The Face and the Icon, Part Three
Olivier Clément
Translated From:
Olivier Clément. Le visage intérieur. Paris: Stock/Monde Ouvert, 1978, pp 45-64.
3. The Icon: A Transfigured Face
Anastasius of Sinai has the transfigured Christ say, showing His own face which shines more brightly than the sun: “Thus shall the righteous shine at the resurrection; thus shall they be glorified; it is in My condition that they shall be transformed; it is into this light... that they shall be conformed.” Holiness anticipates ultimate glorification. Eternal life begins already, now. Light no longer comes to us “from the outside” as an unbearable flash, but from the very depth of our body, grafted onto that of Christ, having become with Him “a single plant.” In the school of the icon, we learn to read faces — each face around us — as the end of the world: the place where everything begins to catch fire.
The definition of the veneration of images was clarified by the Second Council of Nicaea, the Seventh Ecumenical Council, in 787: “The more these representations are contemplated in images, the more those who contemplate them will be led to remember the original models, to turn toward them, and to show them, by embracing them, a respectful veneration — not a true adoration, which according to our faith belongs to God alone... ‘The honor given to the image passes to its prototype.’1 To venerate an image is to venerate in it the person whom it represents.”
There is therefore nothing magical in the icon: its substance is foreign to that of its prototype; it confers no power over the one it depicts. The image differs from the archetype “in essence and in medium.”2 But here is its miracle: it makes a person appear. “The icon is sanctified by the Divine Name and by the name of the friends of God, and that is why it receives the grace of the Spirit...”3 It is well known that in the Bible, the name signifies the manifestation of the person — the relationship it establishes with another. Even today, the exchange of names (of first names) remains a ritual of friendship or love. In the icon, a person opens up, communicates, enters into relationship with us, and draws us into his relationship with God.
The representation of the person therefore requires a faithful likeness. “The icon is a likeness of the model, expressing in itself, through the likeness, the entire aspect of the one it portrays.”4 When Bernadette Soubirous was asked to leaf through an album of images depicting the Virgin, she stopped at the only icon in the book: she had recognized the Apparition.
And yet the icon is not a portrait. If we use the image of a circle and its rays, and affirm with Maximus the Confessor that Christ is “the center toward which all lines converge,” we can say that a portrait represents an encounter at the periphery: either by remaining at the level of “realistic” appearance, or by arising from an intermingling of two subjectivities — that of the model and that of the painter. If the painter looks outward from the circle, toward the void, the face becomes barren and disintegrates. But if the painter looks toward the center, and if he bears within himself a disinterested sympathy, then the mystery of the face begins to shine through — yet still within an inevitable mixture of life and death, within the tragic clash between finitude and infinity. The iconographer, however, not only seeks to converge with his model by drawing nearer to the center (he must fast, pray, and be at peace before he paints), but, because he enters into relationship with a being of blessing and transparency, he finds himself received by the model, surrounded by him in a light that is already that of the end, of the ultimate, of the Kingdom in which God will be “all in all.” He will therefore, through a process of abstraction and symbolism, depict a transfigured face — one in which the marks of death and finitude are not absent but are, as Saint Paul says, “swallowed up in Life.” At best, a portrait may allow a glimpse of the person’s fragile but already awakened seed, showing through the hardenings, disintegrations, and masks of our tragic condition. The icon, by contrast, shows the person fully realized and open, bathed in the infinite — welcoming each viewer with the words a saint of the last century5 used to say: “My joy, Christ is risen!”
This is why one of the fundamental rules of iconographic representation is a frontal orientation. An icon shows a person face-on (except in group scenes flanking Christ, where a very subtle three-quarter view may appear, such that the saint gazes both at the common Lord and at the one approaching the icon). The profile is already an absence — or a form of domination: emperors and kings have themselves depicted in profile on medals and coins. One speaks of someone seen in profile in the third person: he, him, the master — or, not without scorn, “that one.” The icon names me in naming itself: it calls to me, says “thou,” without itself being a subjective “I,” but rather an interiority that is both effaced and radiant — an interiority from which the infinite can shine forth.
