In his Third Oration against the Iconoclasts John Damascene declares, “Since the creation of the world the invisible things of God are clearly seen by means of images (εἰκόνας).”Footnote 1 He further explains:
Anyone would say that our inability immediately to direct our thoughts to contemplation of higher things makes it necessary that familiar everyday media be utilized to give suitable form to what is formless, and make visible what cannot be depicted, so that we are able to construct analogies. If therefore the Word of God, in providing for our every need, always presents to us what is intangible by clothing it with form, does it not accomplish this by making an image (εἰκονίζει) using what is common to nature and so bringing within our reach that for which we long but are unable to see?
This passage reflects the privileged use of the word “icon” in the Christian tradition as a rich form of mediation, something that facilitates an encounter with the invisible God by engaging with all of our corporeal senses. Today the word is commonly associated with one such form of mediation in particular, the holy images cherished by the Eastern Christian tradition.
The same word has also been claimed for a now commonplace philosophical use. Although it took inspiration from the same patristic tradition, Jean-Luc Marion's coinage of “icon” evokes for many readers not the “brilliant refreshment of a verdant meadow” as John Damascene's icons did, but the barren desert landscape of a harshly apophatic invisible.Footnote 2 The term “icon” was originally meant to open a possible conceptual approach to God, in contrast to Nietzschean “idols,” which is Marion's primary aim in God without Being. Although it is not his focus, it is clear from an attentive reading of this text that Marion also meant for this “icon” to extend to other approaches such as art and poetry.Footnote 3 Yet this might be hard to envision upon a first reading of the texts themselves or the many critiques they have generated, critiques so omnipresent that they are almost banal: that Marion is a thinker of the invisible, the infinite, and the sublime and has nothing to do with the rich mediation of the Christian tradition.
Is this interpretation really so well founded? To be sure, Marion is rarely very elaborate in explicit and practical details. Yet it is worth paying close attention to the advice of Christina M. Gschwandtner: Marion's preference for talking in abstract, paradoxical, or limit-case scenarios must not be confused with a denial of other possibilities.Footnote 4 Following this strategy, might we better understand the implications of Marion's thought on “icons” by bringing it down to a concrete example? In fact, Marion himself has given us a head start with the last two chapters of his Crossing of the Visible, where he describes what it means for a sacred image to serve as an “icon.”Footnote 5 Can this rare example from Marion of a rich form of mediation—from the Byzantine tradition he was inspired by no less!—help us to understand with greater concreteness what he means by speaking of the “icon” in a more general and conceptual sense?
For many readers, the answer is no. First of all, because for Marion, what makes an icon is not its visible likeness to the original, but the fact that it allows the invisible gaze of the infinite to transpierce it. At least on an initial reading, this is odd: the way a sacred image mediates seems to have nothing to do with its unique features as a visual image. In Jodie McNeilly's words, we seem to find here a “denial of the aesthetic approach in what appears to be an aesthetic-based undertaking.”Footnote 6 Comparing Marion to the iconophile Fathers, Byzantine art historian Charles Barber concludes that Marion's icon “becomes a vehicle by which we might be seen, but, ultimately, it does not permit us to see.”Footnote 7 Emmanuel Falque echoes this, critiquing Marion's icon for “doing away with the image.”Footnote 8 Surely, a sacred image does show something, first of all the painted eyes which gaze upon the viewer, but with it the rest of the painting! The Byzantine icon, in particular, is a very rich aesthetic tradition coded with meaning and significance at every level, from its origins to the process of painting to its use in liturgical practice. Must we ignore all of this in favor of “an invisible gaze”? Or perhaps worse, as Peter Joseph Fritz fears: it seems that if these visible details distract us from the invisible, then Marion would have us discard them altogether, along with “all the other visible (historical) elements of Christianity.”Footnote 9
When Marion does at last say something about what kind of actual visual image might serve as an icon, it only makes everything worse. Using nearly identical language in both key chapters of The Crossing of the Visible, Marion explains that in order to be suited for God's invisible revelation, an icon must “never [cease] to transgress itself.”Footnote 10 It “dulls” itself, and “effaces [se défasse] its own visibility in order to allow itself to be pierced by another gaze.”Footnote 11 He concludes, “The icon, therefore, is derived from the kenosis of the image.”Footnote 12 Based on passages like these, one could no longer claim that Marion is merely indifferent to the fate of the visible image of the icon. In this essay inspired by the ecumenical council that confirmed the importance of the icon, Marion seems to be suggesting large-scale iconoclasm!Footnote 13
Anyone who finds this troubling is in good company. John Milbank will call it out bluntly: “Marion's account of the icon is in fact iconoclastic.” That is, “Beauty does not mediate in its visibility the invisible, but rather forecloses a world of idols or of the merely visible and radically finite as reduced to our representing awareness.”Footnote 14 Charles Barber affirms this view, claiming that by undermining the visibility of the icon, Marion also undermines the humanity of Christ and “collapses the iconic economy envisaged by the iconophiles of Byzantium, and in doing so becomes an iconoclast.”Footnote 15 Graham Ward agrees in terms that are nearly as strong: Marion's “bypassing mediation pertains to Gnostic logic.”Footnote 16 Any icon seems to be “founded upon and produces fissures, ruptures and violence in creation. It works in and through dualisms, struggling to attain a point beyond them, a point beyond the phenomenality of the world.”Footnote 17 Ward interprets this moment of rupture as a matter of the “Barthian” connection Marion draws between the icon and the crucifixion, which according to Ward leads necessarily to Docetism, Nestorianism, or gnosticism. Essentially, it is a denial of the full truth of the Incarnation by iconoclastically denying God's entry into the world.Footnote 18 The icon serves as the sole exception from this idolatrous closure of visibility for Marion only because of its kenotic self-effacement.
