The Face and the Icon, Part Two
Olivier Clément
Translated From:
Olivier Clément. Le visage intérieur. Paris: Stock/Monde Ouvert, 1978, pp 26-44.
II. The Face of God
The Uncircumscribable Word of the Father was circumscribed when He took flesh of thee, O Theotokos; and when He had restored the defiled image to its ancient state, He suffused it with divine beauty. As for us, confessing our salvation, we record it in deed and word.
Kontakion of the Sunday of Orthodoxy
In the 8th and 9th centuries, a powerful current of the experience of emptiness and the desert — Israel’s experience, taken up again in its Abrahamic source by Islam — challenged the legitimacy of the icon. The distance of the Transcendent was thought to be such that any representation must be condemned as idolatry. In response, the defenders of the icon recalled that, at the very heart of history, God allowed Himself to be seen — without ceasing to remain hidden — in a face: the face of Jesus. This face paradoxically constitutes “the visible of the invisible”; it is “the invisible revealed” by veiling itself — not by withdrawing into a distant beyond, but by the very elusiveness of the true face: the one we dream of in our friendships and our loves, the one we sense in our earliest weeks, even before we are conscious of our own self, when we smile at our mother or father... A face opened — doubly so: to the origin and to the other — who then becomes the neighbor; a face whose openness to the origin makes it infinitely close. The icon gives a compelling clarity — not an intellectual certainty, but an evident clarity that sets the “conscious heart” ablaze — to the awestruck testimony of the first witnesses: “That which was from the beginning... we have seen it with our eyes... the Life was made manifest, and we have seen it and bear witness...” (1 John 1:1–2).
A face has appeared — remaining inseparably in the icon and in the intimacy of contemplation — entirely transparent to the Origin, to the One Whom Jesus calls the Father: the inaccessible abyss from which all things come forth, and who reveals Himself as infinite tenderness, source of the Breath with which Jesus is filled and with which He fills us. Hence Christ’s response to those who say to Him, “Show us the Father.” A startled sorrow passes through His voice: “Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me? He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). “No one hath seen God at any time,” says the Apostle John at the beginning of his Gospel; “the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him” (John 1:18). This is why, in the art of the icon, the Father cannot be represented in Himself. The Seventh Ecumenical Council, which defined the meaning of images and their veneration, laid down this prohibition — a prohibition reaffirmed by the Council of Moscow in 1666–1667. Just as an icon is never enclosed in a frame and always “bursts through” its border upward (into which, for example, the halo encroaches), so too is the distance of the Transcendent indicated by the impossibility of representing the Father. There is something idolatrous in those images of a bearded old man that Western religious art multiplied from the late Middle Ages onward. Visual representation presumes to appropriate God entirely, to grasp Him as theological summaries once tried to do with their concepts. From this presumption arose, in reaction, both the iconoclasm of the Reformation and, in part, modern atheism. God is not an individual in the sky. Nor two individuals — one young, the other old — connected by a dove. The paternal origin reveals itself and veils itself simultaneously in the face of Jesus, in the Breath and the Light that transfigure this face.
The prohibitions of the Old Testament — “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,” “Thou shalt not represent God” — therefore remain valid with respect to the very Source of divinity. Yet they have also constituted — and continue to constitute — a kind of negative prefiguration of the Incarnation, an indispensable via negativa. In the time of ancient Israel, these prohibitions stood in contrast to the surrounding Near Eastern cultures, which teemed with ultimately impersonal images. They still stand in contrast today; this is the “idoloclastic” function of Judaism and Islam: to oppose every idolatry of immanence — whether it be the collective man, the sole supreme being for man according to Marx, or the yogic realization of the “self,” where interiority savors itself rather than becoming a transparency made peaceful and a faithful mirror. The Old Testament simultaneously announces the epiphany of the inaccessible, the image of the unimaginable, through the ever-recurring themes of the Face, the Name, the Glory: “Tell me thy Name,” “Show me thy Face” — hopes through which man will rediscover his own face, since, as Genesis says, he was created “in the image and likeness of God” (Gen 1:27). Israel is the one who stands before an absolute Thou, of whom man is the free reflection. But it required — and still requires — a long negative approach, a long fidelity to the unimaginable — even through Jacob’s wrestling or Job’s protest — to tear man away from archaic enstasis, from the discontinuity of fleeting moments (those “little eternities of pleasure” he now seeks in eroticism or drugs), and to reveal to him, through the patience of faith, in the long exodus through the desert, the Other — and thus the neighbor, the Father and the fellow man...
