Medium and Mystery:  

Byzantine Iconography in Light of the Media Theory of Marshall McLuhan 

 

 

 

 

 

Louise St. Germain 

 

 

 

 

 

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the  
Master’s degree in Theology 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Faculty of Theology 
Saint Paul University 

 

 

 

 

 

© Louise St. Germain, Ottawa, Canada, 2020 

  



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SUMMARY 

Medium and Mystery:  

Byzantine Iconography in Light of the Media Theory of Marshall McLuhan 

Louise St. Germain 

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Theology, Saint Paul University, in partial fulfillment of the 

requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Theology. Ottawa, Canada. July 14, 2020 

 

This thesis endeavours to answer, “What does it mean for something to be an icon?” 

Though this is not a new question, it attempts a unique approach by using media theorist 

Marshall McLuhan’s four laws of media, as well as his associated tetrad method of organizing 

the dynamic effects of a medium, as a framework in the analysis. The first part of the thesis 

reviews contributions from various fields that will inform the inquiry: Orthodox theology (past 

and present), especially with respect to iconoclasm and iconicity; phenomenology and its study 

of the experience of art and icons; art theory, including the effect of perspective in art; and media 

theory, which is the domain of McLuhan as mentioned above. The second part of this thesis 

proposes an original tetrad for iconography, derived from McLuhan’s existing tetrad for Cubist 

art and from the theology of iconography. The new tetrad elucidates iconography’s effects on 

observers, its role in veneration and worship, and its sensitivity to factors such as its environment 

and the attitudes of its observers. This leads into the conclusion of the thesis, which summarizes 

the results to date and identifies potential steps for further study of the icon as a medium.  



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TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Summary ......................................................................................................................................... ii 

Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 
Structure and Methodology......................................................................................................... 2 

Limitations and Assumptions ..................................................................................................... 4 
Literature Review............................................................................................................................ 5 

Perspectives on the Nature of the Icon ....................................................................................... 6 
The Phenomenology of the Iconographic Experience ................................................................ 9 
Marshall McLuhan, Religion, and Liturgy ............................................................................... 13 

The Relationship Between Iconography and Modern Art ........................................................ 17 
Part I: The Question of Icons as Media ........................................................................................ 20 

Section 1: Orthodox Theology and the Theological Role of Icons .......................................... 22 
The Iconoclastic Controversy: The Development of Historical Arguments for Icons ......... 22 

St. John of Damascus and the First Period of the Iconoclastic Controversy ........................ 24 
The Seventh Ecumenical Council: Nicaea II (787) .............................................................. 26 

St. Theodore the Studite and the Second Period of the Iconoclastic Controversy ............... 28 
Patriarch Nikephoros of Constantinople: An Unlikely Ally of St. Theodore the Studite ..... 30 

The Integration of Icons in the Byzantine Tradition ............................................................. 31 
Theology of the Byzantine Iconographic Style .................................................................... 34 

Section 2: Phenomenology and the Depiction of the Invisible ................................................. 37 

Phenomenology and the Question of a “Theological Turn” ................................................. 37 
Jean-Luc Marion and the “Crossing of the Gaze” ................................................................ 38 

Merleau-Ponty: The Idea and the Icon.................................................................................. 41 
Michel Henry: Seeing the Invisible Through the Eyes of Wassily Kandinsky .................... 43 

Section 3: Art Theory and the Question of Perspective ............................................................ 47 
Perspective as Worldview ..................................................................................................... 48 

Cubism: A Spiritual (Re-)Awakening from the Renaissance’s ‘Mathematical Space?’ ...... 50 
Section 4: Marshall McLuhan: “The Medium is the Message” ................................................ 54 

The Medium is the Message ................................................................................................. 55 
Figure and Ground: The Extension and Interplay of Medium and Message ........................ 57 

Visual and Acoustic Space: The Icon as a Medium of Acoustic Space ............................... 59 



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Section 5: Introduction to the Laws of Media and the Tetrad .................................................. 62 
The Tetrad: A Graphical Display of the Interrelated Laws of Media ................................... 65 

The Tetrad as a Tool for Analyzing Iconography ................................................................. 66 
Part II: Development of the Tetrad for Iconography .................................................................... 68 

Section 1: Iconography and Cubism as Kin .............................................................................. 69 
Simultaneity and the Multisensuous in Cubism and Iconography........................................ 70 

Lex Videndi: The Relationship Between Education and Iconography .................................. 79 
Movement in the Image: The Obsolescence of Photographic Realism ................................ 82 

Section 2: The Distinction Between Icons and Cubist Paintings .............................................. 83 
Making a Scene: Co-Creator or Co-Participant? .................................................................. 84 

The Crossing of the Gaze Revisited: Sources of the Gaze ................................................... 87 
Reversal: The Non-Visual vs. the Idol .................................................................................. 89 

Section 3: Cubist Icons and Religious Art ................................................................................ 93 

Cubist Icons: Blurring the Boundaries between Icons and Modern Art ............................... 94 
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 98 

Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 102 
 

 

 



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INTRODUCTION 

 Since the very beginning of Christianity, Christians have been creating art not only to 

express their faith, but also to serve as a means of connecting to their religious tradition and 

deepening their relationship with the divine. This has not been without its controversies; the 

legitimacy of creating images of the divine has required defence both in interfaith dialogue (e.g., 

with Judaism and Islam), as well as within Christianity (e.g., factions in the Iconoclastic 

Controversy, and more recently, ecumenical dialogue with post-Reformation iconoclasm). In 

contemporary Eastern Christian texts, a distinction is often made between icons and other 

religious art, indicating that not all such art can be categorized as iconography. It is not usually 

clear why or how such a distinction can be made, however, especially if the distinction is on the 

basis of artistic style.1 Therefore, the key question for this thesis is, “What makes an icon an 

icon, rather than ‘religious art?’—or otherwise put, “What does it mean for something to be an 

icon?” 

 Since this will be a difficult question to answer without any sort of framework to guide 

the enquiry, Marshall McLuhan’s theory of the Four Laws of Media, and its associated tetrad (a 

method of displaying characteristics associated with each of these laws), will be proposed as a 

hermeneutic. Since McLuhan defines a medium as “any extension of ourselves,”2 which includes 

paintings and, by association, icons, the specific investigation in this thesis will be to determine 

 
1 The role of artistic style will be discussed in detail in the body of this text, but distinctions based on 

artistic style are often polemical in tone. For example, Archbishop Lazar Puhalo compares two images of St. 
Christopher—one a traditional Byzantine icon, the other a Western painting—with similar composition and subject 
matter, saying that in the icon, Christopher is redeemed and transfigured, while in the Western image, he is an 
ordinary person still bound to the fallen world. [Lazar Puhalo, The Ikon as Scripture: A Scriptural and Spiritual 
Understanding of Orthodox Christian Ikonography (Dewdney, BC: Synaxis Press, 1997), 59.] 

2 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, ed. W. Terrence Gordon, Critical 
edition. (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2003), 19. 



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whether McLuhan’s Laws of Media can provide an adequate framework with which to structure 

a pertinent response to our question regarding the nature of the icon. 

 

Structure and Methodology 

 This thesis is organized into two major parts. The first provides a detailed overview of the 

contributions from various fields that will feature in the process of reflecting on icons. This part 

has two goals. The first is to identify, clarify, and flesh out the concepts, problems, and themes 

that will be incorporated, either explicitly or implicitly, in the proposed tetrad for iconography. 

The second is to begin to establish the links between these areas of study, where these links have 

not been explicitly described before. To begin with, we will probe Orthodox theology, past and 

present, focussing on two major periods: The Iconoclastic Controversy of the 8th-9th centuries, 

followed by Orthodox modernity, i.e., the literature spanning the 20th century through to the 

present. The philosophical field of phenomenology will be the second major area of enquiry, 

since it offers a unique and pertinent perspective on the ways in which icons are experienced. 

One theorist in particular, Jean-Luc Marion, has written specifically about icons, constructing an 

important bridge between theology and philosophy through phenomenology. The third major 

area of thought to be brought into dialogue will be art theory, especially as it relates to the 

question of perspective. This will in turn provide a useful segue into Cubism, which will be the 

key comparison when discussing art and iconography. From there, we will come to Marshall 

McLuhan’s work, especially in the area of media and communication theory: this will show itself 

to be a useful framework with which to organize discussions about iconology. Especially 

pertinent is McLuhan’s tetrad, a unique tool for analyzing and organizing the dynamic effects of 

a given medium (whether an icon or a Cubist painting). With all these elements, by the end of 



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Part I, I have collected and sorted through all the pertinent pieces and relationships that then 

enable me, in the second part, to build a tetrad for iconography. 

The second part of the thesis is the main original contribution of this work, which 

proposes that a tetrad for iconography can help us to respond to the question, “what makes an 

icon an icon?” This is the hypothesis, stated specifically according to the framework of 

McLuhan’s laws of media. This tetrad is populated with insights gained from the theological 

analysis of iconography in Part I. The rest of Part II proceeds to test the validity and value of the 

tetrad, this time by looking at the dynamic relationships implied in each of the laws of media 

(enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval, and reversal). I frequently use Cubism as a comparison in 

order to determine whether a “tetradic” definition of icons is specific enough to be able to 

describe icons while distinguishing them from Cubist paintings, which are not icons. The first 

section of Part II establishes the similarities and parallels between Cubism and iconography, 

while the second notes the areas in which these two are distinguished or even opposed, pointing 

out the distinctive characteristics of icons. The third and final section of Part II applies what has 

been learned through the tetrad analysis to a unique case—the Cubist icon and other Cubist 

religious art. This “hybrid” case tests the strengths and limitations of the analysis conducted 

hitherto, leading us to the conclusion of the thesis, where we summarize the results to date and 

identify potential steps for further enquiry. 

This approach is valuable because it allows so many further questions to be investigated 

as they concern icons. My purpose here is not to carry out all of these investigations, which for 

reasons of length cannot be included in this thesis. Rather, my purpose has been to demonstrate 

the soundness of my hypothesis, and to show that the tetrad I have constructed has significant 

scholarly and conceptual value. 



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Limitations and Assumptions 

 Of course, given the interdisciplinary scope of the question and the length of this paper, 

certain limitations and assumptions are unavoidable. To reduce the topic to a manageable size, 

the iconography discussed has been limited to that of the Byzantine tradition, though 

iconography plays a central role in several other expressions of Eastern Christianity (e.g., Coptic 

and Ethiopian Orthodoxy). Stylistic differences between distinct periods and schools of 

Byzantine iconography are also not addressed here, in order to keep the focus on its more 

universal characteristics. Furthermore, though the term “modern art” encompasses a spectrum of 

heterogeneous and often unrelated movements, I have chosen to focus on Cubism as an 

illustrative, if not exhaustive, representative for our method.  Further studies could certainly 

extend the comparison both to other forms of iconography and to other religious or secular 

artistic trends. 

 One other concern that needs to be addressed is the validity of applying a framework 

derived from McLuhan’s field of mass communication theory to a theological question. While it 

may seem unusual to identify icons as a form of technology or medium, McLuhan’s definition is 

intentionally and even provocatively broad, going well beyond the electrical or mechanical 

“gizmo” that usually comes to mind at the mention of the word. He does not presume specific 

content; consequently, our identification of icons as a medium and use of his tetrad for 

organizing its effects will not entail an automatic secularization of the medium. In short, 

primarily theological ideas will prove to be amenable to the use of McLuhan’s framework, with 

the expected advantage that the dynamic relationships developed between them will more readily 

come to light. If this approach does prove valuable for the description of iconography as a 



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medium, confirming its place in Eastern Christian Tradition, our methodology may in turn be 

applied to other theological topics—perhaps not only media as extensions of the person, but also 

revelation as an extension of the divine toward us. 

To do justice to iconography, it is vitally important to maintain a theological focus: 

Without a grounding in the Tradition in which icons exist and operate, it would be impossible to 

evaluate them as media inextricably tied to the act of faith. However, just as Christ and his 

disciples were called to interact with those outside the faith, so here, elements of truth or insight 

derived from fields outside theology are brought into dialogue: not to dilute the theological ideas 

at hand, but to offer potential insight into them. Therefore, in this first part of the thesis, we 

provide an overview of Byzantine iconography, first drawing upon Eastern Christian sources, 

and subsequently from other fields that may have pertinent perspectives. 

 

LITERATURE REVIEW 

 Although many studies address aspects of how icons differ from other portraits or scenes, 

none of them use our proposed methodology which, as previously explained, is to examine the 

topic through the lens of McLuhan’s Laws of Media, incorporating his central concept of the 

tetrad. Surprisingly, very few studies address McLuhan’s tetrads (whether theoretical or specific) 

in any context. In this section, the state of the question will be examined in its separate parts, 

subsequently weaving together the individual threads of the discussion. There are four main 

areas to explore: the nature of the icon from the theological vantage point; the experience of the 

icon from a philosophical (phenomenological) perspective; the application of McLuhan’s 

theories to religious matters; and finally, existing comparisons between modern art and 



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iconography. Links between these areas will also be highlighted in preparation for merging the 

various discussions in my ultimate effort to answer the single question at the centre of this thesis. 

Perspectives on the Nature of the Icon 

 Of the relevant fields of discussion, this one is the most mature, given that the nature of 

the icon has been debated for over a millennium. A more detailed examination of the arguments 

presented during the Iconoclastic Controversy of the 8th-9th centuries will follow in Part I. The 

three main writers of this period to be considered are St. John of Damascus, with his Three 

Treatises on the Divine Images;3 St. Theodore the Studite, with his On the Holy Icons;4 and 

Patriarch Nikephoros, with his Discourses Against the Iconoclasts.5 

 Iconography has been a much-discussed topic among theologians in the 20th and 21st 

centuries. The principal authors include Leonid Ouspensky, who wrote Theology of the Icon and, 

in conjunction with Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, one of the seminal 20th century 

texts on iconography, and their contemporary, Paul Evdokimov, author of The Art of the Icon: A 

Theology of Beauty. All of these important works will be discussed in greater detail in Part I.  

In the 21st century, the conversation about iconography and the nature of icons remains 

vibrant, among scholars such as Bissera Pentcheva, Arianne Conty, Clemena Antonova, and 

Bruce Foltz. Pentcheva is an art historian who has specialized in Byzantine art and acoustics. Her 

 
3 St. John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, trans. Andrew Louth, Popular Patristics 

(Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003). 
4 St. Theodore the Studite, On the Holy Icons, trans. Catharine P. Roth (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s 

Seminary Press, 1981). 
5 Patriarch Nicephorus, Discours contre les iconoclastes: Discussion et réfutation des bavardages ignares, 

athées et tout à fait creux de l’irreligion mamon contre l’incarnation de Dieu le Verbe notre Sauveur, trans. Marie-
José Mondzain-Baudinet, Collection d’esthétique 52 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1989). 



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2010 book The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual and the Senses in Byzantium6 studied how the 

materials (e.g., gold, ivory), the form (e.g., flat board or relief carving) and environment (e.g., 

flickering lights, changing shadows, air movement) affect the way icons can be understood in 

their ritual context. This segues into her 2017 book, Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space and Spirit in 

Byzantium,7 which focuses more broadly on the interplay between aesthetics and acoustics in the 

liturgical life of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Her article “The Performative Icon”8 

addresses similar themes as The Sensual Icon, and will inform my examination, in Part II, of 

Pentcheva’s contribution. 

Clemena Antonova, a fellow art historian, has also written on iconography in Space, 

Time, and Presence in the Icon.9 However, this book and her research in general are restricted to 

Russian icons, rather than dealing with Byzantine iconography more generally. In addition to the 

book just mentioned, she has published several articles on iconological themes, especially with 

regard to spatial perspective10 and its temporal counterpart, where she discusses the non-linear 

flow of time in the icon.11 

 
6 Bissera V. Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (University Park, 

PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010). 
7 Bissera V. Pentcheva, Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space, and Spirit in Byzantium (University Park, 

Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017). 
8 Bissera V. Pentcheva, “The Performative Icon,” The Art Bulletin 88, no. 4 (2006): 631–655. 
9 Clemena Antonova, Space, Time, and Presence in the Icon: Seeing the World with the Eyes of God, 

Ashgate studies in theology, imagination, and the arts (London, New York: Routledge, 2016). 
10 Clemena Antonova, “On the Problem of ‘Reverse Perspective’: Definitions East and West,” Leonardo 

43, no. 5 (October 2010): 464–469. 
11 Clemena Antonova, “Florensky’s ‘Reverse Time’ and Bakhtin’s ‘Chronotope’: A Russian Contribution 

to the Theory of the Visual Arts,” Slovo (Maney Publishing) 15, no. 2 (October 2003): 101–114. 



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Arianne Conty is a philosopher of religion; her “Bending Heaven down to Earth,”12  

examines the medieval icon, its use of perspective, and the more modern idea of the “crossing of 

the gaze.” In this sense, she and Antonova explore similar themes, although Conty discusses both 

Byzantine and Western art. In “Absolute Art: Nicolas of Cusa’s De Visione Dei,”13 she describes 

an experiment conducted by Nicholas of Cusa with his fellow monks, and from this she develops 

a “sociology of belief,” concluding that knowledge of God is not only impossible from a single 

perspective or vantage point, but is also dependent on being in community with others who are 

seeking a relationship with God. Cusa’s work and the question of perspective, along with the 

“crossing of the gaze,” are subjects that will be taken up again later in this thesis. 

Bruce Foltz is a philosopher writing primarily about the environment, though he also 

covers several topics in the philosophy of religion. Although his work will not be revisited later 

in this paper, it is worth noting that in The Noetics of Nature he establishes parallels between 

icons and the Earth, namely, in the way that environment and interconnections (or 

intertextuality) are important for the being and meaning of both. He argues: “The icons manifest 

spiritual realities in part through their contextual inter-relations—graphic, poetic, narrative, 

ontological, and spiritual—within a world seen variously through other icons.”14 He even 

dedicates a whole chapter to “The Iconic Earth,”15 although this idea of iconicity and idolatry in 

the natural environment and in the liturgical environment are prevalent throughout. If Antonova 

 
12 Arianne Conty, “Bending Heaven down to Earth: The Medieval Icon,” Religion and the Arts 19, no. 1–2 

(2015): 1–30. 
13 Arianne Conty, “Absolute Art: Nicolas of Cusa’s De Visione Dei,” Religion and the Arts 16, no. 5 

(January 1, 2012): 461–487. 
14 Bruce V. Foltz, The Noetics of Nature: Environmental Philosophy and the Holy Beauty of the Visible, 

Groundworks - ecological issues in philosophy and ecology (Fordham University, 2014), 142–143. 
15 Ibid., 113–157. 



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represents the specific (i.e., Russian) end of the spectrum, in discussions about iconography, 

Foltz may represent the opposite, more generalized end, given that he invites not only icons but 

the entirety of the natural world into the discussion about iconicity and experience. We turn to 

this perhaps peculiar idea of “experiencing icons,” in our next section on phenomenology.  

The Phenomenology of the Iconographic Experience 

 The phenomenologist who has written most prolifically on the subject of phenomenology 

in conjunction with icons is certainly Jean-Luc Marion. Among his works, the monograph The 

Crossing of the Visible16 (originally published in French as La croisée du visible in 1989) will be 

the focus here, since its key theme is to distinguish object, idol and icon. These ideas will be 

discussed in more detail below. The book just mentioned is not, however, Marion’s only 

treatment of iconography and its related themes. His 2001 The Idol and Distance (originally 

published in French as L’Idole et la distance in 1977) opened the discussion on the “visible” and 

“invisible,” though his questions were left open-ended; The Crossing of the Visible both 

continues the train of thought begun twelve years prior (and extended in his 1982 Dieu sans 

l'être),17 one that will prove central to our evaluation of how an icon can be experienced as such, 

and what might differentiate it from an idol or other work of art.  

 Marion’s research in this domain also includes articles and conference presentations. One 

of these, “Le prototype de l’image”18 formed the basis of what became chapter 4 of The Crossing 

 
16 Jean-Luc Marion, The Crossing of the Visible, Cultural memory in the present (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford 

University Press, 2004). 
17 Jean-Luc Marion, Dieu sans l’être, Quadrige 129 (Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France, 

1991). 
18 Jean-Luc Marion, “Le Prototype de l’image,” in Nicée II, 787-1987 : Douze Siècles d’images Religieuses 

(presented at the Colloque International Nicée II, Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1987), 451–470. 



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of the Visible. Another noteworthy paper from the same conference is Michel Costantini’s “L’Art 

contemporain : L’idole en quête d’icone?”19 Here, Costantini introduces modern art and 

photographic realism into the dialogue, and finds in those media the negation of iconic traits—in 

place of the icon appears a pretentious idol coming from imitation and manufacture, without any 

sense of the Creator’s giving of self through the icon, nor with any inkling of acheiropoeisis 

(made without hands).20 This abhorrence of imitation or mimesis is a theme that will return in 

Part I, in our discussion of Michel Henry and the work of abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky. 

Henry also touches on the topic of Byzantine icons, primarily in the form of larger mosaics, in 

Barbarism, where he describes how the power of Byzantine iconography comes from its 

aesthetic composition.21 

 Also of interest is Marion’s “Seeing, or Seeing Oneself Seen: Nicholas of Cusa's 

Contribution in De visione Dei”22 which explores the theology of 15th-century German 

theologian and philosopher Nicholas of Cusa. In the latter’s De visione Dei sive de Icona, as 

Marion notes, there is not only the question of visions of God, but also of visibility generally 

speaking, which leads to the discussion of phenomenality. To Marion, this means “questions 

concerning the icon as a type of phenomenon, the reversal of vision into a countervision, the 

distinction between the object or the nonobject of the seen, and the possibility of seeing the 

 
19 Michel Costantini, “L’art contemporain : L’idole en quête d’icone?,” in Nicée II, 787-1987 : Douze 

siècles d’images religieuses (presented at the Colloque International Nicée II, Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1987), 471–
488. 

20 Ibid., 488. 
21 Michel Henry, Barbarism, trans. Scott Davidson (London and New York: Continuum Impacts, 2012), 

32. 
22 Jean-Luc Marion, “Seeing, or Seeing Oneself Seen: Nicholas of Cusa’s Contribution in De Visione Dei,” 

The Journal of Religion 96, no. 3 (July 2016): 305–331. 



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other.”23 Similarly, Arianne Conty, mentioned above, analyzes De visione Dei, concluding that 

our communal understanding of God must be mediated by the words (and thus experiences) of 

others, because it is not possible to completely understand God from the vantage point of a single 

person. This conclusion was based on Cusa’s experiment with his fellow monks, who 

circumambulated an icon composed in reverse perspective, and discovered each monk to have a 

unique perspective.24 I do not review Cusa’s work directly in what follows, although he is 

included to the extent that he has had an influence on Marion. Further studies in this area, 

however, especially those inclusive of Western religious art, would benefit from a closer 

engagement with Cusa’s text.  

 Returning to modern philosophy: although Marion is a major figure in the 

phenomenology of icons and art more broadly, he is not the only one writing on this topic. 

