Wounding Presence of Prayer in Orthodox Iconography

As objects of devotion and veneration, icons invite the beholder to an encounter with the one depicted. But the presence an icon promises is grounded on a metaphysics of presence and absence, which, refuses stability or mastery and ultimately entails an essential difference between the icon and whom it depicts. In this paper I explore how phenomenology illuminates this encounter with the icon’s metaphysics of presence and absence. Drawing on Jean-Louis Chretien’s analysis of prayer, which explores the experience of presence and absence in prayer as both wounding and blessing, I argue that the traditional metaphysical accounts of the icon are amplified by consideration of how presence and absence is an experiential reality revealed in the prayerful encounter of the one depicted, an encounter that carries with it the possibility of wounds that bless. I proceed first by explicating the icon’s metaphysics of presence and absence, and then turn to summarize Chretien’s phenomenology of prayer. By way of conclusion, I offer a constructive rapprochement between the two.  

Icons are not locations of the divine essence, and their very materiality distinguishes the image from the one depicts. The relationship between the icon and who it images is often imagined through likeness or countenance. Thus, communicating a presence through likeness, icons focus our attention and prayer on the one depicted, while simultaneously communicating a deferral of presence through their essential difference. Because presence is found in prayer with icons, they are often interpreted as extension of the symbolic world, “devised to guide us to knowledge and to make manifest and open what is hidden,” meaning icons are mediators and windows to the spiritual world (John of Damascus, Treatises on the Divine Image, III, 17). As symbols, icons take the beholder beyond the image’s own materiality to apophatically encounter and contemplate the invisible God. The mystical presence found in and through the icon is often related to the unapproachable light of Tabor. Though the light blinds, it also transfigures our vision and senses to participate in the unknowable, wherein our prayerful contemplation becomes “unitive, ineffable, and beyond human language (Paul Evdokimov, Art of the Icon, 235).”

            The inseparability of presence and absence, grounded in a difference in essence, here unfolds a thick relation between the icon and whom it images, not as a stable metaphysical theory of imaging, but a mystical participation with the effable and invisible God. Such stability is absent, refused, even as prayerful encounter can open to a spiritual vision, a transfiguration, initiated by the image itself, first and foremost by the gaze of the one depicted. There is a reciprocity inherent to praying with an icon. I am caught in the icon’s gaze and am both invited and compelled to respond, a notion reminiscent of Jean-Luc Marion’s work on the iconic gaze, wherein the icon “does not result from a vision, but provokes one (God Without Being, 17).”  As a mediator rather than a talisman, the presence of the icon is encountered only when I respond to its call, when I am willing to hold its gaze. Iconic presence is determined in and through prayer.

            Having traced these primarily metaphysical theological accounts of presence and absence in the icon, the second part of this paper will turn to phenomenology. For Chretien, prayer offers a paradigmatic encounter that reveals the fundamental relationship of Call and Response that constitutes creation and Creator. This paradigm is revelatory precisely because the divine Call is heard only in the response. In terms of prayer, God’s speaking is heard in the human response of supplication, lament and praise. As such, prayer’s revelatory possibility is always cooperative, requiring an active participation that is nothing other than a form of self-manifestation (Chretien, Ark of Speech, 19). In addressing the divine other, the addresser is affected and constituted by their words—faced with themselves, torn down and reconstituted, and ultimately transformed. Prayer is a struggle, a wound precisely because the “closed circle” of speech has been broken by another who has “silently introduced himself into my dialogue with myself (Ark, 21).” I am irrevocably changed by my words addressed to another for another. These wounds are inseparable from blessing, however. Chretien uses the image of Jacob wrestling with the angel to render more concretely just how affected we are with the encounter, how the wounds necessarily remain in order to bless. (Ark, 37; Hand to Hand).

The very speech of prayer is a wounding self-manifestation revealing both the elusiveness of the other and of prayer itself. Amidst the destabilization, however, is an assurance that, in prayer, one is bearing themselves as a response to a call. Our ability to respond is a gift, and so woven into us, blurs the line between human and divine agency. Describing the “circulation” of the call and response, Chretien states that the “breath we draw to make our request” is from a “breath already received.” This circulation is embodied in one’s own voiced prayer, but corporately in the mystical body of the Church as an “exchange of voices” wherein as a single body, “we pray towards him, in him, and by him (Ark, 30).”  In its very destitution, prayer reveals the gifts of breath, body, and community that make it possible, that make the creature the response to the call of God.

The destabilizing aspects of the encounter with icon’s have already been explored phenomenologically by Marion, by his account of how such saturated phenomena rupture false pretensions to autonomy and stability. In the concluding part of this paper I will explore more directly through Chrétien how this rupture is also the gift of a new self, and how the inseparability of such wound and blessing are born of the dispossession of prayer before the face of the icon, a dispossession that already disrupts stable delineations of divine and human agency, of the difference between our speaking and God’s speaking, and of the difference between divine presence and iconic representation.