, , 

ultural Memory
in
the
resent

Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors

IMAGE, ICON, ECONOMY
The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary

Marie-José Mondzain
Translated by Rico Franses

  

, 
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California

English translation ©  by the Board of Trustees of the

Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of
Stanford University Press.

Image, Icon, Economy was originally published in French in  under the title
Image, Icône, Économie: Les sources Byzantines de l’imaginaire contemporain © ,
Éditions du Seuil.

This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support
from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the
French Embassy in the United States.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mondzain, Marie-José.
[Image, icône, économie. English]
Image, icon, economy : the Byzantine origins of the contemporary economy /
Marie-José Mondzain ; translated by Rico Franses.
p. cm. — (Cultural memory in the present)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
 --- (cloth : alk. paper)
 --- (pbk. : alk. paper)
. Icons, Byzantine. . Semiotics. I. Title. II. Series.
.. 
.’—


Original Printing 

Contents

Translator’s Note ix
Foreword xi
Introduction 

 :  

 Principal Themes 
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

 :   

 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 
 Sacred Precinct and Profane Space 
 Iconic Space and Territorial Rule 

 :   

 The Idol’s Delenda Est 
 Ghost Story 
 The Jew, Frontally and in Profile 

Extracts from the Iconoclast Horos of Hieria 

Extracts from the Antirrhetics, by Nikephoros,
Patriarch of Constantinople 
Notes 
Bibliography 
Translator’s Note

A word needs to be said about the term imaginary as it appears in the

title of this work and then periodically throughout the book. I have fol-
lowed the discipline of psychoanalysis in its rendering of the French term
l’imaginaire, because the word as used by the author retains many of the
connotations that it has in that field. Most importantly, it never simply
means fictive as opposed to real or true. Although it does relate, on the one
hand, to imagination in that what it deals with is a field of mental func-
tioning, it refers more specifically to the particular faculty of the psyche for
thinking in images. To quote Alan Sheridan, the translator of Jacques La-
can’s The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, the imaginary is “the
world, the register, the dimension of images, conscious or unconscious,
perceived or imagined.” Similarly, the term imaginal, which is the transla-
tion of the identical word in French, also relates to this domain of images.

Acknowledgments

First, I owe a debt of gratitude to Alexandra Hauchecorne, who pro-

vided me with many solutions to problems that had appeared formidably
intractable. Grateful thanks go out as well to the following for help cover-
ing a wide array of technical fields: Glenn Peers, Grant McCrea, Stefan
Grant, Paul Duro, Penny Deutscher, and Katarina Posch. I am fortunate to
be able to count such expertise among the attributes of friendship. Many
thanks as well to the author, Marie-José Mondzain, for her careful reading
of this translation, and several crucial qualifications.
Extracts from the Antirrhetics of Nikephoros were translated by Vas-
siliki Dimitropoulou.
Not only Christ but the whole universe disappears if neither circumscribability
nor image exist.
—Patriarch Nikephoros, Antirrhetics, I,  D.

Heresy renders legible in doctrinal terms both social conflict and the binary form
of a mode by which a society defines itself by excluding what it turns into its other.
It links the ideology of the social to the visibility of the process by which the social
body is constituted.
—Michel de Certeau, La Fable mystique
Foreword

One day, an extremely knowledgeable Byzantinist, religiously hoping

to discourage me, declared that only history, geography, and religion ex-
isted in Byzantium, but not philosophy. It was then that I understood how
urgent it was to prove the opposite, not only in the interest of philosophy,
but to demonstrate that the whole question of history, geography, and re-
ligion in Byzantium was nothing other than the very stakes of philosophy
itself. From the outset I was helped by another Byzantinist, no doubt more
knowledgeable than the first, and whom a freer spirit rendered deeply gen-
erous, Jean Gouillard, who is unfortunately no longer with us. He intro-
duced me to the texts of Nikephoros and lent me his support during the
years devoted to the translation of the Antirrhetics.
In addition to the difficulty of the subject itself, I also had to over-
come the obstacles of the derisive disapproval of theologians, as well as that
strange custom current among certain historians of jealously reserving for
themselves proprietary rights to the centuries while dreading like the
plague any theoretical inquiry relating to issues of modernity. One can
readily imagine the degree to which I appreciated the help, support, infor-
mation, and useful criticism provided to me by historian and philosopher
friends like Jean Gouillard and Michel de Certeau, as well as Paul Audi,
Emmanuel Martineau, Marie-France Auzépy, Françoise Armengaud,
Ithzak Goldberg, and Jacques Mercier. I thank them all.
Paradoxically, it also proved necessary for me to resist the sudden flu-
ency made available by the recent fascination of image theorists with
iconicity, in which the champions of modern and postmodern (?) invisibil-
ity have picked up the scent of a redemptive truffle in an “idolatrous”
world. This goes for all those who speak of the icon of the Holy Shroud, of
real presence, and the erogenous giddiness of lack and absence. The demon
of wild analogy has committed as many misdeeds as the one of monopo-
listic erudition and ecclesiastic protectionism.
Considering all of the foregoing, an account of my own path through
iconic thought might be appropriate at this juncture. I have been studying
xii Foreword

it now for the last fifteen years and have discovered even among its most
difficult aspects an infinitely rich and subtle system of thought. In this
book, I have simply attempted to clarify those of its features that are fertile
for the philosophy of the image today.
Because the corpus that I was working on revealed itself to be ever
more coherent, I decided to put it to use it as simply as possible. This med-
itation thus begins with an examination of the term economy, then turns
more specifically to the icon, taking up certain of my earlier studies writ-
ten at the same time as I was translating the Antirrhetics. It then concludes
with several reflections on the idol, followed by a revised collection of texts
concerning the icons of our contemporary world that still seem to me to
bear the mark of iconic thought.
The prophetic tone of an “icon kit,” replete with preconceived no-
tions and ready-made answers, which has prevailed since some have begun
to talk about art, image, God, the face of others, or the new face of the
Slavic world in Holy Russia has no place in this book. Ever since the Other
is no longer to be found anywhere, its icon has been paraded everywhere,
from the church to the computer, from the museum to the analytic couch.
It feeds the mystique of the virtuosi of the virtual and those of the demo-
cratic fraternity who have been gravely wounded. A new artifact of pres-
ence and of hopes for salvation, the icon nevertheless still needs to reen-
counter the foundations of its own true theoretical and political power,
which it derives from the patristic system of thought concerning the econ-
omy.
This study attempts to provide a specific reading of the iconoclastic
conflict inasmuch as it closely and intensely concerns a political and philo-
sophical problem that is still with us now. What interests me about it is the
genesis of a way of thinking about the image that we are still heirs of today.
It is also no exaggeration to use the word reading here, because it is to the
reading of a major text, written during the iconoclastic crisis, that this book
owes its very subject matter. The text in question is the Antirrhetics of Pa-
triarch Nikephoros of Constantinople, written between  and  while
he was in exile during the second iconoclastic crisis.
Throughout the twentieth century, the image has been at the heart of
our concern for the safeguarding of liberty and thought. However, since a
visual and audiovisual imperialism has invaded the planet and reduced all
critical reflection and discussion to a state of servile stupor and acephalic
fascination, it has become incumbent on us to attempt to understand the
elements of a genealogy whose ultimate offspring is the carrier of the best
as well as the worst of things. Perhaps no great disaster is brewing other
 Foreword xiii

than the always threatening one of the abdication of thought, but the im-
age is not responsible for that. Rather, it awaits consideration in terms of
both its present crushing vitality and its history.
I have attempted in this work to return to that intuition of the
church fathers concerning the fundamental interdependence that ties the
fate of the artificial image, or icon, to the transfigured flesh of the natural,
invisible image and to our living, corporeal reality as desiring, political, and
mortal beings. By using the concept of the economy, the church fathers at-
tempted to think through the relation of the imaginary to life and to con-
sider what happens to truth when one’s primary concern, as a matter of ur-
gency, is to act effectively in the real world; and all this while confronting
the difficulty that results from rejecting idolatry, even while it was in-
evitably necessary to reckon with it.
The philosophical and anthropological complexity of this problem
lent a physical and symbolic violence to the debate, one from which those
who are interested in the period have not always escaped. One still sides ei-
ther with or against the iconoclasts. To the extent that the iconophiles won
and deprived us of all the documents that would have enlightened us about
their adversaries, the tendency of the researcher is to privilege those whom
the history of the triumph have injured most. A system of thought that has
come down to us only in the form of lies and caricatures has had to be re-
constituted through scraps. True, such a procedure is both a technical and
moral necessity, yet while recognizing this, this book pursues the issues on
entirely different grounds from the initial polemic: two currents of thought
that cannot be understood without each other are set in relation to each
other, until we finally discover that contradiction is intrinsic to the nature of
the image itself. The image and the icon lie at the heart of all considerations
of the symbol and the sign, as well as their relation to the problematic of
being and appearing, seeing and believing, strength and power. When em-
peror and patriarch confront each other, each in turn wanting to convince
us that this confrontation is a fight against the devil, our only choice is to
investigate the question of how the figures of salvation and damnation
have been constructed through the course of history, and how the image
became the cornerstone of various excommunications and inclusions. Both
camps are passionate; each is fascinating. Iconophilia has drawn us along
in the wake of its violent adherences, but the voice of iconoclasm has never
been killed, for all that. As for the idolaters, who were unanimously con-
demned by everyone—they still prosper and continue to offer us the most
seductive pictures of our own desires to worship and destroy.
Introduction

The iconoclastic crisis in Byzantium was essentially a Constantinopo-

litan political crisis, which is to say, a crisis over the symbolic foundation of
authority. This concerned the very conception of power at the highest level
of hierarchical authority. More precisely, it could be said that the crisis was
an economic one, provided that the word economy is given the meaning that
it had in Byzantium, and it is this that forms the subject of the first part of
our study. Here we will demonstrate how, and in what sense, the debate be-
tween the iconophiles and iconoclasts is knotted around a certain number
of keywords. Our method will consist of attempting to understand the
structure of the lexical constellation that forms the unflagging armature of
the debate by means of the texts that defend images and refute those that
attack them. The crisis will be analyzed on the basis of the polemic, the play
of questions and answers, that was formulated in certain texts, particularly
in the Antirrhetics of Nikephoros. These questions concern, on the one
hand, theoretical issues, such as relationships, mimesis, the line,1 the imag-
inal voice, and the transfiguration of form, and on the other, political issues
such as pedagogy, strategy, and the appropriation of territory. These two sets
of issues define the operational field of the concept of economy as it was ap-
plied to the image and the icon. For such is the ambivalence of the question
posed by the terms eikôn and oikonomia: in question is the natural image
and the fate of the artificial image.
To privilege the icon in the study of a crisis referred to as the “crisis
of iconoclasm” would seem to be obvious, but good sense sometimes ap-
pears vulgar to the wise. Thus, even though they have acknowledged that
a dogmatic debate of a decidedly theological nature was indeed able to
shake an empire to its roots, scholars have preferred to suppose that such a
crisis, even though bearing the name of iconoclasm, concerned, in truth,
something else completely.2 The historical study of the economic, social,
and military circumstances pertaining at the time has often led commen-
 Introduction

tators to hypothesize that the debate over the icon was only a pretext and
that the reality was entirely different. Thus the interpretation of the crisis
has been oriented either toward an explanation of a rather interior sort (a
struggle against monarchical power), or it has insisted on the empire’s re-
inforcement of its borders, economic recovery, the militarization and de-
centralization of power, or even the influence of the oriental provinces that
lived in contact with aniconic cultures. The empire was undergoing a po-
litical crisis; therefore it was thought necessary to furnish a political expla-
nation for it, and in consequence, relegate the question of the icon to the
rank of secondary causes, or put it in the role of a doctrinal screen that hid
reality. But what if this political crisis was precisely a crisis of iconicity—
provided, of course, that one examine this iconicity in the terms in which
it was then linked to the overall effects of symbolization in general, and
therefore also to effects that are political in nature? It is this hypothesis that
underpins this investigation.
What, then, was the doctrine of the icon, this philosophy of the im-
age that for the first time not only overcame within monotheist thought
certain theological prohibitions, but even surmounted those difficulties
born within Greek thought of the ontological speculation about doxa,
mimésis, and the phenomenon? For a Greek system of thought it most def-
initely is that we are dealing with here, and it can be summarized in the
following formulation: an economic conception of the natural image founds
the artificial image, and an economic conception of the artificial image, in
turn, founds temporal power. It is this that will be explained in the follow-
ing pages.
Greece is usually considered to be the birthplace of all philosophical
questions concerning being and language. Its paternity in the domain of
the image, however, has hardly ever been recognized because this philo-
sophical development occurred at the heart of Christian thought, far from
Athens. Because Byzantine Christianity was defined as oriental, it was too
quickly forgotten that the thought of the church fathers was nothing other
than a long debate on the compatibility of Greek thought with the new
dogmas of the faith. A scholar such as Ladner, therefore, stressed the philo-
sophical relationships that gave birth to iconic thought, but his work has
not been given the attention that it deserves among philosophers.3 Christ-
ian scholars and clergy trying to give an account of the origins of Christian
thought are the only ones who pause over it. Today, however, this consid-
eration of the subject of the icon is of concern to all of us in the lay and
 Introduction 

profane world, even though it does not necessarily matter to us in its

apologetic or doctrinal sense. Nevertheless, the ideological use that has
been made of these iconic themes obliges us to return to its sources in or-
der to demonstrate that the philosophical field is in fact fully independent
of the specifically religious domain. For someone like Nikephoros, it is the
very cause of thought itself that is sacred, and if the icon is sacred, it is be-
cause it founds the very possibility of thinking.
Consideration of the image is still a sacred cause today only because
the fate of thought and liberty are at stake in it. The visible world, the one
that is given to us to see: is it liberty or enslavement? In order to be able to
envisage a world radically founded on visibility, and starting from the con-
viction that whatever constitutes its essence and meaning is itself invisible,
it proved essential to establish a system of thought that set the visible and
invisible in relation to each other. This relation was based on the distinction
between the image and the icon. The image is invisible, the icon is visible.
The economy was the concept of their living linkage. The image is a mys-
tery. The icon is an enigma. The economy was the concept of their relation
and their intimacy. The image is eternal similitude, the icon is temporal re-
semblance. The economy was the theory of the transfiguration of history.
The concept of economy has been studied in depth in the theologi-
cal and juridical domain. Its strange and insistent polysemy, however, has
never aroused much more than a mild attention, leading those speaking of
it to see it as a blurred concept, without much systematic content. That a
word so frequently employed might mean so many disparate, indeed al-
most contradictory, things has not pushed those who deal with it to search
within it for a deeper unity, but rather to attribute instability and indeter-
minacy to the word itself.
How, then, could a word, whose resonances were primarily adminis-
trative and juridical, and that was intended for the proper management of
the affairs of the real world, come to concern, without any sense of incon-
sistency or contradiction, the mystery of the Trinity, of the incarnation and
redemption?
The answer to this question arose of itself at a moment of conceptual
crisis—that is, at the time of the iconoclastic crisis. The question of the
economy cannot be separated from the question of the image itself. “Who-
ever rejects the icon rejects the totality of the economy.” This is the leit-
motif of the texts that defend the legitimacy of the icon. Thinking about
the subject of the icon does not in the least indicate a new meaning for a
 Introduction

word that already possessed innumerable ones. On the contrary, it con-

cerns the arrival on the scene of what unites all these meanings without
modifying any of the previous ones at all. The term economy is therefore
not the subject of a new and specific discourse during the iconoclastic cri-
sis; rather, it supports the whole of the edifice of which the icon constitutes
the final stakes, at once intellectually, spiritually, and politically. Indeed, it
is at the moment of the crisis that the term finally acquires its systematic-
ity. From this perspective, it is important to determine what was at stake
theoretically in the polemic between the emperor and the patriarch as they
attempted to impose their own conceptions of symbolic hegemony, and we
will attempt to recreate the theoretical architecture of what might be called
first the imaginal economy and then the iconic economy. This “economic”
doctrine of the icon is a veritable plea for a new conception of the symbol.
Something in the system of thought changes as a result of the political con-
vulsion of iconoclasm. As Paul Lemerle said, “Whatever one’s philosophi-
cal opinion about images and the cult of images, there was a moment
when their defenders, even though they were far from aware of it, held in
their hands the fate of the form of humanism that is still ours today.”4
I would alter this claim in only one respect: the Byzantines were un-
doubtedly perfectly aware of what was happening, and it is rather we, sub-
jects of the Christian West, who have over the centuries been unaware of
what then hung in the balance regarding our future. We may be even less
aware of it because the ecclesiastic authorities were busy hiding it, for it
concerned ensuring the legitimacy of their temporal power. More generally
as well, the wholly modern temptation to qualify as unconscious each col-
lective phenomenon of symbolic reorganization may well end up hiding
the conscious mode in which the protagonists of a revolution think about
the change. The concept of economy is a good example because it would
be completely untenable to maintain that so complex and subtle an elabo-
ration could have troubled the ecclesiastical body without its knowing
about it. On the contrary, the impression one receives is of a flawless struc-
ture in which whatever concerns the most obscure forces is taken into ac-
count and subjected to an enlightened management. Perhaps the church
was more aware than we suppose of the fact that it had to administer the
unconscious of its subjects. I have often been tempted to think that the re-
sistance to philosophical consideration of the concept of economy con-
cerns an unconscious refusal of modern subjects to recognize the common
foundations of our thinking about the image and the institutions that gov-
ern us in an ecclesiastic manner.
 Introduction 

Is it not significant that at each great convulsion of religious and po-

litical thought, the question of the legitimacy of the image was raised yet
again? Thus, was it not the case that the iconoclastic crisis was not studied
until very late, and only then specifically in the context of the Reformation,
which involved a calling into question of pontifical power, and conse-
quently a fight against the ecclesiastic iconocracy that supported that
power? This limited and belated success due to doctrinal and political cir-
cumstances, however, had a distorting effect on the subject, in the sense
that it was sometimes believed that Byzantine iconoclasm was itself in-
spired by a rationalist spirit open to biblical exegesis and the return to
scriptural sources. It is certainly true that the iconoclasts invoked the bib-
lical texts that prohibited the painted or carved image in the name of the
battle against idolatry; nonetheless, their position was driven by a concern
more political than spiritual, because from a doctrinal point of view, they
considered themselves to be perfect Christians. Because they were trying to
separate spiritual power from temporal power, they did not exploit the pos-
sible foundations for a doctrinal and political unity of the Christian state.
It is only the notional edifice built on the term economy that allowed for the
simultaneous administration and management of the law, of belief, and of
the goods of this world. Only the image and the icon together could be-
come its cornerstone.
In relation to iconoclast thought, the damnatio memoriae that befell
the camp of the defeated limits us only to quotes of the second council of
Nicaea,5 when it became necessary to refute the theses of the iconoclast
council of  and fragments transmitted by Nikephoros, who was himself
also concerned with their refutation. These fragments, or Questions,6 are
the work of Emperor Constantine V, obviously a true thinker in relation to
iconoclasm, who was also surrounded by thoroughly competent theolo-
gians. It is therefore only on the testimony of its adversaries that we can re-
constitute the thought hostile to artificial images. This iconoclast thought
can in turn be defined as a noneconomic conception of the natural image. It
could also provisionally be said that once the doctrine of the icon, or arti-
ficial image, had decreed the economic distance separating the visible from
ontology, iconoclast thought fought ferociously against it. Iconoclasm re-
jected precisely the systematic unity of the concept of the economy, and
that is perhaps the reason for its failure.
The continual passage from pretext to reality, from conscious to un-
conscious, from explicit to implicit in the interpretation of the conflict al-
lows us to assume that we are dealing with a crisis in which the relation-
 Introduction

ships between each and every symbol and the real, the imaginary, the ficti-
tious, the deceitful, and the true were all at stake. We are here in a universe
of guile,7 which should remind us of what the Islamic tradition knew and
developed under the name of hila,8 the traits of which are practically the
same as those of the economy in its political and pedagogical sense. But it
is also the Machiavellian guile that in turn takes us back to the political
strategy of speech in its relation to actions. When the image is operative, it
does something that speech does not. And speech about the image and the
icon can only take oblique and twisted routes to explain itself. Because if
speech could say everything that the image is able to do, it would substi-
tute itself for the image and would be its superior by being its theory as
well. It is precisely because the icon is endowed with a power specific to it
that it mattered so much to the emperor to deprive the church of it, and to
reserve for himself its exclusive rights and benefits; for iconoclast images do
indeed exist, and it was by using them that the emperor intended to rule.
The conceptual power of the economy makes the theoretical stakes and the
profane objectives of conquest inseparable from each other. Nikephoros re-
minds us that the image is a Gospel and that there is a perfect equivalence
between the scriptural message and the iconic message. Nonetheless, he
never loses sight of the fact that teaching and persuading by means of the
icon are superior to hearing as a result of the speed with which they oper-
ate, and their emotional effectiveness.
Who, then, was Nikephoros?9 For the personality of the patriarch
and the iconoclastic crisis in general, readers are referred to the preface that
accompanies the translation of the Antirrhetics. The full bibliography con-
cerning this period of the Byzantine empire can be found at the end of that
work as well. Here we will merely summarize a few of the major character-
istics relevant to the present study. Nikephoros was born in , during the
reign of Constantine V, and received a lay education at the imperial court
that destined him for the career of a civil servant. During the first icono-
clastic crisis—that is, the one that preceded the second Nicene council in
—Nikephoros’s father fell victim to his loyalty to the holy images, lost
his job, and died in exile. Nikephoros, still a youth, nevertheless pursued
his studies at the imperial university and appeared bound for an adminis-
trative and political career at the Constantinopolitan court. He was inter-
ested in theology by curiosity and personal inclination, particularly when
the political turbulence of Constantinople drove him to withdraw and iso-
late himself for some time far from the tumult of the capital. On several
 Introduction 

occasions, he seems to have been a man of prudence and negotiation, op-

posing himself to the intransigent attitude of the monks of Stoudios in the
affair of the adulterous marriage of Constantine VI, son of Empress Irene.
Economic thought, by which we should understand here a way of thinking
about prudent adaptation to circumstances, prevailed for him over the de-
mands of akribeia, which is to say, a rigorous and uncompromising faith-
fulness to canonical precepts. In other words, a sort of realist relativism that
evaluated the cost of victory and the willingness to pay it prevailed for him
over inflexible ideas that could only lead to failure. Nevertheless, the time
would come when, engaged in a remorseless struggle that opposed him to
the iconoclast Emperor Leo V, he would find the strength to resist, to the
point of exile and death, in order to defend the cause of the icon. Was this
a return to the strict doctrinal rigor that the church fathers called akribeia,
in opposition to the accommodations inspired by the economy? Certainly
not. Nikephoros always remained an unfailing champion of the economy.
Was it, then, vengeful loyalty to the memory of his father, and a spiritual
and philosophical conviction to defend a just and true cause? Without
doubt, but it was certainly also a perfect evaluation of what was at stake
and of the circumstances that provided an opportunity to fight in exile at
a moment when the intransigence of the martyr would be most effective.
It is possible to be perfectly “economic,” by which we mean opportune and
well thought out, by being a radical when the adversary weakens or when
one senses that victory is approaching. The strictly historical nature of the
concept of the economy allows us to understand the completely historic,
that is, circumstantial, scope of the requirements even of universality and
timelessness.
What makes Nikephoros’s personality both modern and so fascinat-
ing is of two different orders. He is passionate, vehement, and partial, to
the point of the most perfect bad faith. Using by turns the most subtle
rhetoric and the most libelous insult, he nonetheless remains the only truly
philosophical writer of this century of crisis. John of Damascus, in the pre-
vious century, and Theodore of Stoudios, who was his contemporary, also
put their talent at the service of the icon, but their writings are strongly
Christological, and their inspiration is essentially doctrinal. For them, the
issue is one of defending the dogma of the incarnation and the unity of the
church. The defense of the production of icons is always a spiritual obliga-
tion connected directly to the thought of the evangelists and church fa-
thers. In Nikephoros, however, contemplation of the issue has an entirely
 Introduction

different breadth: it concerns the nature of all images and the impossibility of
thinking and ruling without them. As we will see, he draws up a portrait of
his imperial adversary that is, a contrario, highly significant: its intention is
to deprive the iconoclast emperor of all aptitude for thought and govern-
ment. The stakes of the image are therefore not only of concern to Chris-
tological orthodoxy; they are political and philosophical, and of the first
magnitude.
Who, in the end, will be master of the images? He who will be spir-
itually faithful to the natural image, he who will respect the natural image
within the artificial image, or, finally, he who will continuously practice
guile between faithfulness and unfaithfulness, in order to draw from that
artifice all possible benefits? In all things it is God who sets the example,
and it is he whom one imitates.
 1

Principal Themes

The term economy has either been regarded as a vague idea, without
content, or it has been reduced to a sheer effect of rhetorical opportunism.
“I do not believe,” writes Gilbert Dagron, “that it is necessary to go be-
yond summary definitions and see in the economy a well constructed con-
cept. Despite certain striking formulations, a fine rhetorical dressing, and
some moral connotations, the notion remains blurred. Above all it is purely
negative because it is satisfied to merely note and accept a definitive dis-
junction between ideal standards and a social space over which they hence-
forth have no hold.” And he continues a little further on: “If the notion of
economy had a positive content, we would have a real confrontation of
ideas, a dialectic; but as the concept is empty, we only have two poles be-
tween which a sort of equilibrium is established.”1 To talk of an “empty
concept” or a “negative concept,” however, in relation to a term that in
Christian texts refers both to the incarnation and Christ himself cannot
but cause us some surprise. Moreover, to claim a definitive disjunction be-
tween the real and the ideal within the very concept that is responsible for
linking them together with the minimum of contradiction by means of the
imaginal and iconic system is once again to undo the effects of polysemy,
as have all those who reject the linking of spiritual and temporal power in
the stakes of the doctrinal debate of iconoclasm.
In what follows, I will endeavor to draw the economy out of this
vagueness, but I would add that if the issue is one of rhetoric, the stakes are
high for both word and thought. If talking economically consists in reduc-
  

ing every speech act to a manner of speaking, this is of the greatest impor-
tance, considering that it takes hold of the very content of thought, in ac-
cordance with the wording that it adopts in the manifestation of the truth.
Could a theory of relativity be summarized by making every model a sim-
ple rhetorical choice? Yet the economy in Byzantium was exactly a prag-
matic model that took into account the real historical situation of the per-
son who was acting within that model, and by the same stroke led him to
rearrange the truth itself in a different manner. Therefore, if rhetoric there
is, it is not a pejorative consequence of a sophisticated use of discourse, but
a model of mediation inseparable from the trajectory of the Word in the
historical fulfillment of its Parousia. In the same way that God chose a
manner of showing himself in order to make himself better understood,
his servants, in imitation of him, will make instrumental, specifically fo-
cused choices of word and image in demonstrating the foundations and le-
gitimacy of the cause they are defending. One must return to Aristotle’s
Rhetoric in order to understand the quasi-judicial usage that Nikephoros
makes of signs, indices, and proofs in the reasoning and structuring of ar-
guments. We are dealing here with a speech for the defense, perhaps even
a special pleading, that aims as much at condemning the iconoclast as ex-
onerating the iconophile from the formidable charge of idolatry.
The rhetorical conception of the iconophile economy relates to the
ternary relation of the sacred, nature, and reason. It is a “manner of speak-
ing” that is existentially tied to the living character of the word and its in-
volvement in the very effectiveness of the things that it talks about, as well
as the effects that it sets out to obtain. It is therefore a science of effects in
the most radical sense of the term. But inasmuch as it is a concept that sub-
sumes the manner in which truth emerges, it is rather the cause and con-
dition of possibility of its manifestation for everyone. It is the science of the
advocate convinced of the justice of the cause that he is defending and of
the guilt of the adversary that he is attacking. It is therefore not the rhetor-
ical science of the sophist, always ready to prove one thing and its opposite
indifferently. Rhetoric is the use of persuasive speech, the driving force of
which is not cynicism or doubt as to the existence of truth, but the taking
into account of the listener and of the very possibility of communication
on the moving ground of everyday reality. It is an adaptive, specifically fo-
cused tekhné, as every true tekhné is. The great novelty of the patristic econ-
omy is to have abandoned the word rhetoric, which for the church fathers
designated nothing more than a species of an infinitely larger genus: the
 Principal Themes 

manifestation of truth in life. Rhetoric no longer reduces to modes of rea-

soning and tropes of speech: once it has become economy, it concerns the
tropes of our relation with the Logos of God, who is its model. For the
economy is first of all God’s art for the convincing and saving of hu-
mankind. Because the economy is an art, and because it is not an art that
is exempt from guile or that results from mimetic thought, whoever mas-
ters it invites us to imitate him. Rhetoric is a secondary effect of the econ-
omy, not the reverse.
In this respect, Aristotelian thought seems to have been invaded by
the notions of similitude and resemblance. The orator who is mimetic of
Christ conforms to the choices and behavior of his divine model in his
own choice of proofs and argument. On the other hand, his enemy will be
taken for a sophist even if he utilizes the same tekhné, because he is differ-
ent to and separated from that model, and we will shortly witness a key ex-
ample of this in terms of the description of the iconoclast emperor’s body.
This “manner of speaking” and describing prefigures exactly what will be
revealed in our examination of the polysemy of the term oikonomia. The
proof of the adversary’s malice is drawn from his very body because it re-
sembles—or we should rather say, it is in the image of—his own rejection
of the image. The rhetoric that underpins this “description” of the inde-
scribable partisan of the uncircumscribable is in keeping with the power of
inscription of what he who writes and inscribes defends.
In the most learned translations, the word economy is rendered by dif-
ferent terms such as incarnation, plan, design, administration, providence,
responsibility, duties, compromise, lie, or guile, as is relevant, without the
reader being warned of the return of the same Greek word—oikonomia—
in each case. Nevertheless, the translator signals his embarrassment in a
note or explains the liberty that he has taken in keeping the word economy
in quotation marks or italics, accompanying his initiative with a remark
about the homonymy of a term deprived of any semantic continuity; some
examples of this will be provided shortly. In the following section, there-
fore, we will attempt to uncover the organic unity of meanings whose ap-
parent unrelatedness arises only by homonymic accident.

The term oikonomia is found in Paul, the “inventor” of the natural

filial image, in order to talk about the plan of the incarnation.2 After Paul,
it was used almost uninterruptedly from the third century onward—that
is, from the moment when patristic and conciliar thought first elaborated
  

a truly Christian philosophy. At the time of the iconoclastic controversy, it

became the leitmotif of iconic defense, setting in play an entire semantic
ensemble, which it then proved necessary to provide with a conceptual
unity, and which in turn brought it to its highest degree of theoretical de-
velopment. The term recurs thirty-nine times in Nikephoros’s Antirrhetics
and is found commonly in the texts of John of Damascus and Theodore of
Stoudios. It is also clearly invoked in the conciliar acts that defend the le-
gitimacy of icons as well as in the iconoclastic Horos, which claims to be
faithful to that same economy. There can be no shadow of a doubt that the
concept of economy played a determining and structural role in the icon’s
defense, and its effects will be examined further on.
When the iconophiles utilize the word, therefore, they are already pre-
ceded by several centuries of common and familiar usage in patristic texts.
In the Latin texts it is sometimes translated as dispensatio and sometimes as
dispositio, which well confers upon it its distributive, organic, and functional
sense. In the case of the trinitarian economy, Tertullian maintains the Greek
term alongside the Latin words, as though to preserve the global nature of
its implications that the Latin translation may have reduced.
Not only did the term not cease to be used by all the church fathers
to refer both to the entirety of the incarnational plan and to divine provi-
dence, but its meaning also expanded considerably thanks to the crisis. It
became the central nervous system of the iconophiles’ arguments about the
management of the relation of the sacred and profane, the visible and the
invisible, the intangible truth at the heart of an undulating and relative re-
ality, the relations between the visible and the legible, as well as between
the rigor of the law and the adaptability of the rule. Owing to the economy
it was possible to escape condemnation for transgression, because the spirit
of the law was safe in its circumstantial and practical application. Without
the economy there was no middle term between akribeia (akribeïa), which
designated respect for the inflexible rigor of the law, and its transgression
(parabasis). From human nature to miracle, from sin-commitment to the
religious mysteries, it would be possible to make the journey without a
break. The economy is the solution to inconsistency; it is the art of en-
lightened flexibility.
That the doctrine of the incarnation underlies the edifice of iconic
thought there is not the least doubt for the church fathers, who clearly set
it down as a principle. All of them state it repeatedly: whoever rejects the
icon rejects the economy, that is, Christ himself and the totality of the incar-
 Principal Themes 

national plan in history. Yet no matter what they say, nothing could be less
clear, because the iconoclasts who rejected the image also considered them-
selves to be true Christians, faithful to the evangelic message and Christol-
ogy as a whole. There were always those who believed that one could per-
fectly well be Christian and reject the icon, but there was no one who
claimed that one could rule without it. Thus the iconoclasts themselves
never renounced its services to assist them in their reign; on the contrary,
they wanted rather to monopolize it themselves and deprive the ecclesias-
tic powers of it, which they did by means of theological argument, strictly
limiting the interpretation of the economy to Christology only.
Moreover, imperial iconography was abundant—in full bloom,
even—during the crisis. At the very moment when the emperor was or-
dering the destruction of religious images, he was spreading his own por-
trait as well as the signs of his pomp, pleasures, and glories throughout the
empire. Only the images of Christ, his mother, and the saints were forbid-
den and destroyed. Yet the iconoclasts lost the battle, and the explanation
may be that they lacked the use and enlightened manipulation of the con-
cept that gave victory to the other side, oikonomia, thanks to which even a
break with the law could be interpreted as its fulfillment.
Several questions thus present themselves for our inquiry: how the
doctrine of the incarnation and the icon are one and the same, an identity
that the concept of oikonomia subsumes; and how the question of the ap-
propriation of temporal power hinges on the interpretation of a concept
that, officially speaking, should have had only a spiritual calling.
To answer these questions, it is necessary to examine the semantic or-
ganization of economic thought. The concept of the economy is an or-
ganicist, functionalist one that simultaneously concerns the flesh of the
body, the flesh of speech, and the flesh of the image. Thanks to it, the
church itself would be identified with the body of Christ, which must in
turn be capable of being rendered visible in order for the terrestrial king-
dom to constitute itself in the image of the celestial kingdom, whose prov-
idential manifestation it would incarnate here below.
In a Christian society there can be no political legitimacy without the
constitution of a doctrine flawlessly linking doctrinal adherence to the in-
stitutional system that legitimates temporal power. Belief and obedience
are the two sides of the same symbolic assembly that makes use of the
equivalence between engendering belief and ruling. Today this appears to
us to be if not trivial, then at least secularly achieved. Yet how was it possi-
  

ble for one specific system to set in place the philosophical conditions for
this fact that is so obvious? It is a little like Euclidian geometry: it seems to
respond to so natural a description of immediate experience that it took
several centuries to discover and admit that it only derived its validity from
the implicit acceptance of the premises that gave it its legitimacy, yet which
also marked its conditions and limits. One passes unawares from “only be-
lieving in what one sees” to “only obeying what one believes in,” that is to
say, in accepting to have relatively lost from view whatever might become
the object of knowledge or, even more, of doubt. The economy functions
as a gnosis of the enigma. Without reference to the unity brought about by
economic thought of the image in the patristic sense, the stakes of the icon-
oclastic crisis remain incomprehensible.
In the work of even a Byzantine author, with oikonomia being used
in several senses by turns, only context allows us to discern the meaning to
be chosen, or rather, to privilege. But one must never lose sight of the fact
that for the Byzantine reader or listener, all the semantic levels resonated
together in a sort of symphonic unity, and all related to the founding and
unifying principle of the natural image of the Father in the person of the
Son. This, however, does not contradict the juridical and administrative
tradition that turned the same word into the concept covering all its func-
tional, pedagogic, and political adaptations. For this reason, it is hoped that
the present work will allow the conservation of the word economy in all cir-
cumstances, as we have done here in the texts cited. It is the only liberty
taken regarding the translations, and that liberty has its reason within our
purview.
The distensions possible between certain levels, as for example the
fact that the term oikonomia may designate here trinitarian relations or the
Person of Christ and there artifice, concession, or the piously purposeful lie
oblige us to note the fact that we are dealing with a conceptual agent that
founds a science of context, opportunity, and art, in a word, of the adapta-
tion of the law to its manifestation or its application in living reality. Far
from ratifying the disjunction of truth and reality, the economy would be-
come the operator of their functional reconciliation.
The semantic tree generated by the term also shows an organic unity
that is subsumed by a concept that counts among its significations the nat-
ural order of living organisms.
In Part I, we will examine a few of the fundamental references that
will allow us to establish that the oikonomia is neither a disparate mosaic
 Principal Themes 

nor a fragmented term, but a type of intelligible edifice with coherent in-
terweavings, or perhaps even a homogenous continent where the temporal
power of the church is founded by the carnal, visceral, and providential
economy of Christ, which leads us from the Word to the legitimacy of its
icon, as well as to the strategic opportunity of guile or the lie. It is almost
as though the long detour taken by New Testament scripture was only
there to prove that God had a historical need for the Son, the Son for the
church, and the church for temporal power, always and everywhere, in
function of the same coherent and logical principle: the oikonomia.
 2

A Semantic Study of the Term Economy

Before the Church Fathers

Oikonomia does not appear in Homer, Hesiod, Herodotos, or

Thucydides, or in the lyric or tragic poets. The noun seems to appear for
the first time in Xenophon, where it forms an object of inquiry, as it also
does in Aristotle. In both, economic discourse is a logos that lends its epis-
temic status and purpose to a meditation on the administration and man-
agement of domestic life, specifically the philosophical and practical con-
sideration of the management of private fortune, particularly in the rural
domain. Very soon, however, the extensive applications raised by these is-
sues become closely tied to the administration of goods and services in the
public domain.
In the Classical authors, economic discourse is closely linked to a
consideration of profit and utility. Consequently, the issue is not only one
of rationalizing the operations relating to goods and people and defining
an estate, but of optimizing expected benefits as well. This optimization
can be thought of in quantitative terms (increase in wealth) or in qualita-
tive terms (procurement of well-being or the approach of the sovereign
good). Economic science thus comes to have something in common with
philosophy.
Without entering fully into the details of Aristotle’s Economics, let us
highlight some of the relevant points found there, and which were un-
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

doubtedly familiar to patristic thought as well. Its traces will be encoun-

tered again on many subsequent occasions.
Aristotle attributes to economics the acquiring of a domestic life and
its good functioning, without which, he says, there cannot be any social co-
hesion. Without this prior cohesion, there is no place for politics, and eco-
nomics therefore comes before politics. In the second place, economics
must conform to nature, not only in that it is based first on agriculture, but
also inasmuch as nature has already distributed roles and duties within the
species themselves. Implicit within the economy is the notion of an organic
objective and functional harmony. There is therefore a providential and
natural order to be respected while acting in the service of the greatest co-
hesion of utility and well-being.
To these thoughts, however, Aristotle also adds many examples tak-
ing into account the different strategies and diverse opportunistic schemes
put in place by civil and military chiefs in order to increase their profits or,
more trivially, to supply money when needed: “We have further made a
collection of all the methods that we conceived to be worth mentioning,
which men of former days have employed or cunningly devised in order to
provide themselves with money.”1 The concept therefore concerns an en-
semble of means implemented with an immediate material end in mind.
All these dimensions of economic thought will be found again in the
church fathers, although in unprecedented scope, because it is the whole of
providential nature, the incarnational plan, and the strategic adoption of
means to ends that will be subsumed by the selfsame concept.
In Hippocrates, economics is used as a pragmatic concept to discuss
the arrangements to be made concerning the sick.2 In Polybius, it refers to
political administration and even the course of events, or the way in which
they evolve, whereas in Dionysios of Halicarnassus, it concerns the manner
in which a literary work is organized.3 The noun occurs later than the verb
oikonomein, which appears in Sophocles’s Electra, used by Electra herself.4
Mazon translates the line in question as “I am a servant at my father’s
palace,” by which Electra means that she has been reduced to the servile
activity of a steward at her father’s palace. The task of the steward5 is that
of every servant charged with household administration, just as Aeschylus
symbolically refers to anger as the steward of Agamemnon’s palace.6 This
pejorative tone is even more clear in Plato, when Socrates describes to
Phaedrus the mischievous and lethal way in which the affairs of love are
run by he who does not love.7 Thus in Greek, the semantic field is from the
  

outset tied as much to material as to symbolic goods, to which the idea of

service is added as well.
Generally speaking, then, the Classical oikonomia implies the func-
tional organization of an order that has profit in mind, whether material or
not. The model of this order is natural, but the good management of this
economy in society requires the analysis of situations and human inter-
vention in order to serve the goals at hand in the best way possible.
Also related to the economy are issues regarding the natural law,
where questions arise concerning the relationship of an absolute legislative
model to the application and efficiency of the law and justice. This juridi-
cal signification of the oikonomia, however, cannot be seen in isolation:
whatever the domain concerned, it always returns to a reflection on the
law, its interpretation, and legitimacy. Making justice reign amidst hu-
manity cannot be achieved by the pure and simple application of a tran-
scendent law. An adaptive concept is needed that is charged with ensuring
that the law is respected, while taking into account the particularity of
every case and of what will conform best both to the law and the interests
of life in all its senses. The economy always supposes the consideration of
ends, without thereby becoming a sophistic or cynical concept that is pre-
occupied only with results in full disregard of the foundations of justice
and the law. The economy is a science of relations and relative terms, but
in no sense is it a relativist concept. It is a notion that simultaneously ren-
ders a service and takes account of the very idea of service. Its “servile” res-
onance will be encountered again, even in the economic interpretation of
the incarnation, where he who gives himself to save us takes the “form of a
slave.”

Patristic Polysemy

The economy in question here is an infinitely sacred one that, fol-

lowing the incarnation, had come to be inscribed in opposition to theol-
ogy. This opposition had served as the foundation for two systems: the
trinitarian economy and the Christological economy. Resulting from the
theorization of relations that are specifically purposive in nature, the econ-
omy made possible the formulation of both divine unity and divine plu-
rality. It naturally became the principle of all unitary relations within a plu-
rality of parts or functions. It is for this reason that Hippolytus and
Tertullian had recourse to the economy to account for trinitarian relations
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

as considered with respect to history. In this respect, there is a temporality

involved that concerns the historic, immanent manifestation of the eternal,
divine, and transcendent model. All further occurrences of relations of any
sort will be derived from this manner of thinking about the relation of
God to history.
Since the trinitarian economy had introduced both the Person of the
Son and his imaginal and historic nature, it comes as no surprise to see the
incarnate Son conceived as an “economy of the Father.” Yet this usage of
the economy, which is not at all obvious, is nevertheless the one that posed
the fewest problems to Christian commentators and translators, for whom
the word thus retained its religious and sacred specificity.
From Paul onward, the economy designated not only the Second
Person of the Trinity, but the whole of the redemptive plan, from the con-
ception of the Virgin to the resurrection, including Christ’s evangelical life
and the passion. The notion of a divine plan with the aim of administering
and managing fallen creation, and thus of saving it, makes the economy in-
terdependent with the whole of creation from the beginning of time. Be-
cause of this, the economy is as much Nature as Providence. The divine
economy watches over the harmonious conservation of the world and the
preservation of all its parts as it runs in a well-adjusted, purposive manner.
The incarnational economy is nothing other than the spreading out of the
Father’s image in its historic manifestation, which is made possible by the
economy of the maternal body. That passage establishes the entry of the
visible and the flesh into the concept of economy. In all cases, it concerns
an organism or an internal arrangement whose visibility becomes accessi-
ble to us. Yet the powerful bond that holds the economy and visible ap-
pearance together must not make people believe that they are dealing with
the simple and intelligible visibility of reality; the economy is everything
except a naive idea. Rather, whatever is mysterious in the Trinity and the
designs of providence will have the status of an enigma within the domain
of the visible.
If God reveals his salvational plan and intends it to be effective, its
economy will make use of all the means familiar to a father in order to
bring his wayward son back to him, all the subterfuges of the doctor to
heal the patient despite himself, all the seductions dear to the teacher who
must make the most difficult knowledge loved. Speech, remedy, guile, con-
descension, punishment, or lie . . . all the means of the economy are good
when one uses them with economy, that is to say, while remaining loyal to
the spirit of the divine, providential economy.
  

Because it encompasses the strategy and tactics necessary for the

management of a real, historic situation in their totality, the economy al-
ways returns to its classic vocation: to be the concept of the management
and administration of temporal realities, whether they be spiritual, intel-
lectual, or material. Such will be the path that will lead us to the image and
the icon, intrinsically bound to the economy, and with which they in turn
share sacredness, naturalness, and the full range of pragmatic goals.
The consequence of this economic access to the visible leads to a
management of the totality of the visible under the sign of the economy. It
is no doubt this reason that made the oikonomia such an important con-
cept in the debate on the image during the iconoclast crisis. The virgin
pregnancy and birth of the living image of the Father gathers together all
the aspects of economic thought. From there, there is but one last step to
take: someone who identifies the maternal body with the body of the
church, an identification for which the icon is the structural relay, because
it makes possible a formal treatment of the flesh in a relation of relative
similitude, which eucharistic consubstantiality would not.

Theology and Economy

The point here, my dear, is not theology, on the subject of which there can be no
question of effigy or thought of similitude, but the economy, thanks to which the
prototype and its derivation can be seen; again you must admit that the Word has
taken on a flesh similar to ours.8

By theology, Theodore of Stoudios means here the discourse of tradi-

tion as it weighs over history and as it deals with divine substance and the
legitimacy of the names by which that divine substance is known. Theolog-
ical discourse, whether it be cataphatic or apophatic, always meets up with
the end wall of what escapes every word and all comprehension, even if this
is in a sparkling powerlessness that will only dispense the grace of silence
and light beyond all gnosis. The axis of theology, dear to the iconoclasts,
finds its strongest formulation in Pseudo-Dionysios: “Since the way of nega-
tion appears to be more suitable to the realm of the divine and since posi-
tive affirmations are always unfitting to the hiddenness of the inexpressible,
a manifestation through dissimilar shapes is more correctly to be applied to
the invisible.”9 This end wall of theology is precisely what the philosophic,
iconic, and discursive solution of the economy tries to respond to. Its oppo-
sition to theology underlies the foundation of the modernity of iconic
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

thought and allows an approach to it in terms other than those of a single

doctrine and religion. It is a thinking in symbolic terms.
The God of the economy distributes himself out, exerts himself,
makes himself known. Once he has become visible, he declares himself
with a face—prosôpon, the term by which the Persons of the Holy Trinity
are designated. This is the hypostatic economy of divinity. In connection
with the always sought and always impossible meeting between God and
humans that characterizes the Old Testament, this is the opening of the
historical field: a face-to-face meeting, an exchange of looks henceforth
possible, and qualified as enigmatic.
Strangely, therefore, the question of the trinitarian economy, while
being situated interior to theology in the general sense of the term, finds it-
self sensu stricto opposed to theology. The discourse of divine substance,
of its eternal, transcendent essence that surpasses all comprehension and
escapes all visibility, can only be hostile to all possibilities of portrayal and
even to each of the historic figures of the redemption. The economy’s role
will consist in finding a way to introduce the figure and history into theo-
logical thought. This is why the church fathers continuously remind their
heretical adversaries (Arians, Montanists, Sabellians . . . ) each time that it
proves necessary that it is important to distinguish the discourse that
speaks according to theology from the one that is situated within the econ-
omy. This reminder will be fundamental during the iconoclastic crisis, be-
cause each combatant will accuse his adversary of not having respected this
distinction. However, the introduction of trinitarian thought overcomes
this distinction nicely. “For who will not say that there is only one God?
For all that, he still does not deny the economy.”10 Hippolytos, who inau-
gurates (so to speak) the first systematization of divine triplehood, thus re-
minds Noetos that according to the economy, there are not three gods.
This double functionality of the concept is striking: it states what the
mystery is and simultaneously introduces what that mystery offers in terms
of figurative potentiality. For all that, however, there is still no question of
the image constituting the definite flesh of the incarnational economy, yet
one still senses that the ground is slowly being prepared. This suggests that
the use of the concept of the economy will become most widespread dur-
ing the debate over the image. In effect, it is in opposition to the rupture
that separates us from the transcendence of divinity in theology that the
economy will establish the conditions of possibility of a discourse con-
cerning God and a certain kind of knowledge of the creator by hu-
  

mankind. Consequently, it would become possible for trinitarian discourse

to be made more open, at just the time when the shock caused by the de-
velopment of heresies made the explanation of what should have remained
a mystery inevitable.
The defense of the trinitarian economy and its definition is closely
linked to the debate that brought the church fathers into conflict with the
Arian heresy. The “pneumatomachs,” or adversaries of the Holy Spirit, had
made dangerous doctrinal decisions concerning consubstantiality and tri-
une unity. Because the economy was the very concept of relations within
the divine, providential management of the visible world, it also became
necessary to entrust it with the formulation of the relations that coordinate
between themselves the three Persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Ghost.
Yet the mystery of divinity must remain whole, and it is worth re-
peating that it is impious to scrutinize it and to ask too many questions.
That is the sin of “indiscreet and curious thought” of which John Chrysos-
tom speaks so magnificently in his tract On the Providence of God.11 De-
spite this recommendation, however, which is appropriate for all mysteries,
the church fathers had difficulty in foregoing all argumentation, and it is
there that their speculations reached their most fertile heights for the future
of iconicity. As St. Augustine wrote in The Trinity: “This wisdom, then,
which is God, how do we understand it to be a Trinity? I did not say ‘how
do we believe?’ for this ought not to be questioned among the faithful; but
if there is any way by which we can see by our understanding what we be-
lieve, what would this manner of seeing be?”12 This is the question, stated
absolutely clearly, to which the economy would have to respond.
The difference between theology and economy is the difference be-
tween believing without seeing and believing while seeing. To talk about
the Trinity would only be possible using the economy of speech, which is
to say, in the mastery of the remove that will always separate the speaker
from the essence of his object—he will only ever be able to reach it rela-
tively. The economy is therefore involved in a sort of semantic doublet. In
effect, it will be both the science of the internal structure of its object, that
is, the science of the relations between the Persons of the Trinity themselves
(understanding and seeing), and the science of the doctrinal statement of
those relations (speaking).
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

The Trinitarian Economy

In order to understand the trinitarian doctrine of relations as one

upon which the doctrine of the image and the icon would come to be
structured, let us now turn to a few significant textual examples. The first
is from Hippolytos in his treatise against Noetos. Starting, as do all the
church fathers, from the usage that Paul makes of the term economy,13 Hip-
polytos understands by it the mystery of the divine plan from creation to
redemption. This is also the most common meaning that it has in Ire-
neaus, where one finds it in both the singular and the plural to designate
all the manifestations of divine activity. What is new in Hippolytos, how-
ever, is his effort to take into account the structure of the divine substance
itself through its manifestations, and we find this in Tertullian as well.
It should be noted, however, that in using the term structure here, we
risk pushing the economy toward an organicist or functionalist interpreta-
tion of divine substance; nevertheless, this is a risk that must be taken, be-
cause it is also necessary for us to investigate the form and foundation of
the discourse that concerns the maintenance of unity in triplicity—how
can the distinction between the Persons of the Trinity be formulated? “But
if he desire to learn how it is shown still that there is one God, let him
know that his power is One. As far as regards the power, therefore, God is
one. But as far as regards the economy there is a threefold manifestation.”14
Manifestation here is the translation of epideixis. The economy thus deter-
mines a field proper to speech and to showing. This field does not put an
end to the mystery of what determines it; it gives word and visibility access
to it. If the concept of economy has anything to do with dialectic, it is
therefore in an entirely Platonic sense. It does not produce reality by the
productive resolution of oppositions; rather, it organizes the modalities of
a line of reasoning in which the term is included in the definition of that
very line of reasoning.