Fellow phenomenologist Michel Henry published Seeing the Invisible,25 a book on the oeuvre of 

Kandinsky. While not pertaining to iconography directly, it explores many of the same themes as 

Marion’s work, such as the visible and the invisible, which form layers of meaning and 

connection in a painting.  

In “Iconic Wonder,”26 Alexander Kozin discusses the phenomenology of Pavel 

Florensky—an early 20th century Orthodox theologian who had critiqued the thought of Husserl, 

but died (in 1937) before several important phenomenological works were written, particularly 

those with religious themes, in the wake of the so-called “theological turn.” Kozin cites Lévinas 

 
23 Ibid. 
24 Conty, “Absolute Art,” 461. 
25 Michel Henry, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky (London ; New York: Continuum, 2009). 
26 Alexander V. Kozin, “Iconic Wonder: Pavel Florensky’s Phenomenology of the Face,” Studies in East 

European Thought 59, no. 4 (2007): 293–308. 



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and his insistence on the importance of the presence of the Other, especially the Face of the 

Other.27 Although not figuring directly in this thesis, we will encounter Lévinas’ legacy in later 

phenomenologists such as Henry and Marion. 

 Finally, not all phenomenology relating to our topic has an explicitly spiritual bent. 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty has written extensively on aesthetics, though not explicitly in regard to 

icons. Key essays include “Cézanne’s Doubt”28 and “Eye and Mind”29: the former deals with the 

role of the senses and sensations in the experience of both producing and viewing a painting, 

while the latter touches on the representation of the invisible—a conversation continuing in the 

work of Henry and Marion. Merleau-Ponty is discussed in further detail in Part I. 

 Up to this point, we have mentioned resources associated with what might be called the 

traditional dialogue between theology and philosophy concerning icons. The next two categories 

present atypical interlocutors: first, Marshall McLuhan, and his impact on the way the world sees 

media (including iconography), and second, modern art, which though seemingly opposed in 

both content and context, in fact provides a valuable perspective on what iconography is and is 

not. 

 
27 Ibid., 299–300. 
28 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and 

Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith, Northwestern University studies in phenomenology & 
existential philosophy (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 59–75. 

29 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and 
Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith, Northwestern University studies in phenomenology & 
existential philosophy (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 121–149. 



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Marshall McLuhan, Religion, and Liturgy 

Marshall McLuhan, best known for his work in mass communication and the social 

impact of technology, was a professor of English Literature at the University of St. Michael’s 

College (University of Toronto). He was also a convert to Catholicism, who remained devout  

throughout his academic career, as witnessed by the series of letters and essays compiled in The 

Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion.30 This book is in four parts, treating: his 

conversion; the church’s current understanding and relationship to media (i.e., electric/electronic 

media such as television); Vatican II and its relationship to liturgy and media; and the future of 

the Catholic Church in an electronic or digital age. Sections of other key works, such as The 

Gutenberg Galaxy31 and Understanding Media32 also use religious contexts to explain a given 

concept—such as the breaking apart of a cohesive unity of senses when the visual sense is 

favoured nearly exclusively33—even where religion is not the primary focus of his arguments. In 

particular, The Gutenberg Galaxy, which focuses on the effects of the printing press on human 

society, extensively evaluates the effects of the printing press on the Catholic Church and the 

subsequent rise of Protestantism.  

Despite a tendency to engage various aspects of religion and the senses, McLuhan never 

directly discusses icons as a form of sacred art for the purpose of prayer. While making the 

occasional, passing reference to an icon or to the iconic, his concept of the icon can only be 

 
30 Marshall McLuhan, The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion, ed. Eric McLuhan and Jacek 

Szklarek (Toronto: Stoddart, 1999). 
31 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto, ON: University 

of Toronto Press, 1962). 
32 McLuhan, Understanding Media. 
33 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 139. 



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marginally correlated to a religious icon in the Byzantine sense.34 Still, many of the aspects of 

liturgical practice, and Christian faith more broadly, which he does treat, pertain also to the 

context of iconography. In The Medium and the Light, McLuhan refers to the Christian East as 

the portion of the Church that split from Roman Catholicism when the latter became too literate 

or “visual” (meaning text-driven), and consequently too centralized.35 He also raises the 

possibility that as the West re-enters a more “acoustic” (non-text-based) world with the 

introduction of electronic media, the East may meanwhile begin to emulate the West’s visual 

culture, thereby losing the very acoustic or tactile culture it had hitherto preserved.36 This would 

have been the ideal opportunity to discuss iconography as an important element of the East’s 

less-text-based focus (similarly characteristic of the West and its sacred art up to the 

Renaissance). Curiously, however, McLuhan does not discuss this at all, preferring to focus on 

the musical or sung aspects of the liturgy, the centrality of the sacraments, and the use of the 

vernacular. Therefore, I will be using McLuhan’s thought on visual and acoustic space, and its 

 
34 For example, McLuhan states that “women’s dress and hair styles have abandoned visual for iconic—or 

sculptural and tactual—stress.” (McLuhan, Understanding Media, 164.) Inasmuch as McLuhan’s point is that the 
iconic moves away from the purely visual, i.e., text-based, this aligns with the understanding of a Byzantine icon. 
However, McLuhan uses this term much more broadly, usually with reference to something that revives the tactile 
experience of a medium. See, for example, Ibid., 334, 442. 

35 McLuhan, The Medium and the Light, xxviii, 60. On page 60, he writes, “It would be a good time to be 
Russian Orthodox: they split off from Rome because it was too literate. The Eastern Church is an ‘ear’ Church; 
Rome was always very far along the visual road to visual power.” This is arguably a drastic simplification of the 
theological and political complexities of the Schism of 1054, and he does not attempt to explain how these 
complexities can be boiled down to a disparity in the “visuality” of the Christian West and East. However, it does 
shed important light on the possibility of causing major social changes through the favouring a certain sense (in this 
case, visual or text-based) above all others. 

36 Ibid., 207. McLuhan writes, “While we [Roman Catholicism] are rediscovering our inner-directed 
spirituality under electric influence, the Oriental world as a whole is marching toward Western values and its 
external trappings. Isn’t the East about to lose its inner richness in order to put on what we ourselves are 
abandoning? Instead of borrowing from each other what we each lack, each keeping what is good, we risk 
completely exchanging sides and discovering that we are still opposed.” 



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relationship to art and liturgy (if not to iconography specifically), and applying it in turn to the 

question of where iconography is to be located within Christian theology. 

 Secondary source material on McLuhan and religion is similarly void of overt links with 

iconography. Shortly after the publication of his two major works—The Gutenberg Galaxy 

(1962) and Understanding Media (1964)—a few articles appeared, attempting to apply 

McLuhan’s thoughts to the perceived state of society. However, these were rarely authored by 

theologians. Jesuit John M. Culkin’s “A Churchman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan,”37 is largely 

a summary of “the medium is the message” expression, explaining how a text-based society can 

result in linear thinking. When evaluating the application of McLuhan’s theories to the church, 

Culkin aligns the need for a more sensory experience in liturgy with liturgical reforms promoting 

congregational participation, and the introduction of new technologies (e.g., modern musical 

instruments, slides, films) into the liturgy.38  

Another contemporary article, “Liturgical Medium in an Electronic Age,”39 follows a 

similar rationale, predicting a reversal of the linear, uniform format of visual liturgy towards a 

more creative and participatory experience—worship as a work of art. Oddly, the author even 

goes so far as to consider the fourth Eucharistic Prayer, based on the Byzantine Rite’s Anaphora 

of St. Basil, as illustrative of a nostalgia for the more aural and tribal bonds maintained in the 

Eastern tradition.40 In neither article is there any direct evaluation of the new media and their 

associated unified sensory experience, with respect to the sensory experience exemplified in 

 
37 John M Culkin, “A Churchman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan,” Religious Education 63, no. 6 

(November 1968): 457–462. 
38 Ibid., 461. 
39 Charles C McDonald, “Liturgical Medium in an Electronic Age,” Worship 44, no. 1 (January 1970): 27–

39. 
40 Ibid., 36. 



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Eastern Christian liturgy and in traditional Roman rites. There is also no discussion of the 

theological appropriateness of electric or modern media in a liturgical context.  

 This question of the appropriateness of technology in liturgy was taken up in 2005 by 

Martha Smith Tatarnic41: she uses McLuhan’s work to evaluate the seemingly contradictory 

messages often heard about the church today, namely that it is irrelevant even as religion remains 

important.42 She argues that these two messages are in fact one and the same, with the confusion 

stemming from the bias of television toward an individualism foreign to the church. She 

explains: “[T]he primary message of the mass media serves to legitimize this idea of the church 

as irrelevant simply because the demands of the gospel do not make sense in a television value 

system that upholds the satisfaction of individual desires as being of utmost importance.”43 The 

question becomes whether Christianity can be effectively transmitted through any and all media, 

since it appears that the message—the social effect, as McLuhan defines it—of some media (in 

this case, television) is inherently incompatible with Christianity, with the Christian message 

consequently lost in translation. Tatarnic suggests that some of missing elements in the television 

age are those that are “provocative, challenging, ancient, and relational about faith as lived out 

through a religious institution, elements such as mission work and service, social justice, 

sacramentality, community, tradition, ritual, or self-sacrifice,” arguing further that these have 

been replaced by a religion demanding nothing of its adherents.44 Like others, Tatarnic 

references McLuhan’s work only insofar as it relates to the church and electronic or modern 

 
41 Martha Smith Tatarnic, “The Mass Media and Faith: The Potentialities and Problems for the Church in 

Our Television Culture,” Anglican Theological Review 87, no. 3 (2005): 447–465. 
42 Ibid., 450. 
43 Ibid., 459. 
44 Ibid., 461–462. 



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media. Although I will be applying McLuhan’s theories to the traditional “medium” of the icon, I 

take as valid Tatarnic’s critique that nothing is being demanded of Christian adherents; I will 

return to this theme when discussing the phenomenology of the icon and the crossing of the gaze. 

 The final part of this literature review will provide a high-level overview of the topic of 

modern art as it relates to iconography. This may be seen as a natural partner to McLuhan’s 

communication theory; while certainly aware of icons (inasmuch as they warrant the occasional 

mention in his work), McLuhan applied his laws of media to modern art, particularly Cubism. 

Thus, scholarship treating the link between Cubism and iconography should prove especially 

useful to our own project. 

The Relationship Between Iconography and Modern Art 

 As previously noted, McLuhan mentions icons only in passing, and even then, with a 

meaning only loosely connected to Byzantine iconography. He does, however, discuss modern 

art (and particularly Cubism) in relation to his communication theory. I will analyze this in much 

more depth in Part II, providing an extensive discussion of the similarities and differences 

between Cubist art and iconography, in an attempt to apply McLuhan’s framework for media 

effects to iconography. I have yet to come across any academic work with this objective, 

although there are certainly a number of texts which compare modern art with iconography (or 

other religious art) in other ways.  



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 Andrew Spira’s book The Avant-Garde Icon45 explores the connection between the 

iconographic tradition and the development of the Avant-Garde artistic movement46 in Russia. 

Spira recognizes that it may appear that icons and avant-garde art share little in common, with 

one deeply rooted in the Christian tradition and the other based in the rejection of Christianity 

and an antipathy toward religion generally speaking. However, Spira argues that it is the tradition 

of icons in Russia that actually made avant-garde art possible; despite rebellion against the 

Church, local artists were influenced by icons in a variety of ways because of the historical 

importance of iconography to their culture. Similarities do exist at the surface level, such as the 

use of unconventional (non-realist) frames of reference; they may also exist at a deeper level, 

such as the quest in both instances to express, in and through art, something of the 

transcendent.47 While Spira focuses specifically on the Russian traditions of both iconography 

and of avant-garde art, I will be considering iconography more broadly. 

 Clemena Antonova has also compared Russian iconography and modern art, specifically 

Cubism, in her 2016 book Space, Time, and Presence in the Icon.48 Unlike Spira, however, the 

parallels between icons and modern paintings are not her primary focus, although she similarly 

restricts her geographical scope. Antonova covers three themes that pertain to the understanding 

of icons, beginning with an exploration of time, and the dearth of academic study on the topic of 

time in art, then highlighting its importance to iconography. Among other notions, she treats 

 
45 Andrew Spira, The Avant-Garde Icon: Russian Avant-Garde Art and the Icon Painting Tradition 

(Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, VT: Lund Humphries, 2008). 
46 The Avant-Garde movement is largely connected with modernism, and is an umbrella term for a large 

number of forms of art, including Cubism but also Impressionism, Dadaism, Suprematism, and many more. For a 
general overview of Avant-Garde art (including writing, fine art, and music) and its premises, see the Introduction to 
Richard Kostelanetz, A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, second edition. (New York: Routledge, 2001), xix–xxii. 

47 Spira, The Avant-Garde Icon, 8–9. 
48 Antonova, Space, Time, and Presence in the Icon. 



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Florensky’s concept of reverse time, i.e., the experience of time flowing backward, followed by 

Konstantinos Kalokyris’s connection of icons with the idea of liturgical time.49 She proceeds to a 

description of space in painting, which lies at the heart of the classical criticism of paintings in 

general and iconography in particular, given that perspective and viewpoint are key to the 

experience of a work of art. Finally, Antonova compares Cubism with iconography, noting that 

they share a similar structure of multiple simultaneous views of the person or object depicted. 

Whereas Spira identifies the key difference between the two as the rejection (or not) of organized 

religion (and of Christianity specifically), Antonova notes that Cubism rather rejects the Western 

system of (linear) perspective. This could not, of course, be the goal of the iconographic 

tradition, since it largely predates the Renaissance popularization of such perspective.50 Though 

it is true that chronologically-speaking, the ancient use of reverse perspective in iconography 

could not have been a direct response to Renaissance innovations, it is still possible that it was 

consciously used to oppose a purely immanent worldview; I will discuss this prospect further in 

section 3 of Part I. 

 Several other authors have also compared iconography with modern art. Sergei 

Bulgakov, in “The Corpse of Beauty”51 also identifies a transcendent component to Cubist art, 

though he believed it pointed to the demonic rather than to the heavenly. Paul Evdokimov also 

includes a chapter titled “Modern Art in the Light of the Icon” in The Art of the Icon,52 where he 

 
49 Ibid., 15–16. The ideas of both Florensky and Kalokyris regarding time in iconography are revisited in 

more detail later in this paper. 
50 Ibid., 110–111. 
51 Sergeĭ Nikolaevich Bulgakov, “The Corpse of Beauty,” in A Bulgakov Anthology (London: SPCK, 

1976), 67–72. 
52 Paul Evdokimov, The Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty, trans. Steven Bigham (Redondo Beach, 

Calif.: Oakwood Publications, 1990), 73–95. 



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likewise points not only to the absence of a religious dimension in modern art (including 

Cubism), but also to a devastated soul, devoid of the interiority necessary to encounter God.53 

Interiority and perspective are key foundational principles which will be revisited later in Part I. 

 Having reviewed the state of the discussion, the question of what differentiates an icon 

from other forms of art—particularly modern art that shares similar characteristics—is still only 

partially answered, and without any consensus. There is also no existing study applying 

McLuhan’s ideas, such as his laws of media, as a framework for this question. What follows will 

therefore be the first attempt of this sort, and will hopefully be a catalyst for subsequent research.  

PART I: THE QUESTION OF ICONS AS MEDIA 

 Since the goal of this thesis is to bring together resources from multiple fields—theology, 

phenomenology, art history, and media theory—in order to propose a new framework for 

developing our understanding of the icon and what differentiates it from a secular54 or even 

religious painting, I will begin by exploring the pertinent conversations in these fields. Section 1 

provides an overview of what has been said about icons within Orthodox theology, especially at 

the time of the Iconoclastic Controversy, which forced Orthodox iconographic doctrine to be 

articulated in great detail. Texts from the Byzantine liturgy, especially the propers for the Sunday 

of the Triumph of Orthodoxy (commemorating the end of the Iconoclastic Controversy), will 

 
53 Ibid., 76, 78. 
54 In this thesis, unless otherwise stated, “secular” refers to the non-religious, or that which is concerned 

with the worldly, rather than with religion or the transcendent. (Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: 
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 265.) Other meanings of the word exist, which Charles Taylor 
has treated at length in A Secular Age, and are summarized in his introduction. (Ibid., 20.) 



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also be examined. We will then hear from influential Orthodox theologians of the 20th and 21st 

centuries, especially Paul Evdokimov, Leonid Ouspensky, and Vladimir Lossky. 

 Section 2 provides a precis of phenomenology as it relates to the possibilities for 

experiencing an icon. After an overview of phenomenology and the so-called “theological turn” 

that appeared in a field originally conceived in “perceptual” terms, I will turn to Jean-Luc 

Marion, notable not only for exploring the role of the transcendent in human experience, but 

also—and more importantly for our purposes—addressing iconography explicitly in his work, 

particularly in The Crossing of the Visible. 

 Section 3 highlights contributions from art history, especially with respect to the role of 

perspective in a work of art (or an icon) and its effect on the experience of the viewer. This 

extension of phenomenology is important, and Cubism will consequently be introduced as a 

“dialogue partner,” given its superficial similarities to iconography in both appearance (e.g., the 

non-realistic representation of object or person) and in purpose (i.e., portraying that which is 

invisible in symbolic or otherwise visible form). 

 Finally, Sections 4 and 5 provide an introduction to the thought of Marshall McLuhan, 

and to a lesser extent, of his son Eric with whom he collaborated in the latter part of his career. 

The ideas of medium, figure-ground relationships, and the laws of media all form an important 

basis for the tetrad—the framework to be developed and applied in the second half of this thesis, 

with respect to both the ontology and the dynamics of the icon.  



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Section 1: Orthodox Theology and the Theological Role of Icons 

The Iconoclastic Controversy: The Development of Historical Arguments for Icons 

 Within Orthodox theology, much has been said about the nature and role of icons, largely 

due to the Iconoclastic Controversy that rocked the Byzantine Empire in the eighth and ninth 

centuries. The Iconoclastic Controversy began to gain momentum in AD 726, when Emperor 

Leo III decreed the destruction of icons; he reinforced this with a further edict in 730.55 Matters 

were not resolved until 843, when Empress Theodora ordered the re-establishment of icon 

veneration—an event still commemorated by Byzantine-Rite Christians today as the Triumph of 

Orthodoxy.56 The controversy covered two periods, separated by an interval of relative calm 

between the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II) in 787, at which iconoclasm was 

condemned, and 813, when iconoclastic Emperor Leo V the Armenian rose to power.57 

 Four major primary sources pertain to this controversy, all of which aimed to define and 

validate the role of icons as a vital element of Christianity. During the first period, St. John of 

Damascus (ca. 676-749) wrote three treatises against the iconoclasts, which articulate the most 

important theological arguments in favour of icons. The exact dates of the three treatises are not 

known, but estimates are that the first treatise was written between 726 and 730, the second 

shortly after 730, and the third in the early 740s.58 

 
55 Daniel J. Sahas, Icon and Logos: Sources in Eighth-Century Iconoclasm, Toronto medieval texts and 

translations 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 25. 
56 Nicephorus, Discours contre les iconoclastes, 37. 
57 Ibid., 36. 
58 John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, 10. 



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 Two councils led up to the temporary reprieve already mentioned: an iconoclastic council 

in 754, convened in Hiereia by Emperor Constantine V, and one condemning iconoclasm—the 

Seventh Ecumenical Council—convened by the Empress Irene in Nicaea in 787 (also known as 

Nicaea II). Because of the widespread destruction of iconoclastic writings in the wake of the 

controversy, there are few extant records from the 754 Council, though fragments survive in later 

iconophile documents (including the Acts of the Seventh Ecumenical Council treated below).59  

 In the ninth century, two writers are notable for their defence of icon veneration 

(iconoduleia): St. Theodore the Studite (759-826), and Patriarch Nikephoros of Constantinople 

(ca. 758-828). Mirroring the three-part structure of the Damascene’s treatises, St. Theodore and 

Patriarch Nikephoros each wrote three refutations of the iconoclasts. The latter wrote between 

818 and 820,60 and although exact dates are not known for the former’s refutations, they 

generally receive a similar dating.  

 Although some scholars have characterized this second period of iconoclasm as a 

spiritually exhausted, diluted repeat of the first, historian Paul Alexander argues otherwise, 

calling it the “philosophical climax of the entire Controversy.”61 While several of the respective 

arguments and counter-arguments overlap, the second period represented an evolution in 

Christological sophistication and nuance on both sides. 62 In particular, the nature of the 

authentic religious image became the central object of debate,63 as evidenced in the horos 

 
59 Sahas, Icon and Logos, 32–33. 
60 Nicephorus, Discours contre les iconoclastes, 36. 
61 Paul J. Alexander, “The Iconoclastic Council of St. Sophia (815) and Its Definition (Horos),” Dumbarton 

Oaks Papers 7 (1953): 37. 
62 Theodore the Studite, On the Holy Icons, 9. 
63 Alexander, “The Iconoclastic Council of St. Sophia (815) and Its Definition (Horos),” 37. 



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(definition) of the iconoclastic council of St. Sophia (815), as well as the writings of St. 

Theodore and Patriarch Nikephoros. Let us now turn to essential arguments and counter-

arguments put forward in these sources: these will lay the foundation for our subsequent dialogue 

with the modern theologians and philosophers introduced above.   

St. John of Damascus and the First Period of the Iconoclastic Controversy 

 Soon after the advent of iconoclasm in 726, St. John of Damascus wrote his first 

treatise,64 in which he critiques the iconoclasts’ literalistic interpretation of the biblical injunction 

against graven images (Ex 20:4-5),65 and their blanket extension of it to all imagery, including 

icons. John’s later treatises cover similar ground, though varying in presentation and 

sophistication: the second treatise is a condensed version of the first, with almost identical 

florilegia,66 while the third is further simplified, even as it elevates the arguments to a new 

level.67 To distinguish idolatry and worship of the one true God, John repeatedly delves into 

three areas: the nature of images, whether God is circumscribable, and the possible forms of 

interaction with sacred imagery.  

 
64 Jacques Paul Migne and Ferdinand Cavallera, Patrologiae cursus completus, Series Graeca 94 (Paris: J.-

P. Migne, 1864), 1232–1284. Note: in this document, all further references to this series (the Patrologia Graeca) 
will be abbreviated as PG, followed by volume number and column range, e.g., PG 94, 1232-1284. St. John of 
Damascus’s second oration can be found in PG 94, 1284-1317, and the third oration ibid., 1317-1420. 

65 “You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or 
that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them . . .” 
Biblical quotations in this thesis will be from the Revised Standard Version (RSV) unless otherwise indicated. 

66 A florilegium is a series of passages strung together from Patristic sources, as a way of reinforcing the 
authority of the argument. All three of John’s treatises contain one, and those from the first two treatises are largely 
identical; however, they are unusual in that John inserts comments between each passage. See Andrew Louth’s 
comment on this in his introduction to the Three Treatises, pp. 14-15. 