The above concerns about the icon's mediation rightly overflow the single case of the image. This is true, first of all, because in phenomenology what is given in an image is always related to the one who sees it. Thus, Kathryn Tanner warns of the “competitive relationship”Footnote 19 provoked by Marion in the way he correlates what is given and the one who receives it; the only “initiative” allowed a subject is “the refusal to have its own will,” to “wholeheartedly submit to what givenness dictates.”Footnote 20 The apparent passivity of this situation seems to be only heightened in the case of the icon, for not only is the subject emptied of all initiative, but so is the image, in order to make room for the “given” of God. As Marion says, we must pour ourselves out in reverence before it, empty ourselves of our usual epistemological assurance by the fulfillment of our intentions, and instead consent to be looked at by a gaze that we can never grasp or master. Does this not cancel us out too, now deprived of any possibility of intelligent response before an unworldly and invisible revelation that operates outside any visible imaging? Thus, we might suspect, with Joeri Schrijvers, that Marion reduces the viewer to an inert “object”Footnote 21 for God, or agree with Richard Kearney that Marion has eliminated any place for our interpretation.Footnote 22 Tamsin Jones similarly critiques Marion for cutting out the possibility of any kind of preparatory practice of reception,Footnote 23 and Christina M. Gschwandtner has repeatedly called Marion into question for ignoring the community of believers.Footnote 24
Further, as is especially emphasized by Milbank, Ward, and Tanner, such iconoclastic logic reaches far beyond a problematic correlation of image and viewer and the corresponding status of the person at prayer: if a finite thing must undermine itself to “make room” for God, we must assume the same logic applies to all other finite things in their relation to God. At its best, we might think that it is simply a matter of refusing excellence to “diminish” or “dilute” oneself: making sacred art mediocre, not beautiful, to be more fitting for God's presence; a person refusing to cultivate any worldly excellence or talent so God can miraculously shine through. But as “transparency” is the very negation of an image, which by definition must appear (even badly), this tips the balance toward an even more severe interpretation: that not only is the excellence of activity threatened, but any finite activity at all is rendered impossible when we come before God. Marion seems to require the icon to actively transgress any limit that would prevent the infinite from revealing itself through it—does this not thereby result in the destruction of its very finitude, in short, its very self? We could only conclude that by this logic, all created things, including we ourselves, would share the same fate.
Thus, all things would be discardable before the glory of the original; the world of visibility—all finite things—would be definitively closed to God except through negation and self-destruction.Footnote 25 A study of Marion's particular example of mediation would then not defend, but only confirm all the more his stance as a sublime, invisible, infinite thinker disinterested and even hostile to the richly mediated lived reality of Christian history, practice, and tradition.
I contend here, however, that these critiques are not an accurate reading of Marion and that the only iconoclasm here is the one that has been smuggled in through assumptions we bring to his texts. In fact, if we read the text very closely, we can see that Marion's work on the “icon” actually lays the ground for a richer theological understanding of iconic mediation. To demonstrate this, (1) I will first of all explain why it is an advantage that Marion refuses to define a sacred image as a visual representation. (2) I will then explain what Marion means when he says the image must “efface itself.” The key to understanding Marion's view here is the term “kenosis,” which Marion has illustrated at a conceptual level in a recent article. By extending it to the particular and concrete case of the image, I will show that Marion does not, in fact, warrant anyone's self-destruction, but instead proposes something very compatible with the richly mediated religious tradition he takes inspiration from. (3) I conclude with a model for understanding Marion's “icon,” in fact, the very term used so often by Orthodox Christians to describe their own holy icons: a “window” into heaven.
Paradox 1: An Image Not Defined by Visibility
Paintings, Icons, and Sacred Images
Marion grants as a starting point the definition of St. John Damascene that icons are “types of that which has no type and figures of what is most without figures” (τῶν ἀτυπώτων οἱ τύποι, καὶ τὰ σχήματα τῶν ἀσχηματίστων).Footnote 26 The key question is how? In what manner is this relation of type to mysterious prototype accomplished? The most obvious response would be that the icon can be defined as a representation of Christ, a visual copy of his likeness. Marion rejects this, however, as a primary definition of what the icon is.
For, he argues, to define the icon's relation to its prototype through any form of likeness of appearing or mimesis will introduce a logic of competition between original and image. Suppose we place the weight on the original over the image that refers to it. This is the approach of dogmatic metaphysics of Plato and Hegel, claims Marion, who each state in their own ways that the artworks are only temporary mediating filters between the mind and intelligible being.Footnote 27 The image may continue to retain importance, despite this, as a “concession” to our “weakness” as sensible creatures, but these terms indicate that the mediation bears an ineradicable trace of iconoclasm: whatever is possible for us now, it would be better to get beyond the image to have the invisible intelligible more directly.
The alternative to this first approach of mimetic logic is to start instead by prioritizing the type over the prototype. In the tradition of Nietzschean nihilism, the image outshines and distracts from whatever original it aims at, to the point that there need be no original at all.Footnote 28 Although metaphysics at least understood the negated image to be dependent on an inaccessible transcendent origin, here the image is linked to nothing except the spectator who sees it.Footnote 29 With an eye to the entertainment industry, Marion observes that when the image is solely governed by the conditions of our reception of it, these conditions, too, guide the production of images. That is, without any transcendental truth to point to, the only function of images is to please us, to satisfy our desire to see. The path of prioritizing image over original leads to “self-idolatry.”
At least on an initial reading, the grounds of this rejection of visual likeness is odd. Why would Marion waste his time with such extreme straw-man positions? After all, phenomenology has a rich understanding of aesthetics and figurative art developed by Heidegger, Gadamer, and Merleau-Ponty, which understands the painting not as a competition but a manifestation that brings the original to presence in a new and vivid self-showing. Marion himself takes up a similar approach to art in his 2014 book on the realist painter Courbet, which may tempt us to rethink Marion's positions on icons. Gone are these dualities, and instead Marion recounts the power of a painting to show the real thing more fully, even to the point of awarding it the title of “acheiropoietos” or “not made by hands.”Footnote 30 This term is traditionally reserved for icons arising by divine intervention like the Mandylion or the Image of Edessa, the image that appeared on a cloth Christ touched to his face.Footnote 31 Marion uses it to indicate that the painter (here, Cézanne) is so far from the self-replicating idolatry of nihilism that his painting serves as a quasi-miraculous occasion for the original thing to show itself in its truth. Couldn't this be the grounds for a new account of the visibility of the icon? No, for here again, Marion immediately dashes any such hopes. In the same moment he grants Cézanne's work the highest title of iconography, he rules it out as a potential icon. Why has Marion consistently made such an extreme differentiation between art and icons?