“If God has made Himself a face for us, then man can know his own face,” said Nicolas Berdyaev. Man — whose status as image of God is fully restored in Christ — is called, in the Holy Spirit, to a “likeness” — that is, to participation. The distance between image and likeness, with all its collapses into caricature, constitutes the personal destiny of each individual. “Thy light shineth upon the faces of thy saints,” sings the Church.
To attempt to understand what a transfigured face might be, we will begin from two testimonies: one ancient, attributed to Saint Macarius the Great, which describes the state of the deified man; the other modern, in which a 19th-century man — otherwise well-educated and steeped in Western rationality — tells how he came to see his spiritual father transfigured.
“The soul that has been judged worthy to partake of the Spirit in the light… when He has prepared it to become His dwelling, becomes all light, all face, all gaze… having no reverse side, but presenting its face from every direction, as the ineffable beauty of Christ has entered into it and dwells in it… The soul that has been fully illumined by the indescribable beauty of the luminous glory of the face of Christ, and filled with the Holy Spirit… is all eye, all light, all face.”6
The man of light thus becomes “all face.” Not only have the masks fallen, not only has the archipelago been reunited and the inner silence restored, but the body has been freed from “the spirit of heaviness”; it becomes a “spiritual body” — not dematerialized, but penetrated in its very depths by divine light. Saint Gregory Palamas emphasized that the “curled” posture of prayer in the psychosomatic methods of Eastern Christianity — the man seated on a low stool, elbows on his knees, head deeply bowed, gaze fixed on his chest or navel — symbolizes the metamorphosis of the conscious heart, the convergence of the intellect of the head and the vital power of the entrails. In this way, God can “bring desire back to its origin,” and the body, too, may cling to Him “by the very force of that desire.” “The transformed flesh shares in the flight of the spirit and joins it in divine communion. It, too, becomes the domain and dwelling place of God.”7
In icons, the body thus transformed is depicted as elongated, lightened: it is nine or ten heads tall, instead of the five that define the “canon” of classical Greek art. It appears like a stalk flowering into the face, like a contained flame that at last radiates through the gaze — everything is movement of personal existence “ek-stasizing” into the face...
The homily also insists on the deified person’s presence to all: he “presents himself from every direction,” with no reverse, no profile. He turns his back on no one. He is welcome, presence, silent transparency — “all gaze,” “all eye.” Hence the importance not only of frontality in icons, but of the rendering of the eyes: immense, surrounded by broad, shaded recesses — darkened but not gloomy — that embrace and expand their form, opening the face toward an “inwardness” where transcendence bursts forth. The eye, by its very texture, evokes the highest precision, complexity, and tightly integrated matter — and at the same time, a profound porosity to another light. “In thy light shall we see light”: the eye receives the light from within and thereby becomes capable of receiving also the light from without. The eye is in man the place of the greatest nakedness before the infinite; the iris condenses the body, just as the body condenses the world, and at the same time, the wide-open pupil — vast in iconographic depiction — becomes pure opening. Here, world and man reunite, concentrate by ex-centring themselves...
In the notebooks for The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky writes: “Your flesh shall be transfigured (the light of Tabor)... The light of Tabor distinguishes man from the matter he uses as his food.”
Thus the face of man becomes the sacrament of Beauty: the icon seeks to express “the ineffable beauty of the luminous glory of the face of Christ” and “participation in the Spirit, in the light.”
