Igumen Silouan Justiniano

These paragraphs encompass a theoretical meditation on the icon from the painter’s perspective. They treat the icon as a creative act, in light of its aesthetic implications, contemporary challenges, possibilities, and ambiguities. They aim not so much to answer questions as to explore them, in the hope of elucidating facets of the icon as a work of art that perhaps might go unexplored within a more systematic and polemical approach in current theological debate.

1. Diligently search the theological treatise, and you will be hard- pressed to find aesthetic solutions to pictorial problems. Ironically, thinking too theologically about icon painting can get in the way and stifle the creative act. Clues are to be found in the icons themselves, solutions in the act of painting itself. The task involves more than just illustrating theological propositions. The icon should be given space to speak in its own terms: aesthetically.1 Yet it is all too common to bypass the aesthetic facts. Does the painting work or not? What is form doing? Solutions are to be arrived at through unique and unrepeatable creative acts, which bespeak of ever-renewing ecclesial life. Ready- made formulas do not suffice. No method, style, or ‘school’, ancient or modern, guarantees good results. As Shih-T’ao puts it, ‘…he who is unable to liberate himself from methods winds up inhibited by them’. The method we are after is the ‘non-method’ stringing together all icon painting methods. When the painting works—that is, when it acts as the locus of an encounter with the living presence of the deified ones— theology has happened.

1.By the term ‘aesthetic’ I mean, as defined by C. A. Tsakiridou, ‘that approach to things that looks at their sensuous existence, at the way in which they make themselves perceptible and present to our senses. e aesthetic object is a product of this kind of vision: a record of a thing’s self-presentation registered on a panel, wall or other surface’. C. A. Tsakiridou, ‘Aesthetic Nepsis and Enargeia’, in Seeing the Invisible: Proceedings of the Symposium on Aesthetics of the Christian Image, eds Neda Cvijetić & Maxim Vasiljević (Alhambra, CA: Sebastian Press, 2016), 27–43; at 28.