67 John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, 14. 



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Before getting into specifics, John examines the nature of the image, and provides an 

overview of six types, as follows: 

1. Natural images: what is by nature is then followed by that which is through 

begetting or proceeding; e.g., the Son is begotten by the Father, and thus the Son 

is a natural image of the Father.  

2. God’s pre-eternal will: God’s will contains that which is predetermined and shall 

infallibly come to be. 

3. Humankind: that which God brings about through imitation, i.e., we are made in 

the image of God. 

4. Depictions of the invisible in bodily form: Scriptural forms and shapes that 

provide a conception of the divine and angelic, such as the Trinity being 

represented by the sun, sunlight, and the sunbeam. 

5. Prefiguration: Symbolic representations of what will come to be, e.g., the burning 

bush prefiguring the Theotokos. 

6. Memories of past events: Scripture or items that exist as memorials, such as the 

twelve stones from the River Jordan used as a figure to remember the priests of 

the twelve tribes of Israel.68 

Given these variations on the theme of the image being a likeness of the original, the next 

question is whether a likeness of the divine is possible, i.e., whether the divine is even 

circumscribable. The Damascene agrees that in the Old Testament, when the commandment 

against graven images was given, it was indeed not possible to make an image of God, because 

 
68 Ibid., 96–100. Treatise III, §§ 18-23. 



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He was invisible and thus could not be depicted. With the incarnation of Christ, however, God 

had chosen to take the form of man, which could indeed be depicted.69 

The final major argument is that there are multiple forms of veneration and worship, and 

it is crucial to distinguish them. John proposes twelve types of worship and veneration, grouped 

into two broad categories: worship of God, and veneration of creatures. Worship is due to God 

alone, and can take the form of formal services (e.g., liturgy); wonder and desire at God’s glory; 

thanksgiving for good things; supplication for needs, and repentance through confession. On the 

other hand, creaturely veneration—a symbol of submission and honour but not worship—is 

appropriate in certain cases, with John indicating seven: persons assimilated to God through 

theosis; things or places through which God wrought salvation (e.g., Golgotha); things dedicated 

to God (books, chalices, etc.); items prefiguring things to come (e.g., Aaron’s rod, the jar 

containing the manna); other people, as made in the image of God; and those in authority, such 

as masters (to be venerated by their servants).70 The conclusion is that inasmuch as veneration 

causes honour to pass from the image to the prototype,71 and since God has determined to 

become circumscribable in Christ, icons and their veneration must continue to be an important 

part of existing Church tradition. 

The Seventh Ecumenical Council: Nicaea II (787) 

 Some forty years after the last of St. John of Damascus’s treatises on holy images, and 33 

years after an iconoclastic council in Hiereia, an opposing council was convened in Nicaea to 

definitively remedy the situation. Of the eight sessions, the most interesting for our purposes is 

 
69 Ibid., 24. Treatise I, § 8. 
70 Ibid., 104–110. Treatise III, §§ 28-39. 
71 Ibid., 112. Treatise III, § 41. 



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the sixth, in which the Horos from the iconoclastic council of 754 was read and, item by item, 

refuted.72 Several refutations echo those presented by St. John of Damascus, though he is not 

mentioned by name. For example, the iconoclastic council had suggested that an icon of Christ 

either attempts to circumscribe the uncircumscribable, or else confuses the unconfused union 

(perhaps by only portraying his human nature)—either way, a blasphemy. The new council 

proceeds to refute this by means of the arguments advanced by John, pointing to Christ who 

became visible through his humanity, while maintaining a perfect union of his two natures.73 

 Interestingly, just as John made liberal use of florilegia to support his treatises against 

iconoclasm, the iconoclastic council of 754 also used a florilegium to support its position, citing 

a number of passages from venerable authors such as St. Gregory the Theologian and St. John 

Chrysostom. However, the council at Nicaea neutralized each of these in turn by demonstrating 

how these patristic passages had been misunderstood, taken out of context, misquoted, or twisted 

to suit an argument.74 For example, the 754 Horos quotes Amphilochius of Iconium that “we 

should not endeavour to depict on boards with colours the carnal faces of the saints; we do not 

need these. What we need, instead, is to imitate their conduct through virtue.”75 The new council 

retorts that this is only a fragment of what Amphilochius said, thereby misrepresenting his 

position. Instead, they suggest, “we do not praise the saints, nor do we represent them in 

painting, because we like their flesh. Rather, in our desire to imitate their virtues, we retell their 

 
72 Sahas, Icon and Logos, 38, 40. 
73 Ibid., 83–85. 
74 Ibid., 117–146. This is the full fifth volume of the sixth session, which is almost entirely dedicated to 

these refutations of patristic passages. The fourth volume (Icon and Logos, pp. 97-115) contains a similar quotation-
and-refutation format, but with the biblical, rather than patristic, passages quoted by the iconoclastic council. 

75 Ibid., 125. 



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life-stories in books and we depict them in iconographies, even though they have little need to be 

praised by us in narratives or to be depicted in icons.”76 

 The Horos of Nicaea II, defined in its seventh session, sums up the mature position of the 

Church by anathematizing the heretics identified by previous Ecumenical Councils, restating the 

fourth-century Nicene Creed, and reiterating the importance of traditions of the Church, 

including the making of iconographic representations.77 It seemed that the matter had been 

settled, but as previously indicated, the controversy re-ignited in AD 815, despite the conclusions 

of Nicaea II. We will next examine the two key defenders of icons from this second period of 

iconoclasm. 

St. Theodore the Studite and the Second Period of the Iconoclastic Controversy 

In his three refutations against the iconoclasts,78 St. Theodore the Studite does not present 

any arguments not already advanced by St. John of Damascus and the Council of Nicaea II, 

although his writing is stylistically different. As John Luis Antonion de Passalaqua puts it in his 

comparative study of the two writers, “St. John addresses the Iconoclasts as brothers who need to 

be shown the error of their ways, to eventually lead them back to Orthodoxy. St. Theodore is an 

angry man.”79 Much like the Horos of Nicaea II, Theodore equates iconoclasts with heretics, 

writing in turn to prevent the faithful from being led astray. In his first refutation, Theodore uses 

 
76 Ibid. 
77 Ibid., 177–179. 
78 Theodore the Studite, On the Holy Icons. These three refutations can be found in their original Greek in 

PG 99, 328-352 (first refutation), 352-388 (second refutation), 389-436 (third refutation). 
79 John Luis Antonio de Passalaqua, “A Comparative Study of the Theological Approaches of Saint John of 

Damascus and Saint Theodore of Studion to the Iconoclastic Heresy,” in Following the Star from the East: Essays in 
Honour of Archimandrite Boniface Luykx, ed. Andriy M. Chirovsky (Ottawa, Chicago, Lviv: Metropolitan Andrey 
Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies, 1992), 146. 



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a style of argument-and-riposte similar to that already seen in the sixth session of Nicaea II. His 

arguments are nonetheless more articulately expressed, and with more forceful logic and 

cohesion than those of the Damascene’s.80  

In his first refutation, Theodore returns to the idea of Christ being one person with two 

natures:81 since these are distinct and yet inseparable, portraying the circumscribable humanity 

of Christ does not and cannot divide his divinity from his person.82 Theodore then reiterates the 

relationship of the image with its original, distinguishing the copy as having an identity by name 

(e.g., an image of Christ is named “Christ”), but not by nature (i.e., an image is a copy relative to 

the prototype), thus negating the criticism that an image of Christ engenders a polytheistic 

situation in which two Christs are worshipped.83 Revisiting ground covered extensively by John, 

the Studite further refines the concept of veneration and its appropriate uses.84 

Theodore’s second refutation covers much of the same theological ground as the first, but 

is instead written as a dialogue between an iconoclast and an Orthodox iconodule. His third 

refutation again revisits the same general arguments, but he now presents them in a significantly 

more sophisticated and systematic way, although only in reference to the possibility of an icon of 

Christ; he does not expand into the rationale for images of the Theotokos or the saints. These 

 
80 Ibid., 145–146. 
81 As defined in the Horos of the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451: “So, following the saintly fathers, we 

all with one voice teach the confession of one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ . . . acknowledged in two 
natures which undergo no confusion, no change, no division, no separation; at no point was the difference between 
the natures taken away through the union, but rather the property of both natures is preserved and comes together 
into a single person and a single subsistent being . . .” [Norman P. Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 
I (London and Washington, DC: Sheed & Ward and Georgetown University Press, 1990), 86.] 

82 Theodore the Studite, On the Holy Icons, 21–23. First Refutation, §§ 3-4. 
83 Ibid., 28–29, 32. First Refutation, §§ 8-9, 11. 
84 Ibid., 33–35, 38–39. First Refutation, §§ 13-14, 19. 



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latter are covered (among other things) in the three refutations of Theodore’s contemporary, 

Patriarch Nikephoros of Constantinople. 

Patriarch Nikephoros of Constantinople: An Unlikely Ally of St. Theodore the Studite 

 Much like the Studite, Patriarch Nikephoros of Constantinople wrote three refutations of 

the iconoclasts,85 also in a polemical “angry man” tone, though his work in its entirety is longer 

and arguably more wide-ranging than Theodore’s. The first text treats the same questions 

addressed by his forebear: the nature of the icon in relation to its prototype, whether God is 

circumscribable, and the Christological question of the hypostatic union. In his second and third 

refutations, he explores new territory, with a discussion of icons of the Theotokos and of the 

saints. He brings up an important point about images of human subjects: as with the possibility 

(or impossibility) of portraying Christ’s divinity alongside his humanity, there exists the 

possibility (or impossibility) of portraying a saint’s dual ontology—human, yet the subject of 

divinization. Similarly, every person has an invisible soul and a visible, circumscribable body. 

Therefore, it is arguably impossible to portray all aspects of a person, whether Christ or a saint. 

However, because of the very inseparability of the visible and invisible in each of these, they 

may still be portrayed.86 

This idea of circumscribability, and that of the unity of the visible and invisible in both 

the divine, i.e., Christ, and the human leads to one of the central phrases from Nikephoros’s 

refutations: “It is not only Christ, but the whole of existence that disappears, if He may never be 

 
85 Nicephorus, Discours contre les iconoclastes. These can be found in their original Greek in PG 100 205-

328 (first refutation), 329-373 (second refutation), and 376-533 (third refutation). 
86 Ibid., 157. Second Refutation, § 4. 



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circumscribed nor portrayed.”87 The Patriarch is speaking here not only of Christology, but also 

of cosmology, justifying the assessment of Paul Alexander that the second period of the 

Iconoclastic Controversy revolves around the nature of the image and all the consequent 

implications. For Nikephoros, as Marie-José Mondzain-Baudinet put it, “the christomach88 is an 

iconomach, by which one must generally understand, and the Greek pronunciation lends itself to 

this, that he is an ‘economach.’”89 In other words, the icon cannot be forbidden without 

simultaneously rejecting Christ and his Incarnation in Creation, along with the Church that also 

exists in the created world to continue God’s work therein.  This positioning of icons, as linking 

creation and the transcendent, the visible and the invisible, is still celebrated and defended today 

by Byzantine Christians (among others). In the next section, I will provide an overview of the 

role of icons in the Byzantine liturgy—an important part of the oikonomia mentioned by 

Baudinet-Mondzain. 

The Integration of Icons in the Byzantine Tradition 

Undoubtely, as just mentioned, the cosmological aspect present in Patriarch Nikephoros’s 

defense of icons is mirrored in the Byzantine Divine Liturgy. Paul Evdokimov (d. 1970), for 

 
87 Ibid., 86. First Refutation, § 20 (244D). Translation is mine. The Greek reads, “μᾶλλον δὲ οὐδὲ Χριστὸς, 

ἀλλὰ τὸ πᾶν οἴχεται, εἰ μὴ περιγράφοιτο καὶ εἰκονίζοιτο.” Mondzain-Baudinet’s French translation is, “ce n’est pas 
le Christ, mais c’est l’univers entier qui disparaît, s’il n’y a plus circonscriptibilité ni icône.” 

88 The -mach suffix comes from the Greek verb μάχομαι (mákhomai), to fight, and this suffix creates a 
noun meaning an opponent of that to which the suffix is appended. An iconomach is often used as a synonym for 
iconoclast, although the latter specifically means someone who not only opposes images, but actively seeks to 
destroy them (suffix -clast derived from the Greek κλάσις (klásis), meaning breaking). 

89 Nicephorus, Discours contre les iconoclastes, 20. The original French of Mondzain-Baudinet’s quote 
reads, “le christomaque est un iconomaque, par quoi il faut entendre globalement, et la prononciation grecque s’y 
prête, qu’il est un ‘économaque’.” The Greek words iconomach (εἰκονομάχος) and economach (οἰκονομάχος) are 
homonyms; the latter refers to someone fighting against the Divine Economy, i.e., the plan of salvation and its 
practical implications. For a further overview on the Christian and specifically Byzantine understanding of 
oikonomia, see John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes, 2nd ed. (New 
York: Fordham University Press, 1979), 88–90. 



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instance, observes that “the Church’s liturgy is not simply a copy of the heavenly liturgy, but is 

rather the erruption [sic] of the heavenly into history.”90 Thus, he can say that icons and other 

architectural elements of the church (the building, frescoes, objects) are an integral part of the 

liturgical mystery, participating in a single mystical life. The icon’s role in this mystical life is to 

sanctify time and space by uniting meaning and presence. Evdokimov stresses the importance of 

presence both in icons and in the liturgy; not only do icons act as a focus or target through which 

one can be made aware of God’s presence and turn to prayer, but “icons” in the Church are also 

not limited to painted boards. The faithful (synaxis) themselves are indeed living icons of the 

assembly of angels who participate in the eternal liturgy, as described in the Cherubic Hymn 

which inaugurates the Liturgy of the Eucharist: “Let us who mystically represent the 

cherubim. . .”91 In this sense, as St. John of Damascus originally explained, both people and 

painted92 icons, among other things, are images of God in their own ways, with a corollary place 

in the liturgical life of the church. For this reason, both icons and people are incensed during 

Byzantine services, as a sign of God’s blessing through the grace of the Holy Spirit.93 

Though they are already intrinsic to Byzantine services, as described above, icons also 

receive a dedicated feast day; the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy commemorates the 

victory of the iconophiles in 843, and is celebrated on the first Sunday of Lent. The festal 

kontakion (thematic hymn) sung at Matins and at the Divine Liturgy reads: “The 

 
90 Evdokimov, Art of the Icon, 120. 
91 Ibid., 175–176. 
92 In the Byzantine tradition, icons are usually said to be “written”—iconography is εἰκών (image) + γραφία 

(writing), to emphasize that they are Scripture in visual form. However, I am using “painted” in this instance both to 
draw attention to its physical form, and to distance the icon from McLuhan’s idea of visual space, which is primarily 
the domain of the written word. McLuhan’s visual and acoustic spaces, and the situation of icons therein, is 
discussed in more detail later in this thesis. 

93 John Anthony McGuckin, The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Its History, Doctrine, and Spiritual 
Culture (Malden, MA ; Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 357. 



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uncircumscribed Word of the Father became circumscribed, taking flesh from thee, O 

Theotokos, and He has restored the sullied image to its ancient glory, filling it with the divine 

beauty. This our salvation we confess in deed and word, and we depict it in the holy ikons.”94 

Although the Sunday of Orthodoxy is a feast explicitly dedicated to the end of the 

Iconoclastic Controversy and a celebration of the freedom to continue the veneration of icons as 

a central part of the Christian faith, this is not the only liturgical occasion on which attention is 

drawn to the importance of icons. The Sunday of the Seventh Ecumenical Council (October 11th 

or the nearest Sunday thereafter) also emphasizes the theological significance of iconography in 

its kontakion: “The Son who ineffably shone from the Father was born two-fold of nature from a 

woman. Beholding Him, we do not reject the image of His form; but depicting it, we revere it 

faithfully. Therefore the Church, holding the true faith, kisses the icon of Christ’s becoming 

man.”95 

Other feasts, though they do not explicitly mention icons, provide important insights into 

the theology of the icon. One example is the Feast of the Holy Transfiguration (August 6), in 

which Christ’s physical appearance is illumined by the uncreated Light.96 This idea of 

 
94 Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware, trans., The Lenten Triodion, The Service books of the Orthodox 

Church (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1978), 306. The aposticha (hymn sung with psalm verses) for the 
feast is even more explicit in it rejection of iconoclasm and its celebration of icons: “Advancing from ungodliness to 
the true faith, and illumined with the light of knowledge, let us clap our hands and sing aloud, offering praise and 
thanksgiving to God; and with due honour let us venerate the holy ikons of Christ; of the all-pure Virgin and the 
saints, whether depicted on walls, on wooden panels or on holy vessels, rejecting the impious teachings of the 
heretics. For, as Basil says, the honour shown to the ikon passes to the prototype it represents. At the prayers of 
Thine undefiled Mother and of all the Saints, we beseech Thee, Christ our God, to bestow upon us Thy great 
mercy.” Ibid., 301. The reference to Basil is from St. Basil the Great’s treatise On the Holy Spirit, chapter 18, § 45. 
[See for example Saint Basil, On the Holy Spirit, trans. Stephen M. Hildebrand, Popular patristics series 42 
(Yonkers, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011), 81.] 

95 Peter Galadza, Joseph Roll, and J. Michael Thompson, eds., The Divine Liturgy: An Anthology for 
Worship (Ottawa: Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies, Saint Paul University, 
2004), 708. 

96 Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, trans. G. E. H. Palmer and E. 
Kadloubovsky (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1982), 35. 



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transfiguration is especially important in the way figures are depicted in icons—not in 

naturalistic form, but in a transfigured way. In the next section, we examine the Transfiguration 

as a source for reviewing the theology of Byzantine iconography as it stands today, elaborating 

on the fundamentals established during the Iconoclastic Controversy, especially as these are 

represented in the stylistic characteristics of Byzantine icons.  

Theology of the Byzantine Iconographic Style 

 Although the term “transfiguration” most obviously applies to the revelation of Christ’s 

glory on Mount Tabor, it applies equally to the principles governing the theology and techniques 

of Byzantine iconography. As Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky write:  

[T]he icon is a likeness not of an animate but of a deified prototype, that is, an 
image (conventional, of course) not of corruptible flesh, but of flesh transfigured, 
radiant with Divine light. . . a temporal portrait of a saint cannot be an icon, 
precisely because it reflects not his transfigured but his ordinary, carnal state. It is 
indeed this peculiarity of the icon that sets it apart from all forms of pictorial art.97  

In other words, the authors would answer our thesis question with the notion that an icon depicts 

a saint (and, by extension, the Theotokos and Christ) in a state transfigured by the Divine. Still, 

one might ask how this state can be shown through ordinary artistic materials. Although not 

exhaustive,98 two techniques in Byzantine iconography are worth discussing in this regard: the 

use of colour and gold to depict radiance, and the unusual proportioning of bodily sensory organs 

such as the eyes, nose, and mouth. We will begin with the link between gold and the divine light 

or radiance. 

 
97 Ibid., 36. 
98 Of course, not only have iconographic techniques changed through the centuries, but they have also 

varied by geographic region. It is outside the scope of this thesis to cover the details of these variations. However, a 
useful overview of the history of Byzantine iconography and art (e.g., mosaics, frescoes) can be found in André 
Grabar, Byzantine Painting: Historical and Critical Study, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 1979). 



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 Several techniques have been used in iconography to depict the radiance of 

transfiguration through the grace of God. One is the use of gold to represent the divine light, 

whether in the form of gold leaf or gold assist (lines painted in gold). An icon’s background is 

often covered in gold leaf, and is even called “light” by iconographers.99 Another typical use of 

gold is in the halo (also known as a nimbus), which represents the aura of a glorified saint, 

evoking the radiance possessed by Moses after his descent from Mount Sinai (Ex 34:29-35). It is 

important to note that in Byzantine iconography (and indeed theology), the so-called “uncreated 

light” radiates outwards from within the saint, and therefore cannot be depicted as an external, 

separate entity floating above the saint, as it sometimes appears in Western sacred art.100 Finally, 

gold assist is occasionally used, usually on garments, to indicate the influence of the Divine 

Light. For example, the clothing of Christ might be coloured with gold assist in scenes such as 

the Transfiguration or the Descent into Hades. The garments of the Theotokos, similarly, might 

be highlighted with gold assist, in order to show her radiance—due to being bathed in the Divine 

Light.101 

 A second technique used to indicate a radiant light is the use of thin white lines that form 

highlights on the figure or the garments through a technique similar to hatching. This represents 

a light coming from the interior, and is uniform across the figure, thus avoiding the shadows or 

chiaroscuro which would otherwise indicate that the light originates from an external source.102 

 
99 Evdokimov, Art of the Icon, 186. 
100 Leonid Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1978), 205–

206. 
101 Constantine D. Kalokyris, The Essence of Orthodox Iconography (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross School 

of Theology, Hellenic College, 1971), 68. 
102 Jean-Claude Larchet, L’iconographe et l’artiste, Théologies (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, Cerf, 2008), 13–

14. 



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As Ouspensky and Lossky put it, “The Divine Light permeates all things, so there is no source of 

light, which would illumine objects from one side or another; objects cast no shadows, for no 

shadows exist in the Kingdom of God.”103  

 The proportion of bodily features in icons is also symbolic of the transfiguration through 

Divine Grace, especially by means of the sanctified sensory organs. The eyes are large, because 

they have seen great things, and are adapted to better take in the divine law and the Creator’s 

works.  Likewise, the ears (when visible) are large, to hear the Lord’s commandments and attend 

to the divine economy; they are in essence an extension of the ears of the soul. Even the nose is 

typically lengthened, in order to smell the fragrance of the Holy Trinity and other spiritual 

fragrances. In contrast, the mouth is small, since the need for spiritual food has supplanted the 

need for material food.104 Nicholas Constas usefully summarizes these stylistic changes by 

stating that “in the icon, the body and all its senses are imaginatively restored to their true 

function as modes of relation with both God and the viewer.”105 

It could be argued that though these stylistic elements are applied to an iconic figure, and 

indicate something of the divinized, transfigured nature of the person, they are not sufficient, or 

even successful in this regard. To this end, two further aspects of the icon will be discussed in the 

next sections. First, I will provide an overview of phenomenological discourse on the possibility 

of depicting the invisible within the visible—a central consideration for icons, whose very 

purpose is to make accessible something of the transcendent. This will be brought into relation 

with Marion’s concept of the crossing of the gaze, between the observer and the one depicted in 

 
103 Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 40. 
104 Kalokyris, The Essence of Orthodox Iconography, 53–54. 
105 Nicholas Constas, “Icons and the Imagination,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 1, 

no. 1 (1997): 120. 



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an icon. Subsequently, I will look further into perspective as a tool for manipulating space and 

time, given that Byzantine icons very often use inverse perspective in order to open up 

dimensions through which an observer could experience God.  