The other testimony I wish to recall here is that of a disciple of Saint Seraphim of Sarov, Nikolai Motovilov. Motovilov did not understand what his spiritual father meant when he said that the goal of the Christian life is “the acquisition of the Holy Spirit.” Then the old monk revealed himself to him transfigured and made him enter into that same fullness. “Imagine,” wrote Motovilov, “in the middle of the sun, in the full brilliance of its noonday rays, the face of the man who is speaking to you. You see the movement of his lips, the shifting expression of his eyes, you hear the sound of his voice, you feel the pressure of his hands on your shoulders, and yet, at the same time, you see neither his hands, nor his body, nor your own — nothing but a radiant light extending in all directions, over a distance of several meters, illuminating the snow that covers the meadow and falls on the staretz and on me…”8
This light is not some impersonal ocean; it is content, and even superabundance of communion. Nothing is erased of the movement or speech of the mouth, of the expression in the eyes, but the face — like that of Christ on Tabor — is found “in the midst of the sun.” It radiates this “other sun” through the affectionate gesture of the hands resting on the shoulders.
The icon attempts to anticipate this vision. Motovilov’s testimony helps us understand what the nimbus is: a chalice within the radiance of the face, within the solar sphere of which the face has become the center — flesh made Word, since the Word was made flesh…
“Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Matthew 13:43). They already shine — secretly — with a hidden radiance sometimes unveiled, and the icon announces it to us; it draws us into the light, the peace, and the joy of the one (or the One) it represents, just as Saint Seraphim drew his disciple into his own light, peace, and joy...
The light of the icon symbolizes the divine glory — uncreated, veiled by its very profusion, and pointing back to its superessential source. This is why, in an icon, light does not originate from a source located within the cosmos, nor does it produce shadows — the shadows in which human opacity and division are usually expressed. The New Jerusalem, says the Apocalypse, “has no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof” (Revelation 21:23). God, “all in all,” “in all,” becomes our light. And this light casts no shadow, for it comes from all sides at once and nothing is opaque to it any longer. This is the very ground of the icon, which iconographers call light. More precisely, the tempera — applied in thin layers, from darker tones toward lighter ones — gives the icon a kind of transparency, as the darker outlines of the initial layers show through the luminosity of the upper ones.
The spiritual aesthetics of the icon is thus a kind of musicality of solar omnipresence. The transfigured Christ, the “Sun of Righteousness,” “makes His light rise from the earth, a sun that does not set and whose divine radiance eclipses that of the natural sun. Let the earth exult, she who now becomes light!” (Matins of the Forefeast of the Transfiguration, 9th Ode of the Canon). In this art, all colors are defined as refracted rays of the “Light of Lights,” a vibrant whiteness that synthesizes them all and opens itself to transcendence through touches of solar gold. This gold penetrates the colors in fine parallel streaks that icon painters call the assiste. The assiste lightens and illuminates the garments of the glorified Christ, those of the Mother of God, and the wings of the angels. The stroke of genius of Theophanes the Greek, at the end of the 14th century, was to apply bold accents of assiste directly to the very face of man: broader patches on the forehead, the brows, the root of the nose; the brightness of the eyes descending across the cheeks in finer streaks — tears of light. In this visionary art, the very structure of the face — fiercely torn from the night — becomes light.
The icon offers us the truth of the face — the truth we sometimes sense when watching a sleeping child, in moments of intense and silent trust within friendship or love, or in that peace we spoke of earlier, which sometimes seals the face of the dead.
What strikes us first is the space of the eyes, which opens the face inward. The eyes are not only immense; the brows, widened and arched, envelop them like apsidal vaults. Two luminous wrinkles — true waves from beyond — echo the line of the brows across the forehead. Beneath the eyes, the same kind of hollowing — dark at first, then luminous. The gaze is suffused with that “sorrowful joy”, that “blessed sadness” spoken of in spiritual writings: tears threaded with light, mingled with a kind of smile, when the “remembrance of death” is reversed into “remembrance of God.” As Dionysius the Areopagite writes, the capacity to see now consists in “receiving the divine illuminations without disturbance... with simplicity, suppleness, without resistance, in a swift and pure soaring.”9 And Gregory Palamas: “How can our body be offered as a sacrifice pleasing to God? When our eyes carry a gaze full of gentleness, as it is written: He whose gaze is gentle shall be forgiven.”10 This gaze that sees the invisible is the only one that knows how to welcome.