Despite its cynicism, the nihilistic approach to mimesis in fact recognizes something that phenomenology also affirms: the relation of the painting and its original is essentially linked to the one who takes it up, and whoever takes it up has only a finite intentionality, or conceptual aim.Footnote 32 In fact, the image's power will reach its maximum in “the first visible that our gaze can aim at being filled by” and “the last visible it can support without failing.”Footnote 33 That is, a visible that stretches our limits just enough to dazzle us, but not enough to subject us to uncomfortable challenges. This maximum is precisely what Marion calls an “idol,” and its effectiveness is only as good as the measure of the viewer's understanding. Even if we were to bypass Marion's straw-man account of mimesis, to define the icon by what appears still means to define it against the reach of our gaze and the scope of our desire, yielding only a mirror image of our finite selves. This is fine for a painting, but it will not be enough to capture the incomprehensible, uncircumscribable God.Footnote 34
A second reason furthers this point. Marion states it clearly in refusing to let Cézanne's paintings be called icons: “What is missing is not so much the glory of God (which bathes painted creation) nor that God should take a face in visibility (Christ has definitively given his invisible face), but the very possibility of painting a face.”Footnote 35 This response at first seems patently false, as well as a non sequitur. Obviously, one can re-create with paint the visible features of the human face; painters have done this for millennia! But what is important for Marion, following Levinas, is that one cannot paint what is most essential about human appearing: the counter-gaze, or “counter-intentionality.” To see a painting is to see a depthless “facade,” whereas to encounter a “face” is to find oneself seen.Footnote 36 This is why Marion says that even the best truth-manifesting paintings cannot be “icons” and echoes Rothko's reluctance to do “violence” to the human form by “crushing it” into the mere visibility of the canvas.Footnote 37 The name Marion gives to this unique phenomenological structure of “counter-intentionality” is the “icon.”Footnote 38 Whether used for an encounter with the Divine (as in his early work) or expanded to a human other (as in his middle work), Marion's “icon” shares this same basic structure throughout his corpus: the exceeding of my horizon and reversal of my initiative by the counter-intentionality of another person.
In Marion's philosophy, the Byzantine icon thus has a strange status. The icon is a painting and can even be an aesthetic masterpiece. The icons of Rublev or Theophanes the Greek can be experienced as “idols,” in the sense that they may dazzle us by reaching maximum visibility for our gazes. When we come to the icon as an “icon,” however, we are not primarily interested in the dazzlingly beautiful artwork or the stylistic representation of painted eyes. The icon in its truest use is not encountered like a painting at all, but like a person. We come before it to enter more deeply into the real and living relation with the God who truly sees us, a relation that we could not attain by our finite human aim and yet has nevertheless always already been offered to us. This is why possibility of moving from “the visible to the invisible” is not a function of the kind of image we see, but a path that opens only through prayer or veneration.Footnote 39 Simply put, prayer is “letting oneself be seen.”Footnote 40 What makes an image an icon is not that I see the visible likeness of Christ, but that through it I recognize that Christ sees me.Footnote 41 The purpose of the icon is not to serve as an aesthetic experience, but to be a “site of reciprocal transition,” an “instrument of communion.”Footnote 42
Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic Accounts of Icons
Now that we understand why Marion wants to detach the “icon” function from the function of a painting, we can begin to understand how this offers an advantage over those who define the icon exclusively on the plane of aesthetics. For example, Emmanuel Falque argues that Nicholas of Cusa is speaking of a painting, and not an icon, in his De visione Dei. To support this claim, Falque names several characteristics of the image described that do not seem to match Byzantine painting.Footnote 43 It is tempting to challenge the accuracy of Falque's assumptions about Byzantine art; the particular characteristics he isolates are neither universal within this aesthetic tradition nor unique to it.Footnote 44 Yet there is a far greater concern: Falque's approach demonstrates that he defines an icon by its visible characteristics alone. Essentially, this would make the icon merely a special genre of painting among others, a finite and material human artifact. This is not unlike the suggestion that Christians cherish the Scriptures because of the particular genres of literature there. In other words, Falque fails to distinguish between the phenomenality of the visible image, which is still bound to the finite realm of the spectator's capacities, and the phenomenality of God's self-showing, which comes in the form of an invitation to communion, from an origin beyond our capacity to pin it down. Phenomenologically speaking, a purely aesthetic “icon,” however theologically informed, remains a self-referencing “idol.” To recognize what makes icons unique requires us to recognize the gap between what appears to me and what arrives from beyond the image, and the communion that results. By his efforts to “save” the visual uniqueness of the Byzantine icon, Falque has in fact neutralized what makes it so important to the Byzantine tradition in the first place.
A more nuanced approach to the aesthetics of the icon begins to bridge this gap, moving beyond visibility to recognize the icon as a site of ruptures, tensions, and paradoxes between what appears and what does not. This is a first step toward exiting the idolatry of visibility. Georges Didi-Huberman for example discusses the icon's incompatible paradoxes of extreme spiritual subtlety and material weight,Footnote 45 which resembles Archimandrite Vasileios’ description of the icon's paradox of “humility and magnificence.”Footnote 46 Similarly, Jean-Luc Nancy will say that the sacred is precisely what we cannot touch, and that by preserving distance, a painting does not hide the sacred but is precisely the way that the sacred can “cross” to us.Footnote 47 C. A. Tsakiridou defines the icon's aesthetic by “enargeia” or “liveliness,” which pierces through a static, objective gaze and engages the viewer in a dynamic interaction.Footnote 48 And, sounding almost like Marion, Maximos Constas describes ways that icons disrupt the contemporary world of superficial visibles, “using images to overthrow the power of images, the icon seeks to disrupt habituated ways of seeing.”Footnote 49 These are all fruitful and nuanced ways to consider sacred images and the unique visual aesthetic of Byzantine art and can serve as a first step to understanding iconicity. Yet, if we limit the conversation to this, we are still treating the icon as a matter of aesthetic technique, simply a more complicated one.