For Hippolytos, the economy really is the ensemble of the divine

plan insofar as it reveals the triple organization of its substance. It is neither
confusion of Persons nor division of divine unity; one is the will, and triple
the action that shows it. Yet what becomes of the economy after Hippoly-
tos, with Tertullian? Tertullian writes in Latin, and the concept of the
economy appears there as dispensatio. J. Moingt15 subtly analyzes Tertul-
lian’s use of the terms dispositio and dispensatio in order to show that the in-
  

terpretation of the trinitarian economy should not be taken to a substantial-

ist extreme, which he reproaches G. L. Prestige for doing.16 By dispositio, we
should understand the functional, triple arrangement of divine substance;
disposition therefore still forms part of monarchical theology. Dispensatio, or
economy, on the other hand, implies the fulfillment and historical unveiling
of the divine plan. “To whom . . . does it belong to recapitulate all things in
Christ, both which are in heaven and earth, but to him whose are all things
from their beginning, including the beginning itself too; from whom issue
the times and the dispensation of the fulness of times, according to which all
things up to the very first are gathered up in Christ?”17
This temporal unfolding of God’s design, through which his sub-
stance is distributed and revealed and that saves us, is the economy. With-
out Trinity, nothing is revealed. “We, however, as we indeed have always
done (and more especially since we have been better instructed by the Par-
aclete, who leads men indeed into all truth), believe that there is only one
God, but under the following dispensation, or economia, as it is called.”18
Tertullian therefore needs the two notions of dispositio and dispensa-
tio to account for triple unity. Dispositio is the internal organization con-
sidered according to its formal distinctions. Dispensatio is the historic or-
ganization of salvific actions. The divinity that exteriorizes its providential
plan in the triple operation of the Persons of the Trinity is said to do so ac-
cording to the economy.
Tertullian keeps the term economy transliterated from the Greek next
to its synonym—dispensatio—in order to designate God’s will to make
manifest the plurality of his names, a plurality that is in him for all eternity
but that becomes a manifest form starting at the incarnation. Moingt con-
cludes in an elegantly metaphorical way: “The economy is what emerges
from God’s secret room [sacramentum] in order to take form in history. As
well as being his plan, the economy is therefore also all those who execute
it, and consequently also the plurality that was hidden in him and that is
made manifest by the missions of the Son and the Spirit, when the secret
will of the economy ‘organizes unity into trinity,’ as its implementation be-
gins.”19 The economy presupposes the dispositio to be an immanent pro-
cession of the Persons of the Trinity, but distinguishes between them by the
designation of their historical appearance.
Here, however, Moingt encounters a difficulty that he does not re-
solve and that leads him into contradiction. Refusing to give any philo-
sophical status to the economy, in order to accord it only to dispositio, he
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

maintains that it is synonymous with historical organization (dispensatio)

and that the mystery of the economy “does not refer to the mystery of the
divine being distributing himself in the plurality of Persons of the Trinity,
neither in eternity nor in time.” Yet he finally asserts that the economy “is
above all else what is signified in nominibus,” which is to say, “God’s secret
will to dispense salvation and administer his power by his Word and his
Spirit, according to the economy that he gave notice of in the Scriptures.”20
Perhaps, rather than being a contradiction, however, this concerns a diffi-
culty in delimiting the historical organization of the missions within the
will to appear, without this forming a foundational unity of the Persons of
the Trinity. The issue of the natural invisible image and the visible image
has not yet formed the nucleus of economic thought, however. Trinitarian
thought will only clarify itself when the economy subsumes the properly
imaginal character of the Person of the Son and his redemptive iconicity.
Once similitude has then become the substantial figure of the Second Per-
son of the Trinity, the Holy Ghost will become the source of the incarna-
tional operation by which the image of the Father will emerge from invisi-
bility, thus opening the iconic field of history to the natural image.
An entirely new level is reached in St. Augustine’s The Trinity, which
comprises a long meditation on the image. From book  on, Augustine
poses not the theological question of the revealed organization of divine
substance, but one about the specific relation that man, made in the image
of God, has with the trinitarian nature of his creator. The Trinity, therefore,
is in man. Augustine looks for the images of the Trinity proper to man that
will permit him to participate directly in the mystery of God.
For God said: “Let us make man in our image and likeness,” and a little later it
was said: “And God made man in the image of God.” It would certainly be incor-
rect to say “our,” because it is a plural number, if man were made in the image of
one Person, whether of the Father, or the Son, or the Holy Spirit; but because he
was made to the image of the Trinity it was, therefore, said: “in our image.” But
again, in order that we might not think that we are to believe in three gods in the
Trinity, since the same Trinity is the one God, it was said: “And God made man in
the image of God.”21

The term economy does not appear here, but what is interesting is the
way in which the relationship of similitude is so intimately linked to trini-
tarian thought, which in turn will lead to the magnificent meditation on
the Pauline formula in the first Epistle to the Corinthians: “For now we see
in a mirror, in an enigma, but then we will see face to face.”22
  

Further along, Augustine cites the second Epistle: “And all of us, with
unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror,
are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to an-
other, for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.”23 He comments on this in
the following way: “He uses the word ‘beholding,’ that is, beholding
through a mirror, not looking from a watch-tower. . . . ‘are being trans-
formed,’ that is, changed from one form into another, and we pass from an
obscure form to a bright form. Because the obscure form is yet the image
of God; and if the image, then certainly also the glory.”24
However, to explain the term enigma, he returns to rhetorical tropes
and concludes that Paul meant by this a sort of obscure similitude:
quamvis similitudinem tamen obscuram et ad perspiciendum difficilem. He
continues: “For the word enigma would not be used here if this seeing were
something easy. And this is a greater enigma, that we do not see what we
cannot not see.”25
This enigmatic formula that attempts to deliver up to us the “great
enigma” of the image accounts fully for what will constitute the essence of
the economy and its theoretical difficulty. It is a vertiginous trope of spiri-
tuality that links the science of God with the science that humanity should
have of itself. Once the temptations of sacrilegious curiosity have passed,
the divine economy allows itself to be approached by a discourse about dis-
course that is itself transformed by announcing that the highest summit of
the science of man is the science of the image that he carries within him-
self and that he can contemplate as an enigma of divinity. Of course, this
does not concern the artificial image, but one can clearly see the effective-
ness of the concept of relations that governs the trinitarian economy.
Thanks to that concept, the inevitably apophatic character of theology ar-
rives at the possibility of relative modes of speaking, in a linkage of the re-
lations of the Persons of the Trinity with the image of that Trinity in man.
The science of the image is the science of humanity; this is what will make the
debate about the science of the icon so important. It will be the science of
thought itself. And iconic doctrine will also be given a trinitarian founda-
tion, under the three headings of homonymy, mimesis, and the line, which
refer, respectively, to the Holy Ghost, the Son, and the Father.
In order for the visible to be transfigured, it is necessary to discover
the term that will effect the transition from the gaze carried by our bodily
eyes to the gaze of the spirit. One approaches an understanding of divinity
by means of a doctrine of an obscure similitude, which progressively be-
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

comes enigmatic; this is exactly what the iconophiles will call a relative
similitude (katà skhésin). Thought about relations will take over from
thought about obscurity, just as the icon will take over from speech: what
rhetoric only says obscurely the icon will make manifest silently, by means
of formal resemblance (homoïosis).
Another fundamental account comes to us from Basil of Caesarea. In
order to refute the heretics who made of the Holy Spirit a being inferior to
the Father and the Son and different to them in nature, Basil replies:
If then in baptism the separation of the Spirit from the Father and the Son is per-
ilous to the baptizer and of no advantage to the baptized, how can the rending
asunder of the Spirit from Father and from Son be safe for us? . . . As we believe in
the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, so are we also baptized in the name
of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.26

This coordination of the three Persons of the Trinity refers to the us-
age that Athanasios makes of the verb suntassein in the third letter to Sera-
pion: “If the Spirit were a being, [God] would not have set it in a specific
order in relation to the Father.”27 Basil insists therefore on defining the re-
lation of “community and continuity” between the Persons of the Trinity.
He uses a synonym for skhésis (relation), oikéïôsis, as it refers to the relations
of intimacy between the Persons:
As there is one Father and one Son, so is there one Holy Ghost.
And it is not only from there that proofs of its community of nature arise,
but also from the fact that one says it of God. Not in the manner in which all
things come from God, but in the sense of proceeding out of God . . . like breath
from his mouth. But in no way is the mouth a member, nor the Spirit breath that
is dissolved.28

In Basil, trinitarian doctrine does not have imaginal power compara-

ble to Augustine’s, but there is a close linkage between the breath of the
Spirit and the incarnation, which brings to mind again Athanasios’s third
letter to Serapion: “This unction, in effect, is the breath of the Son, so that
whoever possesses the Spirit might say: ‘We are the fragrance of Christ.’”29
In fact, all fourteen occurrences of the word economy in On the Holy Spirit
deal with Christ’s providential and redemptive plan of the incarnation, ex-
cept when the issue involves the responsibility for souls. “All those who
have been entrusted with the economy of souls provide witnesses . . . so as
to produce them at some future day.”30 However, reference to the imaginal
economy is found in a passage that precedes the one cited above, which
  

concerns the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son. He then passes to
the Trinity on the basis of the theme of intimate unity. This is a famous
passage that will endlessly be included in iconophile anthologies:
How, therefore, if they are one and one, are there not two gods? Because we speak of
a king, and of the king’s image, and not of two kings. . . . In the same way that the
sovereignty and power over us is one, so the glory that we render to it is not plural
but one; because the honor rendered to the image passes on to the prototype. What
the image is there by imitation, the Son is here by nature. And in the same way that
in works of art resemblance is dependent on the form, so for divine nature, which is
single, it is in the community of the deity that the principle of unity resides.
One also is the Holy Spirit . . . 31

It is of great importance here that the “in the same way . . . so” that
intervenes between the hypostatic image and the artificial image follows
the homonymic remark concerning the king and the image of the king.
This argument will be widely featured in iconophile anthologies in support
of the “ascent” of the image to the prototype. The community of name
(koinonia) will be supported by the economic relation (skhésis) that links
the word, the thing signified, and the image. The image creates a bond that
is neither natural nor artificial between the signifier and the signified. This
bond is economic, that is, of a relative similitude.
When one worships one God of God, one confesses to the proper character of the
hypostases and one remains faithful to the model of divine monarchy, without
therefore scattering the mystery of God in several pieces. Because in God the Fa-
ther and in God the only begotten one contemplates only, so to speak, a single
form reflected in the mirror at no remove from the deity.32

Consequently, the trinitarian economy is both the principle of the or-

ganization of the three Persons interior to an indivisible unity, and an es-
sential equality where the economy is the historical manifestation of the de-
ity; but it is also the possibility of the power to express it and tell of it. Thus
the discourse on the relations of the Persons of the Trinity inaugurates the
discourse on the similitude between divinity and humanity, which, being in
the image of what it speaks about, can for that reason, and under certain
spiritual conditions, produce in turn an image “as a mirror” and “as an
enigma.” Let us not forget that it is in the writings of Paul that the term
economy appears to designate the plan of God for the salvation of humanity,
and that it is also in Paul that we find the foundational principles of the
imaginal doctrine that will itself nourish thinking about the prototype.
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

The Christological Economy

The Christological economy finds its rightful place in a line pro-

ceeding directly from the trinitarian economy. In order to explore this, let
us now turn to the Two Christological Dialogues of Cyril on the incarnation
and on the unity of the Second Person of the Trinity. In the first dialogue,
the term economy recurs nine times, and it is made clear that the christic
economy cannot be separated from the virginal womb that bore it and to
which it owes its visibility.33
Concerning the generation of the Emmanuel by the Virgin, they laugh loudly,
those wretched ones, they criticize that economy, so wonderful, so worthy of God,
for being dishonest. (b)
This childbirth by a virgin and this manifestation [phanérôsis] in the flesh, how
could it not be a futile effort, how could it not be madness and rambling talk, to
describe it as mere appearance [dokéseôs], this economy that is so divine, so con-
sistent and so evident? (b)
As for maintaining . . . that the Word born of God scorned childbirth by the Holy
Virgin . . . this is done by people who blaspheme the economy and who give
themselves permission to criticize divine plans [skémmasin]. (d)
The Only-begotten became like us, that is to say, a man in full, in order to rid our
terrestrial body of the corruption that had entered it, by condescending to a life
governed by the same laws, owing to the economy of union. (c)
The mystery of the economy was harmoniously fulfilled in two ways: the Word
made use of its flesh, on the one hand, as an instrument [organon] in relation to
the workings of the flesh, physical weaknesses, and in everything that was not
blameworthy; of its soul, on the other hand, for all the perturbations proper to
humans for which they are not guilty. (b–c)
Will we expel the Word born of God . . . from exact similitude with the Father . . .
because of the humbled situation that his economy created for him? I will only say
that it is dangerous and mistaken to cut in two and separate the man and the
Word; the economy does not allow it. . . . For it is the Word born of God, united
to humanity by an ineffable union in relation to the economy, that one under-
stands by Christ. (a–c)
Thus when the only Son, co-eternal with the Father and prior to all the ages of the
world, when he was born of a woman and was established as Son . . . then he who
was his Father by nature chose him a name, using, if I may say so, his paternal
rights. You will make us very happy if you have perfectly understood the mode
[tropon] of this economy. (e–a)
  

He indeed absolves of sin he who attaches himself to him, then annoints him with
his spirit, the spirit that he sends in person and in its capacity as the Word of God
the Father, and that he makes well-up in us, of its own nature, but [also] placing
it together with the economy of the flesh, owing to its union with it. (d)

The economy thus cannot be separated from the virgin gestation of

the human flesh of the Word. The carnal economy of Christ’s birth is the
manifestation of the being who needed an instrument. This instrument re-
lates to the redemption and cannot itself be conceived outside of simili-
tude. The Virgin’s flesh brought God’s imaginal manifestation into the
world, his perfect resemblance, with no discrepancies. The Virgin gives
birth to the image, and the Father gives it its name. All these aspects of the
incarnational economy will be found in full again in the iconic economy.
The economy is the assumption of the totality of human specifica-
tions except for that of sin. The true (not ghostly or illusory) visibility of
the Son is part of the enigma of that economy, which is thus once again
presented as the best response to the objections of Docetism.
The incarnation is economic in two ways: the first is kenosis, or the
assumption of the form of a slave as an empty shape; the second is visible
manifestation. Both are essentially mimetic.

To these initial points, we can add those that arise from a second se-
ries of quotations taken from a work dedicated to the unity of Christ.
Cyril’s economic battle is crucial for the icon’s subsequent fate because it
wrestles with heresies that divide or confuse the two natures of hypostatic
unity: several centuries later, it would again become necessary to refute by
means of the iconic economy those who would accuse the icon of dividing
and confusing those two natures. Here are several passages from the second
Christological Dialogue:
The ingenious economy in the flesh of the Only-begotten: they decree that it was
of no use for the inhabitants of the earth. (d)
If, therefore, instead of properly examining the idea of economy in the flesh, we
were to look to the Word, the only Son of God, no longer engaged in the limits of
his annihilation . . . (d)
For everything that is human has also been made his. Therefore, to say that he
took the form of a slave expresses in its entirety the mystery of the economy in the
flesh. (d)
For he no more ceased to be God any longer in becoming man than he refused the
economy out of contempt for the limits of annihilation [kenôseôs]. (c)
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

Why do they refuse him what would make him be considered to be annihilated?
It is to reduce to nothing, in as foolish a way as possible, the ingenuity [eutekhnès]
of his economy in the flesh. (a)
We say that owing to an appropriation [oikeiôsin oikonomikèn] conforming to the
economy, everything that is human is his, and, along with the flesh, everything
that belongs to the flesh. (a)
He has made a gift of his economy of incarnation to the whole world. (b)

These few extracts allow us to round out the preceding discussion of

the economy by bringing kenosis, or annihilation, into a closer connection
with the “instrumental” nature of the incarnation. The term organon (in-
strument) had already been used frequently by Athanasios in his treatise
On the Incarnation to refer to Christ’s body, as in the following passage:
“For being himself mighty and, and Artificer of everything, he prepares the
body in the Virgin as a temple unto himself, and makes it his very own as
an instrument [organon], in it manifested and in it dwelling.”34
Athanasios, however, does not use the term economy and only refers
to the body by the term instrument. In Cyril, on the other hand, it is the
whole economy as a modality of the union of the Word and the flesh in its
humiliated and perceivable manifestation that is subsumed by economic
instrumentality. He even adds a touch of the ingenuity that prepares the
way for all subsequent instrumental uses of the economy, and that will
carry great weight in the defense of the practical and politically effective
uses of the icon. Despite all this, however, the economic use of the term in-
strument should not lead to an instrumentalist heresy that would reduce
Christ’s body to a simple medium. The organon here cannot be separated
from the salvational end that transfigures and saves the instrument in the
resurrection of the flesh. As in the case of Docetism, one must always be on
guard against any reductive interpretation when the flesh and the body are
concerned.
The designation of Christ by the term economy covers the totality of
the plan of salvation as Paul formulated it in the Epistle to the Ephesians,
and it is used by Irenaeus in this way as well, in both the singular and the
plural. This makes its rendering in italics or parentheses by the most expe-
rienced translators all the more surprising, as though the term’s Aristotelian
background or political fate makes its use without oratorical or scriptural
precautions embarrassing. However, it is exactly on the economic interpre-
tation of Christology that the whole philosophical, juridical, and political
fate of the concept depended. For the majority of the most distinguished
  

scholars in the patristic field, a not always conscious adherence to religious

forms of thought has made them fear undermining divinity by using the
concept of economy too freely. Yet the term is the very means by which
something living and human comes to be spoken in Christian thought,
even in its failings. How can the story of Christ’s temptations be under-
stood without recourse to the economy? Is it not more compelling to link
them to an existential meditation on the question of the relation of evil to
the image than to see them merely as a moment of edification? The church
fathers were doubtless more courageous and realistic than our modern in-
terpreters because they felt no shame, no contradiction or inconsistency in
the polysemy of its uses and the diversity of its consequences.
Christ is therefore economy par excellence, in all senses of the term:
he intrinsically forms a part of the arrangement of the Trinity, he made
manifest the union of the Word and the flesh, and he condescended to an-
nihilation and became the instrument of the Father in the plan of salva-
tion. He is image, relation, and organ. And he is these things naturally,
which is to say that he is by nature what his icon will be by technique and
convention. Whatever is by nature and essence, is so absolutely; whatever is
by artifice and convention, is so relatively. The economy, however, will take
on two orders of similitude: natural, absolute similitude, and relative simil-
itude, or formal resemblance. It takes on these two orders because it is an
organ, the agent that relates them to each other. By means of Christology,
the economy becomes the dominant concept of every possible kind of
thought concerning similitude; by means of trinitarian doctrine, it remains
faithful to thought concerning the organization and management of divine
operations throughout the world and history. Alternatively stated, the
economy only exists because there is an organization, administration, and
management of the visibility of which the incarnation is the prototype, and
from which the organization, administration, and management of all visi-
bilities derive, as though from their model. In this context, however, it is
important to recall once again that the visibility of the revelation is not in
any way synonymous with an enlightenment that will put an end to mys-
tery. We are dealing, rather, with its fulfillment, which is always and every-
where enigmatic and specular. Such is the economy that opens to us at
present the double field of nature (body and cosmos) and symbolic opera-
tions (speech, jurisdiction, and strategy).
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

Economy as Providence ( pronoïa )

In order to trace the development of the concept further, it is neces-

sary to link the Christological economy to its corollary, the providential
plan of God, which concerns the whole universe, and within that universe,
the history of humanity. Only then does the passage from providence to
nature appear clearly.
As in Aristotelian thought, the church fathers believed that the prin-
ciples of organization, management, and administration should be drawn
from a natural model, which is in this instance a divine model. This is be-
cause God is the oikonomos, the supreme administrator and manager, and
the ensemble of his creation in the universe is oikonomia. However, because
the concept of providence clashes with the existence of evil and suffering
in the world, the oikonomia was split in two according to whether it was
God’s will and its effect that was being considered, or the free will of hu-
mans. John Chrysostom’s work On Providence clearly shows this double
meaning of the term as it relates either to the cosmological manifestation
of the creator or to the granting of liberty to humans. The economy would
thus have to find a solution linking universal providence to human liberty.
For John, great orator that he was, this is first of all an occasion to display
his eloquence before the beauty and complexity of the world:
This is why, when the whole of creation came into existence and received its own
beauty, when that completely harmonious, extraordinary work, which strikes one
with such great astonishment, was exposed to sight, . . . the lawgiver restrained
any impudent words, saying: “God saw all the things that he made, and saw that
they were perfectly good . . . there was not only light but shadow, not only fruit
but thorns, not only cultivated trees but wild trees, not only level plains but
mountains, valleys and chasms, not only humans but even venomous reptiles.”35

Chapter  of the work is a long descriptive poem on the beauties of

the world and nature, particularly in the long passage that sings the glory
of the creator. It ends in the following way:
By the life and labor that fell to our share, by the food and drink that have been
given to us, by the customs and arts, by the stone, by the mountain that harbors
the metals, by the navigable sea, by the one that is unnavigable, by the islands and
ports, . . . by sickness and health, by our limbs, by the constitution of our soul. . . .
[There follows an evocation of the earth, the sky, and the depths of the oceans.]
And all of this, man, for you! The arts for you, customs, cities, small towns; sleep
for you and death for you.36
  

Thus, it is only if God’s economies encompass everything that the in-

carnational economy will redeem the whole universe. If this economy dis-
appears, everything disappears. Nikephoros will later take up this theme in
relation to the image, and it will prove impossible to understand without
reference to the cosmic implication of the economic plan of providence.
Economic thought ensures the cohesion of the divine plan for the whole of
the universe from its beginning until the end of time. Yet it is evident as
well that this ineffable cohesion is not content to record only preestab-
lished harmony; it also encompasses suffering, evil, and death because it as-
sumes our liberty as well. There is no economy without the spectacle of the
world, with all its complexity and contradictions. The economy is not in
place to resolve apparent contradictions but to keep the route open be-
tween the visible spectacle and the spectacle of mystery, which, once again,
will make of that creation an enigmatic mirror of its creator.
After having seen a great ocean opening up, and after having wanted to explore
the abyss of this providence, gripped by a sort of vertigo when faced with the im-
possibility of explaining his economy, struck with admiration and astonishment
before the ineffable, the infinite, the unutterable, and the incomprehensible [na-
ture] of God’s wisdom, he drew back, having allowed these words to escape, un-
der the blow of astonishment: “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowl-
edge of God!”37

Then, showing that he really has seen its depths, but was not able to
measure them, he adds:
How unsearchable are his judgements and inscrutable his ways . . . so much so
that not only is it impossible to reach their end, but the origin of their economies
[oikonomôn] cannot even be discovered.38
The chosen vessel [Paul], having come to speak of the economy of God and mak-
ing allusion to all the secrets that he learned, in the way in which he knew them,
expressed himself in these terms: “I speak God’s hidden wisdom, his secret pur-
pose framed from the very beginning to bring us to our destined glory.”39
What is more beautiful in your opinion than the sun? And yet, that luminous,
sweet star, night to ill eyes, chars the earth by darting its burning rays, causes
fevers, often dries out the harvest making it unusable, makes the trees sterile and
transforms part of the earth into an area that we cannot inhabit. . . . But by leav-
ing aside such reasonings and the troubles that they cause, we attach ourselves to
that rock that is the word we have quoted: “And God saw all the things that he
made, and saw that they were perfectly good . . . ” Therefore do not say: “Why
this? For what purpose is this?” But when the economies [oikonomôn] and cre-
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

ations of God are concerned, that silence of the clay before the potter, you too [re-
main silent] before God who created you.40

What is interesting in this work is the passage visible from an ac-

count of the providential economy to a providential justification of suffer-
ing, and from there to the management of evil in general, when this man-
agement is nothing but an instrument to reach a spiritual end. Without
doubt inspired by Stoic thought, as were many church fathers before him,
John easily expresses his wonder before the cosmological order in accept-
ing human suffering. Nonetheless, this submission concerns neither an in-
tellectual decision nor a cognitive process. If the providence that watches
over the world (which is economy) remains an “ineffable and incompre-
hensible mystery” that we must refrain from questioning and explaining, it
is nevertheless true that the instrumental explanation that targets evil and
suffering as economy of liberty and organon of salvation makes the mystery
intelligible on an entirely different level. The economy makes us pass from a
regime of mystery to one of enigma, and it was Paul, as we have seen, who
forever tied the status of the image to an enigma. The economy opens to
humans the field of their own free will, beyond even the judgment that
they will pass on their choices, or the means put in place to save themselves
and others over whom they have responsibility. The economy refers to the
exercise of our freedom. As for the responsibility that is incumbent on
some to be the ministers and servants of providence, that will necessarily
form part of the remit of the economy, and those who are responsible for
being the instruments of providence for others will be the oikonomoi. . . .
The pastoral economy is the mimésis of the providential economy.
Chapter  of John’s work, entitled “Why are the actions of malicious
men, demons, and the devil allowed in this world,” will consequently take
up the theme of the integration of evil with the plan of salvation. Once he
has reminded us of the silence required from us, clay that we are in the
hands of the potter, he continues:
We say that these offences are allowed in order that the rewards of the just not be
diminished . . . Paul also said: “Indeed, there must be factions among you, for only
so will it become clear who among you are genuine.”41
Moreover, the wicked have been left free for another reason: in order that they
not be deprived of the usefulness that results from their conversion. . . . Con-
cerning the Antichrist, Paul gives another reason. What, exactly? It is in order to
suppress all the Jews’ possible means of defense. The former would have been
  

wronged if they had not had the opportunity to fight, but the latter, having suf-
fered harm, should not be reasonably allowed to blame their fall on anyone other
than themselves.42

The experience of evil and of suffering must encounter its economic

solution in the free intelligence of whatever is most profitable for the sal-
vation of Christians, and consequently, the greatness of the church. Thus
the providential economy does not blindly put back in our hands some in-
comprehensible power that will only demand from us blind passivity or re-
nunciation; rather, it leads us to administrate and manage for ourselves, to
the best of our ability, what it is given to us to endure in the full exercise of
our judgment. “Do you see what obedience he demands, what silence? It is
certainly not to suppress our free will [autoexiousion] that he says this.”43
Once the outrage of evil and death has been assumed by the incarna-
tional economy, that economy is commented on in astonishing terms con-
cerning a brilliant spectacle and revelation:
He wanted the resurrection to take place in private and in secret. . . . But the cross,
it was in the middle of the city, in the middle of a festival, in the midst of the Jew-
ish people, when the law-courts were in session, those of the Romans and the Jews,
when the festival brought everyone together . . . before the assembled world, that
he was tortured; and as only those present could see what happened, he ordered
the sun to announce it to the whole world by hiding itself, which it boldly did.44

We see here again the spectacular dimension of the economy, in all its
fullness. It is directed at the gaze, it searches for it, provokes it, and makes
it a means for the proof of salvation, by accepting the providential outrage
of the suffering and death of the Word of God. In the words of Moingt,
cited above in connection with the Trinity, the issue is one of leaving “the
secret room” while still remaining hidden. Wherever the enigma of the
economy is, there too is the enigma of the image, perhaps even still now,
today.
John continues his rousing meditation on “providential” evil before
finishing his work by recalling the gains and rewards that are made possi-
ble by it. True, only spiritual and salvational benefits will reward the vic-
tims of suffering, injustice, and evil, but sometimes even Chrysostom will
plead for an enlightened sharing out of bitter remedies and guile in a bet-
ter service of the truth, and this all still in the name of that same economy.
The essence of revelation in the economy never stops linking together the
incessant coming and going between the visible and the hidden, enigma
and mystery. Every good Christian will have to be an “economist.”
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

Economy of the Flesh

As a proper consequence of the providential economy that informs

the whole of creation, the economy can only be found in the gaze focused
on our own incarnation, that is, on our own bodies, which are completely
implicated in the plan of redemption. The transfiguration of the flesh and
its redemption presupposes that this, our body, which Christ assumed in
totality (except for its sinfulness) carries the mark of the creator. The hu-
man body is in the image of God: it forms part of his economy. The mys-
tery of eucharistic transubstantiation would make no sense if the flesh and
blood of which we are constituted were not in the image of and did not re-
semble the one who desired to redeem that mimésis itself. Following is a
quote from Irenaeus, who used the full force of his words to fight the Do-
cetists, the heretics who made Christ a ghost and our body a straitjacket of
sinful gloom that separates us from God:
In vain, anyway, do those who reject the whole economy [Adelin Rousseau (the
French translator) still puts the word in quotation marks!] of God deny the salva-
tion of the flesh, scorning its regeneration. As the blessed Apostle said in his Epis-
tle to the Ephesians: “We are the limbs of his body, formed of his flesh and his
bones”; it is not of just any pneumatic and invisible man that he says this, for the
spirit has neither bones nor flesh, but he speaks of the true human organism, com-
posed of flesh, of nerves, and of bones. For it is this very organism that is nour-
ished by the cup that is the blood of Christ and strengthened by the bread that is
his body.45

A little further on, he insists:

The flesh will be capable of receiving and containing the power of God, because
in the beginning it received God’s art and thus a part of it became the eye that
sees, another the ear that hears, another the hand that feels and works, another the
nerves that are stretched out all over and that hold the limbs together, another the
arteries and the veins through which the blood and breath travel, another the dif-
ferent viscera, another the blood that ties the soul and body together, and more be-
sides. For it is impossible to enumerate all the constituent elements of the human
organism that were not created without the great wisdom of God.46

We have quoted Irenaeus at length because his argument is impor-

tant for an understanding of icon doctrine in its powerful appeal to flesh
and matter. The organic and physiological economy has its roots in the di-
vinity of our primitive incarnation. Through its carnal economy, the Vir-
gin’s body, which was the true physiological receptacle of the Word in the
  

course of an entirely human pregnancy, participated in the economic plan

of redemption by agreeing to bring the image of the Father, that is, his
economy, into the world. Alternatively stated, far from concerning a con-
cept that, wanting to say everything, no longer means anything at all, we
encounter a term that can, for the first time among the Greeks, give voice
to something that can provide the foundation for both organic life and
freedom of thought. This something, we might say, presents itself as a “to
suffer,” a pashkein, which will subsume both the affectivity and power of
suffering by declaring it to be in the mode of a paschal joy. The body’s
economy for suffering is inseparable from the body’s economy for resur-
rection. In Peri tou anthropou kataskeuès (On the making, or constitution,
of Man), translated as De natura hominis, by the monk Meletios, a con-
temporary of Chrysostom, economic thought appears only in the form of
a verb, never as a noun.47 We encounter no instance of oikonomia, but
oikonomein occurs several times with respect to the following topics:
—In relation to the liver, which nourishes all the parts of the body with
blood. Here, the economy is referred to as providence.48
—Elsewhere, the phrase arkousa dioikèsis amounts to the same thing as
oikonomia and means “the administration of expenses in sufficient quantity”
within the interior of the body (referring as well to the beating of the heart).49
—In relation to the feet, the creator acted by giving each element its own place.50

Oikonomia therefore implies the science and technique of order and

the subordination of parts to a whole. It refers to the principle of life (the
mysterious, obscure aspect) and the principle of order (the clear aspect of
wondrousness). . . . 51 Meletios marvels at the order of the organon that is
the body, where the means implemented are perfectly adapted to the func-
tion that is their end. Only man is capable of walking, smiling, of having
an “economic” nature here and a transformed nature in the beyond. In ef-
fect, what interests and fascinates Meletios is the internal, living adminis-
tration of bodies that move, that breathe, that suffer and die. For the eco-
nomic order also implies mortality.
To sum up, then, Meletios uses oikonomein as a verb to refer to the
living, functional, and humoral effect of divinity within the human crea-
ture: the heart, for example, by its beating, economizes all things
(“oikonomoûsa tà sumpanta”). The economic effect is therefore both vital-
ist and functionalist, as the body’s providential economy gives each limb
and each organ its proper place and the most perfectly adapted form for its
function.
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

In the same fashion, the flow of mother’s milk is a providential law

whose very existence puts an end to the exposure of infants. Thus writes
Clement on the subject of the oikonomia tou galaktos [the economy of
milk]. Evidently, the economy therefore was also the primary concept con-
cerning adaptation to circumstances, stressing the formulas most favorable
to life and eliminating those that were not suitable to it. Thus monsters are
excluded from it, just as illness eliminates them naturally, as was the case
with Constantine V for Nikephoros. This is the same idea that will later
make it possible for us to see a saint’s body transform itself into an iconic
mummy, provoking wonder at the whole corporeal mechanism. The econ-
omy can thus also lead to the closing of all orifices and the halt of all the
elementary functions of life, even while it remains the principle of the or-
ganization and harmonious functioning of the body’s organs.
A first explanation of these features might appeal precisely to the eco-
nomic principle of adaptation: what is most fitting and desirable for all is
not necessarily suitable to the saint whose body is also adapted to the mis-
sion that he gives himself or the goal he sets for himself, which is to be in
the image of the image. But it appears that we must search further for what
unifies the economy here, and examine other testimony as well. In the
story that Eusebios tells of the martyr Polycarp, one reads that when the
saint undergoes his final tortures, the onlookers are “struck at the sight of
the economy of his flesh, seeing even the interior of the circulatory system
of his blood and his arteries.”52 The same characteristics are also to be
found in relation to the martyrdom of St. Artemios, who appeared ab-
solutely clearly as an écorché, as reported by John of Damascus: “It is as
though his human form has disappeared. He is naked, the bones crushed,
the parts of the body broken, and one can see the economy of his human
nature [tèn oikonmian tès anthropinès phuseôs].”53
Thus the saint, thanks to his martyrdom, shows us what he is made
of, as we would say. The story of the sufferings of Christ’s passion, the in-
creasing complaisance in describing those sufferings and wounds, the vi-
sion of his sweat and his blood, are just so many proofs of his internal and
true carnal economy. They are the tortures that deliver up to the eyes of all
the body’s naturally invisible economy. The unveiling of the viscera and the
secrets of the flesh make manifest the path of incarnation and resurrection,
just as the womb of the Virgin did. The Virginal body of Mary therefore
participates in this plan in respect of everything that is physiologically nec-
essary for a natural pregnancy, except for the seed of the father. The Virgin’s
body was not used by God as a canal but as a fertile womb, occupied by
  

the bubbling up of blood and its supposed transformation into milk.54 The
economy of the flesh is the body’s invisible interior suddenly become visi-
ble in order to deliver up the true economic message of the redemption. It
is the organon, the organ, and the epiphany. It refers simultaneously to the
bringing of the spiritual mysteries into the light of day and the coming
into visibility of the organic interiority of the body. Thus medical discourse
and theological discourse respond to each other and share among each
other both the good and the bad. This unveiling of the primordial invisi-
bility of the body’s interior is essential for the plan of salvation, where the
flesh must be revived; to phrase the same issue in a different way, the pas-
sage from darkness to light does not function as a simple dissection, but
rather as a transfiguration. It is the mystery of the interior that offers itself
enigmatically to the gaze in order to be deciphered, on the same model as
he who seals the passage from the Old Covenant to the New. Thus, much
later even, in the eleventh century, Garnerius of Saint-Victor would in the
same way still enumerate the physiological and spiritual meaning of each
part of the body in his treatise on man.55
In counterpoint to that flesh that fails us and is lost to us, the body
also provides a full range of metaphors and portents of salvation. Thus, the
bones are the framework of the body, the church, and Christ. As for the
skin, it is the female saints who stick to the bones of Christ when the flesh
(the disciples) fails him. In other instances, marrow is the food of bones,
and therefore, by economic prefiguration, divine royalty, subtlety of spirit,
hidden riches, and intentions. It is a highly economic part of the body be-
cause it participates in the things that are configured within a system in or-
der to ensure its living power and its durability. These subtleties and in-
tentions allow us to understand this marrow of speech as the very fat that
feeds sacred eloquence and ensures its unctuousness.
From the point of view of the redemptive economy, it is interesting
as well to note the unusual status of the viscera, which are that intimate
part of the body that escapes the condemnation of the flesh. For the Mar-
ian womb as much as for the open body of the martyrs, the viscera are the
shape of the ecclesial body. “The word viscera refers to those in the church
who are worthy of the spiritual sacraments. . . . What should we under-
stand by the viscera of the church other than the souls of those who con-
tain within themselves some of its mysteries?”56 Thus the viscera in our
body are in the image of our sacramental incorporation in the ecclesiastic
institution.
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

Visceral interiority itself prepares the way for the enigma of the in-
scription of the uncircumscribable, and we will later see the degree to
which Constantine V’s body will incarnate the monstrous invisibility of a
depraved interior. Everything that concerns the devil is revealed under the
sign of rejection, not of appearance. Excrement, the fetus, vomit, eructa-
tions are so many irruptions of diabolic invisibility. Conversely, Christ’s
body and those of the saints and martyrs allow the delightful mystery of
the natural economy and sacramental organization to appear in full day-
light. Whatever is inside (tà eisô) reaches the eyes by means of the econ-
omy. There is no contradiction, therefore, in physiological discourse rub-
bing shoulders with the two-sided sanctification of the saints’ transfigured
body. Consequently, demons maliciously attack precisely their victims’
economy, as do the sorcerers of whom John of Damascus speaks with as-
tonishment in his brief On Female Vampires. He reports: “Some say that
women pass through the walls of their houses and grab hold of newborns
in order to devour them, to eat their liver and even their whole oikono-
mia.”57 In his edition of that work, Migne notes that John is referring there
to humor, which is defined as “omne ex quo habitudo corporis illorum con-
stat,” that is, whatever their mode of being corporeal consists in. Monsters
are, contrary to nature, vampires who feed on the blood of others; this is
the converse of Christ, who makes a gift of his flesh and blood in order to
provide life for others. The economy thus participates in this way in the
general move away from the Old Testament holocausts that had been nec-
essary to achieve a true sacrifice.
Discourse about the body is closely linked to two themes: the eu-
charist and the resurrection of the flesh thanks to the womb of the Virgin,
which is henceforth that of the church. The sacramental economy of flesh
and blood and the “economy of wood” (the cross) uphold the whole phys-
iological edifice that allows us to speak of the body of believers, of sinners,
and of martyrs. The description of the atrocities perpetrated by female
vampires is the reverse image of the appearances of the christic body; like
it, female vampires pass through walls, but conversely, this is to spread
death. Hélène Sorlin, in an article examining female vampires and goblins,
lists several examples where sorcery myths were used for theological refuta-
tion,58 as John of Damascus does. Although Sorlin stresses the question of
the real and immaterial nature of the christic body after the resurrection in
these stories, I would here like to highlight the destruction of the internal
parts of the body, which are called economy. The aim of these stories al-
  

ways remains the same in the discourse of the church fathers: opposing
pairs are established, with the economy always remaining on the same side:
that of the sacred, the divine, and the natural order. Our created flesh is
configured in the image of our redeemed flesh. The economic studies of
human nature concern not the body inhabited by the devil, but only the
one created in the image of the creator, and which will be redeemed by the
image of that creator through redemptive iconicity and ecclesial incorpo-
ration. We will soon see the consequences of this in the spread of the iconic
economy and in the inverted image of the emperor’s body.

The Economy of Speech and God’s Guile

Let us now turn our attention to the final facet of economic thought.
Having dealt with the sacred and nature, we now come to speech and rea-
son, which are the discursive, educational, and strategic aspects of the
economy. In this context, let us examine the article “Économie” in Migne’s
Encyclopédie théologique. Noteworthy here is the fact that the section con-
cerning what is generally considered to be the principle or most current
meaning of the term, its Christological and providential senses, is very
brief. On the other hand, the rhetorical and circumstantial aspects of the
term are discussed at length, as though to answer urgently weighing
Protestant accusations concerning Roman Catholic laxity and strategizing.
Below are a few extracts:
Economy: government. This term is sometimes used to refer to the manner in
which it pleased God to govern men in the matter of salvation; in this sense, the
old economy, which took place under the law of Moses, is distinguished from the
new, which was established by Jesus Christ; this is the sense in which it is used by
St. Paul.59 More commonly, however, he uses it to refer to the leading of the
church as it is entrusted to pastors.60 It is usually rendered in the Vulgate as dis-
pensatio. Simply experiencing its energy is sufficient to make one understand that
the pastors’ ministry is not restricted only to teaching or preaching, and that no
one is permitted to exercise it without a special mission from God.
Sometimes, the early church fathers used the term economy with a very dif-
ferent meaning, or at least, so the Protestants claim. They say that the Platonists
and Pythagoreans had a maxim that deception, even lies, were allowed as long as
they were beneficial to piety and truth, that the Jews in Egypt learned this maxim
from them, and the Christians in turn adopted it. . . . In the third [century], the
Christian doctors who had been raised in the schools of the orators and Sophists
brazenly used the art of subterfuge that they had learned from their masters for the
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

benefit of Christianity; solely concerned with defeating their enemies, they hardly
cared what means they used to win victory: this method is called “speaking with
economy”61 and it was generally adopted because of the taste for rhetoric and false
subtlety.

After this introduction, Migne continues by quoting St. Jerome’s

thirtieth letter to Pammachius, which is a true topos on the matter of the
economy. He cites the following passage:
It is one thing to argue, and another to teach. In argument, speech is vague; he
who responds to an adversary says first one thing, then another; he argues as he
pleases. He puts forward one proposition and proves another; as the saying goes,
he shows a piece of bread, but holds a stone. In dogmatic discourse, on the con-
trary, one must show oneself forthrightly and act with the greatest candor; but it
is one thing to search, and another to decide; and in the one case it is a question
of fighting, and in the other, of teaching.

He then gives this commentary:

Does it follow from this that, following St. Jerome’s sentiment, these church fa-
thers cheated and used lies, affected equivocations, and mental qualifications to
deceive their adversaries? Aliud loqui, aliud agere: loqui quod non sentiunt, sed quod
necesse est, a much abused expression, means to not say what one is thinking; it
does not mean to say the opposite of what one is thinking. However, we maintain
that the church fathers, in disputing the pagans, were able to not say what they
were thinking, that is, they were able to not expose their Christian belief, because
that was not the place to do it. . . . This is what the church fathers did, and that is
all that St. Jerome meant.

Also in the Encyclopédie is the following definition under the entry

“Pious Fraud”: “a lie, a deception, or a piece of trickery perpetrated on the
grounds of religion, and with the aim of serving it.” Such behavior, however,
is completely condemned on principle: “It is a sin that purity of motive can-
not excuse and that the religion itself condemns.” The article then contin-
ues: “Jesus Christ ordered his disciples to join the innocence of the dove to
the wariness of the serpent.”62 St. Paul did not want anyone to be able to
even so much as suspect him of lying: “But if, through my falsehood, God’s
truthfulness abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sin-
ner and why not say, ‘Let us do evil so that good may come?’”63
The article also analyzes the exemplary cases of Origen and John
Chrysostom, to whom we will return shortly, and whom the article’s au-
thor places in direct relation with the text of Plato’s Republic in which lies
  

are distinguished according to their usefulness: “Any idea admitted by a

person of [a young] age tends to become almost ineradicable and perma-
nent. All things considered, then, that is why a very great deal of impor-
tance should be placed upon ensuring that the first stories they hear are
best adapted for their moral improvement.”64 The article then ends with
these words:
Much fun has been made of the word economy, by which St. John Chrysostom
and other church fathers referred to the innocent guile that they made efforts to
justify. Mosheim’s translator observed correctly that the economic method of ar-
gument consisted in adapting oneself as much as possible to the tastes and preju-
dices of those one was trying to convince. St. Paul himself said that he acted in this
way, and that he became a Jew with the Jews, and so forth.65 The nonbelievers,
however, turned this into a crime.

These lines are sufficient to show the confusion and relative contra-
dictions of those who, today as much as yesterday, cannot concede to ac-
cept the economy in its most profound, conceptual coherence. The the-
ologian of the Trinity, the jurist, the preacher, the teacher—all are
confronted by the problem of the adaptation of the law to real life, of
means to ends, of transcendence to history, and cannot concede to admit
that, for Byzantine thought, the totality of the incarnational plan and the
redemption falls under the effects of the same principle that resolves the
conflictual aporias between the spiritual and temporal world. Hence the
notes, the italics, the parentheses, the comments in the form of pleas or ex-
cuses. Yet for the church fathers of the first centuries, economic thought
functioned with all its resolvent effectiveness and responded with increas-
ing subtlety to the requirements and needs of the times, and it did this
with the most profound dogmatic coherence. It is also evident that its
foundational principle becomes more specific with time and takes on ex-
traordinary philosophical density, until at one particular moment, the im-
age arrives and seals its conceptual unity. If God found it useful to employ
guile with those who believe only in what they see by agreeing to promote
the economic figure of his filial visibility in the visible world, then those
who in turn are responsible (oikonomos) on earth for serving him can re-
main silent about the truth or use guile with the enemy, on the condition
that they practice a nontransgressive accommodation (oikonomia) that has
a salvational goal in view, for souls as well as institutions.
God’s victory has its price and demands sacrifices. The expenditure
(dispensatio) made in this respect resembles an investment because the
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

benefits are redemption and divine victory. The sacrifice of the filial image
saved him who, made in the image of his creator, had fallen. But that is not
the only benefit of the economy. If it were only that, and if it reserved the
field of measures that were effective in terms of strategy and accommoda-
tion only for itself, it would hardly be of interest to philosophy. There is
more: the economy, as we will see, is only in the service of victory because
it never stops defining itself as being in the service of life. This organic am-
bivalence between a tool and a vital organ is at the heart of a system of
thought concerning tekhné that will assume a natural model in order to
raise artifice to the level of an ontological manifestation. This will become
yet another new way of defining the economy.
It is necessary, then, for us to return to the juridical nature of the
concept, which is the aspect that has been best studied, having unfortu-
nately been so often accused of total misalignment with its Christological
meaning. Dagron’s article, which we looked at earlier, concludes that the
economy is totally inconsistent with respect to the issue of the rule and the
exception. In fact, however, the saying according to which the exception
confirms the rule probably has a grammatical and not juridical origin. The
patristic economy confronts the long shadow of the law, from which it dis-
tances itself, the better to fulfill it, and by this means shows the complex
relation of the law to history. An appropriate level must be found for the
process of interpreting the law in an elastic, accommodating manner, for
indulgence and tolerance toward its contravenors, and the conditions of
application of these practices must be formulated in order for the economy
to be able to negotiate with reality without thereby contravening the law
sensu stricto. Dagron makes quite clear that the economy is neither casu-
istic nor jurisprudential. The issue here rather concerns the relation that
the economy maintains with the law in canon law and in the historical cir-
cumstances that led the church fathers to take measures that strict akribeia
(the rigorous application of the law) may have required, but that thereby
may have rendered it ineffective. The economy concerns the relation of life
to the law, a law that no exception could ever confirm. The exception is
much more than a convention of communication and custom that keeps it
in statistical isolation. The exception can only occur once, or a limited
number of times, and yet not modify the rule that prevails in all other
cases. The economy, however, is entirely different: its christic model could
never be thought of in terms of the exception! It incarnates the new defi-
nition of the law, and its condescension still continues to fulfill a plan that
is exceptional in its mystery and perfectly natural in its internal configura-
  

tion. To not understand the way in which this incarnational development

generates law would amount to considering, as do the heretics, that the Son
(and therefore the manifestation of the Father’s economy) was only a cir-
cumstantial remedy to our spiritual maladies. Dagron cites in this respect
Eulogios, Patriarch of Alexandria, whose polemical work is noted by Pho-
tios, and who is undoubtedly the first Christian author to devote himself to
the concept of the economy in a systematic manner in order to question the
conditions and limits of its effectiveness and legitimacy. He distinguishes
three sorts of economy: the first is temporary and circumstantial; the second
concerns the choosing of words or, if necessary, silence; and the last con-
cerns the suspension of the application of a decree. His Christological model
is clear as well; it concerns time, words, silence, and the law. Thus Christ’s
economy is historical, it is made manifest by preaching and the silence of
the passion, and it modified the meaning of the law. Yet Eulogios is also
careful to link this economy to ecclesiastic responsibility by reminding us
that only those who are already servants of Christ and invested with epis-
copal authority can judge and act with economy.
The economy is always put into practice by a mediator who in a crit-
ical or conflictual situation must find a formula for legitimizing and justi-
fying a decision that would not, even occasionally, reduce the law to the
rule by means of an exception. As the science of compromise that must
never compromise anything or encourage any future repetition by setting
a precedent, the economy, far from being an exception, in reality lessens all
circumstantial exceptions and is similar to an exercise in prudence, which
is to say, in existential wisdom. Let us call existential wisdom every act of
interpretation and adaption to circumstances that chooses never to sepa-
rate thought from life, or the concept from the flesh that makes it mani-
fest. It is always exemplary in method, but never in the content of what it
does or decides in each circumstance. Contrary to jurisprudence, the same
case can involve economic measures that are completely contradictory
(taking into account historical situations that are always individual), and
contradictory attitudes can, at the same time, involve the same economy.
What prevails in all cases is the end goal. Only the unity of ends allows one
to admit the plurality of means.
The economy is thus a manifestation in history, but it is not limited
by history. It exceeds all strictly historical circumstances in order to reveal
the meaning of history itself. The economy is the historical modality of the
configuration of truth for fallen souls, and that until the end of time. The
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

model of every economy is God himself, who offers us the image of his
Son and the model of his actions. Once we are saved, we will see God no
longer in the economic enigma adapted to our weakness, but “face to face.”
It was, in fact, imperative that the economy be everything except a
“blurred concept,” “purely negative,” or “empty.” The economy is an oper-
ative concept that is defined by its living fertility. And this is all the more
clear in that it takes for its historical model the fertility of the virginal
womb. If there is any emptiness in the economy, it is only by the effect of
kenosis, of the hollowing-out of the incarnation itself. How could it have
been otherwise for a term that refers to divine providence and the incarna-
tion of Christ in a single movement?
Dagron, however, convinced of the conceptual emptiness of the
term, ends up defining the economy as “rhetorical.” He is therefore only
able to define its unity by referring it to a specific manipulation of speech
that pleads, defends, or justifies. But this is once more to take the concept
for what it is the condition of: the cause for the effect. In order for rhetor-
ical power to exist, it is necessary that economic thought be able to serve as
a model for the administration of the relations between truth and the liv-
ing strategy destined to make it triumph. God’s guile results from his free-
dom, a freedom that is immanent to reality itself.
In order to clarify the economy, whether holily strategic or simply
tactical, let us now examine three key examples that continually served as
references for the church fathers in their justification of their terrestrial and
temporal practice of the truth. The texts are drawn from Origen’s Com-
mentary on the Gospel According to Matthew, in which the economy con-
cerns the idea of accommodation; Basil of Caesarea’s On the Holy Spirit,
where the author explains his silence on the subject of the consubstantial-
ity of the Third Person of the Trinity; and John Chrysostom’s On the
Priesthood, which deals directly with economic guile and deceit, and which
leads us directly to the initial and fundamental question of the incarnation
as the constitutive legislative “abeyance” of the law itself.

