to man. Therefore, we can say that the very Image of God in God is Heavenly Humanity, and the Prototype, according to which the world-man was created, is this Heavenly Humanity. And man is the image of this Prototype, earthly Adam - Heavenly Adam, like created Sophia, a living Icon of the Divine. That man was created in the image of God, i.e. that he is the created image of the uncreated Image of God, the Divine Sophia, this truth is proclaimed by the Word of God 93 in the narrative of the creation of man (Gen. 1, 26–27; 5, 1–2. Wed Prov. Sol. 8, 22–31; 1, 3, 7–11). Man is a living icon of the Divine, created by God, but not made by hands; humanity is God-like. Therefore, in the visions of the Old Testament, in particular, in the vision of the prophet Daniel about the Son of Man (Dan. 7:13), then in the vision of glory in the prophet Ezekiel (Ezekiel 1), i.e. even before the incarnation of the Son, God appears in human form. This image is venerable in man; incense is performed before it, as before an icon of the Divine, as long as it is not distorted by sin, with which it was eclipsed, having once sparkled in Adam. 94 In this sense, already by creation, and not only by redemption, people are called gods (“Is it not written in your law (Ps. 81:6): I said: you are gods” (John 10:34). Humanity vaguely senses this, although eclipsed, godlikeness. Hence pagan anthropomorphism, leading to idolatry: the image of the gods in the human image. In ancient art, this iconography reaches truly lofty insights. It is direct artistic evidence of the godlike nature of man, by which it is religiously justified in its general purpose. Here, in ancient icon veneration, the question was raised about what the image of God in man is, and if we portray it, then how. Those who limit the image of God in man only to his spiritual nature, in contrast or even in opposition to his bodily nature, thereby dissect man, limiting his humanity to one soul, leaving the body to the share of animal nature. They must consistently come to the recognition of the indescribability of the image of God in man, and, consequently, of man himself (and hence, of course, to the most radical iconoclasm). Man, as a spiritual being, remains invisible and indescribable. The human body is for them the animal principle in man, which is lower than humanity in him. For them it is only a collection of bones, muscles, nerves, etc. etc., and in this sense, the image of a person is conceived only naturalistically, like a table from a physiological or anatomical atlas. The body is regarded a little higher by those who see in it only substance, matter (ΰλη), which receives and gives place to the spiritual life of a person. From here, strictly speaking, it also does not yet follow a conclusion in favor of the imaginability of the image of God in man, because “matter,” at least in its philosophical (as well as physical) concept, is that “difficult,” formless form of being, which is thought (according to Plato) as if by some kind of illegitimate judgment and has its only definition μή ὄν - meon, non-existent. However, even if one encounters a more positive attitude towards matter, then, of course, even from such recognition of matter its depictability as such does not follow. 95 This Platonizing understanding of matter should be contrasted with the fact that the body is not matter at all, that is, not only matter, thanks to which it only receives reality. The body is a form manifested in matter and possessing it, a realized mental image, an ideal-real being. 96 Now the question is: is it fair to limit the body as a form, as a mental image, in its meaning to animality alone and to see in it only the manifestation of the animal principle, or should it be seen as an image of God’s image, a revelation of the spiritual nature of man in his corporeality? Is it not the image and instrument of the spirit? The eye exists because the soul is an eye, and the ear - because it is hearing, and the brain, because it is thinking and knowing, and the legs, because it is movement, and the hands, because it is action, etc. And the whole body as a whole, as the most perfect manifestation of beauty and harmony, which the art of the ancient world comprehended and revealed, is a revelation of the god-like spirit. There is no doubt that this is true. The human body is a perfect artistic work of the Divine Artist, the Wisdom of God, whose joy is in the sons of men (Prov. Sol. 8, 33). It would mean belittling creation and humiliating the Creator not to see also in the body, together with the spirit, the image of God in man, or the tangible manifestation of the spiritual principle living in man. Man is one and whole, he does not decompose into parts, body and soul, but is an embodied spirit, or spirit-bearing flesh. And the primordial Adam, clothed with the glory of God, which he lost after the Fall (Rom. 3:23), revealed the image of God in his entire being. Just as in God, in His self-revelation, we distinguish the most revealed God and His Divine Icon - the Wisdom of God, 97 and the Prototype and the Image in God are inseparable and at the same time different from each other, so in a person the spirit living in him and his tangible appearance in the bodily image are also distinguished, even though they are inseparable. The body, as a form, does not exist without spiritual content, without it it is not a body. It is the body precisely as an image of the spirit, a revelation and an icon not made by hands, which is the basis for all iconography and iconization of man. The body as such exists only in its spirituality. There is no face without expression, this is clear to everyone. However, not only the face, but the whole body has an “expression”, expresses, reveals the spirit living in it. To see in the body only “matter” or only anatomy and physiology can be seen in abstraction, the convention of which, within its limits and in its place, can be fully justified. But such an understanding of the body is essentially slander against the body, resulting from blindness, due to which the icon of the Divine is not seen in it. However, the question naturally arises: why was the religious understanding of the human body characteristic only of paganism, as well as its images, but the latter were prohibited for the chosen people? How can we understand, in the light of this thought about the spirituality of the body, the second commandment and all the Old Testament prohibitions? The reason for this lies in original sin, which eclipsed his image in man and clothed him, instead of the glory given to him, with leather vestments. The human body, having become white and revived, became incapable and unworthy of showing God’s image, being struck by sin and distorted by passions. The idol images were the same: the Divine image, indestructible in man, shines through in them through the mask of sin and in spite of it, but the direct subject of the image is not the face, but the mask. These human passions are depicted in idols; they are icons of passions and sin and are not worthy of worship. Thus, the Old Testament prohibition refers to the untruth of the human image, which occurred as a result of the fact that man lost the purity of his humanity. However, this does not interfere, as we have already indicated, with the Old Testament theophany in human form, of course, free from sinful distortion. This is especially clear from the fact that in the Old Testament, along with the prohibition of humanoid images, it was prescribed to make golden sculptured images of angels. What does this apparent contradiction mean, which for some serves to prove that human images were prohibited, and for others - the exact opposite? The images of angels - and this is the whole point - contained human images, - due to the co-humanity of the angels. 98 Of course, they were distinguished by some special features to express precisely the angelic nature (wings, lack of signs of gender, a youthful image), but these features do not change the human character of the image itself (as usual the Old Testament angelophanies were in human form). Thus, the religious reproduction of the human image, the icon of humanity, which was directly prohibited, was prescribed indirectly, in the icons of angels. Why? The reason is obvious: in the images of angels, the human image was not obscured by sin. Therefore, he was depicted here, although, of course, not in his entirety, since it was still an image of spiritual beings, although co-human, but without a body. However, this image here was purer than in a person, and therefore, in a certain sense, more humane than in him. This is the paradox of Old Testament icon veneration. The image of angels had a symbolic, commemorative meaning: in a negative sense, it testified to the closed nature of God in man as obscured by sin. In a positive sense, it is, so to speak, an icon of an icon, and this last icon, the original, true humanity, has not yet been restored. But she became restored through the incarnation of God, through the incarnation of the Word, which was accomplished, so that “he would again renew the image that had been corrupted by passions.” Christ, the one, sinless, new Adam, restored in his humanity the true human image, which is also the true image of God. The Lord appeared truly man, and in Him the true man, the new Adam, appeared. He has a true human image, which is the image of God, a living, miraculous icon of the Divine. This is the real meaning of the Incarnation for the dogma of icon veneration. 99 The basis of icon painting and icon veneration is not that the Lord accepted the human body in its natural describability, as the defenders of icon veneration usually asserted and continue to assert. But the Lord, having accepted this body, removed the veil of sin from it, thereby revealing its true image in its true humanity. The usual train of thought among icon venerators was this: the human body itself, although depictable due to its fleshiness (“materiality”), is not worthy of depiction and veneration as such, for it has no relation to the image of God. Only due to the fact that in the Incarnation the Lord took on this fleshly body as a kind of clothing, and thereby sanctified it, it became worthy and depicted in the icon as an image of His human nature. The iconoclasts rightly objected to this, that with such an external understanding of the depictability of Christ’s humanity, his icon cannot be considered as an icon of Christ. Be that as it may, the general judgment of the fathers of the VII Ecumenical Council, as well as all the saints. fathers, defenders of icon veneration, agree that the incarnation of God is of fundamentally decisive importance in the issue of the icon. This is the truth accepted by the conciliar consciousness of the Church. Only the further development and application of this idea in the doctrine of icon veneration is by no means indisputable and is subject to verification and clarification. To understand the essence of the icon, one should take as a basis the fact of the incarnation of the Word as revealing what was already given at the creation of man. Man as such, by creation, already has the image of God, is a living icon of the Divine. He ceased to be this icon as a result of original sin, but this original iconicity of his is restored in him by the power of the incarnation. Human nature was revealed as an icon of the Divine after it was revealed in Christ. Christ, the new Adam, appeared in our humanity as a true man, and in Him, in His humanity, our humanity found itself in its truth. Man in the fullness of his spiritual-physical being, therefore, in his flesh, is an icon of the Divine by his very creation. Christ, as a true man in His humanity, is an icon of the Divine, and in Him and with Him all humanity, which through Him returned to itself, again acquired the image of God. Having accepted the created human nature of the old Adam, the new Adam took upon Himself not alien to Himself, external like clothing, but His own image, which He, as God, has in man. His humanity is also the image of His Divinity, by the very creation of man, who has for himself the Prototype in Heavenly Humanity of the new Adam. Christ in His flesh took on His own image of Heavenly Adam, His icon. His Divine image is therefore completely transparent in His humanity. The main mistake of the iconoclasts, which was supported by icon-worshippers, is that they actually separated both natures in Christ in relation to the image. According to their teaching, the Divine, as invisible, has no image, but humanity is impenetrable to the Divine and is not its image, and therefore the image (“descriptibility”) belongs only to the human body. In reality, with two natures, Christ has the same Divine image, but twice, or, better said, in two ways. According to His Divinity, He is the Image of the Father and at the same time the Proto-Image of all things, as well as the Proto-Image of man, who therefore is His image: “The first man is from earthly earth, the second Man is from heaven, - O δεύτερος άνθρωπος ες ουρανού. And just as we bear the image of earthly things, so we will bear the image of heavenly things” (1 Cor. 15:47-49). Man in Christ is a direct image of His Divinity, for It itself has a human image. Why is creation, created in the image of God, bearing the image of man. Therefore, the initial premise of the iconoclasts, which was fully shared with them by icon-worshippers (St. Theodore the Studite and others), that the Divinity of Christ is indescribable in the sense of its ugliness is incorrect: it has an image in man, therefore, it is describable. 100 Here the pious thought is stopped by the fear of admitting directly and decisively that man himself, as God by grace, is the image of God, albeit a created one, and therefore the icon of Christ’s humanity is not only an icon of His body, irrespective of the Divinity, but is His icon in general, precisely as the image of His Divinity in created nature. Christ has His image, one and identical, in two ways: according to His Divinity it is invisible to created eyes, but according to humanity it is visible. The existence of an image does not necessarily mean its visibility with created eyes, for an image can be both visible and invisible. Such is the Son as “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15): He remains invisible to humanity until he appears, that is, he becomes visible through humanity in the incarnation. One and the same Image existing in the womb of St. Trinity, penetrates the visible world and imprints it with Himself, appearing in human form. 101 Christological dogma is characterized by the combination of two positions: a single hypostasis with the unity of life under two natures. In relation to the icon, both iconoclasts and icon-worshippers reasoned as follows: according to human nature, or rather, according to bodily nature, Christ has a visible image, we can depict it, but according to Divine nature, He does not have it and is indepicable. Therefore, in relation to the image, they divided nature, and thereby limited the power of the image in order to at least somehow save it and not completely reject it. But the image does not belong to the nature of Christ in its duality, but to His very hypostasis in its unity. Christ, having a single hypostasis, although in two natures, also has a single image, only revealing itself in two natures in two ways: invisibly - spiritually, and visible - bodily. Or, we can say differently that we cannot imagine this image according to our Divinity, but we will imagine or depict it according to our humanity. In it he is visible, and everything visible is depictable, or may have its own icon. Therefore, an icon of Christ is possible, precisely in His visible human image, which, however, is identical with His invisible, Divine image. And just as in determining the relationship of both natures in Christ, Orthodox theology teaches about περιχώρισίς, mutual penetration, mutual entry of both natures despite all their separateness, so in relation to the Image of Christ, imprinted in His Divinity and humanity, we must also accept a kind of perichorisis. The latter is expressed in the fact that in the human image of Christ His Divine image clearly shines. We have some guidance for this in the Transfiguration of the Lord: on Mount Tabor the disciples saw the Lord changing his image and being transfigured. What does it mean? And the fact is that, although He retained His own human image, this image became transparent to His invisible divine image: “and as a disciple, I saw Your glory, O Christ God.” 102 Glory is the spiritual divine image of Christ, and the glorification of His body, its appearance in glory, is its permeability to the Divine, that very περίχώρίσίς that we spoke about. The Body of the Lord, enlightened after the Resurrection, invariably retains the features of this glorification. Glorification is such an identification of both natures of Christ in the unity of the image while maintaining the separation of His heavenly, eternal, and created humanity, a single humanity in dual existence. In the relationship of both natures of Christ with the unity of His Divine image, we have the same thing as in the relationship between the Divine Sophia and the created, or the Divine and created world. Sophia is one, and this unity establishes the identity of both worlds at their foundation, however, this unity and identity does not eliminate their immutable difference: a creature, even one deified (“God is all in all”), cannot become God, identifying with Him only by the grace of deification. The visible image of God in the humanity of Christ was not only accessible to perception, visible to his contemporaries, but he is generally depictable, that is, his icon is possible. Here we come to the very essence of the question of the nature of the icon. V. The icon, its contents and boundaries The icon of Christ depicts His human image, in which His Divinity is also imagined. Therefore, directly it is a human image, and as such it is a type of portrait. And therefore, in discussing the icon, one should first ask oneself what a human image, such as a painting or portrait, generally represents. It is perhaps easier to first say what he is not. It does not represent exactly what both sides in the debate about icon veneration took it for: a naturalistic depiction of individual parts of the body in their totality, so to speak, a photographic atlas of anatomy or physiology. 