Whether we try to posit a duality of “inherently secular images” versus “inherently spiritual images” (Falque), classify the icon primarily as a special kind of paradoxical aesthetics (Tsakiridou, McNeilly), or render all art essentially spiritual (Didi-Huberman, Nancy), Marion would argue that we have not really arrived at what makes the icon unique. We need more than an opposition of a “visibility” against “invisibility” understood in its literal sense, of what does or doesn't register for the eyes; and even more than an extension of “visibility” and “invisibility” to what can fall within one's intentional aim and what cannot. To truly understand the meaning of an “icon” (including but not limited to a Byzantine one) requires taking the step that Marion has articulated in the phenomenological language of counter-intentionality. The icon is for communion in prayer (as indeed authors like Constas will ultimately agree).
Thus, the importance of Marion's position is precisely what initially seemed so problematic: that he refuses to allow the mediating element itself to be the point of what the icon is. This does not mean that the icon cannot have a richly designed aesthetic style, but that aesthetics is always secondary. The tradition of Byzantine icons is not cherished primarily as a form of representation, but as a way of praying or entering into a closer relation with God. Certainly, the icon is notable in its aesthetic devices; the ever-changing color of gold, for example, reminds us that Divine activity cannot be grasped or absorbed into any human color spectrum, while inverse perspective places the icon's vanishing point in the heart of the viewer who comes before it. Yet the primary purpose of its particular aesthetic devices is directing us to relation, at recognizing God's gaze upon us. This alone can single out the icon and what it means to those who pray to it in its truly unique phenomenality.
Yet we are also left with a question: What remains of the visible image? If the icon is defined by the invisible counter-gaze, which requires my prayerful acceptance of it, we might wonder if we can say anything about it at all. Does it not matter that an icon portrays a face that seems to have a visual likeness to Christ or his mother? Would one even need an image at all to have an “icon”? As Christopher Denny suggests, Marion's move from aesthetics to communion seems to make this “a secondary issue, perhaps even a non-issue.”Footnote 50 Marion gives us very little on this point, and what he offers is mostly negative: seeing a painted face is not enough to show us the gaze of God. Yet, Marion does eventually give us some hints of his positive requirements for a particular image to serve as an icon, and on an initial reading they lead us into potentially serious problems.
Paradox 2: An Image That Effaces Itself
The Icon and the Cross
I have already mentioned some of the alarming phrases Marion uses to describe the activity of the image functioning as an “icon” in the sense that he means it. Let us examine one of the key passages at greater length:
Since the icon is defined by a second gaze that envisages the first, the visible image is no longer a screen; on the contrary, it permits itself to be transpierced; but two gazes cross there. Thus the visible surface must, paradoxically, efface itself, or at least efface within it every opacity that would obfuscate the crossing of gazes [la croisée des regards]: the icon dulls the image in it, in order to there prevent any self-sufficiency, autonomy, or self-affirmation. The icon inverts the modern logic of the image: far from claiming its equivalence with the thing while flaunting itself in glory, instead it removes the prestige of the visible from its face (elle démaquille sa face des prestiges du visible), in order to effectively render it an imperceptible transparency, translucent for the counter-gaze. The icon does not expect one to see it, but rather gives itself so that one might see or permit oneself to see through it.Footnote 51
This leads to the conclusion, “The icon, therefore, is derived from the kenosis of the image.”Footnote 52 The term “kenosis” is of course taken from the scriptural hymn of Philippians 2, where Christ, though Divine, ἐκένωσεν, “emptied” himself, or “poured out” of himself by taking human form in the Incarnation, even to the point of death.
Marion will use this term to relate the icon to the cross, furthering our cause for concern. For Marion, the cross is an icon par excellence: image and cross are both types that bear the same relation to the prototype, which is “the holiness of the Holy.” If neither icon nor cross functions by visible imitation, this is particularly evident in the latter. Marion says this not for the obvious reasons (that the cross gives a symbol rather than a human figure), but because the cross symbolizes an event where the disjunction between the visible world and the glory of God is at its greatest possible height. Marion associates this disjunction with a “mark” of the human rejection of God's advance. The cross thus appears “not [as] a sacred image imitating the divine … but the imprint paradoxically received by the invisible in the manifest wound that the invisible imposes on it.” In other words, we recognize the Holy One on the cross only by seeing the marks of violence left by our refusal of it. In a few dense and cryptic sentences, this relation also is extended to justify the icon: “Just as Thomas recognized his Lord in the very type [τύπος] that offered the trace of the nails, so also the faithful can recognize their Lord in the visible types that are drawn by artists.”Footnote 53 Thus, just like the kenosis of Christ on the cross, the image must empty itself to reveal God: “The image extricates itself from idolatry by constantly destroying the screen of its visibility, in order to become impoverished, as the pure sign of that which marks it.”Footnote 54 As we see Christ's kenotic love in the wounds of his crucifixion, so we will recognize Christ's love only in an impoverished, self-effacing image.