Section 2: Phenomenology and the Depiction of the Invisible 

 When speaking of the theology of icons, Orthodox writers commonly return to the idea of 

presence—that sense of gazing into an icon not being a matter of staring at an object, as one 

might look at a secular painting, but rather of encountering the divine such that one is 

simultaneously also encountered by it. While this dynamic of mutual encounter is certainly a 

central theme in Christianity, it is also an important topic in philosophy, particularly in the field 

of phenomenology, especially as this has developed over time from a focus on things to one on 

persons. 

Phenomenology and the Question of a “Theological Turn” 

Linking Orthodox theology with phenomenology may seem viable to some and 

problematic to others, especially since phenomenology has had a history of being rooted in 

atheist philosophy, and originally excluded the possibility of the divine as a factor in phenomena 

and their perception. The groundwork laid by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and Martin 

Heidegger (1889-1976) in this domain contributed to Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1905-1980) 

development of existentialism—a far cry from the type of Orthodox experience described in this 

paper thus far. However, not all phenomenologists could agree with this limitation, beginning 

with Emmanuel Lévinas (1906-1995), and extending into the thought of Paul Ricoeur (1913-

2005), Michel Henry (1922-2002) and Jean-Luc Marion (1946-), among others. This was a large 

enough shift in French phenomenology that in 1991, Dominique Janicaud (1937-2002) wrote the 



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essay “Phenomenology and the Theological Turn,” criticizing French phenomenology (under 

Lévinas and others) for its departure from the immanent or atheist phenomenology of Husserl 

and Heidegger and its opening to the invisible, the Other, and/or to a pure givenness—a 

departure that he dubbed the “theological turn.”106 In response to Janicaud, four 

phenomenologists penned their own essays in defence of the spiritual in phenomenology—

Ricoeur and Henry, already mentioned, as well as Jean-Luc Marion (1946-) and Jean-Louis 

Chrétien (1952-2019).107 

Of these “theological phenomenologists,” Jean-Luc Marion is especially important for 

our purposes, given his study of the icon, especially in contrast to the object and the idol. Thus, 

we now turn to an overview of his thought. In particular, his discussion of the “crossing of the 

gaze” will be foundational, because it is a someone and not a something that can originate a 

gaze, bridging the gap between object (painting, canvas, board) and person. 

Jean-Luc Marion and the “Crossing of the Gaze” 

  Marion’s The Crossing of the Visible (La Croisée du visible, 1996) is dedicated to the 

phenomenology of painting, and focuses on understanding the difference between an idol and an 

icon. Although this is not the first time he has engaged the question, having previously done so 

in L’Idole et la distance (1977, later published in English as The Idol and Distance) and in Dieu 

 
106 Dominique Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, trans. 

Bernard G. Prusak, Fordham Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 
17. 

107 These four essays form the second part of Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: 
The French Debate. While a complete history of phenomenology and the development of theological ideas within it 
are beyond the scope of this paper, this book is a useful resource for a summary of the position of critics and 
supporters of the “theological turn” within phenomenology. Another useful overview of the role of several 
phenomenologists (including those already mentioned here) in the development of a Continental philosophy of 
religion can be found in Christina M. Gschwandtner, Postmodern Apologetics?: Arguments for God in 
Contemporary Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). 



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sans l'être (1982, later published in English as God Without Being), in The Crossing of the 

Visible he gives sustained attention to the painted image, whether in the form of iconography or 

in modern art.  

Early on in the text, Marion establishes the connection between the visible and the 

invisible in his treatment of perspective, touching upon what might be considered incarnate 

vision. Vision is not limited to simply seeing shapes and colours without any regard to the 

physical act of seeing; rather, the body is in space, the eyes move in response to a scene, and the 

invisible space between visible objects (walls, floor, etc.) is knowable because of the experience 

of the body moving through such spaces. Therefore, through this connection, the visible 

organizes the invisible and results in what he calls the “paradox of perspective,” in which the 

visible is directly proportional to the invisible.108 

Building on the interwoven visible and invisible, Marion begins to distinguish three 

forms of the visible: the object, the idol, and the icon, all of which differ by their characteristic 

forms of gaze. Objects are simply seen and valued in a utilitarian way, tied to production and 

manufacture, without any connection to personhood.109 Idols and icons, however, both involve a 

returned gaze. He defines the idol as that which dazzles the gaze and lives in the realm of 

spectacle; like a mirror or radar signal, it reflects the originator’s gaze back upon itself. Its being 

is thus contingent on the desires of the viewer and, to a certain extent, on the ability of the idol to 

conform to those desires.110 The icon, in contrast, returns a separate gaze, such that the two can 

 
108 Marion, The Crossing of the Visible, 3–5. 
109 Ibid., 42. 
110 Ibid., 33, 52–53. 



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participate in a crossing of the gaze. Whereas the idol exists in proportion to desire’s expectation, 

the icon stands beyond this; its gaze toward us replaces ours towards it.111 

 To further characterize the icon, Marion outlines three important traits. First, an icon 

makes itself available to another’s gaze, and does so independently of any space created with the 

use of perspective. In other words, although the invisible can inhabit the space modelled through 

perspectival drawing, the invisible works through the gaze of the figure in the icon without the 

need for a perspectival system. Second, the icon is not only seen by a gaze, but gazes back—and 

this is always through a human face. As Marion puts it, “the painted gaze invisibly responds to 

the invisible gaze of the one in prayer, and transfigures its own visibility by including it in the 

commerce of two invisible gazes—the one from a praying man . . . the other the gaze of the 

invisible saint.”112  Marion inextricably links the visible with the invisible, since the gaze is the 

invisible within the visible; in the icon, this forms the basis of the spiritual exchange. Through it, 

the face-to-face encounter is made possible, such that two invisible gazes can cross between two 

visible bodies. Finally, the icon does not just insert the invisible into the visible, but it does so 

more radically than is the case, for example, in Suprematist painter Malévich’s Square.113 Here 

Marion invokes not just the crossing of the gazes, but the play of the gazes, which engage in 

 
111 Ibid., 33. 
112 Ibid., 20. In other words, through the icon, an observer’s gaze is engaged with that of an otherwise 

invisible—though living—saint. This is distinct from the idol, where there is no “other” to return the gaze. 
113 Kazimir Malévich (1878-1935) was a Russian painter, famous for his paintings consisting of a simple 

square on a square canvas. Malévich painted several variations of a square on a background—black square on white 
background (Black Square, 1915), red square on white background (Red Square, 1915), white square on white 
(White on White, 1918), etc. However, the specific painting to which Marion is referring is likely unimportant since 
here Marion previously made a point about the invisible made manifest through such squares. He writes, “The 
square reproduces nothing, does not satisfy any aesthetic need, nor is it the deposit of the experiences of 
consciousness . . . The invisible, from that point on, plays no longer between the aim of the gaze and the visible but 
rather, contrary to the gazing aim, in the visible itself— and is merged with it, inasmuch as the white square is 
merged with its white base.” (Ibid., 19.) 



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prayer and love. The icon also pulls away from the spectacle, which comes from an objectivity 

foreign to it.114 

 In summary, Marion begins with the idea of perspective and the way in which the visible 

and the invisible are inextricably linked through it. From there, he goes on to distinguish the 

simple object (something that is simply seen) from the idol (something the gaze desires) and the 

icon (something—or someone—that gazes back). Although Marion is the phenomenologist who 

has written the most extensively about icons, he is not alone in considering what happens when 

painting and observing a painting. The next section will elaborate the parallels presented in the 

thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. 

Merleau-Ponty: The Idea and the Icon 

 Merleau-Ponty wrote a number of texts that form what could be described as an 

“aesthetic phenomenology,” several of which pertain to the philosophy of painting, including his 

essays “Eye and Mind”115 and “Cézanne’s Doubt.”116 Unlike Marion, Merleau-Ponty does not 

ascribe any type of divine or transcendent dimension to the iconographic, nor does he 

specifically treat icons in their Byzantine (or other religious) form. Nonetheless, he shares the 

notion that the visible and the invisible co-exist inseparably in a painting, and that this is in turn 

an essential feature of the iconic. As Jenny Slatman argues, although Merleau-Ponty does not 

directly follow Plato’s classical distinctions of eidos, eikon, and eidolon (parallel to idea, icon, 

and idol),117 he does use the term icon to describe an image containing the invisible within the 

 
114 Ibid., 21–22. 
115 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind.” 
116 Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt.” 
117 Jenny Slatman, “Phenomenology of the Icon,” in Merleau-Ponty and the Possibilities of Philosophy: 

Transforming the Tradition, ed. Bernard Flynn, Wayne J. Froman, and Robert Vallier, SUNY series in 



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visible, thus using this term in contrast to Cartesian representational thought.118 In this sense, 

both Marion and Merleau-Ponty are aligned in the conviction that “the icon is an image that 

transcends the visible of the representational ideology, and this image can be realized in the art 

of painting.”119 

 In “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty is also concerned with the relationship of the painter 

to the subject of the painting, and to the world in which the painter exists. In this sense, he brings 

in a third party: not just the icon’s observer and the one depicted in the icon, but also the one 

who created the icon. He indicates that painter and painting inevitably switch roles, such that 

artists often feel observed by things: “We speak of ‘inspiration,’ and the word should be taken 

literally. There really is inspiration and expiration of Being, respiration in Being, action and 

passion so slightly discernable that it becomes impossible to distinguish between who sees and 

who is being seen, who paints and what is painted.”120 These claims approximate Marion’s 

crossing of the gaze, though also implying the potential anthropomorphizing of natural objects, 

such as trees, in a way that Marion would not have countenanced. In their own ways, both 

Marion and Merleau-Ponty reject the notion that there is a barrier separating a person’s inner 

world from his or her outer environment. Therefore, they—and arguably the iconographic 

tradition as well—respond to the question of how the self and the other (and even the divine 

Other) are interconnected, even mutually dependent.  and in a sense, part of the same whole. 

 
contemporary French thought (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009), 198. Here she refers to 
Plato’s Politeia, which describes a three-level hierarchy through which reality can be understood: eidos, eikoon, 
eidolon. 

118 Ibid., 199. 
119 Ibid., 202.  
120 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 129. 



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 Marion and Merleau-Ponty further agree that a painting or an icon can portray something 

beyond the visible—whether transcendent or a simple intangible such as shadow or certain 

effects of colour. The final phenomenologist to be introduced in this section is Michel Henry, 

who like Marion is also concerned with aesthetics, although writing primarily about abstract art, 

especially the work of a pioneer of abstractionism, Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). 

Michel Henry: Seeing the Invisible Through the Eyes of Wassily Kandinsky  

 To continue with the theme of invisibility in art, as described in the works of Marion and 

Merleau-Ponty, it is worth mentioning Michel Henry’s Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky.121 

Although Henry does make reference to painting (and even Byzantine iconography) in other 

works,122 it is primarily here that he develops his theories concerning the depiction of the 

invisible in works of art. The book systematically examines each aspect of painting—form, 

point, line, colour, composition—but the overarching interest of Henry—and his relevance to our 

present inquiry—is the idea that art exists to provide access to that which is invisible. 

Kandinsky’s works are an ideal test case for Henry because in their abstraction they lack the 

obvious figurative or “visible” aspect that is usually present—and usually taken for granted—in 

other styles of art, thereby evoking the invisible as the primary subject of his paintings. 

 Kandinsky not only painted, but also wrote about the theories underpinning his artistic 

methodology, and Henry in turn engages with Kandinsky’s texts as much as his paintings. The 

artist’s formula of true reality, as Henry describes it, is as follows: 

 
121 Henry, Seeing the Invisible. 
122 See, for example, Henry, Barbarism, 29–38. In this passage, Henry describes the Byzantine mosaics at a 

monastery in Daphne, and the incomprehension of science toward the invisible essence of life contained within 
artistic expression. 



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Interior = interiority of absolute subjectivity = life = invisible = pathos = abstract 
content = abstract form123 

This effectively equates interiority, life, and the invisible with the abstract, wherein something is 

abstract “when it is separated from the reality to which it belongs.”124 Of course, a large part of 

the discussion consists of deciding what abstraction actually means. On the one hand, Henry 

points to a form of art such as Cubism, in which objects are reduced to simple geometric shapes 

that may be rearranged almost beyond recognition; this form, however, is unquestionably 

worldly and thus figurative, since the visible object still dictates the rules of deconstruction and 

reconstruction to the artist. 125 On the other hand, by the end of his book, Henry proposes that all 

painting is abstract. Noting that Kandisky associated realist and figurative painting with the 

materialism of the world and the scientific method of viewing it,126 and used the abstract as a 

way to allow life to regain membership in the world to which it belongs, Henry extends 

Kandinsky’s theories of abstraction to what would normally be called figurative or even realist 

sacred art. For example, a painting of the Adoration of the Magi could be considered purely 

abstract since no one was there to paint it when it originally happened, with the artists who 

painted the scene centuries afterwards making their compositional choices (e.g., spatial 

considerations, objects depicted, colour choices, garments) in response to abstract problems—

such as the development of tone and inner resonance with the aim of invoking a certain 

pathos.127 

 
123 Henry, Seeing the Invisible, 27. 
124 Ibid., 12. 
125 Ibid., 94. 
126 Here, Henry is referring to Kandinsky’s thought related to art. However, the idea that a purely objective 

viewpoint, as proposed in the scientific method, results in a culture of death (i.e., excludes life by excluding the 
subjectivity of the viewer) is a key thesis in Henry’s book Barbarism. 

127 Henry, Seeing the Invisible, 129–130. 



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 Henry’s description of all paintings, and especially the sacred art he describes, as being 

abstract is important to the discussion of iconography, to the extent that portraying the 

invisible—including the transcendent—is essential to religious and liturgical art. According to 

Kandinsky, “every work of art is the child of its time; often it is the mother of our emotions. It 

follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own, which cannot be repeated. Efforts 

to revive the art principles of the past at best produce works of art that resemble a stillborn 

child.”128 The revival of certain forms of art, that is, can occur when periods share similar inner 

moods, but it is the emotions, or inner form, that drive the outer expression—as in speech with 

thought driving the use of words—and not vice versa.129 With such claims, Kandinsky appears to 

separate body and soul, especially in his description of the desire of men to build statues of their 

departed, “as though there were any intrinsic value in the bodily existence of such divine martyrs 

and servants of humanity, who despised the flesh but wanted only to serve the spirit.”130 This 

separation of body and spirit is reminiscent of Manichaean dualism, and although Henry’s text 

largely focuses on the invisible, as does Kandinsky’s art, Henry draws the visible and the 

invisible back together, acknowledging that even with the application of abstract principles to a 

work of art, the visible and invisible are inseparable. He concludes that “every pictorial element 

involves a dual aspect: external and internal . . . It follows that the reality of the world is the 

same as the reality of art, exhausting the division between the visible and the invisible.”131 

 
128 Wassily Kandinsky, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” in Art, Creativity, and the Sacred: An Anthology 

in Religion and Art, ed. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, New revised edition. (New York: Continuum, 1995), 3. 
129 Ibid., 4, 7n1. 
130 Ibid., 7. 
131 Henry, Seeing the Invisible, 136. 



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 Another separation brought into question, relative to the phenomenology of painting, is 

that between the artist and other observers of the work of art. When comparing Marion and 

Henry with regard to their philosophies of depiction of the visible and the invisible, Christina 

Gschwandtner remarks that both assume the artist has privileged access to truth, in a near-

oracular sense—a “gift” or “genius” that others do not possess. She thus questions how or why 

only artists would have exclusive access to this genius.132 While her question is left open-ended 

and unanswered, it is one well worth addressing to Byzantine iconography, as it may shed 

important light on the tradition. New icons are expected to be unsigned copies of existing icons 

already belonging to the Byzantine liturgical and spiritual tradition, with the artist in turn 

presumed to be an active participant in the faith community; arguably, then, any distinction 

between artist and observer is effectively non-existent. The icon is by and for the Church 

community—the body of Christ. Therefore, it is important to turn to the more general question 

already asked by Henry and Marion, among others: how can the invisible truth be depicted in a 

visible painting? Without being able to answer this question, or if its answer is that the invisible 

truth cannot be depicted, then there can be no icon; all that can exist is the idol. This 

phenomenological question is thus a vital key to our overall discussion of iconicity, and we will 

return to this question later on. 

 Having engaged theological and phenomenological perspectives, it is worth exploring 

one more field, in order to properly grasp the issues in play: our next section will thus investigate 

the use of perspective in a work of art from the vantage point of art theory. 

 
132 Christina M. Gschwandtner, “Revealing the Invisible: Henry and Marion on Aesthetic Experience,” The 

Journal of Speculative Philosophy 28, no. 3 (2014): 311–312. 



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Section 3: Art Theory and the Question of Perspective 

 Having established at this point that presence, and in particular the crossing of the gaze, 

is a central condition for a painting to be considered an icon, the next question relates to the use 

of perspective and its relationship to the notion of presence. Nicholas Constas argues that 

“contemplating the icon of the person . . . places the viewer within the locus of a dynamic, 

personal presence. It produces in other words a space, a relational space conditioned by the 

communion and union of persons. The iconic construction of space suggests that the world is not 

a world of things, but a world of persons, constituted by their shared relations and activities.”133 

In a world of persons, where one both sees and is seen by another, it is not a case of a single 

observer viewing an object (or even a person) in a self-contained, separate reality. Rather, in the 

icon, a greater reality encompasses both the observer and the one depicted, and this reality is not 

specific to a fixed point in space or time. Inverse perspective is used to communicate this reality 

of liberation from space and time by focusing on movement not towards a distant vanishing 

point, but rather on movement from within the image toward the viewer.134 

 While it can be tempting to place the icon’s reverse perspective, or its mix of 

perspectives, in contrast with the linear perspective of the natural world introduced during the 

Renaissance, it can be argued that the situation is more complex; even linear perspective is itself 

only one of many ways of representing the natural world. As such, various forms of perspective, 

including linear and reverse, are intrinsically tied to the worldviews of those who depict their 

 
133 Constas, “Icons and the Imagination,” 121–122. 
134 Ibid., 122–123. 



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worlds in these ways. In the next section, this hypothesis will be explored further through the 

work of Erwin Panofsky.  

Perspective as Worldview 

 The idea that perspective—whether in a work of art or in an icon—can be used to 

represent a specific worldview is not uniquely Christian or Orthodox. In his seminal book 

Perspective as Symbolic Form, secular art historian Erwin Panofsky traced the development of 

perspectival systems from antiquity through the Renaissance, and arrived at the counterpart of 

Constas’s conclusion: “the history of perspective may be understood with equal justice as a 

triumph of the distancing and objectifying sense of the real, and as a triumph of the distance-

denying human struggle for control; it is as much a consolidation and systematization of the 

external world, as an extension of the domain of the self.”135 In other words, whereas the use of 

inverse perspective in iconography was a means by which a person could enter into a 

relationship with another subject, and participate in a space rather than control it, the 

popularization of linear perspective beginning in the quattrocento (1400s) served to place full 

control of the image into the hands of the person and create a clear subject-object relationship 

that does not reverse. Panfosky notes further, “the vision of the universe is, so to speak, 

detheologized . . . the result was a translation of psychophysiological space into mathematical 

space; in other words, an objectification of the subjective.”136 

 Although texts about iconography can tend to contrast the reverse perspective of icons 

with linear perspective, indicative of natural or mathematical space, Panofsky argues that linear 

 
135 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York : Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books, 1991), 

67–68. 
136 Ibid., 66. 



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perspective is itself only one way of depicting natural space. As he points out, antique optics as 

developed in the Greco-Roman world used the sphere as the basis of its field of vision, knowing 

that the retina in the eye was not planar, but spherical; correspondingly, its associated geometry 

was based on relationships of angles and arcs rather than distances and lines, which Euclid 

explicitly stated in the Eighth Theorem of his treatise, Optica.137 Furthermore, even within linear 

perspective, one-point, two-point, and three-point perspective (enumerating the number of 

vanishing points) all exist, and all result in slight variations in the final appearance of the scene 

depicted. 

 In the theology of icons, multiple perspectival systems have also been identified. Along 

with the inverse perspective already mentioned, there exists a multi-view perspective, where 

several sides of an object are visible, including ones that would not normally be simultaneously 

in view. There is also isometric perspective, where parallel lines determine edges and items do 

not shrink in the distance toward a vanishing point. Although this is often used in contemporary 

drafting, it sometimes features in iconography to preserve the uniformity and integrity of a given 

subject, regardless of how the senses might normally perceive it. Tipped perspective allows the 

items on a surface to be viewed as if from somewhat above, while maintaining a more frontal 

view of the remaining scene. Hieratic perspective, for its part, arranges and sizes people and 

objects in the order of their spiritual importance.138 In summary, then, both within and outside 

 
137 Ibid., 34–35. See also Panofsky’s extensive notes, pp. 87-105, which describe not only the Eighth 

Theorem, but the history of how it came to be often misquoted or mis-paraphrased during the Renaissance, once 
linear perspective became established as the norm for depicting natural space. 

138 David Clayton, “How the Form of Byzantine Icons Relates to the Christian Worldview,” in The Turn to 
Aesthetics: An Interdisciplinary Exchange of Ideas in Applied and Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. Clive A. Palmer and 
David Torevell (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool Hope University Press, 2008), 89. 



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Orthodoxy, perspectival systems can be chosen such that they correlate with a specific 

experience that the creator intends to communicate to the viewer. 

 Speaking of art and paintings generally, and their potential connection to the divine, 

Panofsky comments, “perspective, in transforming the ousia (reality) into the phainomenon 

(appearance), seems to reduce the divine to a mere subject matter for human consciousness; but 

for that very reason, conversely, it expands human consciousness into a vessel for the divine.”139 

It is unlikely that Byzantine theologians would agree with the second part of Panofsky’s 

statement, especially given his earlier statement that mathematical space results in an 

objectification of the subjective. Since a large body of religious art exists in non-iconographic 

styles, however, Panofsky’s comment begs the question whether there is room for an encounter 

with the divine in forms of art outside iconography.  

Although an exhaustive exploration of the potential for religious encounters in non-

iconographic art is well beyond the scope of this thesis, we will briefly address the topic by 

examining Cubist art. On the surface, Cubism and iconography share a similar rejection of linear 

perspective, and arguably for similar reasons. Therefore, in the next section we turn to an 

overview of Cubism and its spiritual narrative. This will form the basis for our subsequent 

development of a tetrad describing the dynamic effects (“messages”) of icons, using McLuhan’s 

tetrad on Cubism as a starting point. 

Cubism: A Spiritual (Re-)Awakening from the Renaissance’s ‘Mathematical Space?’ 

 The early twentieth century was a time of rapid change in almost every way; political 

revolution and instability, scientific discoveries (such as Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in 

 
139 Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 72. 