Adaptation

Origen’s commentary appears in the French series “Sources chréti-

ennes,” translated by Robert Girod, who apparently feels the need to put
the word economy in parentheses: “The Gospel text is not only simple, as
some think, but it was presented to simple people with economy as being
  

simple. For those who want to understand it in a more penetrating man-

ner and who are capable of it, realities full of wisdom and worthy of the
Logos of God are hidden within it.”66
Girod then cites St. Augustine’s Commentary on the Lord’s Sermon on
the Mount in a note: “[God,] through his holy prophets and servants and
in accordance with a most orderly economy of circumstances . . . gave the
lower precepts to a people whom it behooved to be bound by fear; through
his Son, he gave the higher precepts to a people whom it befitted to set free
by charity. . . . [He] alone knows how to proffer to the human race a med-
icine adapted to its circumstances.”67 This association of the economy with
medicine dispensed by a doctor more worried about health than truth is a
topos of the same sort as the stories in Plato’s Republic that are intended to
make small children behave properly. Origen even goes so far as to say that
the truth has a fatal effect on those who are not ready to receive it:
Those who are still ill are not able to receive the blessed bread of Jesus. But if
someone, instead of listening to the words: “Let everyone put himself to the test,”
and thus prepared, he “eats of this bread” and paying no attention to this warning,
and in the state that he is in, takes part in the bread and chalice of the Lord, he be-
comes weak or ill, or even scatterbrained, so to speak, by the power of the bread,
and he dies.68
The Lord comes in the form of the Savior, as a good physician.69

The general precept that governs all these economic uses is the phrase
taken from Matthew: “Do not give what is holy to dogs; and do not throw
your pearls before swine.”70 Misfortune will come to those who obtain
what they are they not worthy of. What characterizes Origen’s conception
of the economy and differentiates it largely from Basil’s and Chrysostom’s,
however, is that it is tied to qualities of attentive listening and to the spiri-
tual level of the person that it addresses. Like all medicine, it is adapted to
the illness that it treats. In the words of Athanasios, “Just as the doctor has
recourse to subterfuge in order to make one drink the medicine,” so the
church will make us swallow its message by employing formulations
adapted to our respective illnesses and dispositions.
The fact that medicine is capable of returning one to health, how-
ever, does not mean that it must be continually employed in order to re-
main healthy, and even less that the medicine is the general cause of
health—once cured, the patient can dispense with it. In this sense, the vis-
ible world is nothing but the medicine that our blindness calls for, and the
future use of the concept will go beyond even this point by making the vis-
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

ible the very essence of our own relation to the truth. Thus the economy,
having started out simply as a circumstantial cure, turns into a synonym
for all thought incarnated in life.

Silence and Accommodation

In order to reach that point, however, the economy had to take a new
philosophical and spiritual step. A century after Origen, the church’s posi-
tion had become critical because the emperor Valens had converted to Ar-
ianism. The first Nicene council had ruled on the consubstantiality of the
Son, but it still remained for the church fathers to establish the consub-
stantiality of the Holy Spirit before trinitarian doctrine would be able to
establish the identity of the hypostases in terms of their substance and their
divine equality. At just that moment, just as the trinitarian question was
proving to be a serious stumbling block with the Arians, Basil, then bishop
of Caesarea, found himself divided between his doctrinal mission and the
threat that hung over his episcopal seat as well as over the security of the
Christians of Cappadocia, who the Arians were then preparing to perse-
cute. He therefore adopted a median solution by speaking of homotimie,
that is, of the equality of honor between the Persons of the Trinity, but
mentioned nothing about the consubstantiality of the Holy Spirit. As a re-
sult, a debate arose concerning his silence, and it is exactly on that subject
that Athanasios and Gregory of Nazianzos invoke his economy. Basil, it
turns out, had used such shrewdness and taken so many precautions in set-
ting out his doctrine that he even became suspect in the eyes of strict
Nicene orthodoxy. Even here, then, at the very heart of the debate about
the divine economy of the incarnation, we encounter a use of the economy
in its sense of a strategic accommodation to circumstances in the form of
silence. Yet, because the economy is itself a principle of continuity, we also
discover its operational cohesion within the activities that constitute its
own field, and it is for this reason that we cannot agree with Benoît Pruche,
the editor of the Basil text in the “Sources chrétiennes” series. Speaking of
the term oikonomia, Pruche notes: “The word was coined by Athanasios
and Gregory of Nazianzos. It characterizes the fairly complex attitude of
the Bishop of Caesarea before the explicit declaration of the divine con-
substantiality of the Holy Spirit; it therefore has a special meaning here,
bearing no relation to what it normally signifies in patristics: the mystery of
the redemptive incarnation, in opposition to theology, which refers to the
  

mystery of God.”71 To say that the word was invented by Athanasios and
Gregory of Nazianzos when their use of it still conforms to its Classical
meaning of the management of and enlightened adjustment to real, criti-
cal situations is already an astonishing statement, to say the least. To assert
in the same breath, however, that this usage bears no relation to the patris-
tic sense of the term when we are located at the very heart of the patristic
oeuvre itself shows the degree to which conceptual confusion leads to the
refusal of any theoretical efforts concerning the cohesion of the system of
thought itself. The meaning of oikonomia in Basil corresponds entirely
with Dagron’s study concerning the relations between canon law and indi-
vidual cases, and it is in full agreement with what canon law calls the ec-
clesiastic economy. There is nothing in this meaning of the term that has
been made up; rather, it makes use of its classic sense within canon law,
and more generally, in all circumstances of pastoral or political life where
the person who is about to take action must keep in mind the ends that he
is aiming for in order to adapt the best means possible for attaining them,
all the while keeping alive the spirit of church doctrine and not losing sight
of the interests of the moment. As in the previous case with Origen, what
disturbs the commentators did not disturb the church fathers in the least:
using the same word to refer to the mystery of the incarnation and the en-
lightened process of deliberately adapting to a given situation. Oppor-
tunism thus became a political and spiritual virtue that served the interests
of the church better than an intransigent rigorism would have done in an
unfavorable power struggle, where the victory of doctrine or the institution
was not assured.
Consider in this connection Theodore of Stoudios, who on a differ-
ent occasion demonstrated his demand for akribeia in relation to the adul-
terous marriage of Constantine VI, yet who also wrote the following:
Question: how should Christians, who live amidst heretics and must maintain
their desire for perfection, behave?
Answer: no monk should share his meal with a heretic unless he has no
choice: in doing this, he is adopting an economic attitude [ei mè ti oikonomias
tropoi].72

Theodore in this instance is only following the example set by Basil in re-
lation to the question of the baptism of the Asians—Basil believed that
those baptisms should be recognized as valid without entering into the par-
ticulars of orthodoxy in an inadequate fashion, owing to the economy of
many things (“oikonomias eneka tôn pollôn”), by which we should under-
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

stand a managed organization of the truth that takes into account many
circumstantial parameters. To be economic is to take into account, to
reckon with, to calculate the advantages and disadvantages.
What, then, is this ongoing refusal to recognize the doctrinal coher-
ence of the term economy other than an early disavowal of the links that
bind the future of the doctrine concerning the Father’s natural image to po-
litical stakes and temporal interests? In appearing to dissociate themselves
from a highly metaphysical or religious integration of the concept of econ-
omy, historians and translators arrive at the same result as strictly religious
souls do because both, in the same way, separate out what is structurally de-
signed to communicate. In trying too hard to avoid the philosophical ques-
tioning of a world that continually integrated spiritual care with political
decisions, however, one also loses whatever constituted the specific unity of
that way of thinking, by setting it in contradiction with itself or even at-
tributing to it inconsistencies that are groundless. Thus in the debate over
Basil’s silence, Athanasios and Gregory both defend him against accusations
of cowardice or anti-Nicene treachery. In his letter to Palladios, Athanasios
condemns “the audacity of those who dare to raise their voices against the
beloved and true servant of God, Bishop Basil.”73 The monks must “con-
sider his economy and render glory to God, who gave to Cappadocia this
bishop, the like of whom all countries wish that they had.” The struggle be-
tween the “pneumatomachs,” or adversaries of the Holy Spirit, demands a
response that is specifically tailored, at once both firm and prudent. Thus
Basil writes in a letter, “Above all else, it is necessary to avoid renewing the
battles over consusbstantiality in relation to the Holy Spirit. The situation
of the Asian churches is too precarious to take such a risk,”74 and the trea-
tise On the Holy Spirit ends with this comment to Amphilochus: “For these
reasons, I decided that it was better for me to remain silent than to talk. A
human voice cannot make itself heard in such an uproar . . . ; your level-
headed and calm character was a guarantee against the untimely disclosure
of what I would have said to you. Not that it was necessary to hide it, but
to avoid throwing pearls before swine.”75
If this debate foregrounds Basil’s economy of silence, then, it is
nonetheless also the case that he uses the term economy to refer to the plan
of salvation and the message of the Gospels as well, even as he talks with-
out any sense of inconsistency of the oikonomia tôn psuchôn, the economy
of souls, when referring to his responsibility as a bishop. Here again, there
is no contradiction or recent invention.
  

Guile

Questions of guile and lying are explicitly approached for the first
time in John Chrysostom’s On the Priesthood. In order to grasp fully the de-
velopment of his thought in relation to the economy, it is necessary to re-
call the circumstances that brought him to make use of it, which concern
his friend Basil, who Chrysostom loved and revered with all his heart:
“Their union was sturdy and without flaws.” At the moment when both
were about to join the priesthood, the beloved Basil seemed to his friend
to possess all the intellectual and spiritual qualities required for such an
undertaking. But Chrysostom himself did not yet feel ready for that step,
torn between his taste for pleasures and the world, an aging mother who
did not want to see him distanced from her, and the love of his friend, who
was trying to win him over to the religious life. Here are the words of the
“Golden Mouth” himself, describing what happened on the appointed day
of the two friends’ ordination:
For looking to myself, I found nothing worthy of such an honor. But that noble
youth having come to me privately, and having conferred with me about these
things as if with one who was ignorant of the rumor, begged that we might in this
instance also as formerly shape our action and our counsels the same way: for he
would readily follow me whichever course I might pursue. . . . But after a short
time, when one was to ordain us arrived, I kept myself concealed, but Basil, igno-
rant of this, was taken away on another pretext, and made to take the yoke, hop-
ing from the promises which I had made to him that I should certainly follow, or
rather supposing that he was following me. For some of those who were present,
seeing that he resented being seized, deceived him.

Then follows a description of Basil’s grief and helplessness, and his

feeling of betrayal by his friend, so that “Grief cut short his words before
they could pass his lips.” Then Chrysostom begins a long plea regarding
his attitude:
What is the wrong that I have done you? . . . Is it that I misled you and concealed
my purpose? Yet I did it for the benefit of thyself who was deceived, and of those
to whom I surrendered you by means of this deceit. . . . And if you investigate the
history of generals who have enjoyed the highest reputation from the earliest ages,
you will find that most of their triumphs were achieved by stratagem,76 and that
such are more highly commended than those who conquer in open fight.

Chrysostom then launches into an explication that is all too strategic

for his unhappy friend, who says: “But none of these cases apply to me: for
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

I am not an enemy, nor one of those who are striving to injure you, but
quite the contrary. For I entrusted all my interests to your judgement, and
always followed it whenever you bid me.” To which John responds sub-
limely: “But, my admirable and excellent sir, this is the very reason why I
took the precaution of saying that it was a good thing to employ this kind
of deceit, not only in war, and in dealing with enemies, but also in peace,
and in dealing with our dearest friends. . . . Go to any of the physicians
and ask them how they relieve their patients from disease.”
Then follows a long detour that uses a medical example. Finally, John
makes the following astonishing declaration: “For great is the value of de-
ceit, provided it be not introduced with a mischievous intention. In fact
action of this kind ought not to be called deceit, but economy, cleverness
and skill, capable of finding out ways where resources fail, and making up
for the defects of the mind.”77
The French edition of A. M. Malingrey obviously does not retain the
term economy; she uses the term forethought78 instead, as she does for all
three occurrences of the term in books  and . For John insists further:
That it is possible then to make use of deceit for a good purpose, or rather that
in such a case it ought not to be called deceit [apaté], but economy worthy of
admiration.79
Will you, then, still contend that you were not rightly deceived, when you
were about to superintend the things which belong to God, and are doing that
which when Peter did, the Lord said he should be able to surpass the rest of the
apostles?80

John proclaims that the sole instrument of recovery and victory is

speech: “This is the one instrument [organon], the only diet, the finest at-
mosphere. This takes the place of medicine, cautery and cutting, and if it
be needful to sear and amputate, this is the means which we must use, and
if this be of no avail, all else is wasted.”81 And despite this, a little further
on, he uses an entirely different argument:
For it is not for one kind of battle only that we have to be prepared. This warfare
is manifold, and is engaged with a great variety of enemies; neither do all these use
the same weapons, nor do they practice the same method of attack and it is not
possible for us to counter-attack using only one means. He who has to join battle
with all, must needs know the artifices of all, and be at once both archer and
slinger, captain and general, on foot and on horseback.82

In other words, for Chrysostom, incomparable orator that he was,

the economy is the oratorical exercise of authority par excellence, one that
  

surpasses all worldly exercise of power. It is to put oneself at the service of

Christ’s body, the model of every economy, by using all the weapons de-
manded by the attacks of the devil himself. The economy of speech seems
to be the exemplary instance of the art, but the therapeutic and military
models that support it leave open the door by which certain means other
than the sole proclamation of the truth could be introduced in order to ob-
tain results.
With this use of the concept of the incarnation, Chrysostom, more
than anyone else, inaugurates what was to become the field of the image,
although he had no reason to be interested in it in his own day, at the end
of the fourth century. However, if we restrict ourselves to the economy of
speech only, we see that it already closely associates the incarnation with
the fields of strategy and pedagogy.

Pedagogy

It would be an injustice here to limit ourselves to citing only

Chrysostom, considered one of the greatest models of sacred eloquence, in
his use of deception and guile. Following, therefore, are several other ex-
amples concerning the issue of the pedagogical conception of the economy,
which is the logical consequence of the interpretation of divine condescen-
sion (sunkatabasis), another name for the incarnation.
In his Dogmatic History of Dionysios’s Struggle Against the Arians,
Athanasios says that the apparent similarity that can be noted between the
writings of Dionysios and Arius should not deceive us.83 If Dionysios
writes in the way that he does, it is by economy—as with the doctor whose
cures can sometimes surprise the patient. When the goal is only health,
however, then one may use whatever has been seen to be successful in the
past. The apostles, according to Athanasios, cannot be criticized for having
spoken of Christ in relation to his carnal reality and the criteria of human-
ity; on the contrary, in that respect they showed that their economy and
pedagogy was well adapted to those who listened to them (“tèn en kairo di-
daskalian kai oikonomian”). In this connection, it is worth noting that
most of the (sometimes overly sophisticated) pedagogical senses of the
economy come to be justified on the basis of commentaries on Jeremiah:
at one point, finding himself in conflict with God, Jeremiah asks him,
“Why did you deceive me?” The Origenist commentary on this passage
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

distinguishes three lines of reasoning that all function similarly to the story
of the kettle with a hole in it:84
. Jeremiah did indeed say those words to God, but that was only a
manner of speaking: this is the economy of speech.
. God appears to deceive us, but when we understand the truth,
we too understand that we have not been deceived: this is the
pedagogical economy.
. Furthermore, if God does deceive us, it is because he has no
other means to get from us what he wants: this is the strategic
economy that considers only results.
Evident in this hermeneutic reasoning, then, is a summation of all
levels of economic effectiveness: a manner of talking, a way of teaching in
order to save, and a method of subduing.

The Listener’s Emotion

The church fathers believed that truth only obtained its authority by
means of its emotional power, its direct access to the heart. The speaker
must touch his listeners in order to convince them and change their atti-
tudes. Intelligence is not enough—it can even corrupt by the perverse ma-
nipulations of its arguments. Pathways must therefore be found that lead
the intelligence directly to the enthusiastic passion for the truth. A flash of
brilliance is not enough; ardor is necessary as well. As we have seen in On
the Providence of God, John Chrysostom was endowed with a faculty of
speech that could be called magical, with both poetic force and emotional
power. He was an extraordinary sacred manipulator, practicing a shaman-
ism of the word.
In order to fan the flames of love to the point of martyrdom, reason
is powerless, and revelation is given only to those who are prepared for it.
Moreover, the opening of the heart to revelation is tied to the suspension
of critical reason and to the sole action of the fires of grace. Nothing is
more enlightening on this subject than the fully developed expositions of
the Encyclopèdie thèologique, which are thoroughly imbued with the teach-
ings of the church fathers. Let us turn, then, to the entries “Emotional
Arousal” and “Oratorical Precautions,” which will give us a better under-
standing of the economy of speech and its future career in the church:
  

Emotional Arousal: the preacher does not know his own power. . . . He is unaware
of the better part of it when he believes that he can only instruct and clarify. . . .
He can still impress on the heart whatever feelings he wishes; he can and he
must. . . .
The truly eloquent orator does not restrict himself to instruction and being
well received; in order to reach perfection, it is also necessary to arouse hearts, stir
passions, and influence the most rebellious wills. . . . The grace of pure light is the
grace of the creator. It sufficed when man was innocent; but the grace of the re-
deemer, healing grace, contains still more delights, which sinful man needs. . . . I
speak the truth when I say that if your words have brilliance about them, that pure
and honest brilliance of the truth, they will still be nothing more than beautiful
but cold ice [glace]. Light and warmth must appear in them, activity and force.
They must be one of those mirrors [glaces]85 in which one appears as one is, and in
which one can moreover see a flame forming that is capable of consuming and pu-
rifying. To expound Christian truths coldly is to do them wrong.

The displacement of meaning in this passage from ice that freezes to

a mirror that reflects will be readily appreciated; here, indeed, is a
homonymic play that honors the economy of speech! The author then pro-
ceeds to eulogize Chrysostom’s eloquence, which is capable of representing
both hell and salvation with fiery images that are unforgettably moving.
The article concludes: “It is difficult not to surrender to speech of this
character. One feels imperceptibly carried away by some sweet violence
that he does to the heart and spirit. Waves follow one after the other, waves
not blindly or timidly conceived, but ones that an enlightened reason leads
and arranges as if by degrees and which form a passionate speech, wise and
reasonable, which it is impossible to resist.”
The article “Oratorical Precautions,” on the other hand, specifies the
necessary modulations of the true and the false, speech and silence, temer-
ity and prudence—in brief, all the care “that the orator must take in order
not to offend the delicacy of those before whom or of whom he speaks, as
well as the studied devices, adroit and ingratiating, that he uses to say cer-
tain things that, without them, would appear harsh or shocking.”
Our flesh and hearts must thus be reached by the evangelical message
in the name of the redemption of the flesh, and because the regime of the
flesh is that of pleasure and pain, a sermon that addressed itself only to the
spirit would commit, in short, the same error that the monophysites fell
into with respect to the incarnation. And because sight is quicker in this
domain than hearing, the instructional image will touch people more
surely and rapidly than speech. Did the Old Testament God not choose to
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

reach us by allowing himself to be seen, he who was not obeyed when he

used only the word? The visible signs of his anger did not have anything
like the same effect as those of the carnal suffering of his image. No iden-
tification is possible when faced with a deluge of snakes, whereas a cruci-
fied and revived body, a body similar to our own, immediately arouses
emotional and redemptive identification.
Emotion thus forms a part of the well-adapted, specifically targeted
organization of good and evil. Seduction and terror are resources to be ad-
ministered and managed, in order that they not be abandoned to the devil.
The expenditure of holy eloquence and images that touch people is there-
fore part of the direct effect of the salvational economy. Here too, there is
a principle of nonwastage: truths must not be dispensed through speech
without art. Thus, the management of speech is an investment in emo-
tional expenditure, aiming to gain time and force. This is the principle of
all propaganda and publicity: how to spread the maximum information in
the minimum time, and how to obtain agreement without reserve, convic-
tion and obedience without objection. This is the strategy of seduction, the
temptation of the flesh itself put at the service of salvation in a political
doctrine where the means are justified by the ends. Beauty, like the lie, has
the advantage of seduction and emotional arousal, and such weapons must
only be used by the hand and mouth inspired by the grace of the Holy
Spirit. The confessor, the preacher, as the painter, must allow themselves to
be imbued with divine grace in order to be assured that all their negotia-
tions with the perceptible world and the universe of sin are entirely guided
and transformed by the divine spirit.
The eye and the ear are thus only the “meatuses,” orifices that open
the visceral body to discourse; speech and the image must speak to the gut.
Rabanus Maurus, in his description of our body, would write: “viscera mys-
tice significant affectum pietatis et misericordiae”: the viscera, mystically
speaking, refer to the affect of piety and mercy. This emotional economy
joins together perfectly with the visceral character of the church institution
and the sacrament, of which we have seen an example above.86 Emotion is
the trick of a God who forces a path to our soul through our body, who
dispenses his grace within everything that carries the mark of life in order
to lead us to the heart of institutional and salvational vitality. To arouse
emotionally, to seduce, is to force a path not in the spirit but in the entire
body of the listener or spectator, and in occupying it, to become the mas-
ter of what it digests and rejects. Music, too, therefore has an important
  

role to play in the emotional economy, and it is not by chance that in phys-
iological texts, one encounters a belief that bodily cohesion can be main-
tained by musical, resonant harmony.
In relation to seduction, then, it appears as though God possesses
ownership, and the devil usufruct. The economy is truly the commerce of
God and the devil in a sort of life annuity based on the durability of both
parties, but the eternity of only one. This is an extremely sensitive issue, of
course, because it concerns the management of our feelings and desires.
On the one hand, they are the chosen ground of the devil; on the other, be-
cause of this, they are the chief concern of the redemption. They are what
must be taken back from the diabolical usurper. He who came to earth to
preach the word of love became established as the supreme model of re-
deemed affect and desire. Emotion is therefore anagogical, as is the whole
economic plan, which must always be understood with the nobility neces-
sary to avoid complicity with the devil.
The image will pose the same problems in negotiating our weakness
on the road that leads to salvation. It will not be content just to remind
and instruct; it will have to stir. Upon seeing it, eyes brimming with tears
will be illuminated by proof coming from the heart. As Grumel writes: “It
would be impossible to deprive the church of so powerful a weapon in its
fight against the devil,” and it is sometimes necessary to fight him with his
own weapons. Thus the oikonomia becomes the sublimation of the diabol-
ical, with the forces of satanic ensnarement and menace diverted and put
to the service of the good.

Temporal Management

The church has as its task the management of both our feelings and
the temporal realities that the devil would be only too happy to appropri-
ate exclusively for himself. Yet there again, its power was contested. Is that
not, however, the scenario that is generally supposed to be at stake between
the iconophiles and iconoclasts? Nonetheless, if those feelings and tempo-
ral realities are objects of dispute, it is to prevent the devil from occupying
the terrain of life itself.
Returning to Chrysostom’s On the Priesthood, we find that in the rest
of the text, the term economy is used again without any sense of inconsis-
tency to refer to the priestly office and responsibility for souls. Yet the
French translator, without any warning, suddenly writes “governance”87 to
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

translate the word that she had rendered as “forethought”88 in the preced-
ing book. “Those who attain to this economy should be contented to be
consecrated to the dignity or removed from it, as becomes Christians.”89
An additional note, however, states that “Here, the word oikonomia has a
very broad meaning; it covers all the administrative responsibilities in-
cumbent on the bishop, being used to talk of each one of them: the distri-
bution of goods and the care of widows. Its general meaning90 refers to the
obligations that the ministry carries with it.” Why, however, is this mean-
ing described as being very broad? Has the reader been given the impres-
sion from the beginning that it has a narrow or restricted meaning? More-
over, it is evident that the “general meaning” invoked by the translator is
not the one that Benoît Pruche cites in the case of Gregory and Athanasios.
Similarly, there is no allusion to the use made of the same word earlier in
books  and , where as we have just seen, it concerns lies and guile. Fur-
ther, by translating the word as “governance,” as the “Sources chrétiennes”
edition does, one ends up with a somewhat contradictory statement by
Chrysostom, because he explains precisely that one must be ready to aban-
don power if the situation requires it, and that “I do not think a word is
needed to prove what great gain they [the sinners] procure from him [the
virtuous man who renounces power] by their wickedness.”
The economy, then, does not have as its goal the pure and simple
seizure of power by all and any means; on the contrary, it is the result of a
fair and wise evaluation of the profits and losses pertaining to a certain of-
fice. The idea of this office, however, is peculiar to the economy and not to
government, specially when power is the effect of a violence or authority
devoid of any salvational inspiration. The strength91 of the economy
should never be confused with a pure and simple appropriation of power.92
It is neither the abandoning of thought to the profit of a short-sighted and
ambitious realist pragmatism, nor blind service to immediate interests in a
disregard of the truth. It is what thought must pass through to be alive,
even as it maintains the authority of the law. Paradoxically, however, there
are those who attempt to defend the church by bringing into play disjunc-
tions at the heart of the economy that end up with the opposite result, be-
cause they turn the economy into a sort of perverse concept. Yet the econ-
omy is rather a philosophical and political concept that tries as hard as
possible to escape the perverse effects of power by privileging strength and
authority. The fact that the institution does not always succeed in this,
  

however, is yet another problem that concerns the inevitable ambivalence

of every iconic choice produced by the dynamics of the concept.
Remaining with Chrysostom’s text a moment longer, we find that the
term reappears in book , evoking this time the management and distribu-
tion of goods. In this instance, it concerns Judas, whom God had not only
chosen as an apostle but to whom he had confided the economy of goods
(“oikonomian tôn chrématôn”), and who was punished for having misused
them.93 Even more significant, however, is the use made of it in chapter 
of the same book, where Chrysostom passes directly from the management
of goods to the management of the christic body, by taking up the medical
metaphor again:
It is not the economy of corn and barley, oxen or sheep, that is now under consider-
ation, nor any such like matters, but the very body of Jesus. For the church of Christ,
according to St. Paul, is Christ’s body, and he who is entrusted with its care ought to
train it up to a state of healthiness and beauty unspeakable, and to look everywhere,
lest any spot or wrinkle, or other like blemish should mar its vigor and comeliness.
For what is this but to make it appear worthy, so far as human power can, of the in-
corruptible and ever-blessed Head which is set over it? If they who are ambitious of
reaching an athletic condition of body need the help of physicians and trainers, and
exact diet, and constant exercise, and a thousand other rules (for the omission of the
merest trifle upsets and spoils the whole), how shall they to whose lot falls the care
of the body, which has its conflict not against flesh and blood, but against powers
unseen, be able to keep it sound and healthy, unless they far surpass ordinary human
virtue, and are versed in all healing proper for the soul?94

As we have seen several times, oikonomia is regularly used to refer to

the responsibilities and administrative offices of the clergy, this being an
intrinsic effect of its conceptual unity; the corresponding term in Latin will
frequently be rendered as administratio.95 From this point, the transition is
easily made to the management of goods and the distribution of charity,
which necessarily form part of the ecclesiastic economy, for the enlightened
exercise of charity and the administration of alms is similar to the admin-
istering of medicine or the teaching of truth. And because the concept of
economy is indistinguishable from the notion of service and actions that
are successful, the precepts of charitable economy thus come to be formu-
lated in its name.96
Because the economy implies both the notions of organization and
expenditure, it justifies all the expenses entailed in maintaining its author-
ity or in making a convincing case for its necessity. Thus alms, which are
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

charitable economy (which will designate all the forms of social and hos-
pital assistance), cover all expenses, the receipts for which are always antic-
ipated by the church, spiritual though these may be. In this way, a mean-
ing concerning accountancy enters into the notion of economy in a direct
line from the Classical economy. The creation was an expenditure; Christ
was an expenditure; speech as well as the image figure in the program of
necessary expenditures. This is the dispensatio. But in this notion of ex-
penditure, nothing is arbitrary or free. All the sacred expenditures, all the
divine expenditures, are methodical, purposeful, justified, balanced by ma-
terial profits as well as by spiritual benefits. This is a tidy piece of account-
ancy whose principle is the optimization of investments in view of a par-
ticular result.
The economic thought of the church is thus a system of thinking
that is both administrative and corrective. It is administrative in that
oikonomia is at one with the organization, management, and development
of each ministry. But it is also necessary to add to it a corrective function,
because human initiatives that are not inspired by grace can only engender
inequalities, injustices, or transgressions. The divine and ecclesiastic econ-
omy must therefore take charge of the wretched management of our his-
tory and regulate it in an enlightened and redemptive way. By compensa-
tory management, it reestablishes a justice that human iniquity does not
know how to, and cannot, avoid. In this sense, the church does nothing
other than manage an ensemble of expenditures to maintain an equilib-
rium. One only has to refer to Martin-Doisy’s Dictionnaire d’économie
charitable to discover the balanced accounting of the ecclesiastic economy:
in the article “Capital and Revenues,” chapter  is entitled “Charity prof-
its everyone.”97 It states: “Is it not better to lend [one’s wealth] to the poor
who can repay it . . . than to push them into bankruptcy or the sea that
will swallow them, or set them to gambling, which consumes every-
thing?”98 In other words, charity, like any expenditure, must be an invest-
ment. This conception of expenditure and distribution also provides an en-
tirely new way of thinking about a different subject: that of sacrifice. The
economy can no longer be content to spill the blood of holocausts in a
pure oblation to assuage the hunger and thirst of God. The New
Covenant, under the sign of the economy, only sacrifices with a view to re-
purchase and resurrection.
  

Conclusion: Dangers and Precautions—

A First Look at the Iconic Economy

It will be readily understood that on the historical level, which is

where the concept plays out, there was a constant danger of lapses, and
these did in fact take place, whether for reasons of cowardice, want of rigor,
or a taste for profit. The same applies to the image: it was a fertile reality,
but it was sufficiently ambivalent to lead to the excesses of idolatry and su-
perstition. In other words, there is therefore no escape from the question,
at first glance already eliminated, of perverse effects.
What makes this notion of the economy so fascinating is not its power
in mediating between instances that without it would be unreconcilable
and contradictory—human and divine, truth and lies, the visible and the
invisible . . . ; if the doctrine of the image and icon had not produced the
connective tissue that legitimates the pathways between disjunctive realities,
the economy would have been able to stay in the vague terrain of adaptation
and compromise. Rather, in the many-colored relational field that it deals
with, the economy tried to resist the confusion that could have reduced its
tidy, living dynamic to both a psychological and political opportunism. It is
like a one-of-a-kind cloth woven from a medley of colors.
Yet how can respect for the truth and the liberty of others be guaran-
teed if, in the final analysis, the only criterion of the economy is the tri-
umph of the cause that it defends? The decision to act with economy can
only result from an internal deliberation that has no model other than the
condescension of Christ himself and the grace of his own counsel. As far as
the management of the iconic economy is concerned, we will see that only
purity of intentions will serve as a guarantee of the good use of our carnal
pleasures at the heart of the visible world.
When Basil decided cautiously, yet wisely, to remain silent on the
subject of the consubstantiality of the Holy Spirit, Gregory of Nazianzos
wrote him a letter making plain how difficult the situation was: “Some re-
proach us for impiety overtly, others for cowardice; impiety by those who
are convinced that we do not profess to the holy doctrine; cowardice by
those who accuse us of dissimulation.”99 Gregory then tells Basil how he
was criticized for his position at a recent banquet with some monks: “He
contents himself, they say, with causing things to be obscurely glimpsed,
and so to speak, only skirts around the doctrine. With more politics than
piety, he harps on, and by the power of his words masks his duplicity.”
 A Semantic Study of the Term Economy 

At this point, Gregory says that he attempted to defend Basil’s econ-

omy, but “those present did not accept this economy, finding it vain and
believing that it made fools of them, under the pretext that we were de-
fending our cowardice rather than the doctrine.” Gregory then makes a
special appeal: “I dismissed them. . . . But as for you, divine and holy
friend, teach us how far we should go in the theology of the Spirit, what
terms must be used, how far it is necessary to be economic [oikonométéon],
so that we may know these things when we face our opponents.”
The crucial question thus remains one of the moral control of eco-
nomic practice and its doctrinal limits. The only good steward100 is the one
who maintains Christ’s condescension as a model and acts only when he is
invested with spiritual authority, which alone guarantees sound judgment.
Such a condition limits the practice of economy considerably because it re-
quires that the church hierarchy and the sacrament stand guarantee for it.
How, then, to generalize the economy—or rather, how to universalize it?
Considering that in principle it manages thinking, life, and history, how to
open it up to the whole world that the full breadth of its salvational plan
concerns? This could only be accomplished if it were based on an ethics of
mimésis, the exemplary object of which would be the icon.
In order for the economy to be applicable to everyone (that is to say,
it should no longer need to be invested with the highest hierarchical au-
thority in order to escape suspicion of transgression, laxity, or abusive op-
portunism), it would be necessary to find a solution that would combine
all the effects of both pedagogical strategies and church doctrine. An in-
strument had to be found whose message was unambiguous and allowed
no further contradictions, a universal instrument that ignored the barrier
of languages and obstacles such as knowledge. This instrument would have
to be a holy and divine ruse, taking into account our body, our elementary
adherences, and our emotions. This rational and magical instrument, it
will be clear, is the iconic image. . . . Inanimate matter undertaking the
manuduction of matter toward spirit, something double that will respect
the distinction between two natures, the icon will incarnate the word at the
heart of its own silence, under the order of univocal revelation. It will sup-
ply a solution as efficient as it is elegant because the doctrine that consti-
tutes it and legitimates it shelters it from falsehood, while endowing it with
all the adaptive and seductive power of the economy. The image, we might
say, is phenomenologically true. It is the visible manifestation of something
that founds the truth of the gaze inasmuch as it arouses not only our eyes,
  

but the ardor and passion that inhabit us in the production of truth. It ad-
dresses itself to the element in each one of us that founds our adherence to
life and thought as though they were the same thing. The tekhné that
Chrysostom defends concerning language is nothing other than the art of
speaking in order to show, to incarnate the Word in the flesh of language
that cannot be anything other than our own living flesh. It is for this rea-
son that the same word speaks of the christic incarnation, the incarnation
of speech and the incarnation of the image.
This brief presentation of the economy, then, comes back to rhetoric
in the sense that we discussed at the beginning. The art of speaking, as will
prove to be the case with painting, is in an immanent and existential rela-
tion with our incarnation; but the flesh that it is concerned with does not
reduce to the fragile and mortal envelope that renders us visible to the eyes
of others during our ephemeral passage through this life. That flesh is noth-
ing but appearance that is deceitful and deceived. The true flesh, however,
the one that lives in the word and the image, does not concern appearance,
but a becoming visible, there, where the order of manifestation overcomes
all the traps of illusion. This flesh participates in the Parousia of being by
keeping itself at a remove from it; it is the reign of “resemblance.” But if this
remove is of the order of the sign in the case of the word, the operation is
even more complex in the image, because the icon, in having the right to
the name of symbol, is no longer at the same remove with regard to being.
It reflects it as an enigma, thus becoming the index and living proof of the
existence of what it “crosses over to” (diabainein). The icon will escape the
function of reference; rather, it will itself become what is referred to. As we
will see shortly, the order of reference remains peculiar to the word, and
more specifically, to the voice. But at the tribunal where the innocence and
legitimacy of the icon is pled, however, transfigured flesh will be found not
guilty because it produces the proof of its own redemption.
 3

The Doctrine of the Image and Icon

To those who consider Byzantine art in a cursory fashion, it can ap-

pear repetitive and monotonous, immovably confined in hieratic icono-
graphic forms, congealed by scriptural demands, by their cultic function
and their place in the liturgy. This is so to such a degree that if we ignore
the pleasure that the brilliance of materials, the luster and the pomp of the
pictorial ensemble, confers on us today, we may ask ourselves whether we
are in fact dealing with an art at all, in that for several centuries now, artis-
tic development has most often been identified with the successive (more
or less abrupt) introductions of new formulas, of singular works, marked
either by the avatars of psychosociological analysis or the fetishism of nov-
elty. The problem is compounded in that the Orthodox themselves are re-
pelled by any museographic, hence pagan, exploitation of something that
is fundamentally linked to a path that for them is spiritual.
It so happens that iconic doctrine supplies a response to the question
of whether it is necessary to differentiate sacred from profane art generi-
cally, and it does this by means of the relational economy. With astonish-
ing modernity, this doctrine provides its own solution to the question of
the essence of art.

The canonical appearance of unchanging forms in Byzantine art is

based on an economic doctrine that takes charge of the circulation of dif-
ferent gazes involved, as well as the question of abstraction itself. The prob-
lems of formal resemblance, of essential similitude, and of imitation (ho-
   

moiôsis, homoousia, mimésis) appear as so many openings to action, so

many horizons for knowledge, directions for active contemplation or effi-
cient evangelization, while the servitude of reproduction and representa-
tion, as well as the imagining of illusory forms and the production of fic-
tions, are radically excluded. In truth, Byzantine art never stopped
“moving”—exactly like Alice on the other side of the looking glass, who
discovers that she must run continuously in order to stand still. In order to
preserve (diasôzein) its mimetic place, which is a place of movement, the
icon had to fight on all sides against the temptations of homoiôma as ei-
dôlon, that is to say, against the idolatrous threat that the fabric of the copy,
of the artefact, constituted for the nature of the gaze when they became
substitute objects receiving sacrilegious cult, by which we should under-
stand a deadly adoration of nothing. For the iconophile, the idol, not hav-
ing an ontologically based model, can only show fallaciously what does not
exist or what is only the inanimate sign of death within the world. Con-
versely, through the effect of its doctrine, the icon sought not to fall into
the categories of representation, fiction, or illusion at all. It belongs no
more to the reign of the animate than the inanimate. Such is the strange
situation that leads for the first time to the formulation of what a picture
is. To say that the icon wanted to be a picture and not an idol or represen-
tation is to say that it institutes a gaze and not an object. Participating en-
tirely in the Pauline reign of similitude and enigma, it aims at no “resem-
blance” other than assimilation, the ad-similation of seeing and being seen.
The iconoclasts were Christian believers. The temptations of atheism
and rationalism that some would have liked to detect in their thought in
order to be able to claim to be their followers during other periods of icon-
oclastic upheavals are totally foreign to them. Iconoclastic thought in
Byzantium was not meant to be in the least revolutionary, and the worst
accusation aimed at one camp or the other concerned the suspicion of in-
novation. Nonetheless, something new would be expressed, and what
makes the reading and recognition of that novelty difficult is that it is ex-
pressed in terms of loyalty to memory and tradition. The iconoclastic cri-
sis was a period of theoretical creation in a world where all novelty was re-
garded as diabolical and consequently condemned. Let there be no doubt,
in order to invent a new world in the name of conservativism, extreme in-
genuity is required, but we should also recognize in the liberties taken with
classical thought during the crisis a true movement of philosophical inven-
tiveness rather than a reprehensible effect of bad faith. Besides which, eco-
 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 

nomic effectivenes and adaptability would of course demand the aban-

doning of rigor (akribeia) in the philosophical domain if required by spir-
itual interests. If pagan thought proved to be useful at any one moment, it
could be used without regard for its integrity, then dropped when it
stopped presenting immediate advantages.
The first iconoclastic crisis, which ended with the accession to the
throne of Irene (), had led to the formulas of the second council of
Nicaea, which defended the true faith in respect of the true religion. The
second crisis, after Irene’s death (), however, encountered a more de-
manding audience. This was a renewed iconoclasm, which regarded the re-
sponses and refutations issued by the Nicene council (formulated against
Constantine V) as being neither persuasive nor sufficiently definitive to
end the debate. Thus when Nikephoros speaks out against iconoclast
thought from his place of exile, it is as a well-read philosopher and aca-
demic as much as, if not more than, a theologian.
In the face of the invasive expansion of the icon in Byzantium that
began in the sixth century, it can be easily understood why a group of the-
ological intelligentsia and the holders of spiritual power became alarmed.1
Superstitions, fetishism, and all the pagan perversions linked to the talis-
manic manipulation of the image were all feared, and all of these fears
were grouped together in the global condemnation of Hellenism and idol-
atry. However, besides this spiritual concern, the fact that iconoclasm was
initiated by imperial power indicates the degree to which both faith and
power were entangled with each other in this issue. When the emperor
Constantine V (–), spokesman for state iconoclasm during the first
iconoclastic period, denounced the icon, he did so by setting forth the fol-
lowing objections:
. If the icon is like the model, it must be of the same essence and
nature as it. However the icon is material and the model is spiri-
tual, therefore this is impossible.
. If the icon claims to resemble only the physical and perceptible
form of the model, it necessarily divides it by separating its per-
ceptible form from its invisible essence. The icon is therefore im-
pious because it divides the indivisible.
. If the icon draws the figure of the divine, it encloses the infinite
within its line, which is impossible; therefore it only encloses
nothing or falsehood, which forces it to renounce all homonymy.
   

. If the icon is only venerated in what it shows, it is therefore its

matter that is venerated. It is therefore an idol, and the
iconophiles are idolaters.
Conclusion: the only miméseis (we should not translate this too
hastily as imitation, but rather as an act that aims to make present, to make
manifest) “in truth and spirit” will be the cross, the eucharist, the virtuous
life, and good government. The cross, because it respects divine invisibil-
ity by renouncing resemblance; the eucharist, because, being of the same
substance as God, it is pure similitude without relative resemblance; the
virtuous life and good government, because they are active engagements
that aim at rejoining their model without claiming to identify with its
form or essence. The living imitator would never attribute to himself the
name of God and would therefore never be homonymous with him. Every
other image is a pseudonym.
These iconoclast grievances comprise several different issues that are
all nonetheless closely connected to the problem of the relation between
the image and icon. The first is homoousia, or consubstantiality, which con-
cerns the nature of any resemblance possible between the natural image
and the artificial image. Both camps reject the idea of identity in terms of
substance; for the iconoclasts, however, consubstantiality is part of the def-
inition of every image of whatever sort, which in turn makes any artificial
image impossible without sacrilege. For the iconophiles, consubstantiality
would never be part of the definition of the image except, on the one hand,
in the case of the natural image, where there is similitude between Father
and Son, and on the other, in the eucharist, where there is no icon. Con-
substantiality, for them, is not of the same order as manifestation. In all
other cases, therefore, a different definition is required, one of a relational
type, which would maintain similitude through the aspect of formal re-
semblance, even though substances are heterogeneous.
The second and third points made by Constantine concern objec-
tions to two constituent elements of the icon that the iconophiles would
still have to meet, the doctrine of the graph2 and homonymy. His last
grievance deals with a different issue, the cultic consequences that are im-
plied by the difference between the image and the icon, on the one hand,
and the difference that prevents the icon from being confused with the
idol, on the other. Here the iconophiles would have to show that the icon
respects the hypostatic unity of divinity and therefore, even though it does
not have the right to adoration, it nonetheless has the right to respect
 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 

(timé) and prostration (proskynesis). This distinction would in turn be made

possible by an argument that would rigorously separate the holy from the
sacred, not allowing them to become confused with each other.

Given the overabundance of publications on the topic of what an

icon is, what might still be possible to add to the many glosses, knowl-
edgeable, aesthetic, and religious, already in existence? My answer here is
that I believe that the philosophical analysis of the concept of the economy
allows us to grasp something in icon doctrine that touches on questions
that are essentially modern concerning the issue of images in general. It is
therefore from an economic point of view that I will consider the follow-
ing issues: the natural consubstantial image; the artificial image (or the
icon) in its heterosubstantiality and its relational economy; and the nature
of the graphic line and homonymy. Finally, I will put forward some brief
thoughts on the placement of the icon in sacred places and public spaces—
in sacred places, in order to examine the vocabulary of its sacredness in the
profane world, and in public places, in an attempt to understand the ped-
agogical and political issues at stake in its constituent elements.

The Natural Image and Consubstantiality

Greek philosophy never neglected the image, but it also never left the
site of an ontological questioning of mimésis. Rather, it almost appears as
though the image had been summoned before a noetic or eidetic tribunal
that made it renounce all dignity as a product of tekhné. During the early
centuries of Christianity, discourse about the image was much more in-
debted to Platonic and Neoplatonic thought than Aristotelian. It con-
cerned two things: the similitude of God’s human creations in Genesis,
and the interpretation of the Pauline expression of the Son as image of the
Father. In what sense, however, do we resemble our creator? The reply is in
the first instance spiritual and does not lead in any way to the possibility of
making artificial images. In fact, the earliest Christian thinkers were mostly
hostile to portrayal of any kind, in order to emphasize the distance that
separated them from any form of Greek paganism and idolatry (bearing in
mind that all non-Christian cults, including Jews, were called idolatrous!),
and it was this aniconic tradition of proto-Christianity that was then
passed on, in its anthology and references, to the later iconoclast thinkers.
The more the doctrine of the incarnation became a direct auxiliary to
   

the establishment of the church’s temporal power, however, the more the
resemblance between the Father and the Son and between the Son and his
mother posed problems that were extremely important yet delicate. It soon
became necessary, therefore, to establish the relative unity of foundational
similitude and historical resemblance, without making of the latter a
purely transitory accident; as we have seen before in trinitarian theology
and in the management of historical visibility, this is the crucial point
where all economic thought hangs in the balance. In this connection, Ger-
hart Ladner, in his study retracing the development of iconic thought,
notes that “The transfer of the image concept from the sensible to the in-
tellectual realm [is] a long process traceable in Hellenistic and Early Chris-
tian thought from Plato to Philo and St. Paul, and from Plotinus and Pro-
clus to Pseudo-Dionysios the Areopagite and St. John of Damascus.”3 It
appears, then, that this trajectory permitted the legitimation of the percep-
tible world’s spiritual participation in the intelligible world, and that this
inspiration was anagogical in nature.
When the iconophile fathers, however, confronted iconoclast
thought, the issue of the incarnation meant that they had to answer two
separate questions: how did the natural, invisible image take on flesh, and
how does the flesh of our visible images lead us back to that invisible im-
age? With the arguments of the first iconoclastic period being so strongly
Christological in nature, however, it was not until Nikephoros and the sec-
ond iconoclastic period that icon doctrine became a philosophical doctrine
based on the relational economy concerning images in general. This
meant, therefore, that when Nikephoros came to formulate his arguments,
he had to cast about for some theoretical assistance for them, some model
for reasoning, and in the end, it was Aristotle who was invoked. Yet al-
though it was true that evangelical doctrine could no longer do without a
philosophical framework, it is also the case that the predicament could
only be worsened by an attempt to use Aristotle to resolve theologico-po-
litical questions that originated in the social, political, and doctrinal history
of Byzantium alone. This predicament, it is worth adding, is in itself fasci-
nating to observe, as Nikephoros can be seen wrestling with a Classical vo-
cabulary that he has trouble adapting to the new conceptual situation, and
we should note in this context as well that the apparent lack of rigor evi-
dent in his writings is simply an effect of a system of thought searching for
the language of its own formulations.
Nikephoros’s knowledge of the Aristotelian texts is in all likelihood
second hand, derived from commentators who were studied as part of the
 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 

Trivium and Quadrivium. Yet although several passages of the Antirrhetics

show an ambiguous relation to Aristotle, the appeal that Nikephoros
makes to him is never a mere token, either when he is not named or cited
explicitly, or in quotations that are faithfully retranscribed. Was
Nikephoros, then, so far from his sources at the end of his life that he no
longer felt capable of accounting for them? Or again, did this great Chris-
tian thinker have to adopt either a universally apodictic tone or one of un-
shakable confidence to avoid making himself too explicitly dependent on
a pagan thinker? In any case, his appeal to Aristotle is an appeal to natural
reason, because from this point forward, the iconic cause becomes a natu-
ral, logical one, and the icon a question whose stakes are universal.
For the well-read Byzantine, Aristotle was first and foremost the au-
thor of the Organon, a work whose goal was taken to be solely the formu-
lation of the logical rules of rigorous discourse. This “instrumental” use of
the book resembles certain school exercises in the medieval universities,
which is a far cry from the way in which references to the Metaphysics were
made. The instrumental use, rather, reduced Aristotelianism to the mere
learning of formal exercises for the foundation of propositional logic. Yet
what still emerges clearly in the church fathers in respect of this is the idea
that theological discourse ultimately amounts to choosing a theoretical and
practical manner of speaking about something that had previously been re-
garded as having a character that was fundamentally unknowable and in-
capable of being formulated in words. This question of how to speak of the
ineffable, which is central to theology, is of course a major concern of the
economy as well. Relational thought as applied to both image and speech
allows a purely nominalist discursivity to be avoided by proposing the ex-
istence of a specific kind of intimate relation between speech, the image,
and their divine object. Image and icon doctrine is economic because it ad-
ministers the possibilities of access to the manifestation of the divine and
to its relative comprehension. It is thus effective in a way that is entirely at
odds with the interpretation of the economy as a mere formal exercise of
rhetoric.
In relation to these issues, several different problems arise: What is
the link between the science of speaking and the legitimacy of the icon?
What are the implications of the graphic constituents of inscription and
writing? What is the relationship between a message borne by speech and
one by icon? In order to deal with these, Nikephoros makes liberal use of
the Organon, although he is not in the least hesitant to clash with Aris-
totelian opinion when doctrinal necessities require it. We should add in
   

this connection that this philosophical pragmatism, which could also sim-
ply be called a tactical instrumentalism, was not difficult to arrive at because
the Metaphysics was not taught in the cleric’s or theologian’s curriculum.
Image doctrine was thus born and developed under the pressure of a
political crisis. That said, the fact that it was necessary to turn to the
Organon in order to mount a defense against iconoclasm demonstrates
clearly that the enemy had already reached a certain level of philosophical
sophistication. The icon’s defense was clearly no longer a simple defense of
religion alone; rather, it had become a broader plea concerning the condi-
tions and modalities of thought itself, and the future of that thought in a
culture that was preparing a royal place within it for the image.
As the final word on Nikephoros’s sources in Aristotle, we should
note that since the incarnational economy necessarily engages the economy
of speech, he occasionally has recourse to the Categories as well. Defini-
tions, distinctions, and syllogisms based on a logic of inclusion appear,
with quantifiers and operators that are characteristic of, or authorized by,
Greek and a somewhat motley respect for Aristotle’s text.