103 Such an understanding is tantamount to a denial of art. Art sees a mental image, or idea, which shines through in a thing and constitutes its ideal content or basis. In this sense, the image of a person - we will conventionally call it a portrait - deals, first of all, with the ideal form of the human body, with the image of humanity, and then with the individual traits that we have in this image. A portrait is an artistic testimony to this intelligent image and its consolidation through the means of art. In this sense, he depicts not a face, but a face visible by the artist, and this vision of the face, seen in the prototype, or original, is conveyed not in abstract contemplation, but concretely, precisely shown as existing in the original. Therefore, we get his image, a portrait of this person. This portrait resemblance therefore simultaneously includes the reproduction of individual features of his appearance - his hair, figure, etc. (i.e., what the icon-worshippers usually had in mind), but together with his spiritual face. It would be a mistake to think that the similarity lies in the hair, nose and warts - it goes much deeper. The main difference between man and all the things of this world and even from the creatures of the animal world is that he is spirit-bearing, his body is a vessel, and together the instrument and form of the spirit living in him, and this unity of spirit and flesh is inseparable. It is impossible to depict a person apart from this spirituality of his. And therefore, to consider a portrait image only as a reproduction of a person’s members and their position, as both sides understood in the dispute about icons, means not only to destroy art, but also to deny the icon in essence. The body cannot be considered only as meat and bones, separately from the spirit living in it: without it, it does not even exist as a body. It is not only an inseparable container and instrument of the spirit, but it is also its image. The body of every person is a miraculous icon of his spirit, and the image of a person, his portrait, is an artificial, man-made icon of this icon. And it depicts not only the body, but also the spirit living in the body, or, what is the same, the visible bodily image of the invisible spirit and its states. Of course, it is precisely this vision of the face in the face, and even in the mask, and in the testimony of it in the image that lies the task of art. 104 And in this sense, there is a qualitative difference between a photograph, no matter how perfect it is, and an artistic portrait, no matter how imperfect it is. 105 Thus, about a human portrait we can say in the words of the Areopagite that “an icon is the visible of the invisible,” for it depicts an invisible spirit living in a visible body. But from here comes the main aporia of the portrait, which marks its border, which, moreover, runs in two directions. Firstly, each portrait is an image of a certain individual, in his individuality different from all humanity as a certain personal and unique modus; but at the same time, he is an icon of humanity in general, for man is a generic being and a race lives in each of the individuals. The aporia here lies in the impossibility of accurately capturing and conveying this relationship and the inner facet of the individual and the race, and hence in the involuntary and inevitable exaggeration of one side or the other. Secondly, each portrait is an icon of an icon, an artificial reproduction of a miraculous natural image of the spirit, which is the body. To what extent shall we depict the spirit? Even the created, human spirit, which nevertheless has a divine origin, as if breathed from the mouth of God, in its God-likeness has inexhaustible depth and is not exhausted by any of the private revelations of its life. Consequently, each of his natural icons, each being true in its iconicity, is nevertheless not adequate and not exhaustive. The same spirit is revealed in its different states and, therefore, in different images: in childhood, in youth, in old age, in fall and uprising, in decline and rise. 106 And even abstracting from the differences in the artist’s penetration into spiritual reality, one-timeness and therefore one-sidedness remains inevitable in the portrait. He is always pars pro toto, capturing only one of the phenomena of the phenomenology of the spirit, which he takes as an adequate image of this spirit. And from here follows the inevitable relativity of every portrait, and therefore their fundamental multiplicity. A person in his life reveals an innumerable number of icons of his spirit, unfolding an endless cinematic tape of his phenomenology. Likewise, every portrait, no matter how perfect it is, is not the only and exhaustive one, it is not a direct icon of the integral spirit as such, but only one of its manifestations. However, the integral spirit is perceptible in each of its manifestations, for it is indivisible. Therefore, every icon, having a particular meaning, at the same time retains a general one. 107 This leads to the following remarkable feature of a portrait: every portrait needs a name. An unnamed portrait, even with the greatest portrait “resemblance” (which, of course, relates only to one specific moment in life and disappears over time due to its variability), does not yet have in itself the final fixing point that is given by the name: only it completes, certifies, and therefore itself enters into the image as a pictorial means. Naming correlates the image with the original, the icon with the prototype, it attaches this icon to the multi-icon spirit. (In the same way, the name itself is given to its bearer, who before this name was many-named or nameless.) The name expresses individuality itself - the spirit that lives and reveals itself as the subject of its states, present in all of them and not identified with any of them, for it is not exhausted by it. A name is in this sense a hieroglyph of a personality, a signification of the invisible in the visible, and an icon is, in a certain sense, a hieroglyph of one of the states of this personality, its self-revelations. Naming an icon means its inclusion in the number of manifestations of this spirit, of which there can be an indefinite number. Therefore, the same name is given to different and many portraits of the same person, and all of them are strung on him like on a thread, or are connected by him as if in a common cinematic tape. Of course, an icon portrait must have its own persuasiveness even before naming, regardless of it. It, although inevitably one-sided, testifies to its original: it contains a real pars pro toto, because the soul is indivisible and united. But at the same time, this irremovable difference between the part and the whole remains. Therefore, we do not feel calm and satisfied until the image has received a name, which is the icon of the subject himself as the bearer of all his states 108 and, therefore, the original of all his icons. Now let us turn directly to the icon of Christ. In some respects she is no different from a human icon at all. Like the latter, she is a human image in which the spirit living in her is revealed. In particular, individual icons of Christ depict either individual events of His earthly life (for example, icons of holidays, various images of Gospel events), or His image corresponding to portraiture in general. But, of course, those general boundaries that are valid in relation to any icon receive special force here. And this applies, first of all, to the image of the body itself, the human nature of the Savior. He revealed himself as a perfect man, showed the true image of humanity. We can say that His body is an absolute (in the sense of perfection) human body. But any perfection is difficult to depict for human art, which has only relative means, so to speak, of chiaroscuro and uses deformation to convey individual form. For individuality in our sinful world is certainly also deformation, relativity, some ugliness, defectiveness in one respect and excess in another, dissonance awaiting resolution. Only through the harmony of dissonances does the individual body become depictable. But the body of the Savior in this sense is not individual, because it is all individual, or super-individual, or absolutely individual. In His light there are no shadows, in His harmony there are no dissonances, in His type there is no deformation, and therefore the usual visual means of art are exhausted here. Nevertheless, it is given to a person, in this case an artist, to have his own vision of Christ, and he seeks His image (perhaps, in fact, he is not looking for anything else - consciously or unconsciously - fine art). As an all-individuality, the face of Christ, although it is not equal to any separate individuality, nevertheless contains them all, or vice versa, in every human face, by virtue of its humanity, there is participation in the human face of Christ (which is why we can say that in essence the entire human race in its humanity has one face, the whole face of Christ). This opens up the possibility of approaching the human image of Christ, although it remains obviously inadequate and inevitably takes on a personal, psychological coloring, 109 but nevertheless, in a sense, it corresponds to its task. Therefore, the image of Christ always stands before the eyes of art. It is painted by both believers and non-believers (and, perhaps, the psychology of non-believing painters more clearly demonstrates 110 how deep this Image is embedded in the human soul). Looking for the true image of man, the artist unwittingly finds Christ in this humanity. 111 Therefore, ancient religious art, since it demonstrated beautiful humanity, unconsciously created the icon of Christ before Christ, and here it becomes parallel with ancient philosophy, like Christianity before Christ. Thus, Christ in His humanity can be depicted as He is seen by man through various subjective prisms, although He is indepicable in His truth and glory, for for this the one depicting must be not only similar and akin, but also equal to the depicted. However, to justify art, this imageability alone is sufficient, if through it the ray of Christ’s humanity can be revealed, even if only in reflection, as it glides on all things and shines in the faces of the saints of Christ, or the saints in their individual image have something of the face of Christ (more on this below). But the icon of Christ is not only an image of His perfect humanity, but also of His Divine Spirit, an icon of the Divinity itself. We already know that the human body cannot be considered at all separately from the spirit, of which it is the container; the image of the body is also the image of the spirit. Therefore, the icon of Christ is not only the image of His human body, as the iconoclasts revered it, but also the icon of His Divinity (which the icon-worshippers did not fully understand, seeing in the icon of Christ only the image of His humanity, or rather, even only His Body). It is at this point that the problem of the icon becomes extremely acute: how can and can the Deity be depicted? God reveals himself to us - in many parts and in many ways - in word, action and in images. The Word of God, to the extent that it has appeared to man and “living with man,” can be depicted and, although, of course, it can never be adequately, perfectly depicted. However, this condition is not required for imageability: for the latter it is necessary that the images of the incarnate Word, the icons of Christ, are not empty, but have a reflected ray of the Divine in them. But this directly follows from the general fact of the revelation of God to man, from the conformity of man to God, and, consequently, from a certain humanity of God. From this it follows that God is depicted for man in this humanity of His. Therefore, the true and complete postulate of the icon of Christ is to provide not only a human image of Christ, so to speak, a historical picture - a portrait, like other images of great people and historical figures, which worldly artists, believers and non-believers, claim to do, but also an image in which the Divinity of Christ would be reflected. The icon depicts the God-Man. But this task already takes us beyond the boundaries of art into the religious sphere, or rather, it connects both of these areas. It requires from the icon painter not only art, but also religious insight, vision, and this is possible only by combining his artistic and religious life, that is, on the basis of the church. Thus, icon painting emerges as church art, which combines all the creative tasks of art with church experience. 112 An icon is a work of art that knows and loves its forms and colors, comprehends their revelation, masters them and obeys them. But it is also a theurgic act, in which the revelation of the supermundane is evidenced in the images of the world, and spiritual life in the images of the flesh. In it, God reveals himself in human creativity, and the theurgic act of uniting the earthly and heavenly is performed. Therefore, icon painting is both a feat of art and a religious feat, full of prayerful and ascetic tension (which is why the Church knows a special face of saints - icon painters, in whose person art is thereby canonized as the path of salvation). This leads to another feature of icon painting. As church art, it lives not only in the general tradition of art with its schools and artistic tradition in general, but also in church tradition, which is expressed objectively in the icon canon. What is this canon? First one must reject his false, perverted understanding. The canon (“original”) contains, first of all, a disciplinary principle, a kind of spiritual censorship for icons, with a number of requirements, primarily of a formal and prohibitive nature. These censorship requirements are changeable, corresponding to the nature of the era and the level of church development. Of course, this is not what the canon as church tradition consists of. It contains a certain ecclesiastical vision of the images of the Divine world, expressed in forms and colors, in images of art, evidence of the conciliar creativity of the Church in icon painting. The canon contains both visions, i.e. “images” (“excerpts”) of icons and visions of a certain content, i.e. certain types and methods of interpreting the image, symbolism of forms and colors. This is, as it were, a treasury of the living memory of the Church about these visions and apparitions, its conciliar inspiration, and as such it is a type of church tradition that exists along with its other types (such as patristic writing, liturgical tradition, etc.). On this basis, an icon consecrated by tradition is in its own way as authoritative a source of divine wisdom as the others mentioned above, and therefore theology, seeking support in church tradition, has the right and duty to turn to this source. Like all church tradition in general, the icon canon should not be understood as an external rule and an unchangeable law that requires passive, slavish submission, which is why the task of the icon painter is reduced only to copying the original. Such an “Old Believer,” legalistic understanding of the canon is, firstly, unenforceable, and secondly, false. It is impracticable and utopian, because copying (unless it is a craft, which is not copying at all, but only a more or less gross distortion or even parody) is an artistic and creative act in which the copyer reproduces in himself, revives and, together, gets used to the work of the master. Therefore, artistic copying is creativity, marked by the stamp of individuality. Let's take Rublev's Trinity as an example. Of course, it can be artistically repeated, but it will, strictly speaking, not be a copy, but a discovery by modern means and in the modern consciousness of what was once found by the master. Of course, art, which can agree and find such repetition worthy and even important for itself in a free and sincere creative act, cannot degrade itself to being limited and exhausted by such repetition alone. It simply cannot do this, because the nature of art is creative freedom, and not copying, which, if possible for it, is also only as a manifestation of this freedom. It moves incessantly, because it lives. It is impossible to transform art into mere copying, but true copying of works of art is not possible for non-art, for craft. Thus, the only resource for the Old Believer attitude towards the original icon is only color photography. Of course, it is now acquiring very important significance for the history of art and its popularization, but it cannot become a replacement for icon painting. And, in any case, it would be clear evidence of the entire utopianism of the Old Believer attitude towards icons if it turned out that it confines all the possibilities of icon painting to the photographic reproduction of some, say, classical originals. At the same time, this would be idolatry in relation to these originals, which alone supposedly possess the quality of iconicity. But to limit the task of art to simply copying existing originals is also religiously false, for this distorts the idea of ​​church tradition. In particular, with regard to the religious content of this or that icon, the history of the icon already testifies that in the church there is a unique life of the icon. In this life, some themes or versions of icons of known content are brought to the surface, others fall out of use, but, in any case, the possible content of an icon can never be considered exhausted or not allowing for change or increase. In particular, it is enough to point out that the glorification of new saints brings new icons. The glorification of new miraculous icons, which had not previously had fame and distribution, does the same. Further, it is important to establish that, although the presence of icons of known content in the Church already serves as evidence of church tradition in favor of the known church reliability and authority of their content, 113 nevertheless, new icons of new content are fundamentally possible, and even directly arise. The life of the Church is never exhausted by the past, it has a present and a future and is always equally moved by the Holy Spirit. And if the spiritual visions and revelations witnessed in the icon were possible before, then they are possible now and in the future. And it is only a matter of fact whether creative inspiration and boldness will manifest itself in a new icon. Wasn’t the act of St. John the same bold? Andrei Rublev, who inscribed his vision of the Holy Trinity on the icon, 114 thereby touching the most intimate and sacred object of the Christian faith? Wasn’t the icon of St. Sophia of Novgorod or various cosmic icons of the Mother of God? To prohibit new icons in advance in an Old Believer manner would simply mean killing icon painting (and indirectly encouraging either an idolatrous or artisanal attitude towards the icon). But even leaving aside the question of the possibility of new icons, one should remember that old icons are inevitably always painted in a new way. The fact is that types, or originals, are only abstract schemes, for which, although there are artistic images, but, of course, not of an indisputable or, at least, not the only type. And in art it matters not only what, but also how. The execution of a given type, or original, if it is not outwardly artisanal, but religious-artistic, is its creative perception, independent interpretation, and through that a variant or change, and, what is most important, not even intentional, but involuntary and inevitable. The canon is not an external law, which is impossible here, but an internal norm that acts by the power of its persuasiveness and to the extent of this persuasiveness. In this, the iconographic canon does not differ from the entire church tradition, which is also not an external law, but lives creatively, constantly being renewed and enriched in this renewal. The iconographic original lives in the same way. Since it is not a law, but a conciliar vision, then every member of the Church who treats the original not with arbitrariness, but creatively, is included in this unction. And through the accumulation of these infinitesimal changes, new originals arise, the life of tradition is realized in the icon canon. 115 The canon is also important for observing that asceticism in the icon image, which is contradicted by naturalism (the so-called Fryazhian letter). The style of the icon is such that it is diametrically opposed to the ideal of Apelles’s apples, the depiction of the most immediate physicality (to which the icon-worshippers strangely reduce the icon). The icon should not contain anything that affects sensuality or even only evokes images of the sensory world. 