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1905), and a taste for experimentation in artistic and cultural endeavours. This period witnessed a 

number of artistic movements falling under the umbrella of “modernism,” including Cubism; 

like many modernist movements, Cubism is characterized by a tendency toward abstraction.140 

The spark for this new movement is usually taken to have been Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles 

d’Avignon, painted in 1907: a life-size painting which portrayed five nude women in geometric 

form with hard angles and sharp curves, against a background similarly broken up into angular 

components. Although this painting was not generally well received by either Picasso’s friends 

or his critics, fellow artist Georges Braque took inspiration from the style, and together they 

developed the distinctive style of Cubism.141 

  In contrast to linear perspective as developed in the Renaissance, which had the effect of 

fixing the observer to a set point in space and time, Cubism sought to break away from a singular 

viewpoint. As art historian Dorothea Eimert describes it, Cubists circled around the objects of 

their paintings, analyzing every facet and assembling the resulting fragmented image onto the 

canvas. These deconstructed and interwoven surfaces blend space and time, perhaps in response 

to contemporary changes in traditional notions of space and time.142 At one level, then, Cubist 

 
140 Marilyn Stokstad, Art History, revised 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Education, 2005), 

1021. 
141 Ibid., 1034–35. 
142 Guillaume Apollinaire, Dorothea Eimert, and Anatoli Podoksik, Le Cubisme (France: Parkstone 

International, 2014), 29. Although Eimert does not explicitly mention to which changes in the notions of space and 
time she is referring, it may be Einstein’s special theory of relativity, published in 1905 (two years prior to Picasso’s 
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon), which introduced the famous E = mc2 equation. However, it is unclear whether this 
could have been the inspiration for Cubist painters. As science historian Stanley Goldberg reports, Einstein’s work 
was essentially ignored in France until 1911. (Stanley Goldberg, “In Defense of Ether: The British Response to 
Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, 1905-1911,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 2 (1970): 96–97.)  
Thus, it seems unlikely to have been an inspiration for French cubists such as Picasso and Braque, whose period of 
Analytic Cubism mainly spans 1909-1910. (Stokstad, Art History, 1036.) Even Einstein himself later wrote that 
there was no connection between his Theory of Relativity and the method by which Cubists depicted space, 
although it can be argued that neither a detailed nor accurate understanding is required for artistic inspiration. For 
more on Einstein’s comments about Cubism and their context, see Paul M. Laporte and Albert Einstein, “Cubism 
and Relativity with a Letter of Albert Einstein,” Art Journal 25, no. 3 (1966): 246–248. Another possible influence 
could be the work of James Hinton, who introduced the idea of the fourth dimension and produced a series of 



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paintings and icons share a sense of movement and a rejection of a static, unmoving relationship 

between the observer and object (or person). However, this may be at least in part due to an 

understanding of geometric space that was itself in flux at the turn of the 20th century. 

 The relationship of Cubism to the spiritual is certainly less apparent than what is obvious 

in the case of an icon, but there is evidence that some kind of spirituality influenced the 

movement. Guillaume Apollinaire, a poet, art critic, and friend of Picasso, wrote of the Cubist 

artists: “Above all, artists are men who want to become inhuman. They search laboriously for the 

traces of inhumanity, traces that are nowhere encountered in nature.”143 Apollinaire admits that 

Cubism is not founded on any specific religious beliefs, but has many characteristics in common 

with religious art.144 Hence he comments, “The painter must, above all, give himself the 

spectacle of his own divinity and the paintings he offers to the admiration of men will confer on 

them the glory of also, and momentarily, exercising their own divinity.”145 From this, it appears 

as though the art is not oriented toward any transcendent divinity, but rather towards man as his 

own divinity—something that Marion, among others, would call idolatry. Given this and 

Apollinaire’s comparison of Picasso dissecting the object of painting the way a surgeon dissects 

a cadaver,146 Cubism—at least as practiced by Picasso, Braque, and their circle—is not an art of 

 
influential science fiction novels in the late 19th century. Hinton is mentioned in Nicoletta Misler’s biographical 
sketch of Pavel Florensky, who commented on a Picasso exhibition in Moscow. See Pavel Florensky, Beyond 
Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, ed. Nicoletta Misler, trans. Wendy Salmond (London: Reaktion, 2002), 59.   

143 Apollinaire, Eimert, and Podoksik, Le Cubisme, 11. Translation mine. The original text reads, “Avant 
tout, les artistes sont des hommes qui veulent devenir inhumains. Ils cherchent péniblement les traces de 
l’inhumanité, traces que l’on ne rencontre nulle part dans la nature.” 

144 Ibid., 17. 
145 Ibid., 8. Translation mine. The original text reads, “Le peintre doit avant tout se donner le spectacle de 

sa propre divinité et les tableaux qu’il offre à l’admiration des hommes leur conféreront la gloire d’exercer aussi et 
momentanément leur propre divinité.” 

146 Ibid., 12. 



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the same ilk as iconography, with its dependence on presence between observer and subject, 

along with the implication of honour through veneration. 

 Although from Apollinaire’s description of the Cubist movement one can imagine a type 

of spiritual art simply emptied of the divine and replaced with a narcissistic self-idolatry, some 

Christian observers—especially Orthodox but also some Roman Catholic147—went even further 

to describe it as evil. Orthodox theologian Sergei Bulgakov (1871-1944), after having visited an 

exhibition of Picasso’s work, penned an essay entitled “The Corpse of Beauty,” in which he 

admits that Picasso’s work has real power, and there is something of the mysterious and spiritual 

in his work—perhaps even of the iconic.148 However, Bulgakov believed that the spirituality 

inherent in these paintings was that of vampires or demons; thus, Picasso had painted icons of 

the demonic, even going so far as to say that Picasso had “become the plaything of an obsessing 

spirit, an artistic, and therefore convincing advocatus diaboli.”149  

Paul Evdokimov does not hold Cubism in much higher regard. Interestingly, he laments 

that “cubism decomposes the living unity of things into geometric elements and cerebrally 

reconstructs a painting like a mathematical problem”150—a critique reiterating Apollinaire’s 

comment about Picasso’s work resembling the dissection of a cadaver. Evdokimov perhaps 

provides the nuance lacking in Bulgakov, in the latter’s description of Cubism as demonic; for 

 
147 In 1951, the “Tract of Angers” was circulated, which was a letter signed by a group of Roman Catholics 

criticizing Picasso as a “Communist and Enemy of God.” Picasso had also submitted proposals for a side altar at a 
church in Assy, as well as a set of stained-glass windows for the cathedral in Metz, but faced opposition on both 
counts. See Jane Dillenberger, The Religious Art of Pablo Picasso (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 
2014), 37–38. 

148 Bulgakov, “A Bulgakov Anthology,” 67–69. 
149 Ibid., 70. 
150 Evdokimov, Art of the Icon, 77. 



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Evdokimov, iconography is symbolic, bridging the visible and the invisible, while Cubist art is 

diabolic, throwing these two apart.151 

Although Picasso and Braque are the best-known Cubists, and the focus of most dialogue 

about Cubism as a religious art (or its antithesis), the work of two other artists is relevant to our 

considerations here. American Herman Trunk, a devout Roman Catholic, painted a crucifix 

which arguably does not fall into the same category of paintings described by Evdokimov as 

devoid of meaning; though also Cubist, it is stylistically very different from Picasso’s multiple 

renderings of the same subject. Second, Ukrainian Myron Levytsky completed iconography for 

ten Ukrainian Greco-Catholic (i.e., Byzantine-Rite) churches using a modern, Cubist style. These 

will be used as case studies to test the implications of what can be defined or excluded as 

iconography. To provide a framework in which to evaluate this, I propose the use of Marshall 

McLuhan’s tetrads, to be introduced in our next section. 

Section 4: Marshall McLuhan: “The Medium is the Message” 

 Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was a Canadian media theorist who wrote and spoke 

extensively about the effects of media, especially electric (and by extension, digital) technologies 

such as radio and television. Famous for coining the term “global village” and the phrase “the 

medium is the message,” he is well-known for probing the relationships between media and the 

changes effected in their respective social milieux. Because he often wrote with “probes” or 

otherwise provocative rather than conclusive statements, however, his corpus cannot be defined 

 
151 Ibid., 86. Evdokimov points to the common root of the words “symbolic” (σύν (together) + βάλλειν (to 

throw)) and “diabolic” (διά (through) + βάλλειν, meaning to throw across or to separate, throw apart). Although 
Evdokimov refers to “-bolos” as meaning “throwing,” it is actually a noun meaning a casting, though it also has its 
root in the verb βάλλειν. See the entries for βόλος and διαβάλλω in Franco Montanari, The Brill Dictionary of 
Ancient Greek (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 395, 480. 



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as a systematic exploration of media or communication theory, consequently attracting many 

critics in academia.152 Nonetheless, he articulated and often revisited several key themes, 

including the “figure-ground” relationship of medium and message. Toward the end of his 

career, he developed four “laws of media”—questions designed to retrieve and elucidate the 

various effects of media on society, the results of which could be schematized in a tetradic 

structure. These are introduced in Laws of Media: The New Science,153 co-written with his son 

and published posthumously. 

In the present context, we will explore the pertinence of the tetrad for clarifying the 

effects of the icon. As already indicated, the tetrad is itself dependent on McLuhan’s notions of 

medium and message, and linked to those of figure and ground. In the next section, therefore, 

these key ideas will be introduced, followed by an explanation of the tetrad as a framework for 

analysis. 

The Medium is the Message 

McLuhan defines a medium as “any extension of ourselves.”154 This differs somewhat 

from definitions given in dictionaries, which define a medium as, for example, “an agency or 

means of doing something.”155 McLuhan’s examples of media include clothing as extensions of 

the skin, the refrigerator as an extension of the stomach, the mirror as an extension of the eye, 

 
152 For a relatively balanced overview of McLuhan’s career and legacy, along with its reception (both 

positive and negative) in academia and popular culture, see Donald A. Fishman, “Rethinking Marshall McLuhan: 
Reflections on a Media Theorist,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 50, no. 3 (September 2006): 567–
574. 

153 Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science (Toronto, ON: University of 
Toronto Press, 1988). 

154 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 19. 
155 “Medium | Definition of Medium in English by Oxford Dictionaries,” Oxford Dictionaries | English, 

accessed November 1, 2018, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/medium. 



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and the wheel as an extension of feet in motion.156 One of the key observations for which 

McLuhan is best known is that media have both content and messages. Content is what a given 

medium transmits, and is always another medium; for example, the content of radio is speech, 

which is itself a medium containing thought. Messages, on the other hand, are the effects, 

whether on a personal or social level, of media (or technologies), such as the elimination of jobs 

due to the introduction of automation.157  

McLuhan’s idea of tying media to their respective effects will play a central role in our 

discussion of icons inasmuch as our focus here is not on content per se (i.e., the life and context 

of a particular saint), but rather on how the viewing and venerating of icons has repercussions—

whether in the life of the observer or that of the wider community. With this focus, we will in 

turn be able to distinguish the “messages” (effects) of icons, and the extent to which the effects 

of icons are distinct from those associated with other paintings (e.g., the Cubist art mentioned 

above). 

 One further observation to make, before proceeding, is that McLuhan provides the same 

definition for technologies as he does for media, even giving the same examples—clothing, 

wheels, extensions of parts of the body. As with media, he states that technologies create 

environments that affect human sensory patterns in ways that can be felt without being 

noticed.158 Therefore, “medium” and “technology” can be considered synonymous. His uses of 

the word “technology,” however, usually refer specifically to mechanical or electric devices, or 

are otherwise references to tools extending the physical capacities of the body. I will therefore 

 
156 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 117. 
157 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 19. 
158 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, ed. Stephanie McLuhan and David 

Staines (Toronto, Ont.: McClelland & Stewart Ltd, 2003), 57. 



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continue to refer to icons as a medium, rather than a technology, in order to avoid any confusion 

with mechanical, electric, or digital technologies deriving from the realm of machines or 

automation.159 

Figure and Ground: The Extension and Interplay of Medium and Message 

 When McLuhan wrote Understanding Media and proposed that “the medium is the 

message,” he was interested in the effects of media beyond the public eye, and specifically the 

reciprocal relationship of media. The idea of certain aspects of media being visible or in the 

foreground, while others remain invisible or in the background, was eventually named the figure-

ground relationship.160 The figure-ground relationship, however, is a dynamic one, contingent on 

a given point of reference, and even in the writing of McLuhan (and his son Eric), statements 

about what constitutes figure, and what is ground need to be taken in context. In 1975, McLuhan 

said that “the medium is ground, and the so-called message is always figure.”161 Nevertheless, 

 
159 Recognizing that by “medium” or “technology,” McLuhan means any extension of the human person 

and not just an electronic technology like television or computers, is an important distinction. Confusion in this 
regard may be the source of contention for some of McLuhan’s critics, several of whom consider him to be a 
proponent of technological determinism, which is a reductionist view claiming that technology defines the nature of 
society. For an overview of such claims about McLuhan, see Ellen Balka, “Rethinking ‘The Medium Is the 
Message’: Agency and Technology in McLuhan’s Writings,” Media International Australia Incorporating Culture 
and Policy 94, no. 1 (2000): 73–75. Where “technology” is defined strictly as mechanical or electrical devices, it 
would be difficult to make this claim about McLuhan’s work, since he does not claim that such devices are the only 
sources of social influence. However, since McLuhan has defined technology (media) so broadly—any extension of 
man, including speech—it could be argued that in this sense he is a technological determinist, since it is 
inconceivable that any type of society could be formed without some sort of extension of persons beyond 
themselves.  

160 In a November 1975 interview, McLuhan states, “when I wrote this book [Understanding Media], I was 
not using figure-ground. Now I have switched completely to figure-ground. It was implied in here, but it was not 
explicit.” (Marshall McLuhan, “Interview with Nina Sutton,” interview by Nina Sutton, November 1975, Library 
and Archives Canada, accessed March 28, 2019, https://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/030003/f7/030003-
009.wma.) 

161 Ibid. It is worth noting that in the context of this interview, “the medium is this huge change that takes 
place in the world . . . it’s the huge service environment that the medium creates.” In other words, the message of 
one medium (usually that collection of effects regarded as the “message”, here described as a service environment) 
is, in McLuhan’s eyes, itself another medium. 



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this cannot be taken as a rule since, as McLuhan himself later argues, the figure is an area of 

attention, while the ground is a much larger area of inattention: since these exist simultaneously, 

they are in flux, with figures rising out of and disappearing back into grounds. Therefore, in 

order to bring the message of a medium into view, a new situation needs to be created (an “anti-

environment”), which will pull the old ground out of invisibility and present it as a figure; he 

claims this is usually the work of poets and artists, who perceive the inarticulate more acutely.162 

 McLuhan was also influenced in this regard by scientists, who often start with an effect 

or thing to be discovered, and work backward to the causes.163 Extending this pattern of thought 

into the social sphere, even scientists can become aware of the social effects of technologies; he 

notes that quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg pointed out that technical change impacts habits 

and thought patterns.164 Still, though the McLuhans’ oeuvre acknowledges that scientists and 

management specialists, for example, can redirect attention from the figure to the ground, and in 

this way provide valuable information about hidden causes of a given effect, it is the artist who is 

indispensable for an understanding of the nuances of the forms and structures resulting from the 

introduction of technology (media).165 This may be at least in part because McLuhan and 

McLuhan believe that a visual (i.e., text-based) bias exists in Western society, such that rigorous 

academic study in areas such as philosophy tends to disregard the audience of the texts (i.e., the 

 
162 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 5. 
163 An illustrative example of this is Root Cause Analysis (RCA) in science and engineering. In fact, one 

Root Cause Analysis methodology used in several Fortune 500 companies identifies four elements to the cause and 
effect relationship, which are strikingly similar to McLuhan’s concepts: “1. Cause and effect are the same thing. 2. 
Causes and effects are part of an infinite continuum. 3. Every effect has at least two causes in the form of actions 
and conditions. 4. An effect exists only if its causes exist at the same point in time and space.” [Dean L. Gano, 
Apollo Root Cause Analysis: Effective Solutions to Everyday Problems Every Time, 3rd ed. (Richland, WA: 
Apollonian Publications, 2007), 3.] 

164 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 93–94. 
165 Ibid., 96. 



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ground) almost completely, in favour of a visual fixation on the figure. In conclusion, the arts 

enable the visibility of the ground; simultaneously, “without the interplay of figure and ground, 

no art or knowledge is possible.”166 

 Marshall McLuhan, in analyzing the dynamism of figure and ground with respect to a 

given medium and its effects (or messages), parallels many of the ideas discussed above with 

respect to iconography, such as the visible and invisible, the crossing of the gaze, and the sense 

of movement and subject created through reverse perspective. Next, I will highlight McLuhan’s 

contrast between visual space and acoustic space, one particularly relevant to our considerations 

of the icon as medium; although an icon is a traditionally visual medium in the popular sense of 

the word, McLuhan would argue that it inhabits primarily acoustic (rather than visual) space, and 

this has implications for the senses involved in the experience of icon veneration. 

Visual and Acoustic Space: The Icon as a Medium of Acoustic Space 

 In Laws of Media, McLuhan contrasts visual and acoustic space, which are characterized, 

broadly speaking, by linearity and simultaneity respectively.167 Visual space, he contends, is 

built around the eye and vision and, as an extension, represents that which is continuous, 

connected, linear, homogeneous, and static. He calls this a man-made artefact, in that it is only 

through man’s use of the phonetic alphabet, with its associated abstraction from the percepts of 

other senses, that visual space can exist. In this space, a figure exists without a ground—a 

 
166 Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Media and Formal Cause (Houston, TX: Neopoiesis Press, 

2011), 76. Italics are theirs. 
167 One can call these diachronic and synchronic, respectively, and McLuhan does make the connection to 

these concepts especially in relation to linguistics, as in the writing of Ferdinand de Saussure. However, he notes 
that the use of the term “visual” can be problematic in predominantly visual space, since McLuhan means a text-
driven society and not everything that can be seen with the eyes (paintings, natural vistas, etc.). McLuhan discusses 
this briefly in McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 111–112. 



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phenomenon absent from natural environments.168 McLuhan’s argument here seems dubious: as 

described earlier, he indicates that there is always an interplay between figure and ground, 

neither existing without the other. In fact, McLuhan even calls the phonetic alphabet “the hidden 

ground of the figure of visual space.”169 The notion of visual space could be refined as that 

which is focused on the figure, such that one rarely perceives the (still-present) ground. It is 

“space as created and perceived by the eyes when they are abstracted or separate from the 

activity of the other senses.”170 

 Acoustic space, in contrast, enhances the simultaneous, the resonant, and the 

multilocational; it is the antithesis of visual space characterized by the sequential, static, and 

linear.171 It is important to note here that McLuhan does not restrict “acoustic” to the audible or 

auditory; instead, it denotes anything that can be sensed in synchronous fashion, including visual 

stimuli that do not resemble, for example, the sequential reading of abstract letterforms as text on 

a page. Acoustic space also implies a sensory synthesis, since it is “always penetrated by tactility 

and other senses, is spherical, discontinuous, non-homogeneous, resonant, and dynamic. Visual 

space is structured as static, abstract figure minus a ground; acoustic space is a flux in which 

figure and ground rub against and transform each other.”172 

 Although McLuhan does not specifically discuss iconography in his writing, his criteria 

of visual and acoustic space would locate the domain of the icon in the latter. This may seem 

counterintuitive, since the icon itself makes no sound or use of other senses beyond that of sight. 

 
168 Ibid., 22–23, 205. 
169 Ibid., 22. 
170 Ibid. Italics are theirs. 
171 Ibid., 160–161. 
172 Ibid., 33. 



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There are two reasons, however, why iconography should be conceptualized in this manner. 

First, and most obviously, although icons are often said to be “written” and even “read,” 

understanding and praying with an icon involves a non-linear, synchronous approach to the 

image as a whole, such that one goes beyond the visible surface, into the presence of the 

prototype. This movement is further reinforced by the natural environment of the icon, i.e., a 

place of worship whose light moves with flickering candlelight and a thin veil of incense, (as 

described by Florensky173), supplemented with liturgical chant—elements which form a 

synthesis of the senses. Second, the dynamic interplay of figure and ground is an apt description 

for the interaction of the immanent and transcendent, or earthly and divine, in the icon. 

Historically, the iconoclasts struggled to understand how a depiction of the earthly by earthly 

means could adequately represent the presence of the divine; analogously, those accustomed to 

visual space might well struggle with the visibility of the figure and the invisibility (but not 

absence) of the ground, as described in McLuhan’s works. 

 With these considerations in mind, we can now turn to an overview of McLuhan’s laws 

of media and the tetrad, i.e., his method for classifying and displaying the effects of media that 

can be ascertained through these laws. Cubism will feature as a case study, since McLuhan 

developed a tetrad to explore the effects of this artistic style. With this baseline established, I will 

attempt to develop a new tetrad, schematizing the dynamic effects of the icon. 

 
173 Florensky, Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, 108. 



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Section 5: Introduction to the Laws of Media and the Tetrad 

 To define a medium, and consequently grasp its potential effects (“messages”), McLuhan 

sought to systematize the ways that media could extend or modify the senses; he identified only 

four, termed “laws of media,” that could be tested objectively:174  

1. Enhancement—the extension of one or more senses, and the intensification of a situation 

in some way. In figure-ground terms, this can be either the conversion of a ground 

element into a figure, or the further intensification of an existing figure element. The key 

question is, “what does the medium enhance or intensify?” 

2. Obsolescence—the displacement into impotency of a former situation. This moves a 

previous figure element to the ground. The key question is, “what does the medium 

render obsolete or displace?” 

3. Retrieval—the revival of something that had previously been made obsolete. Like 

enhancement, this is a ground element becoming figure, though indirectly as a result of 

the situation created by the introduction of the medium. The key question is, “what does 

the medium retrieve that was previously obsolesced?” 

4. Reversal—the result of overload, or taking the process to the extreme. This is best 

viewed as a dual action where figure and ground change places. The key question is, 

“what does this medium produce or become when pressed to an extreme?”175 

 
174 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, viii–ix. 
175 Ibid., 7, 227–228. 



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Although these laws appear numbered above, they are not to be taken as sequential. As 

soon as any one of these effects occurs for a given medium, all the others do as well.176 That 

said, McLuhan and McLuhan have identified two types of relationships between pairs of laws 

that should be noted. First, they propose that enhancement and obsolescence relate to 

morphology, or the form of a medium, while retrieval and reversal relate to metamorphosis, 

namely, the “embedding of one situation in another.”177 The strength of these laws is their 

accounting for the effects of metamorphosis. Enhancement and obsolescence (which one could 

dub “morphological laws”) may tend to be more obvious since they concern what is either 

already figure, or being purposely brought in as figure. Retrieval and reversal can be more 

difficult to perceive, as they require insight into the ground of a given medium—hence the focus 

of McLuhan’s work. It is perhaps due to the difficulty in gaining this insight that the McLuhans 

suggest retrieval is both the “keynote or dominant mode” of the laws of any given medium and, 

as such, can be the most difficult to discover.178  

The second type of relationship to note, and the one that came to govern the format in 

which the tetrads were presented, is that there is an inner harmony between the laws, such that 

pairs can be represented as analogous ratios or proportionalities. The McLuhans conceptualized 

this using the mathematical idea of “A is to B as C is to D.” In the case of the laws of media, 

they proposed that “enhance is to reverse as retrieve is to obsolesce,” which they visualized as: 

 
176 Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, The Lost Tetrads of Marshall McLuhan (New York and London: 

OR Books, 2017), 14. 
177 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 228. 
178 Ibid. 