The initial step of Nikephoros’s refutation of Constantine V concerns

the essential and therefore consubstantial identity of image and model.
The text begins by citing what was doubtless one of Constantine’s ques-
tions (Peusis), although, as is fair enough under the circumstances, it is
taken out of context: “That is why Mammon4 adds immediately: ‘If the
icon is good, it is consubstantial with what it is the icon of.’” Nikephoros
responds to this as follows:
Therefore, you do not simply object that an image is made of Christ, but [you ob-
ject] that the iconic copy is heterogenous to him, because Christ is one thing and
the material out of which his icon is made is another. . . . If his intention were the
natural image, which is absolutely opposed to the artificial image, and I mean the
Son who is the image of the Father, his argument might have been tenable. He has
failed, though, by using the copy here in an unintelligent way, since there is no
need here for copies nor for objects to be aimed at [stokhasma] by our sight.5

Further on, he continues:

Art imitates nature without the former being identical with the latter. On the con-
trary, having taken the natural, visible form [eidos phusikon] as a model and as a
prototype, art makes something similar and alike. . . . It would be necessary then,
according to this argument, that the man and his icon share the same definition
and be related to each other as consubstantial things.6
 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 

What, however, is a relation of consubstantiality? The first question

here concerns what a natural image is and in what sense one can still speak
of a relation when there is an identity of substance, that is to say, when the
image and the prototype are one. As we have seen, it fell to trinitarian the-
ology to turn this original relation into the very essence of relations, and
thus to raise the question of the image to the theoretical heights that it later
reached. Nikephoros, however, does not pose the question of the nature of
divine essence, but of what it is in the essence of our nature that depends
on its imaginal nature, and that makes it participate in the natural image,
which is to say, in the deity. Similitude is in God; he is the Same without di-
vision. The origin of the image is divine because the original image is di-
vine. It is an invisible image, but the supreme image, the model of every
image. The image is at the beginning, because in the beginning was the
Word, and the Word is the image of God.
Within the domain of iconic thought, the Trinity can be expressed as
the Father, the Image, and the Voice.
The nature of plurality, while it excludes alterity, is both imaginal and
pneumatic. This relation is neither a relation of pure logical identity nor a
homonymic relation because it does not refer to an equivalence of signs in
the unity of the signified or a simple relative participation of the Son in the
name of God. Rather, there is a plural unity of meaning itself that will come
to form the basis for the legitimation, by derivation, of the icon’s own dual-
ity. Whether situated on the level of the natural image or the artificial im-
age, the image is underpinned by a system of thought that does not concern
the sign, but rather concerns meaning. The foundational model of the con-
substantial relation makes the image into a figure of meaning forever, not
into a referential sign cut off from signification, and it is this that the church
fathers call a symbol. Additionally, figure here must be understood as having
nothing to do with rhetoric; rather, it concerns the figural character of the
incarnation. The incarnation is not an in-corporation but an in-imagina-
tion, as we will see shortly. The image is everywhere a figure of immanence,
absolute in the one case, relative in the other. In one it concerns a presence,
in the other an absence. It is what Nikephoros calls symbol, in opposition to
the sign privileged by the iconoclasts.
In what sense, then, is the relation of essential similitude still a rela-
tion? We have already encountered this point in our analysis of the trini-
tarian economy, and the answer is that the relationship in question oscil-
lates between the rigor of the Aristotelian pros ti and the relational—that
is, economic—mystery of the procession of divine uniplurality. Édouard
   

Hugon summarizes the formula in the following way: “The Son, because
he originates from the Father, must have a real relation with him; the Holy
Spirit, because it originates from both the Father and the Son, must have a
real relation with both of them. In turn, the Father, because he has a nature
that is identical with the Son, cannot not have a real relation with him.”7
This means that apart from the problems specific to the terrestrial incar-
nation (the problem of circumscribability), the Son and the Father have,
for all eternity, a natural and real relation, through which the idea of a nat-
ural image is defined. This relation is called skhésis, not pros ti, and the term
is attested in the trinitarian works of Gregory of Nazianzos, Athanasios,
and Gregory of Nyssa. Skhésis has an advantage over pros ti in that it can
absorb the pros, that is, the differential specificity of the relation, because
its objective is intimacy. Skhésis has an emotional tone, keyed here not in a
psychological or physiological mode, as sometimes happens, but referring
rather to the relation of love or grace that ties the image to its model. Skhé-
sis is the relation as it is comprised economically and no longer only logi-
cally; it is the mark of things that live, the mark of life itself. To be “the im-
age of ” is to be in a living relation. This is why the model of every relation
is that of father and son: it is a donation of life (this implication is foreign
to the Aristotelian pros ti), and it leads to the emotional power of each and
every imaginal, and consequently iconic, relation. The grace of this imagi-
nal relation will soon come to be rediscovered in the charismatic intimacy
that supports the iconic relation, and Nikephoros himself will play on the
two terms of skhésis and pros ti in order to pass more easily from the theo-
logical level (the natural image) to the economic level (the icon).
Skhésis does not originate in the vocabulary of logic. According to H.
Bonitz, it occurs only twice in Aristotle, in On the Movements of Animals
and the Fragments, where the phrase “skhésis andros pros gunaika,” that is,
“the relation of the man to the woman,” appears.8 In this case, the term has
a heightened psychophysiological connotation with an emotional meaning,
referring to familiarity and intimacy in the contact between people. A later
use of the term is also found in Chrysostom, as noted by G. W. H. Lampe
in the Patristic Greek Lexicon, associated with oikéiôsis and referring to the
relations of proximity and intimacy that tie God to the angels.
Returning to the question of father and son, we find that they are in
fact ordered in relation to each other; in this sense, paternity and filiation
are relatives, and their relation is symmetrical, reciprocal, and simultane-
ous. This relation, however, does not refer to the essence of the terms, but
only to the means by which they are related to each other. On the one
 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 

hand, there is essential identity between them, yet on the other a verbal
distinction (secundum dici) between individuals. Thus Gregory of Nazian-
zos writes: “Father is not a noun that refers to an essence or action; it is a
noun that indicates the father’s manner of being in relation to the son and
the son’s in relation to the father [onoma skhéséôs].”9 Akakios of Berroia too
speaks of a “modus substantiae seu nomen est habitus,” habitus here being
translatable by skhésis,10 and Cyril of Alexandria writes in his Dialogue on
the Holy and Consubstantial Trinity that “Father is a relative noun, and son
also. . . . Whoever denies the father denies the son.”11
The same insistence is found in John of Damascus, who reminds us
in The Orthodox Faith that “Nouns of this sort do not refer to essence, but
to a reciprocal relation and a mode of existence.”12 There is therefore one
case, and one only, where skhésis refers to a relation of identity in order to
maintain a distinction without confusion, and that concerns the Son of
God, image of the Father, when both are referred to not in their essence
but in their relation. Interestingly enough, if we return momentarily to the
Categories, we find that there is nothing there that contradicts this, because
within the father-son relation, it is not essences that are under discussion;13
rather, the relation is simultaneous and reciprocal, as the Categories pro-
vides for.14
However, although it is not as essences that the father and son are rel-
ative, Aristotle does tell us, on the other hand, that whatever is similar is rel-
ative to what it resembles (“to te gar homoion tini homoion legetai”).15 In
what sense, then, is the son the image of the father? Certainly not in the
same way that an image is related to its model, as we will find in the case of
the homoiôsis of the icon. Rather, the essence of the image “as itself ” is in di-
vinity. Everything that proceeds from the Father is his form and his voice.
Recourse to Plato is both tempting and embarrassing where Christ-
ian thought is concerned. Although Aristotle is only invoked methodolog-
ically, Plato was able to serve both iconoclast and iconophile causes, ac-
cording to whether it was his condemnation of all images as copies of a
model already untrustworthy because sensorial that was under considera-
tion, or the Timaeus, where he takes the temporal display of the natural
world to be the perfect and harmonious image of the eternal paradigm, the
manifestation of the divine.16 The Plato of the iconoclasts, however, is
rather more the one who inspired Origen and Eusebios.17 Is Christ not, in
some way, the “mobile image” of the Father, he who the icon would have
to represent with respect to a canonical, metrical system, the proportions
of which are mathematically fixed? It is only through this that the “celestial
   

image” of which Paul talks will become capable of being visibly and canon-
ically portrayed, rejoining the harmony of the created cosmos that is the
joy of the creator.
In order for the artificial image to rejoin the natural image, several
conditions that are closely connected to each other, yet of different orders,
will have to be united. The Holy Spirit will have to breathe upon the heart
and soul of the person who is drawing and painting; the iconography will
have to respect the canons of cosmological harmony, arithmetic canons
that rule over the beauty of the world and the body. And last, and most im-
portantly, it will be necessary to have an unimpeachable doctrine of the in-
finity of line and homonymy.
On the first two conditions, here is the painter’s prayer: “Direct the
hands [of thy servant] for the irreproachable and excellent depiction of the
form of thy person.” And here is the voice of the master:
Learn, O pupil, that in the whole figure of a man there are nine faces, that is to say
nine measures, from the forehead to the soles of the feet. First make the first face,
which you divide into three, making the first division the forehead, the second the
nose and the third the beard. Draw the hair above the face to the height of one
nose-length; again measure into thirds the distance between the beard and the
nose; the chin takes up two of the divisions and the mouth one, while the throat
is one nose-length. Next divide from the chin to the middle of the body into three
measures, and from there to the knees two more; for each knee you take one nose-
length. Take again two more measures to the ankle-bones, and from them to the
soles of the feet one more nose-length, and from there to the toe-nails one more
measure. From the pit of the throat to the shoulder is one measure, and likewise
to the other shoulder. For the thickness of the upper arm take one nose-length and
measure to the elbow from above one measure, and again one more to the base of
the hand; from there to the fingertips is one more measure. Both the eyes are
equal, and the distance separating them is equal to one eye. . . . When a man is
naked his waist should be four nose-lengths across.18

The numerical obsession evident here clearly has Pythagorean origins

and attests to the secret hope of finding a material itinerary worthy of es-
sential similitude, by the use of a canon of proportions.

To sum up, then, the natural image allows a fundamental definition

of the image radically independent of visibility. To be seen is not its aim, and
visibility does not belong within its essential definition. The remove that
necessarily separates every model from its expression in signs is outside its
remit, because neither expressiveness nor the sign are part of its definition.
 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 

Being one only with the economic figure of the divine procession, it is its
manifestation and configuration, first in the invisible figure of similitude,
then in the display of carnal visibility. Thus the icon, made in the image of
this image, will no longer be expressive, signifying, or referential. It will not
be inscribed within the space of a gap, but will rather incarnate withdrawal
itself. It is in the withdrawal of the figure that the transfiguration of the flesh
that is made into the body of the natural image is effected. It is the natural
image that refers to the icon and not the reverse.
The theme of contempt for the flesh does not in the least contradict
the glorification of the body. The body must once again become glorious.
It is for this reason that two contradictory interpretations arose from the
theme of the transfiguration. For the iconoclasts, it concerned a victory of
spirit over matter, thus rendering the portrayal of that triumphant and ra-
diant immateriality useless and impious. For their adversaries, it was on the
contrary the triumph of the flesh over sin, suffering, and death. Portrayal
is therefore the portrayal of life itself, of which the economy was the condi-
tion of possibility and manifestation, organic as well as spiritual.

The status of the natural image’s relation to its own essence finds a
new application when the visibility of the Word maintains a specific rela-
tion of intimacy with its essential similitude in the incarnation, and the
transfiguration then makes manifest the imaginal identity of this essential
similitude. In rejecting this relation, however, it was difficult for the icon-
oclasts to avoid the temptation of Docetism, which made of the living flesh
a phantomlike or transitory appearance, no longer maintaining any inti-
macy with the natural image. Rather, the image as Word remains invisible
and consubstantial, but Christ, because he took human form, will go to
the ends of dissimilarity in order to finally recover his foundational iden-
tity and at the same time make us participate in that recovery. It is this par-
ticipation that is at stake in the icon.
What links the economy of the natural and consubstantial image to
the artificial icon and prevents them from being confused with each other
is the question of absence or emptiness, which is also the mark of the histor-
ical economy. This is no doubt the reason that, instead of appearing to be
a philosophical meditation, the economy is thought of as an “empty con-
cept” by those who refuse to understand that what is at issue is the specifi-
cation of something in the foundation of the imaginal gaze that always
necessarily involves a problematic of withdrawal and vacuity.
It is this that is also undoubtedly the “secret” of the image, by which
   

I mean that which it both secretes and hides, and which Paul gave voice to
in his formulation of the specular enigma. What is an enigma? The pro-
viding of meaning to hidden words, a cryptic word that suddenly exposes
what was until then a pure mystery. An enigma is opposed to a mystery not
in its negation, but as a figure of its hidden manifestation. The icon does
not fall within a theological mystery, but within an economic enigma.
There, the Word marries the flesh, the voice fertilizes the body. Whoever
understands this accepts the power of the gaze and renounces the naive
declaration that he only believes what he sees or that he only sees what is
visible. Thus the first way of thinking about looking at the icon is estab-
lished, inasmuch as it is the first way of thinking about an invisible gaze
coming from the image itself and dispensed by it. The constituents of the
icon summon the gaze and challenge vision without, for all that, trying to
take advantage of it.

The Artificial Image, or the Icon

He believes that copies do not differ in anything at all from the models that
they are the copies of, and that the identity of nature and substance be-
tween elements that share only resemblance is purely maintained. But how
could someone distinguish the image from the copy if there is no difference
between them, resulting from their different natures?
—Nikephoros, Antirrhetics , I,  B. [trans. V.D.]

The question raised by icononphilia concerns the icon’s legitimacy

and faithfulness to the image that is its original, foundational model. The
economic relation of the artificial icon to the natural image concerns pre-
cisely the organization and function of visibility in its relation to the invis-
ible image, which remains the only true image. In other words, the ques-
tion ceases to be whether the icon is either by nature or definition true or
false, or good or bad, because its truth is derived not from itself but from
its founding cause. The essence of the image is not visibility; it is its economy,
and that alone, that is visible in its iconicity. Visibility belongs to the defini-
tion of the icon and not the image. This is why the icon is nothing other
than the economy of the image, and its task is to be faithful to the proto-
type of each and every economy. The question, then, is how the artificial
image will resemble the Word. For if God’s Word chose the visible and the
flesh in order to distribute the salvation of the image by means of the im-
age, it is up to us to take into account this choice of the flesh in order to
 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 

render forever present and visible the memorial of our redemption. Who-
ever rejects the icon refuses to arise from the dead.
How must an icon be if its goal is to be recognized in its similitude and
legitimacy by the gaze that the Image directs at it?
The icon aims at resemblance to its prototype without trying to
maintain with it the relation of similitude that the prototype maintains
with its own substance. What relation of resemblance, therefore, would be
possible between the icon and the essence of similitude? This is the ques-
tion internal to each and every tekhné, which, being authorized by the use
of the term stokhasma (“the object aimed at” or “target”), must carry out an
act of mimésis that is not only purely formal, but as one might say, deliber-
ate and abstract as well.

The Iconic Economy and the Mimetic Relation

(Mimésis-Skhésis)

Once Nikephoros has departed the terrain of consubstantiality, he

rethinks the category of relations in order to establish the foundations of
the icon. He thus switches registers and resituates himself, which he does
because the question of the icon can only be broached from within the
economic order—which is exactly the one that controls the switching of
registers.
In constructing his arguments, Nikephoros turns to the Organon, be-
cause it deals with definitions, homonymy, synonymy, and the category of
relations. Aristotle thus becomes the instrument through which the apor-
ias of theological discourse will be reduced to a pure problem of language.
Returning momentarily to the Categories, we read there that essences can
never be relative (“oudémia ousia tôn pros ti estin”).19 Playing on pros ti and
skhésis in turn, Nikephoros gives them a technical sense that is closely
linked to the question of the icon. Thus the Son has a double relation: one
with the Father, which is pure, essential intimacy, and the other with hu-
manity, which is a relation of relative identity because it is subjugated to
the visible and perceptible conditions of our world. Thus, if the carnal
Christ continues to be an image of the Father, and therefore a natural im-
age at the time that he assumes the human morphé, then it must be the case
that an economic relation of similitude (“homoiôsis kat’ oikonomian”) oc-
curs between God and his Son, an effect of purposive organization in the
temporal world.
   

The statement that Jesus continually remained an image of the Fa-

ther may be taken to mean that Christ was necessarily the most beautiful
and intelligent of men possible, spared from suffering and mortality, the
natural image conferring on the visible the whole organized manifestation
of his perfection. Yet this is also a dead-end solution that can only lead to
Christ’s sacrifice being a useless act, because he would in that case no
longer resemble us. Additionally, if that were so, the redemption would
constitute an impasse that would extinguish all hope for the salvation of
our own weakness and mortality. Christ must therefore share our imper-
fection; it is only through his being similar to us that he saves us. In other
words, the natural image of the Father must have agreed to imitate us. He
made himself similar to us, with the exception of sin. Christ is thus twice
an image, being both the image of the Father and in the image of man.
The steward (oikonomos) of the paternal image, he teaches us to imitate by
submitting himself to imitation. The christic mimetic is therefore not the
imitation of a model, no matter how one considers it, because neither God
nor man is a model for him. Mimésis is the act by which the image rejoins
the image, because it is the image that is the prototype. The image is made
flesh. And if that is so, what will the flesh of our own images be?
All this raises yet another question: how can our imperfect hands and
our gaze, blurred by sin, produce an image of such perfection, all the more
so now that the transitory flesh that assumed the Word is no longer here to
inspire our eyes? Undoubtedly, it was this melancholic observation that
partially inspired the tradition of acheiropoietic images, those not made by
human hands, but rather produced miraculously by divine grace. These
images made it possible for an artist to be highly faithful to the real model
because they were its direct, immediate, unstained imprint. As we have al-
ready seen, however, the artists’ canons tell us that the true solution lies
elsewhere; it is of a doctrinal order and can only arise at the end of the de-
bate regarding the real meaning of mimesis and grace. Of course, the issue
of the imprint and the trace, called by some an index, often finds an echo
in icon doctrine. However, the question then becomes one of justifying the
resemblance of the figure to an absent original, rather than being about
submission to a real model. Passed on by the metaphor of the seal and the
wax, the indexical trace is as inseparable from the history of our images as
the stain and blood, for the image is fundamentally tied to the question of
absence and death. Here, however, rather than considering the icon in its
mythical or imaginary aspects (which Ewa Kuryluk has already done in a
 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 

thorough and stimulating study),20 we will examine it in terms of its doc-

trinal constituents only.
Within this context, then, let us now turn to questions concerning the
graph and iconic inscription. Here, the icon is categorially separated off
from the indices of the acheiropoietic tradition, despite the iconographic
imagination being broadly nourished by the legendary existence of those
images not made by human hand, and the fact that the theme of the veron-
ica also bore a close connection with the history of relics and the founding
myths of iconicity. These issues, however, we will return to later.21

The icon sets the visible and the invisible into a relation with each
other without any concessions to realism, yet without contempt for matter.
This relation would then make it possible to begin considering the mean-
ing of the icon’s abstraction, and the economy would in turn become able
to implement that “abstract” relation that characterizes the formal, delib-
erate resemblance of the icon to its model. This is the question of iconic
homoiôsis, or the formal resemblance that cannot be reduced to the mate-
rial constituents of homoiôma, that is, of the facsimile, of the material copy.
The model is called the hypostasis, by which it is to be understood that the
historical Christ is the existential manifestation of God in a synthetic unity
that mysteriously links the two natures, human and divine, to each other
without mixing them together or altering them. The chosen moment when
this hypostatic unity appeared in the visible world of history is the incar-
nation. By the time the question of the icon arose, of course, this event al-
ready dated back more than eight centuries, but the nature of its actual
presence, its remembrance, and its cult became a topic of active debate.
The general question of the image always concerns the term eikon. For
the artificial icon, the term homoiôsis is the one that recurs everywhere as the
general concept of similitude, even though constant attempts are made to
diversify it through analysis—if not in kind, then at least in aspect. In order
to grasp the specificity of homoiôsis, then, we need to return to the defini-
tions that give the vocabulary of the icon its chief characteristics.
In terms of its materiality, the icon is called apeikasma, eikonisma,
and finally homoiôma, which is associated with ektypôma, which itself refers
again to the copy and the ectype. The inanimate object itself is neutral, and
this can only be fully grasped by linking it immediately to stokhasma: the
object with which one aims to deviate from the similar (paragôge toû pros-
eikotos). Here is Nikephoros on the subject:
   

The archetype is the principle and the model underlying the visible form that is
made from it, as well as the cause from which the resemblance derives. This is the
definition of the icon such that one could use it for all artificial icons: an icon is a
likeness of the archetype, and on it is stamped, by means of its resemblance, the
whole of the visible form of what it is a likeness of, and it is distinct from its model
only in terms of a different essence because of its material. Or [another definition]:
an icon is an imitation of the archetype and a copy differing [from the model] in
its essence and in its underlying substance. Or [it is] a product of art portraying
the visible form of the archetype by imitating it, but it differs from the model in
its essence and its underlying substance. Indeed, if the icon does not differ in any-
thing [from the archetype], then it is not an icon, but nothing other than the ar-
chetype itself. Thus, the icon is a likeness and a replica of beings who have their
own existence.22

The vocabulary that refers to the model, on the other hand, is not as
broad in scope. Even when it implies an irreducible duality in what it refers
to, it is far from being as ambiguous. It is called hypostasis, hypokeiménon,
that is, the formal, not the material substrate of the icon, and also archéty-
pon and prototypon. And when Christ is referred to in his carnal economy,
he appears as eidos, that is, a visible form, morphé, a perceptible form,
skhéma, a figure, charactèr, a line of the face or the silhouette, tupos, an im-
age as a sign or imprint, and therefore less strictly iconic than a symbol.23
How, then, does Nikephoros deal with the question of relations?
It is not inopportune now, I think, to add to my speech that the icon is related to
[skhésis] the archetype and that it is the effect of a cause. Therefore, it is necessary
that the icon both be one of these relatives [pros ti] and be called such. The rela-
tives, these very same things, depend upon things other than themselves, and
change their relationships reciprocally [antistréphi te skhési pros allèla].
For example, the father is called the father of his son and inversely, the son
is called the son of his father. In a similar way we can talk about the friend of a
friend, and about the right of the left and, inversely, about the left of the right.
Similarly, the master is the master of the slave and inversely, and the same can be
applied to all similar cases.24

In this section, Nikephoros is following chapter  of the Categories

fairly closely: “We call relatives all such things as are said to be just what
they are, of or than other things.”25 Although Aristotle is not speaking of
images here, what he does say is still of great importance for us: similarity
is a relative, and he adds to this the point that all relatives have their cor-
relative, as the master and the slave (“panta dè tá pros ti pros antistréphonta
légetai ”). Nikephoros, however, continues as follows: “So, in this way, the
 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 

archetype is the archetype of the icon, and the icon is the image of the ar-
chetype. Anyone who asserts that the icon does not concern a relation
could not assert that it is an icon of something.”26 Earlier, he had already
provided some additional information:
As if, for example, when talking about a man, it were said not that his icon resem-
bles him but that he resembles his icon. It is as though even if the existing rela-
tionship between the icon and the archetype were reversed, their relationship
would remain the same and unchangeable, and it could be said that not only is
there an icon of a man but also that there is a man of an icon. On this premise,
from this point on, one could wonder which of the two is the cause of the other
and antecedent to the other.27

These passages are entirely imbued with Aristotelian concerns that

warn us against the inadequate conversion of correlatives. Aristotle states
clearly that there is a natural simultaneity of the terms of a relation, but
that certain relatives have a necessary anteriority over their correlates,28 and
he gives the example of the object of a science, which has a de facto ante-
riority over that science. Nikephoros, it is true, does insist on the anterior-
ity of the prototype, but because homoiôsis is a knowledge (gnôsis), the
model cannot therefore participate in the same type of anteriority as the
object of science itself. The concept that he is wary of analyzing more rig-
orously, however, is the notion of cause. In the case of the natural image,
the relation of the Father to the Son had already smoothly absorbed the
problem of the causal relation; here again, in the domain of the artificial
image, the prototype becomes the objective cause of the icon thanks to the
oikonomia. Materially, Christ can no longer be the cause of his icon, but
formally, he continues to inform the perceptible world, to the degree that
this world aims toward him, offers him that empty (kénon) zone that was
once the site of his incarnation and which remains henceforth the site of
his manifestation. There is, indeed, a relation between the icon and the
prototype that is nothing other than the one that ties science to its object,
for mimésis is a relative gnosis.
The Aristotelian homôion, taken from the outset as a relative, is first
of all defined as a copy (homoiôma), which is to say, as a fabricated image
(apeikasma katá tekhnèn). This is the dimension of the périgraphè (outline)
in the strict sense, which Nikephoros calls again apotélesma tès tèkhnès katà
mimèsin: the fulfillment of the art according to mimésis, and therefore dif-
ferent to mimésis itself. Its primary characteristic is that it is essentially
graphic; it is the visibility of the visible, in the same way that the copy aims
   

at that visibility as stokhasma. All the aspects of the homoiôma inscribe

Christ’s body in matter as his impression (typos). In this way, the Aris-
totelian demand regarding the correct attribution of correlatives is re-
spected: it is not essences that are relatives, but only the correctly attrib-
uted relative and correlative. Here, that means circumscribed,
circumscribable, and circumscription. Homoiôma is a relative.
To be an image is to aim toward a model, it is to be toward it, as St.
Thomas clearly reminds us: “A relation, by its essential logic, is not some-
thing, but to something [non habet quod ponat aliquid, sed ad aliquid].”29
The specific feature of homoiôsis (which refers to similitude in the
iconic relation) is to mediate between extreme terms (mésiteuei toîs akroîs),
so much so that “it is the hypostasis itself that one can see in the icon of the
one who is painted.” The icon mimeitai, which is to say that it renders the
relation to the Word (pros logon) present and visible, that it is ad-verbum,
to paraphrase Meister Eckhart, who speaks of both man and the image as
an adverb. Additionally, if the icon is mimetic, hence “adverbial,” the ear-
lier images, such as the lamb, had no status other than “pro-verbial.”
Mimésis refers therefore to homoiôma as a directed emptiness. Ladner
writes in this connection: “For the church fathers and for the Byzantines,
identity between image and original does not exist with respect to the for-
mer’s matter or the latter’s nature. . . . The identity is only a formal ideal, a
relational one (according to skhésis or pros ti).”30 This is what allows us to
use the phrase “formal resemblance” to translate iconic homoiôsis in all its
senses, with the proviso, however, that the concept of form falls entirely
within the category of relations, and that relations itself refers not to de-
pendence, but to orientation.
From this perspective, the icon is perhaps the best historical introduc-
tion to the development of abstraction. Within it, form has a nonobjective
reality very close to Mondrian’s admonition to “no longer be concerned
with form as form.” It is as indifferent to empirical reality as it is to an ideal
or fictive beauty that would bring mimésis and the icon into the orders of
reference and representation respectively. Difficult though this may be to
accept, it must be admitted that the icon attempts to present the grace of an
absence within a system of graphic inscription. Christ is not in the icon; the
icon is toward Christ, who never stops withdrawing. And in his withdrawal,
he confounds the gaze by making himself both eye and gaze.
The nature of this withdrawal can only be understood by thinking of
it within the framework of the double register that constitutes it. The first
 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 

bears the mark of the absence of the model. The anagogical property of the
icon leads us through a site of which it is the itinerary, the path. The limit
of iconic vision is the gaze of the icon in the uninterrupted volt of the face-
to-face encounter. Because the function of the homoiotic icon is to relate
the human form to the divine Word, it is mimésis of the incarnation itself.
“Whoever rejects the image rejects the incarnation,” “Whoever rejects the
image rejects the economy,” is how the existential role of the icon must be
understood. The relation that ties tekhné to mimésis is the same as the one
that links morphé to logos. Thus in the third apology of On the Divine Im-
ages,31 John of Damascus writes: “For each thing, that which is according
to nature comes first, and only afterwards, what is according to convention
[thésin] and according to mimésis.” Mimésis is therefore no closer to essence
than a simple material copy. It is its iconic correlate.
That the Aristotelian notion of mimésis should become slowly con-
taminated by kharis, as Kantorowicz argues in “Deus per Naturam, Deus
per Gratiam,” should not surprise us at all.32 This contamination demon-
strates again, although it is hardly necessary to do so, that by way of imi-
tation, mimésis aims for nothing other than the actualization of the incar-
nation, that is, the uninterrupted propagation of the oikonomia as a
relation. In this way, the ancient privilege of vision over speech is recon-
firmed, as Theodore of Stoudios recalls once more: “opsis protêra akouei.”
Kantorowicz cites a considerable number of examples drawn from Greek
and Latin patristics where the pairs phusis-mimésis or natura-imitatio and
then phusis-kharis, or natura-gratia, refer to a relation that moves from the-
ology to economy, then more specifically, from God to humans. He also
notes that these pairs correspond naturally to the opposition “possidere aut
consequi ”; thus, for example, St. Jerome writes in the Tractaeus in Librum
Psalmorum: “Quod dii sumus non sumus natura sed gratia.”
This famous distinction has its origins in Psalm :, which was con-
stantly reinterpreted with reference to the significance of our divinity: “You
are gods, children of the Most High, all of you.” Yet is there really a sub-
stitution of imitation by grace, as Kantorowicz claims? He considers the
terms to be interchangeable, and that the former tended to be abandoned
because it was too anthropocentric in character. Additionally, grace, on his
reading, would confer on God alone the centrifugal power of radiating
even the possibility of a contemplative relationship. Personally, I do not be-
lieve this, at least not in relation to Nikephoros’s text. Homoiôsis appears to
retain there, in its considerable density, all the relational properties of ho-
   

moiôma and mimésis. Equally, the claim would appear to neglect the whole
side of the economy that ensures the ongoing, endless exchanges between
perceptible matter and essences. Above all, however, it would prevent the
notion of knowledge (gnôsis) that Nikephoros speaks of from being given
its true value. Perhaps for him, still under the influence of the Aristotelian
model, a relation remains a specific aim, not only of gesture and look, but
of human intelligence as well, because it makes the hypostasis known to us
without “representing” its object, even as it still respects its anteriority and
activity. What does not constitute grace, however, and yet produces mimé-
sis is the sensitive contemplation of a glittering absence, made by the hand
of man. Homoiôsis does indeed play a role in the human tasks of seeing and
knowing. The icon was willing to wager that a man-made image would be
able to renounce the representation of reality and attract instead the gaze
of truth. Kandinsky once said that there were some people who, departing
for Berlin, would get off the train at Ratisbonne, by which he meant that
they considered themselves to have arrived safe and sound when they had
completed only half the journey.33 In this sense, Orthodox painters and
thinkers refuse to get off at Ratisbonne. To us, this is not only due to grace,
but also to the rigor with which mimetic doctrine was briefly cast. To iden-
tify homoiôsis too actively with grace would be to betray this ardent, polem-
ical, and theoretical will to establish the only view possible of the visibility
of the invisible. That, in effect, is the iconoclast perspective. Nonetheless,
there can be no doubt that the chance of ending up in Berlin arises only
because the correlate of mimésis is grace. Otherwise stated, it is because the
relation between the natural image and the icon is a function of the charis-
matic economy established on the model of the incarnation that the iconic
shadow takes on a colored hue, that the copy (homoiôma) becomes
mimetic. The knowledge that the mimetic icon makes possible concerning
the hypostasis is in turn supported by the acquaintance that the hypostasis
has with us. Thus, seeing implies being seen. The icon contemplates us. In
its turn, it becomes God’s gaze at the contemplator’s flesh, which gets
caught in an informational and transformational circuit of relationships.
The flesh transfigured by the icon transfigures the gaze turned upon it. The
icon acts; it is an effective instrument and not the object of a passive fasci-
nation. Perhaps it is in this way that we should understand the story, end-
lessly repeated, of a viewer who is gripped with emotion and then converts
at the mere sight of an icon. Unfortunately, we cannot enter here into the
problem of miraculous images from a sociological, psychological, or magi-
 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 

cal standpoint. In terms of mimésis and kharis, however, the issue concerns
the iconic body’s effective power as a transfigurative agent. It functions
within the evidence of the manifestatio. Whoever sees it sees himself or her-
self. Whoever sees it is seen. The icon derives a particular power from its
relational and theoretical status that explains the role that it was then able
to play in Byzantium in civic, administrative, and juridical life. It func-
tioned as an effective presence, the presence of a gaze that provides guar-
antees and cannot deceive. Born under the sign of relations, it presides over
all contracts. However, the presence of the iconic gaze cannot be described
as a real presence. In the artificial image, it is the pressure of absence that
bears all the weight of authority. The icon teaches us that the economy of
gazes never substitutes for the people in whom those gazes found their
physical flesh. As we have already said, the issue here is not one of repre-
sentation. What becomes law in the icon is what it portrays the lack of for
us. It is the effective and efficient form of the lack that the divine model of
each and every economy assumed in the “kenosis” of its annihilation.
The icon perhaps never had any model other its own end goal, that
is, the visible experience of a truth whose imprint it makes present on its
own flesh and whose grace it makes present on its own horizon. Thus the
contemplative gaze produces the truth of the icon, the truth as an existen-
tial relation. Consequently, form becomes inobjective and settles upon its
own emptiness. The icon’s obvious disinterest in both realism and Classi-
cal-style aesthetic idealization bears witness to its bitter struggle against the
simulacra of the morphé. The prototype is interior to the desert heart of the
icon. In “Byzantine Art in the Period Between Justinian and Iconoclasm,”
Kitzinger, having performed a subtle analysis of the stylistic influences op-
erating on the icon, is surprised to discover that on the eve of the iconoclast
crisis the tendency that prevailed was what he calls abstract, believing rather
that it should have been the development of Hellenistic realism that would
have had to have been responsible for the iconophobe reaction.34 However,
the argument that we have been making about economic thought and its
graphic, doctrinal, and political unity leads directly to the conclusion that
it is precisely the abstraction of the icon that is in question in the debate
with iconoclasm. Moreover, it is striking that a half-century before
Kitzinger, Wilhelm Worringer had used Byzantine art as an example illus-
trating a tendency toward abstraction against Einfühlung.35 Will scholars
never stop talking only about iconoclasm in relation to abstraction?
The oriental doctrine of the icon, then, should no longer be categor-
   

ically opposed to the image relation as it is found in the West. We turn now
to an investigation that will demonstrate, on the contrary, that the greatest
western pictorial works of art also necessarily concern an existential rela-
tion to the presence of an emptiness, although in a place where this is not
always perceived. By this we mean that in their secret emptiness, they re-
main faithfully indifferent to representation, in order to maintain a skhésis,
a pros ti, where mimetic polarities are linked together, between the specta-
tor and their invisible center. All great art is kenotic.

The Line, the Void, and the Virgin’s Body

( Graphè-Périgraphè )

What does it mean, in terms of principles and consequences, to por-

tray a face captured in iconic space, and constituted by a setting of closed
forms? For the iconophile, the pictorial inscription of the body is not in any
way a circumscription that might imprison or limit that body. The icono-
clast, however, claims loudly that such a gesture encloses and limits divine
infinity, the unenclosability of the Word.
In this respect, one must be wary of taking the incarnation as a cor-
poreal weightiness of the Word that will be filled with flesh. The infinite
cannot be filled. The Word illuminated flesh. The incarnation, called
sarkosis, is also referred to in Pauline and subsequent texts by the term
kenosis. When the word was made flesh, it emptied itself.36 This hollowing
out of the incarnation is found again in the defense of the icon itself. The
icon is not in any way filled with Christ. Its graphic limits do not in any
way contain or keep captive the essence of the Word. The iconic line, as
much as the Virgin’s womb, is therefore a threshold always overflowing
with the existence of the Word, for a gaze that resigns itself to doing with-
out circumscription. In Paul, the kenosis of the Son definitely refers to
Christ’s agreeing to take on the form of a slave (“labôn morphèn doulou”),
which means that the Son’s epiphany in the visible world was carried out
under the sign of dereliction and death. Christ’s anthropomorphism even
went so far as to cause the Father to be left behind, the sacrificial rupture
between the image and the model. Kenosis therefore really signifies aban-
doning divinity, leaving it outside the world. By his sacrifice, the divine im-
itator filled in the distance that separated the image torn from the model,
assuming its decay. In rising from the dead, he carried along with him the
carnal image that he had agreed to identify himself with for a time, open-
 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 

ing for it a heaven of promises in which the human image and the natural
image would be reconciled. This is a true saga of the image, which is noth-
ing other than the saga of the incarnation itself, where the salvation of the
body, expressed as the salvation of the soul, is nothing other than the sal-
vation of the body expiated by a God who reveals himself as the essence of
the image. Once God is hidden, the God of all mysteries emerges in the
light of his enigma.
It must be understood in what way the line, this incision or marking
of the medium that separates the plane in two, that cuts it, subjugates us
to the artifices of form, without (for all that) undermining the essence of
its model. The line is an edge where being begins, an embankment where
something ends. Inscription (graphé) allows nouns to be declined. Thus
form is that roll37 of the world that encircles masses, or rather, conceptual-
izable zones, in an homogenous space, but that encloses nothing. Does
whatever exists within the line, ringed by it, therefore have meaning, or a
hollowed-out meaning? Does the line engender a full and differentiated
space, or with its raw wound, its graphic fissure, does it mark the visible
limits of the void itself ? Form in the icon is exceeded by its function. The
iconic line, the one that forms a contour, will never be a perimeter, a limit
for the being that it shows. Christ’s face, which allows itself to be seen in
the form of morphé, eidos, skhéma, tupos, charactèr, resembles him accord-
ing to a mimetic that must be firmly distinguished from circumscription
(périgraphè), even if this limitation was his lot during his terrestrial life. To
imprint is not to encircle. To draw is not to delimit. Christ is not the pris-
oner of the icon; the iconic graph is neither a prison nor a tomb, as it was for
the Platonic soul and body. It is crucial to understood that the duality that
inhabits the icon has nothing to do with the duality of body and soul, but
with that of the Word and humanity.
The invisibility of the Word is different in nature to the invisibility of
the soul. This is why the iconoclast reproach concerning the inanimate
character of the icon is unacceptable to the iconophile, who can only see in
it an Apollinarist confusion. The iconic graph must be understood as a tri-
umph of the flesh, which is transfigured by the spirit of the Word, not the
psykhe. This, at least, is the doctrine that underpins the graph. The fact that
the iconic object is inanimate establishes a relative similitude with the hu-
manity of its model, and the fact that it is visible creates another relative
similitude with the divinity of that same model. The icon is no more sim-
ilar to man than it is to God. But it maintains with both natures a rela-
   

tionship of which line and color are the sole vectors of the manifestation of
a relationship between them. There is no pretense, therefore, to a sum-
moning or evocation of the prototype, as is the case with the idol, to which
the effigy appeals. In iconophile thought, the idol tries to take possession
of and retain the occult force that it dreads or invokes. The idol, as we will
see, is on the side of the double.38 The iconic mimetic, however, is alien to
duplication. The icon claims to show the liberty of the omnipresent God
by not seizing it anywhere, by not calling to it, but rather allowing its voice
to be raised and to act causatively. To not circumscribe is to make manifest
infinity and liberty.
As an effect of line, the incarnation operates in withdrawal. The
mimetic of the line is its withdrawal. The absence of God at the heart of the
icon is to be understood in Christ’s double mimetic articulation: the empti-
ness of the kenosis (kenósis, the annihilation assumed by the Son in radical
exile, far from the Father) became the emptiness of a perceptible form, and
then a luminous radiation of the maternal flesh transfigured by the Father’s
voice. It is within the remit of the iconic economy to make itself similar to
this double hollowing out. The icon speaks of mourning and the resurrec-
tion by turns. The icon’s flesh strives toward what was the flesh of the res-
urrection that it commemorates and of which it maintains the promise.
Christ’s icon is empty of his carnal and real presence—in this it differs rad-
ically from the eucharist—but is full of its absence, which by the trace that
it leaves and the lack that it incarnates, produces the very essence of the
visible. To incarnate oneself is to empty oneself, or what amounts to the same
thing, to become similar to one’s own image.
When the Word became flesh, divinity did not fill up with matter, no
more than matter with divinity. The icon, as a memorial to the incarna-
tion, is therefore really a memorial to the hollowing out that is brought
about by the infinity of the line. In order to understand Christian doctrine
as being no more or less than a doctrine of the image, it is crucial to avoid
the fundamental error of confusing the incarnation with materialization.
The incarnation is not a materialization: the icon as a memorial of the in-
carnational economy makes use of a flesh that is not matter. This is what
the iconophiles accuse the iconoclasts of having missed in reproaching the
icon for its materiality, as is supposed to be the case for the object labeled
“idol.” Idol, in fact, is the word with which one denounces the supposed
“materialism” of one’s enemy.
It is because “became flesh” is not equivalent to “became matter” that
 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 

the question of what it is that constitutes the flesh of our images and the
body of our institutions arises in a completely new way. Economic think-
ing about the flesh is even more complex and subtle than it might first ap-
pear in that it demands that another error, as weighty as the first, be
avoided. This is the claim that the incarnation is a dematerialization, or al-
ternatively, constitutes the idealization of matter. But transfiguration is not
idealization. The light that forms Christ’s flesh is real and natural, similar
in every way to the flesh of our similitude before the fall, and to what that
flesh will once again become by means of the redemptive economy.
The meaning of this cannot be understood without further examina-
tion of the doctrine of kenosis, which I take to be a system of thought con-
cerning an emptiness that makes place for the light of real, natural, and
transfigured matter. Only then does it become possible to glimpse that el-
ement that has the ability to become imaginal flesh rendered visible in
iconic flesh. Kenosis has often been interpreted solely from the aspect of
divine condescension as referring only to the humility, poverty, and nudity
of the Messiah. The “form of the slave” of which Paul speaks would in this
sense be nothing but terrestrial exile, far from the Father’s glory. But in the
debate over the image, the question of the incarnational emptiness takes
on a whole new amplitude, because it perpetuates the emptiness of the
Parousia in the very form of the iconic memorial.
The line produces a partition of space, as the coming of Christ pro-
duced the partition of time between the Old and New Covenant. Hence-
forth, the representation of the Messiah in the symbolic form of the lamb
can be abandoned; henceforth, Christians have the right to the face, a sign
of the new law. Christ is risen, his face, his person (prosôpon) triumphs over
the cross, and the transfiguration of his body continues in the icon. Trans-
figuration, métamorphôsis: this is the word that refers both to the glory of
the risen body and the workings of the gaze upon the icon. Iconoclasm
claimed that Christ’s body could only be portrayed before the resurrection,
before he had reencountered the luminous immateriality of his divine na-
ture. Nonsense, exclaimed the iconophiles; the icon is a memorial to both
natures, and therefore to his arisen nature as well. The line on the panel
can no more imprison than the cross could annihilate. The icon of Christ’s
face rims Christ, just as his absent grace rims the gaze of the contemplator.
The face in the icon rims an essence whose incarnation and resurrection
the icon reiterates, but never represents.
Faced with the iconoclast’s leitmotif concerning divine uncircum-
   

scribability, Nikephoros, in a veritable theoretical tour de force, convinces

his audience that there is a radical difference between iconic spatiality and
the spatiality of natural perception. This is his one truly novel contribution
to the philosophy of the image. The law of the icon, which I will call its
ico-nomia, is its topical singularity, its phenomenological specificity. The
visible is not the perceptible. What is unduly attributed to aesthetics has
nothing to do with perception. And despite everything, the icon looms up
before our eyes to manifest a body whose light it welcomes, without ever
appropriating. This is what graphic inscription can do: it relates a visible
periphery to an invisible and transfigured content. It has no existence other
than the preliminary, and the threshold that it marks is the threshold of in-
finity. Idolatry is averted because the gaze finds nothing to graze upon (to
take up again Paul Klee’s word) in this delightfully empty object that re-
spects the uncircumscribability of its prototype. The iconic line is a flaw
that refers to Christ’s body as a passing weakness of God, both willing and
salvational. Kenosis situates the icon definitively beyond any metaphorical
or indexical sign; it owes its status as a symbol only to the combined oper-
ation of the gaze and the voice. The invisible similitude that haunts the vis-
ible image does not concern any category of material signs. Rather, it is the
gaze that constitutes an index.
The line is a kenotic practice that the history of images will never go
back on, and the doctrine of the iconic graph is the earliest formulation of
pictorial abstraction. Iconic anthropomorphism should never be taken for
representative realism: the figure is only there in order to show the empti-
ness and absence of what it indicates to the gaze constitutes its horizon.

Line and Color

As Dionysios of Fourna tells us, in the making of an icon, the graph

concerns copying and drawing.39 Note, however, that the question of col-
ors has not yet arisen. At this level, Christ’s icon, which is nothing other
than an icon of the image, is called apomagma, that is, an imprint, Christ
being the seal (sphragis), like the intaglio (antibola) image engraved on
coins and seals. The vocabulary of sigillography and numismatics is signif-
icant here, for it aims at establishing an ever-closer relation between doc-
trinal and political choices, as the reddere Caesari had already implied. In
the third Antirrhetic, Theodore of Stoudios also stresses this characteristic:
“allo sphragis kai héteron apomagma.”40 Whatever in the visible universe
 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 

touches Christ’s body closely becomes his graphic trace. A tenth-century

text recounts an episode from the life of St. Nikon that bears some signifi-
cance in relation to this. After Nikon dies, a fervent admirer of his desires
to possess his portrait. The artist given the task of painting the icon, how-
ever, still experiences great difficulty with it, even after obtaining the de-
scription of the saint by hearsay. Then one night, Nikon appears and refers
to himself by name (homonymy). The text then tells us that on waking,
the painter found that the panel on which the painting was to be done al-
ready bore an imprint. Everything was there; all that was left to do was to
add the colors: “ta loipa tôn chromatôn prosagagôn kai tèn eikona téléôn.”41
This legend confirms both the links as well as the distance that exist be-
tween the icon and the acheiropoeietic image. The imprint not made by
human hand transmits a contour, a homonymic graph, but it will only be
brought to completion as an icon by the luminous grace of color. Thus
John Chrysostom writes: “For however long somebody traces the lines of
his drawing [charagmata], there will only result a type of shadow [skia ti
eétin]. But when one paints over the top of the shading and puts on the
colors [chrômata], then there is an icon [tote eikôn ginetai].”42 The same
echo is found in John of Damascus: “When the painters trace their lines
[grammas] on wood and draw the shadow, they then add the truth of col-
ors [alêtheian tôn chrômatôn]; Christ himself did it in this way.”43 And
Cyril of Alexandria, addressing himself to Akakios of Melitene, should be
understood in the same way: “We say that the old law is the shadow and
graph for the contemplation of those who see reality. The graphic shadows
on the wood of art are the first lines [charagmata] to which are added the
luster and brilliance of the colors [anthé tôn chrômatôn].”44
Many more such examples could be given. What always emerges
from them is that the relation between shadow and color, contour and bril-
liance, confirms the relation that links the Old Testament to the New. In
Nikephoros this amounts to an understanding that when covered with
brilliant colors, the périgraphè of the homoiôma, the circumscribed copy,
“presentifies” the new law. Thus it was for the above-mentioned painter of
St. Nikon, to whom fell, upon waking, the mimetic task of color, which
alone could link his work as a painter to his faith as a Christian. The term
concerning color that flows constantly from the pens of the church fathers
is anthos or anthê, which refers simultaneously to flowers and to brilliance.
Color, chromatic richness, the use of brilliant materials like gold, precious
stones, and pearls,45 should not be understood on a mimetic level as a naive
   

investment of riches where the church displayed its power. It concerns

something else entirely. These materials act in their skhésis, that is to say, in
a relation of specific intimacy that maintains the gaze and the absence. A
site of brilliance and light, matter becomes a mirror for the Word, aiming
in its orientation for the blind spot in the eye that catches only the divine
vestigium in the icon’s flesh.
There is therefore at the heart of the icon a whole mimetic that con-
tinuously forms an obstacle to the repose of any gaze that might happen to
alight on some object capable of satisfying it, and above all, of fulfilling it.
The homoiôma, or facsimile, simultaneously bears the language of tech-
nique and incarnation, to which the grace of color lends a vertiginous qual-
ity. This attribute of the icon necessarily implies that the mimétès, who is
both a painter and a believer, is himself already touched by his desire for
truth. In other words, painter is a relative term, a pros tí, a stokhasma. The
only definition it has is that of a vector, always active. The contemplator is
no more a subject than the icon is an object. It is a magnetic pole, both an
aiming and the object aimed.
No portrait of Christ, therefore, is possible, and the anthropomor-
phic resemblance of the facsimile always remains within mimetic ambi-
tions concerning knowledge of uncircumscribability. When the painter
paints, says Pseudo-Dionysios, “He looks continuously at the form [eidos]
of the archetype, without being distracted by any other visible thing, pay-
ing no attention to anything else. . . . He will show the truth in the copy,
and the archetype in the image.”46 This human “similitude” is specially
important in that it is differentiated completely from the simulacrum,
even if it is symbolic. Nikephoros cites in this connection the councils,
particularly canon  of the Quinisext synod, that demanded that the
lamb henceforth be replaced by Christ’s human face.47 This theme, which
opposes Old Testament symbolism to the new economy, is of the greatest
importance. It allows the iconophiles not to be satisfied with nothing but
the cross or the lamb, both of which make use of the relation of sign and
symbol.48 In the same way, Melchisedek is not a true image, insists John
of Damascus, but a premonitory shadow (proskiasma) whose truth is
Christ. In other words, the similitude of Christ in the icon is greater than
that of the lamb in previous symbols, not in terms of the reproduction of
a human model, but as the production, the visible institution, of the New
Covenant (oikonomia). In this sense, whoever rejects the homoiôma rejects
the incarnation and continues to place him or herself in the expectant sit-
uation of the Old Testament; such people are henceforth impious and
 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 

know only shadow and simulacrum. They confine themselves to symbolic

representation. To accept the homoiôma is to leave behind the old
prophetism in order to approach the field of mimésis and grace. It is be-
cause the relation between oikonomia and homoiôma exists in truth (en
alèthèiai) that homoiôsis bears witness to a mimetic relation opening up at
the heart of the icon.
Just as drawing is the inscription of a body that has disappeared, the
chromatic surface that graces it is the indexical trace of the pressure of its
light-producing gaze. Color then follows and perfects the transfiguration
of the line. The graph is prefigurative, as was the prophets’ shadow-writing
(skiagraphè). It is also completely identified with the field of writing. When
color arrives, however, one enters the field of light-writing, which may al-
ready be called “photography.” The analogy will certainly be made many
centuries later, as we will see below.49
In the icon, color is laid on in successive coats, starting with the dark-
est and ending with the lightest, which is transparent. The painter’s ges-
tures thus become a memorial to the redemption of the flesh, by the ascent
from darkness to light.
The iconic graph and its chromatic treatment is truly an unprece-
dented philosophical invention because it marks the first appearance of a
question concerning the life of the image. There was no doubt for the pro-
tagonists of both camps that life belonged to the model itself, that is, to the
imaginal prototype, but the iconoclasts then reproached the icon for being
an inanimate figure of that life. Iconophile thought therefore had to deal
with and resolve a problem that had never before been posed on the sub-
ject of the image in Classical philosophy. What the concept of the econ-
omy allowed is precisely the linkage of the filial relation to the idea of a liv-
ing image. In the Old Covenant, life is breath; in the economy of the New
Covenant, life is light. Its opposite is therefore not death but darkness, and
it maintains with death neither a productive nor (above all) a dialectical re-
lation, but a prefigurative one. Darkness is the enigmatic mirror of life, and
through the transfiguration, the organic life of the flesh receives the light
that raises it beyond its status as prefigurative.