116 Although the icon is a mental image of the world and man, it is taken so peacefully that the icon image for sensory perception turns out to be abstract and schematic, dried out, dead. The voices of this world are not heard in it and its aromas are not present. We are here in the pale kingdom of Goethe’s “mothers” (the second part of Faust), 117 as if in another, mountainous world with rarefied air. This does not interfere, but rather even promotes the ideal realism of the icon, as well as the high artistry of its symbolism, composition, rhythm, and colors. But all these images of carnal existence are, so to speak, dematerialized, taken, as it were, outside of their implementation in the flesh of the world. And this is the main difference and even the opposite of Orthodox icon writing (as well as its artistic prototype in Egyptian iconography and ancient sculpture) from Western naturalism of the Renaissance. Hence, personal images, losing their portrait character, turn into “originals.” This is the difference between a religious painting from the life of Christ and his icon. 118 Nevertheless, the presence and justification of the canon testifies that the icon of Christ (and then, in connection with it, of course, other icons) is not only a creation of art with its individual character, but also an ecclesiastical vision with its conciliar nature, in which the individual does not die, but is included in the highest conciliar multi-unity of the Church. Therefore, in a certain sense, we can say that the icon of Christ, although it is painted by a separate artist, actually belongs to the Church. This affiliation is revealed from a new side in the consecration of the icon. VI. Consecration of the icon and its meaning A portrait - a picture of a person, as we have seen, necessarily requires naming; the mental image of the form is complemented by the image of the idea. But this is the need for naming and this connection of the image with the name applies to the highest degree to the image of all images - to the image of Christ, and, moreover, equally in both pictures and icons. If when depicting any human face we are inevitably limited to only the periphery of the spirit, its covers, although they reveal it, are powerless to exhaust its depth, then in the image of Christ we have the same thing to a degree that surpasses all understanding. It can be said that any image of Christ, even the most powerful, sincere and masterful, remains immeasurably far from fully achieving its task, revealing the Divine spirit of the hypostatic God the Word. In the first case, in the human image, we stand before the unsearchability, and therefore the transcendence, of every created spirit, which is immanently revealed in life. Here we have an abyss separating God and man, the Creator and creation, the Divine spirit and the created. From this it is absolutely impossible to draw the conclusion that the Divinity of Christ is generally indescribable. Then one would have to conclude that the icon of Christ itself is impossible and, therefore, the iconoclasts are right. No, Christ is depictable in His divine-human being, and therefore can be depicted, but He cannot be depicted in an absolute, exhaustive way. He is depicted, so to speak, in his appearances, just as the back of God was visible to Moses, but not His very Face (Ex. 33:23). However, this was also a genuine theophany, after which the face of Moses shone (Ex. 34, 35). And the image of Christ may be a true icon of Christ (or at least a religious picture of His life). But for this, this phenomenon must be correlated with the Appearing. And this means that it must be named. Therefore, the name, the inscription of the Name is an essential element of the image itself. It is the name of the subject to which the predicate, i.e., the image, is related. The entire icon as a whole is held together by a name, like a link: 119 this image is Christ, it belongs to Christ. Iconicity in the icon is realized by this mute, indicating is. There can be an indefinite number of artistic-symbolic predicates, that is, images, for human art always seeks to embody the image of Christ, but one Name lives in all of them, all predicates relate to one subject and are connected to it by the connective is. Let us remember that the icon contains an antinomy. This antinomy does not consist in the fact that God is not depictable and only man is depicted, as was accepted in the theology of the 8th–9th centuries. Such provisions are inconsistent, and it is impossible to prove the legitimacy of the icon on the basis of them. But the real (sophiological) antinomy present in the icon is that God, who reveals himself in creation and has his own image in it, remains, as the Creator, transcendent to creation, inaccessible to it in the depths of his being. Revelation is true and real, but it is not exhaustive; images are inseparable from the Prototype, but are indisputably different from it. This antinomy is vitally resolved in becoming, in the process: the life of the creature contains the ongoing revelation of the Creator, it contains created eternity in its communion with the eternity of God, in deification. In icon painting, this antinomy is resolved in the naming of the icon, in the combination of name and image. An icon is a named image, a word-image, a name-image. From here it is obvious how closely and inextricably iconology is connected with onomatology, 120 icon veneration is associated with the name and the icon itself with the Name. But the theological teaching about the Name of God had not yet arisen during the VII Ecumenical Council, and for this reason alone the dogma of icon veneration could not receive its completion then. But the question of the dogma of the Name has already been raised in our days, and therefore both dogmas - the icon and the Name, or the image and the Prototype - are inextricably intertwined in modern theology. 121 A proper name, in contrast to “common nouns,” expresses not a property at all, but an essence, not predicates, but the subject, not predicates, but the subject. A proper name is a verbal icon of a hypostasis, a person, while all its images are its different predicates. Hence the need to name even any painting in general, at least a portrait. The Name of Jesus is the eternal icon of His hypostasis, which itself is the hypostatic image of the Father. The Divine Name of Jesus expresses the ineffable personality of the Lord, the Father in the Son through the Holy Spirit, and in this sense it is inseparable from His being, and the Lord Himself is present in it, according to the strength of the connection between the image and the Prototype (although this does not imply the identity between them). Therefore, the naming of an image is a kind of dedication to the Prototype, a significant assimilation of it, and at the same time its overshadowing, the realization of an idea, the realization of an image. Of course, such naming itself in this sense can have varying degrees of reality or force, from a subjective claim to a certain materiality. There is a whole range of shades between the pretentious daub that covers itself with some loud name, and the greatest tensions of art, which strives to impart the utmost saturation of reality to the image, through the efforts of artistic magic to give the portrait its own life. (Such is Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” which wants to be, by the will of the artist, more than just a portrait, but an embodiment, and such is the demonic reality of Gogol’s “Portrait.”) Essentially, naming is the attachment of an image to reality, to a certain existential point. But can such boldness in naming be allowed in relation to the icon of Christ and His life? Based on the premises of the teaching about icons of the 8th–9th centuries, the answer should be negative. Based on the above, a completely affirmative answer to this question can be given: yes, it is possible, because Christ, as the God-man, has a human image. In it He included His earthly human life, and in it and through it all human life. Therefore, artistic Christology should by no means be closed and exhausted by the actual gospel history with its archeology. (However, the latter also has its limits, for what historical framework can be given for depicting the Transfiguration of the Lord, or the Resurrection, or the Ascension, or the walking on the waters, or the temptation in the desert, or the resurrection of Lazarus, the daughter of Jairus, etc.?) Actually, the gospel story as such generally represents only one of the possibilities for the artistic depiction of Christ. Religious art, past and present (and of course, future), goes beyond these limits to depict Christ in His humanity and in our lives. And, of course, it is right in this. Such a right was given to man by Christ himself, who became man, living in His humanity. The image of Christ in humanity is an inexhaustible theme of artistic piety and creative contemplation, an artistic thought about Christ, a Christology in images, which is as inexhaustible as that in words and ideas. However, when naming the icon of Christ, while attaching the image to the Prototype, we distinguish two possibilities: natural and grace-filled. Any human naming of an icon or painting, no matter how justified and sincere, inevitably remains only human, i.e., to a certain extent, subjective, anthropomorphic, and is more a wish and thought than reality. Man has no power to give naming the power of Divine reality, but only the Church, which itself - by the power of the Holy Spirit - names the icon, and this is the consecration of the icon. An icon fully becomes an icon only in consecration. The latter draws an indispensable line between a religious painting, no matter how high it may be in its religious content and artistic achievements, and an icon, no matter how modest it may be in this regard. Consecration is such a secret action of the Church in which “this icon is sanctified by the grace of the Holy Spirit,” but the power of this action or its content is the act of church naming, which is precisely contained in consecration. Consecration is the church identification of an image with the Prototype, which is accomplished through the grace-filled, effective naming of an icon. Therefore, one should distinguish between the ordinary, human naming of a painting or icon from its church naming, or consecration. The presence of a naming of an icon is necessary for its completion, 122 as well as for the possibility of its consecration. A named but not yet consecrated icon is, as it were, a blueprint for the icon. And simple human naming cannot replace sanctification, that is, church naming, as was thought back in the era of the VII Ecumenical Council, and as other name-glorifiers think even now (thinking by this to bring greater exaltation to the name of Jesus). The awareness of the need for consecration was not immediately reflected in the practice of icon veneration in the form of different consecration rites for different icons, and, what is especially interesting, the VII Ecumenical Council does not yet know the special consecration of an icon. 123 Later practice, which established the need for the consecration of icons, 124 made up for the incompleteness of the definition of the VII Ecumenical Council, which, without knowing consecration, thereby does not distinguish sacred icons from any religious image. Consecration also matters for the dogmatic teaching about the veneration of the icon, which we now have to discover. One of the most difficult questions in the doctrine of icons, which remained unresolved in the 8th and 9th centuries, relates to the veneration of icons, to their very iconicity. What are the limits of this veneration and its true foundations, how is the icon fundamentally different from the Holy Gifts, on the one hand, and from idol images, on the other? For the iconicity of an icon, as we already know, a sacred naming is necessary, which is consecration. Of course, this naming is associated with an image, which is, in a certain sense, also a hieroglyph of the name. It would be impossible for an icon to consist of one outline of a name: the name in relation to its bearer, and the naming of the icon in relation to the content of the image. But the sacred name, or consecration, has reality in a double sense: it not only states a certain identity of the image and the prototype in relation to its ideal mental image, or form (which is usually called “similarity”), but also gives this image a certain life, realizes it. It introduces him to the existence of the prototype, makes the icon a place of his special, blessed presence, and identifies him with it in a certain way. Now we need to find the dogmatic measure of this identification and thereby more accurately define and limit it. What is clear, first of all, is the negative boundary that distinguishes the icon in the precise sense, i.e. a named, consecrated image, from an unconsecrated, or from a religious picture. Of course, one cannot deny the certain venerability or sacredness of even such an image in itself (as was recognized in the 6th Act of the VII Ecumenical Council). The image as such is correlated with the prototype and is sacred to it. It has a certain natural power of image due to its relationship to the prototype. Such power is especially clearly inherent in the sacred images of church painting, which have no meaning as icons and are not worshiped as such (through lighting candles or kissing). To a lesser extent, it extends to non-church images, although of sacred content. Perhaps, in certain cases, this power still existed and was inherent in them, in particular, in those times when (as in the era of the VII Ecumenical Council) the Church had not yet established deliberate consecration, and therefore associated all the power of iconography with the content of the image. Then the icon was directly consecrated by the acceptance of the Church, by the power of the effectiveness of the image itself and by the hieroglyph of the name with the direct power of the latter. 125 However, now that the dividing line has already appeared and we, along with the image, also have a special consecration of the icon and comprehend its power, this line cannot be erased and obscured again. And therefore we must say that not every image, not every icon has the power of iconicity, but only a consecrated one, and therefore it is impossible to show iconic veneration to an unconsecrated icon. The difference between a natural image and a secret image, between a painting and an icon, still remains qualitative. Consecration mysteriously changes the nature of the icon, gives it such meaning and power, puts it in such a relationship to the prototype, which the image as such does not have, only by the force of the natural connection of the image with the prototype. This action of consecration can be expressed as follows: the consecrated icon becomes a place of presence in the image of the Depicted One, and in this sense it is identified with him. The consecrated icon of Christ is for us Christ himself in His image, just as He is present for us in His Name. The icon is the place of the appearance of Christ, our prayerful meeting with Him. When we pray before the icon, we directly pray to Him; kissing her, we kiss him; By bowing to her, we worship Him. This in no way diminishes His sitting at the right hand of the Father and His omnipresence, as well as His closeness to us in spirit, apart from any icon. But He deigned to appear to us in a visible image on His holy icon. This is where the question arises about the relationship between the icon and the Holy Gifts, or more precisely, the presence of the Lord in His icon to His presence in the Holy Gifts. And this question arises in all its severity in the theology of the iconoclasts. As is known, the iconoclasts, denying the icon of Christ, opposed it as the only true icon of St. Gifts, the Eucharistic body and blood of Christ (which is why the consecration of the Holy Gifts receives from them the meaning of the consecration of this icon). This perverse idea 126 was rightly refuted by the fathers of the VII Ecumenical Council (D. 232–4). Indeed, although a certain rapprochement can be made between the icon of Christ and the Holy Gifts, it only provides the basis for their distinction and opposition. What they have in common is that in St. icon, and in the Holy Gifts we have the appearance of the Lord on earth, but, however, completely different. In contrast to His presence among the disciples during His life, the Lord after His Resurrection and Ascension only appears to the disciples, and the image and nature of this appearance differs according to its purpose. Otherwise, the Lord appears, before His Ascension, to the disciples whom He allowed to see and touch His body, and otherwise He appeared in heaven to the Apostle Paul, who heard His voice (DA 9, 3–7). Otherwise, he appears mysteriously in St. Gifts for the communion of believers, and otherwise in the holy icon for prayerful presence. From the fact that the icon and the Holy Gifts equally turn out to be, so to speak, an image of the appearance of Christ, the identity of both of these phenomena does not at all follow. Namely, in the Holy Gifts the Lord is present essentially or really (praesentia realis), however, in addition to His image, mysteriously. (Therefore, their transformation into an icon of Christ, which we have in the Catholic adoration of the Holy Gifts, is already a violent abuse of them.) On the contrary, in the icon we have a visible image of Christ, but without reality, without essential being. The power of the Holy Gifts is their identity and real unity with the body of the Savior, and, due to the inseparability of His being, with Himself. The power of St. The icon lies in the identity of the mental image in the icon with its Proto-Image, but only as an image, and not as reality. True, this image, in order to be consolidated, needs matter (boards, paints, tiles, marble), in which it exists for us. However, matter only accepts and gives place to the image, but it itself is not the image, which in the icon, although a material thing, is ideally present 127 (therefore, when it is erased and becomes indistinguishable, then the icon is abolished, the board remains). Matter here has the purpose only of a pictorial means, which is why its substance can be different. Of course, as the place of the appearance of the Lord, both the icon and the Holy Gifts are venerable (which is why we pray before the Holy Gifts at the liturgy). But this does not eliminate the significant difference between them. And one can say (which Catholics do not feel) that one cannot pray to the Holy Gifts the way one can pray to an icon. Praying before the icon and contemplating the image, we ascend in thought to the Lord himself; When we pray to the Holy Gifts, we have the Lord himself before us, as if we no longer need to mentally ascend to Him, and yet we do not have His image before us. He gives Himself as heavenly food, heavenly bread for eating and internal union with Him. Therefore, the worship of St. The gift is both greater and lesser than the veneration of an icon, and generally cannot be equated with the latter. According to this, although we can talk about the presence of the Lord both in the Holy Gifts and in the icon, however, in a different sense: in the Holy Gifts His presence becomes effectively felt in connection with Him through communion, and in the icon it is recognized through prayer, the Lord approaches the one praying to Him in His icon. Accordingly, the consecration of the Holy Gifts differs from the consecration of an icon not only, so to speak, in its specific weight - for the first is the greatest sacrament, the second is only a secret action - but also in its meaning: in the sacrament of the Eucharist, bread and wine are transformed into the very body and blood of Christ, but in the consecration of an icon there is absolutely no transformation of substance or at all a change in the essence of the icon, which remains unchanged. But in it, the authority of the Church identifies the image with the Prototype. In this sense, one can, perhaps, even talk about the transformation of an image drawn by a human hand into an image that is truly the image of the Prototype. “Matter” is not substance, but a man-made image made by man. Through consecration, it becomes not made by hands, and is likened to the image of the Savior, imprinted by His will on the canvas for King Abgar. 