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Enhance is to Reverse 

as 

Retrieve is to Obsolesce179 

It is interesting to note that here, the McLuhans explicitly sought to avoid the analogy, 

“enhance is to obsolesce as retrieve is to reverse,” claiming these to be incorrect as ratios,180 

although these are precisely the pairs mentioned in Laws of Media, as described above. The 

authors provide no further elaboration in this respect, despite mentioning these same pairs 

elsewhere.181 It appears that the stated laws are in relationship (or interrelationship) on several 

levels, although the secondary literature on the McLuhans’ work has yet to produce a complete 

characterization. For the sake of our argument, it will be understood that all four laws are indeed 

interrelated, representing different movements in the dynamic perception of figure-ground 

relationships:  

• Enhancement—what becomes figure? 

• Obsolescence—what becomes ground? 

• Retrieval—what figure had previously become ground, and is now returning to 

figure? 

• Reversal—how can figure and ground switch places when the medium is taken to 

the extreme? 

 
179 McLuhan and McLuhan, The Lost Tetrads of Marshall McLuhan, 26–27. If this is the case, then based 

on the concept of proportionality, it is also the case that enhance is to retrieve as reverse is to obsolesce. 
180 Ibid., 26. 
181 Along with being mentioned by the McLuhans themselves in Laws of Media, these pairs are also listed 

in Pruska Oldenhof and Logan (the latter of whom has previously collaborated with Marshall McLuhan): “The 
enhancement as figure is to the obsolescence as ground as the retrieval as figure is to the ground of reversal.” 
[Izabella Pruska Oldenhof and Robert K. Logan, “The Spiral Structure of Marshall McLuhan’s Thinking,” 
Philosophies 2, no. 2 (June 2017): 12.] 



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As previously mentioned, the laws are not sequential but rather operate simultaneously. 

In order to display them, the McLuhans developed the format of the tetrad, in which each effect, 

and any glosses, are displayed graphically. We will now explore this.  

The Tetrad: A Graphical Display of the Interrelated Laws of Media 

 The four laws of media are generally presented in a diagram called a tetrad, in which a 

space is divided into four areas, two wide and two tall. Each law occupies one quadrant, being 

laid out according to the original proportionalities that the McLuhans identified. 182  

Enhance Retrieve 
Reverse Obsolesce 

 Although dozens of tetrads appear in Laws of Media and dozens more in The Lost 

Tetrads, the one that will serve as the main prototype in the present context is that developed for 

Cubism, as shown below in Figure 1. 

Cubism  
(painting) e.g., Picasso, Braque 

Enhances Reverses Into 
Multilocational eye 

• A collage of many points of view: the eye 
used in terms of other senses, moving, 
penetrating 

• Re-enter the simultaneous; exit the one-
thing-at-a-time 

Iconic image 
The non-visual 

• Icon demands an educated audience? 
• Sculpture 
• With no ‘object’ presented, nothing to look 

at, the painting becomes a mask for the 
user to wear, to see by 

Retrieves Obsolesces 
The viewer 
The making process 
(the genuine fake) 

• The multisensuous; iconic image 
• The complex sensibility of many levels 

simultaneously 
• Cf. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 

(ca. 1909) 

Representation: visual space 
Objectivity 

• Single, fixed point of view, perspective, 
foreshortening, chiaroscuro 

• The passive viewer and photographic 
realism; the cell for citters to cit in [sic]. 

• Standing on a Paris street in 1914, 
watching a parade of military vehicles 

 
182 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 129–130; McLuhan and McLuhan, The Lost Tetrads of 

Marshall McLuhan, 27. 



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• The viewer has to complete the image, 
thereby becoming co-creator. 

• Rediscovers and up-dates primitive 
values in everyday objects 

• The mode of light-through 

using the new camouflage, Picasso said, 
‘Braque and I invented that.’ 

Figure 1: Tetrad for Cubism.183 

 Just as media may form chains, where the content of one medium is another medium, 

tetrads can also be mutually related. McLuhan identifies two possible ways in which this may 

occur. First, they may form a chain of tetrads, should an element of one tetrad’s quadrant be the 

subject of another tetrad. Alternatively clusters may form, if the given tetrads have similar 

elements in a quadrant—for example, if they all obsolesce the same thing.184 As analytic tools, 

therefore, tetrads have the potential not only to ascertain the figure and ground effects of a given 

medium, but also to assess the various connections between related media.  

The Tetrad as a Tool for Analyzing Iconography 

We now reach the goal of the present endeavour, which is to test the usefulness of tetrads 

for displaying the dynamics of iconography as a theological medium. The hypothesis is that this 

tool will be a useful means of focusing our attention on the complex and perhaps overlooked 

figure-ground relationships at play. As the McLuhans state, 

Insofar as tetrads are a means of focusing awareness of hidden or unobserved 
qualities in our culture and technology, they act phenomenologically. From Hegel 
to Heidegger, phenomenologists have engaged in an attempt to get at the hidden 
properties or hidden effects of language and technology alike. In other words, 
they have tackled a right-hemisphere problem using left-hemisphere techniques 
and modes of cognition. With the tetrads this dilemma is resolved.185 

 
183 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 156–157. I have modified the display format to a tabular form 

to streamline its presentation in this thesis, but the items are as written by McLuhan and McLuhan, including 
inaccuracies (Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was painted in 1907) and liberties in spelling (“cell for citters to cit in.”). 

184 Ibid., 130. 
185 Ibid., 128. Defining and critiquing the parallels between phenomenology and McLuhan’s thought is 

beyond the scope of this thesis. However, an excellent overview of McLuhan’s media theory and phenomenology, 



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I would contend that the dilemma referred to cannot be completely resolved even with the tetrad, 

given that the tetrad is itself arguably a left-hemisphere technique for mapping figure-ground 

relationships and placing them in analogous proportions with each other. Still, the tetrad will 

demonstrate its usefulness as a method for elucidating not only the figure-ground terrain in 

iconography, but also the extended chain of media to which it belongs. The tetrad representing 

Cubism will be used as a starting point for the development of a similar tetrad for iconography, 

not only because of the many similarities shared by these two styles of art, but also because icons 

(or the iconic) are explicitly and repeatedly mentioned in the Cubist tetrad. Since these 

references occur in more than one quadrant (reversal and retrieval), it would appear that the 

tetrad for Cubism naturally forms a cluster rather than a chain in relation to the proposed tetrad 

for iconography. In other words, Cubism and icons share certain properties and processes, rather 

than one leading to another. In what follows, therefore, we will periodically make comparisons 

with Cubism, which will enable us to assess the differences in the respective figure-ground 

relationships defining iconography. Incidentally, other tetrads elsewhere developed by the 

McLuhans will also be referenced to expand our analysis; specifically, the tetrads for acoustic 

space, visual space, and perspective in painting will all prove to be highly pertinent.  

 
especially that of Heidegger, can be found in Laureano Ralon and Marcelo Vieta, “McLuhan and Phenomenology,” 
Explorations in Media Ecology 10, no. 3/4 (July 10, 2012): 185–206. In particular, they argue that McLuhan took 
too narrow a definition of phenomenology, calling it “Cartesian” and failing to distinguish transcendental 
phenomenology (Husserl) from existential phenomenology (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre). (195) They 
further point out that McLuhan’s media theory and the phenomenological movement have the same roots, which are 
the humanist or anti-positivist artistic movements (art, philosophy, literature) that began to develop toward the end 
of the 19th century, in reaction to Cartesian intellectualism and scientific positivism. (194) For our purposes, 
McLuhan’s tetrads will be taken as one tool among others—such as phenomenological theory—with which 
iconography can be explored, with the qualification that this tool remains itself a medium in relationship with others. 



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PART II: DEVELOPMENT OF THE TETRAD FOR 

ICONOGRAPHY 

 As presented in Part I, the McLuhans developed a tetrad describing the figure-ground 

relationships and effects of Cubism, taken as a medium. Despite its many similarities with 

iconography, there are also important differences, ranging from stylistic divergences to perceived 

theological discrepancies—such that Bulgakov, for instance, could go so far as to label Cubism 

as demonic. Nonetheless, taking the Cubist tetrad as a starting point,  Figure 2 proposes an 

iconographic counterpart. Because of the interconnection between the four laws of media 

discussed above, there is no linear path through the discrete sections of our new tetrad. The 

analysis of its contents, therefore, will proceed in three parts. First, the similarities between 

Cubism and iconography will be discussed. Next, the important differences will be addressed, 

particularly, those features in which iconography and Cubism stand in opposition—whether in 

form or doctrine. Finally, further nuances will be discussed—for example, the effect and role of 

the icon in its theological, not to say liturgical, milieu. Our focus will be on a properly 

theological discussion of iconography, as a medium bridging the transcendent and immanent. 

However, contributions from other areas (as described in Part I) will also be incorporated into the 

discussion where relevant. 

  



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Iconography  
Enhances Reverses Into 

Multilocational thought 
• The extension of the space of thought 
• Re-enter the simultaneous; exit the one-

thing-at-a-time 
• Polycentrism – conflation of the one and 

the all 

Idols 
• Movement out of the transcendent into 

the purely immanent (which may appear 
transcendent) 

• Icon demands an educated audience? 
• Static, controlling subject. 

Retrieves Obsolesces 
The viewer 
Creation 
In-person relationship 

• The multisensuous, especially noetic 
sense 

• The complex sensibility of many levels 
simultaneously 

• E.g., Rublev’s Trinity (15th century) 
• The viewer has to become part of the 

scene – “crossing of the gaze” 
• The Word, acoustic space 

Representation: visual space 
Objectivity 

• Single, fixed point of view, perspective, 
foreshortening, chiaroscuro 

• The passive viewer and photographic 
realism 

• The passive object as item to be 
viewed—still life 

Figure 2: A potential tetrad for iconography. 

Section 1: Iconography and Cubism as Kin 

 A number of important parallels exist between Cubism and iconography, as reflected in 

their respective tetrads. Specifically, six statements from the original tetrad on Cubism carry over 

into the iconographic counterpart. Three relate to the existence of both Cubism and iconography 

in acoustic rather than visual space, a topic addressed in greater detail below. For now, it can be 

noted that the “space” of iconography arguably extends much wider than that of Cubism, 

including as it does the transcendent, and engaging not only the five physical senses, but also the 

“noetic” faculty. A further similarity is the apparent need for an educated audience. The final two 

concern the experience of the viewer, who in both cases lacks a fixed viewpoint as well as a 

specific point in time. Since the icon arguably creates a “double dynamic,” where the viewer is in 

turn also being gazed upon from multiple viewpoints by the subject of the icon, our discussion of 

this feature will segue into the next section, which elaborates on the differences between our 

chosen styles—the crossing of the gaze being a crucial one. 



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Simultaneity and the Multisensuous in Cubism and Iconography 

Spatial and Temporal Simultaneity 

 One of the most obvious aspects that Cubism enhances, as noted by the McLuhans, is 

exiting the sequential (“one-thing-at-a-time”) and re-entering the simultaneous. The use of the 

terminology “re-entering” as opposed to simply “entering” implies a retrieval of something 

previously existent, and it is in fact in retrieval that two other, related items can be found: on the 

one hand, references to the multisensuous and, on the other, to experiences of simultaneity. 

These will be elaborated upon below. The key enhancement—the movement from the sequential 

to the simultaneous—is synonymous with leaving visual space and entering acoustic space (to 

use McLuhan’s terminology as described in Part I): it is in acoustic space that such synchronicity 

is possible.  

The McLuhans appear to concentrate primarily on spatial synchronicity, i.e., viewing an 

object from multiple vantage points simultaneously, and this leads to the name of the 

enhancement chosen for this tetrad: the “multilocational eye.” In other words, although 

synchronicity could mean either juxtaposing multiple spatial viewpoints of a given object, or 

composing an object from a single viewpoint over a period of time, as though simultaneous, the 

emphasis in the Cubist tetrad is on the spatial aspect of synchronicity. This is reinforced by the 

McLuhans’ other gloss in that category, describing the multilocational eye as a collage that 

assembles multiple points of view. This is not to say, however, that temporal synchronicity is not 

a factor in Cubism: obtaining multiple points of view does imply movement between vantage 



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points, and thus a time lapse—even if only over a brief period. Critiques of Cubism have also 

noted both spatial and temporal synchronicity to be characteristic of this form of art.186 

 In a similar way, icons are conventionally characterized by synchronicity, both spatial 

and temporal, although it has been argued that this applies only to the presentation of the image 

on the board, rather than to the manner in which an icon is processed by the human eye given its 

limited visual field.187 Nonetheless, it is common for an icon to feature multiple facets of an 

object that would not normally be visible unless one were to walk “around” the scene. Contrary 

to what an uninformed viewer might presume, Florensky notes that the seemingly inaccurate 

appearances of elements in an icon are not limitations imposed by a lack of technical skill, i.e., 

by some inability of the artist to portray them naturalistically. In many cases, the sides of objects 

otherwise hidden are not only depicted, but are also brightly coloured to emphasize their 

placement alongside the normally visible facets. This indicates that such synchronicity exhibits 

the intention of the iconographer, rather than being the result of inferior training in 

perspective.188  

 
186 Pamela A. Genova, “The Poetics of Visual Cubism: Guillaume Apollinaire on Pablo Picasso,” Studies in 

20th & 21st Century Literature 27, no. 1, Art. 3 (January 1, 2003): 64. In fact, Genova mentions a third form of 
synchronicity—semantic—that is identified through the work of Guillaume Apollinaire (a contemporary of Picasso) 
as being an element of Cubism. 

187 Pavel Florensky, for example, in defending the icon against accusations that it is not physically possible 
to see three walls of a house at once, argues that it is not possible to see two or even one whole wall at once, because 
the eye can see only a small portion of a wall without moving around to see the rest of it, and that we can see 
nothing all at once. [Pavel Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” in Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, ed. 
Nicoletta Misler, trans. Wendy Salmond (London: Reaktion, 2002), 271.] This statement is inaccurate, especially as 
it has been demonstrated that the normal human field of vision, i.e., the space the eye can see instantaneously, 
extends from 60° (horizontally toward the nose) to 100° (horizontally toward the temple), and 60° to 70° upward 
and downward respectively. [Robert P. Cubbidge, Visual Fields, Eye essentials (Edinburgh and New York: Elsevier 
Butterworth-Heinemann, 2005), 2.] Since the normal visual field is large enough to encompass the majority of icons 
and paintings that will be discussed, the analysis in this thesis will be limited to what is displayed simultaneously in 
the image, and will exclude any factors relating to visual field or eye movement related to “taking in” a whole 
image. 

188 Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” 202–203. 



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 Although Florensky describes the technique in question, an unusual use of perspective, as 

intentional, Ouspensky and Lossky delve further into the rationale for it. Returning to one of the 

main issues addressed during the second iteration of the Iconoclastic Controversy, namely, the 

relationship of image to prototype, they note that it is important for an icon to avoid the illusion 

of being the prototype. In other words, the very challenge of the icon is to portray three-

dimensional space without artificially creating the impression of going beyond the two-

dimensional panel of the icon, so as to avoid any confusion between image and prototype. The 

use of reverse perspective successfully prevents the eye from being drawn into or behind the 

panel, instead directing the gaze back toward the observer.189 

 The matter of perspective in iconography must be pressed further at this point, because a 

simple understanding of reverse perspective does not fully encompass the forms of perspective 

used in iconography. Reverse perspective does allow an icon to avoid naturalistic illusion, but 

often multiple forms of perspective are adopted simultaneously. This could be a combination of 

reverse and direct (“normal”) perspective in the same icon, such as in Rublev’s Trinity,190 or it 

could be a variety of architectural façades that not only converge toward the viewer (reverse 

perspective), but do so according to several discrete “vanishing points,” all in the proximity of 

the observer. As Arianne Conty suggests, this technique can have the effect of disorienting an 

observer who is used to being at an unmoving centre, creating in turn the feeling of being 

“played upon by the painting.”191 The resulting sense of movement will be revisited below, when 

discussing the themes of dynamic presence and the crossing of the gaze, but it is worth noting 

 
189 Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 41. 
190 Ibid. 
191 Conty, “Bending Heaven down to Earth,” 2. 



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here how an unusual use of perspective in the layout of elements and figures can be an important 

contributor to this distinct characteristic of icons. 

 A further aspect not emphasized in the Cubist tetrad is temporal simultaneity, wherein 

different points in time are collapsed into a single moment. This is arguably an essential 

characteristic of iconography, and can be represented in multiple ways. In one sense, any 

portrayal symbolizing the divine or transcendent necessarily implicates an experience of time 

other than the linear, chronological sort that is proper to the natural world. This can take the form 

of a representation of kairos instead of chronos, but also that of the juxtaposition of elements 

from different points in chronological time within the same image—representing a spiralling or 

folding of chronological time. Uniquely, Florensky even goes so far as to posit instantaneous—

or even reverse—time, as an analogue to reverse perspective;192 however, other authors do not 

echo this idea. 

 The most noticeable form of temporal simultaneity in iconography is what I term above 

as the “spiralling” or “folding” of time, a process by which separate events can be seen 

simultaneously. As Evdokimov writes, scenes can be assembled according to that “redeemed 

time,” which itself regulates the interior order of the icon. Such time creates links within scenes 

based on intrinsic spiritual meaning. Due to their placement in redeemed rather than 

chronological history, even indoor scenes are not typically depicted as being enclosed by walls, 

 
192 Florensky describes this relative to dreams, which he describes as “images that separate the visible 

world from the invisible”—straddling visible and invisible in much the same way as icons. In dreams, when one is 
suddenly awoken by an external sound, he notes that often in the dream, a whole sequence of events can lead up to 
the sound, even though the person could not have actually anticipated the sudden sound. Therefore, he supposes that 
in a dream, time can run backward from the sound through to the beginning of the dream sequence. [Pavel 
Florensky, Iconostasis, trans. Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 
1996), 33–44.] Evdokimov would not agree, indicating that time is not reversible, but can rather be opened up 
[Evdokimov, Art of the Icon, 133.]. This is more in line with Florensky’s original idea of instantaneous time rather 
than the time running in reverse that he develops from it. 



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so that they might not appear limited by physical time and space. In this way, the icon shows that 

“everything is subordinated to everything and that everything is immanent to everything.”193 

Furthermore, as Constantine Kalokyris notes, beyond removing walls that would place a scene 

indoors, an iconographer also habitually omits such items that might make the scene identifiable, 

or at least renders them in only a rudimentary manner. For example, a crucifixion tableau might 

include a small mound with a skull to indicate Golgotha, but would not generally feature an 

historically accurate depiction of everything that could have been visible to a contemporary 

observer.194 

 Time in the icon can be seen not only as “redeemed” but also as disclosing the “eternal 

present,” which is echoed in the language and essence of the liturgy—the context in which 

iconography belongs. As Kalokyris writes, “the individual events of religious history are not to 

be understood as mere occurrences in the past, but as happening mystically and as events active 

even today. This means that the worshipper does not merely commemorate, but lives, and 

himself actually partakes in, the life of the Saviour and of his saints.”195 Evdokimov would 

describe the eternal present (i.e., eternity) as a positive form of time, wherein the past, present, 

and the ages to come are all fully open to the presence of God.196 In this he brings us again to the 

theme of presence in the icon, especially as it relates to what might otherwise be considered 

historical figures. Far from simply being a portrait of a person or event of a bygone age, it is 

understood that in and through the icon, a saint and an observer are brought together into an 

 
193 Evdokimov, Art of the Icon, 223–224. 
194 Constantine D Kalokyris, “Byzantine Iconography and ‘Liturgical’ Time,” Eastern Churches Review 1, 

no. 4 (1967): 361. 
195 Ibid., 359. 
196 Evdokimov, Art of the Icon, 128. 



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eternal present, becoming contemporaries. In the icon, mathematical time is thus abolished,197 

just as much as mathematical space. For this reason, in the tetrad for iconography, it can be said 

to exit the one-thing-at-a-time (mathematical or linear time) and to re-enter the simultaneous—

the eternal present. 

The Multisensuous Experience in Iconography 

 In the tetrad for Cubism, the McLuhans identify the multisensuous, and specifically the 

iconic image, as that which the style retrieves.198 Defining the “iconic” in a television interview, 

and speaking of television as an iconic medium, Marshall McLuhan said that an iconic medium 

“is very low in visual quality, very high in tactile. Active touch, not cutaneous but active touch, 

as the psychologists say.”199 Accordingly, the multisensuous is rooted in acoustic space, wherein 

the simultaneous and the resonance between figure and ground are key.200 In our next section, 

the multisensuous will be explored first in modern art, and then in iconography, with the goal of 

clarifying the parallels and differences. 

 Speaking about iconic art, where McLuhan’s definition of “iconic” (as cited in the 

previous paragraph) is intended, the McLuhans note that “there is muting of the visual as such, in 

order that there may be maximal interplay among all of the senses. Such was the painterly 

 
197 Kalokyris, “Byzantine Iconography and ‘Liturgical’ Time,” 360. 
198 However, the iconic image, along with the non-visual, is also shown as the primary item into which 

Cubism reverses when figure and ground are flipped. This forms something of a paradox since retrieval creates a 
figure (iconic image) from a ground, and reversal swaps figure and ground—which should make a ground of the 
iconic image, not a figure. This is a potential problem with the tetrad. For the purposes of developing the tetrad for 
iconography, the focus here will be on retrieval of the multisensuous and the role of acoustic space; the iconic per 
McLuhan’s definition will be considered as belonging to acoustic space. 

199 Frank Kermode, “The Future of Man in the Electric Age,” television, Monitor (British Broadcasting 
Corporation, 1965), accessed April 11, 2019, http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/interview/1965-the-future-of-
man-in-the-electric-age/. 

200 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 160. 



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strategy ‘since Cezanne,’ to paint as if you held, rather than as if you saw, objects.”201 In his 

essay “Cézanne’s Doubt,” however, Merleau-Ponty approaches the situation somewhat 

differently:  

Cézanne does not try to use color to suggest the tactile sensations which would 
give shape and depth. These distinctions between touch and sight are unknown in 
primordial perception. It is only as a result of a science of the human body that we 
finally learn to distinguish our senses. The lived object is not rediscovered or 
constructed on the basis of the contributions of the senses; rather, it presents itself 
to us from the start as a center from which these contributions radiate . . . If the 
painter is to express the world, the arrangement of his colors must bear within this 
indivisible whole, or else his painting will only hit at things and will not give 
them in the imperious unity, the presence, the insurpassable [sic] plenitude which 
is for us the definition of the real.202 

Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, a painter like Cézanne does not attempt to represent one sense (such as 

touch) with something observable to the visual sense. Rather, the style of painting begins within 

the idea that the senses are part of an indivisible whole; if successfully expressed in the work, 

this indivisible, sensory whole, though perceived visually, will lead to a connection with the 

presence of the reality represented therein. 