Graham Ward, as I have mentioned above, critiques Marion's appeal to the crucifixion as a “Barthian” rupture.Footnote 55 In fact, he overlooks Marion's source, which was neither invented nor of Barthian origin; it was cited directly from dogmatic justification of iconophilia, the Horos of the Second Council of Nicaea:
We decree with full precision and care that, like the figure of the honored and life-giving cross (παραπλησίως τῴ τύπῳ τοῦ … σταυροῦ), the revered and holy images, whether painted or made of mosaic or of other suitable material, are to be exposed (ἀνατίθεσαι, proponere) in the holy Churches of God.Footnote 56
As Marion argues, the Greek “παραπλησίως” here is not so much a question of being “similar” or “like,” as the standard English translation has it (which would lead us back to problems of mimesis), but should be translated as an “approximation” or “approach.”Footnote 57 For like the icon, the cross is not holy because of what it shows, but because of how it approaches the prototype. That is, the cross is not holy because of what is visibly available, but because it gives itself “with such little reservation that the immediate radiance (éclat) of its glory is thereby abandoned.”Footnote 58
The authoritative source for Marion's comparison of icon and cross does not necessarily mitigate Ward's critique, for while Marion takes the words of the iconophile council seriously, he neglects their historical context. This places him uncomfortably close to the camp of the enemy. The iconoclasts of the eighth century had rejected images of Christ, fearing that a visible image would be a liar, as it purported to show the invisible, infinite God who could not be circumscribed in finite line and color. Yet they were strongly devoted to the cross, which was a sign and could appropriately symbolize Christ without showing too much.Footnote 59 By setting the veneration of icons parallel to the veneration of the cross, Nicaea II was simply securing icons a place alongside a practice undisputed by both iconophile and iconoclast Christians. Passing over this context, Marion interprets these words with a theological weight they were not meant to carry. Instead of a pragmatic confirmation of two practices, Marion makes crucifixion essential to the definition of what the icon is and why we venerate it, which leads to such troubling results of the image effacing itself. His position is not exactly the same as the iconoclasts, but it is also quite different from the Church Fathers who find the theological justification for an icon through the Incarnation.Footnote 60
Refining the Term “Kenosis”
Despite this unquestionably violent rhetoric and his uncomfortable proximity to the historical iconoclasts, however, Marion actually says very little about what any of this means for the image in the concrete. He even acknowledges as much: “It remains to be seen how the theological paradigm of a kenosis of the image translates into aesthetic principles.”Footnote 61 And when we pay attention to the suggestions Marion gives, they indicate perhaps his position here is not as harsh as it seems: he admits as kenotic images the paintings of Rembrandt and Caravaggio, as well as the play of light and shadow in Gothic domes, all of which bring us to the mystery of the unseen, rather than merely presenting something wholly visible.Footnote 62 Marion clearly does not intend for his position to be anything like iconoclasm or the undermining of sacred art as such. This invites us to take a closer look at his claims here. Is there any way to reconcile these very reasonable examples with his apparently extreme anti-aesthetic stance?
Setting aside the poetic imagery of transparency and self-effacement, let us instead focus on the operative term behind it: “kenosis.” As Tamsin Jones explains, Marion's earlier work often uses the term “distance” to speak about “the kenosis of God” that is, “the withdrawal of God at the very heart of God's self-revelation … [which] evokes a response of love and relationality.”Footnote 63 But Marion does not speak about it at great length until his 2015 essay in Communio, “À partir de la Trinité.”Footnote 64 I will first explore what Marion means here by the kenosis of Christ, and then transpose it to the activity of the icon.
Kenosis of Christ
Philippians 2:6–11 (NABRE) states that Jesus,
Though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped (ἁρπαγμόν). Rather, he emptied (ἐκένωσεν) himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness, and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
The key to this passage, according to Marion, is not the word “kenosis” in itself, but the contrast set up between “emptying” (κενόω) and “grasping” (ἁρπάζω), which mark two different modes of relation to God. As Marion observes, variants of the latter are used throughout the Scriptures, in contexts of robbery, rape, and spoil.Footnote 65 Ultimately, the term designates what one “seizes with violence in order to possess it by force, and to keep it in this possession as long as one has the power to do so.”Footnote 66
Christ was equal to God. The kenotic hymn affirms this. But as Marion argues, the question is not of knowing whether he was equal with God. The question is understanding how.Footnote 67 The Pharisees assume the only way to gain the rank of divinity is to grasp it with violent force, just as they seized as a right their status as children of Abraham (John 8:33, 40, 55). The disciples, too, try to grasp the privilege of sitting on his right and on his left (Matt 20:20–21) and to earn the title of the “greatest” (Mark 9:33–34). But Christ “did not count equality with God something to be grasped” (Phil 2:6). Jesus continually counters the idolatrous logic that seeks to grasp or master God: the greatest must make themselves the servants, for the kingdom of God is not gained by possession, but dispossession. It is not an accident, as Marion points out, that everywhere else it appears in the Scriptures the verb “κενόω” means a “radical failure.”Footnote 68 The kenotic attitude is one that does not attempt to earn, claim, or possess a relation to God, but like the one who loses his life to save it (Luke 9:24), it wholly abandons oneself to receive whatever relationship the Father would give. Thus, Jesus’ equality with God is not something he earns by saving himself and establishing his glory, but something given in his perfect abandonment to the Father, even unto death. In fact, this total self-emptying is precisely what manifests the perfection of his relation to the Father as the Son. Kenosis, first of all, is a kind of relation to God, one open to receive what the Father gives, rather than attempting to seize it violently.
Building on this, Marion emphasizes that it is a mistake to locate kenosis primarily in the event of the crucifixion, whereby Christ makes a choice to empty himself of his divine life and power to the agony of a violent death. This would lead to the theologically troubling consequences of either removing Jesus in his negation from his divinity or putting such negation of life in the heart of the Trinitarian God.Footnote 69 But understood as the way Christ already relates to the Father, kenosis becomes simply the ultimate manifestation of Trinitarian life:Footnote 70 through the total abandonment of the Son to the Father, the Son receives the Father's absolute self-gift, in the Spirit. The result of this is that the kenosis of the crucifixion is not a deep, dark wound in the heart of these loving Trinitarian relations, it is the heart of these loving Trinitarian relations introduced into the world's darkest, deepest wounds of sin. Kenosis is not self-destruction, but simply the way that God is: as loving self-gift.
There is an apparent destruction associated with kenosis. The force of this violence is not from the kenosis itself, but from the idolatrous refusal of kenosis, the opposing attitude of possession that tries to grasp infinite Trinitarian love. “Crucify him!” was our own command; God has not demanded anyone's evisceration. Yet even if kenosis is not defined by the cross, we might still say that the cross is the clearest manifestation of it, at least for those who have eyes to see it, as the kenotic hymn declares. It demonstrates the extent of Christ's abandonment to the Father, in a way farthest outside of any patterns of worldly possession, this gift of himself without reservation into the hands of those who hated him, even to the point of being “a worm and no man,” unrecognizable in his suffering (Ps 22:6). Yet, for Christ, the relation of dispossession is not a lessening of who he is, but the truest expression of who he is as the Son of the Father.Footnote 71 It is because of the kenotic love that accepts obedience unto death that Christ also appears in glory in the Transfiguration and Resurrection. Such kenosis is one and the same, separated in appearance only in the prism of a world torn by idolatry.