128 By the power of this sanctifying mystery, which finds its dogmatic basis in this tradition about the miraculous image of Christ, we have in the icon a special image of the appearance of Christ on earth after His Ascension, along with His sacramental appearance in the Holy Gifts. In addition to purely spiritual communion with Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the Lord allows Himself to be tasted in the Divine Eucharist and to be seen in His image on the icon, which has a special authenticity and effectiveness of the image of Christ. In the sense of such effectiveness, every consecrated icon is fundamentally miraculous, since the power of God’s presence is inherent in it, although it is not always tangibly manifested. And only in the sense of special perceptibility, manifestation of this power, which is united with this or that icon by the will of God, are icons glorified as miraculous. Naturally, in the resolution of the VII Ecumenical Council, which, as we have seen, does not yet know the consecration of an icon as a special final act, we do not have a directly expressed teaching about the power of the icon. Here only the significance of the icon is indicated for the memory of prototypes and for awakening love for them. 129 The Council of Trent, as noted above, further emphasized the commemorative meaning, but even more decisively rejected the power of the icon as a place of the special presence of God. And this is a step back in the dogma of icon veneration, essentially overthrowing it. It becomes even more significant if we take into account that the Council of Trent no longer had to take into account the accusations of idolatry that the iconoclasts brought against the Orthodox. In any case, on this point (as opposed to all the others, where the council with excessive harshness confirmed the entire medieval Catholic dogma), he quietly made significant concessions to the Protestants, and thereby weakened the veneration of icons in the Catholic Church. In order to completely reject accusations of idolatry, the fathers of the VII Ecumenical Council are looking for dogmatic expression for that special way of venerating icons, which would distinguish it from the worship of God himself. The dogmatic terms used here turned out to be: service, λατρεία, in relation to God, and reverent worship, τιμητική προσκύνησίς, in relation to the icon. “Kissing, veneration and worship, but in no way that true service, which, according to our faith, befits only the divine nature, because the honor given to the icon relates to its prototype, and the one who worships the icon worships the hypostasis of the person depicted on it” (D. 285). The difference here is thus confined to the ideality of the image as opposed to the reality of the prototype. However, this consideration can also be supplemented by the fact that the image itself on the icon receives some reality, namely, it is the place of the gracious presence of Christ, listening to prayer to Him. And it is precisely this that positively substantiates that “reverent worship” (through kissing, worship, lighting candles, censing), which is characteristic of an icon, but in relation to a religious painting or icon before consecration, of course, is impossible. Reverent worship 130 has its basis in the connection of the image with the Prototype, their well-known identity, but the difference between the image and the Prototype limits it, distinguishing it from the latrine worship of the Prototype itself. Latric worship also befits the Holy Gifts as the mysterious manifestation of the Lord Himself, but for accuracy it must be added that the concept of latria as divine worship, which remained undivided at the VII Ecumenical Council, allows for further differences within its own limits. Latria, rendered to the Holy Gifts, of course, still differs from the worship of the Lord Himself (cf. Matthew 28:17: “and having seen Him, they worshiped Him”; Rev. 1:7: “Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see Him, and all the tribes of the earth will mourn before Him”). However, this difference lies beyond the scope of the doctrine of the icon. If the correct relationship between the image and the Proto-Image is violated, then on one side the result is simply a religious painting or a type of portraiture of a subjective-anthropomorphic nature, which does not have objectivity and power, and on the other side - fetishism, superstition, bordering on idolatry. An idol can be considered as a well-known fable in images 131 (according to the Apostle Paul, 1 Cor. 8, 4: “We know that an idol is nothing in the world”), but both a real icon and another thing become an idol, as a result of an idolatrous attitude (according to the words of the Apostle John: “Children, keep yourselves from idols,” 1 John 5, 21). We have idolization when we misunderstand the icon and exaggerate it. In the icon we have the place of the presence of God for our prayer to Him, but if we overly generalize and spread the idea of ​​this presence, freeing it from all restrictions, we identify the image with the Prototype and thereby turn the icon into a fetish, that is, into a thing in which God lives and which is therefore identified with Him. This leads to superstition and idolatry, of which the iconoclasts accused (in some cases not without reason) the icon-worshipers. 132 No matter how highly one evaluates the meaning of the icon, its meaning is still limited; namely, it serves for a prayerful meeting with the Divine. Moreover, such a meeting precisely through the icon is by no means a necessary condition for prayer, but is only an auxiliary means, without which it is also possible to pray. This was, in particular, all Old Testament prayer. Therefore, modern icon-deniers, although, of course, by this denial they damage the right faith and the fullness of truth, they do not remain deprived of prayer only because they do not pray in front of the icon. To assert the opposite would also mean falling into fetishism and idolatry, considering that prayer does not exist at all outside the icon. A person can turn to God and communicate with him directly in the spirit, for he is a spirit, albeit an incarnate one, and this spiritual side of prayer in general constitutes a necessary condition for it, both before the icon and in addition to the latter. So, the basis of icon veneration is the Image of God, revealed in creation - in the world and in man - and restored in Christ. Christ is true God and true Man, and the icon of Christ is the single image of God and Man in the God-Man. This is the basis of icon painting. The basis of icon veneration is the effective power, graciously imparted to the icon of Christ, which becomes the place of His ideal presence and, in this sense, the living image of Christ. Christ, having retired from the world in the Ascension, retained a connection with it and appears in it in two ways: essentially, although sacramentally, in the Eucharist and ideally in the Holy Spirit. To your icon. The dogma of icon veneration must be understood in connection with the dogma of the Eucharist in the sense that both testify to the living connection of Christ with the world, as well as His real presence in it, moreover, twofold: in His image and in the substance of His body - in the icon and the Eucharist. The possibility of icon-making lies in art, the power of which is invested, along with the image of God, in man: man is a creative being, who is given the ability to see the intelligent world and capture what he sees in images. And every object of creativity is an icon of Christ, understood in the broadest sense, as the face of Christ in the world, in the events of His human, all-human life, Christ in His humanity. The task of the art of icon painting is primarily and directly pictorial, the creation of images. But it cannot limit itself to this, just as art cannot limit itself, which has a calling not only to proclaim an ideal world, its heavenly state, but also to transform the world, to be projectively active, theurgic. 133 The Divine Eucharist, the transformation of world substance into the body and blood of Christ, has not only human, but also cosmic significance, 134 by it and in it the transformation of the world is accomplished in the corporeality of its substance on the way to its final transformation. But even in iconography, which is accompanied by sanctification, the mysterious identification of the image with the Prototype, Christ traces His image in the world and man, and it will shine in him in the fullness of time. The meaning and power of the Eucharist and the icon are one and the same, since here Christ, having conquered the world and expelled its prince from it, imprints His image in it until it is imagined in all creation. Thus, the icon is not only a saving fact of God’s economy (as St. Theodore the Studite defines it, I. 135), but also its outline in the world (“project”). This is the eschatological meaning of the icon, which is clear in essence, but difficult to reveal in content. Therefore, he who denies St. icon, thereby belittling the power and effectiveness of the incarnation and opposing it. This is exactly what St. asserted. fathers regarding iconoclasm. This is the general and fundamental idea of ​​the Church. The dogmatic dispute about icon veneration focused primarily on the question of the icon of Christ, in connection with which, however, the question of icons of other content was resolved. In this sense, the definition of the VII Ecumenical Council legitimizes, in addition to the icon of Christ, also the icons of the Mother of God, angels and all saints. What is the dogmatic basis for all these icons? And first of all, for the icon of the Holy Trinity, in particular for the icon of God the Father, which, although not provided for by a direct decree of the VII Ecumenical Council, is nevertheless legitimized by church practice? Is it possible to have an icon of God the Father, who reveals himself only in other hypostases and who himself remains transcendent (“Beginning”) even in the depths of the Holy Trinity? Obviously, icons of such content cannot exist separately and independently. The Father, if at all, can be depicted, then only in relation to the Son, through the Son and in connection with Him, or on the icon of the Holy Trinity. If sometimes God is depicted as an old man, then here we have a humanoid image of a single, personal, trinitarian God (Eogim), 135 and there is no reason to see here an icon of the Father (however, usually this image is not an icon, but only a wall painting). This human-likeness of the images of the Creator-God (moreover, without a direct relation to the incarnation of God) in itself clearly indicates that the image of God was inscribed in man at his creation, or, conversely, that the human image is inherent in God. The humanity of the image of the Creator is evidence of pre-eternal Humanity, or of Sophia, the Wisdom of God, the eternal icon of God in God Himself, who with her, Wisdom, creates the world. Therefore, the “Sex Day” is essentially a Sophia icon. But this same idea about the divinity of the human image is also evidenced by the direct and undoubted image of God the Father together with the Son on the icon of the Holy Trinity: the Father is depicted here in the form of an old man. What does this depiction of the Father as a man mean, although He did not become man? The simplest, but at the same time clearly unsatisfactory explanation can be seen in the fact that this is done, so to speak, by attraction, to testify to the similarity of the Father with the Son, who reveals the Father. But such a consideration would still not justify this incarnation of the Father on the icon, and if this were only so, then in this case one should simply avoid the icon of the Holy Trinity, but it seems to us that here we have something else. This human image of the Father, as in the Sixth Day, testifies that man was created as a living icon of the Divine, and humanity is the direct image of God, as evidenced by the vision of the prophet Daniel (Dan. 7:9), before the incarnation, as well as the vision of the prophet Ezekiel (Ezekiel 1, cl.). However, this Humanity inherent in the Holy Trinity is specifically revealed only in the Son, who already has the individual human image of Jesus, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham. The Father does not have such a personal image except through the Son. And only in relation to this image is the first person of the Holy Trinity depicted as the Father of the Son. Strictly speaking, what is depicted is not the human personality of the Father, which does not exist, but Humanity, as the image of the Holy Trinity, individually perceived by the Son. In this sense, we can truly say that the icon of the Father is an image of the Son in the Father, whom he revealed to people. Therefore, if one can see an iconographic “attraction” in the human image of the Father, then this latter is not an external way out of a hopeless situation, but an internally justified solution to it. The Icon of the Holy Trinity also has another version; it depicts the Epiphany to Abraham in the form of three angels. To understand this image, we must remember that the image of angels is a human image, and the icon of the Holy Trinity in the form of three angels 136 is, with inevitable features, still a humanoid image of the Divine. In particular, God the Father is also depicted here in a humanoid form as the central angel. At the same time, although the hypostasis of the Father, transcendent to the world, is depicted in human form, the Holy Spirit is not depicted hypostatically in human form, either separately or even on the icons of the Holy Trinity. The only exception is the Rublevskaya icon, but in it the main emphasis lies not on the personal character of each of the three angels, but on their tripartite relationship - three are depicted in unity, and not three, and only the features of different hypostases are outlined. On the icon of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit is depicted only emblematically or allegorically in the form of a dove, as well as in the form of tongues of fire on the icon of the descent of the Holy Spirit. Meanwhile, for the depiction of the Holy Spirit on the icon, it would seem that there is no such fundamental obstacle that exists for the depiction of God the Father in view of His transcendence. On the contrary, the Holy Spirit, although not incarnated, is sent into the world and inhabits people. How can we understand this absence of His own icon? Do we not have His indirect, mediated image in general in the faces of saints, spirit-bearing men, and first of all, and in an exclusive sense, in the icon of She who is truly the Spirit-Bearer after the Annunciation? Isn't the Mother of God secretly an icon of the Third Hypostasis in human form? Nevertheless, there is no direct image of the Third Hypostasis: the wisdom of the Church eliminates this image. In this regard, there is an analogy between the absence of an icon of the Holy Spirit and, in essence, also the absence of the Holy Spirit’s own holiday. True, we have the “Day of the Spirits” on the morning of St. Pentecost is a replenishment of this holiday. 137 Being commemorated, as it were, emblematically, He remains in the shadow of the feast of Pentecost, even without having its own service, this, so to speak, liturgical icon. 138 In this mystery of God’s gaze one can see a similarity to the Old Testament prohibition of icon images. The latter did not at all signify the inadmissibility of icons in general, but only meant that the time and timing for the appearance of the human image in the God-Man had not yet arrived. Doesn’t this prohibition also mean that the revelation of the Holy Spirit is not in His gifts, but in the Hypostasis itself, and belongs only to the future age? Are St. depicted on icons? angels, disembodied spirits? Although in the resolution of the council this issue was resolved in the affirmative (obviously, already by virtue of the Old Testament permission for their depiction), however, no dogmatic basis was given for this. 139 Imaginability of St. angels is based not on their imaginary corporeality, which is generally not characteristic of disembodied spirits, but on their co-humanity. These icons are not images of their non-existent bodies, but symbolic images of their spiritual nature, as if translating its properties into the language of forms and colors. Therefore, in their meaning, the icons of angels, as well as the Holy Trinity, in particular, God the Father, differ from the icon of Christ and the saints in that there is actually no image of the body as a container of the spirit, but the spirit itself is depicted in images of the corporeal world. Humanoid images of angels testify to the fact that both angels and man are created in the same image of God, and, being connected by this unity of the Prototype, the angels in their co-humanity are depicted humanoid, as if borrowing the image for their appearance to man from man. The special attributes of angels - wings, circles of fire, etc. - also have a conditionally symbolic (and, of course, by no means naturalistic) character and find their basis in biblical images of the appearance of angels (vision of etc. Isaiah ch. 6, vision of St. Ezekiel ch. I, Revelation of St. John). In general, the content of the icon cannot be exhausted or limited by the “descriptibility” of the body, sensually perceived, about which so much has been said in the debate about icon veneration. Such bodily describability is by no means the only source of images, which can also have spiritual and symbolic meaning, and therefore have a different origin. And in this, once again and from a new side, the weak side of that teaching, common to both defenders and opponents of the icon, is revealed, that the spirit was considered by them to be indescribable in the images of the human world. Meanwhile, in addition to direct describability, there is also a symbolic and symbolic meaning of the form and images of this world. True, the necessary link between the spiritual and physical world is still a person who has a “described” body, and at the same time a spirit, the image of which is the body. Therefore, he can find images to symbolically commemorate spiritual beings, which in the proper sense do not have a body. This is the essence of St. angels who are depicted in bodily images in a symbolic-commemorative sense, but not descriptive (which those who attribute thin, “gaseous” bodies to angels want to give to these images). The same is generally the symbolism of the spiritual world, depicted in the images and forms of the physical world with its space (and the distinction in it of top and bottom, gum and neck: “sit at the right hand of the Father”). This symbolism is included in the content of many icons along with human images and objects of the visible world in general. These are many icons that can be defined as dogmatic. They are not simple allegories, although they are not “descriptive” either. They are distinguished by their inherent symbolic realism, in which there is fusion, concreteness of image and idea. 140 Such, for example, is the icon of St. Sophia of both the Yaroslavl and especially the Novgorod type (a fiery angel on the throne, with the Mother of God and the Forerunner on the sides, the Savior and the intelligent sky above). This icon, firstly, is not only a theological scheme or allegory, but an intelligent vision, a revelation in artistic and mystical contemplation. Secondly, the fiery angel is therefore not an allegorical, but a symbolic image of the pre-eternal Spiritual Humanity in the Divinity, which is revealed in the created world in man: in Christ as the God-man and in the Mother of God and the Forerunner as realizing the pinnacle of humanity and therefore being its representatives, and, finally, in the angelic world. And the entire composition is an icon of the Wisdom of God, uncreated and created, of pre-eternal humanity and created humanity in their unity and connection. 141 Of course, it is easy to fall from these dizzying heights of contemplation into abstract schematism. For symbolism, not sufficiently experienced and sincere, sometimes turns entirely or partially into allegorism and schematism, by analogy with how realism in the depiction of what is described turns into naturalism. Both allegorism and naturalism are equally phenomena of decadence in the work of the icon, however, associated not with its essence, but with the weakness of its creators. At the same time, it goes without saying that the sacred name, accomplished through the consecration of the icon, in all these icons retains the same meaning as in the icon of Christ and the saints. The need for such dogmatic icons is sufficiently justified by their origin: their inspiration is born from divine wisdom and vision of God. And is it possible to quench a spirit and destroy a prophecy? Will not the answer to this be the words of Moses, spoken by him to Joshua, when he turned to the prophet: “My lord Moses, forbid them” (to prophesy). Moses’ words were: “Are you jealous for me? Oh, that all the Lord’s people would be prophets, that the Lord would send His Spirit upon them!” (Num. 11, 28–29). In connection with this, another question must be resolved: can new icons with dogmatic content or new versions of existing icons still appear, or, on the contrary, are their possibilities limited and all exhausted by the existing icon-painting canon, which should be observed by the Old Believers? The answer to this question leaves no doubt: yes, they can. For God does not give the Spirit by measure, and the Church, which is equal to itself in all eras of its existence, never remains deprived of Him. This does not mean, of course, that it is permissible to invent icons without connection with tradition, without regard or - which is especially common among us - simply without knowing the “original”. Any movement in church life, as in art, takes place only under the condition of such a connection and on the basis of it. 142 Innovation in an icon must therefore be spiritually compelled by religious contemplation and creatively justified by artistic vision. Therefore, it equally cannot be a matter of rational allegorism, as well as of icon-painting (“god-made”) craft, but represents a combination of religious insight and artistic inspiration, and such a combination is, of course, an extremely rare gift. But in this case, it is precisely that it is fully revealed that icon painting is an art - a religious art. Service of Rev. Andrei Rublev, who for us embodies the ideal image of an icon painter, as well as all those who follow him on this path, is religious artistry as a deliberate gift of God and a special church service. Along with symbolic icons, there are icons that have their basis in the describability of man, and their content in images of saints. The general basis for the icon of man, which was prohibited in the Old Testament, but permitted in the New Testament, is that the image of God was restored in the man Christ, who revealed the true human image in His humanity. And therefore, all human images, since they are not obscured by sin, are images of this Image, the same Face is imprinted in all of them, all icons of saints are, in a certain sense, the many-sided icon of Christ, in them “Christ is imagined” (Gal. 4:19). Saints are “gods,” as St. John of Damascus. 