 In iconography, it can also be argued that a stylized rather than naturalistic portrayal of 

people and their environment also serves to express a form of “real presence,” through an 

experience appealing to all the senses together. As previously discussed, the use of reverse 

perspective, exaggerated facial features and generic environments, among other features, are 

adopted in order to foster both a sense of dynamic movement and of being connected to the 

reality of the person or event depicted. However, this appeal to all our senses is not restricted to 

 
201 Ibid., 55. 
202 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. 

Johnson and Michael B. Smith, Northwestern University studies in phenomenology & existential philosophy 
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 65. 



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that which appears on the icon board. Icons are also inextricably entwined with their liturgical 

environment, and thus the symphony of senses extends beyond the icon and into the liturgical 

experience. Florensky comments that icons are not only associated with the architecture of the 

surrounding church and the thin veil of incense wafting around inside, but they are also part of an 

organically connected whole that includes choreography, vestments, the symbiosis of music and  

poetry in liturgical singing, and the aesthetics of church ritual itself, taken as a musical drama. 

As a result, “everything here that is coordinated to everything else does not exist if taken 

separately, or at least it exists falsely.”203 Sahas reinforces this claim, joining the sight of icons to 

the sound of music, the smell of incense, the movements of kneeling or the sign of the cross, and 

the taste of communion, as part of a complete experience of liturgy.204 Thus, the icon is not just a 

painting, but constitutes a liturgical act—both of and for the Church—and is conducive to 

communion with God.205 

 Still, although all the senses are engaged synergistically when praying with an icon in its 

ecclesial, liturgical environment, the burning question of the Iconoclastic Controversy remains: 

how do we both portray and perceive that which is invisible—namely, the sanctity of the saints 

and the divinity of Christ? In our discussion above, we addressed the key arguments of Patriarch 

Nikephoros, with respect to the inseparability of the visible and the invisible. Affirming, with 

him, that both aspects of a person can be portrayed, it is not yet evident how the transcendent 

might become perceptible. Although we often mean the five physical senses when speaking of 

“senses,” from the time of the Church Fathers onward, other spiritual means of perception have 

 
203 Florensky, Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, 108–109. 
204 Sahas, Icon and Logos, 10–11. 
205 Ibid., 10. 



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been identified. One of these is the nous, which could be translated as “intellect;” however, it 

includes not just intellectual and moral reasoning (dependent on the ordinary senses), but also the 

perception of otherwise invisible spiritual realities, extending to the “noetic” aspect of human 

beings and even to the apprehension of God himself.206 It is especially through the nous that one 

might perceive a presence, and not just an object, in an icon. Because the nous, in patristic 

thought, is associated with the image of God in a person, it also forms the contemplative faculty 

enabling him or her to seek God and approach divinization (theosis)—union with God through 

divine grace.207  

 Sergei Bulgakov also makes a case for the nous, describing an observer’s capacity for 

noetic vision as the very basis for the icon. Elaborating on what this kind of vision sees, he 

suggests that in the “proto-thing” or “proto-image”—the iconodules’ “prototype”—the nous 

beholds the “noetic image.” Thus, adapting a quote from Kant, Bulgakov states that “things 

without proto-images are blind (naturalism) and proto-images without things are empty or 

abstract (schematism).”208 Bulgakov thereby highlights the importance of the link between the 

material and conceptual—the visible and invisible—a link that figures such as John of Damascus 

had already articulated when making the case for the possibility of revealing the invisible 

through the visible.209 

 
206 Nonna Verna Harrison, “The Human Person as Image and Likeness of God,” in The Cambridge 

Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology, ed. Mary B. Cunningham and Elizabeth Theokritoff, Cambridge 
companions to religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 83. 

207 Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (London: J. Clarke, 1957), 201. 
208 Sergei Bulgakov, Icons and the Name of God, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. 

Eerdmans, 2012), 46–47. 
209 Ibid., 46. 



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 The result of contemplating an icon with both the physical senses and with the nous will 

be considered below, in our discussion of presence and the crossing of the gaze; for the present 

purpose of constructing a tetrad for iconography, it can be noted that both icons and Cubist 

paintings share the characteristic of retrieving the multisensuous through a visual medium. 

However, I would argue that iconography is oriented not only to the physical senses, but also to 

those spiritual faculties expressive of the nous. The integration of all of our potential modes of 

perception does not occur automatically, however, and requires development and refinement—

particularly in the case of the nous. We therefore return to the brief question the McLuhans ask 

with respect to reversal in their tetrad for Cubism: “Icon demands an educated audience?”210 

Since the nous is often associated with the intellect, and even at times reduced to it, we will 

proceed with an examination of the role of education in iconography. 

Lex Videndi: The Relationship Between Education and Iconography 

 When the McLuhans ask “Icon demands an educated audience?” in the Cubist tetrad, 

they are probing the context of Cubism, with its reversal into an iconic image and/or the non-

visual.211 Although I have already addressed the problems with presenting the icon as both a 

retrieval and a reversal of Cubism, there is the further question of education: does it precede the 

experience of venerating an icon, or is it rather through veneration that one comes to be educated 

in the relevant manner?  Michel Quenot, who has written extensively on Orthodox icons, 

suggests that the dynamic is reciprocal: “Purified by a centuries-old theological development, 

Christian faith becomes crystallized in the icon according to the previously stated maxim: lex 

 
210 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 157. 
211 As previously discussed, the meaning of “iconic” in McLuhan’s work generally refers to the tactile or to 

simultaneous, acoustic space. It is used in contrast with the “visual,” by which he usually means linear or text-based. 
Thus, reversal into the “iconic” or “non-visual” is movement into the multisensuous. 



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credendi, lex orandi, lex videndi! The icon reflects the faith and evokes it to such an extent that a 

return to the sources, the reactivation of the ‘Christian Memory,’ today can take that path in 

reverse: lex videndi, lex credendi, lex orandi!”212 This interdependence of faith, prayer, and way 

of life is an important condition that will be considered as we further examine the connections 

between iconography and education. 

 To begin with, it is important to recall that the pedagogical value of the icon is 

consistently acknowledged by the Church East and West. John of Damascus draws a parallel 

between books and images, proposing that images are to the illiterate what books are to the 

literate, and that sight is sanctified by images just as hearing is sanctified by words.213 Similarly, 

the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II) referenced the claim of St. Basil the Great, that “that 

which speech presents through hearing by giving an account, painting does show, although 

silently, by art of representation.”214 In The Educating Icon, Anton Vrame points to the 

mystagogical role of the icon, emphasizing the importance of the Word becoming flesh—i.e., 

visible and tangible—by providing a visual articulation of the Gospel message. At the time of 

Christ, those who encountered him both heard and saw him, in a verbal and visual experience. 

After the Ascension, the spoken message continued through oral Tradition and, ultimately, the 

 
212 Michel Quenot, The Resurrection and the Icon, trans. Michael Breck (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s 

Seminary Press, 1997), 67. Both of the “lex” statements Quenot provides are variations on the better-known maxim 
lex orandi, lex credendi, (the way we pray is what we believe) from 5th century Prosper of Aquitaine. Both are also a 
play on words on the occasional expansion of the statement to the tricolon lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi. (The 
way we pray is what we believe, which is how we live.) Lex videndi would translate to the “rule of seeing” or “the 
way we see.” In the traditional statements, lex orandi comes first, suggesting a primacy to the place of prayer and 
worship. In Quenot’s statements, it comes after lex credendi, an unusual placement. It is beyond the scope of this 
thesis to exhaustively debate the validity of this, although I would argue for maintaining the original order, lex 
orandi, lex credendi, not only for the sake of maintaining the traditional order in the statement, but also because of 
the primacy of worship in Eastern Christian theology. For this thesis, the focus will be simply the reversal of lex 
videndi between the beginning and the end of this chain. 

213 John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, 31. Treatise I, § 17. 
214 Sahas, Icon and Logos, 104. The Council is quoting St. Basil the Great’s To the Holy Forty Martyrs, 

Homily 19 (PG 31:509A). 



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Gospels. To retain the integrated experience that original encounters with Christ had, the 

Tradition also generated iconography: it is this dual verbal-visual Gospel that is understood to be 

the most authentic evangelical transmission.215  

 Beyond the educational value of icons, however, there is also an argument to be made 

that a certain education is itself required, in order to appreciate iconography and honour its 

proper role in in liturgy and prayer. As described earlier in this section, multiple techniques are 

used to express something of the transcendent within the limited two-dimensional realm of the 

icon. Because of this, grasping the structure and symbolism of iconographic elements—what one 

might call their visual lexicon—is key to an observer’s ability to receive the message, or rather 

encounter the presence, communicated through the image. Both the historical and contemporary 

occurrences of iconoclasm are a key indicator of the need for appropriate education: extensive 

theological debates were required to identify how icons are related to their prototypes, and how 

(if at all) they should be venerated. Furthermore, given that icons are integrated into the liturgical 

life of the church, the milieu must be understood as a whole. As Sahas writes in the introduction 

to his translation of the Sixth Session of the Seventh Ecumenical Council:  

The icon cannot be understood apart from the wider cultural and theological 
context to which it belongs. . . . A familiarity with the essentials of Christian 
theology and a willingness to draw from and refer to them are prerequisites for 
understanding the icon as a phenomenon. The reverse is also true. The icon allows 
one who has a theological and contemplative disposition to see the basic 
theological principles of Christianity in relief or, in fact, in colour.”216  

Finally, beyond the cycle of educating for, and being educated by iconography, Vrame 

points to the teleology of the art form: it serves to lead a person not only to contemplation, but to 

 
215 Anton C. Vrame, The Educating Icon: Teaching Wisdom and Holiness in the Orthodox Way (Brookline, 

Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1999), 52–53. 
216 Sahas, Icon and Logos, 5–6. 



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action—the imitation of the depicted virtues, and the openness to transformation through the 

grace of God. Ultimately, the goal of the icon as a medium “is not to know about the saints, but 

to become saints.”217 Therefore, among the many purposes of the icon is one that is somewhat 

hidden, namely, to be a companion in the ongoing process of theosis.218 Since movement, both 

of God towards the person and the person towards God, is an important aspect of iconography 

and of theosis, this movement will be examined next. 

Movement in the Image: The Obsolescence of Photographic Realism 

 In Part I of this thesis, I provided a brief overview of the variety of perspectival systems 

used in multiple forms of visual representation, whether in iconography or in secular paintings 

from the time of the Greco-Romans to the modern period. I have already described the role of 

non-linear perspective (e.g., reverse perspective) in creating a sense of movement, and this will 

be revisited shortly. Before doing so, it is worth touching upon McLuhan’s statement that 

Cubism—and here, I argue iconography also—obsolesces the passive viewer and, with it, 

photographic realism. Such realism, which those writing about iconography often refer to with 

terminology such as naturalism, marks an important development in media from the 19th century 

onwards after the invention and popularization of the camera. It could be approximated in earlier 

centuries with certain styles of painting, especially those using linear perspective. 

 The difference between a photograph and a Cubist painting (or an icon) can also be 

framed in terms of what Marshall McLuhan calls hot and cool media, which differ mainly in 

their participatory characteristics. A hot medium, like a photograph, targets a specific sense and 

 
217 Vrame, The Educating Icon, 56. Italics are his. 
218 Ibid., 54–56. 



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renders information in high definition, requiring little additional effort from the viewer. In this 

sense, a hot medium could be considered as one implying a passive viewer. In contrast, a cool 

medium, like a cartoon, modern painting, or icon, does not have the same high definition transfer 

of information to a given sense (in this case, visual), and requires more active participation from 

the viewer in order to complete the available information and discern a meaning. McLuhan 

argues that because of this difference in audience participation resulting from the form of the 

medium, each one has different effects in society.219 

 It is at this point that the differences between Cubist paintings and icons are worth 

examining in greater detail. Although both have the property of being participatory, I propose 

that the role and corresponding responsibility of the viewer differ in these two genres. 

Furthermore, it is worth noting the significant divergence in the object—or subject, in the case of 

an icon—of the respective artistic styles, and in their amenability to Marion’s “crossing of the 

gaze.” The question of reversal for each of these forms of art also requires attention. All of these 

issues will be discussed in the following section. 

Section 2: The Distinction Between Icons and Cubist Paintings 

 As we have seen thus far, Cubist paintings and icons share a number of characteristics. 

Nevertheless, significant differences exist: icons cannot be outright considered as Byzantine-

style Cubist paintings, even apart from the superficial difference that they are rarely composed of 

purely geometric shapes. At least three other differences are important enough to warrant further 

attention. First, I will consider McLuhan’s statement that Cubism retrieves the need for the 

viewer to complete the image, thus becoming a co-creator in the scene. In an icon, I will argue 

 
219 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 39. 



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that rather than becoming a co-creator controlling a scene, one participates in the scene without 

acquiring (or even aspiring to) such a status. A second difference, related to the first, is that in 

iconography the person depicted is never an object to be viewed, but is instead another 

participant or subject, with whom a gaze can be exchanged. The icon is therefore never the 

equivalent of a “still life” painting, as might be expressed in a Cubist context, even though both 

genres obsolesce the idea of a stationary viewer. Finally, McLuhan claims that Cubism reverses 

into the iconic image or the non-visual, whereas I suggest that the icon reverses into the idol. 

Taken together, these claims indicate that the similarities between Cubism and iconography 

mask a crucial distinction in their phenomenological perspectives. 

Making a Scene: Co-Creator or Co-Participant? 

 In the McLuhans’ tetrad for Cubism, they suggest that the style retrieves the viewer as a 

co-creator who completes the image—likely in contrast to the hot medium of realist or naturalist 

art220 that was normative since the Renaissance (with its focus on linear perspective), and whose 

influence was intensified with the modern invention of photography. Because iconography, like 

Cubism, displays “coolness” as a medium, i.e., the need for the viewer to actively participate in 

completing a given scene, it might seem that iconography would likewise place the viewer in a 

co-creative role. However, the iconographic goal of making accessible a transcendent reality 

calls this role into question: in both Eastern and Western Christian traditions, there is a clear 

 
220 “Realist” and “naturalist” are being used here to identify painting techniques that are highly 

representational or life-like, i.e., relating to how the subject is depicted. It is important to note that these terms have 
also been applied to specific 19th century artistic movements, where naturalism was the presentation of ordinary 
daily life (figures and landscapes), while realism was naturalism with socialist (political) overtones—i.e., relating to 
what is depicted. (Stokstad, Art History, 971.) This is not the meaning implied by the use of these terms in our text. 



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theological distinction between Creator and creation, with the viewer included in the latter 

category. 

 One indicator of a difference in the role of the viewer in each form of art is the possible 

range of subject matter. In Cubism, for instance, any object can be depicted; even a cursory 

glance at a series of Cubist paintings will reveal a range of items, such as violins, bottles, people, 

houses, and more.221 Most importantly, it is both possible and common for the subject matter in 

Cubism to be one or more objects, with no people depicted. However, there are no icons that 

depict only objects.222 In broader Greek usage, an icon (εἰκών) denotes a portrait; the meaning of 

the word in the Byzantine theological lexicon is specifically a representation of Christ, the 

Theotokos, and/or the saints.223 

Another difference between Cubist paintings and icons is the experiential aspect of icons. 

As art historian Bissera Pentcheva points out, icons and those praying with them participate in 

the performative nature of liturgy. Icons are physically venerated with kisses, signs of the cross, 

and prostrations, while candlelight and incense create a flickering sense of animation in the 

image. All this occurs in an environment in which the senses are engaged, and in which the 

faithful not only actively exchange their gaze with that of the icon, but also offer it their touch.224 

 
221 Many examples are available in online galleries, including those of Tate Modern (“Cubism – Art Term,” 

Tate, accessed July 20, 2019, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/c/cubism.) and the Guggenheim Museums 
(“Cubism,” The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation, accessed July 20, 2019, 
https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/movement/cubism.). 

222 This is generally not stated explicitly in sources on the topic of iconography, although one can observe 
this in any reference guide on icons, such as Alfredo Tradigo, Icons and Saints of the Eastern Orthodox Church, 
Guide to imagery (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2006). Ouspensky also notes that indeed in early 
Christianity, some Old Testament symbols were used in the place of a human image, such as a lamb representing 
Christ, the Lamb of God. However, the Council in Trullo (AD 692) ordained that Christ should be depicted as a 
human rather than a lamb, making clear that in Christ, the Old Testament symbols were fulfilled, and their direct 
meaning should therefore be depicted. (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 28–29.) 

223 Pentcheva, “The Performative Icon,” 631. 
224 Ibid., 640. 



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The necessity of immersion in this liturgical and sensory environment for the full experience of, 

and participation in, the icon appears altogether distinct from the requirements for the experience 

of a Cubist painting. The latter is native, of course, to the more sensorially sterile environment of 

the art gallery—even if one could imagine an exhibition in which the other faculties were 

somehow intentionally engaged. 

The differences just discussed, with respect to subject matter and environment, segue into 

those concerning the varying the role of the observer. Now in one sense, an icon’s observer 

might justly be called a co-creator, as McLuhan says of one observing a Cubist painting. This is 

because the human being is imago Dei—made in the image of God—thus reflecting the 

creativity of the Creator.  But an observer creates neither the physical icon, nor the prototype 

depicted, but only orients him- or herself towards the prototype through the icon. As Ouspensky 

comments, “what is gathered into the Church is all in human nature that is inherent, created by 

God; and this includes creative art, sanctified by its participation in the building of the Kingdom 

of God, the task of the Church in the world . . . This process does not depersonalise.”225 

Ouspensky simultaneously notes both the creative aspect of humanity and its active or 

participative role in the Church (and in the Kingdom of God). Without God as Creator or, more 

plainly, the existence of transcendent Being, the notion that an observer might co-create an icon 

falls into the category of idolatry critiqued by Marion: creation according to desire, in which the 

original or prototype (i.e., the divine or divinized subject) disappears.226 For the proper 

veneration of the prototype to occur, it must not be an impersonal object; one cannot enter into 

prayerful relationship with a violin or a bottle. This begs the question of what kind of 

 
225 Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 28. 
226 Marion, The Crossing of the Visible, 53–54. 



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relationship one might expect to experience with an icon, in contrast to Cubist painting; for this, I 

will return to Marion’s concept of the crossing of the gaze. 

The Crossing of the Gaze Revisited: Sources of the Gaze 

 As explained in our discussion of phenomenology in Part I, Marion differentiated the idol 

from the icon by claiming that with the icon, there is a crossing of gaze: the observer not only 

gazes at the icon, but also experiences the return of his or her gaze. In other words, the observer 

is also the observed. I would add that not only do icons always depict divinized (if not divine) 

persons, but they also depict them in such a way as to resist objectification—the opposite of a 

painting wherein a mobile observer sees multiple views of a static (observed) subject. A Cubist 

example of this observed subject would be Picasso’s Dora Maar Seated (1937), where one can 

simultaneously see frontal and lateral views of the model’s face. This is a characteristic not 

observed in Byzantine iconography.  

 Pentcheva provides another appraisal of the risk of idolatry and its mitigation in 

iconography. She states that in the ninth century, both Patriarch Nikephoros and St. Theodore the 

Studite emphasized a nonessentialist definition of the icon, in which the icon is imprinted with 

the divine form while not itself containing the divine essence. Therefore, the icon itself should 

not be worshipped, since it does not actually contain the divine. Accordingly, one could even say 

that the icon is the absence of the divine, exemplifying Byzantine mimesis—imitating 

presence.227 With this paradoxical “present absence,” the icon can give form to a sacred figure 

 
227 Pentcheva, “The Performative Icon,” 632–633. Here Pentcheva also contrasts Byzantine mimesis (of 

presence) with the Western idea of mimesis, which is the imitation of form. Kandinsky, as discussed in the section 
on Michel Henry and phenomenology, referred to the imitation of form as producing art akin to a “stillborn child.” 
(Kandinsky, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” 3.) It would be interesting to investigate further what he would have 
thought of the notion of imitating presence, especially considering how the extreme non-representational form of his 
art was aimed at bringing forth the invisible. 



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otherwise absent. Pentcheva describes this distinction as that which occurs between tangible and 

intangible absence—reframing the conventional dichotomy of the visible and the invisible. This 

acknowledged absence also ensures that the icon is safe from idolatry.228  

The question of tangibility becomes even more important in light of miracle-working 

icons, especially those that display physical effects, such as streaming myrrh, stirring a breeze, or 

lifting a veil. Pentcheva admits that such (alleged) phenomena contradict the theoretical idea of 

the icon as an absence.229 Perhaps this special case of miracle-working icons could be viewed as 

another manifestation of the Incarnation. As St. Athanasius wrote, “it is a property of God not to 

be seen, but to be known by his works.”230 To date, the discussion about the crossing of the gaze 

in the context of iconography has been purely visual. If the icon is a physical object belonging to 

a multi-sensory liturgy, as argued earlier, then it is possible that the “gaze” may be too limited a 

term to capture the way in which the icon connects us with the transcendent. Instead, it is 

possible that the “gaze” that the divine returns may consist not only of being seen, but also of 

being touched, or being smelled, or being heard. In other words, perhaps what is being 

exchanged in these miracle-working icons is not a single-sense gaze, but a multi-sensual 

experience of the other.231 

 
228 Pentcheva, “The Performative Icon,” 636. This “present absence” has a similar structure to the Eastern 

Christian juxtaposition of positive (kataphatic) theology and negative (apophatic) theology. Pseudo-Dionysius the 
Areopagite summarizes this position: “Since [the divine] is the Cause of all beings, we should posit and ascribe to it 
all the affirmations we make in regard to beings, and, more appropriately, we should negate all these affirmations, 
since it surpasses all being.” [Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. 
Colm Luibhéid and Paul Rorem, The Classics of Western spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 136 (§ 
1000C).] By recognizing an absence or limitation of understanding, the observer is reminded that what is being 
venerated is beyond the material realm, and is not a construction born of this world. 

229 Pentcheva, “The Performative Icon,” 634. 
230 Saint Athanasius, On the Incarnation, vol. 44b, Popular Patristics (Yonkers, N.Y.: St Vladimir’s 

Seminary Press, 2011), 83 (§32). 
231 This opens the question of why some icons are miracle-working or otherwise “special,” while others are 

not. This is beyond the scope of this paper, but for a useful introduction to miracle-working icons, specifically in the 



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The idea of absence in the icon is useful in distinguishing the icon from the idol, but the 

existence and corresponding fame of miracle-working icons open a larger discussion about the 

possibility of idolatry within the context of iconography and icon veneration. In the next section, 

this potential for the reversal of icons into idols will be examined more closely. 