The forehead is wide and luminous. Often, a tuft of hair at the top center rests like a Pentecostal flame.
The forehead and the eyes are unified; the luminous wrinkles and the long, pure lines of the brows converge at the root of the nose, often marked by a sort of triangle whose point is sometimes sharp, sometimes rounded. Not a “third eye” as in the traditions of India or Tibet, where man dissolves into inwardness, but rather the pivot of the balanced scale between the eyes — a unification, not a fusion, of their gaze. This gaze sees the other in his otherness, sees in him the possibility of the icon, and the “flame of things.”
The winglike motion of the eyebrows extends toward the “earthly face” of the mouth along the line of the nose — long and slender, or rather two parallel lines, each one continuing without interruption the curve of an eyebrow. It is the arrow drawn by the bow of the eyes, the mystery of breath that links the eyes and the heart, so that the light of the heart is expressed in the gaze. The nostrils are not thickened into the mass of the nose, which is thus freed from its animal resemblances. They are added with precision, clearly delineated on either side of the nose’s base, as a discreet reminder of the great cross it traces with the eyes. “The capacity to perceive to the utmost the fragrances that surpass the intellect,” writes Dionysius — an opening to the original Breath, returned to the heart with the invocation of the Divine Name, which, in the prayer method of the Christian East, is performed in rhythm with the breath.
The mouth is beautifully shaped, not heavy, yet not lacking density — the lower lip generally shorter than the upper, so that the whole reprises the movement of the face, a blessing that rises from below to above. The mouth is closed upon silence but, in the case of Christ, ready to breathe forth the Spirit — as shown by the swelling of the neck...
The ears are reduced, as if drawn inward — sometimes a tiny shell curled upward, listening to the divine Word, “for man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God,” and also listening to that Silence which is “the language of the world to come.”
The cheeks are spaces of silence. In representations of “the old sages” — ascetics or bishops, especially Saint Nicholas — they are deeply hollowed, yet filled with the white or luminous waves of the beard: controlled whirlpools, a transfiguration of the carnal life, a symmetry surrounding the chin, which is sometimes marked by a golden spiral...
The whole face is of a very soft brown, the color of earth illumined from within by sunlight. The great ascetics, moreover — those who already here below, through the burning of the heart and the charismatic tears, experience the awakening of the body of glory — gradually take on a complexion that calls to mind this very color.
It may be meaningful to compare this expression of the transfiguration of the face with the lakshanas of Buddhist art, which indicate the state of “liberation” through a deformation of the sensory organs. In the icon, symbolic abstraction is incorporated into the face; it suggests the fulfillment of the face through a dual and simultaneous opening — to both transcendence and the neighbor. It reveals an exteriority-interiority, a presence of the unknowable in which transcendence gives itself without ceasing to be inaccessible. The icon is a face received by grace. In Buddhist art, the face tends to identify with the symbol, to become itself the symbol of an ineffable Nothingness, fully interiorized. It is abolished as face by dissolving into an interiority where there is no longer either self or other. In both cases, the face is haloed. But the Christian face is in the light as iron is in fire — its fullness is transparency; the Buddhist face becomes spherical, expands, and in a sense merges with the luminous sphere represented by the nimbus. In Chinese emblematics, the fully realized face is no longer of fire — which would still signify a striving — but of water: pure infilling by the Void. And one thinks, perhaps not without some injustice, of prenatal waters, of their bliss rediscovered. Even filled with the grace of the Spirit, the Christian face remains aflame with the quest for the “ever sought”: for the living God is all the more unknown the more He is known; the Song of Songs never ends (and indeed no theologian or mystic has ever managed to comment on it to the very end...); there is no final resting point, no transition to a limit — “enstasis” always refers back to “ekstasis.”