143 The saints are glorified by the power of Christ's atoning sacrifice and union with Him. It is remarkable that the icons depict and venerate not only New Testament saints, but also Old Testament saints, who were forbidden to be depicted in the Old Testament. The burial place of Moses was even deliberately hidden from the Jews (Deut. 34:6). Their human images also shone in the light of the resurrection of Christ and the power of His incarnation. And just as we cannot separate Christ from His humanity, we, considering the holy friends of God, also worship their icons. An icon of a saint is neither a photograph nor, in general, a naturalistic image in which an immediate and external resemblance is sought. It is not even an artistic portrait, which still strives to give a natural face, albeit an ideal one. The icon depicts the face of a glorified, spirit-bearing saint, not as he was on earth, but in his glorified, heavenly radiance (which is externally symbolized by a halo). But since this glorified spirit-bearing flesh remains beyond us and for our vision, the image takes on a typological and symbolic character, although it retains certain individual similarities. It is this stylized image that is fixed in the original, which expresses the type of image of the saint that has developed in church tradition, his hieroglyph. In this sense, a portrait (or painting) and an icon of a saint are different in purpose. The first seeks to express a natural, individual face, the second - a supernatural, glorified face. Here the same difference is reproduced that exists between a picture (religious or historical) of Christ and His icon. For complete clarity, it should also be added that in the icons of saints, of course, not only their bodies are depicted - in the most characteristic features, usually indicated in the “original” - but also their souls, or rather animate bodies, for a body does not exist without the spirit living in it and apart from it. During the era of the struggle for icons, both sides, both iconoclasts and icon-worshipers, agreed in the recognition that the spirit is generally indescribable, and only the body is depictable. They applied this idea (some pro, others contra) to the icon of Christ, and therefore to the icon of every saint. But just as we rejected this idea when applied to the icon of Christ, we also reject it - and on the same grounds - when applied to icons of saints. It is necessary to completely overcome and eliminate the prejudice that the spirit cannot be depicted, for the body is the image of the spirit living in it, its living, miraculous icon. Therefore, saying, for example: icon of St. Sergius, we do not want to say that this is an icon only of his soulless body, but an icon of his full human image, that is, his spirit living in the body. A soulless body is no longer a body, but a corpse. For an icon of a saint, its naming is of significant importance, which is used to complete the image, according to the above. This naming, externally expressed in the inscription of the name on the icon, is secretly and effectively accomplished by the Church through the consecration of the icon, which establishes the special grace-filled presence of the saint in his icon. For the consecration of icons of saints, there is a special rite, which expresses the dogmatic basis for their veneration. Here we can say a few words about the difference between the icon of the saint and his relics. Both are places of special grace-filled presence of the saint, but in a different sense. In the icon, the saint is graciously present to receive prayer in his image, by the power of his connection and ideal identity with the prototype. On the contrary, the saint is also present in his relics to receive prayer through the power of the real connection of his spirit with his body. Here, in fact, there is no image of the saint, because his remains may be completely devoid of the fullness of the bodily image (even an insignificant particle of holy relics is already equivalent to their whole), but there is the real substance of his body. The power of the relics lies in the fact that the body of the saint, captured by his spirit, retains a connection with him even after death, so that in a mortal form it has the power of immortality, and in the image of dishonor and corruption it already has in itself the beginning of future glory. Nevertheless, the relics are not an image, or an icon, of a saint. The relics, in a certain sense, are greater than it, because there can be an indefinite number of icons of a saint, but only one relic (although, however, they can be broken into pieces). But the relics are smaller than the icon, because they do not have the ideal image of the saint. 144 There is a well-known analogy (however, only within certain limits) between the relationship of the icon of a saint to his relics and the relationship of the icon of the Savior to the Holy Gifts (which the iconoclasts, as we already know, mistakenly took for His only icon). The Holy Gifts also contain the body and blood of Christ mysteriously, that is, without the image that is inherent in the icon. Each particle of the Holy Gifts in the sacrament of communion imparts to the communicant the partaking of the body and blood of Christ, just as each particle of St. relics contains all the relics. But, of course, the difference remains in full force that, while the body of Christ is sacramentally taught at all times and on all altars, not limited by either place or time, St. relics are available only in a certain place, cannot be multiplied, and sometimes cannot be preserved at all. A special place among the icons belongs to the icon of the Mother of God. The general basis for Her depiction on the icon remains the same as for the saints: it depicts the saved and redeemed humanity of Christ, revealed, glorified and deified in Him. In the resolution of the VII Ecumenical Council, the icon of the Mother of God is not particularly highlighted; it is mentioned when listing other icons only along with others; the issue of it was not particularly highlighted in the conciliar judgment (D. 239–40). Meanwhile, the practice of church icon veneration strongly distinguishes it. First of all, the icon of the Mother of God occupies the very first place after the icon of Christ, both in the number of its different types, and in the special intensity of its veneration. Here we cannot limit ourselves to those general considerations that can be given regarding icons of saints. The Mother of God, of course, belongs to the holy humanity of the Church of Christ, however, not as one of its members, but as its Mother and Queen, the most honorable cherub and the most glorious seraphim without comparison, superior to all creation, and its leader. Moreover, the humanity of the Mother of God is the humanity of Her Son, with Whom She is inseparable by His birth. This inseparability is expressed in the dominant type of Mother of God icon, namely in the image of the Virgin Mary with the Child. It is difficult to even say about this icon of the Mother of God whether it is an icon of Christ - for His image is also present in it, or of the Mother of God, to whom the icon is directly dedicated. More precisely, here we have the image of the Mother of God, or the Man of God, in which the Word of God takes on the human nature of the Mother of God and pre-eternal humanity is united with earthly human nature, Divine Sophia with created Sophia. 145 In this sense - the unity of the Divine and created nature - the icon of the Mother of God with the Child belongs to the Sophia. On the other hand, the Virgin Mary is the most holy vessel of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit-Bearer, and the icon of the Mother of God, especially without the Child, is the human image of the Holy Spirit in the sense that for him Her human face is completely transparent. She is not His incarnation, but the highest manifestation in the human face. Finally, Her icon is thereby also an icon of all holy, spirit-bearing humanity, an icon of the Church. This idea is especially clearly expressed in the icon of Sophia from the Kiev version, which depicts the Church of Wisdom with the Mother of God, surrounded by prophets and apostles, i.e. the Church. In connection with this image of the sophia in the icon of the Mother of God there is another important variety of this type, namely Her cosmic icon, in which, through the Mother of God and in Her person, the sophia of all creation is depicted: these are icons of the Mother of God with cosmic attributes (“It is worthy to eat”, “The Burning Bush”, “Theotokos in the Fields”, hanging in the cell of Elder Ambrose, “About You” rejoices”, etc.). But despite this Sophian, pan-human and cosmic significance 146 of the image of the Mother of God on the icon, it also retains a personal character: it is an icon not only of the Queen of heaven and earth and all creation, but also of the Virgin Mary, who has a certain personality and her own personal destinies on earth (which is especially clearly manifested in the icons of the Mother of God feasts). How can this most holy Sophian Being be depicted, having its own human face, for which, of course, there are no lifetime images or even indications about them? In terms of her humanity, the Mother of God is more accessible to depiction than the God-man. Her icon is naturally warmer, less conventionally hieroglyphic, than the icon of the Savior. But, of course, Her face cannot be conveyed by means of a naturalistic image. The icon of the Mother of God is a vision that is given to the insight of the icon painter, and not to an individual master alone, but in the Church, in church tradition. 147 Having mysteriously emerged, these faces live in church tradition, in the icon-painting canon as some guiding types in which the icon painter sees his own vision, expressing it in his execution of the established original. In the church iconography of the Mother of God there is absolutely no place for the depiction of any woman in her natural image, no matter how beautiful it may be. This is what Western icon painting is guilty of, even in its best examples, in which one can sometimes feel a “beautiful lady.” 148 Of course, in the beauty and purity of a girl’s or woman’s face, an icon painter can discern individual features of that Heavenly Face that he seeks to express in an icon, but this is still an insight through this earthly face and for it. This impression can creatively enrich the artist, but this face itself should not appear to him in a natural way. Therefore, in the icon face of the Ever-Virgin and the Mother of God, the feminine nature is not felt at all, which does not, however, diminish the feminine principle in it. For Her Ever-Virginity, although it is united with the feminine principle, nevertheless lies on the other side of sex in the carnal sense. As a result, in the image of the Mother of God no place can be given for sensuality associated with naturalism, although there should also be no aridity associated with schematism. Icons of the Mother of God should be characterized by special warmth and beauty; the language of colors and forms here should be especially flexible, delicate and rich in shades. In Her icon, the world itself and all of humanity seeks to express its beauty with all the richness of its palette. For beauty is a tangible manifestation of the Holy Spirit, therefore the image of the Spirit-Bearer is adorned with special beauty. Corresponding to this is the variety and variety of icons of the Mother of God that the Church possesses, and it is constantly increasing due to the fact that new types of Mother of God icons appear, arising from insensitive changes in the original, sometimes, according to human understanding, purely accidental. But these icons, becoming “venerable” or being glorified as “miraculous”, mark the beginning of new types. Therefore, in the iconography of the Mother of God, in the presence of the richest icon canon, the creative movement is especially noticeable, which enriches it, one might say, constantly. It is appropriate here, in application to a particular case, to pose the question already answered above in a general form: can there be new icons of the Mother of God? The answer here should sound even more confident and self-evident: yes, they can. But at the same time, the requirements of religious art remain unchanged: spiritual insight and artistic contemplation in their inseparability. Naturally, the icon of the Mother of God provides the greatest scope for inspiration of religious mastery. That is why it is the most favorite area of ​​icon painting. Based on the above, another peculiar question arises: although an exact account is impossible here, it is possible to express, as indisputable, the general impression that the “miraculous” and “manifest” icons of the Mother of God are, in general, more numerous and common than any other icons, not excluding the icon of the Savior: it is enough to look at the calendar to be convinced of this. Of course, we cannot give an explanation for the will of God revealed here, but we should not ignore this fact in its meaning for us. The Lord appears to us first of all in the Divine Eucharist, which is, of course, the main and more important image of His presence with us than His icon. Further, the Lord reveals himself and appears to us in St. The Gospel, which is His verbal icon, as in His most holy Name. Therefore, His icon is only one of the images of His appearance, which, naturally, cannot receive the meaning of a single one, or even cannot become on par with the Eucharist. 149 In St. In gifts we have the miraculous presence of the Lord, and they, in a certain sense, can be likened to the miraculous icon of the Savior, they are an image of His descent into the world after the Ascension, indicated by Himself. And at the same time, His Ascension, meaning His departure from the world and transcendence to it, sets the boundary of His closeness to us in the icon. And yet, it is precisely in the sense of the special perceptibility of such closeness that the icon is called miraculous (for miracle-working in the proper sense, there is only an external and, moreover, not permanent manifestation of it). The perceptibility of the presence of Christ in the world in His appearances, therefore, is doubly distributed between His Eucharistic presence realiter and in the icon idealiter, and this division and distinction is irreducible. Of course, the Lord is present in His image in every consecrated icon, and icon veneration is based on this grace-filled presence of His in the image. But the image and measure of this presence in the icon is still determined by His transcendence to the world, which is not overcome by His ideal presence in His image. He becomes immanent to the world only in the Holy Mysteries, in which He descends to earth while remaining in heaven. This is one side of the question, but there is also another: why are there so many miraculous icons of the Mother of God? And what does this miraculousness of theirs mean? It expresses the special presence and closeness of the Mother of God, as if Her dwelling in the icon. This does not change the ideal character of the icon and does not turn it into a fetish (in the above sense), but gives it special objectivity and power: it becomes not only a general place of grace-filled presence for prayer, but also an appearance of the Mother of God, which is something more than the first (as is narrated in the lives of the saints about the appearances of the Mother of God). This abundance of miraculous icons of the Mother of God contains a sign of her closeness to the world, with which She lives the same life and grieves it with sorrows. In the vision of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos, St. To Andrei She cries for the world, but in his vision of the heavenly paradise She is absent from heaven, for she temporarily descends into the world. This closeness corresponds to maternal love, which is inherent in the heart of all creation, and the feeling of this closeness is noted with special warmth in the veneration of Her icon. However, the following puzzling question may arise here: wasn’t the Mother of God, resurrected by her Son, ascended to heaven by him and became transcendental to the world, just like He? However, this ascension of the Mother of God does not mean her removal from the world (“in Your Dormition you did not forsake the world,” 150 – sings the Church), but only Her glorification. Just as Her resurrection by the Lord is not Her own resurrection, so the ascension of Her body to heaven is not an ascension, or, if it is, then in a different sense than the Ascension of Christ. The Lord ascended Himself, by the power of God, by the Holy Spirit, and sat down at the right hand of the Father, as one of the Holy Trinity. The Mother of God, sitting at the right hand of the Son, is a glorified creature, but She does not dwell in the bosom of the Divinity. She is completely adored, partaking of the divine life, so that the word is fulfilled in Her: there will be all God in all, 151 - but She remains with the world and in the world: “in You, O Gracious One, every creature rejoices.” 