The beauty of truth.

Over the years I have been given several icons as gifts; and I have found them beautiful but foreign, outside the tradition of religious art that I was at home with. Then this winter, I was reading Frederica Mathewes-Green's Facing East, about her conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy [see next page], when the subject of the Lenten study program at my (Episcopal) parish, St. Mary the Virgin, was announced: "The History of Icons." And the Metropolitan Museum's "Glory of Byzantium" show opened soon after.

Mrs. Mathewes-Green used to have rather more of a problem with icons than I did. She writes,

For many, many years, I didn't like icons. I

kept this a secret. People I respected loved

icons dearly, so I knew there was something

I just didn't get.... A friend would

pause before an icon, and I would hear

that sharp intake of breath and her words,

"Oh! Isn't it beautiful." "Yes," I'd agree,

"how marvelous." I searched the image,

trying to find something other than a wizened,

severe, and apparently angry Christ.

I was thinking, What's beautiful about

this?

The beauty, she came to learn, is in Truth. Not that an icon can't be beautiful in artistic terms. But artistic beauty is almost beside the point. One evening in our Lenten class someone asked which church in New York City has the "best" icons. The answer was that the standard by which an icon is judged is not, How many Michelin stars would it get? but, How is it venerated? If no one is moved to pray before it, then be it never so beautiful it belongs in a museum, not a church. Fr. Norman Catir, the rector of the Church of the Transfiguration, with which we join forces for our Lenten study, told us of one day when he and his wife, Zulette, were taking delivery of an icon from a master iconographer. The icon was resting against the gate while its new owners dealt with keys. Suddenly an old woman who had been passing by rushed over and knelt down before it, crying, "Ikon! Ikon!" It was the genuine article.

This sort of thing poses a problem for many Christians. Our own rector, Fr. Edgar Wells, took the class through the Iconoclastic Controversy, as the history books understatedly call it. During this "controversy," whose hottest phase lasted a century, the iconoclasts indeed smashed sacred images, as their name says; but they also martyred iconodules (those who venerate icons). One might add that the iconoclastic impulse did not die out in 843. A later outbreak resulted in the most visible legacy of the Protestant Reformation. I remember the fierce elderly tour guide in Oxford who, every time she led us into a church where there was clear glass in place of stained, or some truncated piece of wood that should have ended in a carving, would intone, "That's Cromwell's doing." The iconoclasts are remembering the words God spoke to Moses: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in Heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth."

But of course God spoke those words before the Incarnation. We cannot make an image of God the Father, for we cannot see Him. But once God had the audacity to take on our flesh and come among us as a man, then His face could be represented: not only because it had been seen, but also, and infinitely more importantly, because He had restored the relationship between Himself and the material world, so that physicality did not need to be--indeed, could not properly be--scorned. And in such a world an image can be used in worship--not worshipped itself but used, to paraphrase St. Basil the Great, to transmit worship to its prototype.

When Western churches display icons, they tend to have one or two in and amongst their other paintings, statues, crucifixes, and so on. In an Orthodox church, the iconostasis forms a whole wall. But so far from regarding it as a wall, the Orthodox regard it as a window--a window into Heaven. Indeed, as the thinnest point of separation between Heaven and earth.

What are appropriate subjects for icons? Any person or event actually described in Scripture, and any of the saints. I had always thought of icons as predominantly portraits, but there are many others that show whole scenes--the Nativity, the Transfiguration, the Crucifixion, the Ascension, of course. But Mrs. Catir also showed us an icon of Lazarus being raised from the dead, with wonderful reactions from the other people in the scene; and the Met's Byzantium show has a glorious Annunciation, all golden with a ray coming down from the Heaven to Mary's heart.

In portraits Jesus Himself can be portrayed as the Man of Sorrow, or as the Ruler of All. But probably the best-loved icons are those of Virgin and Child. These come in two forms--the Virgin of the Way, with the Mother of God (or Theotokos, God-bearer, as the Orthodox call her) holding her Son up with one hand and gesturing toward Him with the other; and the Virgin of Tenderness, with Mother and Son cheek to cheek.

And here is where, to my mind, we see the most startling difference between Western and Eastern Christian art. Most Western depictions of Our Lady are either sweet or triumphant. I know of nothing in the West comparable to, say, Our Lady of Vladimir, or to the one that first grabbed Mrs. Matthewes-Green, and which is in the Met's show. Our Lady of Vladimir is a Virgin of Tenderness; but she cannot bear to look at her Child, and her eyes are dark with misery. The one at the Met is a Virgin of the Way; she also is looking away from her Child, and instead of pointing toward Him, her right hand opens helplessly. Mrs. Mathewes-Green sees her as already knowing what is to befall ("Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also"); I see her as saying, I know I'm supposed to show Him to the world--but what will you do to Him if I do? In any case, it is an image from which squads of museum-goers with their audiophones cannot distract.

I don't imagine we Westerners shall ever treat icons in the same way the Orthodox do; but for us too they can be windows into Heaven.