INFORME DE ELECCIONES MUNICIPALES V.- INFORME DE ELECCIONES AUTONOMICAS

The icon not only has its aesthetic; it also has its theology. The icon includes an alchemic aspect concerning the spiritualization of mat-ter: its transfiguring function; a symbolic aspect concerning the trans-position of the archetypes into visible images: its purifying function;

and finally a liturgical aspect concerning the “descent from heaven to earth,” which is its cultural function.

Plotinus had already glorified a vision of Nature that, aimed at the “inner eye,” neglected the appearance of forms in order to reveal their essence. Orthodox Christianity adopted this philosophy while at the same time adapting it. Origen would outline the study of the five spiritual senses and the organ used for contemplating incorporeal objects, in other words the “eye of the heart.” This is not analytical and discursive learning, it is an immediate intuitive knowledge offered by the spiritual core, from logos to the heart of sensitive things. The job of the artist will be to successively peel away the bark that covers them to let the being emerge. This explains the disappearance of all perspective, shortcuts, external lighting, and earthly horizons in the icon; this also explains the translucent aspect of the characters and objects, which is comparable to petals arranged around and throughout a luminous source. These coats, these tunics whose folds retain the memory of gowns, drape the souls more than the bodies.

The icon foreshadows, here and now, the glorification of mankind of the Eighth Day—not only mankind but all of Creation.

The small wooden board, the egg yolk base paint,—symbol of the triple world—holy water diluting colored paste are the humble beginnings of the substantial Redemption that should operate dur-ing the Apocatastasis. For by becomdur-ing flesh, Christ made the meta-morphosis and the deification of the physical world itself possible.

If the Fall was not only Adam’s, but the occultation covering the entire universe, the paradisiac modality, likewise, the final Salvation concerns not only humanity but all the atoms of the cosmos. A pre-cious idea in Orthodoxy: by descending into Jordan, Christ sancti-fied the waters in advance; stretched on the cross, he sanctisancti-fied the wood (this wood which also designates the cosmic substance);

*From Athos, the Transfigured Mountain, V, 2.

buried, he sanctified the earth; by breathing our air, he sanctified the air; and by manifesting himself in Hades, the fire. This is what the first aspect of the icon eloquently teaches.

Its second aspect recalls that the icon is a mirror in which Eternity, Paradise, the future Century are reflected; a window onto the Absolute, by which Essence, the supraterrestrial Beauty descends. The gold of the background suggests the deifying Grace penetrating everything. Its light arouses things more than it illumi-nates them since things illuminate themselves; it is the vehicle of archetypical presence. The icon procures the “sensation of divine things” by revealing them; it purifies the place where it mysterious-ly shines and attesting to the presence of the Transcendent there, it is as such, theophany. It is the point of convergence of a precipitate and a concentration of energy, the expression that Ramakrishna consecrated to the divine image: “a condensation of conscious”

could be attributed to it without syncretism. On the one hand, it is above all the place where God puts on a face, that of a man, where the human face of God appears unveiled; on the other hand, the place where man can contemplate at the same time—reminis-cence—the original image of the Face that was his before the cos-mic catastrophe, and—anticipation—that of the Face that will be his in Celestial Jerusalem: one and the same Face in the glory of Pleroma.

There is no greater miracle than seeing the Invisible become vis-ible; no better confirmation than discovering that the Face of God is also that of humanity. But the wonder of wonders is that this Face has a gaze, a tear through which Heaven surges, unfurls to meet our eyes.

The third and last aspect concerns the liturgical and sacramental role of the icon. The liturgy of the here below only reproduces the one that, uninterrupted, takes place in the other world. The icon is perhaps the visual echo of this Liturgy. Placed on the iconostasis that simultaneously separates the nave from the altar, the profane from the sacred, and regards the profane as sacred for presenting them to the Kingdom, the Holy Images are located at the conflu-ence of the terrestrial and the celestial; and as the divine truths are reflected in the human mind by images, they reflect likewise Heaven on Earth.