152 Therefore, between the Mother of God and the world there is not only a connection, but a direct ontological unity: there is no being closer to the world, more cosmic, just as there is no closer to humanity, more humane than the Most Pure Mother of God. She reveals this closeness in Her miraculous icons. Miracle-working icons of saints should be accepted in a similar sense. And they belong to the created world, although they have gone beyond earthly existence; and they belong to the human race and are connected with it by bonds of love and, as friends of God, intercede for man and show their grace-filled presence to their fellows in their revered icons. Of course, the line between a miraculous and a non-miraculous icon is not absolute, but relative, and not fundamental, but only factual. Every consecrated icon, that is, a worthy image of a face, called the Church, is already an icon, and as such, it is also miraculous. Miracle-working consists in the gracious presence of the prototype in the icon, whether it is revealed or not. One can even say that every icon, in front of which one fervently and sincerely prays, so that the closeness to us of what is depicted on it becomes palpable, is already miraculous for the one praying, and the personal shrine of each God-lover is filled with such miraculous icons for him. And the same can be said regarding the church icon for those praying in a given church. But if this very feeling unites the entire local Church, moreover, over the course of centuries, and is strengthened by miraculous signs from this icon, then it is popularly glorified as miraculous. In the resolution of the VII Ecumenical Council, as in the creation of St. Fathers, another meaning of the icon is invariably indicated, namely narrative-memory. Undoubtedly, within certain limits, the icon also represents a religious picture, which speaks with its content and is an indispensable means of visual teaching of the truths of faith (which is of particular importance for countries with poor literacy rates). This is especially applicable to images of various events of both general gospel and church history (icons of holidays, icons of the lives of saints, etc.) It would, of course, be one-sided and downright wrong to reduce the entire essence of the icon to this, abstracting from its prayerful meaning. But one cannot help but recognize the right to exist in the icon and this figurativeness, since there is generally a place for fine art in the Church. After all, icon painting is based on the depictability and describability of Divine existence in the images of the world. Therefore, for an icon, not only consecration is important, but also the image itself, which should serve as evidence of the spiritual world. We can say that in this last sense, for the existence of an icon, it, containing the image itself, is equivalent to consecration, insofar as the latter contains a name. On this basis, an erroneous, incorrect name or consecration of a false or imaginary image is possible, and in general, not every image is subject to consecration. In addition, there remains room for the independent existence in the Church of images of divine life and images of sacred events, which are not at all intended for consecration and prayer, and yet are made specifically for the Church, differing from paintings of a secular nature, although even with religious content. This is wall painting in a church, which is something like an artistic sermon, teaching in colors and forms. Church painting therefore occupies a middle place between an icon - because it is not an icon - and a painting - because it is intended, if not for prayer, then for contemplation of God. Its content is wider than the actual icon writing, because it can include not purely icon-based, although religious themes of a biblical or mystical nature (the creation of the world, the Fall, the flood, the procession of Israel in the desert, Christ and the sinner, Christ with Martha and Mary, etc.), church-historical and church-domestic (Ecumenical Councils, the baptism of Rus', etc.) and even religious, cultural and historical (such as, for example, images, although only in the temple vestibule, of pagan philosophers, “Christians before Christ” - Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Sibyls, etc.). This also includes a special church ornament of a symbolic nature (vines, fruits, flowers, trees), which originates from the Old Testament church: “The likenesses of cucumbers and blossoming flowers were carved on the cedars inside the church, and cherubs and palm trees and blossoming flowers were carved (on the doors), and overlaid with gold carvings” (1 Kings 6:18, 35). Ornament as part of the whole - the painting of the church - is also part of the tradition, but of course even less as a fixed and absolute given, but as a set of motifs and themes. This also includes stylized images of monasteries, churches and holy places. The religious landscape that we have in the icon would deserve separate consideration, although regarding this topic we will limit ourselves here to only the most general and fundamental judgments (this side of icon painting still awaits competent religious and artistic research). The first impression of an iconic landscape is its conventionality and stylized aridity, as if it only pays tribute to the need to depict the environment required by the content - nothing more, and the guiding considerations are decorative and compositional. However, an iconic landscape can have a completely independent meaning; it is a kind of icon of nature - not its natural face, but its spiritual, Sophia face. Its character is subordinate to the main iconic plot, the landscape is included in the image, is, as it were, its external continuation and radiation, and in this sense it itself becomes spiritual. In the iconic landscape, that division of nature and man and that undue independence of nature from him, which she acquired as a result of his fall (and about which she sighs, hoping for her deliverance from it), is eliminated, but, on the contrary, their unity and interpenetration is restored. This is not the lyricism of nature that can be concentratedly expressed in a lyrical landscape, where a person expresses his mood against the background of the corresponding nature. We see it in works of art, and we love and appreciate the lyrics of these unique poems by Fet in forms and colors. The iconic landscape is rather alien to lyricism as “psychologism” is still not free from subjectivity. It is ontological in the sense that it expresses the humanity of nature, as well as the naturalness of man. The Mount of Transfiguration belongs to the image of the Transfiguration not only as an external setting, but as a part of itself, for it too is co-transformed with the Savior, just as the Jordan in the icon of Baptism is not only the place of baptism, but also the image of the baptismal water of the “Jordan”, i.e. transformed water of the next century. And we can say that the consecration of such an icon, where the image contains not only a face, but also nature, also applies to the landscape, allowing it to be an icon of the natural world of the next century. This character is especially clear in icon images of the “cosmos” (in the descent of the Holy Spirit and other icons), earth, sun, moon, fire, water, etc. But to the extent that the landscape belongs not to an icon, but to a church painting, it shares the general character of the latter; it is, although not a consecrated, but still a sacred image of nature, an icon of the world. Now let us briefly dwell on the image of the cross. We have already seen that the image of the cross was not disputed by the iconoclasts, 153 and this was also confirmed in the resolution of the VII Ecumenical Council as a general basis and example of icon veneration: “that holy and honest icons should be offered (for veneration) in the same way as the image of the Honest and Life-Giving Cross (D. 285). Moreover, in Acts 6 the idea is expressed that “the image of the Life-giving Cross, although no prayer is relied upon for its consecration, 154 is considered by us worthy of veneration and serves as a sufficient means for us to receive sanctification” (D. 235). In relation to the cross, one can distinguish, on the one hand, the cross as an icon of the crucifixion, and on the other, the cross as the sign of the cross itself. In the first respect, the cross does not differ from the icon, and in this (although only in this) sense we can say, together with Patriarch Nicephorus, that “the cross exists because of the icon, and not vice versa, the icon because of the image of the cross.” 155 The cross differs from other icons in that it is not only an icon of the crucifixion of Christ and is not only a symbol of His suffering, but it also has an independent meaning, for it “bears the image of the Holy One.” Trinity" is its emblem. 156 The cross, being an image of sacrificial self-denying love in the Holy Trinity, is, at the same time, a sign of God’s love for the world, the passion of the cross. The cross on the icon is either an icon of the passion of Christ (crucifixion), or a metaphysical icon, “the incomprehensible and divine power of the Honest and Life-giving Cross.” Without going into theology about the cross here, let us note, however, its main feature, which really distinguishes the cross from other icons and gives it immediate power. Like an icon, the cross is consecrated, and we do not yet worship it, although we honor it before consecration. But the cross is also the sign of the cross, which we draw in the air, on ourselves and on others, and this sign of the cross, in conjunction with the Name of God, pronounced or even only implied, has direct sanctifying power. This is a blessing, first of all, episcopal and priestly, and then given by every Christian (for example, a mother baptizing her child). The sign of the cross is a kind of mental icon that has and gives direct consecration. And this power of the cross as a sign is religiously self-evident. This is the reason why the veneration of the cross is preserved among iconoclasts, ancient and modern, so that even among the most extreme Protestants, from whom all use of icons has been banished, the cross remains on the church, in the church, and often in the external image of the church. This same sign of the cross is contained in the image of the structure of our body, which further indicates the image of God in man from a new perspective. And the restoration of the image of God in the fallen Adam was accomplished by the new Adam by death on the cross, the appearance of the cross in Man, who was also God. Therefore, the image of the cross is not only an object of worship, but also an instrument of consecration: the holy cross is immersed in water during consecration in a cruciform manner, it is blessed in a cruciform manner by the priest, and in general all secret actions are performed in a cruciform movement (blessing of the Holy Gifts, anointing with holy chrism and holy oil, tonsure and ordination, etc.). In the cross as a sign we have a direct unity of symbol and power, and in its outline with the name of the Holy Trinity already lies its naming and consecration. In this sense, the cross is the prototype of the icon, or the seed from which it develops. At the same time, it has an indissoluble unity of external and internal, force and image; it is a direct symbol of the divine, for in it the super-created and created principles are united and fused. And in this inseparability, the cross is the image of Sophia, the Wisdom of God, uncreated and created, heavenly and earthly, Humanity of the first and second Adam. Sophia of the Cross (this side corresponds to the Yaroslavl version of her icon) is also the Church, one, but heavenly and earthly, and therefore, naturally, the Church is headed and adorned with the cross that every believer wears on the chest and has in the heart. The cross is a sacred hieroglyph of the Divine Sophia-Church, in which the image of the Holy Trinity is imprinted, and it is a sign of our salvation. Therefore, he is, indeed, the image of all iconicity - an icon of an icon. Iconoclasts love to refer to the words of St. Gregory the Theologian: “It is unfair to conclude faith in paints, and not in the heart, because what is contained in paints is easily erased, paints are easy to wash off, I love depth” (D. 248). And it is true that only external icon worship can lead to superstition and inconspicuous idolatry. The central nerve of a person’s personal religion lies not in the veneration of icons, but in the worship of God in spirit and truth. In this sense, icon veneration belongs not to the center, but to the periphery of divine veneration - “faith lies not in colors, but in the heart.” However, one must not diminish the importance of the periphery, which is inseparably connected with the center, without crippling, impoverishing or perverting the very worship of God, which through this becomes abstract instead of spiritual. Man himself is the image of the Image, and he is characterized by the imagery of experience. He is in this sense a figurative being, a είκονικόν, who not only thinks and perceives figuratively, but also creates images. This creativity is art, the path of which is contemplation, and the effective force is beauty. Art is both knowledge and the endowment of beauty, meaningful beauty. It is the appearance of Sophia, her revelation. And it is not limited only to created images, it also penetrates into the divine world, which, although separated from the created world, from the nothing created world, is inseparable from it in its divine basis. The world is full of divine images, and divine existence is figurative, and therefore depictable in art. This is the basis of both icon painting and icon veneration. In the struggle for the icon, it was not about the Christological dogma and not about the truth of the Incarnation (for even for Docetism, which nevertheless recognizes a certain image of the appearance of Christ, one can allow the depiction of this phenomenon), but about the conformity of man to God, about the revelation of the Image of God in the image of man. In other words, the icon proclaims not opposition, but unity of the divine and created world. It is evidence of the sophistry of being. Sophia is the Icon of God in God Himself, and every icon of ours is an icon of the Icon. Therefore, the dogma of icon veneration is essentially sophiological. Oros is a proclaimed council resolution. Oikonomia - Greek, economy (i.e., the area of ​​​​practical institutions in church life). The VII Ecumenical Council, convened in Nicaea in 787 and abolishing the decisions of the iconoclast council of 754, took place in an atmosphere of unrest in the Byzantine army, which partially sympathized with the iconoclasts. (See article: F.L. Smirnov Iconoclasm // Christianity. Encyclopedic Dictionary. T. I. M., 1993.) Wed. Prof. Hugo Koch. Die altchristliche Bilderfrage nach der litterarischen Quellen. Göttingen. 1917. Bulgakov’s point of view on paganism as a search for God and “some kind of revelation about Him”, see his work “The Light of the Night” (Section three, part I, chapter “Light in the Darkness” - vol. 1 present, ed., pp. 279–286.). Beseliel is the chief artist, builder of the tabernacle (a Jewish church during the exodus from Egypt). For example: “But those are more pitiful, and their hopes are for the soulless, who call gods the works of human hands, gold and silver, works of art, images of animals or a worthless stone. Praying before him, he is not ashamed to speak to the soulless, and calls for health to the weak, asks for life for the dead, asks for help for the completely incapable, for a journey - unable to walk, for profit, for a craft and for the success of hands - completely unable to do hands, the most powerless asks for strength” (Wis. Sol. 13, 10, 17–19). Teraphim - figurines of idols for home worship (See Judges 17:3–5; Zechariah 10:2). Such a human figure was approached with questions about the future, like an oracle. St. Nikephoros, Patriarch of Constantinople in 806–815, was deposed and exiled by the iconoclasts, and became famous for his extensive polemical writings against them. Rev. Theodore the Studite, abbot of the Studite monastery in Constantinople, a confessor of icon veneration, who was persecuted by the iconoclasts, sent three books of “Refutations” against them; in particular, in the rejection of images of Christ he saw a diminishment of the fullness of His human nature. Wed. work about. Pavel Florensky “Reverse Perspective” (P.A. Florensky. T. 2. At the Watersheds of Thought..., M., 1990. P. 43–106), written in 1919 and, obviously, unknown to Bulgakov, although he could become acquainted with its main ideas during oral communication with the author, before leaving for Crimea. This refers to the work of the Protestant theologian Adolf Harnack “Lehrbruch der Dogmengeschichte” (“Textbook of the History of Dogmas”). Voltaire’s famous exclamation, referring to the Catholic Church: “Crush the reptile!” (French). Wed. the later, although perhaps tendentious, evidence in the letter of the Byzantine Emperor Michael II in 824 to Louis the Pious, read at the Frankfurt Council: Mansi coll., cone. 14, p. 420. At the Council of Elvira in the city of Elvira (now Grenada), where mainly the Spanish episcopate was present, decrees were adopted against idolatry in the spirit of the Old Testament prohibitions. Prof. says rightly. I. D. Andreev that the evidence of iconoclasm “was masterfully selected and in terms of precision of expression, consistency, clarity and strength left nothing to be desired for the iconoclasts.” (St. Tarasius, Patriarch of Constantinople. “Theological. Vestn.” 1899. IV. 177). In addition to the above-mentioned works, see the famous work of Schwarzlose [Karl], Der Bildertreit. Gotha, 1890. Karl Hasse. Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Kirchengeschichte, II, 1928. Ceorg Ostrogorsky. Studien zur Geschichte des Bysantinische Bilderstreites. Breslau, 1929. Docetism is an early Christian heresy, according to which the humanity of Jesus Christ was only a ghostly appearance. Lit.: willful ignorance (lat.) – term of logic: incorrectness in proof, consisting in the fact that what is being proven is not what is required, but something else; conscious substitution of the thesis being proven. This is the same opinion of Prof. A.P. Lebedev, who says: “It is impossible to find a single fact in the entire history of iconoclasm that would indicate that there was a causal connection between iconoclasm and previous heresies concerning the face of Christ and actions in Him and which were the subject of condemnation at the Ecumenical Councils. On the contrary, one can rather discern hostile relations between iconoclasm and the Nestorian and Monophysite and Monothelite heresies” (Prof. Lebedev. History of the Holy Ecumenical Councils. Issue II. Moscow, 1876, pp. 221–2). “Iconoclasm, by its origin, has no connection with the heretical errors of former times. It constitutes a phenomenon completely original and independent of them” (222). In particular, early icon veneration is also found among heretics (Carpocratians) and, on the contrary, it meets with sharp rebuff precisely among the Arians (Eusebius) and Eunomians, among the Nestorians (Thomists in the East) and the Monophysite sects (Philoxenus and Severus). In general, historically, the attitude to icon veneration was determined by a complex and changeable set of reasons, which resulted in such fluctuations within the Orthodox Church itself over the course of three centuries. Acts VII Om. cathedral Rus. lane Kaz. Spirit. Academy. Ed. 2nd, pp. 255–6: “Since you wrote about some kind of icon, supposedly of Christ, and wanted me to bring such an icon to you, what kind of icon do you mean, which you call Christ’s? Is it true and unchangeable, and containing within itself the essence of His nature, or representing that nature of His, which He assumed for our sake, putting on the flesh as if it were a slave-like garment? But as for His image as God, I myself think that it is not Him you are looking for, because you have been taught by Him that no one knows the Father except the Son, and no one knows the Son Himself except the Father who begat Him... Of course, you are looking for an icon that depicts Him in the form of a servant and in the flesh with which He put on for us; but we have been taught that it too is dissolved by the glory of the Divine, and the mortal is swallowed up by life... So, who is able to depict with dead and soulless colors and shadows the brilliance of His glory and dignity emitting radiance and emitting brilliant rays - to depict Him as He is? Even His chosen disciples could not look at Him on the mountain, but fell on their faces, admitting that the brilliance of the light was unbearable for them. So, if the image He assumed during the incarnation received such glory from the Divinity that dwelt in Him, then what can we say about His state when He, having laid aside (from Himself) mortality and washed away corruption, changed the form of a slave image to the glory of the Lord and God - after having won victory over death, ascended into heaven, sat down on the royal throne at the right hand of the Father and rested in the unspeakable and ineffable bosom of the Father? These acute questions that deserve a direct answer in the refutations read at the council by Deacon Epiphanius are answered, firstly, by ad hominem references to the Arianism of Eusebius, and, secondly, by patristic testimonies about the originality of the flesh of Christ, which did not become “divine” (D. 256–261). However, no direct answer is given to the question of the imageability of the glorified body of Christ. D, 256–269. Here are the following eight anathematisms against icon-venerators: 1. Whoever dares to depict the divine image of the Word made man with paints is anathema. 2. Whoever dares to depict the indescribable essence and hypostasis of the Word, for the sake of His incarnation, in humanoid forms, and does not want to understand that the Word is not imageable even after the incarnation, is anathema. 3. Whoever dares to depict a hypostatic union of two natures on an image and begins to call the image Christ and, thus, confuse the two natures, anathema. 4. Whoever wants to depict the flesh of Christ united with the face of the Word of God, separated and separated from the Word itself, anathema. 5. Whoever divides the one Christ into two persons and wants to depict the one born of the Virgin separately, and, therefore, accepts only a relative union of natures, and therefore His depiction on the icon as having a special hypostasis, borrowed from the Virgin, is anathema. 6. Whoever depicts the flesh of Christ deified through its union with the Word and thus separates it from the Divinity is anathema. 7. Who will depict God the Word, on the basis that He took upon Himself a slave image, with material colors, as if He were a simple man, and will separate Him from the Divinity inseparable from Him, thus introducing the fourfold nature into the Holy Spirit? Trinity is anathema. 