The Icon and Virginity

In order to open us to his “relative” visibility, God chose the flesh in

which the Word assumed a body, so that he could shoulder the fate of the
figure completely. The instrument that served to redeem the body was
   

none other than the womb of the Virgin, within which “the Word was
made flesh.” It would therefore be incorrect to claim that the Virgin was a
simple material cause, in the Aristotelian sense of the term, because in or-
der for flesh to be capable of being fertilized by the Father’s voice, it must
already occupy a special place in the economic plan of the redemption.
That body must already be in the image of what fertilizes it. It is also pure,
virginal, and open to grace. In other words, the Virgin is already inscribed
in the economy of the natural image; the new Eve, her virginity is imaginal
in its essence.
The issue at stake therefore does not concern the comical, organic
monstrosity of being simultaneously both virgin and mother. On the con-
trary, that state is a totally natural, internal effect caused by the nature of
the image itself. It is the imaginal life in the icon that produces the eco-
nomic concept of the virginal womb. For the icon is nothing other than
that when it carries the image within itself. Fertilized by the grace that
speaks to it in the primary voice of the épigraphè that was the annuncia-
tion, it becomes the fertile womb from which all future images will be
born.50 What is at stake in the virginity of the Virgin is the purity of the
image. Henceforth, the rest of us women will have to choose between the
redeemed visibility of our virginal, maternal image, and the diabolical
darkness of our unimaginable matter, impure and deflowered.

Such useless sniggering over this virginity! At this very site, through
her flesh, woman becomes the place of choice for the body of the whole
imaginal economy. In this way, the immaculate womb of the invisible is
opened to iconic life: panel, canvas, blank page, veil, vaults, unknown lands;
in a word, endless space, no stain of inscription whatsoever, the body with
no border of jurisdiction, the mirror empty of specularity. For the rest of us
women, this is what is henceforth offered as the flesh of our sovereignty!
Even today, the fate of the image of women cannot be thought through
without an initial, fundamental consideration of what the woman in the im-
age is. The virginal body both keeps and sustains every cloth and every
shroud that collects the traces and stains of life, death, and resurrection.
And what if this were the foundation of painting of every sort?
That said, however, let us now return to the icon. In order to conde-
scend to human form, that is to say, in order to pass from the state of the
natural, invisible image to icon for the gaze, it is necessary to have a womb.
And this human mediator was pregnant with this son, imaginal and virginal
like her, to whom she transmitted her traits, her form, her temporal and
 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 

spatial definitions. She was the circumscribed envelope of a circumscribable

son without suffocating the uncircumscribability of his imaginal nature. A
virginal, uterine space was thus defined by the economy. This womb, which
is of value only for its borders and to which the visible owes its form, is re-
ally the body of the mother. The dawn of the first icon appears with the an-
nouncement of a voice saying to a woman that she is henceforth the
dwelling place of the infinite. The icon reiterates and perpetuates in turn
the implantation of the Word within the virginal border, a uterine khôra tra-
versed by divine breath, sustained by the voice of the herald.
It will be readily understood, therefore, just how philosophically im-
portant it was to anathematize those who claimed that Christ was pre-
formed, and that he only passed through his mother as though through a
canal. Thus Gregory of Nazianzos, for example, insists vigorously on the
absolute naturalness of the phenomenon of the Virgin’s pregnancy.51
Christ’s unimagination in the maternal and virginal body means that
his image cannot be dissociated from the femininity of the temporal institu-
tion that makes his economy visible, the church itself. The Old Testament
images are inverted. First, fallen Eve had taken her form from Adam’s
body; now the virginal institution becomes the space from which the new
Adam arises, and within which it will be possible to register the full power
of temporal conquests.
Thus, as a result of the image being saved, she who caused the loss of
our pure similitude in the Old Testament story is redeemed as well. In or-
der for this to happen, however, a woman exempt from original sin would
be required, and this in turn became a necessary dogma. The point to be
made here is that Christian discourse, taken as a whole, is nothing other
than an immense ordering and management of the question of the image,
whether it is flesh, sin, women, nature, or art that are concerned.
Within the institutional universe, one enters a peaceful belly that, in
its analogical fertility, will be able to pass easily from one image to another:
“Listen, my Son, to the words of your Father, and do not dismiss the insti-
tutions [thésmos] of your Mother. . . . Our Mother, the church, carries
within it institutions that cannot be dissolved.”52 Thesmos has taken the
place of the teachings of the Torah.

The Voice and Homonymy ( Épigraphè)

The epigraph is the written name that always accompanies the per-
son or people portrayed in the icon. If the icon is neither an expressive con-
   

vention nor a referential sign, however, what is the phenomenological

meaning of this practice? What does the graph of the name do?
The scriptural foundation of the economic link between the graph
and both the written name and the voice that sustains it allows us to un-
derstand the close link that connects the prohibition on the portrayal of
the face with the ban on pronouncing the name in the Old Testament.
This is the same prohibition that banishes the image and its homonymy.
By means of the epigraph’s voice, the image pronounces itself. In Deuteronomy,
he who makes his voice heard prohibits his name from being taken in vain.
Henceforth, the voice will no longer be raised against the image; it forms
one with it, it registers itself in its flesh. This is the meaning of the
homonymic economy.
If economy and incarnation cannot be separated from kenosis, the
voice too unfolds in an empty place that only the icon has the right to fill,
although without ever filling it up. Thus is raised that strong voice that
knew how to refer to the Incarnate one in order to announce him, the
voice of St. John Prodrome, representing itself perfectly: “I am the voice of
one crying out in the wilderness.”53 Such is the voice in the iconic wilder-
ness, where the kenotic figure of removal54 is the condition of acceptance
of the natural image and the divine gaze.
The incarnation is nothing other than the redemption of the image
by the image. The imaginal contract of the God of Genesis with his hu-
man creations had remained without issue since the fall in the Old Testa-
ment. Being of a God without an image, the people had no sense of hearing.
Yet God did not stop calling out to his people, talking to them, inscribing
his law in writing. But would that writing not remain as if dead, with the
image not sustaining it? Thus God, through his providential will, set in
motion the economic power of his iconic nature and decided to renew the
only covenant possible with humans, the inherent covenant of the cre-
ation, similitude.
In Aristotle, who was not concerned with the image as such, ho-
moion, resemblance, is nevertheless cited as a pros ti, a relative. The prob-
lem of the image is thus present, although only indirectly: it arises not
from the viewpoint of relations, but from homonymy, and it is from that
angle that Nikephoros, following the church fathers of the second council
of Nicaea, makes use of it. Here is his text: “Moreover, the resemblance
confers homonymy. The name is one and the same for both [the icon and
the model]. The icon of the king is called ‘the king.’ The icon could say:
 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 

‘the king and I are one thing,’ despite the evident fact that they are differ-
ent in essence.”55
Nikephoros thus asserts that a relation exists here because there is a
sharing of the name, that is to say, homonymy. The example of the king is
a topos of patristic literature, but it comes to be used in a completely new
way by the iconophiles. Previously, the king’s voice had allowed for the ex-
planation that just as there were not two kings as a consequence of his im-
age, a fortiori, there were not two gods as a result of the duality of the Per-
sons of the Trinity. Thus, in Athanasios we see: “The king and I are one
[égô kai ho basileus hèn ésmén],56 which is modeled on the voice of the Lo-
gos in St. John: “My Father and I are one,” which in turn echoes the
demonstrative voice of the Father during the baptism in the Jordan: “This
is my Son, the Beloved.”57 With the iconic crisis, however, the king’s voice,
invoked afresh, takes on a different weight as the iconophiles see the redis-
covered splendors of imperial iconoclast art being unfurled before their
eyes. The theological meaning carried by the example of the king’s image
is therefore intensified by political allusion. For the emperors, always care-
ful of ensuring that the sacred character of the Savior be respected by
means of aniconicity, for their own part never stopped seeking to derive the
maximum benefit possible from the spread of their own “icons.”
But how will the question of iconic homonymy be dealt with when
it becomes necessary to justify it not theologically or politically, but philo-
sophically? In the first place, it is interesting to discover the following
quote at the beginning of Aristotle’s Categories: “When things have only a
name in common and the definition of being which corresponds to the
name is different, they are called homonymous. Thus, for example, a man
according to whether he is alive or in a picture.”58 And at line six: “One
will give a definition specific to either one or the other [idion ekatéron lo-
gon apodôsei].” In effect the definition is given according to essence (ousia)
and not according to name (onoma). Homonymy in Aristotle does not
form part of the relatives. It is Nikephoros who asserts simply of this
homonymy that “it is in relation [tèn skhèsin ékhei].”

This point can only be understood by returning to the example itself

and Nikephoros’s follow-up to it, on what we might call the voice of
homonymy. Whoever worships the icon worships the prototype, because
homonyms have no de facto identity. As a result of the economy’s jurisdic-
tion, however, they do have an identity by right than can only be under-
   

stood from the point of view of mimésis. The name is not an abstract, iso-
lated, or arbitrary convention. Rather, it is sustained by the authority of the
voice that refers to the project of similitude and on which it rests. I refer
here to the analysis of E. Martineau, who suggests that the sign is a “deic-
tic, demonstrative sémeion.”59 The claim being made is thus that the word
stops being purely conventional when a thing refers to itself in its image. A
homoiôsis then takes effect that is neither nature nor convention, but the
voice of reference as the foundation and guarantee of identity. The gap that
separates the model from its icon is thus transformed into an intimacy that
is relational (skhésis) in the voice that says: “I am this one.” What must be
stressed here is the imperative character of the homonymic voice, the index
of its jurisdiction. The homonymic icon gives an order: in the case of the
king, it commands respect and obedience; in Christ’s case, it decrees the
direction of the gaze. The fact that the model and the icon share the same
name functions as a contract for a response by rights: it is the spiritual con-
tract of the visible and invisible guaranteed by the voice. It is not Christ in
person, but a voice in this place (the icon) that designates it as a place of a
relation that is contemplative. Homonymy draws the icon out of the si-
lence of the idols in order to make it enter into that demonstrative silence
where the Father will name his Word. Within the homonymic relation,
Nikephoros insists on the alterity of definitions that imply the alterity of
essences. There again we find the topos of hypostatic thought. There is no
allos kai allos but allo kai allo,60 which is to say that there is no alterity of
two things, but a distinction between two modes. This argument is set out
with some rapidity, but it is no less important from the point of view of the
homoiôma: even as the material copy of the physical model, the icon does
not in any way share the definition of the material elements that comprise
the archetype. This material alterity is also imposed by homonymy. Be-
tween Christ’s flesh and the matter that constitutes the material of icons
there is a distance as large as between heterogenous essences, an essential
heterogeneity that leads the iconoclasts to describe the icons, precisely, as
pseudonyms.
The icon is either deceitful or a homonym. The most original feature
of iconophile thought is to make of homonymy a relation of intimacy that
is both essential and relative. In other words, it consists in an economic or-
dering and administration of the identity of the name. But, Nikephoros re-
minds us, Christ’s flesh is animate, liable, mortal, which are all so many
properties that the icon’s “flesh” does not share. Homonymy therefore does
 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 

not institute a metonymic relation any more than a metaphoric one. The
icon is neither part of nor substitute for its model. This is essential in order
to answer the iconoclast argument concerning the division of hypostatic
unity. From the moment that homonymy comes into being, there is an al-
terity of definitions and natures. The icon shares nothing with the model
in the way of conjunction, reproduction, or even allusion or participation.
It shares nothing of the appearance of an intelligible reality. Eidos is the
mode by which the prototype allows itself to be seen in the icon. This is the
immanence of sense and not of essence. It resembles similitude without
ever being confused with it. This resemblance is of the order of the gaze of
the flesh and not of the matter of bodies. The matter of which it is made
has no pretensions to resemble what was its living flesh. It cannot be con-
cerned with the double reproach of being inanimate like an idol or animate
like a magical object. It is the site of an autonomous, singular relation that
does not compete in any way with historical or tangible reality, but which,
as has been said, will refer to it, as the arrow refers to the target. The graph
is not a part of Christ; it is only a mark of formal unity that inscribes in the
flesh the union of the gaze and the voice because it is the same word that
refers to the iconic graph and the graph of writing.
The voice operates at the junction of the visible and the readable, or
the audible, we should rather say, because the epigraph is often a cryp-
togram that does not really lend itself to reading. The epigraph takes over
from the voice that had long (since the time of the prophets) announced the
incarnation of the Father’s Word. The voice speaks the name. The finger
points to the body that has the right to that name. And we know that this
voice and this finger refer to nothing. They do not make a sign, they make
meaning. Once again the iconophile differentiates himself from his adver-
sary in not generating any distance between the named-shown and the op-
erations that name and show. Just as the Persons are one and not removed
from each other in the Trinity, so the Father, his image, and his voice are
united in the icon, in the iconic manifestation. The voice of the epigraph is
the voice of invisible similitude that is united with resemblance.
What proof do we have of Christ’s royalty and divinity when he
came to earth? We have nothing other than Speech, the word of the Old
Testament that announces both him and that his coming finally brings
enlightenment, the word of the angel Gabriel whose voice left Mary in no
doubt, the words of St. John the Baptist. And finally and most impor-
tantly, the voice of the Father heard at the Jordan, saying, “This is my
   

dearly beloved Son,” which is often illustrated iconographically by a fore-

finger suspended over Christ’s head. Thus a most perfect image advances
toward humanity in the annihilation of its flesh, saying, “I am here,” and
always accompanied, preceded, overcome by the voices that say, “He is
here, it is Him. Ecce Homo.”
This vocal reference is of the utmost importance. How is one to
know that the image fits the model? By what is expressed by the voice,
which gives them the same name. This is a constant theme in the icon’s de-
fense, and it can be summarized by saying that the icon is a homonym. It
is for this reason alone that a name must be inscribed (épigraphè) on the
icon; it has nothing to do with providing information about its contents.
The epigraph, the hand of the Virgin Hodegetria (which shows while re-
ferring), the forefinger of the Father, St. John the Baptist, or the apostles,
which refer everywhere to the Son, are so many signs that allow the image
in the icon to be identified. The choir of voices that murmur unanimously
around Christ’s body in order to attest to the homonymy of his portrayal
only has to stop for the figurative illusion to be undone, for the mechanism
by which he is presented to us to be made clear. As soon as it is named,
however, the kenotic body shines in its absence “with a sparkling radia-
tion.”61 Only two sorts of lines remain before us: those that form a corpo-
real envelope, intensified by the icon of the mother who holds her son in
her arms, and those that form the signs of the epigraph and that refer back
to the Father’s voice. The position of Christ’s fingers, which form the first
letters of his name, intensify this homonymic coming together of the
graphs that inscribe flesh and name.
The child born of the union between the flesh and the voice: that is
what the icon is. The fruit of the womb to which these lines refer is the
icon itself. It is there, he is not there; he is no longer there, but it (the icon)
is. Thanks to it, he is there “in some way”—that is to say, relatively there
and relatively not there. Thus it is as though the Word enters a mise-en-
abime in the icon, coiled in his mother’s body, resting in his Father’s voice,
promised to this world, a completely imaginary iconic object that confers
universal royalty on him.
How not to reproach the voice of the iconic epigraph with the picto-
rial game of Magritte: “This is not a pipe,” as though he wanted to untan-
gle the economy of the homonymic incarnation in the painting, and only
succeeded at the price of a play on the signifier? What is the voice that sus-
tains this ludic space if not that of a forger of a theological parody? This is
a poetic but extremely naive game. The iconophile is less naive and cer-
 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 

tainly less poetic. He shows the iconoclast a graph and says clearly: “This
is not Christ, but you, you remain deaf to the voice that calls your gaze,
you remain blind to the graph that inscribes the presence of that voice.”
Christ’s icon does not refer to a higher reality, one that is more au-
thentic; that would be the reality of an exterior model, invisible and dis-
tant. The distance is rather inside the icon itself, and it allows us to hear the
echo of a voice within it.
It is clear that the iconophiles were duty bound to attempt to escape
the threat and accusation of idolatry. But they found in it a linkage that
mediated between the presence of the divine image and the presence of the
material icon. It is the voice that provides that linkage.
Mention may be made in this regard of Byzantine music, which with
its chants fills the sacred places filled with icons. Monodic music, or the
human voice, exclusive of all instruments, turns its back on narrative, an-
ecdotal melody, and functions instead on two planes simultaneously that
are closely related to each other: the recitative and the drone.62 The sus-
tained note of the drone is conducive to prayer in that it rests only on the
rhythms of breathing (pneuma). This pneumatic character of the drone
makes it the privileged instrument of the breath of the Holy Spirit. It is the
Spirit of the Word that breathes and that underpins all attempts at expres-
sion. As for singers, they develop their threnodies and prayers on the basis
of the sacred texts. In song, the voice sets up a decomposition of sense,
which functions by rhythmic effects that completely distend the semantic
units to such a degree that the vocalizations end up forsaking all meaning.
This happens in the chant dedicated to the fruit of the Virgin’s womb (“to
karpos tès koilias soû”), which ends in a stressed “terirem-terere rirem” that
sounds highly significant but means absolutely nothing. The Byzantine
voice is thus faithful here to the iconic voice, in the sense that it brings the
spiritual actors face to face with each other in a meeting based on the grace
of the breath whose operation is transfigurative (métamorphôsis).

The Anti-icon of the Iconoclast Emperor’s Body

Let us now turn to Nikephoros’s description of the iconoclast em-

peror’s body. On the basis of the foregoing material, we are now in a posi-
tion to read this passage in an entirely new way, one that will allow us to
decipher it as a discursive performance that molds the emperor into the an-
titype of the iconic economy.
   

What Nikephoros chose to cite or to have his iconoclast adversary say

is of no less value for us than an original iconoclast speech would be. It is a
sort of hollow mold meant to make us understand again, but in a negative
way, what is at stake in the icon itself. This portrait by an iconophile of
someone who, by rejecting the icon foregoes by the same stroke all visibil-
ity, cannot fail to affect us.
If God, on the one hand, can no longer manage without the image
and icon in order to reveal himself and to reign over the world, then he
who turns himself, on the other, into the occasional iconographer of the
devil has recourse only to words, which form a tight weave of logical argu-
ments, ruses, and insults. This “anti-icon,” which is highly significant, is
specifically tailored, meant to show us just what an enemy of the economy
of the gaze and speech is made of. This man no longer has any place to be
because he has no place to appear, and Nikephoros’s description is of a
body of whom no icon is possible. In it we recognize as well the con-
stituent materials of the rhetorical structure representing the savage and the
barbarian, a structure destined for a great and terrible future. The enemy
of culture distinguishes himself by the characteristics of his body and the
unacceptable nature of its space. The “ideological” power of such a de-
scription can only be grasped if it is compared to the essence of the Chris-
tian body and the iconic space within which that body constitutes the par-
adigm of its own visibility and power.
The catalog of insults directed at Constantine V can be seen as one
of the many “breviaries of hatred” in which the history of Christianity was
so abundantly fertile. There again, it is the concept of oikonomia that de-
termines how the model of abjection will be developed. It is because the
concept recoups the idea of nature, which the very definition of the image
is associated with, that Constantine was relegated to the camp of mon-
strosity and unnaturalness. To reject the image is a teratological act that
only an already unnatural and perverse being could commit. It is therefore
extremely important to understand the sense in which the image is first of all a
natural reality, because it is in the nature of the image to show what it itself is,
namely, nature itself.
The list of insults leveled at Mammon is highly systematic. The en-
emy of the economy incarnates an inverted model of the economy of the
incarnation, and through that, of the iconic economy. Repeatedly making
his point, Nikephoros states that the icon’s enemy is a triple enemy: he is
an enemy of the sacred, of nature, and finally, of reason. These three
charges are expressed in a specific triple lexicon that covers the whole field
of the economy, of which he is the antitype.
 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 

Let us begin by looking at the terms in which exclusion from the field
of the sacred and order are expressed.63 The iconoclast is an atheist, Christ’s
accuser, an apostate, unbelieving, a blasphemer, a Christomach, a criminal,
reckless, destructive, defamatory, idolatrous, heretical, an outlaw, impure,
impious, merciless, intractable, unbelieving, infamous, ungrateful, unsta-
ble, iniquitous, Jewish at heart, wicked, disloyal, perverse, a plunderer, a
polytheist, rotten, profaning, sacrilegious, villainous, dirtied and dirtying,
a theomach, a desecrator, violent. . . . All these words function to describe
the enemy of the theological and Christological economy, that is, the econ-
omy that is constitutive of Christian doctrine and the true religion. This
concerns as much his opposition to the doctrinal order as to the ecclesial
order, both of which define the order of sacredness. It is because he is an
idolater that he considers the icon through idolatrous eyes. This is the same
argument that was used to justify the ban on making images in Deuteron-
omy: it is because Jews are by nature idolaters that they were ordered not
to make graven images. Such an order, however, no longer has any raison
d’être when one is dealing with an enlightened, faithful people who will no
longer confuse the icon with the idol, or render to the one the honor that
is due only to the other. Thus the enemy of the icon is placed in the camp
of those he is denouncing. This hypocrite, this deceiver, to no one’s sur-
prise, thus conceals an entirely pagan allegiance to the figures of diabolical
polytheism behind the mask of fundamentalism. This aspect of the accu-
sation meets up with the theme of a break with tradition, both evangelical
and patristic. He who is faithful to the letter of Scripture transgresses it.
Constantine thus stands accused of rejecting Christ through blind faith-
fulness to Old Testament injunctions: the ban on images is addressed only
to idolaters, and therefore to Jews. To respect the letter is to transgress the
spirit. Constantine has understood nothing of the idea of fulfillment. The
sacred Scriptures and the words of the church fathers, inspired by the Holy
Spirit, cannot but legitimize the sacredness of the image as the fulfillment
of the messianic prophecy. The whole of Scripture is nothing but an antic-
ipatory and annunciatory sketch of the Father’s uncreated image coming
into the world, which reconciles and saves the created image. He who de-
sacralizes the image can therefore only desacralize and profane Scripture
and Tradition. A darkened spirit who knows only the writing of shadows,
Constantine and his friends err lamentably in the Sheol of their sins and
errors.
By this means, too, Constantine becomes an enemy of history and
therefore of any type of memory and commemoration. The icon, however,
is both a tradition and a memorial. Because the economy is the very con-
   

cept through which theology enters historicity, the concept that deals with
the fulfillment of prophecy in human temporality, iconoclasm cannot
grasp what is fulfilled in the production of the iconic gaze. This inability to
understand the difference between what constitutes a product and what
constitutes a reproduction in large measure supplies the material for the
catalog of insults aimed at this enemy of nature.
The second charge against Constantine concerns the claim that he is
excluded from nature. Here is the vocabulary describing him in this way:
he is an animal from the breed of wild beasts, of snakes, and all others con-
cerning depravity, excrement, and the pigsty. Familiar with the horrors of
hunting and the hippodrome, he loves blood, manure, mud, and feces. He
delights in smells and only appreciates the unction of refuse. A cavalier en-
amored of his coachman, he maintains relations with him worthy of
Sodom and Gomorrah. A ferocious beast who loves combat and cloacas,
he slithers, grunts, eructates; his stomach rumbles, and he cannot hold in
his stool or his vomit. A gaping gullet, an insatiable stomach, a fetid
drunkard wallowing in the dregs, he ferments until his viscera explode.
Irascible and melancholic by turns, he knows only states of excess; he is a
being without form and reserves. Incapable of speaking, of understanding,
unfit for any limit or regulation, he is nothing but pride, vanity, and dis-
soluteness. A theatrical ham wearing makeup who parodies Christians, he
offers a sadly ridiculous spectacle that he is the only one to applaud. A
monstrous runt, he in turn gives birth to a fetus even more monstrous than
himself. A stinking, ruminant ventriloquist, he wallows in manure, where
he likes to assuage his degrading passions.
And so the list of infamy goes on; what it amounts to in the end is an
impossible portrait of a body without a soul and without speech, an open
body whose orifices are nothing but uncontrolled sphincters. This inconti-
nence, however, must be understood in the light of the iconic economy,
underpinned by a doctrine of the line that closes without enclosing, of the
complete equivalence of the icon and speech. The man with the gaping in-
continence is the one who invented the concept of circumscribability,
which implies the Word’s confinement in its flesh and in the flesh of the
icon. Being a pervert of unlimited openings, he has understood nothing of
the written graph, and above all, of the iconic graph, which is the enig-
matic closing of infinity. What can a debaucher understand of the mystery
of the virginal body, and therefore of the icon? Behind all the insults, then,
there is rigorous doctrinal intent. The theoretical aim of this anti-icon in a
 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 

debate that is centered on the visibility of the incarnational memorial is to

make the enemy’s body into the emblem and symptom of his own heresy.
He who has not understood the distance that separates inscription from
circumscription is himself a body excluded from symbols and limits.
Whereas iconic thought is based on the fertility of the virginal belly that
offers the Word a womb capable of receiving the grace of its infinity, the
iconoclast’s belly is a diabolical cloaca that can only produce wind and fe-
ces. Was Constantine not named Kopronymos to remind us that on the
day of his baptism, he dirtied the holy water that made him a Christian?64
A profaner in the cradle, he already exhibited there all the signs of his Sa-
tanic incontinence. Dilated by evil, he must therefore also be a homosex-
ual, in exile from the Father’s power and the Mother’s fertility. Nothing is
lacking from this paradigm of sterility.
What Constantine lacks, however, is the subject of the third slate of
insults that the portrait paints to perfection in its anti-iconic systematicity.
In the last place, the enemy of the sacred, of order, and of nature is also the
enemy of reason, of every form of logos: he is a madman. A whole new vo-
cabulary is now deployed to condemn the alogos concerning his incapac-
ity for speech and theoretical speculation, as well as his brazen manipula-
tion of lies, calumny, and falsification. The gaping, mute mouth of a
moment ago is suddenly long-winded, spouting gibberish. It gushes idio-
cies, nonsense, and childishness worthy of a young child or an old woman.
Nikephoros turns to the Epistles of Timothy as the basis for this descrip-
tion of the scandalous absurdities that emerge from Constantine’s dreams
and fantasies, at least when they are not the delirium of the excessive
drinker driven to fury and distraction. Constantine divides things that are
one and confuses those that are separate. As with his Monophysite or even
Nestorian friends, everything with him is nothing but disorder and confu-
sion. Ignoring the elementary principles of logic, he flounders in contra-
diction. A liar and a sophist, he teeters on the abyss of incoherence and stu-
por. There is no need, incidentally, to be wise in order to notice his
stupidity; simple good sense will suffice. This loathsome character, devoid
of intelligence, gives complete license to his unbridled tongue and is en-
snared by his own stupidity. Once again, no limit is in evidence: quarrel-
some, a driveling old fool, humming twaddle, his talk is hollow, his speech
empty. Pettifogging, a quibbler, a logomach, an onomatomach, he is a past
master of false subtleties and possesses as well the pervert’s dexterity. He
deceives, he falsifies, he feigns, and he knows only one mimésis: he apes the
   

devil. He is to be found everywhere from the bottom of the most gloom-

laden insanity to the most consciously diabolical premeditation.
This aspect of the attack on Constantine brings us closest to what is
at stake philosophically with the question of the icon. He is devoid of in-
tellect, yet the icon is entirely a question of intellectual thought; the icon is
not only a matter of faith, but concerns what is at stake generally in terms
of thought itself. Icon doctrine, in fact, attempts to establish its legitimacy
in the name of reason and the foundation of symbolic production in gen-
eral. It is madness to deprive oneself of the image if one wants to rule, and
it is perverse to deprive the church of it in order to appropriate it. One
senses from the violence of the accusations that the eructations and stom-
ach rumblings of this supposed drunkard must truly have had considerable
theoretical power, putting the temporal power of the church at serious risk.
The devil lacked neither force nor persuasion, and it proved necessary to
formulate a solid doctrine in order to refute him.
The formulation of this doctrine was a secular procedure and it never
stopped serving its purpose: to produce its monster, to make him an un-
namable ekphrasis. The hatred present in that discourse is always in direct
proportion to the fear of the power that is being fought against. The entire
rhetoric of the ideological battle constantly reminds us that the enemy must
be an enemy of sacred values, of the natural order, and of the most elemen-
tary good sense. But it is undoubtedly when he is exiled from the world of
thought that the most dangerously perverse scenario arises, because the un-
thinkability of someone who does not think authorizes anyone who rejects
him to no longer be accountable, in relation to his own thought, for what
he will do or say against that unthinkability. The history of hatred for the
other’s body lies at the core of the abdication of thought itself.
In the case that we are concerned with here, the iconoclast’s body is
opposed not only to the iconic model, but also to the body of the holy
man, which was itself constituted as a paradigm within the system of
thinking about the iconic body. The holy man’s body was often already
transformed into iconic flesh during his own lifetime. Anyone who, in im-
itation of Jesus Christ, departs this world without being limited by the
temptations of the flesh and spirit ends up with a body closed to the devil’s
penetrations. For, as we have come to understand, evil acts by penetration,
intrusion, occupation. It lays siege to the body’s openings, and salvation
cannot occur other than by closing them. Little by little, the holy man’s
orifices no longer function. Nothing more enters or leaves. In the closed
 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 

gravity of his silence, in the enclosure of his retreat, the immobile saint
dries up, and his flesh becomes as flat and thin as a piece of parchment on
which could be written any letter of his choosing. Transfigured matter,
transformed by grace, it accedes of itself to the sort of two-dimensionality
that makes it a living image. Thus it was for Daniel the Stylite, whose body
was fixed to a board after his death to be shown “in the manner of an icon
and exposed to the view of all.”65 At the end of the third Antirrhetic,
Nikephoros puts on display these two bodies, the iconoclast’s and the
saint’s, when recounting the last days of Constantine and bitterly recalling
his cruelty to saints.
He lived an extremely sad and harrowing life, assailed by those unspeakable pains
and sufferings that those who have ulcers know. His limbs were disabled by the ef-
fect of wounds and in places he was losing his skin. Endlessly terrorized by evil
spirits, he spent horrifying, miserable nights going over his decisions when the
faith that he had pursued turned back on him. . . . He could not swallow any food
placed in his mouth and he vomited constantly. What shamelessness and bestial-
ity he showed to those close to him, what abominations he demanded! Who can
say what these people endured? Lacerating backs and arms with innumerable
blows of the whip, he was no more human than a wild carnivorous beast.66
Laugh, therefore, at the lives of the saints and ascetics whose bodies show
angelic, not carnal, nature. Denounce continence, humility, sweetness, tranquility,
courage, magnanimity, criticize the straw mattress on the bare ground . . . crow
against the angelic and apostolic habit.67

Thus the body of circumscription, doomed to death, is the opposite

of the body of iconic inscription, whose earthly transfiguration already
shines with the fires of eternity, the full display of which we will witness
shortly. The art of describing these bodies is the very deployment of the
mimetic operation. The body resembles the soul; even more, it is its
epiphany. But for anyone who is haunted by the devil, there is no image
other than the symptom, the sign of dissimilarity with the one and only
image of divine similitude. The devil is not an ulcer, but the ulcer signifies
the devil’s presence. In opposition to this, the sanctified body of the saint
and the icon manifest an essential similitude, and an image of it is there-
fore possible, taking, as it does, the natural image of the Son as a model.
The wounds that tear at the holy man’s body show his economy. Transfig-
uration is neither a symptom nor a sign, but a relative participation in the
manifestation of the economy itself.
The Docetists, who rejected the idea of the carnal reality of the in-
   

carnation, could have placed themselves either in the iconophile camp by

supporting the idea of the icon as the redoubling of an illusion, or in the
camp of the iconoclasts by defending the one and only natural, invisible im-
age. Their heresy is undoubtedly the richest in its teachings on the modern
question of the image and “semblance.” During the Byzantine crisis, how-
ever, they were disavowed by both, for they took up the idea of the economy
in all its radicalness and unity. Iconoclasts and iconophiles both, however,
officially make use of only one inconsistent, partial interpretation of it.
The iconoclast economy is the economy of the incarnation that ac-
cepts no imitation other than the mimésis of the virtuous life and good gov-
ernment—actions, therefore, and not symbols. They recognize only the
eucharist and the cross as the true image and sign of Christ’s economy. The
cross and the eucharist imitate nothing. By means of the sacrament, the eu-
charist is consubstantial with its model and therefore acts by the effect of
real presence. However, it requires consecration and consequently can only
spread its charisma within the sacred precinct and by institutional means;
there is never any question of its becoming a profane and universal instru-
ment that would be able to appropriate space and authority.
As for the cross, it is by definition a memorial to torture that can only
act by the indirect voice of negativity. It is the site of the separation of the
Father from his own substantial emanation, and is therefore what separates
him from his own image. It is what the Son’s death has vanquished and is
consequently the active, sacred antitype of the resurrection. The symbol of
the dissimilar, it is not able to inscribe itself in a doctrine of mimetic rela-
tions. It is therefore a sign rather than a symbol, because it refers to some-
thing other than itself. It is a site rather than a space, and this by virtue of
its very form that does not contain anything, as with the Khôra of the vir-
ginal womb and the icon. It is a tupos, that is, an incision that marks, that
crosses out, and that orients. It crosses out our mimetic hopes by propos-
ing the sign of the crossroads over any illusion of presence, even though it
be administered by the economy of symbols.

Conclusion

Given that the voice of the image makes itself heard on several occa-
sions, we should not be in the least surprised to find Nikephoros putting
words into its mouth and making it speak in a prosopopoeia that is, in it-
self, nothing short of astonishing.68 Let us pause here specifically at what
 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 

might be called the discourse of the throne. In the third Antirrhetic,

Nikephoros develops the theme “My kingdom is not of this world” and at-
tempts to demonstrate that the anthropomorphic image of Christ is not in
any way the anthropomorphic image of the kingdom. In order to make
himself better understood, he evokes the spectacle of royalty, there at the
very place where royalty is itself a spectacle, implicitly referring to those
rulers so familiar to the whole of the East, particularly during the Byzan-
tine period, who were simultaneously dazzling and terrifying. At this time,
the Christian empire and the nearby Caliphate rivaled each other in pomp
and magnificence, and the iconoclast emperors, whose reign was marked
by a particular upsurge of the imperial cult, formed an obvious target for
the iconophile patriarch. In his text, Nikephoros means to show that
Christ’s icon is not in any way a luxury art intended to dazzle with its lux-
ury and gems the people who the church wished to subjugate. It is not the
icon that is an art, but the economy. What he is defending is therefore re-
ally a doctrinal position on the icon, not a particular category of objects
that happen to have been marked either by the seal of wealth, a sumptuous
spectacle, or a sequence of aesthetic choices.
For a prince, to present oneself to one’s people is a whole art.
Nikephoros’s prosopopoeia leads the reader to think of royal power in
terms of images underpinned by the voice. This is the foundation that I
call the “ico-nomics” of power, which is the source of its legitimacy, its
force, and its fertility. Power is drawn not from things themselves, but from
relations between things. It is relations that are power, it is circulation that
is fertile, and it is the voice that is their guarantee. Some princes seek to
impress with ostentatiously scintillating displays that are meant to be inim-
itable. Others show a Spartan austerity that make them models of virtue,
and that one would balk at imitating. None seems capable of escaping
choosing an image, and it is God who sets the example.
Ecclesiastic power, on the other hand, appears to be trying to “per-
fect” the mimetic doctrine that all true power implies, by means of the me-
diating operation of the image as it gathers about itself a consensus of
voices. What the church is looking for is not power, strictly speaking; what
it aims for, on the contrary, is the power of something that will provide au-
thority. For power is nothing other than the appropriation of iconic au-
thority and its symbolic fertility.
The icon in its graphic drone, in the brilliant authority of its repeti-
tions, embodies the endlessly demanding nature of the sovereign labor of
   

the gaze. It bears witness to the belief that can be found across perhaps the
whole history of the great sites of vision, that what makes a painting is that
epiphany in absence that only occurs during an eclipse. What is an eclipse?
An object comes between the viewer and the sun and darkens the world of
empirical forms, while its outline is illuminated by the fire that it hides,
but whose brilliance we are momentarily able to contemplate.
Icon doctrine is not in the least naive in relation to the faith that it at-
tempts to engender. The economy does indeed imply a condescension to-
ward the most popular forms of belief, and it negotiates with the most dis-
turbed and disturbing thoughts that drive our pleasure of seeing. But this
is an educational and functional condescension that does not obtain its
power from a strategic, cynical manipulation of our desires and drives. On
the contrary, the economy tries to locate all the levels of our perceptions in
the unity of a divine plan. It is as concerned with the salvation of our body
as our soul. They are all one.
Iconoclasm, on the other hand, appears to have tried to separate what
the economy had unified. This is why the accusations leveled against it,
and which made it an enemy of the economy, do not mean that it should
be seen as an enemy of religion in general; rather, the rejection of the im-
age is equivalent to a rejection of life itself. Constantine is not suited to life,
and his conception of the world is no more so. At least, this is what we are
meant to believe. He has only one concept, uncircumscribability, to defend
himself with, and even that is not linked to the architectonic organism of
the economy; consequently, he does not, so to speak, measure up. He
would either have to accede to a lay conception of the basis for his author-
ity, or else produce an economically legitimate theory of signs, as the Re-
formation did.
For the iconophile, the incarnation is imaginary; it is the entry of the
natural image into the flesh of the visible image (iconicity), which allows the
redeemed image to return toward the redemptive image. The meaning of
this redemption is therefore really to bring humans to that inherent simili-
tude that was their destiny within the plan of creation. The icon participates
in the salvation of the image. The emptiness of the iconic Parousia does not
in any way eliminate the obligation to portray it or its legitimacy; on the
contrary, it situates it in another register, because it interprets imitation and
the relation of similitude as being removed from any effect of duplication.
The icon is neither metaphoric nor redundant. It is an economy of the im-
age, a working, functional organization of its salvational power.
 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 

If the icon is double within the unity of a name, that is because dual
unity is the very essence of the model. Christ is two in unity. This myste-
rious unity of two natures is at the heart of the presentative figure of ab-
sence. The duality of which we are speaking has nothing to do with the
one that opposes body and soul, or matter and spirit. It concerns the union
of the Word with humanity. In this respect, the Apollinarist error, which
confused this with the union between body and soul, must be avoided. In
iconic doctrine, the body is no longer considered to be a prison or tomb for
the soul, and it therefore does not concern itself with that metaphor and its
dialectical outcome. The carnal body and the iconic body cannot become
a prison or tomb for the Word. On the contrary, they are its economic in-
struments, the material figures of the Redemption.
This union of the Word with humanity is not a reduction of divinity
to the limits of humanity. That was the error of the Nestorians. It is no
longer the ghostly union of divinity with a single human appearance. That
was the heresy of Eutyches and the Docetism of the Monophysites. The
natural image of the Father and the human image of the Son are one and
the same image, in the sense that the relation “son of ” is equivalent to the
relation “image of.” The icon satisfies the demands of both homoiôsis (im-
age of the Father) and homoiôma (image of the Mother), that is, the de-
mands of formal resemblance and material resemblance.
The dual unity of Christ, of the Word and the flesh, is composed of
all the real characteristics of humanity (body and soul) and all the essential
attributes of divinity, yet in a way that does not mix them all together. This
hypostatic union can only reveal its mystery in full daylight by means of a
single, mediating term, a relative, that puts the Word and the flesh in rela-
tion to each other: Christ during his earthly life, the church by means of
its institutions, and the icon in the totality of the created, living universe.

What, then, is an enigma? The perceptible manifestation of the mys-

tery; a crypt for the gaze, the cradle of the imaginary.
 4

Sacred Precinct and Profane Space

What is the economy of the site that icons occupy? Between the holy
of holies and the profane world, how does the economy negotiate the defi-
nition of iconic sacredness? Exempt from consecration and worthy of pros-
tration, the icon inhabits an abstract space and becomes the connecting tis-
sue that causes nature, grace, and reason to communicate with each other.
If the iconoclast is a true enemy of the sacred, that is because two op-
posing conceptions of sacredness are current at the same time. In order to
understand this better, let us turn briefly to the work of Benveniste on the
Latin and Greek terms referring to the sacred, and the Sanskrit terms that
correspond to them.1
In respect of the Greek material, Benveniste concentrates specifically
on hiéron and hagion, the sacred and the holy. The sacred—hiéron—occurs
in relation to the terminology of sacrifice and venerated places or people.
“Hiéros everywhere belongs to the domain of the sacred, whether this qual-
ity is attached to it by a natural bond or associated with it by circum-
stance.”2 On the other hand, hagion indicates rather “that the object is not
allowed to be violated in any way.” Benveniste therefore introduces it as the
“negative” concept of the sacred, that is, prohibitive, in opposition to the
hiéron, which would be its positive correlate. The interdiction that applies
to the definition of the hagion protects it from any human contact. This is
the sacred as purity. Things that are hiéron, on the contrary, are sometimes
associated with the hosion, that is, a sacredness legitimated by law and an
institution. In the same way, the hiéron comes into contact easily with the
profane by means of sacrifice and human legitimation. Even though they
 Sacred Precinct and Profane Space 

had previously been profane, things that are hiéron can become sacred by
the effect of ritual. The hagion, on the other hand, is both holy and sacred
in “essence” because it is occupied by a transcendent principle that guar-
antees its purity. The counterpart of this, however, is that its pneumatic
transcendence keeps it at a distance from human intervention. If the threat
that confronts the hiéron is one of excessive proximity to the profane
world, the one that hangs over the hagion concerns devilry or magic, which
itself is a result of the ambivalence that is so strong a feature of the field of
prohibition and impurity.
We thus have two individual principles of sacredness that are used
differently by the opposing parties. Let us now examine these differences
in an attempt to understand the role that the icon played for the
iconophiles in their efforts to ward off the double threat facing it: is it a
profane object stripped of all holiness, or rather an idolatrous object
haunted by a diabolical presence? Is it holy or sacred, and by what means?
In the relevant texts, each of the adversaries makes highly distinctive
uses of the hiéron and the hagion. The iconophile party uses the two terms
in a system arranged according to their function and movement. This cir-
culation of the sacred, which is a characteristic of iconophile thought, has
a natural foundation in the icon, which serves as a major pathway for the
circulation of sacredness in general. The term hiéron, however, is almost
entirely absent from iconoclast texts. Only the hagion functions as a fixed
reference point, and it serves as the basis for the ban on the image. It is a
negative concept, or better, it is tied to prohibition, faithful to its Indo-Eu-
ropean root yaozdata, which involves “the idea of a rigid conformity to the
norm . . . [and which] is the result of an operation that confers ritual pu-
rity.”3 It is noteworthy as well that Indo-European also links the term with
the vocabulary of law.
The use made of these two words in the Antirrhetics and the Horos of
the council of Hieria demonstrates how broad Nikephoros’s accusation
against Mammon is:
Do I have to say that these synods have been overturned by these criminals? In
their violence against the whole mystery of the Economy of our Savior, they have
trampled on our customs, our institutions, and everything that is sacred [hiéra].
Without the least shame with regard to the Church of Christ and our divine
dogmas, and having disdainfully dismissed every sacred tradition [hiéran para-
dosin], they utter vain words against the glory of the only Son, words that only
confirm their stupidity, words inspired by a lack of belief towards the Father, or
better to say, by their apostasy.4
   

If the enemies of the icon have no place in the field of the sacred,
they will consequently be unworthy of sovereignty. In the following analy-
sis we will consider three aspects of Nikephoros’s proof that the iconoclasts
are sacrilegious. The first concerns the written tradition, and within that,
the close relations between the iconophile conceptions of the holy and the
sacred. Here we will approach the iconoclasts’ suspicion that the holy (ha-
gion) is idolatrous, and examine their restrictive interpretation of the eu-
charistic sacrament. In the second place, we will look at the nonwritten tra-
dition in both its oral and graphic forms, in order to see how the
iconophile conception of the sacred opens on to the “iconic economy.”
This specifically concerns sacredness as it relates to images, and therefore
the Christological meaning of the economy, because the iconoclast “does
nothing but desecrate the totality of the Economy of Christ our Savior as
well as the sacred symbols [hiéra sumbola] of our faith.”
Starting from these premises, the third aspect of iconoclast sacrilege
will be self-evident: the very image of iconoclastic life is impious and blas-
phemous. Mammon is the Antichrist; he is the opposite of the holy man.
Sacredness is thus envisaged here as holiness. The holy man (hagios) shares
the concept of mimésis with the image. What is a sacred imitation? Con-
stantine is caught in flagrante delicto in daily profanation. Nikephoros im-
plicitly ends up with a mimetic definition of the hagion, mimetic in that
the image functions as the imitation of the workings of its prototype. The
image imitates the prototype in its action of sacralizing the profane world.
By linking holiness directly to the sacredness of the iconic relation and no
longer only to pneumatic inspiration, iconophilia thus develops a direct
grasp of holiness itself.

Hiéron, Hagion, and Tradition

Constantine’s attack on the sacred functions in essentially two ways:

institutional transgression and spiritual profanation. Institutional trans-
gression concerns the church as bearer and guardian of both the written
and nonwritten tradition. This tradition (paradosis) is converted into law
according to several criteria: the selection of saints who transmitted it, and
the ratification of scriptural, patristic, and conciliar texts that elevated
mores and customs into an obligatory article of faith and universal confes-
sion over the long term. In effect, the scriptural tradition has no more im-
portance than the oral tradition and the repeated customs of generations of
 Sacred Precinct and Profane Space 

Christians. These criteria constitute the unshakable and insuperable char-

acter of tradition itself as sacred. From this perspective, the sacred is based
in the institution and could very well be identified with whatever is conse-
crated, that is to say, with everything that ritual and the institution ratify.
To demonstrate that Constantine-Mammon has transgressed the institu-
tional universe is to attack him on the same ground on which he stands:
the law. Was he, after all, not careful to convoke a synod and to grant all
possible forms of legality to both his system of thought and his decrees?
The iconoclasts unquestionably paid great attention to issues of legality
and accused the icon of not forming part of the ritual universe of the sacra-
ment. Thus at the iconoclast council of Hieria (),5 the bishops clearly
state that it cannot bear the title of sacred, because “no sacred [hiéra] prayer
has blessed it, which would have made it pass from a coarse thing to being
holy [pros to hagion]; it remains coarse and without honor.”6 It is difficult
to know from this, however, whether the institution (and therefore the law)
is on the side of the hiéron or the hagion, that is to say, on the side of the
human practice of sacralization or the divine working of direct selection.
The iconophiles must therefore prove two things: that the iconoclasts are
unaware of the sacred, and that they pervert the holy.