However, if God is the Totally Other, He is not the opposite, non est aliud — He is not another thing, said Nicholas of Cusa. Thus distance becomes the place of Glory, of the Shekhinah, of what Jewish mysticism calls the “divine sparks” and what the spirituality of the Christian East calls the “energies.” It is the “reverse side” of the inaccessible that Moses may behold. But this radiance, too direct, not yet filtered and interiorized by the flesh of the earth assumed in the Incarnation, remains unbearable; and Moses must veil his face, which would otherwise be consumed. In Judaism, as in Islam, the icon remains veiled. This is an indispensable reminder to Christians that the icon must never become an idol — that it is, in itself, like every true face, an epiphanic veil. Already, however, for Ezekiel, the Glory shines forth in a “form of a man” inscribed in God — God bears within Himself His Other, and it is a “form of man”! The Servant Songs in the wondrous prophecy of Isaiah — which Eastern Christians call “the fifth Gospel” — link the final outpouring of Glory to the mysterious absence of brilliance and beauty in the Servant, the revealer of a God who strips Himself and opens Himself.
The Name, the Face, the “form of man,” the Glory — not as an overwhelming fire that consumes, but as the very opening of a liberating Fatherhood — all converge upon the face of Jesus. Upon that Face which begins to appear, mysteriously, between the Cherubim — those terrifying angels who guarded the Ark of the Covenant — and which can be found represented at Germigny-des-Prés, in a Carolingian church, in a mosaic above the altar... The prohibitions of Exodus and Deuteronomy dismiss the idols, carve out the paternal distance, and make room for the icon of the Absolute.
We could multiply citations from the Fathers here. Gregory of Nyssa writes: “...the Person of the Son becomes as it were the form and the face of the perfect knowledge of the Father, and the Person of the Father is perfectly known in the form and face of the Son...” (Letter 38, 8). And Cyril of Alexandria says: “The image of the invisible God, the radiance of the Person of the Father, the imprint of His substance, took the form of a servant... while still preserving, even so, His identity with the Father.”1
The West has spoken too much of the “Word,” going so far as to identify it with rationality and logic. But this divine Word is also a mysterious Other, a living Image, not separate, “consubstantial.” The face of Jesus is the icon of that eternal Icon. “Since the invisible has clothed Himself in flesh,” writes John of Damascus, “since He has appeared, represent the likeness of the One who manifested Himself.”2 And another defender of images, Theodore the Studite, notes: “If art could not represent Him, it would mean... that He had not become incarnate.”3
Nicholas of Cusa said that Jesus, because He is God made man, is the “maximum man.” One could say that the face of Jesus is the maximum face — in a sense, the only face fully open — and thus that the icon of Jesus is the foundation, and even the very possibility, of the art of the icon. In the Christian East, some icons are said to be “not made by human hands” (acheiropoietai). Thus, Christ is said to have imprinted His face on a cloth and sent it to the sick king of Edessa. This legend connects with the Western story of Veronica and perhaps finds historical truth in the Shroud of Turin. But the spiritual meaning is clear: the consubstantial image of the Father was imprinted in the womb of the Virgin, and the virginal conception expresses precisely this rupture in the chain of faces conditioned by finitude, born to die — this appearance of a face freed from finitude, born to rise again and to raise us with Him. Let this nativity not be seen as contempt for human eros, but as its renewal. In the Christian East, the icon of the kiss exchanged by Mary’s parents, Joachim and Anne, magnificently exalts the loving union of man and woman.