8. Whoever depicts the faces of saints with material paints on soulless icons, which do not bring any benefit at all, because this idea (about the worship of icons) is false and came from the devil, and will not reflect on himself their virtues, these living images, he is anathema.” It cannot be denied that both the thoughts and the formulation of the first 7 anathematisms are distinguished by dogmatic clarity, sharpness, and peculiar strength and, in any case, require serious consideration, which was not sufficiently given to them at the VII Ecumenical Council. Prof. rightly insists on this. Andreev (ib. 471) indicating that otherwise Patriarch Nicephorus (as well as St. Theodore the Studite) would not have had to write his treatises on the same basic topic about the depiction of Christ on the icon after the VII Ecumenical Council. It also explains that after the VII Ecumenical Council, a new false council took place in 815, which approved the “triumph of Orthodoxy.” This shows with what difficulty the dogma of icon veneration is nurtured in the Church. The dogma of the two natures of Christ - the perfect Divine and the perfect human, unfused and indivisible, was adopted at the 4th Ecumenical Council in Chalcedon in 451. Apophatic (negative) theology characterizes the Deity as transcendental in relation to any possible definitions and properties; Complementing this approach, cataphatic (positive) theology attributes positive attributes to the Deity in their superlatives. See Part 2 of Section 1, “Divine Nothingness,” in “Non-Evening Light” (this edition. Vol. 1, pp. 104–140.). Transition to another genus (category) (Greek). See prof. I.D. Andreev. St. Tarasius, Patriarch of Constantinople. "God. Vestn." 1899, VIII, pp. 460 ff. Wed. Andreev, ib., p. 470–71 Diphysitism – here: separation of the two natures of Christ; the separation of the man Jesus from God the Word, which was found, in particular, in the teaching of Nestorius. About him see prof. I.D. Andreev. St. Germanus, Patriarch of Constantinople. (God. V. 1897, V–VII. Especially VII, pp. 229–230). G. Ostrogorsky. Connecting the question of St. icons with Christological dogmatics in the writings of Orthodox apologists of the early period of iconoclasm. Ed. Kondakov, seminary. Prague, 1929. St. John of Damascus. An Accurate Statement of the Orthodox Faith. Book IV. Ch. XVI. Defensive words against those who reject holy icons, first word, chapters 8, 18, 21, 22. Second word, ch. 5, 6, 20. Ostrogorsky, ib. 43–45. Creations of Rev. Theodore the Studite in Russian. lane St. Petersburg, 1907. T. I. The first refutation of the iconoclasts. Page 120–121. He even encloses this idea in anathematisms: “Whoever does not confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, who came in the flesh, is describable by the flesh, but by the Divine nature remains indescribable, is a heretic. If we begin to assert that the Divinity is also describable due to the fact that the flesh of the Word is describable, and at the same time we do not distinguish both in one hypostasis by natural property, whereas in fact one does not destroy the other in an indivisible unity, we are a heretic” (pp. 132-133). “The property of the Divine is indescribability, incorporeality, absence of external appearance and form. The property of humanity is describability, tangibility, measurability of three kinds. If Christ consists of two natures, then, of course, He is both indescribable and describable” (159). In his letter to the Iconoclastic Council (op. II. 325), St. Theodore also says that Christ “in the Divine image remains indescribable” (although he is describable in the human image). Negative particle in Greek. “Was not Christ like us in image and form? Was not His body made of bones? Were not the apples of His eyes protected by eyelids and eyebrows? Were not His ears made with winding passages? Was not His sense of smell adapted for this purpose? Was He not gifted with blooming cheeks? Did He not speak with His mouth, and did He not eat and drink?” etc. (Tvor. I, letter XXXIII, p. 376). “For example, Peter is portrayed only to the extent that he, along with the general definition, differs from other people, having some particular features, such as an aquiline or blunt nose, or curly hair, or a good complexion, or beautiful eyes, or anything else that characterizes his inherent appearance. Then, although it consists of soul and body, not a single property of the soul is reflected in the appearance of the image. And how can this be if the soul is invisible? So it is in relation to Christ. He may not be portrayed from the side that He is simply a man, although He remains God at the same time; but insofar as He, differing in personal properties from all those like Him, was crucified, and is depicted in this form. So, Christ is describable according to his personal being, although according to his Divinity he is indescribable” (I. 169). First rebuttal. I. 121–122. “According to His nature, He is visible and imaginable, tangible and describable; in accordance with it, He eats food and drink, matures and grows, works and rests, sleeps and wakes, hungers and thirsts, sheds tears and sweat, in general does and endures what is characteristic of a common man” (122). “He (Christ) came from the womb of His Mother, the Theotokos, having an image, and if not, he would have been some kind of degenerate, and not a person who had received an image, oh, fighters against God! If He came into existence as an imaged infant, which is true, then it absolutely follows that He can be depicted in an icon.” (Creation II. 334. Letter to the brothers. VIII). “It is a reproach for them (the iconoclasts) if the Mother of God is depicted on the icon, but He who was born of Her and fed on Her breasts, and experienced everything related to His bodily presence, is not; Or will the self-viders and servants again be depicted, but the One whom they served and treated will not be depicted? (335) Lit.: quadrupling a term (Latin). Term of logic: an error resulting from the ambiguous use of a concept. “We depict Christ not because He is God and not because we erect icons of Him; but we use icons insofar as He was a man and appeared on earth.” (Creations of our holy father Nicephorus, Archbishop of Constantinople. 1904. Part I, p. 49). The first protective word. XI. Creation of St. John of Damascus, 32. Wed. An Accurate Statement of the Orthodox Faith. Book IV, ch. XVI, p. 321. The third protective word. XXI, p. 401. The first protective word, ch. XVI. Eutychianism is the recognized heretical teaching of the Patriarch of Constantinople Eutyches (mid-6th century). close to Monophysitism and Docetism, denying, in particular, the reality of the human bodily needs of Christ (hunger, thirst, etc.). Apart from the excellent articles "Images" and "Iconoclastes" in Diet, de théol. cat.", VII t. and in “Diet, d'arch. ehrét." Characteristic is the lack of independent consideration of this issue in Thomas Aquinas in the Summa theologiae and his judgment on the issue of worshiping the image of Christ: Sh-a, qu. 25. The Council of Trent, recognized as Ecumenical by the Catholic Church, met three times in 1545, 1551 and 1562; his dogmatic decrees (Décréta) date back to 1563. Imagines porro Christi, Deiparae Virginis et aliorum sanctorum in templis praesertim habendas et retinendas, eisque debitum honorem et venerationem impertinendam, non quod credator messe aliqua in iis divinitas vel uirtus, propter quam sint colendae, vel, quo ab eis sit pretendum, vel quod fiducia in imaginibus sit tingenda, veluti olim fiebat a gentibus, quae in idolis spem suam collocabant, sed quoniam, honos, qui eis exhibetar, refertur ad prototype, quae illae représentant, ita ut per imagines, quas osculamur et coram quibus caput aperimus et procumbimus, Christum adoremus et sanetos, quorum illae similitudinem gerunt, veneremur (Enchir. Denz. 986). Part instead of the whole (lat.). The primacy of the pope is the assertion of the primacy of the Bishop of Rome (pope) over other episcopal sees due to the supposed succession from the Apostle Peter; this idea took shape in the West into a coherent doctrine in the 12th–13th centuries. Filioque – “and from the Son” (lat.); the teaching of the Catholic Church about the procession of the Holy Spirit and from the second Person of the Trinity - the Son (and not only from the Father); an addition rooted in Western Christianity to the corresponding formula of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. See about this in my “Non-Evening Light”: Divine Nothingness (Negative Theology). Religio - piety, shrine (Latin) here refers to the not entirely reliable etymology of this word from Latin: lego - to collect, bind. “...Take off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground” (Ex. 3:5); the same - I. Nav. 5, 15 - a warning from above about approaching the shrine. See in “The Non-Evening Light”: Created Nothingness. Dieu est fou de l'homme*, as Schelling puts it. God who hides himself, hidden (lat.). See our essay “Hypostasis and Hypostasis” in the collection in honor of P.B. Struve. Contradiction is the driving force (German). The VI Ecumenical Council (3rd Constantinople, 680–681), which condemned the “monothelitism” heresy, approved the dogma of two energies and two wills operating in Jesus Christ - Divine and human. Essentially a sophiological antinomy is the teaching of St. Gregory Palamas on the unknowability of the being of God οὐσία and on the knowability by the “energy” of God ενέργεια. Moreover, the latter are identical in nature with God and in this sense are God, and together the uncreated basis of creation. 1 Tim. has the same antinomian (and not apophatic) meaning. 6, 16: “God dwells in an unapproachable light, which no man has seen or can see” (thesis), but before this it is said (6, 14), “about the appearance of our Lord Jesus Christ” (antithesis). Next is 2 Peter. 1. 16–17: “We made known to you the power and the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, being eyewitnesses of His majesty, for He received honor and glory from the Father” (antithesis). Truly existing and abiding (Greek). Akashic Chronicle (German). Akasha is an all-encompassing world space (a concept borrowed from Buddhist mythology). It may be pointed out that imagery, to a certain, albeit very limited extent, can also be accessible to animals. To this it can be objected that it is accessible to them only to the extent of their humanity, i.e., closeness to man, who, after all, includes the abilities of the animal world. See my Ladder to Jacob (about angels). 1929. We have to admit that among the defenders of icon veneration (only with St. John of Damascus this naturalism is combined, as we will see below, with the Sophian interpretation of the icon) we find only a naturalistic understanding of art, which in advance already blocks the path to understanding the essence of the icon, and, consequently, to its systematic defense. This especially has to be said about Rev. Theodora Studite. He proves the depictability of Christ by the fact that His body consisted of certain human members that are depictable, as if in the icon it was an anatomical atlas. Here, in understanding the icon, he goes even further than naturalism when he asks the iconoclasts: “What is their physical basis and what is the reason for such inconceivability? Did not Christ take our image? Was not His body composed of bones,” etc. (Creations, II. 376). Following naturalistic logic, along the path of Rev. Theodore the Studite would have had to come to the conclusion that the best icon of Christ would have been a photograph had it existed at that time. The miraculous image, in which, according to legend, the face of the Savior was miraculously reflected, cannot be considered as a passive photographic image (despite the visible resemblance to it), precisely because it was an act of His miracle-working will. The so-called Shroud of Turin (assuming its authenticity) is more suitable here. But it is not an icon of Christ, and is not considered by anyone as such, although for those who believe in its authenticity it is a great shrine, as it clothed the body of Christ and preserved its imprinted traces. From the letter to the Apostle John the Theologian. It is given by St. John of Damascus. Word three. 416. From the Epistle to Titus. Quote at St. I. Damascus. Sl. I. 361. The third word, XVII, p. 400. For Christian theology, the doctrine of ideas goes back to the doctrine of angels, who are the personal carriers of the ideas of earthly existence in the spiritual, heavenly world. I reveal this connection in “Jacob’s Ladder,” to which we refer the reader. But for the question of icons this aspect of the doctrine of ideas is not important. A word in defense of icons, first. X. 351. Word three. XIX. 401: “The second type of image is the thought in God of what He will create, that is, His eternal council, which always remains equal to itself, for the Divinity is unchangeable, and His council is without beginning, in which, as it was decided before the ages, so at the time predetermined and appointed by Him it will be fulfilled. For images and examples of what will be created by Him are the thought of each of these objects, and they are called predestinations by Dionysius, since in His advice there is inscribed and depicted that which is predetermined by Him and will undoubtedly be fulfilled before its existence.” I indicated the sophiological significance of this teaching in “The Burning Bush,” excursion III (about patristic writing). An allusion to lines from A. S. Pushkin’s poem “Hero”: “The darkness of low truths is dearer to me / The deception that elevates us.” Natural order, ideal order (lat.). At St. John of Damascus (Third Homily, XVIII, p. 400) we read: “The first natural and unchangeable image of the invisible God is the Son of the Father, showing the Father in Himself. For no one can see God anywhere (John 1:18). And again: no one has seen like the Father (John 6:46). And that the Son is the image of the Father, the Apostle says about this: “Who is the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). And to the Jews: “Who is the radiance of glory and the image of His hypostasis.” And that He shows the Father in Himself - about this in response to the words of Philip: show us the Father and he is sufficient for us (John 14:8). The Lord says: I have been with you for so long and you have not known Me, Philip, who has seen Me, seen the Father (John 14:9). The Son is natural, inevitable image of the Father, similar to the Father in everything, except unbornness and patronymic.” “Who made the image first? God Himself was the first to give birth to the Only Begotten Son and His Word, His living and natural Image, the unchanging reflection of His eternity” (St. John of Damascus. Third Homily, XXVI. 403). This includes the text of John. 14:8-9: “Philip said to Him: Lord, show us the Father and it is enough for us. Jesus said to him: I have been with you so long, and you do not know Me, Philip. He who has seen Me has seen the Father. How do you say, show us the Father?” “The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God” (1 Cor. 2:10). St. John of Damascus. Third Word, XVIII, 400. “The Holy Spirit is the image of the Son, for no one can speak of the Lord Jesus except by the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12:3). So, we know Christ the Son of God and God through the Holy Spirit, and in the Son we contemplate the Father, for by nature the Word is the messenger of the mind and the revelation of the spirit. In the same way, the image of the Son is unchanged - the Holy Spirit, which has a difference only in its procession, for the Son is begotten, but does not proceed.” This is where the doctrine of filioque applies and is applicable: not to the hypostatic procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son (a pâtre filioque, which violates the unity of command in the Holy Trinity), but to the revelation of the One First Principle, the Father, in two hypostases in spiritu filioque. Deity, (but not) God (as Person) (Greek). “The fact that man was created in the image and likeness of God shows that the arrangement of images is in some way a divine matter” (Venerable Theodore the Studite. Creations. I. 178). Unfortunately, this topic does not find further development here and is drowned in the apophatic teaching about the invisibility of God. This truth is revealed by St. John of Damascus in his teaching about different types of image (Third Homily. XX, 401): “The third type of image is created by God in imitation, that is, man.” “God created man in his own image and likeness. And Adam saw God, and heard the sound of His feet as He walked in the evening, and disappeared into Paradise. And Jacob saw and wrestled with God. It is clear that God appeared to him in the form of a man. And Moses saw, as it were, the back of a man; and Isaiah saw Him as a man sitting on a throne. And Daniel saw the likeness of a man, and as it were of the Son of Man, who came to the Ancient of Days” (XXVI. 402–409). “Is it not for this reason that we bow to each other, because we were created in the image of God? For, as Basil, who speaks God and is well-versed in the divine, says, the honor given to the image passes on to the prototype. The prototype is that which is depicted, from which a photograph is taken” (Credit of the Orthodox Faith. Book IV, Chapter XVI, p. 320). In the funeral rite he composed, we sing: “I am an image of Your ineffable glory, even though I bear the burden of sins.” Wed. above cit. words of St. John of Damascus (Third Word, XXVI, 403–404). And there is no reason to see in this solely an anticipation of the Son of God who is about to appear in human form (ibid. 404), but, on the contrary, His very appearance should be considered in connection with the presence of the image of God in man by creation, and not only due to the incarnation. Therefore, the Son of Man has judgment over the entire human race and at the Last Judgment judges it with human judgment. St. John of Damascus. Sl. first, XVI. 354: “I do not worship matter, but I worship the Creator of matter, who became matter for my sake and was pleased to dwell in matter and through matter brought about my salvation, and I will not cease to honor matter through which my salvation was accomplished... I honor and respect the rest of the matter through which my salvation was accomplished. Do not blaspheme matter, for it is not despised” (Cf. Second verse, XIII. 380). “I worship the Creator of matter, who became matter for my sake... For the word flesh was clear to everyone that flesh is matter and creation” (ibid. XIV. 381). Of course, understanding the body as matter is obviously not enough, and it is quite difficult to draw a conclusion from this in defense of icon veneration. See the doctrine of body as opposed to matter in my “Non-Evening Light”, Section II. The Wisdom, or Glory, of God in this sense can be considered the body of the Divine. (See my article: Eucharistic Dogma. “The Way”, 1930, I–II [20–21]). See my “Jacob’s Ladder (about Angels).” This thought is definitely expressed in the “rite of consecration of the icon of one or many saints” in the Trebnik (secret prayer of the priest): “O Lord our God, having created man in His own image and likeness, through disobedience to the first-born I was corrupted, but by the incarnation of Thy Christ, Whom I have received the form of a servant, was found in the image like a man, having renewed this in the first inheritance in Thy saints, Thou hast brought , we piously honor their images, the saints, whose image and likeness are the essence, we honor: we honor them, we honor and glorify You as the prototype.” In general, indescribability, understood as ugliness or formlessness, is mistakenly viewed as a consequence of the perfection of God. On the contrary, it would mean imperfection. God is the Form of forms, the Image of images, the Idea of ​​ideas, and it is a mistake to think that boundlessness and immensity (άπειρον) in the sense of ugliness, chaos, abyss would correspond to the greatness of God. Angels also have a human image due to their co-humanity, but, according to the spirituality of the angelic nature, this image is spiritual, that is, invisible to humans, except for their special, exceptional “appearances”. From the kontakion of the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord. In addition to numerous (partly cited above) judgments in patristic writing, in the apology for icon veneration read at the Sixth Act of the VII Ecumenical Council