The icon sanctifies the gaze of the one who looks at it, trans-forming the former into a “sense of vision.” Free from any sensual-ism, it inaugurates the “fasting of the eyes,” pacifies, illuminates. It

is also a support for meditation, canalizing the mental and psychic currents. It facilitates the repetition of the Divine Name pro-nounced before it by helping concentration—an exercise that recalls that of the Hindu manasapuja. Moreover, the contemplation of the icon is this gaze of the silence that awakens within us the appearance of the archetypes and the desire to bring them togeth-er. Little by little, the divine-human Face becomes part of the firmest tissue of the human being; it gives him order, purifies him, prepares him for the vision of God. Has it not been said that “he who has not seen God in this life will not see him in a future life either?” And because “man becomes what he contemplates,” said Plotinus, he who has contemplated Love will obviously become Love, first by reflection, then by imitation, and lastly by identifica-tion. Likewise, the one who has contemplated ugliness, vulgarity, violence and hatred will become ugly, vulgar, violent and hateful, and the seed of criminality will germinate in him. In the rampant

“image oriented civilization” that marks the times, it is unfortunate that the actuality of the icon, mirror of holiness, is so poorly under-stood by our contemporaries.

This impregnation works toward inner transformation and is the preparation for the Face-to-face meeting at the moment of the great passage. The icon is a tool for the acceptance of death. It immerses, empowers the deep layers of the unconscious. Its memory is kept above the immediate and superficial memory of the brain; and the face it represents and buries in the depths of the human being lets him recognize the Face located on the other side, and to feel, in the beyond, that he is in the land of knowledge.

The supporters of the goddess of Reason, with her authorization, denounce the worship of Images. In the eighth century, the Iconoclasts were already criticizing Christians for wanting to repre-sent God, and in the way of the pantheists, of deifying matter.

Constantine V Copronymus (surnamed Dung) would have them tor-tured and dragged through the streets, sewn into sacks then thrown into the sea. One can admit the possible existence of superstitious deviations, of an idolatry. But let the debate be raised to the level of the Fathers.

The latter reply, on the one hand, that if God cannot be repre-sented, the Word became flesh, and it is possible from that moment on to “represent the likeness of The One who showed himself”; on the other hand, the substance is not adored, but through it, the Principle is. In a definitive formula, Saint John Damascene explains,

“I do not worship matter but the Creator of matter who, because of me, became matter, and with that matter saved me.” A strange irony of sorts: the one nicknamed Chrysorroas—“Gold flowing” (because of the eloquence of his words), had to defend the icon in the Muslim state, not against the Muslims, but against iconoclastic Christians: he was lain to rest in a mosque. According to the Council of Nicaea in 787, “Anyone who worships an icon worships the per-son it represents.” The holy Fathers have said it more than enough that “honor given to the image passes to the being embellished by imagery,” and that “by looking at an icon, the spirit ascends to its prototype.” By becoming flesh, God did not divinize matter, he dei-fied it; he made it the Spirit’s receptacle.

By turning to abstract art, Western religious art proves today its complete lack of understanding of the meaning of Incarnation, and that by doctrinal weakness or out of concern for demagogic adap-tation it has lost intellectuality to intellectualism. Insofar as abstract art can be appreciated in Islam, the religion of divine Impersonality, it is unjustifiable in the religion where, par excellence, God gives concrete expression to the Face. As for profane art, faced with the world of icons, it only translates a fragmented world of decomposed shapes that favor the appearance of imprisoned structures instead of the essence; a world where matter, unfamiliar with assumption, disintegrates under the aspect of haunting monsters or mechanical grins, where the psyche, uprooted from all references, agonizes in the dregs of the human misadventure … Nightmarish depiction of a glacial Hell into which Christ did not deign to descend. Exaltation of the Triad of inversed hypostases: titanic Arrogance, facing the dis-cretion, obliteration and absence of all rhetoric from the Word;

hateful Folly, with respect to God’s “passion” for mankind;

Nothingness, like the parodic reply to the divine kenosis, made from spareness, renunciation, and sacrifice until death.

Contrary to the dryness that is characteristic of naturalism, cubism and tachism, the art of the “saints and precious icons”

soothes the eyes and rejuvenates the soul; it arouses a dream that is truer than reality, presents the plenary Truth. After having discov-ered the splendor and diverse levels of meanings, one can only turn once again toward this sea that brings us everything to see if other icons won’t sail toward us; this sea that, from ages to ages, has brought to the shores of Mount Athos, these floating images, slowly pushed by the wind, collected by a monk, and that the traditions loaded with miracles, and piety, with flowers.