Visions of the Transcendent

By Andrew J. Clarendon

The word icon evokes a number of associations: a modern person might think of an icon as a representational image on the computer screen, or, in the looser sense, a person who is idealized as a great cultural figure. In devotional art, an icon is a sacred image that is usually painted on wood with traditional lines and colors involving rich symbolism; iconographers speak not of painting an icon but of writing one. While the artist depicts persons and events, there is no attempt to produce a realistic image of the subject in a material sense. As one commentator puts it: “an icon is a sacred image of Jesus Christ or a holy person in another reality, place, and time . . . a religious icon is much more than just a beautiful piece of art—it is a ‘window into heaven.’” Furthermore, “icons do not speak [in the ordinary sense of the term] or display any actions . . . they invite us into the world of silence, prayer, and contemplation. They do not show human emotions, as they are not intended to force an intense emotional response,” but rather seek to elevate above the physical. These considerations lead to fascinating meditations on the purpose of devotional art, differences between the east and west, and even more fundamental questions about the relationship between the body and the soul. Whatever the distinctions, of vital importance is that the aim of iconic art—and of all the arts—is to create something transcendent, a reflection of the Creator Himself.

The Foundation of Western Culture

There is, however, another way to think about the iconic, a discussion that embraces multiple arts and forms a foundational basis of Western culture. Firstly, words themselves, and therefore the poetic, can be iconic. In literary and semiotic circles an icon is a special type of word: as one reference book puts it, “at more sophisticated levels of representation and presentation, a verbal or aesthetic icon states a case and also embodies or enacts the case”—to give a simple example, the word “cuckoo.” What is more, from the beginning of the literary tradition, there is an ancient and deep connection between poetry and the visual arts like painting or sculpture. For the ancient Greek lyric poet Simonides of Ceos, “Painting is poetry keeping silent; poetry is like a picture.” Or again, centuries later, the Roman poet Horace wrote that “poetry is like a picture.” In one of her essays, Eva T. H. Brann notes “that a painting should say something and that poetry should depict something is arguably the crux of the Western representation, mimetic [that is, imitating nature] mode . . . [and so] if poetry is to be like a picture then, by a natural transition, is might very appropriately be about a picture.” These “descriptions of visual works in poetry are . . . called ‘iconic.’” While painters depicted scenes from Homer’s Odyssey, for example, ancient Greek writers would compose “pieces describing with the utmost pictorial vividness real or imaginary works of graphic art, images of images as it were.” It is noteworthy that the Greek word for poet—poiein—literally means “maker”; this iconic mimetic tradition of the visual arts and poetry is that of “sister arts” that reflect in their own mode the work of the Supreme Artist, the Supreme Creator. As Dante writes in Inferno 11: “Nature takes her course from the Divine / Intellect . . . / your art, too, as best it can, imitates / Nature, . . . / so your art may be said to be God’s grandchild.” True art is both grounded in Nature and reaches higher, to the source of reality.

An Example in Dante

A richly illustrative example can be found later in Dante’s Divine Comedy, in Purgatorio 10. Having passed through the gate into the main part of Purgatory, which is divided into seven terraces that correspond to the seven capital sins, the Pilgrim starts walking along the cornice in which pride is purged. While each of the terraces include examples of the vice being purged, each also has examples of the opposite virtue, the first always taken from the life of the Blessed Mother. In this first level, to present the fundamental virtue of humility, Dante depicts the Annunciation, creating a tour-de-force of iconic poetry: “all the inner cliff / . . . / was pure white marble; on its flawless face / . . . stor[ies] cut into the stone.” These are “carvings that would surely put to shame / not only [the great Greek sculptor] Polyclete but Nature too”; they seem “a shape alive, / . . . / an effigy that could have spoken words. / One would have sworn that [the angel] was saying ‘Ave!’” The statues, are, as Professor Theodolinda Barolini writes, “re-presented so wondrously that they seem not ‘re-presented’ but presented: they seem not art but life”; they are, Dante writes later in the canto, “this art of visible speech”—so perfect and delightful that only God could have created them. Again, Brann draws the two threads together: as “pictures speak silently through sight, [a] poem can render them visible through speech.” Normally, the artist, limited by his own humanity, can only, as Hamlet says, “hold the mirror up to Nature;” but since Dante is displaying Divine lessons in a supernatural realm, the art itself, both the statues, and, eventually, the poetry, must be greater than anything found on earth, including Nature. Since the nature of art is imitative of the visible world around it, poetry assumes a character that reflects the visible world and the visual arts assume a character like poetry; that is, they must use a visual metaphor to represent that which cannot be understood with the eye. Dante writes later in Purgatorio: “as a painter painting from his model, I / would try to show you how I fell asleep. / But let whoever can paint sleep, paint sleep!” Hence, at the highest levels, visual art becomes more symbolic, less focused on the material while maintaining a grounding in the physically real; and poetry becomes more metaphorical as the poet—like Dante in Paradiso—strains to give even a sense of supernatural realities and abstractions.

Our own decadent and destructive times feature the often base and sensual materialism of cinematic imagery coupled with an attempt to obliterate, even physically, the beautiful works of the past. The old icons are either a product of a cultural past that is to be utterly repudiated or, what might be worse, regarded with ignorant indifference. It is a neo-iconoclasm not just of statues but of the entire Western cultural tradition. It is, as Richard Weaver notes in Ideas Have Consequences, the triumph of egotism: “modern man in his innumerable exhibitions of irresponsibility and defiance . . . [displays] a prodigious egotism . . . which is another form of fragmentation, a consequence of that fatal decision to make a separate self the measure of value. . . . It is egotism which enforces the separation between nature—by which is meant here the enduring reality—and art.” Now, after centuries of this fragmentation and egotism, the citadels of civilization are the small communities here and there trying to preserve the tradition. Even in these dark times, “now, under conditions / That seem unpropitious,” we hope along with Dostoevsky that “beauty will save the world.”