by Deacon Epiphanius, we also read: “An icon is similar to a prototype not in essence, but only in its reminder and in the position of the depicted members. A painter depicting a portrait of a person does not attempt to depict the soul” (D. 223). Therefore, of course, the just cited judgment, expressed at the Sixth Act of the VII Ecumenical Council, that “a painter depicting a portrait of a person does not attempt to depict his soul” is completely incorrect. As far as this is true, he is simply not an artist. Photography can have meaning for an artist as a replenishment of what is directly visible to the human eye, and, moreover, it can also include art, expressed in skillful taking, so that photography itself turns out to be a special artistic means, like a palette and brush in the hands of a skilled craftsman. By contrasting photography with art, we mean to distinguish the passive-reflective, naturalistic reproduction of the momentary state of an object from its active-contemplative vision and image. In this sense, we can say about the created, human spirit that it has powers and energies that are different from each other, but also identical. Here a comparison arises between how the revelation of the Divine and created spirit is accomplished. The Divine spirit has an absolute and adequate icon of its being - this is the Divine Sophia. The perfect spirit is characterized by the fullness and relevance of life with its perfect immobility and immutability. This is astus purus, which belongs to eternity. On the contrary, every created spirit in its life reveals itself in its God-likeness in an endless process, becoming, and therefore its entire existence is characterized by sophia and constant sophia, but not Sophia itself in its unchanging eternity. The development of this thought already relates to the doctrine of names, to the theology of name-glorification. I outlined the philosophical foundations of name-glorification in a special work on name in general and on the Name of God (manuscript). See the first chapter of this study in German in Festgaben an Mazaryk, 1930: Was ist das Wort? From the history of iconography it is known that the face of Christ in the icon image takes, for example, national features, even if they are not expressed outwardly and crudely: there are images of the Greek, Russian, Western (and in it Italian, German, Dutch, etc.) type. Wed. for example, Kramskoy’s confessions about how he wrote his “Christ in the Desert”. Turgenev expressed this feature of Christ’s face—His all-humanity, and in this sense, as it were, ordinaryness and impersonality, which in reality shows the depth and meaningfulness of each face—in his wonderful prose poem “Christ.” This is not understood by other artists who, having mastered the skill, easily take up icon painting, without thinking about the religious side of this matter. And even more, many Orthodox Christians do not understand this, who, in the complete absence of artistic skill, inspired only by piety, undertake to paint icons (although it would never occur to them to take on paintings due to their complete artistic helplessness). Added to this is the handicraft production of icons by “bogomaz” of various types, which, while satisfying the needs of the masses, nevertheless represents a scourge for icon painting as an art. This explains the crisis of the icon that occurred throughout the world and in Russia long before the revolution. The icon as a creative work is the highest and most difficult type of church art; this is what both careless artists and craftsmen should know equally. However, church leaders, unfortunately, know how to ignore this if certain icons do not correspond to their prejudices. We have a clear example of this in the attitude of influential church circles to the ancient and revered, in any case, vested with the authority of church tradition, icons of Sophia the Wisdom of God among modern Sophia fighters It is known that the icon of St. Rublev's Trinity differs from related icons of this type in that it eliminates the figures of Abraham and Sarah, receiving and treating their unknown visitors to a meal. Thus, what was rather a depiction of one episode from Old Testament history, the Rev. Andrew became an open and bold icon of the Most Holy. Trinity. In this example, perhaps, it is most clearly possible to see how the icon painter, taking into account tradition, at the same time creatively changes it, and thereby, with his creativity, he inserts himself into church tradition. What initially could have been a bold innovation is now a canon for us, the correct attitude towards which is the Venerable himself. Andrey sets by his own example, although not the only one. For an archaeological essay on the icons of the Holy Trinity, see the publication: Semmarium Condacovianum. N. Malitsky. On the history of the composition of the Old Testament Trinity. Prague, 1928. Beyond the scope of our task is the immediate disclosure of the meaning of the icon canon from its artistic (compositional and pictorial) side and some of the main features of icon writing (the absence of a third dimension, reverse perspective, etc.). This subject is still waiting for its competent religious and artistic researcher, who would reveal the religious meaning of the artistic symbolism of the icon, its, so to speak, phenomenology and language. Until now, this task has been replaced either by the interpretation of the theological content of the icon, or by the Old Believer aesthetic registration of them, or by archaeology. Wed. with Bulgakov’s essay “Two Meetings (1898–1924)” in the Appendices to the present. that. See the Dark Gallery scene. From the point of view of dematerialization, the elimination of all naturalism in the icon, specific difficulties exist for sculptural images, which in principle can be acceptable on the basis of the general definitions of the VII Ecumenical Council and have prevailed in the practice of the Western Church since ancient times, although they have never been excluded from use in the Eastern Church, in Orthodoxy. To begin with, sculpture in any case deals with three dimensions, from which icon painting is freed by a flat image. At the same time, the very tactility of the forms is already naturalistic, and this feature is further intensified when the statues put on clothes. However, sculpture, without losing its three-dimensionality, can find in its artistic means the possibility of idealizing images, which frees them from the density of naturalism. We have this in our own way already in ancient art, even more so in the Christian art of the Middle Ages, and, of course, this does not remain excluded for modern times. Wed. interpretation of the connective “is” in “The Philosophy of the Name” (pp. 54, 61 et seq. of this volume). Onomatology is the science of names. Here Bulgakov again returns to the ideas of his book “The Philosophy of the Name.” The theology of the name is not the subject of this essay. To what extent some of its elements are necessary, I rely on the conclusions of my (unpublished) work on the Name of God in connection with the general doctrine of the word and name In patristic writing we repeatedly come across indications of the importance of naming an icon, as evidence of the connection between the image and the prototype, although nowhere does this idea receive dogmatic clarity. The most important places in Rev. Theodore the Studite: “By nature, Christ and His image are different, although by their inseparable name they are one and the same” (Creation I. 127). “A name is the name of what is called by it, and, as it were, some natural image of the object that bears this name: in them the unity of worship is inseparable” (ib. 129). “The similarity between the prototype and the image is indicated only in relation to the name; the identity of worship, and not the substance, is equally (affirmed)” (ib. 141). “The icon of Christ, as well as the Mother of God, is called by the same name as Christ and the Mother of God, therefore, he who demands renunciation of the icon directly demands renunciation of the one whose icon. Such is the property of the image and its prototype that the image and icon are called by the name of the prototype, and when one is rejected, the other is also rejected, since they exist together” (Tvor. II. 362, part II, letter XXI). St. Patriarch Nicephorus, creative work. Part I. 270: “Christ our God, having become man, received a name which signifies equally both of the united natures, both the sanctified Divinity and the sanctified humanity, so that under one word both the duality of united natures and the hypostatic union of them into one person are known.” See Act 6, pp. 235–6: Bishop Gregory read the following objection of the iconoclasts: “...and there is also no sacred prayer consecrating icons to make them holy from ordinary objects, but they always remain ordinary things, not having any special meaning other than what the painter told them.” The answer read by Deacon Epiphanius acknowledges this fact: “Over many of these objects that we recognize as holy, no sacred prayer is read, because by their very name they are full of holiness and grace. Therefore, we honor such objects as worthy of veneration and kiss them. Thus, the very image of the picturesque cross is the same in relation to the icon; denoting it by a well-known name, we attribute its honor to the prototype; By kissing her and worshiping her with reverence, we receive sanctification. So are the sacred vessels. Therefore (concludes the counter-objection) either iconoclasts must recognize all these things as ordinary and not worthy of celebration, since they “do not have sacred prayer sanctifying them,” or they must recognize sacred icons as sacred and holy and worthy of veneration.” This practice is currently common for both the Eastern and Western Churches, and in the Russian Church the rite of consecration of an icon, in addition to the corresponding prayers, necessarily includes the sprinkling of St. water with consecrating words (also in the Catholic rituale), in the Greek church it is replaced by anointing the icons with holy myrrh (or in the newest practice, the icon is placed in the church for 40 days and, with the blessing of the priest, is given to the believers). However, in the newest edition (1800) of the Greek Helmsman, or Pidalion, it is established, with reference to the VII Ecumenical Council (see above), that for icons one inscription is sufficient and consecration is not required, which is seen as a Latin custom (S.V. Troitsky. On the names of God and name-worshipers. St. Petersburg 129–135). But this false opinion, which even within the Greek Church was unable to abolish the consecration of icons, is a consequence of enthusiasm in polemics with Catholics and, of course, has no doctrinal significance. We have already seen that at the VII Ecumenical Council, to justify the fact that icons are not consecrated, they referred to “the image of the life-giving cross, although no special prayer is required for its consecration” (D. 235). Apparently, the iconoclasts (inconsistently, of course) recognized St. the cross is venerable and, moreover, without consecration. Below we will touch upon the issue of the cross. Indeed, the sign of the cross as such is inherent in immediate holiness, sanctifying power, however - “in the name” of St. Trinity, loudly said or silently implied. On the contrary, the cross as an icon of the Crucifixion is consecrated, like any other icon. This idea is already expressed in the treatise of Constantine Copronymus (St. Patriarch Nikephoros. Refutation of Mammon. Works. Part II, pp. 100–193): “The bread that we receive is the image (είκών) of His body, revealing (μορφάζων) His flesh as turning into an image (τύπον) His body." A similar thing was read at the VII Ecumenical Council (D. 6, pp. 231–2): “So, this is what (the Holy Eucharist) serves as an icon (image) of His life-giving flesh. This icon must be prepared with prayer and reverence. Christ established that in the image (of Him) a chosen substance should be offered, that is, the essence of bread, which does not represent the image of a person, so that idolatry is not introduced. Consequently, just as the natural body is holy because it is deified, so is that which is such by institution, that is, His holy image, just as holy, since it is deified by grace through sanctification.” The essence of this difference is not fully captured by the terms of the VII Ecumenical Council λατρεία and προσκύνησίς τιμητική. (The question of this was also not raised in Catholic theology, despite the widespread practice of adoratio.) Therefore, those superstitious abuses of which iconoclasts sometimes rightly accused icon-worshippers were based on gross confusion, for example, that paint was scraped off from the icon and poured into St. communion or that the Holy Gifts were consecrated and placed on the icon for communion. King Abgar (or Abgar) the Fifth is one of the rulers of a small kingdom in Mesopotamia. An ancient Christian legend connects the origin of the so-called with his name. The miraculous image of the Savior, which arose due to the fact that, fulfilling Abgar’s request to send an image of the great wonderworker, Jesus Christ applied a canvas to His face, on which His face was imprinted. There is one indirect basis for the conclusion that the council implied the special power of the icon, namely, that the main analogy given in the resolution for the veneration of St. icons, the image of St. the cross, which has the directly sanctifying “incomprehensible and invincible” power of the cross. Rev. Theodore the Studite expresses this relationship between the image and the Prototype in such a way that the worship of the image is performed relatively (σχετιϰως), according to the unity of naming (ὀνοματιχώς), by virtue of similarity (ομοίωματίκως), but not by virtue of being or nature (not ουσιωδώς or φυσικώς). Therefore, it is relative, reverent worship (σχετική προσκύνησίς, τιμητική). (Creations, II part II, letter 65, to Naucratius, p. 423; p. 85, to Athanasius, p. 446; letter 151, to Severian, p. 527). At St. Patr. Nicephorus, we find the following difference between the image and the Prototype: “An icon is a likeness of the prototype, similarly imprinting the appearance of what is depicted, but differing from it, with a difference in essence, in the mother - or: it is an imitation and reflection of the prototype, differing from it in essence and material, or: it is a work of art created in imitation of the prototype, but differing from it in essence and in matter.” (Creation II. 55). “And an idol is an image of something that has no real existence” (ib.). Thus, St. Nikephoros limits idols only to the realm of fiction. Such an exaggeration in the identification of the image with the Prototype, widespread in that era, can be found even in the work of St. Theodore the Studite, who, in a letter to John Spafari (Tvor. II, I. p. XVII, p. 233) fully approves of him in that he used the icon of St. Vlkm. Demetrius as a recipient at baptism: “it is clear that the martyr received the baby through his image, since you believed so, you acquired such a godfather, as they say,” etc. Bulgakov’s ideas about the theurgic (“divine-active”) and projective nature of art go back to the ideas of V. S. Solovyov (“The General Meaning of Art”) and N. F. Fedorov (“Philosophy of a Common Cause”). See the development of this topic in Bulgakov’s article “The Holy Grail” (Appendices to this volume). Elohim (Elohim) is one of the names of God in the Hebrew tradition, the plural of “Eloah” or “El” - the name of the deity among the Semitic peoples. For more information on this, see my “Ladder of Jacob (about angels)”, ch. about theophanies and angelophanies. Liturgically, Spiritual Day is a complete analogy to the usual celebration of the memory of the main participants in the event on the morning of the holiday. So on the day of the Nativity of Christ the “Cathedral of the Mother of God” is celebrated, on the day of Epiphany - the “Cathedral of John the Baptist”, on the day of the Annunciation - the “Cathedral of the Archangel Gabriel”, on the day of the Nativity of the Theotokos the memory of St. and rightly so, Godfather of Joachim and Anna, on the eve of the Presentation of the Lord - the memory of St. God-receiver Simeon and Anna the prophetess, on the eve of Pentecost - the day of the Holy Spirit. It is obvious that by this liturgical comparison this day is further diminished in its independent meaning. Actually, the entire service of the day of the Holy Spirit is the service of Pentecost, and only at Compline there is a special canon to the Holy Spirit. In Act 5 of the VII Ecumenical Council, an excerpt from the book of John, Bishop, was read. Thessalonica, where he speaks about the imageability of angels on the basis that they have bodies “thin, airy and fiery, only the Divine being is incorporeal and indescribable, and rational creatures are not completely incorporeal and invisible, like the Divine nature.” Therefore, angels are “not incorporeal” (D. 188), and therefore can be depicted. This opinion about the corporeality of angels, although it met with the consent of Patriarch Tarasius and was not refuted by the council, remains essentially more than controversial and in any case does not apply to the resolutions of the council. Therefore, it is natural that St. Patr. Even after the council, Nikephoros was forced to defend the imageability of angels in a lengthy discussion about the indescribability and describability of angels (Tvor. II. 110–119). As St. says John of Damascus (Third Homily, XXIV. 403), spiritual beings “are depicted bodily, but in such a way that the bodily image shows some incorporeal and conceivable contemplation.” Wed. interpretation of this icon in the article “Hypostasis and Hypostasis” (Appendices). So, in particular, deformation, deliberate and responsible, presupposes complete knowledge and mastery of the normal form (the same in both icon painting and secular art), and not a simple lack of ability to correctly convey the form - artistic illiteracy. First word, XIX. 356. “Therefore we depict Christ the King and Lord, without depriving Him of the army; but the army of the Lord are holy” (XXI. 357). Wed. Second word, XV. 381, Third Homily, XXVI, 405): “I honor the saints, slaves by nature, friends by choice, and sons and heirs by divine grace.” Wed. my essay on the relics (handwritten). Is this not the mysterious meaning of the church custom, according to which “local” icons in the iconostasis always combine images of the Savior (on the right) and the Mother of God (on the left)? For the dogmatic development of these ideas, see my work “The Burning Bush (Orthodox teaching about the Mother of God).” Tradition attributes the first icon of the Mother of God to St. Evangelist Luke - obviously, as the one who drew Her verbal icon in his Gospel. Wed. characterization of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna in the essay “Two Encounters (1898–1924)” (Appendices). According to the expressive custom of the Orthodox people, icons are kissed by communicants only before communion of the Holy Mysteries, but not after it (the only exception is the altar cross given by the priest for kissing after the liturgy). From the troparion for the Dormition of the Blessed Virgin Mary. “...let God be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). Hymns in honor of the Mother of God at the Liturgy of Basil the Great after the Translation of the Gifts. Constantine Kopronymus: “We worship the image of the cross for the sake of Him crucified on it” (St. Patriarch Nicephorus. Works, part II, p. 173). This attitude of the VII Ecumenical Council to the consecration of the icon is discussed above. Let us add that the Church has special rites for the consecration of the altar and pectoral cross, as well as that erected on the church. Creations, 2. 178. But it is no longer possible to agree, at least in such a general form, that “the icon that represents Christ himself to us is more worthy than the cross, which shows the way of His suffering” (ib. 176). It is difficult to compare the degree of honorability of an icon and a cross, but the latter is not only a symbol of suffering. “This sign of the cross is for the glory of You, God and the Father, and Your consubstantial Son, and Your co-natural Spirit, and in remembrance of the glorious victory over the devil of death and hell and our deliverance built” (Rite of the blessing of the newly constructed cross). Wed. my “Chapters on the Trinity” (“Orthodox Thought”, I).