Kenosis of the Image
This same polarity of possession or dispossession is strongly at play in the icon, appearing on almost every page of The Crossing of the Visible. The kenotic, dispossessive image is never set in contrast with art as such, but with “the modern tyranny of the image,” which bombards us daily with images manufactured to manipulate us, to captivate our attention by giving us exactly what we want to see, and to train us what to desire.Footnote 72 Blockbusters, pop idols, advertising, clickbait, twitter memes, pornography, and reality television all provide an easy high of stimulation to our inert, addicted gaze.Footnote 73 We can imagine what short work these kinds of images might make of a divine revelation: whatever could overwhelm us with special effects, cloying emotion, or miraculous drama. They would aim to put the Divine on call for our viewing pleasure, in an appearing that would confirm in itself, without doubt, effort, or struggle, the immediate content of the God we always expected to see.
It is in contrast to this kind of image that Marion discusses the “self-effacement” of the icon. The icon does not attempt to grasp revelation, to overwhelm the viewer with a Divine experience initiated by the sole impact of its visible power. Rather, an icon must allow its viewer the space to recognize a relation to God that is freely offered and must be consented to freely. This “transparency” or “self-effacement” is thus not a refusal of visibility as such, but simply the refusal to be like the rest of these possessive visibles that would purport to conjure and contain God as immediately accessible.Footnote 74 This is clearer when we read beyond the most extreme statements that have been targeted by critics. Although Marion twice says the icon “dulls” itself, at least once, he immediately qualifies this statement: the icon in fact must dull whatever in it would give the impression of self-sufficiency or autonomy, whatever would hinder the communion between the believer and the God she adores by focusing the visibility and glory on itself. Just as Christ did not refuse any equality with God, but specifically refused an equality gained by possessive force, the “aesthetic asceticism”Footnote 75 of the icon does not refuse appearing as such, but only “whatever opacity would obfuscate the crossing of gazes,” the communion of the believer and the Divine.Footnote 76
This helps us to say more concretely what becomes of the visible image. If we adopt the mimetic model, and rank appearances based on their ability to dazzle and delight, we would conclude that idols are beautiful, whereas icons must be ugly and unpleasant. But this holds only if we are still clinging to the idolatrous assumption that beautiful or desirable images can only be defined by manipulation. If we follow Marion's suggestion and abandon the mimetic paradigm that places dazzling as the be-all and end-all of images, we are freed from such a conclusion. Beauty is certainly captivating to attention, but that does not necessarily mean possessive and self-referential. A beautiful image often leaves space for what lies beyond it, and thus could be fitting for an icon. And ugliness can sometimes be totalizing, false, and self-confirming, thus serving as an idol. So there is no need to rule out images that are beautiful or striking or even delightful in appearance from being icons, only images that claim self-sufficiency of appearance. Once again, Marion does not want to destroy the image but to liberate us from the conceptual problems that come from placing too much importance in the aesthetics alone: an image is suitable as an icon if it makes its relation to God clear, that is, if it reveals its dependence on a revelation beyond itself and invites us to come through it to communion with God. It is an idolatrous image if it tries to manipulate us into believing it grasps the Divine through its own devices and thus merits its own glory.
Similarly, if we can affirm that kenosis does not mean destruction of the image, it may yet be the case that, like Christ, the icon's self-gift may expose it to the violence of idolatry and the hatred of a world that is not always open to the gift. For this reason it will bear the wounds of rejection and misunderstanding; the icon “bears the mark where the invisible Holy is given with such little reservation that the immediate radiance (éclat) of its glory is there abandoned,” a mark which “takes the shape of the Cross.”Footnote 77 It is in this parallel that Marion's most violent and iconoclastic language is found. The problem is that the language used to highlight the similarity of these situations risks setting up a false parallel. First, these are two very different modalities of action, for in one violence is merely accepted, and in the other it is sought out. Christ “receives” the “murderous mark that the visible inflicts on the invisible that loves it”;Footnote 78 the image “effaces itself,” “dulls itself,”Footnote 79 “destroying the screen of its invisibility.”Footnote 80 Second, the same word, “violence,” is used for very different actions, in fact, for actions that are the polar opposites of the kenosis hymn. The violence suffered by Christ is that of our grasping possession against the holy. The other is the “violence” to oneself, which in fact looks violent if measured by the idolatrous standards of grasping possession and autonomy but is really a kenotic dispossession toward a love that is the opposite of violence, as we have already seen. Marion's dense and difficult rhetoric here is aimed to highlight the paradoxical similarities between the icon and the cross, but by neglecting to point out these critical differences he risks misleading his readers instead.
If we take care to read more deeply than these apparent contradictions, the larger context can guide us to Marion's primary point, which remains an important one. If destructiveness arises into the picture of kenosis (and certainly it will), its source is not the kenosis itself or the command of God that creatures should have to efface themselves to receive him. Its source is always the violent actions of the possessive and grasping attitude that cannot tolerate kenotic love. For the world that is locked into reproduction of such possessive and grasping images is violent. It has no room to receive. But God was born a vulnerable infant in the visible world to invite us to a relation freely, rather than forcing us to our knees under his raw theophanic power. In keeping with this free gift of revelation, the icon opens a space to respond to its invitation in dispossessive freedom. Submitting itself to our interpretation and cooperation, the icon also renders itself vulnerable to destruction, ridicule, and ignorance, just as Christ did.Footnote 81 It is in this sense that we should understand Marion's connection between the icon and the cross.