The Anti-idolatrous Tradition

For Nikephoros, the Old Testament is above all else a warning to the
Jewish people against idolatry. However, the texts also abound in exam-
ples that, in his eyes, prove that God loves images that contribute toward
his own glorification. He considers the struggle against idolatry to have
substituted precisely the impurely sacred with the purely sacred. Purifica-
tion occurs. This is to say that in relation to the sacred, idolatry consti-
tutes a particular category that coincides not with the profane but the
damned (tà enhagè). In other words, the holy very quickly risks being con-
taminated with the damned if there is no intervention by the workings of
the image, which, thanks to the Son, placed the divine in contact with hu-
man law. Without this saving access to the hiéron, whose positivity func-
tions as a mediator, the partisans of the hagion are kept in the confusion
of a sacredness without a “symbol,” which lacks the economy of the “rel-
ative” (katà skhésin).
The field of the forbidden is therefore left behind for what is hence-
forth permitted, the authorized, which in turn becomes a dogmatic obli-
   

gation that if not obeyed will constitute a betrayal of the New Covenant.
This is why, says Nikephoros, the iconoclasts, just like the idolaters, “mix
everything together, confuse everything, the pure and the impure, the pro-
fane and the holy [bébelon kai hagion].”7 It may be surprising to us to see
the iconoclasts being placed together in the same category as idolaters, but
matters become clearer when we examine the vocabulary of sacredness and
malediction that underpins the accusation. In ancient times everything was
hagion. Then, “Wood replaced wood, the temple replaced the temple, sac-
rifices replaced sacrifices; in the place of everything that is impure and pro-
fane there is a substitution of things that are holy for us [tà kath’ hémâs . . .
hagia].”8 Thus it is the very introduction of the sacred into the interpreta-
tion of tradition that allows a full understanding of the types of sacredness
itself. This is why, being completely within the hagion, the iconoclast is, to
the iconophiles, paradoxically in exactly the same situation as anyone else
without symbolic capacity.
On the other hand, the written tradition that condemns idolatry is
the same one that also opens up the sacramental field of the imaginal con-
tract with God, because God ordered the making of images for the whole
temple and chose the filial image to invest sacred space. In Nikephoros, as
in the Hieria text, whatever is consigned to writing and unanimously con-
fessed bears the name dogma (dogmata). But in iconophile texts, the
dogma inspired by the Holy Ghost takes on the value of law by constitut-
ing the foundation of the field of the hiéron itself. In this framework, the
image will occupy a twofold place, because as we will see, it is marked in
every place and every circumstance by the category that is inherent to it:
the double. This double nature is a result of its participation in the holy
even as it remains the womb of the sacred. This circumstance arises from
its relational status, as it circulates continuously between institutional au-
thority and the objects that incarnate it. Neither signifier nor signified, it is
the major pathway that sets their similitude in relation to each other. Thus
in Nikephoros, the sacred is given the responsibility of making the power
of the hagion to symbolize that similitude both visible and institutional.
Thanks to this development of the sacred, the holy stops being a
purely negative authority and becomes a disciplinary, dogmatic, and ritual
corpus. This is more than just a minor benefit, because the hiéron also de-
prives the hagion of its power of potential malediction and impurity. As we
have seen, the holy could be shared with idolatrous paganism, which was
well acquainted with the animist magic of the diabolical cults. In other
 Sacred Precinct and Profane Space 

words, the devil himself is not without hagion, and whoever lacks the “eco-
nomic” category of the hiéron will find himself mixed up in a sabbath of
infernal forces. The iconophile institution and law are therefore funda-
mentally associated with the development of the hieratic signs to which the
hagion will henceforth owe its univocal, verified purity. In reading
Nikephoros we come close to believing that the sacred’s point of departure
is the profane itself, just as Christ’s humanity remains the center of the in-
carnation. The clergy who, more than anything else, constitute the hieratic
field therefore come to be preferentially invested with the function of
sacralization itself, including that of the law. It even appears as though the
hiéron’s claim to be the specific “cause” of the hagion granted the very
power of legislation to the church.
It is therefore not simply by chance that all through the Hieria text
the accent is continuously placed on the ensemble formed by the terms ha-
gia, dogmata, nomoi, and prostagmata, that is, the holy, dogma, the law, and
the decree. Thus one reads about the impious iconophile, whether cleric or
lay, “that he falls under the blow of imperial laws since he is the enemy of
divine decrees and adversary of the church fathers’ dogma.”9

The Sacramental Tradition

Iconoclasm thus explicitly tries to link its own legislative power to

pneumatic holiness alone, without any ecclesial mediation. Any interven-
tion of the clergy in the iconoclast hagion must therefore necessarily pass
through consecration. In a long refutation contained in the second Antir-
rhetic that responds to the Hieria argument concerning icons that have not
received any priestly consecration,10 Nikephoros explicitly accuses Con-
stantine of having confused the icon with the eucharist.11 The debate seems
to revolve entirely around the notion of circumscribability.
On the one hand, Mammon does indeed describe the eucharistic
species as a “true image” (ten alèthèn eikona),12 and he speaks of the “bread
of the eucharist as a non-deceiving image” (apseudè eikona).13 This truthful
icon is the one of the carnal economy of Christ-God (tês énsarkou oikono-
mias Khristoû toû theoû). In reading Nikephoros and the Horos, however, it
emerges that Constantine considers the only memorial (mnémé) to the
economy to be the eucharist insofar as it is a sacrament (hagiasmos). The
question, however, as Nikephoros himself always recognizes, is not whether
the mouth in communion is in the process of devouring the infinity of the
   

Word itself. It concerns rather the interpretation of economy, which is the

sacralization of the profane world by the power of the incarnation. For
iconoclasm, the eucharistic consecration linking the pneumatic holiness of
the mystery directly to the liturgical activities of the priest remained as a
“princeps scenario,” so to speak. (Let us add, to anticipate ourselves mo-
mentarily,14 that this consecration also presupposes a specific place: the sa-
cred precinct of the consecrated temple.)
The term oikonomia appears five times in the Hieria text.15 The first
refers to the salvational economy (sostiken oikonomia) in a global way. A lit-
tle further on, Constantine uses it as a synonym for dogma to refer to the
incarnation. Then oikonomia becomes the equivalent of the sacramental
mystery of the transubstantiation. In the passage concerning the eucharist
for Maundy Thursday, the following appears: “to pragmateuthen mystérion
en te kat’auton oikonomia.” Then again, “the truthful icon of the carnal
economy.” The last usage concerns the nonconfusion (to asynkhyton) of the
christic economy. In other words, the linkage is crystal clear for Constan-
tine, who ties the holy to the eucharistic sacrament in the name of the
economy. It is the hiéron that is in his eyes confusionist, and the term hi-
ereus, or officiating priest, then appears in its ritual, authorized function.
Nowhere is hiéron used in the neutral or plural, as it is in Nikephoros, who
elevates it precisely to a categorial dignity concerning the animate as well
as the inanimate world (tà hiéra).
Nikephoros, however, argues strongly against a “symbolic” interpre-
tation of the eucharist. The positioning of the icon as a ligament between
the pneumatic and the profane allows him to raise an outcry when it
comes to the issue of real and consubstantial presence. The iconoclasts, he
thinks, truly profane the host. It is clear for him that the universe of con-
secration is one of consubstantiality and sanctification, and that it should
never be confused with the universe of the hiéra, which is one of sacraliza-
tion. The icon can never have a mediating function in the procedure of
sacramental sanctification.
Nonetheless, iconophile thought remains fundamentally nonsepara-
tive. It concerns mediation, the symbol, and sharing, and consequently
Nikephoros has to elaborate an argument about the eucharist itself that
links it to the hiéron: “The rest of us [Orthodox] do not say that this [the
bread and the wine] is the image or portrayal of his body, even if this
comes about symbolically.”16 He therefore introduces a primary relational
concept on the subject of the eucharist itself. He also carefully avoids the
 Sacred Precinct and Profane Space 

term hagion other than to describe the Holy Spirit who presides over the
mystery of the transubstantiation. Finally he says: “How and by what
would one recognize that great, immaculate, and venerable victim, the pu-
rifying sacrifice that saves the world?”17 Thus the hiéron infiltrates the sac-
rificial and pneumatic field of the eucharist all at once. To refer to the
sacrament itself, Nikephoros prefers teletès to hagiasmos, that is, fulfillment
rather than sanctification. He thus holds to his objective: even if the eu-
charist has nothing to do with icon, it cannot constitute an autonomous
practice of sacredness by itself only. It needs the ecclesiastic institution to
achieve its symbolic fulfillment.
For Nikephoros, the bread and the wine are the profane species par
excellence. In fact, even Mammon says so: “It is not all bread that is his
body or all wine that is his blood, but only that which, by the effect of
priestly consecration, passes from its state of a product made by human
hand to its state of a product not made by human hand.”18 “Behold this
that has no need of demonstration,” exclaims Nikephoros, so evident is the
matter. We should understand by this that it is evident to him that in the
eucharist itself, where there is no image, a passage from the profane to the
sacred world is still necessary, and this passage requires not only the inter-
vention of the Hagion Pneuma, the Holy Spirit, but the officiating priest as
well, who relates the profane and the sacred to each other. The bread and
the wine are therefore not icons, and they can never become Christ’s body
and blood without the mediation of a Christ imitator-mediator, Christ
himself being similitude and mediation.
In this case, the imaginal (homoiotic) function is filled by the priest
(hiereus ), and ecclesiastic power therefore remains the master of the medi-
ating, sacralizing activities. For the iconophile, then, the field of the hiéron
is considerably expanded, because when all is said and done, it becomes
the master of mediating, sacralizing activities and the producer of sanctifi-
cation (hagion) as well. At stake here in doctrinal terms, therefore, is the
very power to establish or institute, in and of itself. Only the church has
the power of “limits,” that is, to determine the field of the profane, the
holy, and the sacred, and to perform the actions that make people and
things pass from one field to the other. The church calls this power neither
political nor religious. It bases it on a third term—the economy—whose
placement gives it all its operational and symbolic force. Our initial analy-
sis of the sacred, then, reveals this to be the ultimate goal of the defense of
the hiéron in its links with the icon and the image. “In reality it is against
   

the economy that he has declared war, and on that basis the typhoon of
impiety has arisen and has not stopped growing, setting its vile doctrine
against our sacred dogmas [hiérôn dogmatôn].”19

The Written and Nonwritten Traditions

The Written Tradition

The iconoclasts’ profanation of the sacred consists first of all in a vi-

olation of the written tradition. Nikephoros therefore denounces impiety
and unbelief, asebeia and apistia; the enemy is anhosios, bebèlos, dussebès, as-
sebès: impious, profane, irreligious, sacrilegious. . . . Additionally, the accu-
sation that the iconoclasts transgress the sacredness of the written institu-
tions is borne by a legislative vocabulary: “Once he has become the enemy
of Christ and all Christians, the denigrator of the divine laws and sacred
[hiéron] canons established by the apostles and the holy fathers . . . ” Seam-
lessly, Nikephoros here associates hiéron with nomos, the sacred and the
law.20 Those things that are law cannot be transgressed, and the word of
tradition marks the very limit of the Christian word with its seal. “If you
respect the inviolable limits [horoi] of our divine religion, if you keep intact
and in your heart the tradition of the Catholic church, this would only be
but a spark of faith:”21 the Horos of the synods has set the limits (horoi) of
every last word concerning dogma.
The words of the council thus form the very precinct of Christian
thought, and to step outside of that precinct is blasphemous. In reference
to the synod of Chalcedon, Nikephoros writes: “He did everything to un-
dermine the great synod, that sacred [hiéron] meeting where so many men,
under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, clearly set out the principle that
forms the basis for the hypostasis of Christ and his double nature.”22 The
councils are here evoked not to be analyzed for their respective, specific
content, but so that they form a coherent, disciplinary chain that marks off
the new territory of Christian thought in an absolute way. Anyone who
dares pose even the smallest question that allows some doubt to arise about
conciliar truths will be impious and blasphemous. These are definitive texts
in the field of the sacred-hiéron, and they derive their validity from two cri-
teria. The first is dogmatic and described as hagion: it is the inspiration of
the Holy Spirit, because the grace of the Hagion Pneuma presided over all
conciliar decisions. The second is a quantitative criterion based on forces of
time and number.
 Sacred Precinct and Profane Space 

Nonetheless, it is still remarkable that Constantine makes such an ef-

fort to qualify as hagion everything that touches on tradition, the very
point at which Nikephoros so tirelessly repeats the term hiéron. He there-
fore clearly privileges institutional roots rather than the pneumatic crite-
rion. Not that he eliminates it; on the contrary, as we will see, his goal is to
interlink pneumatic holiness with the symbolic effectiveness of ecclesiastic
sacredness. This concern will appear even in relation to the Virgin and the
saints, the description of whom as holy remains absolutely constant. The
mimetic path, however, also allows them to be made inseparable from the
ecclesiastic institution.
In order to make his pragmatic argument based on time and number,
Nikephoros lists “numerous” council assemblies and provides a large num-
ber of reports and citations. This is nothing other than a numerical argu-
ment, and it certainly replies fairly well to the iconoclast demand that the
iconophiles produce their sources and compare them in length and num-
ber with iconoclast sources. Thus both camps produced anthologies of ci-
tations and arguments based on authority. It is striking to note in this re-
spect that on both sides, synods were regularly called sacred (hiéroi)
meetings. Constantine, who was, as we will see, loath to an extreme degree
to utilize the term hiéron, uses it only twice: to describe the synod, and to
describe a ritual consecration gesture where it is associated with a verb of
the same root: “aphiéroménon eis hieran hupourgian.”23 Elsewhere, he de-
scribes everything touching on piety as hagion, holy, including even the
synods themselves. He thus clearly privileges the pneumatic holiness of in-
spiration in conciliar thought, although it then falls to the emperor and the
patriarchs to give the Holy Spirit’s orders the form and status of earthly de-
crees. For iconoclasm, therefore, the hagion is connected directly to the
nomos, the holy to the law. In Nikephoros, the same assemblies are de-
scribed as hiéroi. These meetings are sacred precisely because they gather
together holy men and texts.
An additional characteristic that arises from the similarity of sources
and authorities invoked concerns the lists that both sides produce of coun-
cils that had taken place earlier, and that still had authority. Of course, as
we have already mentioned, nobody, either then or earlier, wanted to be
considered an innovator. The idea of continuity itself thus forms a part of
sacredness, and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit is not regarded as being
in the least innovative. Rather, it specifies, defines, and develops dogma
whose apparent novelty is caused only by the sudden appearance of inno-
vation in one’s adversary. The procedure to be followed, therefore, is that
   

in the face of any new danger, what has been true forever must be recalled
and restated in a new way. This is why both Nikephoros and Constantine
list the councils of Nicaea I, Constantinople, Ephesos, Chalcedon . . . that
defeated and cast out of the church the Arians, the Nestorians, the Euty-
chians or Monophysistes, the Acephalics, the Apollinarians, the disciples of
Macedonios, Marcian, Adamantios, Evagrios, Theodore of Mopsuestia,
Severos, Honorius, Makarios. . . . Jews, Greeks, and Saracens too were
globally anathematized, and Origen was condemned by both camps. To
iconoclasm’s blacklist we should of course add as well the Patriarch Ger-
manos, John Mansour, and John of Damascus. As for the citations, they
begin on both sides with the Old Testament texts of Exodus, Deuteron-
omy, the Psalms, and the Prophets, and are followed by the Pauline Epis-
tles, and then an avalanche of references to Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of
Nazianzos, Basil, John Chrysostom, and Amphilochios. . . .
Thus, even though they were interpreted differently, the fact that
both camps used the same texts is not in the least surprising, because all
parties were in fundamental agreement on the status of the natural image,
and the authorities invoked had not yet been touched by the iconic debate.
The possibility of any new interpretation would therefore have to wait for
the sudden turn of the economy within iconic thought.

The Nonwritten Tradition

Within iconophile thought, the category of the hiéron is developed

most intensively and effectively not in the written or sacramental domains,
but within the oral and iconic traditions. An examination of these will al-
low us a better understanding of the way in which the profane field, the
one of human practices, comes to be sacralized. As we noted above, the cri-
teria by which church councils become sacred are not only based on pneu-
matic inspiration. There is also a criterion of legitimacy based on number
and repetition. In other words, both iconoclasts and iconophiles are deeply
concerned with guaranteeing the “ecumenical” character of their decisions
and doctrines, even if, in the final accounting, the territory of the one
group is the whole universe, and that of other (the iconoclasts) is power-
fully determined by the limits of Empire. This is why the numerical argu-
ment—concerning both the number of citations and antecedents as well as
numbers of those who attended—is strongly connected to relations of
force, the setting for which is always a crisis.
 Sacred Precinct and Profane Space 

This “political” character is found again in the very nature of the ar-
gumentation: the assault of citations, the argument of large numbers, the
strength drawn from duration and repetition. Thus Nikephoros is pleased
to recall the frequency and number of synods attended by crowds of Chris-
tian authorities from all corners of the empire. The iconoclasts, too, are
equally concerned with the legitimacy of their own numbers:24 the council
of Hieria was refused the qualification of “ecumenical” by the iconophiles,
who considered it to be a “headless synod” because of the absence of rep-
resentatives of the pope and the oriental patriarchs. The strength of the nu-
merical argument was reinforced by the even more powerful one of dura-
tion. Nikephoros engages in a plea that is dispersed throughout the
Antirrhetics, although it is in the end methodical, for the authority of rep-
etition. This is an important matter, because as one senses, the sacred force
accruing to the law is often conferred on it by custom, habit, or even more
by its mythically immemorial character. It is the tradition as it “has been
transmitted since the beginning by the holy apostles and our venerable
church fathers and that has the force of law in the church.”25 The sacred-
ness of everything that exists ex archès—from the beginning—allows tra-
dition (paradosis) to become synonymous with custom (sunétheia). On the
iconoclast side, there is an anxiousness to legitimate the new decrees on the
basis of previous texts and decisions. Once based on these premises, how-
ever, it is really the pneumatic hagion that is directly made manifest,
through the imperial will. Thus there is no place for any new intervention
in between holy scripture and the legislative text. The tradition, inasmuch
as it is hagia—holy—is defined in the same way as the law, that is, as the
continuation of a prohibition.
Nikephoros, on the other hand, also engages, little by little, in a gen-
tle exercise of verbal slippage on the paradosis graphomenè, the written tra-
dition. This tradition consists of everything “that has been transmitted
from the beginning by the holy apostles and our venerable church fathers.”
Everything that is originary has become a custom, a habit, a repeated prac-
tice (sunétheia, ethos). What becomes law by habit is part of the tradition.
Thus custom, repetition (since the beginning) will first become part of the
definition of the sacred, and then become even more than that, because
Nikephoros, starting from a plea for the nonwritten law, will truly be able
to conceptualize the hiéron as a sacredness that does not need the sacra-
ment to institute and develop its effective activities. Idolatry has been kept
at bay as a “false sacred”; now it is necessary to reconquer the profane in or-
der to open it up to the iconic gesture.
   

Ethos, Nomos, Thesmos

Divine law and profane law communicate within the field of ethos.
The term ethos thus appears regularly to highlight the inscription of the sa-
cred in daily life. This is because Nikephoros wants to create a further link-
age: after moving from the scriptural to the nonwritten tradition, he wants
to take the final step from the nonwritten to the icon. But these slippages
are smoothly made, at a good distance from each other, and done so well
that the reader gains the impression of a series of cascading, accumulating
arguments, rather than ones that are explicitly articulated. In fact, if the
scattered texts of the three Antirrhetics concerning relations between the sa-
cred and tradition are gathered together, it becomes evident that the whole
forms a coherent chain of irrefutable conclusions that resemble successive
breaking but overlapping waves, without it being possible to really push
any one argument to its limit and thus make the argument that follows it
less certain. Nikephoros structures his discourse very carefully at just the
moment that he reproaches his adversary for being contradictory and dis-
jointed—although when he does take liberties in his arguments, he loves
to begin by adopting an outraged attitude. Note the chaining together of
arguments and the tone in the following quotation:
These villains and criminals accuse us with their brazen doctrine, us, who remain
within the pure faith and the nonwritten tradition of the catholic church. But they
must be told that the nonwritten tradition [agraphos paradosis] is above all the
most solid of all. It is the base and the foundation of all of life’s practices [krépis tis
kai hedra tôn en té khrései tou biou] that constitute custom [ethos] in the long run.
This custom reinforced over a long period, becomes natural.26

Here, the written tradition is nominally on the side of the law—

nomos (en graphais hemîn nomothetoumena). The slippage is therefore ef-
fected between the written Old Testament law (nomos) and the tradition
(paradosis) that imperceptibly becomes equivalent to ethos and sunétheia,
the mores in practice and custom. From this arises an expansion that truly
desacralizes the written law in order to sacralize habit:
But we see that even the laws consigned to writing are not respected when tradi-
tion and a different practice prevail over them. In effect, in everything, custom has
full power, and deeds prevail over words. To tell the truth, what is a law if not a
custom consigned to writing. Conversely, custom is a nonwritten law. It is even
easier to note this in the world outside of religion. In effect, even amongst the
grammarians, if by chance they happen to note in a text a discrepancy between a
 Sacred Precinct and Profane Space 

word and the prevailing rule, and seeing that custom is of a different opinion to
that which is written down, they cite the tradition, arguing that it is the rule of the
rule [kanona kanonos].27

This passage is clearly of great importance in overturning the argu-

ment concerning the supreme sacredness of the written text as it applied to
the conciliar horoi and patristic citations. Religion, its practices, and its
laws behave exactly like a living language in which the rules are both fixed
by the “nomothete” and endlessly transformed by the users of the lan-
guage. A language having only laws would be like a dead language, which
for Nikephoros is the case with the Jewish religion. Rather, the ethos, the
sunétheia, will be raised to the dignity of “new law” in the Pauline sense,
that is to say, as the fulfillment of the law.
The work of Jérôme Kotsonis concerning the ecclesiastic economy is
in complete agreement with these ideas.28 Developing the notion of the
economy in its juridical sense, he takes up Photios’s definition: “The econ-
omy is the suppression or suspension for a certain time of the strictest laws
or quota of the plaintiffs, the legislator making a decision in relation to the
weakness of those who will benefit.”29 The economy is therefore, as we
have seen, primarily linked to the occasional and the exceptional, to the
kairos in relation to what becomes law. Kotsonis takes up the series of
questions posed by Theodore of Stoudios in a letter to Athanasios, and
ends with the crucial question: “Finally, we pose the question of the types
of transgressions for which the economy can be of value.”30 Thus Theodore
writes to Athanasios: “Is there an economy for every man and for every
transgression of a commandment? Or for which ones, and in which
cases? . . . And does it concern kings only, for a single fornication, or for
each violation of the law?”31
The issue, therefore, is one of how, and in what case, that which is
not sacred by written tradition can become so by custom. The objection
may therefore be raised that this question is not an “economic” one, be-
cause custom is based on repetition, whereas economic practice would con-
cern only a unique instance. Yet Theodore of Stoudios also says the follow-
ing in a letter to Naukratios: “In the church fathers, some economies are
temporary and others, on the contrary, are valid forever.”32 Thus this
perenniality of the particular reaches canonical status under the heading of
a permanent economy. None of this, however, is surprising, in that it is the
incarnational model that underpins it all. Thus, custom becomes law to
the degree that it forms the living, practical rule. Nikephoros, then, having
   

wanted to prove that Constantine was a profaner of the Holy Writ, now
intends to prove that he transgresses custom in its capacity as law as well.
For Nikephoros, ethos and sunétheia function as exempla of divine
condescendence. The sacralization of custom is assimilated to the sacraliza-
tion of the daily, profane world by he who accepted its bondage. Laws can-
not be inflexibly applied, so great is human diversity, so fragile is the obedi-
ence of humans. In order for the law to be visible, it must be subjugated to
its own conditions of application; it must, like Christ, humanize itself.
The humanization of the law is not its laicization or its weakening. On
the contrary, it marks the entry of the sacred into human life. “The current
word economy comes from the economy that caused the incarnation to be
seen.”33 The nonwritten law, which first of all is simply assimilated to cus-
tom according to the classical topos, is finally identified with the new Law,
that of Christ himself, who never cared to write anywhere other than “in
hearts.” “The economy is the imitation of divine benevolence,”34 because
“for us, salvation is not in words but rather in fulfillment.” This is because
“the substance of dogma” is not in the written letter.35 In other words, the
incarnational hierophany is superior to the legislative akribeia of the Old
Testament hagion. The writings of the church fathers thus paradoxically
serve to eulogize what is not written. “This was already announced by the
holy prophets: having given the laws to their minds, I will also engrave
them in their hearts. We know that all this was carried out by Christ, . . .
and that it is only later that facts were engraved in letters.”36 The nonwrit-
ten tradition is therefore prior to the written tradition: “What written tra-
dition would have transmitted the unanimous and daily confession of the
sacred symbol of the faith [to hiéron tès pistéos sumbolon] if it had not first
been introduced in a non-written manner?”37
Nikephoros then follows this with an enumeration of the practices
and customs that “the harmonious organization of the sacred order puts
before our eyes [ho tès hiéras eutaxias ekdeiknuei diakosmos ].” Custom
therefore prevails over law.
At this point, however, we suddenly see the following slippage:
Nikephoros identifies the institutionalized ethos, sacralized by practice,
with thesmos. The term thesmos, which refers to institutions, gives ethos its
legislative status and implies a new notion of sacredness: that of the mater-
nal image. Implicitly, the law (nomos) of the Old Testament was the holy
(hagia) law of a father without a son who ruled by prohibition. In the
economy of the new Law, however, we are dealing with a contractual sa-
 Sacred Precinct and Profane Space 

credness (hieroi thesmoi). The contract that is sacred is the one that ties the
heavens to the earth, first by the mediation of the mother’s body, then by
the mediation of the church’s body. The “divine Epiphany” says: “It is nec-
essary for the church to accomplish this, because it received the tradition
of the church fathers from it.” And Nikephoros continues, still quoting the
Epiphany: “As it is said in Solomon: Listen, my son, to the words of your
Father and do not reject the institutions [thesmos] of your Mother.”38 He
then concludes peacefully: “Our Mother Church carries within herself the
institutions that cannot be dissolved [méter hémon hé Ekklesia eikhé thes-
mous én heauté keimenous mé dunamenous kataluthénai].”
Thus the final goal appears clearly: to defend the nonwritten law is to
defend the church itself as an institution of custom that dispenses a con-
tractual sacredness arising from natural law. For him, the iconoclasts
wanted to fight not only the icon, but the church as well: “But those who
live in pride and unbelief falsify the definitions of what is just [tous toi
dikaiou horous], and completely distort the church’s institutions [tous thes-
mous tés Ekklésias].”
The appearance of the term dikaion is striking here, because it clearly
indicates that the debate about the law of custom concerns legitimacy.
Mammon remains stupidly legalist: “Where does it come from, he says,
and what is this law [poios nomos] that enjoins us to prostrate ourselves in
order to worship Christ’s image?” For Nikephoros, the matter is clear: the
law that enjoins this worship is not nomos but the insitution of the mother
(thesmos ).
The mother, however, is hagia or Panhagia. Consequently, the pneu-
matic inspiration that presided over the annunciation and the incarnation
guarantees the sacredness of the maternal, and therefore ecclesiastic, insti-
tution. We thus have here a primary example of the contamination of the
holy by the sacred. This way of thinking about contagious contiguity that
causes, as we have seen, the holy and the sacred to communicate with each
other, is characteristic of the “economic” system of thought, one that,
above all, concerns universal propagation. The image is the essential organ
of that enlightened “prudence” and that imitative, conquering economy.
In this way, the iconoclasts are expelled into an area of confusionist
logomachy. They are nothing but onomatomachs. “One must not allow
oneself to be dragged into fussy and highly uneducated questionings that
engender logomachy and prattling. . . . That is the invention of the Greeks
and infidels. In effect, similarly to the Jews who demand a sign, the Greeks
   

chase after wisdom.”39 Mammon is thus sacrilegious in his very fidelity to

the letter and to writing, that is, to the sign. The sacred is displaced at the
moment of the incarnation. At this point in his argument, however, the
participation of the sacred in the human world is so total that if
Nikephoros were not extremely careful, he would have to admit that the
hieromyst of this new sacredness, Christ, was also its supreme profaner in
that he invested himself so completely in humanity. This is why the pow-
erful spring that causes the sacred to rebound from its fall in the new hi-
erophany is the icon itself. “Henceforth accept the icon or erase the
Gospels.”40
If the iconoclast is a slave to the sign, this is because for him, it is as
though Christ’s body was perpetuated solely by sacramental sanctification
(the eucharist). Christ and the eucharist, indissolubly tied together, thus
form the hagion that is both foundational and diachronic, and ecclesial sa-
credness is therefore excluded from the field of pneumatic signs. A doctrine
of topos—a place consecrated by the presence of relics and the fact of epis-
copal consecration—would thus be necessary in order for the Church to
form a part of the holy. For the iconoclast, the Church therefore cannot be
separated from its spatial definition, from its visible body. It has limits, and
its limits in turn determine what will be interior or exterior to it.
The situation is entirely different as far as the iconophile hiéron goes,
however. It links the body of Christ in the incarnation with its perpetua-
tion in the Marian institution of the church. The eucharist thus continues
to celebrate the mystery of consubstantiality in the nonsymbolic, that is,
nonrelative, sacramental universe. The hiéron is by definition nonconsub-
stantial sacredness—symbolic sacredness that overflows all the places it in-
vests, so that neither the Word nor any womb can imprison it. It defines
the space of sacredness as a space of communicative unfolding, where the
church is a quasi-transcendental system with respect to the workings of di-
vinity in the visible world.
The sacred will therefore also be immanent to the definition of au-
thority. Temporal power will no longer draw its legitimacy from charisma
or the prophetic mystery of signs, but from the subjugation of every sover-
eign authority to the authority that confers iconic power on it, that is, the
church.
Thus the nonwritten law does not only refer simply to the oral tradi-
tion whose model is christic teaching; it is that paradosis siopôsa, that mute
tradition that is inscribed silently in the social body itself in order to impose
 Sacred Precinct and Profane Space 

what would henceforth become law and would therefore be sacred. In ef-
fect, that which is just (dikaion) and that which is law is no longer obedi-
ence to the text that expresses prohibition, but submission to a silent system
that lifts all prohibitions, on the express condition that every practice, every
gesture, every thought be linked to the iconic doctrine of symbolic media-
tion. Practice and repetition only have the force of law because they inscribe
this linkage of the visible and invisible, the inside and the outside, in the si-
lence of the body. All these things form the essence of the economy.

The Icon: A Nonwritten Tradition

The Graph and the Evangelical Message

The nonwritten law, the agraphos tradition, is nothing other than this
inscription of the ecclesiastic institution in a body that is simultaneously
the nonwritten body of Christ and the body of every believer that becomes
its abode by means of the eucharistic sacrament. As we will see, the hiéron
is destined to become the receptacle, the container, of the hagion.
The inscription (graphè) of Christ’s body in the icon is situated at an
absolute remove from written law, just as it is at as clear a remove from eu-
charistic consubstantiality. This inscription of the nonwritten is the iconic
inscription for which Nikephoros reserves the exceptional status of a sym-
bol that mediates between sacred things and the internal threats that they
conjure up; that is to say, between the hagion and the damned (the diabol-
ical), between the hiéron and the profane (the lay). In order to do this, the
icon sets the holy and the sacred in relation to each other. The icon is con-
temporaneous with the evangelical message. The apostles “bequeathed the
speech of divine religion to us, just as, by means of painting, they also
made visible and evident for us . . . the world in which the Saviour came to
live on earth.”
But the contemporaneity of the icon and the Gospels is not enough.
Nikephoros wants to prove, in well-tried patristic tradition, that the icon is
superior to the letter and even to speech: “Opsis protéra akoué.” This pri-
macy of vision over hearing is a classic theme in the literature of the church
fathers; here, however, the topos is overdetermined in its aim, because vi-
sion is being invested with a function that is sacred.
Elsewhere, the same topos will rather serve the pedagogical intentions
of the iconophile orator: “This is why that genre of more unrefined writ-
   

ing, which is nevertheless clearer for the benefit of simple and crude peo-
ple, was necessary.”41 However, he wants to show first that whoever is an
enemy of vision, and therefore of the icon, is also an enemy of the sacred.
Here we encounter the last of his slippages, which causes a sacredness that
is not one of the written or oral, but visual, tradition to resurface, so to
speak, from the field of the ethos. Whatever appears, is sacred: “To what-
ever degree reality is above speech, the imitation and formal resemblance
of reality will prevail over the sound of speech to let us know things
clearly, . . . since vision is more efficient than hearing in causing convic-
tion, and is not at all secondary to it.”42
Yet what is entirely new here in relation to the classical topos is that
the preeminence of vision has as its foundation the preeminence of the
icon, and not the opposite. In effect, it is not from its visual effectiveness
that the icon derives its strongest argument; rather, it is by means of iconic
sacredness that vision obtains its primacy. The choice of the image is in the
first instance divine. It is God himself who, in making his filial Person vis-
ible, marked out the royal road of vision. The icon is evangelical because he
who occupies its center is image. The sacredness of the icon is based on its
divine origin. Vision is the mediating organ of similitude. Whoever aims a
blow at the icon is sacrilegious, because he strikes the very essence of the
Second Person of the Trinity.
The progressive abandonment evident of the hiéron’s criteria did not
present any danger for the iconophiles, because all of its power would
reappear and come to be firmly established in a defense of the hagion.
This sacredness, which is the very one formed by the trinity of the econ-
omy, the Virgin (Panaghia), and the saints (hagioi), would in turn pro-
mote a contamination of the sacred, which would give the hiéra and all
the sacred symbols (hiéra sumbola) their character of inviolability and in-
stitutional legitimacy.
For Nikephoros, the hagion could already be seen functioning in the
inspiration that dominated the decisions of the synods. That sacredness de-
fined a supernatural power whose presence could be seen by the effects of
illumination, inspiration . . . but at no moment is that hagion human, even
though the nature of its operations reaches the human field. It remains su-
pernatural. The sacred, on the contrary, is economic and therefore natural.
However, yet another character is added to the hagion’s already supernatu-
ral character: its mediated hierophany. This character is essential to the
workings of the Son, his mother, and the saints, because image and icon
 Sacred Precinct and Profane Space 

continually sweep across the double field of the sacred and the holy. In the
light of this, Constantine is described as a blasphemer who prevents the es-
tablishment of a natural communication between the holy and the sacred.
Constantine considers anything that is the object of consecration (hagias-
mos) or priestly celebration (hieratikès teletès) to be sacred. He is incapable,
says Nikephoros, of conceiving of the sacred without consubstantiality.
This is why the paradigm of the holy, consecrated image could only be the
eucharist. Consequently, even the pure hagion transmitted to humans by
divine power is submitted to sacramental actions.
The icon, on the contrary, derives its sacredness from the pneumatic
breath that transfigures similitude without having any need of the sacra-
mental institution. Its sanctity (hagion) comes to it from the workings of
its model who, absent in his very sanctity, remains intangible and invisible.
Its sacred (hiéron) presence among the sacred symbols (hiéra symbola) is the
result of an intrinsic activity. With its contagious presence it generates the
sacredness of the social space at whose heart it irradiates the sanctity of its
model. As an icon, it is only hiéra, which is to say that it is owed only
honor and respect (timé), but as something that originates in an imaginal
model that is holy, it has the right to proskynesis, venerating genuflection,
that is radically different from latria, worship that is addressed to its only
model.
What nonsense, then, to use the term iconolatry to speak of
iconophilia!43 Latria is at the heart of the iconic battle to ward off the idol.
Iconophilia, rather, is a highly specific term, which authorizes interpretive
side-slipping and enlightens us about the real side slips to which the icon
was itself subjected.
The icon is therefore imbued with different levels of sacredness with-
out ever being identical with any of them, because its function is to make
them communicate with each other, as its model, Christ himself, did. This
icon cannot be restricted solely to the site of consecration in the strictly in-
stitutional sense. In effect, if the icon needed the sacrament in the sacred
precinct in order to be sacred, it would then derive its sacredness from two
conditions: pneumatic inspiration and the ecclesiastical hierarchy put in
place by the emperor. This status of the icon would then respond to the
iconoclast’s wishes to separate the sacred from the profane. On the other
hand, the iconophile (who, let us repeat, will never be an iconolater) wants
to develop a nonlocal, nonsacramental system of thought concerning the
sacred, a system of thought that will render it open to the profane world
   

that will promise a contaminating unfolding beyond precincts, borders,

and the statal hierarchy. Once perfected, however, this new “profane” def-
inition of the sacred is not, for all that, an “anarchizing” doctrine of iconic
propagation. The institution will produce a mastering framework for it,
will control its power by other means, thanks to an economic conception
of the new symbol; for what is desired is not a frenetic doctrine of icons in
free circulation, but a coherent theoretical body that will allow the icon to
be thought in a univocal way, from a point of view that is as much spiritual
as strategic, that is, as a major mode of investing the imaginary and sover-
eignty in a controlled space, and all that in an endless mobility between
places that are either under threat or remain to be conquered.

The Icon and Its Sacred Site

The icon concerns a particular category in which immediacy and me-

diation are alternately linked to each other. The icon is immediate, as is the
gaze, and it mediates, as does the gaze of whatever it renders present. It is
the site in which the sacred circulates in its polymorphism, to the point
where it is integrated as a profane object, but imbued as well with sacred-
ness. The definitive text that makes this dynamism, this iconic mobility,
come alive is found in the third Antirrhetic, where Nikephoros engages in a
display of virtuosity on the topology of the sacred.44 In it, he comes to the
foregone conclusion that whoever knows only the pneumatic sanctity of
consubstantiality and the sacrament totally misinterprets the notion of the
sacred itself. This will lead the misinterpreter finally only to know and prac-
tice within the category of the profane, and consequently to blaspheme.
But the text is also extremely important because it leads the reader to con-
ceive of the ubiquity of the sacred, the modal nature of the question of the
interior, the exterior, and the relations between sacredness and beauty,
through the successive designations of what is sacred and what is not.
When a pious man has a conversation with the iconoclasts, he can say: “it is worth
honoring the divine symbols [theia sumbola], because the things which are placed
in the sacred temples are sacred [en tois hierois oikos anakeimena hiera eisin], just as
the things in these places [en tois] that are spread before the divine altar or some-
where else [heterothi pou] in the sacred precinct [hiérou], and that are portrayed on
the curtain [kata] as on every other material [en heterâ hulé] are venerated as holy
[hagia] together with those places [sunproskoumena]. All these things were made
together by Christians in the beginning.” They say [the Iconoclasts]: “we can see in
 Sacred Precinct and Profane Space 

[en] these places icons of wild animals, of domestic animals, of birds and of other
living beings. And we venerate the sacred things insofar as they are sacred [hiera hôs
heira] and not because of these motifs [tauta di’ekeina]. So, even if we see the icon
of Christ, we do not venerate the icon but what is sacred [hieron], and that is why
the icon must not be venerated outside these sacred places” [ektos touton].45

Even before analyzing the text any further, it is striking to note the
language that Nikephoros puts in the mouth of Constantine, the language
of the hiéron; Nikephoros will of course later catch him in flagrante delicto
when he makes the error of committing himself from the outset to the si-
multaneous veneration of the holy and the sacred. Constantine was loath
to use the term hiéron, both in the Horos of Hieria and the Peusis. When he
does use it, it is, despite everything, to refer to something in the sacred
space that, although contiguous with the hagion, is not confused with it,
without, for all that, creating any confusion in relation to the decor of the
sacred places. His listing of the ornamental elements besides Christ’s icon,
however, clearly demonstrates that he has no conception of the sacred as an
economic and enveloping visibility of the holy. Everything that he says
gives the impression that he does confuse the hiéron and the hagion. This,
in fact, is the iconophiles’ major reproach of Constantine, and it is the rea-
son that they are so partial to those passages where he shows his weakness
on the symbolic level.
Second, there is a clear insistence on a vocabulary of space: inside,
outside, on, elsewhere, with. . . . The issue at stake concerns the place of
the sacred, and Nikephoros wants to be able to reply that it is not the sa-
credness of the places that confers sacredness on things, but the sacredness
of things that is propagated in a place. What, really, does Mammon say
here, in a text that does not appear anywhere in the Horos of Hieria and
that Nikephoros cobbles together for the circumstances? He states that
icons cannot be venerated outdoors. In other words, he says that there is an
intrinsic sacredness whose only origin is sanctification by consecration,
which makes whatever is consecrated worthy of veneration. For
Nikephoros, however, sacredness does not concern “decor,” to use André
Grabar’s translation of the term,46 the Greek word for which does not ap-
pear in the text.
However, let us look at the continuation of the text, where
Nikephoros replies to the iconoclast:
Someone could reply that the same thing [ho autos logos] does not apply to every
case. Indeed, the forms of other living beings were not primarily produced for de-
   

votion and for veneration in the sanctuary, but for the sake of the beauty and har-
mony [kosmon kai euprépeîan] of the textiles in which they were woven together.
This is what happened when, thanks to the piety and zeal of the faithful for the di-
vine dwelling places [peri tous theious oikous], they were presented as a sacred of-
fering [anathéma hiéron]. For, if someone adores the sacred [hiéron] object, he does
not do this by paying attention either to the animal or to the wild beast. He knows
that there is no advantage to come from them [ouden ap’authôn onénasthai]. But
he pays attention to what is sacred [hiéron], giving nothing more than a look to
[the ornaments]. The aim of the holy figures [septôn] is different. How? Because
they are holy per se [di’auto to hagia einai] and they establish the memory
[mnèmèn] of the holy [hagiôn] archetypes, they are venerated as sacred together
with what is sacred [hos heira tois hierois sumproskunoûntai], but not only together
with what they are part of [sun autois]; they will also be honored outside the holy
temples [ektos tôn hagiôn oikôn]. But you, how is it that you are not unhappy to
venerate in the sacred precinct [en tô hierô] the icons of the ass, of the dog and of
the pig, and rejoice in burning to ashes the icon of Christ in the very sacred
precinct [autôi hierôi]? And do you not shudder at undertaking such things, show-
ing that you falsely bear the name “Christian?” What then could those whose in-
tellectual capacity is mutilated and who are defective in mental performance say
about the icons which are situated in the sacred enclosures [en taïs hieraîs kinklisi]
and in the so-called solea, and about those which are seen on the columns and on
the gates [en tois kios kai pulôsin], and about those which are installed in front of
the divine sanctuary?
So, is it for the sake of beauty and harmony that Christians produced them or is it
for the sake of specifically adapting the images to the places [ta oikeia tois oikeiois
epharmozontes], knowing that those places [topoi] are places for veneration and
that those icons were produced [for these places] for the purpose of veneration?47

Noticeable even at a first reading is the density of the text here and
the to-and-froing between the terms that refer both to the sacred object
and to the space, both interior and exterior, where its sacredness is estab-
lished. It is readily understandable that this difficult text has attracted the
attention of exegetes of the iconoclastic crisis, particularly Grabar. How-
ever, the translation and interpretation that he proposes pulls it toward a
justification of decorative forms that is strongly favorable to iconophilia;
moreover, this robs the text of its polemical and properly economic di-
mension. This is so to such an extent that Grabar echoes in his own text
the patriarchal plea by speaking of fetishism and animism when describing
iconoclast thought! A little earlier, as we have seen, the iconophiles had no
hesitation in treating their adversaries as idolators, against all logic. Now it
 Sacred Precinct and Profane Space 

is the modern historian himself who accuses the iconoclast of superstitious

iconophobia.
If Nikephoros takes the trouble to defend the “topology” of the sa-
cred so fiercely, however, it is because his adversaries are neither naive nor
fetishists. Is Christ in the icon like the lamb, or like the griffin that deco-
rates the chalice? Or again, is he like the plants, the animals, and the dif-
ferent motifs embroidered on the hangings? In other words, is he dissocia-
ble or not from the sacred space to which he belongs, from the profane
space in which he stirs, from the matter that serves as his support?
In the first part of the text, Nikephoros talks of sumbola, by which we
should understand not only icons, as Grabar does, but all the objects, the
whole of the sacred abode’s sacred space, with its liturgical objects, decora-
tions, and ornaments. The sumbolon is iconic, so it causes the hiéron and
the hagion to communicate with each other. But everywhere it is involved
with the universe of profane signs, sacralized by consecration or by conti-
guity and community with the sacred world. What characterizes the sum-
bolon above all else is nonconsubstantiality. Nikephoros therefore has to es-
tablish distinctions among the symbols, because his new objective is the
methodical appropriation of space by the sacred, owing to a principle that
is both active and contaminating. He begins by insistently marking off
contiguities: in, in front of, above, below. Then he marks off global fea-
tures, or the formation of a common system: these are the verbs that begin
with syn (sunproskoumena, sundiagraphomena, sunexeirgasthésan, sunprosku-
noutai), thus indicating that sacred “symbols” cannot be dismantled. In a
sacred place, something profane that does not deserve worship or respect
cannot even be considered to subsist. This contamination of the sacred
comes from its close linkage to the pneumatic holy, which is infinite,
spreads everywhere, and therefore possesses, in principle, ubiquity. This is
so to such a degree that by respecting the hiéron of the sacred places, one
reaches so to speak the holy (hôs hagia), which is a phrase that inevitably
evokes the passage stating that in relation to the icon, an absence hôs
paronta is equivalent so to speak to a presence. This hos is the “as if ” of the
mimetic economy.
The first blunder of Constantine, therefore, consists in the desacral-
ization of the interior of the holy places, and the profanations to which the
iconoclasts give themselves over are the proof of this. But, replies
Nikephoros, in the holy place itself, it is absolutely necessary to distinguish
the different species of sumbolon. If every sacred, nonconsubstantial ele-
   

ment is called sumbolon, it is still necessary to know how to differentiate

between three terms—decor, support, and icon—that is, between what is
on top of, below, or neither on top of nor below but “in relation through”
(skhéseôs). There are three forms of symbolic relations: the consecration of
the profane, the temple, or a liturgical object; contamination by the sacred
(this is the case of profane decoration on a consecrated object); and iconic
grace, which renders sacredness by the privileged relation between the icon
and the prototype. What differentiates the two last cases is the concept of
support. Sun, en, and kata refer to a whole topology of contact between the
sacred and the profane that is only resolved in what Grabar calls an “aes-
theticism.” He bases this on the expression “kosmos kai euprépeia” (beauty
and appropriateness), a topos of the argument for the beauty of holy
places, which recurs twice.
But matters are not so simple, for in the case of the icon, beauty
poses an entirely different problem owing to kenosis. In effect, if the icon
is a memorial to the incarnation, that is, to God’s assumption of human
misery, his splendor can only be spiritual, whereas in the case of the orna-
mentation of objects and liturgical places, beauty is not only the motif of
decoration itself, it also becomes an anagogical factor in the contemplation
of divine splendor. Luxuriousness and beauty enter into a relational con-
ception of the symbol in anagogical mode, which spreads the pleasure of
seeing by contiguity in order to carry it to spiritual fruition.
What Nikephoros tries to demonstrate above all, then, is that the
iconoclast conception of the holy is separative, in the sense that it generates
obstacles to communication and symbolic mediation. The sacred, which
has nothing to do with this in his eyes, is essentially a symbolic category,
which is to say that in conformity with the Christological economy, the sa-
cred is profoundly acquainted with kenosis and transfiguration. Kenosis
refers to that hollowing out of divinity and the sacred of which we spoke
earlier and concerns the ultimate profanity: death. In a sense, it could be
said that death, which escapes all symbolization, is substituted by the cat-
egory not of emptiness but of a hollowing out, to which economic dy-
namism provides the possibility of reversal. What resists all symbols is then
symbolized, and the transfiguration is that living resurrection of the world
that by pneumatic grace allows humans and things to appear anew in the
time and space of the sacred.
If Nikephoros is to be believed, Constantine venerates the profane
and profanes the sacred. Once again, what separates is the same as what
 Sacred Precinct and Profane Space 

mixes together. This theme, untiringly reprised throughout the Antirrhet-

ics, is haunted by a diabolical contradiction, itself diabolé: division, separa-
tion—that is to say, the inability to mediate, symbolic inaptitude, and
therefore the impossibility of setting things in relation to each other with-
out them becoming confused. It is therefore not surprising to see that the
“diabolists” are champions of consubstantiality. Thus Grabar, taking up
Nikephoros’s argument again, considers in turn that Constantine “tends to
confuse the representation and the thing represented, and to make the re-
ligious icon slip towards the magical image,” from which a type of
“fetishism” arises. He continues, saying that Nikephoros, “as an ardent
polemicist, may perfectly well have distorted the thought of his adver-
saries,” but that, all things considered, he was probably correct, because “in
this, the iconoclasts come close to traditional beliefs that in the Near East
are perhaps more deeply entrenched than elsewhere!” After this, he con-
cludes that the Orthodox, “educated in the school of Greek thought,” as
was Nikephoros, did not wish to run the same risks and preserved the icon
without confusing it with the idol or “the magician’s effigy.” We believe,
however, that it is rather because he ran the same risks that he worked so
energetically to produce a doctrine that could protect it.
On reading Kitzinger’s study of the cult of icons before the icono-
clastic period, the most striking feature is precisely a growing tendency to
superstition on the side of the burgeoning iconophilia.48 There is a clear
absence noticeable in the expansion of object worship of a confirmed sym-
bolic dimension. In other words, it is not so much the iconoclasts who
obliged the church fathers to produce a coherent doctrine of the symbol as
the crowd of the faithful living in confusion. Kitzinger begins by noting
the considerable growth of the icon between the sixth and eighth centuries,
and goes on to remark that the result of the attribution of “magic proper-
ties to an image is that the distinction between the image and the person
represented is to some extent eliminated,” because “the image acts or be-
haves as the subject itself is expected to act or behave.”49 He points out as
well the icon’s prophylactic and apotropaic character, and the fact that
there is a marked increase in the numbers of acheiropoietic icons during
the time under consideration. Finally, he concludes that as time passes and
the cult of icons expands, its material bond with the sacred disappears.
Now, this is an extremely important point. The icon participates in
the hagion with everything that that entails concerning potential de-
monism and virtual diabolism. The iconoclast, on the other hand, expels
   

what is holy in order to avoid talismanism and animism. Nikephoros,

however, rehabilitates it in the symbolic field of the sacred, where it will
moreover constitute the element that runs transversely to all sacrednesses.
Kitzinger acutely notes that as the contact between image and spectator be-
comes more and more intimate, so it is not that particular relationship that
the apologists try to explore and justify. On the contrary, they raise the icon
above human needs and anchor it in a transcendental relation with divin-
ity. Thus the artist will make abodes for the Holy Spirit; as Leontios of
Neapolis says, “I render honor to the abode of the Holy Spirit.”