The Church has faithfully preserved the memory of the face of Jesus. The historian Eusebius of Caesarea, in the early 4th century, testified that pagans healed by Christ had portraits made of Him; he himself had seen such representations of Christ and of the apostles. But what does it matter, in the end? The Church, in her secret, sacramental, and spiritual fullness, does not cease to contemplate the face of God. And certain of her members, nourished by the very flesh of God, are illuminated by His vision. All icons of Christ give the impression of a fundamental unity — not a photograph, but a presence: a representation, but not an objectification, of the same Person. Each painter, according to the measure of his communion — whether visionary, or, more humbly, in the communion of visionaries who came before him — emphasizes one aspect or another, and sets us on the path toward the inexhaustible, in an art that can only be a celebration of encounter. There is but one Holy Face, whose memory the Church preserves, revived from generation to generation by the vision of the “spiritual ones,” the “apostolic men” (as those are called in the Christian East who speak of realities they have seen), and as many holy Faces as there are iconographers — or even as there are moments in the life of an iconographer. The human face of God is inexhaustible, and all the more unknown as it reveals itself and is represented.
It will take all of human history for the God-man to be revealed in His fullness.
In the face of Jesus is fulfilled what we have seen sketched in every human face: the assumption of all humanity and of the universe. In Christ, says Cyril of Alexandria, the “common person” — more precisely, the “common face” (prosōpon) — of humanity is “revivified.” “The Word has dwelt in all through one, so that from the one true Son of God, this dignity might pass into all humanity through the Spirit of sanctification, and so that through one of us might be fulfilled that saying: I have said, Ye are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High [Psalm 82:6 / John 10:34].”4 The Spirit, the Breath of life, explains Cyril, could not fully rest upon human beings; but now He rests in the incarnate Son “so that He might also rest upon us.”5 The body of the Word, truly the “body of God,” is filled with divine energy; by being incorporated into this body through baptism and the Eucharist, we also receive the very power of the Breath: “For now He calls His flesh Spirit, without denying that it is flesh.”6 Thus the “divine imprints” that Cyril links to the life breathed by the Creator “into the face” of Adam “shine again in humanity.”7
The face of Christ thus constitutes the “common face” of humanity: the face of all faces — not because it abolishes the others in order to replace them, but because its radiance penetrates them, renders them transparent to its own light, to its secret incandescence, which is that of the Spirit. When we are before a being of goodness, of peace, of blessing, we feel that he surrounds us, takes us into himself, associates us with the immensity that wells up within him. How much more does encountering Jesus mean being in him: his face is not a boundary or a magic that dazzles — it is an opening of light in which separation is abolished and difference is affirmed. Jesus does not compete. In this opening that He is, in this light that He communicates, we discover the true face of the other, freed from masks, reunited, the secret of a person and at the same time the place of communion. All races, all cultures, all forms of worship find their place — and their ultimate meaning — in this opening. The face of Christ in the icons, colored like earth infused with light, does not belong to the White race: it is the abyssal face of mankind, both before all differentiations and through them.
It is the assumption of all humanity, and also the assumption of the universe — and of that first “condensation” of light that we call matter. The witness to this cosmic transfiguration is undoubtedly St. John of Damascus. For him, the very art of the icon shows that the Incarnation has truly reached matter, has secretly illuminated it, and restored its fundamental sacramentality. “In Christ, matter has become spiritual, infused with the energies of the Spirit. I venerate that matter through which salvation has come to me; I venerate it because it is filled with divine energy.” And he adds: “Above all, are not the body and blood of our Lord matter?”8 Bread and wine — which sum up the nature of things, but also the labor and the celebration of humankind — become, in the perspective of this mystical materialism, the flesh and blood of a Face. The spiritual essences of things, their logoi, are joined to and unveiled by the incarnate Logos; they find in Him both speech and face. In Christ, the human face becomes fully the image of God and the synthesis of the world. The cosmic prayer that — if we borrow an intuition from India — sleeps in the stone, dreams in the plant, awakens and leaps in the animal, finds here its full expression. Every being sketches the face of Christ and finds its truth in that face.