Thus, Marion's kenotic icon opens a new dimension for us to understand its revelatory value as a mediation: it is not a question only of what it presents to us through visible likeness (Christ, a saint, an angel), but the very way it presents and the way we must receive it. Marion describes in detail this kenotic propagation of charity in his earlier work: “to receive the gift amounts to receiving the giving act, for God gives nothing except the infinite kenosis of charity.”Footnote 82 The gift of God's revelation is not so much an object, but an activity, one that cannot be received or recognized except by taking on this same kenotic stance, as the tiers of a fountain, where each level continues to receive by overflowing: “The basin is not filled up by the cascade from above unless it ceaselessly empties itself into the basin below. Only the abandonment of that which fills it permits that the stream to come should fill it without cease.”Footnote 83 To be in union with God, one must be like him. To be like him is to be kenotic. All beings have their own way of being kenotic, whether image or human, and through this isomorphic action they enter into this communion of God: they become part of the overflowing fountain of this kenotic love. This idea is in fact key to patristic accounts of the icon, but now it is refounded in a phenomenological key. The transparency of the icon is thus not just a function of aesthetic mediation, but a finite reflection of the shape of God's kenotic love, which is the content of the icon, the shape of the icon's opening to us, the shape that we must take to receive it, and the shape that we thereby communicate to others.
This can help us better understand the conditions necessary for the role of the viewer in kenotic reception of the icon. God freely offers us a relation to him, and the only thing that could limit our reception of this gift is how far we are willing to pry open our grasping fists to receive it.Footnote 84 This gift cannot be had by those who idolatrously try to seize it on their own terms. It can be received only by those who approach in the abandon of self-gift. This is what the icon teaches us by breaking out of the possessive paradigm and offering itself to us kenotically. Just as the image “empties itself” or “pours itself out” to manifest the divine counter-gaze, we must pour ourselves out to receive it in an act of veneration, rather than resting in the secure grasp of the knowable and visible.Footnote 85 Our kenotic prayer is a condition for recognizing the kenosis of the invisible God, and the kenosis of the image facilitates this relationship.
Does this make us passive objects before God? A full response to the many important critiques of the place of the “subject” would require more careful attention than can be afforded here, yet we might gesture at a few initial implications from this study. It is true that Marion does not say much about prior preparation of human activity, but one cannot therefore conclude that he opposes its importance. To the contrary, he does leave some hints at what this might look like, for example, the “purification of the gaze” which can prepare us to see the icon, whether in prayerFootnote 86 or through viewing a certain kind of art.Footnote 87 If Marion does not explain what this means, we can imagine he is indicating here not so much a skill gained through practice, but the development of a deeper capacity of action, of a greater kenotic receptivity, which might in turn be associated with a greater range of hermeneutic possibilities.Footnote 88 Yet we must take care not to claim that our actions themselves are sufficient to enact an iconic experience lest we be led back to the logic of ἁρπάζω, which attempts to earn and possess on its own devices, while missing that the one thing needed is the full abandonment of the self to God. For Marion, God remains the primary imitator of iconic communion: “I can very well say that I see God, but that can only be if God, this God who remains a hidden God, grants it to me … In order for a face to see the face of God, it is necessary that God first turn his face toward those who gaze at it.”Footnote 89
By deepening our understanding of kenosis, it becomes clear that despite Marion's stark language, his position does not support the claim that an image, or anything else, must undermine itself in order to be suited for its role of reflecting its prototype. In fact, Marion turns the tables on us. To assume that a kenotic icon would be thereby self-destructive betrays an idolatrous assumption about what it means to be a “self” and what it means to be destroyed. If all things are in a relation of gift to God, then kenosis is simply the acceptance of God's gift of love freely offered. The only thing that would need to be destroyed is the possessive, idolatrous attitude that clings to a false view of its finite being as autonomous, which places itself in opposition to the identity that is in truth freely given by God. Thus, the self is not dissolved into passivity, but it is indeed built up by a right relation to God; Marion would surely agree with Tanner's insistence that “the beauty and the glory of the human form need not rival God's, since God is the giver of it.”Footnote 90 The self-revelation of the God who is love is echoed in the dispossessive openness that marks every moment of this iconic mediation and binds them together.
Window into Heaven
The Byzantine icon has been proudly hailed as a “window into heaven.” I suggest this title is even more fitting as an illustration of the kenotic transparency of Divine mediation discussed above. Let us conclude our investigation by drawing out this analogy following the description of Saint John of the Cross:
A ray of sunlight shining upon a smudgy window is unable to illumine that window completely and transform it into its own light. It could do this if the window were clean and polished. The less film and stain are wiped away, the less the window will be illumined, and the cleaner the window is, the brighter will be its illumination. The extent of the illumination is not dependent upon the ray of sunlight but upon the window. If the window is totally clean and pure, the sunlight will so transform and illumine it that to all appearances the window will be identical with the ray of sunlight and shine just as the sun's ray.Footnote 91
This passage was originally written in the context of contemplating creatures in mystical prayer, but drawing out the logic of this image will clarify both the strengths and limitations of Marion's “icon.”
First and most importantly, in John's description the sunlight is not encountered as an object, or even as the form of a friend or stranger on the other side of the glass. It remains mysterious, invisible, and unable to be grasped directly, too bright for us, just as the gaze of God remains beyond the full powers of our comprehension. Certainly, the Incarnation was an encounter with God as seen, and the icon may present us with a likeness of this human form, but this visibility will not guide us to a clear and unambiguous knowledge of who God is. Even if its origin is far beyond our reach, we are nevertheless able to recognize his counter-gaze upon us, just as we can still sense the rays of sunlight that warm our faces through the window.
Second, the transparency of the glass is not a matter of self-negation, but of the basic openness necessary to join the illuminating activity of the light. An image that is too bogged down in its own visibility, that dazzles and captivates our attention, is like a smudgy window that blocks the full sunlight, obstructing our view of what calls to us through it. When it is clean, a window can be perfectly united with the light from the sun, just as the purified icon is permeated with the invisible counter-gaze. In the same way, kenotic transparency is not destruction for Marion, but a positive condition for serving as the vehicle of communion.
