iconography

by Janet Jaime

We are each uniquely blessed with gifts from God. Some of us have many gifts and others, only one. My gift is iconography. When we offer our gifts to God, we are really only returning what was given to us, that which we do not own nor can take credit for. God provides us, out of His creation, the materials needed to create.

When making Holy Bread, for example, we use the gifts from the earth – wheat, yeast and water, with a pinch of salt – and return it back to God as an offering which we made with our hands. In iconography, our materials are also taken from the earth – pigments, precious minerals, animal hide glue, whiting, wood, gold and eggs – to create, with our hands, an image to be venerated, an icon created as an act of devotion and prayer to God.

Sometime after I became Orthodox, my priest, Fr. Constantine Nasr, suggested that I should learn how to write icons. He said this in a very matterof- fact way, and through his encouragement gave me an open door into a wonderful world.

I began to observe icons closely and soon realized that they appealed to my particular temperament, which is naturally drawn to doing tight, detailed work. At that time I was an illustrator who worked in a photo-realistic style.

I rather naively didn’t see such a great leap between being slavishly accurate in representing detail recorded by a camera, on the one hand, and being slavishly obedient to the rules of iconography, and following prototypes, on the other hand. Icons, I observed, were classically rendered subjects that obviously required a detailed, exacting, time-consuming process. What a perfect fit for me, a lover of anything tedious, I thought.

By Fr. George Morelli

“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims [H]is handiwork. Day pours out the word to day, and night to night imparts knowledge.” (Ps 18: 1–2)

Both the Fathers of the Church and modern behavioral scientists have long inquired into the psycho-spiritual process of knowing. Both sources suggest the strong effects that images and our interaction with the natural world have on this process. Through experiencing the important role of icons in prayer and everyday life, the Orthodox Christian gains a practical understanding of the relation between the body, soul, and spirit and how sense perception can help or hurt us in our journey to perceive God’s living presence.

Perception and the makeup of the creature

The focal point is the spirit

God created mankind of not only body, but also soul and spirit . Consider the spiritual meaning of God’s creation of mankind as recounted by the writer of Genesis (2:7): “… then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” We can consider that the word ‘spirit’ as describing the soul. As Solomon, the son of King David and the writer of Ecclesiastes writes (12:7): “… the spirit returns to God who gave it.” The prophet Zechariah, almost 500 years later, during the time when the Jews were under the captivity of the Persians in Babylon, said: “Thus says the Lord, who stretched out the heavens and founded the earth and formed the spirit of man within him.” (12:1). St. Paul tells the Corinthians “If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.” (1Cor 15:44).

By Cindy Egly

There are approximately five million Eastern Orthodox Christians in America (Nabil, 2000). A minority in a nation dominated by Protestants and Roman Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox culture has maintained strong familial and cultural identities. Understanding something about them, being able to lay aside preconceptions and ethnocentricity to view life from the Orthodox Christian’s perspective will allow the onlooker an opportunity to increase in understanding not only of the Eastern Orthodox Christian but of human nature. It is this author’s intent to introduce the reader to an insider’s perspective of iconography in the life of an Orthodox Christian, in the hope that understanding will increase.

A legend passed down for nearly 2000 years describes the first icon. At the time when Christ was traveling to Jerusalem where He would experience the trial and crucifixion, King Abgar of Edessa sent for Jesus. Christ could not go to the King, so instead He sent a linen cloth on which He had dried His face. The story continues that the cloth carried to the King had an impression of Christ’s face on it. The King’s illness was healed when the cloth was taken to him. This first icon, “not made by human hands”, began a tradition of portraying Christ and the saints in pictorial fashion. (Benz, 1963). The entire town of Edessa treasured this first icon, that is the linen cloth with Christ’s face imprinted on it. It was widely acknowledged throughout out the East and still written about in the eighth century (Ouspensky, 1978).

By Dennis Bell

President, St. John of Damascus Association

Holy icons cannot be isolated from the rest of liturgical tradition and studied in terms of simple aesthetics. They must remain in the context of liturgy, theology, spirituality, hymnography, and architecture. All these facets of Orthodoxy augment and supplement each other. What the hymn says in words and music, the icon says in pictures.

The criteria used in evaluating liturgical art cannot be simply personal taste, pure aesthetics (“does it look nice?”) or even authenticity or age, but rather how well does it convey the TRUTH?; revealed Truth, unchangeable and eternal: that in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity was united to human nature, thus making salvation possible by breaking down the wall of separation between God and man, and “opened to us the doors of Paradise.” As St. Athanasus put it, “God became man, so that man could become God.” As a devotional object, the icon is an integral part of Orthodox Liturgy, and expresses Orthodoxy in its totality.