Jeffrey L. Kosky
Bucknell University
e live in an age of image. This simple statement, often repeated, has complex ramifications; for the extent of the image is much wider than art and television where it obviously appears most often. To even begin to measure it’s the significance of the image, we must consider a complicated web of discourses, ranging from art and aesthetics to science and technology, and passing through theories of subjectivity and the possibility of God or the gods. For, as the art historian Hans Belting has said, "the history of religion and the history of the human subject [are] inseparable from the history of the image" (Likeness and Presence 16).
"This picture brethren, ye shall set up in some place, let us say, on a north wall and shall stand round it, a little way off, and look upon it. And each of you shall find that, from whatsoever quarter he regardeth it, it looketh upon him as if it looked upon none other…. If now while fixing his eye on the icon, he walk from west to east, he will find that its gaze continuously goeth along with him, and if he return from east to west, in like manner it will not leave him… So he will come to know that the picture's face keepeth in sight all as they go on their way though it be in contrary directions" (The Vision of God 4-5). In this experiment, a man monk walks from west to east and then back from east to west without at any time discovering that the fixed and immobile picture has stopped looking at him as he travels across the room, moving from one place to another. Its vision is in this sense "omnivoyant" or all-embracing of the world in its totality. Likewise when all stand still in a semi-circle surrounding the picture, each alike reports that the picture sees him. This phenomenological report would apparently suggest that for Nicholas and the devoted community of monks the subject (man, the one looking at the painting) does not occupy the relational center, does not stand at the center around which space and time would be organized into an ordered and measured system of coordinates. If each of the brethren is regarded equally no matter what place they occupy, and if a single one of them can be seen equally wherever he places himself in the room, this can only mean that the picture itself marks the center.7
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1 It should be noted that, against man's temptation to delude himself into the mistaken belief of having overcome all distance, Heidegger reminds us that "the frantic abolition of all distance brings no nearness" ("The Thing" 165); for the "distanceless" and the "near" are not the same.
2 Originating in a break with the medieval worldview, the very notion of "world-picture," according to Heidegger, is itself characteristic of the modern age: "the world picture does not change from an earlier medieval one into a modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age. For the Middle Ages, in contrast, that which is, is the ens creatum… Never does the Being of that which is consist here in the fact that it is placed in the realm of man's knowing and of his having disposal, and that it is in being only in this way" ("The Age of the World Picture" 130). Similarly the world picture is distinct from the ancient or classical approach to the real. If in the modern age, one sets the world before himself as image or picture in and through the act of representation, for the ancient world, by contrast, the world "does not come into being at all through the fact that man first looks upon it, in the sense of a representing" that would set it before him as a picture to be seen. "Rather, one is the one who is looked upon by that which is " ("The Age of the World Picture" 131). I will pursue some of what Heidegger suggests in these passages later in this essay when we examine the Christian icon.
3 The cult image thus conveys something like what Heidegger sought to recall even amid the frenzy of modern technological life: "the frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness" ("The Thing" 165).
4 In her essay "Two Kinds of Representation in Greek Religious Art" (Representation in Religion: Studies in Honor of Moshe Barash. Jan Assmann and Albert I. Baumgarten, eds. Leiden: Brill, 2001.), the art historian Margalit Finkelberg confirms Benjamin's point, at least in the case of ancient Greek art, showing that cult statues were indeed not made to be put on display, but were instead kept hidden away. Considering textual evidence from ancient Greek authors as well as material evidence from archaeological discoveries, Finkelberg distinguishes cult statues from the temple statues which were regarded as an offering to the deity. As offerings, the temple statues were fashioned in such a way as to reflect and display the wealth and generosity of the donor (in the dedication), the skill of the artist (they were signed), and the self-image of the city state—clearly, objects produced by man in order to be seen; after all, why would so much lavish effort and extravagant outlay of cash on a statue commissioned from a famous sculptor culminate in hiding this statue from the public eye? The cult statues, by contrast, were rumored to have fallen from heaven and to possess the power to inflict punishment on those who displeased them. These statues, "in apparent contradiction to their function as representational artifacts, [were] not meant to be seen at all" ("Two Kinds of Representation in Greek Religious Art" 36); they were brought out of hiding only on ceremonial occasions when they were meant to be bathed, dressed, or otherwise venerated—not simply to be seen. Finkelberg concludes: "in ancient Greece there were images of gods which functioned as cult objects proper but were not intended as objects of contemplation: in fact, notwithstanding their representational character, not a few of these images were not meant to be generally seen. On the other hand, there were images especially designed as objects of contemplation but which, at the same time, were not regarded as cult objects proper" (p. 38-9). It is in this latter group (non-cultic, meant to be seen) that Finkelberg detects the emergence of art and aesthetic consideration, and she cites many texts where "things artfully made" and "worth seeing" are contrasted with antiquities of little or no artistic skill.
5 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of History.Cited in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" 245.