This assimilation of the icon to a dwelling place (oikos) is a constitu-

tive element of its relation to the holy. Just as the holy temples were the in-
stitutional abodes of the Hagion Pneuma, so icons become the mobile
dwellings of a power that their matter does not limit. The contiguity of the
holy and the sacred is of the same nature as the content to the container,
whose iconic graph inscribes the threshold that separates and unites them.
This is why Nikephoros is extremely careful to distinguish the relation of
the decor on the vase that is decorated from the relation of the icon to the
figure that it shows. In the first case, on top of and below have a specific
contiguity: the support is a container sacralized by its place and function.
Its decor is distinct from the container and does not participate in the least
in the content. It arises instead from a surplus over the content, and by
contagion enjoys the respect (timé) that is owed to the support. In truth,
the decor maintains an “aesthetic” relation with the support, by which we
should understand that beauty and harmony do honor to the sacred func-
tion. Appropriateness and beauty—euprépeia and kosmos—are only cir-
cumstantially sacred and have anagogical value.
What fed this anagogical interpretation was a Plotinian conception of
the image: “Whoever sees the perceptible universe also admires the intelli-
gible world that he sees reflected in it, as someone who contemplates a
painting.”50 The gradual passage from the contemplation of beauty to the
contemplation of being finds its precise topical formulation here. The gaze
of the faithful is taken under control, from the spontaneity of its immedi-
ate pleasures to the end of the voyage, which will place it in the hands of
the angelic powers. In this sense, then, the beauty of the decor has a pro-
treptic and pedagogical intention.
On the other hand, the fundamental conception of the icon is clearly
distinct from any thought concerning decoration. This means that the
 Sacred Precinct and Profane Space 

wooden panel and Christ do not have the relation that a support has to its
decoration, of container to content. In the temple, the consecrated abode
communicates to everything that it contains the sacredness that it itself ob-
tains from everything that made it a hiéron in the first place—that is, the
relics enclosed in the altar, without which it is not sacred, and the liturgi-
cal sacrament that dedicated it to an eponymous saint. In other words, the
temple is sacred because it contains relics (hagia), but it communicates its
sacredness to everything that it contains that was originally profane: it si-
multaneously becomes a receptacle and a dispenser. However, the ensem-
ble of the sanctuary, which is unsurprisingly described as hiéron hagion,
maintains its symbolic economy, its capacity for causing the sacred to cir-
culate interior to its consecrated precinct only. Thus the whole mechanism
that communicates between the different levels of sacredness remains uni-
fied and therefore dependent on the institutional framework. The result of
this is that the sacred remains totally isolated from the profane, because
from the moment that one enters the sacred precinct, one way or another,
the holy and the sacred share places, objects, signs, gestures. . . .
In order to part from this precinct, however, Nikephoros finds a sub-
tle means: the term sumbolon, he says, is a homonym. The polysemy of the
word symbol allows the container and the content not to be mixed with
each other. If the symbol is taken as a container, then the sacred spreads
out from it and cohabits with the profane in a manner that is economic.
Among the “symbols,” the icon occupies a highly distinctive place. It forms
part of the hiéra that are venerated as such (hôs hiéra), but by means of the
procession of imitation and memory, it also forms part of the hagia. The
icon is therefore neither only in the field of the holy nor the field of the sa-
cred; it is between the two and makes them communicate with each other
along two paths: the homonymic relation and the archetypal mnemic rela-
tion (eis mnèmèn tôn archétupôn proïenai hagiôn). There are therefore two
means of communication: one is based on its mimetic form, the other in
the interior attitude of the contemplator. In common with all other sym-
bols, the iconic sumbolon is therefore nonconsubstantial, but it also has the
peculiarity of communicating directly with its own cause (aitia), the pro-
totype. In other words, there is no linguistic remove here of the sort that
separates the signifier from the signified; rather, the icon as a symbol be-
comes the manifestation per se of the cause that gives it its meaning. This
amounts to saying that the signifier is present in the icon, even if it is nec-
essary to add to this “relatively.”
   

This relative immanence of the holy in the sacred is specific to the

iconic symbol. In contemplating a decorated object, therefore, the ascent
of worship to the supreme and holy source can only take place by a series
of successive abstractions, each based on the other, in order to detach the
contemplator from the perceptible world; conversely, on the same model of
the incarnation, to which the icon is the memorial, the movement of con-
templating the icon leads the contemplator toward the world. Starting
from the cause (hagion) evoked by the imitation of the prototype (a formal
imitation, homoiôsis ), the contemplator is anagogically led to the sanctifi-
cation of the perceptible world.
The icon brings humans to the world, in that this world is the one of
salvation. Therefore, the homoiotic movement, which confers holiness on
the icon owing to a mimetic sacredness, is complemented by a second
mimetic movement, one that travels from the iconic sacred to the profane,
in order to redeem.
The icon moves toward the world; this means that it leaves the tem-
ple and spreads beyond it: “ou sin autois monon alla kai ektos tôn hagiôn
oikôn.” Not only is worship performed in and with the holy place, but also
outside of the consecrated holy abodes. This irruption of the icon outside
of the sacramental field is a central aspect of the iconophile economy, one
that strives to invade the profane field in order to appropriate it for itself.
Thus the icon is endowed with a power that is both centripetal and
centrifugal. It is centripetal because it captures the holiness of its model
with its forms and centrifugal because it dispenses and spreads the sacred-
ness that it incarnates by contact and contamination. This, in fact, is one
of the major functions of the economy.
How, then, does the capture of the model’s holiness function in the
icon? Here, Nikephoros tries to link together the things that he had ini-
tially needed to separate, that is, the formal concern regarding the imma-
nence of the sacred. In the icon, Christ is not a mere decoration, but his
form must respond to a certain number of requirements appropriate to
symbolic ends: ta oikeia tois oikeiois epharmozontes. Christians are always
careful to avoid rupture, disharmony, maladjustment. The icon painter is
not any old decorator, but an artist who maintains a privileged relation,
governed over by the Holy Ghost, with the prototypical cause. This is so to
such an extent that the formal choices for portraying the holiness of the
prototype cannot be separated from the existential mimésis that governs
holy life.
 Sacred Precinct and Profane Space 

In the production of pictures, pneumatic inspiration works as much

by prayer and contemplation as by the direct intervention of the hagion.
Hagiographies provide us with some examples in which as the artist sleeps,
so the prototype appears in a “homonymic” dream, bearing the traits by
which he will be portrayed in the icon. This first guarantee of resemblance
presided over by the direct intervention of the prototype is then reinforced
by a gesture that offers a second guarantee of authenticity: the inscription
of the sacred prototype’s name on the icon (the homonymic épigraphè).
“Hagiastic” contamination therefore occurs simultaneously by resemblance
and homonymy. To accord the icon this “transitional” status, the texts call
it septa, pure.51 The pure and holy icon thus meets the internal conditions
that its mimetic participation in the incarnation demands.
In what sense is beauty sacred? The making of the icon, as we have
seen, remained closely linked to a system of measurements. There is a sa-
credness in repetition and number. “The transfer of measurements ensures
the transfer of powers,” notes Kitzinger. Thus number and name are the
foundations of the authentification of the sacred. These two foundations
give the icon its symbolic definition, whereas pneumatic inspiration alone,
having guided the hand that “copied” the model, may leave the contem-
plator of the dream or apparition in a position of nonproductive worship.
This is not, however, the intention of economic thought, which is different
in this respect from the acheiropoietic icons. The iconophile, having a re-
lational conception of the icon and a transitional conception of the sacred, ven-
erates the holiness of the Holy Face, even as he prefers to develop an hiero-
phany that is made by human hand. This iconic hierophany is more eager to
sacralize and invest what surrounds it than it is concerned with maintain-
ing the charismatic purity of the acheiropoietic images, which will become
in turn an iconic model.
In relation to the place of the sacred, neither the time nor presence in
the temple of icons or objects touched by pneumatic grace form the object
of iconophile discourse; rather, it is the always mobile link of a progressive
and uninterrupted sacralization of profane space by iconic symbols. It is
this link that is problematic for iconoclast thought, which sees in it, cor-
rectly, a sacredness that escapes hierarchic control and the control of the
institutional universe of the sacraments.

Independent of liturgical control, the icon incarnates that “unvested

power” of the monks that Peter Brown discusses, which is a parallel power
   

that escapes both imperial and episcopal power.52 In his analysis of the cri-
sis, Brown also manifests a tendency to identify the icon progressively with
the holy man. This identification is extremely enlightening in relation to
the interpretation of the mimetic sacred of the holy and to an understand-
ing of the violent antimonasticism of the iconoclasts. But this unlinked,
unvested power, such as he describes it, no longer fits the icon. The so-
ciopsychological analysis that constitutes the rest of his study of the holy
man leads him to follow Grabar and Kitzinger in privileging the icon’s
magical and thaumaturgical character. On the one hand, the force of his
argument arises from the fact that he does not separate the iconic function
of the sacred from the social and political fabric that it reinforces; in his
opinion, danger arises from the fact that the sacred causes an expansion of
a power parallel to all hierarchies. On the other hand, however, there
would nevertheless appear to be a great difference between iconic sacred-
ness and the holy man, although they cannot be separated at all in the gen-
esis of the iconic function. It is in this that the comparison between
Nikephoros’s text and the life of St. Steven the Younger is highly instruc-
tive, for the very use of the terms that refer to the icon and the holy man
make it seem as though the system of thought regarding the sacred is work-
ing hard to separate the icon from its living model, the holy man. “Holy
men and icons were implicated on an even deeper level. For both were,
technically, unconsecrated objects.”53 Brown is in a position to argue for
this identity because he had asserted a little earlier that “the icon merely
filled a gap left by the physical absence of the holy man.”54 He illustrates
this concept with evidence from Gregory Nazianzos and Basil, who had
described the saint as being a statue. The saint, immobile as an icon: the
stylite tradition had long provided a model for this conception. I disagree
with none of this. What is important from our point of view, however, is
the genesis of the iconic system of thought. It is not the saint who stands
at the origins of the icon, but the image that is the cause of what is holy.
This is true even if it is indeed through the hagiographic accounts that
iconic reality can be seen emerging historically, little by little and with
growing precision. The holy man, still named hagios, does manifest his re-
lation with the hiéron in many ways, but in an unstable, confused, and (to
take up Brown’s word) inarticulate fashion.
In this paradoxical performance, the icon, on the other hand, man-
ages to escape institutional space and establish the space of symbolic link-
age itself. A thinker such as Nikephoros cannot be considered the defender
 Sacred Precinct and Profane Space 

of a subversive and turbulent conception of the icon. Rather, he will, so to

speak, gather the powers reaped by the holy man and redistribute them
economically among the different authorities, as that economy decrees.

Conclusion

Nikephoros’s conclusion is clear: “We Christians, . . . we know what

we prostrate ourselves before: we venerate what is ‘sacred’ as ‘holy things’
[ta hiera sebomen hôs hagia].” The hôs here represents diabainei, which
refers to the movement by which the cult that one offers to the sacred as-
cends to the prototype (“epi to prôtotypon”); this is the anagogical relation
that travels from the sacred and the consecrated to the sacrosanct per se.
Such is the economic working of relations (skhésis). It should be identified
not with a relativism lacking in spiritual nobility and serving immediate
interests, but with a relativism that economic thought has made tip over
completely into the mimetic sublimation of divine condescension.
In short, the unremitting effort that Nikephoros puts into proving
that the iconoclast Mammon is the enemy of the sacred corresponds with
his intention to formulate a specific sacredness against the sacredness of his
opponents, in which the image has a structural function. Iconoclast sa-
credness, as all sacredness, has a double character. This duality is inter-
preted by its adversaries as diabolical duplicity, division without mediation.
Constantine V and his disciples recognize on the one hand a pneumatic,
direct power, and on the other an institutional body of signs aimed both at
guaranteeing the authenticity of the sacred and mapping out its disturbing
ambivalence. The system of iconoclast signs passes through two systems of
gesture, each subordinated to the other: the first is the mimetic, imperial
system, which is nominated directly, and the second is the system of sacra-
ments, dispensed by the clergy who do not share in sovereignty, but de-
pend on it. This is a sacredness that is hierarchized in a linear way, and its
duality (pneumatic and semiotic) has no mediator other than the emperor
himself.
Nikephoros renders this imperial production of the sacred derisory
and contradictory in order to oppose it to another duality. Whereas icono-
clasm only recognizes the hagion, iconophilia formulates a subtle theory of
the circulation of sacrednesses on different levels. But this theory, which
makes the hiéron the centerpiece of the new iconocracy, is not set up in a
purely theoretical way. It is the journey of the reader through the texts that
   

allows the coherence of the “weave” to be progressively seen. What is the

hiéron? It is the principle of mastering the hagion’s turbulence and the
sacralization of the profane world, which is haunted by other turbulences.
This amounts to saying that the sacred is an agent that brings order to the
holy and puts it into a well-tempered relation with the real world. This is
why the icon would become the appropriate symbol of the hiéron’s
epiphany. It epitomizes and actualizes in itself all the major workings of the
sacred: to contain the hagion without enclosing it, rendering it visible with-
out releasing it so that it is beyond control, tying it indissolubly to a fertile
and contaminating definition of space to be ruled over and space to be in-
vaded. To say that the icon is a symbol means, strictly speaking, that it is
the very agent of the symbolization of what is holy. The attribution of sov-
ereignty to the keeper of iconic sacredness therefore corresponds well to the
ecclesiastical institution’s objectives, which make the sacred, good order,
and the economy inseparable within a mechanism that substitutes one for
the other, or, if one prefers, by a concatenation of equivalences proper to
the economy.
In order to deprive the emperor of iconic fertility in the order of ap-
pearance as well as representation, the iconophile institution makes use of
the weapon that it is still in the process of inventing and that it never stops
trying to perfect.
 5

Iconic Space and Territorial Rule

To attempt to rule over the whole world by organizing an empire

that derived its power and authority by linking together the visual and the
imaginal was Christianity’s true genius. The church, founded by Paul, was
apparently the first to provide a response to the problems of iconocracy
that we are considering here. These concern the entire operation which, in
giving its flesh and form to something, the very essence of which is a with-
drawal, invisibly takes possession of all earthly, visible things. Having al-
ready examined the question of the theoretical energy involved in this en-
terprise, we now turn our attention to its pedagogical and political
effectiveness. By virtue of the economic unity of the system, an uninter-
rupted pathway between the spiritual and temporal worlds was made pos-
sible; they are one and the same when considered from the point of view of
the economy.
The incarnation of a God appearing in an image in the form of a son
founds both a new theology and a new politics. The Pauline conception of
the eikôn tou theou, the Son who is an image of God (and who constitutes
a body that founds a new kingdom), inspired the church to a doctrine in
which images were given the responsibility of making institutional space
visible. This space develops a worldly or planetary calling under the more
abstract title of the universal. Catholic thought, which in Greek is nothing
more than the category of universality itself, envisages no more and no less
than the conquest of the world beyond the barrier of time, borders, and
languages. We are today the heirs and propagators of this iconic empire, yet
   

effort is nevertheless still required on our part to understand how the prac-
tice of the icon has infiltrated its smooth and efficient operation.
In promoting the visibility of God in his christic incarnation, and in
identifying it simultaneously with the ecclesiastic institution, St. Paul truly
opened the iconocratic field up to the designs of empires. Here is the Epis-
tle to the Colossians (:–):
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all
things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether
thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through
him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hang to-
gether. He is the head of the body, the church [hé képhalé tou sômatos tès ecclèsias].

Yet how did the icon succeed not only in making an institution apparent,
but, by its very spatiality, rendering visible and real a fertile, matrixlike for-
mula for the invasion and domination of territory?
The icon itself, by virtue of its physical, tangible reality, constitutes
an extraordinary treatment of space. Every graphic decision carries mean-
ings that are both doctrinal and institutional. We have already seen exam-
ples of its educational use and its capacity to convince people immediately
of its own truth. However, it also puts in place an extraordinary yet real,
tangible system that is thoroughly imbued with a design for the appropri-
ation of Christianized territory. The question it poses is distinctively mod-
ern, because it is none other than the question of the empire of the gaze
and vision, which is what I call “iconocracy.”
By iconocracy, I mean that organization of the visible that provokes
an adherence that could be called a submission to the gaze. I choose the
term deliberately. Customarily, those who destroyed sacred images are
called iconoclasts and those who defended them iconophiles. In respect of
the latter, however, I prefer to talk of iconophiles only when considering
the spiritual and philosophical arguments that determined the battle in fa-
vor of icons, and of iconodules, that is to say slaves to the icon, whenever
the stakes are considered from the educational and political points of view.
There is no iconodule but for the iconocrat; there is no slave but for the mas-
ter. In the struggle for mastery and control over iconic production, the two
camps constantly accuse each other of being slaves to the idol, because
each would like to seize power. One thing, therefore, is certain: to talk of
iconolatry is to commit a serious error that shows a radical lack of under-
standing of the spiritual and political problems of iconicity. As for the icon-
oclast, it is clear that his hatred of the icon has its source in the unshakable
attachment to what he considers to be the pure, true image.
 Iconic Space and Territorial Rule 

The image, with its capacity to strike as a lightning bolt in the serv-
ice of power, is not content simply to suspend the word and overwhelm by
silence. Here and now, in the corporeal world where it addresses the issue
of the incarnation, it proposes a definition of the entirety of space where
power is deployed. For the church, following Paul, had interpreted the im-
age of God as the advent of a glittering reign, as basileia, a plan for the oc-
cupation of space.
Michel Foucault’s philosophical exercise on a painting by Velázquez
is well known. The chapter entitled Las Meninas in The Order of Things,
which opens his whole meditation on representation, is in fact the subtle
description of a painting approached as a staging, a production. This is a
classic scenography in which looks are exchanged, reveal themselves, and
hide themselves in a pictorial space that has become a metaphor for royal
space. But the monarchy in question is not so much that of King Phillip
IV of Spain as one founded by the sovereignty of the gaze of the painter
Velázquez, who commands the visible to become invisible in a double eli-
sion of the places of the king and the subject. Foucault discovers in this im-
age the visible structure of an imaginary space and the institutional logic of
an invisibility that is submitted to iconic organization. Yet strictly speaking,
in this analysis there is nothing that is relevant to the nature of the iconic
itself. In Foucault’s view, Velázquez’s Las Meninas exhibits something new,
yet the secret of which a methodical and reasonable ekphrasis would, to
some extent, reveal and describe. In this sense, it is possible that the bril-
liant analytic description could make one believe that it has left nothing
unexplained, and that it releases the philosopher from a confrontation with
the object itself. Although this statement may seem excessive and paradox-
ical, the fact remains, however, that the surplus yielded by the contempla-
tion of the painting is nonetheless almost of a different nature to the satis-
faction that one derives from its understanding. The pleasure of the
drawing, of the forms, of the color—in a word, of all the pictorial de-
vices—is added to the deciphered enigma of its meaning, “as though
adding to youth its flower.”
We may well, however, disagree deeply and essentially with the idea
that both the problems posed by painting and the solutions that each work
offers are quite so independent of everything that makes the painting visi-
ble and readable. The plastic value of the painting, the ensemble of mate-
rial procedures, would in that case be nothing but the surplus value of its
meaning.
Yet what brings us to reflect on the technique of the icon is precisely
   

something that takes us beyond the technical operation of a scenography.

The technique of its material production, “the making of the meadow,” as
Francis Ponge said, is a productive unwinding of meaning. The manipula-
tion of materials and styles, the placing of color and lines, bear with them
stakes that are as much spiritual as political. Foucault skirts the greatest dif-
ficulty that discourse about images encounters in addressing himself to im-
ages that generously offer their representativity to the philosopher. The
icon, on the other hand, not representing what it renders visible, issues a
summons to philosophy with an enigmatic specificity. Will it also allow us
to grasp something that, later in the history of painting, emerges as an
enigma specific to painting?
A different explanation might well be offered, however, to the effect
that a painting ought to be understood as something that links the invisi-
bility of the image with the question of the incarnation. Just what is it that
takes bodily form in the visibility of the painting? In the preceding pages
we outlined the mimetic and kenotic consequences of the relations that tie
the flesh of the icon to the body of the resurrection. Our path then led us
to an examination of icon doctrine in holy and sacred space. Now we turn
to the icon in public space and its economic existence with regard to es-
tablished power. Here, we will compare conceptions of the icon and its ma-
terial technique to the idea of a territory that has been invaded or submit-
ted to rule.
In relation to the manufacture and use of the icon, its devotees main-
tained that what was at stake in it in imaginary terms could not be sepa-
rated from its material form. On the question of repetition, for example,
the Byzantine image presents a fundamental generic difference to Las
Meninas. In that unique masterpiece, a repetition arises from a temporal-
ity internal to the mirroring operation of the image. The problem of du-
plication is included in a rhetoric of signs that would bring joy, not to men-
tion semiological delight, to an orator. Yet for all that, Las Meninas resists
and remains a picture, which is to say an enigma whose power is never ex-
hausted by the intelligibility of its signs.
The repetition to be found in the Byzantine icon, on the other hand,
is both institutional and real. The icon must recopy a model that is, for the
most part, another icon, to which it is totally and unchangingly sub-
servient. As a result of this, moving back along the chain of icons, the ne-
cessity arises of decreeing certain images as being both foundational and
miraculous. In other words, to the question of whether, in every image, the
 Iconic Space and Territorial Rule 

notion of imitation requires the existence of a real, or even imaginary,

model, and whether the problematic of the true and the illusory demands
consideration by an ontological tribunal, Foucault responds adroitly,
thanks to Velázquez, by the drafting of a specular scenario in which the
comings and goings are organized from the starting point of the portrayal
of a mirror in a scene where the looks cleverly intersect as they exchange
the sovereignty of their respective fictions. The native exteriority of the
scene is abolished in the rhetorical interiority of painting itself.
The Byzantine economy, however, is entirely different. Byzantine
iconography creates a repetitive and fertile plastic world where the mirror
is the invisible quiddity of being, not represented because not representable.
What is shown, rather, puts in place the visible formula of something that
will ensure the stability of an empire. In opposition to Kantorowicz’s con-
ception of the sovereignty of the artist in the Renaissance,1 I propose a
kenotic practice of virgin space, within which is incarnated the sovereignty
of an institution that will make of the flesh a body, corpus Ecclesiae.
Both the iconophile church and imperial power produced irrefutable
signs and emblems of their own power. Let us now turn to a few examples
demonstrating how it was possible to make the transition from a plastic
space to a territory, the generating principle and concept for which is har-
bored by the icon. In effect, the problem concerns the invasion of profane
space by an authority that ought to have restricted itself to churches and
monasteries, and ought also to have limited its right to concern itself with
moral life, religion, and salvation. Such, however, was not its intention. Be-
sides its spiritual message, Pauline thought carries within it a universal,
conquering message that no wealth or power of this world should be al-
lowed to escape. The role that the icon plays in this conquest still appears
to be both foundational and definitive.
Icons of Christ and the Virgin were frequently associated with impe-
rial power, although this phenomenon dates from well before either the
Quinisext council or the relapses of the iconoclast crisis. The meaning of
this association, however, was radically modified during and after the cri-
sis, as will be evident from the examples to which we now turn. First, we
will examine a few instances of imperial coinage; then we will study two
specific portrayals of the Virgin and child, the Virgin of Tenderness and the
Virgin of Blachernai.
   

Coins and Seals

The invasion of the space, of the territory, of trade by the image of

power is a theme that preoccupies evangelical thought itself. The well-
known episode of reddere Caesari is found three times in the Evangelists: it
appears in Matthew (:), Mark (:), and Luke (:). Here is
Matthew’s text: “They handed him a silver piece. Jesus asked, ‘Whose head
is this, and whose inscription?’ ‘Caesar’s,’ they replied. He said to them,
‘Then pay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to
God.’” It is absolutely clear in this passage that the image engraved on the
coin marks out the space of both an exchange and an obligation. The text
thus clearly distinguishes between spiritual and temporal power, and we
have every reason to believe that this distinction was fairly faithful to Jesus’
thought and to the spiritual nature of his teaching.
What becomes of this tradition, however, with St. Paul? His text says:
“For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s ser-
vants, busy with this very thing. Pay to all what is due them—taxes to
whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom re-
spect is due, and honor to whom honor is due.”2 Here, the issue is no
longer one of separating God from Caesar: profane exchanges and spiritual
obligations are mingled together in a list that designates all collectors or re-
ceivers of taxes as having been given their responsibility by God (leitourgoi
theou). It is no longer a question of giving Caesar his due, but of taking his
place. The icon played a determining role in this takeover and we will now
examine the question of how it did so.
André Grabar, in his study of the imperial cult in Byzantium, main-
tains that the Christian cult imported wholesale the whole system of the
cult of the emperor in order to render it to Christ and the Theotokos, the
mother of God.3 Thus emperors and empresses had themselves represented
in the company of Christ, the Virgin, and saints, both in the profane world
and in holy places.
In this connection, the first object to show the emperor and Christ
side by side is a consular diptych dated to . The field of numismatics,
however, allows us to determine that Christ’s face first appears on a coin in
the period immediately after the meeting of the Quinisext council. This
appearance relates to a “revolution” that took place during the reign of Jus-
tinian II: until then, the gold solidus had represented on its obverse the
bust of the emperor, and on the reverse the iconography of a Victory car-
 Iconic Space and Territorial Rule 

rying a cross, which subsequently became the cross potent on steps. It was
in – that Justinian II famously released a solidus that is described in
the following way in the catalog of the British Museum: “Obverse: Justin-
ian II, facing, bearded. Wears crown with cross and long robes of lozenge
pattern; in l., small mappa. Reverse: Bust of Christ facing with cross be-
hind head. Hair and beard flowing; wears tunic and mantle; r. hand in act
of benediction; l. holds book of Gospels.”
“Revolutionary” though this appearance on a coin was, it had, how-
ever, been preceded by the portrayal of Christ and the Virgin on seals sur-
rounded by an oval frame that have the appearance of the shield carried by
Victory figures. An image inserted into circles or ovals such as these is
therefore called an imago clipeata: a shield image.
These choices of emblems, these novelties that appear on coins and
seals, clearly show the connection between the iconography and the found-
ing signs of both economic life and political institutions on objects whose
essence is circulation itself. Thus the holy image circulates throughout the
empire, yet is also limited by it, because the empire, in turn, determines
the frontiers of its validity and its worth. Furthermore, the circular form of
the seals and coins refers not only to the consular shield of the Victory fig-
ure, but also to the enclosure of the disc shape that denotes both totality
and infinity. It can be found again in the icon of the Holy Face, which
shows Christ with his circular, cruciferous nimbus.
These effigies, carrying the double symbolic value of both mercantile
worth and christic presence, go hand to hand and place to place, traveling
throughout the entire empire and marking by their passage and use a net-
work of exchanges, obligations, and credits. It is not, therefore, simply by
chance that the iconoclast emperors immediately marked the advent of
their reign with the release of a new coin bearing an iconography that pro-
pounded an idea that was thoroughly political in nature. Older models are
repeated, representing on one side the image of the emperor, and on the
other the cross potent on steps. But alongside these, one finds a coin that,
for the first time, suppresses the cross in order to make room for the son of
the emperor: Leo III on the obverse, and Constantine on the reverse. This
is not a matter of purely and simply suppressing the cross, which was, in
fact, the sign favored by the iconoclasts to replace the icon. Rather, it con-
cerns the placing in circulation of a model for the transmission of power
that owes nothing to arbitrary choice, usurpation, or charisma. This hered-
itary, dynastic handover of power constitutes an entirely new notion of
   

monarchical continuity and is one of the elements of the iconoclast con-

ception of power. (In reality, however, dynastic continuity remained ex-
tremely precarious in Byzantium, although dynastic desire did reappear on
several occasions.) This privileging the relation of father to son at the ex-
pense of the mother’s relation to the son refers back to the Old Testament
legacy that makes the king the direct emanation of paternal will, directly
transmitted from the divine will to the birth of the princely heir. The ma-
ternal, ecclesiastic institution, however, clearly saw in this the threat weigh-
ing over its foundational role in the sacralization of temporal power and
was determined not to lose that power. The religious ceremony at which
emperors were crowned would therefore come to be used to reestablish the
signs of the institutional transmission of civil power by the maternal au-
thority of the church.
Let us note, meanwhile, that shortly after the triumph of orthodoxy
(which is to say, the triumph of the image), although it took some time for
the icon to regain a broad dispersion and resume its dominance, there was
an immediate release by Michael III of coins carrying the effigy of Christ.
In other words, the triumph of the icon was interpreted, without the least
doubt or delay, in terms of a very close association between the church and
temporal sovereignty. No power without an image. Additionally, the figure
chosen and put in circulation, Christ and his mother, was one that had ac-
quired particular power during the crisis. Even outside of the strict domain
of icons themselves, then, christic iconography constituted a graphic for-
mula for the inscription of the visibility of that which becomes law.
Thus in a few centuries, the reddere Caesari became a reddere Christo,
which must be understood as a “give to the church.” The image is therefore
in the same situation as coinage itself, a substitute for value, cash circulat-
ing, waiting for nothing other than to be placed in international circula-
tion. It is not a metallic yardstick, because what it causes to circulate is not
the abstract equivalent of merchandise whose value can be estimated in
material production. It is, rather, a material object that harbors an abstract
value, one that is completely imaginary. In this sense it resembles fiduciary
signs that incarnate, without the least fanfare, the effects of faith and of
credit, rather more than coin of the realm, always restricted by the limits of
territory, habit, or time.
 Iconic Space and Territorial Rule 

Icons of the Mother and Son

In order to investigate this economic and globalizing process in

greater depth, let us examine two traditional iconic models portraying the
Theotokos. The first is the Virgin of Contact, the Glukophilousa, still known
today as the Virgin of Tenderness. The second concerns a scene in which
the Virgin points to her son at her breast, yet does not touch him; it is
known as the Virgin of Blachernai, and it is the heir to the earlier Virgin
orants. These two icons are laden with meaning both in the fields of spiri-
tuality and Christology, and in the setting in play of the space where tem-
poral power is decided.
What, then, of the drawn lines that inscribe the face or the body in
each of these cases? Each step of the iconographic technique, each plastic
element of the icon, is invested with a double spiritual and temporal mean-
ing. The icon is a map of the occupation of space, an interpretation of the
incarnation in which each element has a purpose. The duplication of the
iconic vocabulary corresponds to the express vocation of the icon, whose
repetitive essence consists in the implementation of a dual conception of
the invisible world by virtue of its very visibility.4 The visible is one, but the
invisible is two. The image, in its unary evidence, offers a noncontradictory
demonstration of something that, without it, could not be simultaneously
thought without contradiction. The invisible is double because it addresses
itself to the question of being from its position as nonbeing, at the very
moment that it allows a glimpse of its nonbeing in the luminous flesh of
an object. The icon is a symbol, which amounts to saying that in the econ-
omy of its map of the occupation of space it also aims at being a map for the
occupation of the spirit. From now on, the desire of all rulers will be to have
in hand the key to all signs and all symbols. Realism and theatrical specu-
larity have no place at all here. The icon is a system for the inscription of
the hic et nunc of institutional presence. This presence is itself designated
as the authority that makes the body appear as the incarnation of duality.
Henceforth, duality is the very being of meaning. In fact, shortly after the
end of the iconoclastic crisis, it would eventually become possible for the
church to establish itself on the principle of dyarchy (the sharing of tem-
poral power with the emperor) and to appropriate symbolic hegemony for
itself by assuming God’s power here on earth.
Périgraphè, or circumscription, is a line that imprisons and reduces
what it contains at the limits of time and space. Let us now, rather, con-
   

sider the graphic line, which is nonperigraphic in nature, examining it

from the point of view not of the phenomenological void that constitutes
the gaze, but of the indeterminate retreat of borders that limit all space of
whatever sort. Thus, Gregory of Nazianzos writes:
Whoever does not believe that St. Mary is the mother of God, is divided from di-
vinity. Whoever claims that Christ passed through the Virgin as through a canal,
without having been formed in her in a way that is both human and divine, divine
because it was without the activity of a man, human because it was according to
the normal process of pregnancy, he too is a complete stranger to God.5

In the preceding paragraph, Gregory had also enumerated the con-

trary attributes that characterize the hypostasis as being first “at once ter-
restrial and celestial, visible and spiritual,” and then “khôrèton kai akhôrè-
ton,” which the “Sources chrétiennes” translates as “perceptible and
imperceptible.” More precisely, however, it means “that which occupies
space, and does not occupy space,” “space” here being khôra, the place that
one occupies in the visible world. Thus Origen says that to be born of a
woman is what permits every man to say that he occupies space (khôra).6
Thought about the Son is thought about the image, thought about
the image is thought about place and space (the icon), thought about space
is thought about the bodies of women under the double sign, already
broached, of virginity and maternity. The question that we will investigate
here is how that iconic womb would become swollen with space over which
to rule and give expression to the full power of an institution in which real
women would have hardly any place because their strength manifests itself
as the pure, empty substrate of a power that they do not share.

The Virgin of Contact

The space designated by the term khôra refers to the body in its ca-
pacity as both content and container. This is because the verb khôrein
(khôran ékhein) means both to occupy space and to contain something. In
other words, to say that the iconic line shows the khôrèton is to say that
form is something in which the content allows itself to be seen thanks to
the visible edge of its container. This form that is an edge is the zone
(zonè), which is, in Greek, the peripheral belt of contact between the
womb of the mother and the body of the child. It therefore becomes im-
portant to assert that Christ did not pass through his mother as one trav-
erses a canal; that would suppose two forms: the form of the canal and the
 Iconic Space and Territorial Rule 

form of Christ. No: the virginal womb and the child are one and the same
form. The actual womb of the Virgin, strictly speaking, formed a precinct
around that which is infinite, limitless. Inscription is therefore the perfect
characteristic for determining the space of something that has none, the
akhôreton. It makes manifest an unfathomable enigma: the virginal womb
gives its form and its borders, its limits and its characteristics, to a son that
it neither touches nor encloses.
Such is the ecclesial space that is made ready in the icons of the Vir-
gin and child. In these icons, the mother and child adopt different pos-
tures. One of the best known is the Virgin Glukophilousa, or the Virgin of
Tenderness, which shows the areas of contact between the two at their
maximum. Their bodies are fused, intertwined, the two faces together,
cheek to cheek, to the point where the child’s neck is extremely distorted.
Here, we see an iconography of interior space, where Christ’s humanity
appears completely in the contiguity of the child’s face to its mother’s. This
almost inclusive contiguity is accompanied by an extreme care in making
all other anatomical references disappear in the geometry of the folds of the
clothing. In the Vladimirskaya, for example, no corporeal envelope is visi-
ble. The fall of the drapery is formed by a strict organization of geometric
planes, so that a linear, repetitive architecture results, where successive in-
scribed waves, fitting closely into each other, spread the circular and cen-
trifugal effects of occupied space. This inscription of the folds shows us not
only an unusual interpretation of human anatomy, but also an invisible ex-
tension of the tucks and folds of the world in the graphic architecture of a
shadowless body.
The Virgin’s clothing is as beautiful as heaven and earth, as vast as the
universe. The space (khôra) of the virginal body where Christ finds the
form of his carnal periphery, the membrane that defines his terrestrial
place, and the space of the consecration of the ecclesial body are all simul-
taneously identified with each other. The Glukophilousa, the Virgin of
Contact, is the scene in which the body manifests the sacralization of this
contact, this contagion. In fact, contact is a general characteristic of this
iconic formula. Everything that it “touches” is struck by the very fact of its
presence in a contiguity that is made into a continuity. The icon does not
simply show this contact, it also creates it in the very thaumaturgy of its
presence. There is a constant relay between looking and touching, as well
as a mutual limiting of each by the other. Most mosaics cannot be touched,
but icons are often close to the eyes, carried about, carried on one’s person.
   

The development of portable icons actually served to increase this space of

contact and contagion. Wherever there is an icon, the gaze of God is pres-
ent. It does not need a sacred architectural institution. Outside the church,
it transports this holiness symbolically to all places; it brings it into exis-
tence invisibly and with supreme power, wherever it is.
The institution of the icon, which it is not possible to frame or pin
down, is the small-scale model of an ecclesiastic institution; it permits the
production of rules for an open and profane space, which the church can
traverse in all senses and appropriate for itself. Against this invasion, the
iconoclast emperor, careful to preserve his temporal prerogatives, clearly as-
serted that only those things that relate to sacramental space and are con-
secrated are holy. He wanted to restrict the power of the clerics to the lim-
its of the church, and the church within the borders of his own empire. For
the iconophile, on the contrary, everything that the icon invades becomes
sacred and therefore the property of ecclesiastic power. The icon is cen-
trifugal and invasive: by propagation, it spreads the infinite principle that
it includes all the way to infinity, without limiting it. Thus the church, a
sanctuary built in the image of the Marian body, cannot become horos,
peras, an enclosed and circumscribed precinct. Furthermore, the limits, the
borders (horoi, perata) of the empire could not ever become the boundary
markers of a temporal power reduced to a national territory. In other
words, within a framework whose stakes are political, the vocabulary of the
icon’s graphic inscription, which categorically opposes graphè to périgraphè,
becomes a finely targeted instrument for the institutional inscription of a
lifting of the limits on the propagation of ecclesiastic power.
As a result of these principles of iconic production, it happens that
from its place within that territory, the church develops an independence
with respect to all interior boundaries, and thus an access to territory be-
yond the profane space of this world, which it can conquer without limits.
The icon has no frame; no limiting structure surrounds it. Only the
plastic principles of the inscription of the Word govern it, giving it its ecu-
menic and catholic (that is, international and universal) power. The
process of globalizing the image across the whole world has begun. It is the
mode of the universal communication of truth, and it becomes the legiti-
mate property of all places and all nations where it establishes its “opto-
cracy.”
 Iconic Space and Territorial Rule 

The Virgin of Blachernai: The Virgin of Noncontact

( Platutera)

The iconic model of the Virgin of Blachernai goes back to an older

type of Virgin, called the Virgin orant. This image shows the Virgin facing
the viewer, her hands open toward the heavens. At the beginning of the
ninth century, after the triumph of orthodoxy over iconoclasm, the
Theotokos appears in the position of an orant, but wearing on her breast a
miraculously suspended bust of a nimbed Christ, which she does not
touch. As André Grabar justly remarks, this nimbus, so unrealistically sus-
pended, is no longer the triumphant shield of the clipeata icons. Created
after the triumph of orthodoxy in , this late image, he comments,
“could not possibly represent any real scene. For even those images, some
very old, which show the Virgin actually holding a type of shield with the
young Christ portrayed on it do no more than imitate Roman images of
highly-placed people who themselves also carry the triumphal clipeus with
a portrait. The image of Blachernes, however, does not itself reflect any
possible reality, as the medallion with the bust of Christ is not held up by
any physical means.”7 Grabar then goes on to conclude that the scene is in
fact a portrayal of the conception.
Yet how can this icon, which shows absolutely nothing real, be re-
ferred to as a representation of the conception, and therefore as the found-
ing moment of the incarnation? In these scenes, where the body of the
Word detaches itself from the Virgin’s clothing, his nimbus functioning to
render her womb transparent, it becomes necessary to link economic
thought to iconic choices. Iconic models do not refer to realities; all are
imaginary, and all are involved with a unifying conception of celestial
truths and temporal realities. Here, I would rather return to the descrip-
tions that refer to this iconic model as “platutera tôn ouranôn, khôra tôn
akhôrôn,” or “wider than the heavens” and “space of that which is not in
space.” These epithets refer to the Virgin’s body carrying God’s body in the
position of the orant. The Russians call this Virgin “the Virgin of the Sign”;
it could also be named the Virgin of Inscription, of the Graph. This iconic
type simultaneously shows the presence and absence of contact. In order to
contain the body of God, a body larger than the heavens is required, a
space for something that does not have any, a place for something that is
everywhere, a visibility for something that no one can see. The pairs of oxy-
morons follow one another as the dual nature of the Word is formulated,
   

and this, in turn, is essential for establishing the dual power of the ecclesi-
astic institution. The invisible church is therefore invisible in two senses,
the one spiritual and the other temporal. The borders of the visible simul-
taneously impose the invisibility of the spirit and the incommensurability
of restricted territory. The ubiquity of the Virgin’s gaze, as the icon’s title
indicates—peribleptos, she who sees all around her—generates the ubiq-
uity of the ecclesial gaze, which seeks to reign over heaven and earth in
their entirety, and which overflows whatever might impose limits on hu-
man kingdoms. It must see everything. The iconic gaze is thus synoptic.
Not only is it the epiphany of what no eye can see, but it also keeps watch
over what no eye could ever take in. Circulating, circular, encircling the in-
finite—the icon is intended for all, in all times, in all places, and in all id-
ioms. Breaking the spell that punished Babylonian pride, it meets up again
with the foundational polyglotism of the spirit that had been redistributed
to everyone by grace at the pentecost.
The Virgin of Noncontact is the figure in which the equivalence of
inside and outside, the near and the far, is played out. She is the Virgin of
the Oxymoron. Her womb is transparent, allowing one to see her entire
economy, which is to say, her son. What her bosom presents, without con-
taining, transforms the maternal body into a cosmic womb in the form of
a boundless encompassing. This mysterious suspension of the Word is the
very image of the incarnational economy that relates the doctrine of the in-
carnation (caro) to the body (corpus) of temporal power. The Virgin of the
sign is the Virgin of the conception of a concept.
The iconoclasts did not reject all images, but they did reject, very
specifically, images of the Virgin, Christ, and the saints, as well as their
cults. Concerned with tightening the national borders and decentralizing
administrative power, they set about controlling the empire by means of
military and administrative reform. This was the reform of the themes,
which entailed the distribution of land to the peasant-soldiers who de-
fended the empire as they protected their lands. This, in turn, forms yet
another map for the occupation of ground surface, where the emperor del-
egates military, administrative, and fiscal responsibilities to strategists who
are more his executors than representatives.
An important concept at the iconoclast council of Saint-Sophia (),
as P. J. Alexander stresses, concerned the emperor as mimètes tou théou, im-
itator of God,8 an idea that has a whole Pythagorean tradition behind it. If
the iconoclast emperors put such zeal into their rejection of the icon, then,
 Iconic Space and Territorial Rule 

it is because they wanted to contravene the principle of dyarchy, or the

sharing of power with the church, by radically separating temporal from
spiritual power. The iconic economy, by contrast, permitted an ongoing
practice of sharing and delegation. The principle of the king as the sole,
true imitator of Christ, however, remained in force, as can be seen clearly
in the Ecloga of Leo III, for example, which implies a singular reading of
Psalm  (), making it favorable to this mimetic interpretation of royalty.
St. Jerome, however, resists such an interpretation, commenting that “God
does not say ‘you are gods’ when referring only to kings and princes, but to
all of us who have a body,”9 although Eusebios, on the subject of the same
psalm, is of the opinion that théoi relates to hègouménoi and archontés.10
A large number of church fathers also interpreted the image and im-
itation of God from a legislative and juridical point of view, as Kantorowicz
notes.11 He cites, among others, Pope Damasus (–), who says, “Om-
nis res dei habet imaginem.” He also quotes Basil on the subject of the inter-
pretation of the homonymic argument: “The emperor and the icon of the
emperor are not two emperors . . . ; in the case of the identity of the em-
peror with his icon, this identity is accomplished by mimesis [mimètikos].”12
In the first and second centuries, it is the Pythagoreans who develop this
idea. Thus, Sthenidas of Lokri: “God is the first king and natural legislator.
The king only becomes him by imitation.” Ladner remarks that the cae-
saropapist tendency never prevailed in Byzantium, except at the exact mo-
ment of the iconoclastic crisis, and even then, only in a highly complex
way.13 But even there, the caesaropapist concept should be questioned for its
historic relevance. It would be better to say that what interests the iconoclast
emperors is to become, in the name of a fight against the idols, the absolute
masters of political, juridical, administrative, and military representation,
and the sole practitioners of earthly mimesis. For the people as a whole, the
sign of the cross would have to suffice; for the clergy, the celebration of the
eucharistic sacrament; for the king, administration and justice. The people
must make do with dissimilarity; the clergy must be content with consub-
stantiality. Only the emperor has access to similitude, and the iconoclast
tekhnè could be nothing other than the art of governing.
It might be said, then, that for the iconoclast Constantine V, the
icon, far from being as empty as it claims to be, takes possession of space
in its entirety by means of the périgraphè, to the degree that it also sacral-
izes it. For him, all plenary illusion will be brought to a halt by a deserted
sign, a truly open form, tearing space without circumscribing it. Emptiness
   

cannot ever be shown as being contained, and form has a horror of empti-
ness. Thus iconoclasm develops a cruciform semiotic, which places the em-
peror and Christ at the exact point where the spiritual and temporal worlds
intersect, as well as at the crossroads of all the routes that engender a given
territory. It is at these crossroads that the emperor places his statues. The
cross is not the sole memorial to divine torture, but it is the sign of a strate-
gic space that refers not to mediation, but to the localized and efficient
presence of generals and watchmen who conquer and control the territory
that they have under their watch. This semiotic is nothing but the other
face of domination.
It was imperative, therefore, for the church as an institutional body
that the icon triumph. And triumph it did. Henceforth, for the Christian
world, the theocracy of the visible becomes the key to all authority, which is
to say that it becomes a doctrine, both theoretical and strategic, of ex-
changed looks and imposed visions. The church, apparently, was well able
to support and defend an unimpeded alliance between sovereign and sa-
cred roles, on the one hand, and its economic role, on the other, thus sub-
mitting to its control more warlike roles, which it designates as unsuited,
by themselves, to mediation or symbolization.
Such “ecclesiastic” phenomena, then, shaped all subsequent theoret-
ical constructions and practices aiming to produce conviction in submis-
sion and blind adherence in servitude.