In the icon, the rendering of the sensory organs suggests their illumination by grace and their transformation into organs of adoration. The lakshanas, by contrast, symbolize “powers” — notably clairvoyance and clairaudience — through the exaggerated enlargement of the ears and the concentration of the gaze on a swelling at the root of the nose.
Finally, the Christian face looks and welcomes; the blessed duality of the gaze is preserved; silence nourishes the promise of speech — whereas the Buddhist non-face, with closed eyes, gathers itself inwardly into a silence that can no longer have boundaries.
In the art of the catacombs, wisdom and holiness were indicated through a conventional language, rather than symbolized by artistic expression itself. Traces of this remain, for example, in iconography: the stars depicted on the veil of the Mother of God, which recall her virginity. And yet even these stars lend the dark blue of Mary's veil a depth like a night streaming with constellations, a sign of the world’s transparency… Be that as it may, the major fact is this: at the end of the ancient world, Christian art achieved the incorporation of content into form, of symbol into the very depth of the face — a hallmark of properly iconographic art.
In the icon, one passes from symbol to reality — and that reality is the face as epiphany of transcendence. The face, in the image and likeness of God, is a symbol only of itself, as Maximus the Confessor says of the transfigured Christ.
Let us return to the comparison with India and Buddhism: a mandala is, as we know, the geometric symbol of absorption into the center. Eastern Christian iconography also has its own sort of mandalas: in three-dimensional space, for example, the dome over a cubical nave, the two together symbolizing the union of heaven and earth; or, in the proper art of the icon, the circle enclosing two interlaced squares, which surrounds Christ in representations of the Transfiguration. The eight points inscribed within the fullness of the circle refer to the mystery of the Eighth Day — that is, to Pascha, the day after the Sabbath (the seventh day), and the symbol of the Last Day, the day without decline, on which eternity will rise. But neither the dome nor this circle marked by the number eight leads us to a mere center: they lead us to the Pantocrator, to Jesus flashing like lightning — always to a person, always to a face.
Early Christian art employed ancient symbols, cosmic and vegetal: the fish, the lamb, the vine, the bare cross set against the starry sky — to signify Christ, in whom all things are “recapitulated,” since He is the Logos who bears the world and speaks through it. Yet the Quinisext Council (in 692) recommended that these symbols be replaced by what they prefigured: the human face of God, and, for the saints, the human face in God…
Very often, the space of the icon uses inverted perspective (or combines it with a “flat,” two-dimensional representation to once again suggest the union of heaven and earth). In inverted perspective, the lines do not converge toward a vanishing point located on the horizon of this world — a sign of a space that is at once undefined and closed, that separates, projects outward, and imprisons. Rather, the lines expand, open into the light, “from glory to glory.” The lines diverge from the gaze, from the “conscious heart” thus awakened in the one who looks at the icon and finds himself transported into a liberated space, not one of separation — a luminous abyss in which differences are heightened through union itself. This kind of space is intuited when one looks at an almond tree in blossom over the serene gulf of the blue sky, or when one enters the “inner ocean of a gaze.” In the icon, inverted perspective magnifies the “heavenly face,” the breadth of the forehead, the dome of the head.
The icon is still and silent — but with a silence of calling. Yet it is not static. It can at times present the equilibrium of the most extreme tension, as in that fresco in the Church of the Chora in Constantinople, where Christ, descending into Hades in a whiteness like lightning, tears the man and the woman from their tombs. The Crucified-Risen One here incorporates Dionysus — just as Nietzsche perhaps once dreamed: all is vibrant force, a dance of victory — one leg extended, crushing the gates of hell, the other sketching the movement of rising...