6 It should be noted that this understanding of beauty already approaches the notion from an aesthetic perspective where beauty would be a subjective determination of an object, the product of a judgment. Other notions of beauty appear in Heidegger's notion of the work of art and even in Christian theological notions of divine beauty. For both Heidegger and Christian theology, owing probably to a Neo-platonic inheritance, beauty is not the characteristic of an object (not a subjective determination of an object), but the radiance of the thing-itself.
7 The art historian Moshe Barash suggests that the omnivoyant image was a common motif in both eastern and western Christianity.Barash refers us to the Legenda aurea of Jacobus de Voraigne and then cites the Byzantine Nikolaos Mesarites description of the image of the Pantocrator: "His look is gentle and wholly mild, turning neither to the left nor to the right, but wholly directed toward all at once and at the same time toward each individually" ("The Frontal Icon: A Genre in Christian Art." Imago hominis: Studies in the Language of Art. Vienna: IRSA, 1991. 34). The obvious parallel with Cusa's account lends weight to the importance.
8 On darkness that reveals, see most especially Mystical Theology 1001A: "then he breaks free, away from what he sees and is seen, and he plunges into the truly mysterious darkness of unknowing" and 997A-B: "Lead us up… where the mysteries of God's Word lie simple, absolute and unchangeable in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence."
9 A contemporary attempt to convey this aesthetic ascent through unseeing and misty vision might be found in the recent installation Blur, exhibited at Swiss Expo 2002 by the architectural collaborators Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio Their massive installation involved a three story tall, several hundred foot long architectural scaffolding off the coast of a Swiss lake. The minimal structure was clad in a water system that pumped thousands of gallons of water from the lake itself into a vaporized mist, enshrouding the structure itself in a mist, fog or blur into which participants could enter, clad in raincoats, and remain, enjoying a water bar and "angel deck" affording no view or sunlight at the top. The project could perhaps be read as a 21st Century enactment of the theological situation described by the Christian mystical tradition from Dionysios to Nicholas and beyond, including of course the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing. In the future, these texts should be read in conjunction with Diller and Scofidio's project.
10 From an art historical perspective, these devotional images are, of course, different from icons like that which Nicholas gave to the bretheren at Tegernsee: whereas an art historical notion of icon would present its subject matter as, most often, an image of impassive eternity inspiring awe and reverence before the holy, the devotional image generally modeled a particular mood or aspect for a patient's experience. Nevertheless, both the icon and devotional image can be taken as, in the words of Hans Belting, "a pictorial concept that lends itself to veneration" rather than as a style, technique or particular content—in which case they both teach the same lesson: the image is not a picture" (Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art 29).
11 That seeing the image happens when the devotee has modeled himself after it, rather than when it reflects him, is something Nicholas also explains: "I know that Thy glance is that supreme goodness which cannot fail to communicate itself to all able to receive it. Wherefore it behoveth me to make myself in so far as I can, ever more able to receive Thee. But I know that the capacity which maketh union possible is naught else save likeness… If therefore I have rendered myself by all means possible like unto They goodness, then, according to the degree of that likeness, I shall be capable of the truth" (Visions of God 16). Becoming like God who looks out of the icon is thus the way to receive the supreme goodness that gives itself to be seen in the icon.
12 As James Elkins observes in The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), the idea that perspective might be a symbolic form indicative of a "worldview" or revelatory of a culture's underlying assumptions is not accepted by everyone. E. H. Gombrich, for instance, argues that perspective "is based on simple facts of vision and is 'merely' a discovery, not a symbol of some 'new philosophy' or weltanschauung." Perspective is nothing more than what it claims to be: a technique for representing something as it would be seen from a particular vantage point.
13 Sendler here echoes, though with important differences, Panofsky's conclusion in Perspective as Symbolic Form: "It [perspective] opens it [religious art] to something entirely new: the realm of the visionary where the miraculous becomes a direct experience of the beholder, in that the supernatural events in a sense irrupt into his own, apparently natural, visual space and so permit him really to 'internalize' their supernaturalness" (p. 72).The difference is instructive and needs to be emphasized. For Panofsky, perspective may let the supernatural event irrupt into the visual and be experienced, but this event appears only in a space opened previously by the subject itself. If the supernatural is indeed experienced by means of perspective, it is experienced within the world that is familiar and natural precisely because previously ordered and measured by the subject. In this, as in so many other places, Panofsky repeats Kant.
Belting, Hans. Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
Hamburger, Jeffrey. "The Visual and the Visionary: The Changing Role of the Image in Late Medieval Monastic Devotions" in Viator 20, 1989.
Heidegger, Martin. "The Thing." Trans. Albert Hofstadter. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
--------. "The Age of the World Picture."
Nicholas of Cusa. The Vision of God. Trans. Emma Gurney Salter. Escondido, Calif.: The Book Tree, 1999.
Panofsky, Erwin. Perspective as Symbolic Form. New York: Zone Books, 1991.
St. John of Damascus. On the Divine Images. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2000.
Sendler, Egon. The Icon, Image of the Invisible: Elements of Theology, Aesthetics, and Technique. Redondo Beach, Calif.: Oakwood, 1988.
Weber, Max. "Science as a Vocation." From Max Weber. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 1846.
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