Face of all faces, face of the cosmos — does Christ truly have an individual human face? Origen thought that He manifests Himself to each person in a particular way. But then, could He be depicted?
The Fathers of the 8th and 9th centuries recovered, in tension with the Christic universalism, the “pan-Christism” of Alexandria, the Semitic sense of the historical Jesus, of His unique individuality with “that which distinguishes Him from others.”9 Christ is at once all humanity (a synthetic person, one might say) and an individual: the very One Who walked the roads of Galilee and was crucified “under Pontius Pilate.” The Bultmannian distinction between the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith” appears here as radically untenable. Faith, quite simply, sees — with the eye of the heart — Who this man is: Jesus of Nazareth, indeed an individual “circumscribed” in space and time, but also the Person of the Word assuming, reuniting, and deifying in Himself all humanity and the entire universe. God, in a sense, limited Himself — while remaining absolutely without limits — within the features of the human face of Jesus. “Humanity is contemplated in the Person of Christ in the manner of an individual,” wrote Theodore the Studite.10
The result — decisive for the understanding of the icon — is that Christ and His representation are one and the same person: “In the icon of Christ, there is no other person than that of Christ; it is the same person of Christ who, through the form of His appearance, is made manifest in the icon.”11
In his letter to the Philippians, the apostle Paul quotes a very ancient hymn about Christ, which begins as follows:
He, being in the form of God,
did not cling jealously
to the rank that made Him equal to God.
But He emptied (ekenōsen) Himself,
taking the form of a slave,
and becoming like men.
Found in appearance as a man,
He humbled Himself further,
becoming obedient unto death —
even death on a cross.
(Philippians 2:6–8).
The antinomy suggested here — that of fullness and emptiness, of God and the crucified slave — measures the “mad love” of God for man, to borrow a phrase from certain Byzantine spiritual writers. Out of this madness of love, the Word, “in the form of God,” voluntarily emptied Himself. Ekenōsen means “He humbled Himself,” but in the radical sense of “He emptied Himself, laid Himself waste, annihilated Himself.” God — because He is not only the abyss, but an abyss of love and freedom — can, in some sense, transcend His own transcendence, leave behind His inaccessible “supra-essence,” and descend to the furthest limits of separation and “slavery,” into His own absence, into death and hell, in order to reopen the path of Life to all.
Love seeks reciprocity. The very existence of another implies for God a kind of withdrawal and vulnerability. By His voluntary “annihilation,” God becomes a poor, abandoned, crucified God, who — far from crushing man by a jealous fullness — enters from within into his affliction, becomes infinitely near, even in the most painful separation (think of Jesus’ cry from the cross: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”) — in order that there may be no more separation. God conforms Himself to man so that man, in the most tragic depths of his mortal condition, might be conformed to God and receive divine life. Through this “being laid waste” freely chosen, the Word made flesh has removed all obstacles that separated us from Him. What remains, at the pure core of the human person, is our freedom. Only the “humiliation” of the Almighty can bend it — an ultimate proof of love. “Man can only yield under the weight of the extreme kenosis of God.”12
Thus the face of God was not only that of a contingent individual, but the non-face of the “slave,” the aprosōpos, “the one who is not seen”: the Face stripped of all the masks of nothingness — the Paschal Face, where despair is passed through into hope, where emptiness turns into fullness, where all the “faceless” — the excluded, the broken, the despised, the tortured — find their face of eternity. There is perhaps no other key for a Christian engagement with politics than this: the demand to restore a face to the faceless. And there is not a single one among us who has not been — or is not at some moment in life — an aprosōpos. To be a Christian is to discover, in the very depth of one’s hell, the face of God — laid waste and risen, disfigured and transfigured — who receives us, frees us, and returns to us the grace of the icon, the possibility of the face. And thus we are drawn into history to preserve — patiently — not only through social liberation, but existential deepening, that call to the icon which the living God, the God who has a Face, addresses to every man.