Reversal: The Non-Visual vs. the Idol 

 In their Cubism tetrad, the McLuhans note that the Cubist painting reverses into the 

iconic image and the non-visual, which are the consequences of Cubism taken to the extreme. I 

have already described the problem with the McLuhans identifying the iconic image as being a 

reversal and simultaneously as being a retrieval. For this section, I will therefore focus on the 

other suggestion, which is that Cubism at its extreme reverses into the non-visual. Expanding on 

this idea, they note that “with no ‘object’ presented, nothing to look at, the painting becomes a 

mask for the user to wear, to see by.”232 Although this would appear to mean that the Cubist 

painting takes the observer completely out of visual space and fully into acoustic space, the idea 

that the painting would become a ‘mask’ through which someone looks, rather than being an 

object that one looks at, parallels the reversal of acoustic space. For this, the McLuhans propose 

that acoustic space taken to the extreme “exchanges outer for inner sensibility,”233 which is 

reminiscent of Kandinsky’s attempts to isolate the invisible world of emotional affect in a 

painting by moving away from representational forms. 

 
Russian Orthodox tradition, see Chapter 6 (“Icons”) of Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution 
(Oxford, Oxford ; New York, Oxford [England] ; Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2004), 171–213. 

232 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 157. 
233 Ibid., 161. 



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 By contrast, the very nature of the icon centers around the integration of the visible and 

the invisible, the tangible and the intangible, the immanent and the transcendent—it is never 

wholly immanent (an idol), nor wholly transcendent without a visible component (iconoclasm). 

Theoretically, both of these alternatives could be seen as the icon’s reversals, although they are 

perhaps more accurately called imbalances between the immanent and the transcendent, or 

between creation and the divine. However, it could be argued that iconoclasm effects an 

extension of idolatry, in that it is a reaction to an icon that has been, or is perceived to have been, 

reduced to an idol. 

 Marion, as previously discussed in Part I, describes the idol as a reflection or fulfillment 

of the observer’s own desire, while the icon for its part returns a distinct gaze, causing the 

observer to be observed by another subject. This crossing of the gaze is the conventional 

expectation of veneration—an encounter with the divine by means of the image, but not in it. 

Historically, iconodules such as St. John of Damascus were focused on this disambiguation—

through both the careful definition of the image and the extensive cataloguing of reasons for, and 

forms of, veneration. In the case where the material icon itself is treated as a divine object, this 

would be one obvious form of idolatry, and it is this potential—for what I will call here “Golden 

Calf” idolatry—that the iconoclasts most feared. 

 In the more secular234 era in which we now live, influenced as it is by modern art and its 

associated gallery environment, Marion’s concept of the idol—which I will name “Reflection of 

Self”—may be a more prevalent form of reversal. Whereas in “Golden Calf” idolatry, the object 

is mistakenly identified as the divine, in “Reflection of Self,” the observer locks out the divine 

 
234 Here, “secular” is being used to describe a society where belief in God and practice of religion is in 

decline. This is associated with Charles Taylor’s “secularity 2” definition. (Taylor, A Secular Age, 20.) 



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gaze, thus becoming the only subject. This in turn reduces the divinized person depicted in the 

icon into an object. The comparatively sterile gallery, and the increasing presence of icons in 

such environments, undoubtedly facilitates this type of reversal. Vladimir Soloukhin tells the 

story of negotiating for an icon with a Russian woman, attempting to convince her that far from 

being disrespected, the icon would be admired. She replied, “Prayers are what they’re for . . . Is 

an icon some sort of naked girl, that you want to admire it?”235  

A subtler form of idolatry is also possible, which is the idolatry of icons themselves—

iconolatry—honouring not the prototype of the icon, but the system in which the icon belongs. 

As Arianne Conty writes,  

The danger of a univocal appropriating gaze has thus not been spared the icon, 
which has, at different points in time and for different people, effectively become 
an artifact, an idol to reinforce the historic incompatibility of the Christian East 
from the Christian West. There is, in this sense, a hidden iconoclasm in the very 
rigidity of the iconic transmission. The systematic dismissal of all western art by 
the Orthodox tradition is itself an example of the invisible mirror of idolatry that 
iconophiles sought to combat.236 

This wholesale rejection of Western sacred art, often without addressing the reality that such art 

is extraordinarily diverse, is evident in many Orthodox writers, including Ouspensky237 and 

Larchet. In his review of Larchet’s L’iconographe et l’artiste, Church historian François 

Boespflug criticizes the quasi-Manichaean opposition that Larchet consistently sets up, wherein 

 
235 Vladimir Soloukhin, Searching for Icons in Russia (London: Harvill Press, 1971), 161. 
236 Conty, “Bending Heaven down to Earth,” 19n14. In this note, Conty also refers to French historian 

Alain Besançon, who describes the theology of iconography as a balancing act between iconolatry and iconoclasm: 
“The danger comes from the fact that, through the exaltation of a particular theology, one allows the honor due the 
icon to reflect not onto the prototype but onto the system, which is, in fact, the only thing represented. The face 
becomes a pretext to rejoice in being a disciple of Saint Gregory Palamas rather than Augustine, to be Orthodox 
rather than Catholic or Protestant . . . That iconolatry, like all idolatry, is worship of oneself and, rather than 
glorifying in Christ, glories in its own idea of orthodoxy.” [Alain Besançon, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual 
History of Iconoclasm (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 143.] 

237 Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 48. He writes, “the very principles of Western religious 
art . . . are alien to Orthodoxy.” 



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the pure Orthodox tradition is seen as faithful to the Church, while the entire post-Romanesque 

Western tradition is seen as having betrayed Church doctrine.238 Other Orthodox theologians, 

such as Evdokimov and Florensky, are slightly more nuanced, since they recognize the diversity 

of Western sacred art; still, Evdokimov claims that the well was already poisoned with the 

Council of Frankfurt (AD 794) and the Synod of Paris (824), in their focus on the didactic aspect 

of sacred art.239 Florensky points to the heterogeneity of the Western tradition as the issue: its 

diversity is taken to represent a fragmentation of meaning, such that any light found within is 

external to it.240 

 In The Forbidden Image, Alain Besançon explains how easily this reversal can and does 

occur, and expresses doubt as to whether there even exists a zone of right worship between the 

extremes of iconolatry and iconoclasm; he suggests that perhaps that zone is where iconolatry 

and iconoclasm are instead juxtaposed.241 He also argues that sacred art proper, such as 

iconography, forms a desert around itself through its inability and unwillingness to depict most 

of the profane world; this in turn leads to an iconoclastic tendency to reject almost every man-

made image for lacking (a narrowly defined) theological integrity. Besançon calls this the 

“hubris of the icon” or “hubris of Byzantinism,” driven primarily by modern Orthodox literature 

on the topic of iconography.242 Although a full analysis of the appropriation of icons by political 

or national groups is beyond the scope of this thesis, the key point here is that idolatry—or 

iconolatry—can occur either by missing the link between an icon and its prototype, i.e., creating 

 
238 François Bœspflug, “Review of L’iconographe et l’artiste,” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 

54, no. 148 (2009): 222. 
239 Evdokimov, Art of the Icon, 167. 
240 Florensky, Iconostasis, 146–147. 
241 Besançon, The Forbidden Image, 142. 
242 Ibid., 144–145. 



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an idol of the image, or (less obviously) by creating an idol of the context in which the icon 

resides. In either case, the result is a rupture with the divine through an excessive focus on the 

worldly. 

 Up to this point, we have discussed Cubist paintings and icons as separate media, with a 

work of art belonging to one or the other (or neither). In the next section, I will consider the 

effects of their hybrids: Cubist icons or, more broadly, Cubist religious art. By examining hybrid 

cases such as these, we can gain further insight into the strengths and limitations of our analysis 

of these forms of art, which have been considered as separate entities until now. 

Section 3: Cubist Icons and Religious Art 

 The similarities and differences between Cubism and iconography have been well 

characterized in the previous sections, as part of the exercise of developing a tetrad to summarize 

the effects—or messages—of icons as a medium, according to McLuhan’s definition. However, 

our discussion so far presupposes that we are dealing with Cubism and icons as completely 

separate media. As previously mentioned, there are theologians, such as Bulgakov, who would 

argue this to be true; for him, Picasso’s work is as demonically inspired as icons are divinely so. 

Others, such as Ouspensky, acknowledge that certain icons have been influenced by Western 

trends—though this is seen as detrimental to the tradition.243 In light of this, let us examine the 

special case of Cubist icons (or other religious art), to discover what occurs at the intersection 

between these two media.  

 
243 Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 47-48n2. 



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Cubist Icons: Blurring the Boundaries between Icons and Modern Art 

 Several artists have attempted to mediate between Cubism and iconography, producing 

either Cubist icons (in the Byzantine tradition) or Cubist religious art (in the Roman Catholic 

tradition). Most notable among Cubist Byzantine iconographers is Ukrainian-Canadian 

iconographer Myron Levytsky (1913-1993), whose work graces ten churches, primarily in 

Canada and in Australia, including Holy Eucharist Ukrainian Catholic parish in Toronto.244 His 

painting is heavily influenced by the avant-garde modern art movement generally, and especially 

by Cubism. 

 In the preface to art historian Daria Darewych’s book on Levytsky, fellow artist and 

iconographer Sviatoslav Hordynsky writes that Levytsky “belongs to those monumentalists who 

have managed to remove from churches the syrupy-sweet type of decoration and to replace it 

with geometrically simplified, two dimensional design without linear perspective, rich in forms 

and colours, that do not become a decorative addition to the churches, but are an integral part of 

the architectural whole.”245 This statement would support the claim made earlier in this paper, 

that iconography and Cubism share the same obsolescence of (linear) perspective with its fixed 

point of view. However, Hordynsky is praising the change from a gallery-like, decorative 

understanding of the icon toward a holistic integration of the icon into the church architecture, 

which is certainly a move away from the conventional Cubist environment. This ultimately 

begins to address the question, “What if a Cubist painting were moved from a gallery to a 

 
244 Daria Darewych, Мирон Левицький / Myron Levytsky (Toronto: Ukrainian Artists’ Association, 1985), 

120. 
245 Ibid., 9. 



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church, where all senses are activated by the surroundings?” It would perhaps not be 

inappropriate to imagine Cubism deploying its iconographic potential. 

 Levytsky’s intention, however, may not be entirely aligned with the broader Eastern 

Christian tradition. Based on her interview of Levytsky, Darewych writes, “As the examples 

chosen for [his 1985] exhibition demonstrate, Levytsky's religious paintings are modern 

Ukrainian icons in which he has escaped the constraints of Byzantine art adhered to by less 

imaginative artists, in order to create a new religious image, rooted in the past but contemporary 

in form and execution.”246 She further adds, “By doing so he was the first Ukrainian artist to 

attempt to free church painting in Canada and Australia from the confines of the Ukrainian-

Byzantine traditions in sacred art.”247 To see iconography as requiring liberation from the 

outdated constraints enforced by the less imaginative itself reflects a deficiency: namely, a lack 

of appreciation for how traditional Byzantine symbolism in icons developed with the specific 

goal of making visible the invisible. Regardless, the strategy commended by Darewych might 

also be a way to avoid the pitfall of iconolatry mentioned in the previous section, by using 

modern techniques to portray the invisible, in conjunction with the Byzantine determination to 

integrate iconography into a greater and cohesive whole inclusive of both architecture and 

liturgy. 

 Still, two of the major distinctions between Cubism and iconography, as we have seen, 

are the subject matter and the role of the observer. If the observer becomes part of the scene, and 

crosses gazes with the divinized one depicted, then the medium in question is acting as an icon 

 
246 Ibid., 23. 
247 Ibid., 24. 



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should. This dynamic can perhaps be illustrated with another Cubist religious work: Crucifix,248 

painted by American Herman Trunk Jr. (1984-1963) around 1930. While similar in some ways to 

the icons of Levytsky, this crucifix differs in several ways, distinguishing it from the 

iconographic. First, the Christ on Trunk’s crucifix does not have a face, nor are there any 

bystanders; it is therefore impossible for any gaze to be returned to the observer, at least in the 

way expected in the Byzantine tradition. Second, the crucifix is pieced together such that 

multiple sides of the crucifix and Christ are visible at once, as though it were assembled based on 

the observer moving around a stationary object—a Cubist characteristic not shared by traditional 

icons. 

 Nevertheless, Trunk’s Crucifix does convey the desire of the artist to bring forth the 

invisible, as both modern art and iconography also typically intend. As Fowler writes, the aim of 

Cubism (and of this painting by association) is to reveal something more profound than just the 

material representation of an object and, echoing Picasso’s contemporary Guillaume Apollinaire, 

it is to use insight rather than sight to guide the creation of the painting’s structure.249 

Notwithstanding Bulgakov’s previously-discussed claim in “The Corpse of Beauty” that 

Picasso’s work evokes the demonic, in this case Trunk’s subject matter is Christ and the 

crucifixion, without any of the grotesque distortions of Picasso’s renderings of the motif (such as 

 
248 Cynthia Fowler, “Herman Trunk’s Cubist Crucifix: A Case Study,” Religion and the Arts 15, no. 5 

(January 1, 2011): 628–647. An image of this painting appears on the cover of this journal issue; the cover can also 
be seen online at “Volume 15-5: Religion and the Arts,” Boston College, last modified November 29, 2011, 
accessed July 26, 2019, https://www.bc.edu/publications/relarts/issues/former/vol15-5.html. 

249 Fowler, “Herman Trunk’s Cubist Crucifix,” 633. Apollinaire’s original text states, “[Le cubism est] l’art 
de peindre des ensembles nouveaux avec des éléments empruntés, non à la réalité de vision, mais à la réalité de 
connaissance.” [Guillaume Apollinaire, Les peintres cubistes (Méditations esthétiques) (Paris: E. Figuière, 1913), 
24.] 



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The Crucifixion of 1930, reiterated in 1932, or his Corrida drawings of 1959).250 Although 

Bulgakov associated Picasso’s Cubism with the demonic, therefore, and even though Trunk’s 

Crucifix lacks the direct gaze of an icon, the painting may still reveal something of Christ’s 

presence, and cannot unequivocally be considered as opposed to the Christian faith. 

 Levytsky’s icons, such as those in Toronto’s Holy Eucharist,251 are arguably closer to the 

traditional iconographic style, despite their Cubist influence. The icons at that church retain the 

integrated views of the face, with none viewed in profile. The Cubist influence here might more 

accurately be called a geometric approach to iconography, rather than a fully authentic 

expression of the style, in which elements are rearranged in both space and time. However, like 

that of Trunk, Levytsky’s Crucifixion (1971)252 does not show the face of Christ at all, thus 

raising similar questions. Is this a medium in which there is the crossing of the gaze, between the 

observer and the divine (or divinized)? Without a source for the gaze, it would seem implausible 

that this could be considered an icon, though it would perhaps fall into the category of ‘religious 

art’—which includes icons, but also other art with religious themes. This leads to an even larger 

question: “Is there a place for religious art beyond the iconographic?” The corollary would be: 

“Can ‘Western art,’ as defined by Eastern Christians like Ouspensky, be considered as part of a 

broader category of ‘religious art,’ with a rightful place in Tradition, or is it extraneous to 

 
250 Dillenberger, The Religious Art of Pablo Picasso, 11, 19, 81. The crucifixion is a repeating theme in 

Picasso’s work, and it is interesting to note the evolution of his crucifixion scenes from the more traditional, in 1896, 
to somewhat distorted (sketch, 1915-18), to these highly visually- and arguably theologically-distorted Cubist 
versions. 

251 See, for example, the icon behind the altar in the sanctuary (“DSCN2642[1],” Holy Eucharist Ukrainian 
Catholic Church, last modified April 20, 2017, accessed July 27, 2019, http://www.hagiaeucharistia.com/special-
events/dscn26421/.). Additional images of his Cubist icons are available in the online Encyclopedia of Ukraine 
[Daria Zelska-Darewych, “Levytsky, Myron,” Encyclopedia of Ukraine, last modified 2001, accessed March 18, 
2019, http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CL%5CE%5CLevytskyMyron.htm.]. 

252 Image available online at Zelska-Darewych, “Levytsky, Myron.” 



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Tradition altogether? What is ‘religious art?’” Answering this question is beyond the scope of 

this work, as it would encompass a full review of Western and Eastern Traditions (both religious 

and artistic), but it would be the next logical extension of our reflections. 

CONCLUSION 

 The tetrad for iconography, which builds upon the work of Marshall and Eric McLuhan, 

has so far been a useful tool for adding to the conversation about the thesis question, namely, 

determining what makes an icon an icon. The discussion certainly remains open, especially given 

the necessarily limited scope of the response to the question here. 

Based on the development and analysis of the tetrad I constructed for icons, I identify 

several key points about icons in this thesis. One is that the senses, and consequently 

simultaneity, all participate in the experience of the icon, and this makes icons an acoustic-space 

medium using McLuhan’s definition. Here, the senses include both physical senses (touch, smell, 

sight) and the noetic sense. Icons belong in a liturgical context which is similarly acoustic (i.e., 

simultaneous and multisensual), and the dynamic relationship between icons as a medium and 

the Divine Liturgy as a medium would be a rich one to explore in further work on this topic.  

Another main point is the subject-subject relationship expressed in the crossing of the 

gaze. This retrieves the in-person relationship which is otherwise hidden when the transcendent 

is invisible to us in the immanent world. The relationship between the observer and the one 

represented is critical; an icon is that which invites openness to a divine or divinized other, 

resulting in the crossing of the gaze elaborated by Jean-Luc Marion.  Furthermore, distinguishing 

the icon from the idol requires finesse, as an icon can be idolized if that openness to the gaze is 

lost and the icon is rather used to reflect the observer’s desires back onto him- or herself. By 



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delving into the accompanying causes and effects, our tetrad has proved useful in furthering 

discussion about the nature of the icon, especially in contrast to that of the idol. 

Point of view is also especially important in iconography, as it contributes not only to the 

subject-subject relationship just mentioned, but also to expressing certain transcendent or 

invisible realities. Further, it can remove domination from an act of viewing that might otherwise 

convert the one viewed from subject to object. The use of various forms of perspective 

contributes both to guiding the type of relationship expected when praying with an icon, and to 

the sense of movement inherent to the acoustic space to which the icon belongs. 

Finally, structuring these ideas in the form of a tetrad makes manifest in a way that is 

otherwise not obvious a series of interrelationships between these effects, and this structure can 

itself be used in an effort to answer the question “what is an icon?” It does not negate answers 

that have been offered in the past, such as through the iconoclastic controversy and in recent 

theological works on iconography, but it is a means through which the description of various 

aspects of icons can be brought into relationship with one another. 

 As stated in our introduction, the present work has been necessarily limited in scope, both 

to restrict it to a length feasible for an MA thesis, and also to prove the utility of McLuhan’s 

Laws of Media—with their associated tetrads—on a relatively small scale. If further work in this 

vein were to be conducted, several possible avenues exist, many of which have already been 

touched on, including:  

• Can Western religious art after the Romanesque period be considered iconography, or is 

it true that certain styles of art, independent of their subject matter, are incapable of 



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transmitting the invisible truths along with the visible? If some forms of art are 

determined to be unsuitable for iconography, where is the boundary or horizon? 

• It has been argued that one form of idolatry—iconolatry—occurs when icons are used as 

symbols representing political or other worldly social structures. In this sense, icon 

veneration, taken to its immanent extreme, becomes idolatry. Further work can explore 

the factors and causes in this reversal: How prominent was this as a factor during the 

Iconoclastic Controversy in the 8th-9th centuries? During the Reformation? Is this a factor 

in the argument that Western religious art is not iconography (as per the previous point)? 

• Are there characteristics of the Christian Tradition that necessarily require icons in order 

to achieve its fullest potential? Is aniconic worship (worship without images) simply 

another form of Christian lower-case-t tradition, equal among others, or is it missing a 

key element? Is text, such as the Bible, a type of icon, and/or what characteristics does it 

share with icons? 

These are all more complex questions, though they all feed back into the central question 

driving this thesis.  All of these questions would benefit from consideration with respect to a 

figure-ground relationship, so as to assist in establishing both the characteristics and the 

effects of icons as a medium—including its very definition. McLuhan’s technique of looking 

at a medium in relationship with other media has proven highly useful, these relationships 

being either synchronic (i.e., involving relation to other media that exist at the same time, 

such as speech or writing), or diachronic (i.e., involving relation to media from different time 

periods). Considering the effects of transitions between a medium and the other media with 

which it is interconnected can provide considerable clarity on the characteristics of a 

medium. The goal of this work has been to take iconography as a starting point for further 



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investigation into Christian media, inspired by the scriptural claim that Christ “is the image 

(εἰκών) of the invisible God,” (Col 1:15)—the original and everlasting icon. 

 

  



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	Summary
	Introduction
	Structure and Methodology
	Limitations and Assumptions

	Literature Review
	Perspectives on the Nature of the Icon
	The Phenomenology of the Iconographic Experience
	Marshall McLuhan, Religion, and Liturgy
	The Relationship Between Iconography and Modern Art

	Part I: The Question of Icons as Media
	Section 1: Orthodox Theology and the Theological Role of Icons
	The Iconoclastic Controversy: The Development of Historical Arguments for Icons
	St. John of Damascus and the First Period of the Iconoclastic Controversy
	The Seventh Ecumenical Council: Nicaea II (787)
	St. Theodore the Studite and the Second Period of the Iconoclastic Controversy
	Patriarch Nikephoros of Constantinople: An Unlikely Ally of St. Theodore the Studite
	The Integration of Icons in the Byzantine Tradition
	Theology of the Byzantine Iconographic Style

	Section 2: Phenomenology and the Depiction of the Invisible
	Phenomenology and the Question of a “Theological Turn”
	Jean-Luc Marion and the “Crossing of the Gaze”
	Merleau-Ponty: The Idea and the Icon
	Michel Henry: Seeing the Invisible Through the Eyes of Wassily Kandinsky

	Section 3: Art Theory and the Question of Perspective
	Perspective as Worldview
	Cubism: A Spiritual (Re-)Awakening from the Renaissance’s ‘Mathematical Space?’

	Section 4: Marshall McLuhan: “The Medium is the Message”
	The Medium is the Message
	Figure and Ground: The Extension and Interplay of Medium and Message
	Visual and Acoustic Space: The Icon as a Medium of Acoustic Space

	Section 5: Introduction to the Laws of Media and the Tetrad
	The Tetrad: A Graphical Display of the Interrelated Laws of Media
	The Tetrad as a Tool for Analyzing Iconography


	Part II: Development of the Tetrad for Iconography
	Section 1: Iconography and Cubism as Kin
	Simultaneity and the Multisensuous in Cubism and Iconography
	Spatial and Temporal Simultaneity
	The Multisensuous Experience in Iconography

	Lex Videndi: The Relationship Between Education and Iconography
	Movement in the Image: The Obsolescence of Photographic Realism

	Section 2: The Distinction Between Icons and Cubist Paintings
	Making a Scene: Co-Creator or Co-Participant?
	The Crossing of the Gaze Revisited: Sources of the Gaze
	Reversal: The Non-Visual vs. the Idol

	Section 3: Cubist Icons and Religious Art
	Cubist Icons: Blurring the Boundaries between Icons and Modern Art


	Conclusion
	Bibliography