In the undivided Church principles were laid down, chiefly by a decree of the 7th Ecumenical Council, governing an art of transfiguration, the art of the icon.
The whole church, of course, its architecture, frescos and mosaics, is one enormous icon which bears the same relation to space as the unfolding of the liturgy does to time; it is ‘heaven on earth’, the manifestation of the divine-human where the flesh destined to die is transformed into spiritual corporeity.
The icon is not, therefore, a mere decoration, or illustration of Scripture. It forms an integral part of the liturgy and is, as Leonid Ouspensky says, ‘a way of knowing God and being united to him’. By it, beauty becomes a way to know God.
For God not only makes himself heard; he makes himself seen; he becomes a face, and the icon par excellence is that of the Cross. ‘Since the Invisible, being re-clothed with flesh, has become visible, let us depict the likeness of him who was manifested’ (St John Damascene, PG, XCIV, l239). The Incarnation is the justification for the icon, and the icon displays the Incarnation. If human art is able to portray a transfigured world, it is because matter itself, which the painter uses, has been secretly sanctified by the Incarnation. ‘I do not worship matter, but I worship the Creator of matter who, because of me, became matter.., and, by matter, saved me’ (St John Damascene, PG, XCIV, 1245).
To portray Christ is also to portray the members of his Body the Church; the icon shows not only God made Man, but also Man who has become God.
The icon shows a personal presence, it suggests the true face of man, his face in eternity, that third beauty to which we are called, The icon could not do without some likeness to the original. However, while entirely rejecting subjectiveness, it does not seek a photographic objectivity; its setting is communion, All icons of Christ, for example, give the impression of a fundamental similarity, But each likeness is produced by the encounter of two persons, Christ and the iconographer, at the heart of the Church’s communion. Christ is the same in all, but in each case he is revealed to a unique person in a unique way. Thus there is only one Holy Face, whose memory the Church, the Bride, has kept faithfully, and there are as many Holy Faces as iconographers. The human face of God is inexhaustible, always retaining towards us, as the Aereopagite says, an inaccessible quality: the face of faces and the face of the Inaccessible. ‘He who has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14.9). The 7th Ecumenical Council forbade the direct portrayal of the Father, the first Person of the Trinity and origin of the Godhead. In Christ transcendence gives itself but remains forever beyond.
What is true of the face of Christ becomes true of the face of humanity filled by the Spirit. Thus the art of the icon goes beyond the opposition, described by Andre Malraux, between the arts of the non-Christian East, witness to an impersonal eternity, and those of the modern West, subject to sensuality and the anxiety of the individual. It is in the inexhaustible face of the person that the art of the icon expresses the eternity not of fusion but communion.
Compare the image of Christ with that of Buddha, or even the image of a Christian saint with that of a Buddhist sage. The Christian face is fulfilled in communion, the Buddhist face is abolished in an interior state in which neither self nor others exist, but only an inexpressible nothing. In both cases the face is haloed. But the Christian face is in the light like iron in the fire, the Buddhist face is enlarged, identified with the luminous sphere of which the halo is the container. The Christian face expresses simultaneously inner peace and acceptance; the Buddhist face, with eyes closed, communes with itself.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