A second meaning arises when we expand the original context of Saint John's description of the window. For he himself did not use this description for images, but for persons: “The soul upon which the divine light of God's being is ever shining, or better, in which it is always dwelling by nature, is like this window.”Footnote 92 I may also find that I am myself a dirty window, full of too many smudgy attachments and stains of possession that block transmission of sunlight. As Marion has explained, the only limits on the gift God offers are the barriers that I myself erect against it, especially my idols of self-possession and self-definition; kenosis clears me of these obstacles to become transparent to the reception of God's loving gaze.
The idea of a “transparent image” may still evoke the impression of iconoclasm, so we must emphasize the point: strictly speaking, transparency is not negation, but a negative description. Transparency means to not obstruct the light, to refrain from grasping or possessing what God offers. Yet here we can acknowledge that this open-ended character of transparency is not a flaw; it is in fact essential to Marion's account of the icon. Because God's revelation is not tied to a specific image of appearing or a particular human practice, because Marion relates it to kenotic openness or dispossession, God can be potentially mediated through everything. Marion has used the specific theory of holy images to defend how all creation could reveal the invisible God. The transparency of the icon allows it to be a universal possibility.
Further, this universal potential of mediation is not scattered randomly through the world in isolated objects, and this is where Marion advances the window analogy into a new key. This transparent mediation forms what I call an “isomorphic chain of iconicity” that ripples outward through creation. We see this most clearly in The Idol and Distance, the only place where Marion makes an explicit connection between “icons” (in the broad sense) with the word “mediation.”Footnote 93 Explaining again through our analogy, it is the window's kenotic transparency that allows it to be united with the sunlight, which is the same action that transmits this light to others. Thus, communion with the light is one with communication of it; to receive the gift of God's love is one with its expression. This explains why the icon not only depicts Christ, but also the saints, whose transparency to the light of God makes them living “icons” of his love.
By consequence, to receive this light ourselves, we, too, must respond in kind, becoming transparent to the love that is offered. To the extent that we succeed we, too, will pass on the light to others. The shape required to receive the gift of charity is the very shape of passing it along. The gift of God's revelation is not an object to be transmitted, but the very action that cannot be received or recognized except by taking on this same isomorphic stance of kenosis, as the tiers of a fountain, where each level continues to receive by overflowing into the next. As Marion explains, “To receive the gift amounts to receiving the giving act, for God gives nothing except the infinite kenosis of charity.”Footnote 94
Conclusion
Our original concern was that Marion's account of the icon as “transparent” and “self-effacing” refuses visibility as a way of access to God, a claim which is entangled in the dismissal of all other visible, finite, creaturely things. Following its deeper logic leads to a cosmological competition of infinite and finite that ultimately results in gnostic ruptures, denial of the Incarnation, and wholesale self-destruction. I have argued that Marion does not fall into this crude iconoclasm but is in fact deeply congruent with the richly mediating Christian tradition that includes Byzantine icons.
Marion's first paradoxical and apparently iconoclastic move, the disqualification of mimetic art, is not a denial of visibility's importance, but of its sufficiency to define the icon. Visibility as such is strictly defined according to the limits of what we are able to aim at. What is fundamental about the icon is not the finite expanse of what I see, but that I find myself seen. It is in veneration, which is not an activity required by or strictly limited to the visible, that this communion opens to me. It is true that the visible image may help me in this task, and indeed the Byzantine aesthetic has been developed over many centuries to accompany this kind of prayer. Yet Marion keeps us focused on the essential: that if these artistic devices are valuable to the believer, it is only insofar as they serve this encounter of communion that exceeds them. Otherwise, the icon is only a painting like any other.
Marion's second paradoxical and apparently iconoclastic move, the definition of the iconic image as kenotic, deepens this point. The “transparent” and “self-effacing” icon is not emptying itself to self-destruction. For if the icon's kenosis is rigorously modeled after the kenosis of Christ, this means to empty oneself with total abandon to the Father, which is precisely to receive the gift of one's self in the highest measure. The kenotic icon is not renouncing its beauty or excellence as an image, only its self-sufficiency, and by emptying itself it does not destroy its visibility but clears the way for a dispossessive relation to God. It is only the idolatrous autonomy of grasping possession, and not kenosis, that leads to violence and destruction.
Marion leaves most details of this kenosis undefined, which should not be immediately written off as a weakness. In fact, it means that one of the primary advantages of his account is the way that it extends beyond the case of the sacred image alone. Thus, rather than an iconoclastic rejection of images, Marion's move away from the image is a move toward a deeper grasp of the roots of the question. Instead of asking what it means for the specific case of a Byzantine icon to bring us into communion with God, Marion has laid out the groundwork for considering the possibility for anything finite to mediate God. This includes the icon as well as the one who comes before the image, and other mediations besides, in art or poetry, in the fresh breeze of dawn or a human smile. Because of its transparency, Marion's icon allows us to show this movement of God's love to ripple all the way down. But this may not always be recognized. This is not because God is stingy in doling out his revelation but because he gives himself so unreservedly that he exposes himself to our love as well as our hate, just as Christ did. Indeed, he appears in the light of Mount Tabor, but also in the dust of Golgotha, and as a man like any other.
This study of Marion's “icon” as a window into heaven also helps us to see where work remains to be done. A window cleared of dust is exchangeable, as transparent as any other, and yet we know there are many unique ways for things to be kenotically open to God. Limiting ourselves to images alone, there is a great significance to the different kinds of strategies by which an image might become transparent to God's counter-gaze. As we have discussed, some aesthetic strategies are better suited to this than others, possibly in different ways. To engage in these kinds of detailed discussions is of great theoretical and practical significance for religious traditions—provided we have rooted the reasons for such discussions in the deeper function of mediation. By calling attention to this deeper function, Marion's work on the icon has not foreclosed but has opened and invited such an inquiry. He has broken the hold of an idolatrous logic that too often obscures such conversations and set out the tracks along which such an investigation could run without falling into a naive iconoclasm or covert idolatry. But even in these few concrete studies of the icon, this is not a path that he himself has shown an interest in taking. It remains a course for others to run.
