Cornelia A. Tsakiridou

This paper explores ontological and aesthetic similarities and differences between icons and photographs and the tensions that characterize them. It looks at photography’s auxiliary role in Athonite iconography, its influence on the depiction of contemporary saints, and its use in the reproduction of icons for public consumption. The comparison shows that photography has the plastic and expressive capacity to engage spiritual realities.

The notion that in its quest for immutable realities the mind replaces sensuous with noetic forms originates in Plato’s metaphysics. Whether in nature or in art, sensible things are seen as fragmented and disjointed, like the conflicting perspectives they elicit in their viewers, and in need of organization from a higher conceptual level. Thus, as the mind leaves the physical world behind, it substitutes simplicity for plurality, clarity for opacity, and integration for dispersion. This form of idealism was embraced by Orthodox theology when it cast images as theological primitives that are good for the illiterate or serve as prompts for devotion and contemplative prayer, but not much else.

The idealist construction of art is problematic because it is too restrictive. We can see this in Hegel’s aesthetics where, as in Plato, images are incrementally subordinated to concepts.² The logic is simple and appealing. Even though it is the originary form of transcendental reflection, art is too sensuous to host speculative categories once these become clear for the mind.

1. For Father Andrew Louth.

2. C.A. Tsakiridou, ‘Art’s Self-Disclosure: Hegelian Insights into Cinematic and Modernist Space’, Evental Aesthetics 1, n. 1 (2013). 45–72. Idem, ‘Darstellung: Reflections on Art, Logic and System in Hegel,’ The Owl of Minerva 23, issue 1 (Fall 1991), 15–28.