God, in Christ, has become the ultimate Face, appearing in the most opaque aspects of the world and within each of us — the Face of the Servant who has “no beauty or majesty to attract us” (Isaiah 53:2). Yet, precisely through this, He radiates the only beauty that is not aesthetic, ephemeral, or ambiguous, but one that is identical with goodness and love, bestowing a fullness of being that constitutes the very essence of communion.
We must revisit the passage on the Judgment in the Gospel of Matthew: “I was hungry, and you gave me food; I was thirsty, and you gave me drink; I was a stranger, and you welcomed me; I was naked, and you clothed me...” (Matthew 25:35–40). Contemplate this alongside an icon of the crucified Christ or one of those frescoes depicting Jesus “in extreme humility,” with hands bound and crowned with thorns, painted by the Greeks on the “table of preparation” during the early centuries of the modern era. The face is abandoned, the torso opened like a gateway to the heart’s mad love. Yet, this is not merely a suffering man; it is God Himself. The Spirit watches, and all is about to be engulfed in light.
At Gethsemane — “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me”— and at Golgotha — “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” — all human anguish becomes, through the sovereign offering of freedom, the very density of faith and love: “Yet not as I will, but as Thou wilt.” The great cry of abandonment initiates a psalm of praise: “Thou art my praise...” (Psalm 22:26).13 Here, death becomes death to death; the narcissistic fascination with nothingness is overcome; a breach opens forever in this world. The face of Christ henceforth signifies, eternally, “the living icon of love.”14
This face of faces, this individual face, disfigured by love and transfigured through it, is indeed, without any separation, the face of God. It leads to nothing other than itself — to its own inexhaustible depth, to that secret it unveils without abolishing as secret. In a meditation on the transfigured Christ, Maximus writes: “He became the type and symbol of Himself. He manifested Himself as the symbol of Himself from Himself: He led all creation by the hand through Himself manifested toward Himself entirely hidden.”15 Christ reveals to us what we had intuited in the humblest face: that it does not open onto a transpersonal essence but onto the secret of the person, onto a difference where the infinite surfaces while remaining inaccessible.
All the aspects of Jesus’ face are inscribed within the solar splendour, already resurrectional, of the Transfiguration on the mountain. The Gospel says: “a high mountain” — a place where the earth rises into the light, where the celestial gently condenses into the whiteness of snow, a concretion of light, the birthplace of waters that fertilise all life. There, before Peter and the “sons of Thunder,” James and John, Jesus appeared as the source of light: “He was transfigured before them: his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white,” with one variant reading: “like snow” (Matt. 17:1–2), and Luke adds: “of a whiteness like lightning” (Luke 9:29). The priest blesses one who enters the vocation and service of an icon painter by reciting the Office of the Transfiguration over him. The Fathers continually commented on this Trinitarian Manifestation: for everything is enveloped by a “luminous cloud” where the voice of the Origin resounds: “This is my beloved Son” (Matt. 17:5). Anastasius of Sinai, in this context, recalls Jacob’s vision: the opening to the celestial realm seen in a dream by the patriarch is now the face of Jesus: “How awe-inspiring is this face! It is nothing other than the house of God and the gate of heaven,” through which “we see God in the form of a man, the face resplendent, shining more than the sun…”16 Similarly, John of Damascus writes: “Behold this sun, how it blazes…”17
Jewish mysticism spoke of the omnipresent Wisdom of God, “more beautiful than the sun.” The Epistle to the Hebrews presents it concentrated in the face of Jesus — “the radiance of [God’s] glory” (Heb. 1:3).
Alexandrian theology of the fourth and fifth centuries symbolised the relationship of Christ to the one he calls his Father through images of solar fecundity. Christ is “light from light,” says the Nicene Creed. “The splendour proceeds from the divine sun from all eternity,” affirms a Christmas sermon included in the Acts of the Council of Ephesus. Cyril of Alexandria, in particular, celebrated in Christ “the splendour of the Father”: “He is the splendour issuing from the very substance of the light.”18 “The Son proceeds from the Father like a pure effusion of light.”19 These are commentaries on the great affirmation of Jesus in the Gospel of John: “I am the light of the world.”