The light of the icon, which radiates from personal presences, brings out the spiritual essences of things: around transfigured faces, where universal praise becomes conscious, animals, plants, and rocks are stylized according to a kind of “paradisiacal” abstraction. Wisdom makes its dwelling within them. The icon reveals the virginity of matter. Human works are not ignored — many icons depict architecture — but the scenes are always shown outside: a deep desire to displace the mystery from the structures of history, an irreducible tension between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of Caesar. What the icon retains from human constructions is a gratuitous beauty, a surreal interweaving of volumes that would be perfectly unusable if an architect were to try to draw inspiration from them. Architecture in icons has something slightly mad, which frees the play of beauty…
The art of the icon — to which Malraux remained curiously insensitive — goes beyond his cherished opposition between the creations of non-Christian, or more broadly non-biblical, “Eastern” cultures, which bear witness to an impersonal eternity, and those of the modern West, given over to the anxieties, phantasms, and imaginations of individuals. In truth, the icon reveals an eternity that is not fusion but communion, rooted in the inexhaustibility of the consubstantial person.
This art, moreover, is not unknown in the West: one need only think of pre-Romanesque, Romanesque, Ottonian art, the Trecento, certain faces painted by Memling or Rouault, or the etchings of the old Rembrandt. Yet while early Gothic art still offers a noble balance between the divine and the human (though without any real transfiguration of the human), these elements increasingly separate thereafter, and only a few visionaries bridge the distance — it ceases to be the norm of a truly liturgical art...
The icon also escapes the opposition between figural and non-figural art. It is a “trans-figurative” art. As we have seen, it does not ignore abstraction — but not in order to move from appearances to phantasms. Rather, it serves to unbind the body from the wrappings of death, revealing a “spiritual” corporeality — in the sense of a metamorphosis through the energies of the Spirit. Abstraction in the icon puts to death the gaze of possession and delight, the impulse toward torture and murder, in order to free the gaze into a non-power that is fully accepted. Thus, in its highest realizations — for there is no lack of lesser works: pious craft, excessive devotion that covers the painting with precious metals — the icon stands as both a call and a judgment. It leads us from the manifest other to the hidden other, to the mystery of the face “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). It helps us resist the daily murder of love, in which each of us becomes an iconoclast of the image of God in our brother. God became face, and the ultimate “proof” of God — for the man of today — is perhaps the human face, when it strips away its masks and is illumined by another light. When it begins to become icon.
Saint Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit, trans. David Anderson (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980), 18:45.
Saint Nicephorus, Patriarch of Constantinople, Antirrheticus I.28, PG 100, 277A.
John of Damascus, Oratio Apologetica Prior adversus eos qui sacras imagines abjiciunt, PG 94, 1300; English trans. in Three Treatises on the Divine Images, trans. Andrew Louth, Popular Patristics Series (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003).
Saint Nicephorus, Patriarch of Constantinople, op. cit.
Editor’s note: This was the manner in which Saint Seraphim of Sarov greeted seekers and pilgrims year-round, and not only during the Paschal season.
Saint Macarius the Great, First Spiritual Homily, 2, PG 34, 451AB; English trans. in A.J. Mason, Fifty Spiritual Homilies of St. Macarius the Egyptian (London: SPCK, 1921).
Jean Gouillard, ed. and trans., Petite Philocalie de la prière du cœur (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1979), 207–208.
Irina Goraïnoff, Séraphin de Sarov, trans. from the Russian (Spiritualité orientale, no. 11; Bellefontaine: Abbaye de Bellefontaine, 1965), 209; English trans. in Little Russian Philokalia: St. Seraphim of Sarov (Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1991).
Saint Dionysius the Areopagite, De coelesti hierarchia 15.3, PG 3, 324D–325A. English trans. in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem (New York: Paulist Press, 1987).
Saint Gregory Palamas, Triades pour la défense des saints hésychastes, ed. Jean Meyendorff, Spiritualité orientale, no. 6 (Chevetogne: Abbaye de Bellefontaine, 1959), 364. English trans. in Gregory Palamas, The Triads, trans. Nicholas Gendle, ed. John Meyendorff (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1983).