This light constitutes the very essence of beauty. For beauty is a divine Name, a divine Energy, one of the fundamental modes of God’s presence to His creation. In Christ, divine beauty restores, in the light, human beauty: “He has restored to its original dignity the image of God and has united it to divine beauty,” says the liturgical refrain of the feast where the Orthodox Church commemorates the restoration of the veneration of icons. “Through the beauty of the Son in time, men are as if led by the hand toward eternal Beauty.”
The rose blooms on the cross. In the cruciform halo of the Transfigured One, his face, says the Armenian Church, heir to the ancient Syriac tradition, is “the Resplendent Rose.”
Cyril of Alexandria, Quod unus sit Christus, in SC 97, ed. and trans. Marcel Richard (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1963), 451; English trans. in On the Unity of Christ, trans. John Anthony McGuckin, Popular Patristics Series (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995).
John of Damascus, Oratio Apologetica Prior adversus eos qui sacras imagines abjiciunt, PG 94, 1239; English trans. in On the Divine Images, trans. David Anderson, Popular Patristics Series (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980).
Theodore the Studite, Antirrhetici tres adversus iconomachos, PG 99, 417C; English trans. in On the Holy Icons, trans. Catharine P. Roth, Popular Patristics Series (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981).
Cyril of Alexandria, Commentarius in Joannem Evangelistam, PG 73, 161C; English trans. in Commentary on John: Volume 1, trans. David R. Maxwell, ed. Joel C. Elowsky, Ancient Christian Texts (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013).
Cyril of Alexandria, Commentarius in Isaiam prophetam, PG 70, 313D; English trans. in Commentary on Isaiah: Volume I, Chapters 1–14, trans. Robert Charles Hill (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2008).
Cyril of Alexandria, Commentarius in Joannem Evangelistam, PG 73, 604D; English trans. in Commentary on John: Volume 2, trans. David R. Maxwell, ed. Joel C. Elowsky, Ancient Christian Texts (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015).
Ibid. PG 73, 205 B.
John of Damascus, Oratio Apologetica Prior adversus eos qui sacras imagines abjiciunt, PG 94, 1245A and 1249C; English trans. in Three Treatises on the Divine Images, trans. Andrew Louth, Popular Patristics Series (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003).
Maximus the Confessor, Epistula 15, in PG 91, 560C; English trans. in Kevin L. Flannery, “The Logic of the Word Incarnate: A Translation of Maximus Confessor’s Letter 15,” unpublished Licentiate thesis, Weston School of Theology, 1988.
Theodore the Studite, Antirrhetici tres adversus iconomachos, in PG 99, 401B; English trans. in On the Holy Icons, trans. Catharine P. Roth (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001).
Theodore the Studite, Epistula 194, in PG 99, 1589.
Maximus the Confessor, Epistula II ad Thomam, in PG 91, 560C; English translation in Maximus the Confessor: Ambigua to Thomas and Second Letter to Thomas, trans. and ed. Joshua Lollar, Corpus Christianorum in Translation 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009).
Psalm 22:26. “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” is the first verse of this psalm.
Maximus the Confessor, Letter 44, in PG 91, 644 B. English transl. in Maximus the Confessor, Selected Writings, translated by George C. Berthold (New York: Paulist Press, 1985).
Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguum 10, in PG 91, 1165 D–1168 A. English transl. in Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, Volume I, translated by Nicholas Constas, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 28 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
Anastasius of Sinai, In Transfigurationem Domini Nostri Iesu Christi, in PG 89, 1361–1376.
John of Damascus, Homilia in Transfigurationem Domini, cited in Kate Rosemond, La Christologie de saint Jean Damascène (Ettal: Buch-Kunstverlag, 1959), 99.
Cyril of Alexandria, Dialogus de Trinitate, in PG 75, 1030.
Cyril of Alexandria, Thesaurus de sancta et consubstantiali Trinitate, in PG 75, 560.