Conclusion

As is well known, Christ stated that his kingdom was not of this
world.14 Such spiritual words, however, did not serve to establish any
church.15 Rather, Nikephoros, the champion of iconophilia devotes him-
self to an active, effective reinterpretation of the subject of taxation, one
that is worthy of Pauline rhetoric. In effect, the church’s enemies could
only “stupidly” satisfy themselves with Christ’s phrase in an attempt to
thwart temporal power. Once more, we are reminded that the enemies of
the economy understood nothing of the evangelic message, and most of
all, of the necessity of understanding it economically.
Here, then, are the words of Nikephoros, giving us a magnificent
prosopopoeia of Christ the king, which reverberates like the drums of a tri-
umphant despotism; the king of the universe announces that he is aban-
doning all the usual signs of terrestrial royalty in order to reveal an empire
 Iconic Space and Territorial Rule 

of his own symbols: a brilliant light, glory without limit and without bor-
ders, cosmic monarchy, ubiquity and perpetuity.16 The text resonates like
the voice of an icon traversing the borders of space and time:
Contrary to those earthly and mortal sovereigns who acquire a temporary and less
important glory, my kingdom will not be interrupted like those kingdoms that are
founded in this poor world, and whose glory fades like the flowers of the fields,17
and which finally corruption and death will replace. Moreover, the thoughts and
unstable opinions of the mob have deprived them of their dignity, and they have
been subjected to ill repute and to innumerable misfortunes and difficulties. In
fact, none of those who rule the world and life here would be found in my king-
dom, and nothing that could be observed in the history of these [earthly] kings.
No votes of the demes, no elections by the people where human opinions often
prevail. . . . None of the symbols which mark such dignity can be found in me,
symbols which are corruptible and perishable: no purple robe, no crown set with
precious stones, no sceptres, no raised thrones, no radiant spectacle. No chariot
embossed with gold, nor the public honors of an escort. [I have] no troops bear-
ing shields, no spearmen, no sounds of acclamations coming from those who ei-
ther precede or follow me. [I have] none of these transitory and human things
which usually occur in earthly power. Consequently, my kingdom is not of this
world. Poor in appearance, humble to those who see it, I lead few disciples, an in-
glorious group composed of poor men and fishermen, but it is a sublime group,
which excels in everything perceived by the mind. I am the son of God, the all-
powerful king of the universe. I am his most legitimate child and his radiance.18 I
bear the same glory and honor as my Father, because I am the inheritor of the pa-
ternal glory. Sharing the same throne with my Father, I am situated together with
and equal to his glory, and I possess the prerogative of kingship. That is why I am
the king and the master of the universe. Neither is my kingdom then of this world,
nor does my power resemble in anything the powers of this world. My authority
is not circumscribed. I am the master and the Lord not of this or that people, land,
or city, but of angels and of humans and of the earthly, the celestial and the sub-
terranean realms at the same time. Every knee bends to me.19 Everything is under
my feet and there is nothing that escapes my hand, because my kingdom is with-
out limit and without end.
This is the truth and there is no other. This is believed and proclaimed by
all faithful people. Where would the plans of providence regarding earthly things
be, and how would the affairs of our lives be governed, “if there is not in God’s
hand the depths of the earth?”20 Everything is held under his authority and is ad-
ministered by him not only as God but also as man; as has been said: “I will make
the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.”21 It is also
said, “For he is king of the whole world,”22 and again, “Look, your king is coming
to you, humble;”23 at Jerusalem it is said, “righteous and saved is he.”24 It is writ-
   

ten again, “the righteous Lord is in the midst of your people,”25 and again, “the
Lord will reign forever, your God, O Zion, for all generations.”26

This astonishing demonstration of power that Nikephoros puts into

the mouth of the image of the Father reveals his true project to us: to make
of the economy a program of universal conquest. It would take little for
these words to be put into the mouth of some ruler from the domain of sci-
ence fiction today, or some fantastic doctor to whom one could assign the
most devilish paranoia. But what is this about? A charismatic voice arises in
a tone of untroubled legitimacy to announce to us that if his kingdom is
not of this world, it is because the entire world is his kingdom. This ecu-
menical power is the one of the selfsame symbolic deployment that estab-
lishes the idea of economy. The relation that all the “images” of the world
maintain with those things made of flesh and soul that make up humanity
overflows national borders for ever in order to carry out an ecclesial incor-
poration. Does the failure of those diabolical doctors of science fiction not
arise from the fact that they always lack access to the image? Always invisi-
ble, disfigured, masked, monstrous, and occult, as soon as one sees them
and they make themselves heard, their ruin is certain. Teratological figures
of invisibility, they constitute an off-camera population that terrorizes the
living. They are positively diabolical. It took a long time before images of
the devil were produced, because hell is first and foremost completely in-
visible. The powers of evil assume many faces, yet have none that they can
call their own. They are aprosopon, exiles from the face and the status of
personhood, and in this connection we will shortly witness a surprising his-
torical example concerning the Jewish face.27 The enigma of the icon, how-
ever, has nothing to do with the occult. It is this that also resolutely sets the
icon in opposition to the talismanic image, which summons invisible forces
forth in order to diminish them and ward them off by rendering them vis-
ible and audible, and which in turn causes them to “switch sides.”
Besides demoniac invisibility, however, a complementary tradition
also exists within the Christian imaginary. The devil too knows the power
of images and makes use of them himself. He disguises himself in visible
form to seduce and to tempt. He apes God, shows himself, and makes
himself heard. For lying, diabolical images do, in fact, exist: they are the
ones that the holy man will confront during his fasting hallucinations in
the desert. Whoever has been tempted only by the world does not yet
know true temptation, that of the false image, the diabolical image that
comes to besiege the spirit and the flesh far from any earthly reality. The
 Iconic Space and Territorial Rule 

great variety of pictures that are inspired, paradoxically, by the diabolic se-
ductions of the image is well known. Implicitly, iconic thought recognizes
that between the clarity of doctrinal distinctions and the earthly vitality of
the imagination and desire, there is space enough for all manner of confu-
sions and temptations. Is an image that bleeds and that heals you all that
different from one that persecutes and kills you? As in the investigation of
the economy, the investigation of iconic power meets its own spiritual lim-
its and must appeal to a principle of distinction that has no place in the im-
age. The later tradition of spiritual exercises, aimed at repressing the ex-
cesses of a “pseudonymous,” enticing imagination, also bears witness to the
church’s long-standing concern regarding iconic temptation.
Who would be able to negotiate with life and history while being as-
sured of escaping everything that leaves a mark on our finitude, our weak-
ness, our mortality? Who could escape desire? The image of God itself is
capable of falling into sin, and the iconoclasts no doubt had good reason to
mistrust and denounce it. Yet iconic doctrine is not only the first real sys-
tem of thought concerning the freedom of the gaze in its encounter with
painting, it is also the first meditation on idolatry, conceived no longer as
a divergence from this or that religion, but as an anthropological fact from
which no one can escape.
In the prosopopoeia that we have just examined, the passage con-
cerning the renunciation of all that makes up the visible glory of this world
for the universal and sovereign appropriation of the whole universe is re-
soundingly clear. The paradox here is only an apparent one, because invis-
ible omnipotence is based on the interpretation of the visibility of the in-
carnate image. It is the image of God demeaned in man that was saved by
this image of the man who recovered his place in God. Henceforth, the
image will form part of all plans for redemption in the universe as a whole.
It will prevail over all other modes of communication. It is the discourse of
silence and submission, the discourse of emotion and conviction, the dis-
course of proof and noncontradiction. And if the image is all of this, one
understands that there can be no question of it being left in the hands of
the public at large. It demands a monopoly on its production, its pro-
grams, its messages. Only the master of the image, whom I call the icono-
crat, will know what is right, good, and equitable to render visible in it,
which is to say, to make known and to cause to be believed in relation to
it. As Serge Gruzinski says in connection with this point: “If the image
comes up against so many stumbling blocks, it is because it is the manifes-
   

tation of a structure that exceeds it everywhere. It is the expression of a vi-

sual order, and, even more, of an imaginary in which conscious and un-
conscious assimilation is synonymous with occidentalization.”28
Because the invisible has a universal value, all that is necessary for
each and every iconic hegemony to be legitimized is the production of a
dogmatically sanctioned means of making it visible. Anthropology has
confronted us with the relativity of our reason. To the vertigo inflicted by
the discovery of the limits of a triumphant logocentrism, the image has
brought the consolation of a federative, universal, and pacifying tekhné.
There are arguments that claim that the church has lost everything in our
world because it no longer rests on the same doctrinal and spiritual certi-
tudes that it once did. This, however, is to misunderstand the very bases on
which despotisms of every kind now repose. It is to forget that the church
bequeathed a dual concept concerning duplication itself. The economy ex-
plains the most elevated works of art just as well as the most oppressive
uses of visibility. It is ecclesiastic thought that makes heard the voice that
says that the image is “the best and worst of things.” Will we be able to re-
spect its enigma in order to maintain our own liberty?
 The two preceding sections of this book, on the general concept of
the economy and the iconic economy, inevitably raise new questions about
the modernity of patristic thought. This is a field that is still wide open,
and it is to be hoped that the material presented here, which is more than
a thousand years old, will provide a basis for understanding the origins of
all of today’s sites of vision, in all their grandeur and misery.
It is not my intention here to attempt a global interpretation of dom-
inant visibilities or to paint a picture of all our iconicities. Nonetheless,
with all sectors of contemporary production being so completely depend-
ent on the practices and doctrines of imagery, it is incumbent on us to at-
tempt understand both its promises and its disappointments. One thing,
however, is certain: today, there is no alternative system of thought con-
cerning the image capable of competing with the theoretical and political
power of the one that the church developed during its first ten centuries.
Most attempts at theorizing the icon and the image have until now
simply consisted in manipulating vocabulary in order to hide the total ab-
sence of anything new to be said. On the one hand, it is true that there is
no novelty in thinking that does not evidence a reworking of language, and
the Byzantine example demonstrates clearly how necessary it is to fight and
debate within a language in order to make it say what is innovative within
a system of thought itself. On the other hand, when the frenzy of neolo-
gisms overtakes an entire group and becomes, rather than the sign of an in-
novative restlessness, the standard of an overcautious collective, one may
   

legitimately wonder whether the interest in forming a single group has not
prevailed over the true desire for fresh thinking. For a long time, semiology
has taken us strolling amid the latest conceptual blossomings in new parks
of meditation, but we have very quickly found ourselves in an old French
garden where only the gardeners change, delighted to be promoted to the
new rank of landscape artists. But of a truly new landscape, nothing.
We have always been, and are still today, heirs to a Christian iconoc-
racy that was spurred on, at its very core, by profaners who were attracted
to it. If we want to do more, or if we simply want to do something else, the
entire task still remains before us. Who, indeed, can claim to have ac-
counted for the philosophical and spiritual aspirations of our century by si-
multaneously unifying several disparate theories and producing a critical
tool that is both valid and well suited to the latest iconic productions? We
tinker about between marvel and anxiety, between technical revolutions
and an unassuaged thirst for revolution itself.
All the same, there is an urgency about all of this, failing which,
systems of thought will continue to suffer balkanization. Some people
dream of the icon, of a redeemed body or a new ethics, whereas others
get drunk on numerical virtualities and take themselves to be the new
Mabuse. The former sound the soul’s knell at the sight of the works of
the latter, who in turn, lamenting the retrograde and timorous incompe-
tence of the former, continue creating a world that they no longer have
the means to think through. The work still remains, and I, for one, do
not claim to have done it.
What, then, can I add to all this? First, I will pause at the one point
on which the two Byzantine sides agree—their mutual condemnation of
idols and idolatry—in order to investigate what that condemnation signi-
fies. Following this, I have included a brief report on my efforts to articu-
late what patristic thought can bring to the study of a few examples of
modern works in the fields of painting, cinema, and photography. What
exactly are our icons today, our iconoclast signs, our idols?
The following, therefore, are a few elements of a work still in
progress that I have added here, in order to avoid ending the book on a
note that may give the illusion of closure, and to open it up to the consid-
eration of all those who, like me, feel that talking about the image is the
most difficult task of all, particularly at a moment when visual productions
have invaded the world of spirits and bodies to the point of depriving them
of all hope in relation to the image itself. The church fathers taught us, at
    

least, that seeing and showing are not enough to exhaust the definition of
the image and visibility. Just what can we be similar to today? How can the
order of similitude be redefined?
For this reason, I have gathered together these several texts, written
over a period of time. Most of them, however, have been altered slightly
because my approach has been transformed as my research has progressed.
Nonetheless, all have their place here because they all bear the mark of my
exploration of the Christian world, and each in its own way shows the con-
tinuity of both my philosophical concerns and my unresolved questions.
All partially illustrate the long dependence of our vision on Christian
thinking about the image and icon, whether this be to develop its concep-
tual potential or to elude its traps. Striking to me is the revealing recur-
rence of certain themes: the quest for the acheiropoietic image (the veron-
ica); the violent return of the problematic of idolatry in the contradictory
modes of fascinated adulation or destruction; and again, the complex in-
terweaving of theoretical aspirations, lucrative management, and the polit-
ical administration of iconicity within economic relations. And last but not
least, the problem of the incarnation, which was at the heart of my entire
meditation on the visible and is still before me, although it should be borne
in mind that patristic teaching puts us perpetually on guard against any
confusion of the incarnation with the materiality of the visible. What is the
flesh of an image, and what is it that is formed in the gaze that we cast
upon it?
To the degree that this work was primarily intended to expand on the
foundations of Christian thought regarding iconicity, the texts and reflec-
tions that follow are only brief variations on themes. They were inspired by
irregular encounters with objects or with readings that provoked afresh ei-
ther my hypotheses or simply my questions.
 6

The Idol’s Delenda Est

The “theology of the icon,” the backbone of oriental Christianity,

was obsessed by one problem: how to harbor the icon from the slightest
suspicion of idolatry? This is why it was possible for the cult of icons to be
based on a radically abstract theory of iconic appearance. Iconoclasm and
iconophilia are not opposed to each other in the same way that a general-
ized, unconditional adoption of portrayal would be opposed to a radical
aniconicity.1 All had only one goal: to defend the one true icon by estab-
lishing the truth of the image. The icon without reference to the image is
by itself neither true nor false, and it bears no relation to ontological ques-
tions of any sort. It is imaginarily true. The iconophile imagination differs
from the iconoclast imagination in the definition of the visible, because for
the latter, there cannot be a true icon of a true image, but only a sign. This
sign is of the order of a mark or a gesture. Nonetheless, the fact remains
that all, iconophiles and iconoclasts together, universally condemn idola-
trous fictions. For both, it is claimed that the imaginary is linked only to the
symbol and sign, and knows nothing of illusionist mimesis and immanen-
tist fictions.
We have seen that the notion of similitude in the icon is completely
imbued with a phenomenological conception of the gaze as the constitutive
aiming of a circularity of exchanges between the essential emptiness of the
icon and the breach that contemplation brings about in the spectator who
gazes at it. It could be said that what the icon imitates is not the vision that
humans cast at things but God’s imagined gaze that is cast upon humans.
 The Idol’s Delenda Est 

Similitude is not resemblance. The icon is referred to as an “eco-

nomic,” or relational, symbol and not as an imitative entity; as for the sign,
it claims dissimilarity by abandoning to the foundational image the privi-
leges of consubstantiality. The icon is not a part of the object, any more
than it is a representative convention.
Iconophilia condemns idolatry and attempts to maintain no relation-
ship of any sort with it. Its entire theoretical effort is driven by this concern
because it is the chief accusation made by the opposing camp. Equally, what
strikes Christians from the Orient first when they consider western paint-
ing is its profane character, which they immediately denounce as idolatry.
They believe that the icon’s symbolic articulation, thoroughly imbued with
the relational economy, has been completely betrayed by optical substitutes.
Alternately phrased, for them, western knowledge about vision has replaced
the doctrine of the gaze. This is so to such an extent that in the place of the
symbolic remove that governs iconic mediation, a persepectivist distance has
been substituted that assigns places in space to subjects and objects alike for
an eye that mimics the supposed distance of the subject from the object of
his or her thought. A theoretical mimetic has become a specular mimetic,
and the certainties of salvation have given way to rhetorical virtuosities and
the unstable pleasures of illusion. Or this, at least, is how an orthodox ad-
herent might situate western art.

The corporeal reality of the sacred is corporeal reality in that it is sa-

cred, in that it is the object of a scopic exchange where the body only al-
lows itself to be seen gloriously and miraculously. There is no more contact
between the divine prototype and its icon than between the icon and its
human model. In any case, what is called the incarnation is neither an im-
mersion in the flesh nor an idealization of matter, but rather something
like the gaze’s imitation of itself when it is haunted by the desire to be seen.
To become flesh is here nothing other than the obtaining of a certain gaze in
the empty space where he who accedes to existence when he enters the field of
what constitutes him for the gaze of another is incarnated. Being in possession
of the existence of his flesh only by virtue of the sole fact of another gaze
requires that that gaze be endowed with an infinite thirst for imagining.
Such is the thirst of God, a pure image given to the thirst of the humans
whom he consigns to his imitation. The imaginal relation gives birth to the
flesh of being. The symbol is, strictly speaking, imaginary.
In forging this doctrine of the incarnation as God’s “imagination,”
Nikephoros is not surrendering himself to some metaphysical reverie or
   

poetic meanderings. Rather, within the terms at his disposal, he discovers

the relations that bond both formations of the imaginary and symbolic
productions tightly to the constitution of the body itself. However, once
economic thought had succeeded in linking a meditation about the flesh to
the constitution of each and every body, including the constitutional body,
the result was that this appropriation of imaginal powers by the authorities
became a reality, as they sought to order and control the collective belief by
seizing hold of the body’s genesis in the gaze. A sudden upsurge of icono-
cratic power consequently followed, along with its inevitable correlate and
dreaded consequence, idolatry. Considering that the Byzantine debate was
centered on the incarnation, it must be acknowledged that for both camps,
the icon was situated on the side of the body. But because the ecclesiastic
institution was not willing to renounce the linkage of imaginal flesh to the
ambiguous benefits of the management of desiring bodies, individual as
well as social, it had greater difficulty than its opponents in escaping from
what I earlier called strategic and political “slippage.” Thus the church
struggled on that narrow and vertiginous border that places the icon on the
outer banks of idolatry while keeping it at the heart of the worldly visibil-
ities whose generator and vital organ it had become. Negotiating between
the symbolic and diabolical would always be a subtle endeavor.

It consequently became urgent for the Christian people, whom the

church was trying to subjugate in this way, to be assured that the icon im-
posed on them was safe from the slightest suspicion of idolatry. Idolatrous
were the Jews, the Greeks, and the barbarians; idolatrous was everyone not
Christian, even the iconoclast Constantine himself, which makes clear how
much the enemy of the incarnation was himself no more than a body with-
out an image. He is therefore turned into an idol lover, with the energetic
army of iconophiles resolutely maintaining that they have nothing in com-
mon with him.
For everyone without exception, then, the watchword is irrevocable:
the idols must be smashed. It is only with their material disappearance that
the threat of their powerful fiction disappears too. This implies two things:
first, that they are feared because they have power, and second, that it suf-
fices to smash them in order for that fear and power to disappear. In other
words, they are not simply smashed: in fact, they are killed. The history of
idols is never without murder, and the idol is by definition neither an ab-
stract dynamic of the sign nor a living economy of symbols, but the turbu-
lent and expired existence of destructible, sacrificed bodies.
 The Idol’s Delenda Est 

Who, in that case, is an idolator? It is always the other, or more par-

ticularly, the people. It is never the leaders, whose ambitions induce them
to take themselves for gods, rather than to worship them, or even to derive
from that divine worship exemplary benefits for the representation of their
own power. Idolaters are neither emperors nor patriarchs. But the faithful,
the believers, the credulous, the superstitious, these are the idolaters, a
feverish mass, inspired and subjugated at the same time, who do not have
ears for the too-subtle doctrines of the incarnation and consubstantiality.
The idolaters are all those who bend the knee, who prostrate themselves,
who worship, who touch and sway to the point of ecstasy. They have seen
the icons cry, have seen them bleed, have seen them kill. They have seen
their own hemorrhages and leprosy disappear at the single touch of a di-
vine object. Their blind eyes have once again become piercing, their
tongues loosened. They have even been revived from dead. They carry
with them effigies, amulets, phylacteries, and talismans. They are called
fetishists, and they do indeed often resemble them. They travel the world
searching out and preserving relics. They spend time with icons and con-
template them, eyes brimming with tears; they notice the incorruptibility
of holy cadavers. They are all there in their thousands, those who believe in
the pleasure and suffering with which the bodies that incarnate them are
imbued; they take action, invoke, make, and sacrifice. They deploy a new
force in which, for them, no activity is improbable. Everything is possible
for those who believe. The popular imagination rediscovers the archaic di-
vinities that have always caused it to maintain with the visible matter of
the world operative relations of a violent effectiveness. Demons and won-
ders! Nature appears to defy itself—or rather, to defy everything that is
predicated on it.
Idolaters, fetishists? It is not by chance that these terms carry with
them a heavy history of colonial conquests and the justifications of geno-
cides and repressions of all sorts. Figures worshiped by the other always in-
spire hate and a destructive rage.
The iconoclastic dispute is perhaps nothing other than a convulsion
concerning the meaning and fate of idolatry itself, and this is not a restric-
tive definition, because it makes clear that what is at stake in the debate
both has perpetual validity and is thoroughly modern. Whoever wishes to
rule must, above all else, be a good manager of idolatry. What does this
mean, if not that he must administer worship to his advantage by eluding
the fate of all idols, which must, in turn, be sacrificeable, and indeed, al-
ways end up by being sacrificed. Christian thought managed to arrive at an
   

interpretation of the christic sacrifice (that is to say, the putting to death of

the image itself ) that allowed it to bring into the world an indestructible
image that no one else could destroy. Jesus rises from the dead, and his
icon is indestructible. Whoever destroys it behaves like an idolater. It is for
this reason that Constantine is referred to as an idolater without a hint of
paradox, he who rejected all cult rendered to the true image and who, by
destroying it, treated it as an idol. The idol’s emptiness is not kenotic; it
concerns the question of bewitchment, possession, and exorcism.
The idol is defined by the theological dictionaries as being both an
image of falsehood and a false image of the truth. In the first case, it is an
image of the truth that is being defended; in the second, there is a rupture
between truth and the image. In the iconoclast conflict, the bond between
the truth and the image was maintained by both camps. This was in-
evitable, because both remained faithful to the Pauline message of the Son’s
imaginal economy. It is therefore visibility that is the problem, and not the
image itself. In truth, no cult of visibility can escape the question of idola-
try, and the iconoclasts therefore treat their opponents as idolaters. But
how can the iconophiles reproach the iconoclasts with the same thing?
Simply by invoking the fact that they only have eyes for matter, that they
are only capable of that gaze particular to idolatry; unable to look at things
in the correct way, they pretend to condemn them, the better to hide their
paganism and their passion for the world. Thus Grabar, the great
iconophile expert, ends up finding them to be animists! I think it is now
clear that the entire debate is at the other extreme from this problem, be-
cause it is really the iconophiles who have the most work to do to escape
the suspicion of idolatry. They succeeded philosophically, but when it came
to the management and administration of the goods of this world, they
found themselves battling with what I would call the idolatrous economy
of the visible. Symbolism must manage the diabolical; it is in this sense
that I said earlier that the world belongs to God, but the devil has usufruct
of it, the pleasure of its uses and the mastery of its pleasures. We can thus
say in this sense that one of the functions of icon doctrine was exorcism.
The church had no intention of separating itself from the power of
belief in, and effectiveness of, the idol. That idolatrous people whom we
are told that God hates, that he punishes, that he condemns, the church
decides (in the name of the economy) to accept into its camp. Economy: a
diabolical negotiation in which total turmoil will come to be inextricably
linked to the imperatives of both salvation and strategies that alienate. The
double language of the icon: abstract thought endowed with unequaled
 The Idol’s Delenda Est 

spiritual virtue, and simultaneously, an unsettling manipulation of matter.

Byzantine hagiography abounds with examples and prodigious accounts
that tell of the thaumaturgical, irresistible power of imitators and imita-
tions. These accounts, whose purpose is intended to be edifying, are full of
that ambivalence, that double language proper to the icon, of the spiritual
purity of the image and the mad worship of things.
Those who are mad for God are never far from the devil, who end-
lessly visits them anyway in order to tempt them. Suffice it to look at the
anchorites, alone, emaciated, in the middle of the desert: it is no longer the
world that assails them, it is the demon of images who comes to besiege
them. It is temptation. But what is temptation? Nothing other than an im-
age, an apparition, a diabolical hallucination. The true proof that the saint
of the desert submits himself to is vision and the capacity to discriminate
between the images that assail him. The ability to be portrayed, and por-
trayal itself, are the devil’s preferred instruments. A rendezvous is made
with desire.
The moving fragility of that flesh that is discovered in the experience
of passion; all the passions.


In the film Andreï Rublev, Tarkovsky movingly demonstrates the way
in which temptation is linked to the vocation of iconographer. No icon is
possible within passion, but it is also true that no icon results without that
infernal crossing of the universe of temptation, despair, and death. From
the very first images, as in all of Tarkovsky’s films, a trinity of men set off
walking, and they travel the road that separates us from hell in order to re-
discover the anagogical path that separates us from salvation. A trinity of
men leaves in the darkness, searching for another trinity that alone can
take them back to their state of foundational image and restore them to
their iconic vocation. Tarkovsky must himself have thought of his own cin-
ematographic vocation at the heart of this infernal, redemptive pilgrimage.
In his own way, he both posed and resolved the question of the incarna-
tion, which he never separated from the transfiguration and the resurrec-
tion. It could also be said that the issue he deals with concerns the passage
from passion to compassion, that is, to that imaginal affection that takes us
back to similitude with those whom we do not resemble.

For the idolater, the icon is neither true nor false in relation to some-
   

thing that is foreign to it. As an icon, however, it is always true and itself
produces its own authentification by the brilliance of its effectiveness. Yet
it also resembles something that is neither true nor false, something that is
not yet sure, and doubtless never will be. The product of uncertainty and
anguish, of the desire for fusion with the spirit of mystery, it is something
in which that uncertainty and desire find their forms and are resolved by a
reticulation of the visible that governs the signs of its ritual actions. In this
way, those who are called idolaters expect a real service from their idol and
will destroy it if the contract is not fulfilled, if their expectation is disap-
pointed, or if it is replaced by a new, stronger divinity to whom they will
then turn. This is why idolaters inspire such great terror. But in whom? In
the living idols of power who dread the death of their annihilation. But the
one and only God also fears idols; he shows his anger for them and he de-
mands their destruction. Jean Pouillon describes the fetish as a “trap for
gods,” that is, as a means of tying the immanence of the sign to meaning.2
I would add, however, that in the case of the idol, this trap for gods is only
a trap because it condemns the gods to death. The all-powerful God of
monotheism knows this well, he who hates idols and idolaters. He knows
that idols are the death of God, the limit of his power, his very powerless-
ness. Thus the idols maintain a double relation with death. Destroyed by
the iconocrats, who feel severely threatened by them, they expose them-
selves to fracture, to being smashed, and to the death whose signifier they
intrinsically are. And what they inform us of when they have finally been
smashed is the futility of the divinity they were charged with enclosing.
The God of the Bible, however, could not tolerate such a fate. Let there be
no image if it is impossible to produce one that is definitively indestructi-
ble. Paul actively concerned himself with this issue, and thanks to him, it
proved possible for the church to establish itself within the power of its
own virginal, decay-proof iconocracy.
Idolatry is the quintessential cause of horror. The same abomination
is found in all monotheisms, whether in Hebraic texts, the message of the
Koran, or in Christian thought. Idolatry, which is denounced as the cre-
ation of false gods, the sacrilegious worship of matter, and the satanic ad-
herence to magical and talismanic thought, functions to give shape both to
figures of terror and legitimations of hatred. The power of the idol values
the fact that its destruction can only confirm its infernal recurrence. It is as
insurmountable as our mortality.
When talking of idols, Nikephoros is always careful to say that they
 The Idol’s Delenda Est 

do not in the least resemble anything true. Always pseudonyms, their power
is mysterious, far from all the imaginal and iconic similitude of the enigma.
The icon is a memorial to life, through the transfiguration of its flesh,
whereas the idol, from the start, is a memorial that makes a dead person’s
body present and consequently belongs to the shadows. I refer here to
Jean-Paul Vernant’s analysis of the eidôlon and the colossos, in which he de-
scribes the eidôlon as the “category of the double.”3 “The double,” he
writes, “is something entirely different from an image. It is not a ‘natural’
object, but neither is it a mental product: neither imitation of a real object
nor delusion of the spirit, nor creation of thought. The double is a reality
exterior to the subject, but which in its very appearance is opposed by its
unusual character to familiar objects, the ordinary decor of life.”4 As
shadow, smoke, or a shaped effigy, the eidôlon forms part of the invocations
of death and the gestures that establish our commerce with the dead. The
idol retains all these characteristics in Christian doctrine, which constructs
iconic thought in a term-by-term opposition to the signs of a Greek pa-
ganism that cannot be separated from sacrificial rites. The icon, however,
refuses to be a double by administering dual thought in an entirely differ-
ent way, that is, by the economic path. But on several occasions, we have
seen how the refusal to duplicate did not necessarily escape the traps of du-
plicity. Would the church itself not one day succumb to the temptations of
photographic duplication, so strongly dreaded by those familiar with ways
of thinking about shadows?5
The idol’s often three-dimensional nature puts it on the side of things,
manipulable objects, a part of which escapes direct or frontal vision. It be-
longs to a world without life, light, and voice, without everything by which,
a contrario, iconic nature is defined. It is also often on the side of dolls, that
strange population of duplicating objects and replicas produced in the
threatening heat of feminine manipulations. The sorcerers are never far
away. It is not by chance that the ecclesiastic iconocracy put an icon of a
mother without depth and shading at its center, full of a being who does
not fill her up. This suppression of the idolatrous empire doubtless forms an
intrinsic part of the diversion of all feminine power for the profit of a power
that had the cunning to put the icon of a woman at its foundational center.
Are women not full of the mysterious vitalizing power of the body’s matter,
women who are worshiped but whom it is also necessary to destroy? A de-
ceitful and reptilian woman who will be forbidden from deceiving. . . .
Idolatry is a space of incessant mobility, traversed by burning erup-
   

tions and an exterminating roar. It is the very place where the fascination
with the feminine is linked to the mystery of life and the sideration of
death. It is what doubtless maintains the murderous spectacle of the cor-
rida in the Christian countries most frightened by the pleasures of the
body, and which take as much pleasure in temptation as in mortification
and sacrifice. One kills for the benefit of a lure, in the proof of what is said
to be a truth. One rejoices with the idolaters, and their festivals are
strangely traversed by a macabre joy, a desperate elation. Carnival is the
carnivorous jubilation of bodies at the funerals of transfigured flesh. The
idol’s essence is antieucharistic: for hopes of resurrection, it substitutes the
strict repetition of calendar rhythms—for idols have their seasons. The
arena is a key site of Christian idolatry, a place where the death of what one
had previously worshiped is applauded. Do women always know their
place in this sacrificial rite? There are “ways of the cross” in existence that
come close to mimicking that same operation in sacrificial celebration: the
exquisite murder of the worshiped image.


Picabia.6 Man Ray’s photograph shows him to us, the victim of the
corrida, the animal powerful and naked, the one who really wants to die
under the banderillas and sword of the priests of art. . . . That disrespecter
demands respect because he is going to die.
Everything was possible for him because reality had for him neither philo-
sophical status nor theological dignity. It is nothing other than that stupefying
despair of the body that encounters its mortality at the moment it climaxes. The
work of a powerful and serious sensualist who has nothing childish about
him. . . . He was never fooled, all the while dreading that he doubtless would be.
The work that passed through his hands that were not in the least capable of
holding on to anything, the hands that lose things, that squander . . . even his
talent; he loves to see it slip between his indifferent fingers.
In Spain there is a desperate love of idols. . . . There, the theater of
suffering becomes the site of a true distress strangely mixed with the dawn-
ing of pleasure. Spain has the secret of that painful idolatry. A violent pa-
ganism inflates the veins of the beautiful Spanish women. Picabia is of
those women. The animal sacrificed in the arena is God’s victim, his fa-
vorite, powerful and seductive. Picabia comes from there. . . . The women,
the bulls, the machines, everything is only a self-portrait. Picabia was born
without sin of that idolatrous soil that is never scared of blood, and that
maintains with death relations of brazen seduction and sublime coquetry.
 The Idol’s Delenda Est 

A Spanish laugh . . . just before the cry that was supposed to suspend
everything rings forth, before great art collapsed in turn beneath the artist’s
dreadfully wounded body.


Idolatry cannot be separated from feminine power, as though iconic
power, the power of its maternal virginity, had repressed what makes it for-
midable and could only doom it to destruction. This repression endlessly
returns and spreads in broad daylight with the daily swarming of idols that
can only be mastered to a greater or lesser degree: the misleading fantasies
surrounding a star, the gleaming paganism of a Spanish procession, or even
the expiatory sacrifice of Marilyn Monroe or the methodical organization
of the virginal transfiguration of Michael Jackson, who appears to want to
rise from the dead before he has had a chance to be killed. All are
ephemeral, for all worship leads to murder.7
Everybody agrees on that delenda worthy of Cato: the idol must be
destroyed. I would say that the definition of the idol is nothing other than
an image that must be killed. History abounds with accounts of the break-
ing of idols, to the point of the most recent current events, where accom-
panied by singing, idols and flags are destroyed, yet not without the
reestablishment of iconic cults. All the troubling ambiguity of the return to
orthodoxy is there in the countries that have just destroyed their idols. It is
the act of an idolater ready to substitute one idol for another.
When an icon stops being an image, it becomes an idol and demands
a sacrifice. The iconoclasts destroyed icons to prove their idolatrous nature,
which is to say, to demonstrate their mortality. For the iconophile God,
however, the icon is indestructible.
Whereas the destruction of the martyred Christian body allowed us
to see its whole economy, and by the same token, its redemptive function,
the idol, once destroyed, admits its emptiness and shows its nothingness,
its truly cadaverous nature. Empty of grace, it refutes the kenotic vacuity
of charismatic entrails. Broken idols never become relics. Thus each piece
shows the nothingness that haunts it. Deserted by the spirit like a broken
toy, a dismantled machine, it is now devoid of mystery, the very object that
never raised itself to the height of a decay-proof, unbreakable enigma. No
one believes in it anymore, the object that endured only through the single
motivation of passionate belief. The idol is nothing other than the fate of
an image caught in the flux of passion. The passion of Christ’s sacrifice is
its reversal, its redemptive inversion.
   

But can we be so sure that in the secret intimacy of our incarnations,

objects respect the order, given to them by the church, not to give in to the
evil spell of confusion?

Melancholia, Nostalgia, or Fate:

The Sign, the Symbol, and the Idol

From the preceding discussion, it emerges that there are several areas
around which both the production of images and our considerations of
iconicity can be centered: the anti- or defigurative iconoclast sign, the
icononphile symbol, which can be both figurative and abstract, and the
double, which is the idolatrous object. In all three cases, we are dealing with
distinct figures of sacredness. However, this has nothing to do with the clas-
sification of objects; rather, it is about a distinction in an imaginary relation to
invisibility. The same object can pass from one status to another; the ques-
tion is purely one of interpretation and custom, and in this respect, it is
worth noting that the church fathers had already specified what amounts
to purity of intentions in the production and interpretation of the visible.
In relation to images, everything depends on the role that we decide to
make them play; by themselves, they have no power of decision. It is for
this reason that I do not see any reason to fear any one sort of visible im-
age more than another. The image offers itself; it is up to thought to avail
itself of it. What is to be feared, however, is the power that we cede to those
who have the monopoly and mastery over its manipulation and interpre-
tation. The true masters are the masters of signs and symbols; idols can al-
ways be destroyed and replaced. It is in the interests of power, however, to
disguise those idols as signs and symbols of meaning and truth in order to
ensure their permanence. Those who rule fear idols, inevitably doomed to
sacrifice and quick to revolution.
What, then, do partisans of the sign do? They sacralize mourning,
and here I stress that it is mourning and not death that I speak of. They
produce both works and discourse about melancholia, privileging the em-
blems of lack and the yawning gap in the name of an irreparable absence.
These are often works of tearing, opening, and incompleteness. They are
also often works of insolence, laughter, and derision. Denouncing all idol-
atrous ceremonials, they do not harbor iconic dreams and iconophile am-
bitions. I would number among their ranks the dadaists, the “abstract” ex-
pressionists, the supporters of art brut, and the champions of Pop art,
 The Idol’s Delenda Est 

surprising though such a combination may appear. The champions of the

sign are in fact always far from abstraction, even when they work in a non-
figurative mode, because they are ignorant of the withdrawal that haunts
iconic life. The emptiness left by the figure of mourning and the emptiness
that the workings of grace demand can never be confused with each other.
In other words, the emptiness of the sign has nothing kenotic about it; it is
only that definitive remove that separates us from the immanence of a
meaning.
All practitioners of the sign have in common with each other the
melancholy of mourning and the annihilation of all the indulgences of
memory. Their object is no longer the manifestation of a presence, but the
sign of a definitive incompleteness and an unbroachable remove. The
doubt that haunts it does not concern expression or expressiveness but the
very possibility of communicating meaning or the existence of truth. Mad-
ness, misinterpretation, nonsense, contradiction, skepticism, and tension
all give these works their own violence that often makes them revolution-
ary or antiestablishment figures both in the field of art and in the social
field itself. Endlessly suspicious of the unfaithfulness of memory, laughing
at the certitudes of science and all forms of apodicticity, iconoclast signs
underpin works that at first sight do not present any stylistic kinship with
each other. These signs make fun of styles, can adopt them all, put all of
them to the test, and then easily separate from them without nostalgia.
Lovers of codes, virtuosi in their use, they can invent them in order to en-
joy their combination and their multiplicity all the more, with no last re-
sort or ultimate return, no project, no regret. The melancholic is not nos-
talgic, unlike the iconophile partisan of the symbol.
I spoke earlier of the shape of sacredness. What would it be here? It
is a negative sacredness marked by the seal of profanation, driven by the
dynamism of sacrilege and the breath of blasphemy. What is this other
than the sacredness of desire itself seizing control of all the routes offered
to it, without regard for idealizations or institutional conventions, whatever
their nature? The kingdom of signs does not know censure and punish-
ment. It is always sovereign in its own domain and does not claim ongoing
continuity. It is the art of princes without a church, an art of fighters hos-
tile to all feudalism. The melancholy of Don Quixote who peregrinates
against idolatrous winds and iconic seas. Marcel Duchamp.
Something else entirely is the lineage of lovers of the image who do
not renounce the illuminations of the iconic symbol, “symbol” here being
taken in the sense that I will call nikephorian. Convinced of the image’s in-
   

visible naturalness and its carnal economy, they put themselves at the serv-
ice of its complete manifestation. Figurative or not, the iconic symbol
treats absence in an entirely different way, because it makes it a deliberate
object, produces its trace, illuminates its imprint, and prepares its resur-
rection. Their concern is not melancholic but nostalgic. Something is lost:
it must be refound. Something is forgotten: it must be remembered. We
are in exile: we must return to our country of origin.
Technicians of the transfiguration, the producers of icons hold forth
either openly or secretly about truth and salvation. Partisans of a redemp-
tive art, they begin to be the redeemers of art by themselves. Balancing be-
tween the hopes of anamnesis and the despair of nostalgia, they are people
of memory and gravity. Their violence is not that of insolence but that of
the call to order and a return to sources. All through the ages, these artists
have had the ability to put to the image the question of its own origin and
destination. They work, they make pictures. They plead for the spirit and
promise liberty. And then they take this liberty, not fearing martyrdom.
Their joy, as much as their dereliction, bears them witness; their cause is
universal enough to justify their solitude. Figurative or abstract is unim-
portant to them, because the operative figures of life, truth, and meaning
must be found here and now. This is a form of that economic reasoning
that historically has managed the visibilities of our incarnation. Abstrac-
tion, in the stylistic sense of the term, is only the explicit figure of the his-
torical retreat from threatening idolatry. It is a spiritual and virile art, al-
ways faithful to its iconic mission.
Ranged within this lineage are all the meccas of visibility that persist
in the iconic economy, from Michelangelo to Malevich. All fought for an
authentic visibility safe from idolatry. This is a fight that still continues and
will last for as long as the hope for freedom of spirit and the conviction of
truth endure. Error dies hard, and this made the nonfigurative painters of
the beginning of the century iconoclasm’s last champions. Anyone loyal to
visibility is an iconophile, especially when it speaks of invisibility! The
iconophile is always driven by faith, although that faith need not be reli-
gious or assume the insignia of theology. The issue is simply one of faith in
the image and enthusiasm for the imaginary, and that enthusiasm can also
be for God’s face, science, or technique . . . it is always a symbolizing ela-
tion and an economically productive dynamism.

Sacredness here is the sacredness of life itself, assumed in the flesh of

its passions and its expectations of grace. The icon maintains its relations
 The Idol’s Delenda Est 

with the enigma without faltering. It requires hermeneuts of transubstan-

tiation of all sorts, because life arises from matter. Iconophile art is always
a eucharistic procedure that transforms matter into a living image and a re-
demptive gaze. In his study of Jawlensky, I. Goldberg notes that still life
goes hand in glove with trompe l’oeil as far as inanimate things are con-
cerned.8 “Has anyone ever seen a trompe-l’oeil crucifixion?” he asks. To
this pertinent question, I would reply that the still life is undoubtedly the
iconic genre in which the modern scenario of the imaginal incarnation is
played out to the greatest degree. These inanimate, consumable things
echo in their silence the solitary voice of the crucified flesh. Warding off
idolatrous fictions, the still life reactivates the iconic question by casting
off, little by little, the yoke of specular representation. It constitutes a ma-
jor step in the reconquest of iconicity within European art, in a spiritual
form that is all the more new, no longer being religious. Goldberg demon-
strates this point brilliantly in the faces painted by Jawlensky, and this
leads me to suggest the Gioconda as the first still life. This did not, how-
ever, prevent its transformation into an idol, arousing destructive rage with
its changeable moods. In this sense, it is exemplary of the narrow limit that
separates all iconicity from the fate of the idol, a threat that is entirely ab-
sent from the world of anti-iconic signs. From the perspective of the sign,
the question of the flesh of the image is eliminated; from the perspective of
the symbol, slippages between incarnation and incorporation are in-
evitable. If the flesh does not take on bodily form, the passage from the
speculative to the institutional is impossible; if on the contrary, it does, the
figures of idolatry invade it forthwith, and the whole fascination with con-
sumption and sacrifice begins.
In the face of these two attitudes, melancholic or nostalgic, disjunc-
tive or mediating, the idol looms, offered for worship and sacrifice, an in-
explicable object, its mystery resisting all hermeneutics. It holds forth un-
intelligibly about the body, belief, and pleasure. It renounces the
immortality of redeemed flesh in order to promote the mysterious vitality
of the corruptible body and intangible shadows. The idol is neither melan-
cholic nor nostalgic because it has no soul and is unaware of its states of be-
ing. Active, functioning matter, it mimics the immanence of death even to
its final remains. Inanimate, powerful, it materializes mystery yet does not
incarnate it. It incorporates it and disappears with it, carrying it along in
its silence and returning stubbornly to show the physical obstinacy of its
powers and threats. Any visibility can become an idol and all iconocrats
tremble to see it return. And return it does, because it is nothing other
   

than the figure of fate itself. Will we ever stop wanting to destroy it? In or-
der for that to happen, we would have to stop loving it. Having nothing to
do with the field of similitude, it stands in the field of the double, of re-
semblance. In a word, the idol resembles us. Like us, it wants to be loved,
and like us, it knows that it must die.
To say that the idol is fated is simply to say again that it was as im-
possible for partisans of the sign to do without it as it was for partisans of
the symbol. Imaging matter, inescapable power, the invisibility that it har-
bors no longer has anything economic about it. Its function does not lie
within the legitimacy of management or the justice of organization. It spills
out, it wanders around. In the profusion of its effects, in the seduction of
its promises, it shows itself off under the threat of its own disappearance.
It is nothing but living energy that is spread in the intimate knowledge of
its own annihilation. It only lives by repetition. It loves the incandescent
rituals that accompany both its glory and its sacrifice. It loves the blood
that sacralizes its indignity and in which its contract with human desire is
inscribed. Does this energy not bring to mind that hagion that the icono-
clast wanted to keep in the protective secret of the temples and tabernacles,
and that the iconophile dared to manage and transform, the better to ad-
minister wisely its profitable turbulences? The living relation between art
and women hinges on it.
If access to symbolic linkages is what marks the advent of the Law,
then the impossible confrontation of the idol and the Law becomes more
understandable. When Moses descends from Sinai for the first time, the
Law is smashed when it comes face to face with the idol. When Moses re-
turns with the Law for the second time, it is the idol that is smashed. This
incompatibility of the Law and the idol is reinforced by the Law itself,
which expresses the prohibition on the idol, for the idol threatens the Law.
The idol can only erect its monuments on the signs of its own aboli-
tion. It establishes its scenarios in broad daylight, the very ones in which,
endlessly broken, it erects its own fragments into cenotaphs of belief itself.
The image is thus nothing more than the shroud found in a deserted
tomb, on which our desires for resurrection continue to be inscribed.
Doctrine has eliminated idols but not idolaters, under pain of elimi-
nating humanity in its entirety. It has simply classified the objects of sa-
credness into good and bad objects, trying to give itself the means to use
that energy and to prevent it from turning back in an attack upon itself
and the legitimacies that it institutes. Nevertheless, there will one day be
 The Idol’s Delenda Est 

objects that we will no longer have the right to destroy without damning
and condemning ourselves. True iconoclasm is in fact an idoloclasm in-
tended to prevent us from embarking on paths of destruction.
We thus find ourselves once more located within a strange topology
of authorities to be both destroyed and respected. Even as theoretical
thought establishes the institutional power that terrorizes that hard-won
freedom that it wants to be able to control or even annihilate, it also makes
possible the entire field of productions of the imaginary and, indeed, of our
hopes of freedom as well. This is why the question of the image, the icon,
and the idol is so harrowing for us: it addresses us simultaneously about
both life and death.
Such is the image in all its economic power, deceitful and truthful at
the same time. It institutes a series of wide-ranging questions regarding the
relations between our desire and our identity. Is “know thyself ” essentially
a “know thy image”? In order not to appear to be succumbing to some
rhetorical vagueness with this question, I would rather say that it is proba-
bly the case that the type of visibility chosen by each and every person
clearly shows the relation that he or she maintains with his or her essential
similitude. It would be possible for such a point of view to underpin a his-
tory of narcissism within which both the anagogic or deadly figures of our
freedoms and servitudes, our despairs, and our utopias would unfold. A sort
of political economy of narcissism that would not, in any shape or form, be
the account of an accidental drowning. Philosophical thought about the im-
age is after all perhaps only a way for Narcissus to learn to swim.
Artists today seem to be traveling the lush and contradictory territory
of images, icons, and idols in all directions. Passing from one to the other
without even always knowing it, they once more explore the domain that
Pauline thought had already defined two thousand years ago. Is it possible
for us to imagine rearranging the forms and functions of the visible in an
entirely different way? For that to happen, it would be necessary for us to
overturn the economic architecture on which all these combinations rest,
and which was able to give a place and a function to what threatens it: the
idol. Were we to take the liberty to think the image otherwise, would that
not be only by leaving behind the terrain of monotheism?
 7

Ghost Story

“The story began in . The first photographs revealed a positive

image of an enigmatic face belonging to a mysterious man who had been
crucified. The shroud had silently waited for more than eighteen centuries
to be revealed, both spiritually and photographically. It was sixty years as
well since Daguerre. . . . Finally, at the appointed hour, the discovery took
place—providentially—at a time when the excesses of the adolescent hu-
man sciences sometimes even cast doubt on Jesus’ very existence.”1
This passage, of course, refers to the Shroud of Turin. The text, which
is one of hundreds like it, is by René Laurentin and comes from the preface
to a work by Antoine Legrand published in . A few years later, the fa-
mous shroud was definitively dated. It was made between  and 
and is not in any way a “natural” image, or acheiropoieton, not made by hu-
man hands. To a great many Christians, however, this fact makes no differ-
ence at all: the shroud is and will always be Christ’s authentic burial sheet.
In this chapter I would not simply like to give an account of the his-
tory of a false relic, but to show how photography was then experienced as
a magical operation (as it is still perhaps considered to be), capable of cap-
turing the invisible in a direct way, without human intervention. Although
this may be astonishing to us, we should not in the end be surprised that a
technical object with an attendant group of optical and chemical proce-
dures should have become the providential instrument for the revelation
and proof, both objective and material, of the presence of the divine and
the sacred, of death and resurrection.
 Ghost Story 

The case of the Holy Sudarium is exemplary in this connection in

that it simultaneously renders visible the principle of eternal life and the
figure of death. Here, photography was put to the service of the unrepre-
sentable in order to reveal the invisible. In relation to this—or, rather,
when faced with this object—the fantasmatic workings of a segment of
Christian society, of the faithful and their leaders, produced a body of as-
sertions and beliefs that leaves precious little to choose in comparison with
the most remote forest or desert tribes who demonstrate a sacred terror be-
fore, and violent rejection of, photographs. Photography, or etymologically
“writing in light,” produces a strange eclipse of consciousness as the lumi-
nous impression becomes an inscription of shadows. In that photography
works with the double, it is not in the least surprising that it should arouse
the impalpable figures of the land of the dead and demons. But the fact
that Christianity, officially so concerned to eliminate all talismanic beliefs,
was able to produce and preserve so doubtful an object allows us to
glimpse something that the economy felt should be exploited. Long em-
barrassed by a suspect relic that it had no means of rendering fruitful, it left
it sheltered in reliquaries, awaiting its moment. And that moment came
one night in . Then, the predatory apparatus of the shadows became
the means through which the illumination of the soul was spread. Leaving
the abject dread of the double to the pagans, the church was finally in a po-
sition to hail the collaboration of technical know-how with its own re-
demptive mission.
In order to understand this fully, it is necessary to bear in mind the
major stages of thought concerning the true, natural image that gave rise
to the belief that the photographic apparatus had come—“providentially”
as Legrand said—to perfect and fulfill the imaginal meaning of the uni-
verse. Here, let us attempt to uncover just what it is that has fed the fan-
tasy of an acheiropoietic photography from the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury to the present, making it do more, even, than take over from the
tradition of the veronicas. For, on examination, we receive the impression
that it is tradition itself that has at last found its legitimating medium.
The oldest tradition concerning the image not made by human hand
dates from the middle of the sixth century. There is a document entitled
“The Teaching of Adaï” that mentions a Holy Face, and we find an ac-
count confirming it in Evagrios’s Church History,2 which talks of an icon
that is theoteuktos, made by God. However, before taking up Evagrios’s rel-
atively late story, it is worth inquiring about the genesis of this tradition,
   

which, before it became one concerning an acheiropoietic Holy Face, was

itself preceded by an earlier story related by Eusebios in his Church History.
It is, of course, impossible to discover the facts underlying these stories, but
the chronological sequence of the accounts and the ways in which they
come to be modified in accordance with the economic necessities of the
times can be discerned.
The text of Eusebios’s Church History, dating to around , recounts
that the king of Edessa, Abgar, ill perhaps with leprosy, wrote to Jesus ask-
ing him to come and cure him. Jesus replied that he would send his disci-
ple Thaddeus to visit him, which he did after the resurrection. Thaddeus
did indeed cure Abgar, but there is no allusion to an image or a portrait.3
In , W. Cureton discovered a Syriac document among the man-
uscripts of the British Museum, which he published under the name of
“The Teaching of Adaï.”4 It was republished in a fuller version in  by
G. Philips, after the discovery of a second Syriac manuscript in St. Peters-
burg. The d’Addai text, which appears to be later than Eusebios’s version,
repeats the account of the king’s illness and petition, but now his messen-
ger, Hannan, makes a portrait of Christ that he brings back to Edessa,
where it becomes the object of great veneration. The image is not
acheiropoietic, but the text does make a specific connection between the
incarnation and Christ’s “iconic tolerance.” Ewa Kuryluk remarks in this
connection that “The Christian culture of Edessa and, more generally, of
Syria and Cappadocia was shaped by the clash of two major traditions: the
non-iconic attitude of the Semitic population, which was prone to suc-
cumb to the Monophysite heresy . . . and that of the Greeks devoted to de-
piction and hence supporting the orthodox line. . . . The controversy was
reflected in the legends of Jesus’ letter and portrait.”5
It is not until the sixth century (–), however, with Evagrios,
that first mention is made of a miraculous image, that is to say, one not
made by human hand. In that account, Hannan embarks on his trip and
attempts to accomplish his mission. Christ, however, occupied with his
preaching, cannot make the journey. Instead, he dips a piece of linen
(mandylion, mindil) in water, passes it over his face, which is then mirac-
ulously inscribed with its imprint, and gives it to Hannan in order to cure
Abgar. Thus was born the Holy Face. Shortly thereafter, it was used to re-
place an idol on Edessa’s ramparts, then immured in order to escape de-
struction by the pagans. Then, in , after it had saved the city from siege
by Chosroes, Bishop Eulalios had a dream in which its location was re-
 Ghost Story 

vealed to him.6 It was extracted from the wall, and a double miracle was
noted: the lamp that had been enclosed with it was still burning, and the
tile on which it had been placed also bore the imprint of the divine face.
Henceforth there would be two Holy Faces: one on a piece of linen, the
other on a tile.
After this account, the image reappears regularly in theological texts
and sacred tales. At the council of Nicaea II (), for example, which
sanctioned the first reestablishment of images during the iconoclast crisis,
it is mentioned as a justification for the painting of icons.
In the tenth century, Constantine Porphyrogenitos had the
mandylion brought from Edessa to Constantinople, and from then on,
each year on August , a liturgical service was celebrated in its honor; thus
the following words occur in a sticheron of the Vespers: “Having portrayed
your most pure face, you sent it to the faithful Abgar who wanted to see
you, you who according to your divinity are invisible to the cherubim.”
Henceforth humans would be able to see what the angels themselves can-
not contemplate, and this because, by the effect of his light and grace, an
image of God was painted.
From this point on, what came to be known as icons of the Holy
Face were spread throughout the Christian world. According to the texts,
the icons were made by human hands but were modeled directly on the
mandylion. In Rome, one of these icons, said to have been sent by Stefan
Nemanja II, Grand Zupan of Serbia, to Pope Celestine II in the twelfth
century, was called the True Icon, or in the vernacular, vera icona, or veron-
ica. Worshiped in Rome until , when it was destroyed by the soldiers
of Charles V, it was then replaced by the story of the Veronica cloth, the
best-known image of which is still the Franciscan one of the fourth station
of the way of the cross.7 From this moment on, the story becomes a west-
ern one, and no further allusion is found to it in the East, where the two
Holy Faces, on fabric and tile, are considered to have been lost after the
Crusader’s sack of Constantinople. In Eastern Christianity, icons made by
human hand take over from them.
The change from the Holy Face to the Shroud took several more cen-
turies to be justified, and it occurred within the western tradition (al-
though even in the East there was no lack of stories attesting that Christ’s
shroud had not been destroyed or lost after the resurrection, and mention
was still made of it as a relic: in , Mgr. Pietro Savio published more
than seventy-five sources attesting to its existence between the second cen-
   

tury and ).8 In order to justify the transformation of the acheiropoietic

Face into a full image of the body, however, it was said that the shroud had
been kept in Edessa since apostolic times, but folded up, in order “not to
show that it was a burial cloth.” Only the part showing the face could be
seen, and it was called “Abgar’s veil.”9
It is, as mentioned, in the West, however, that the issue comes back
to life, so to speak, particularly at its beginning. We move now to the four-
teenth century, at Lirey, near Troyes; the widow of Geoffroy I of Charny
returns the shroud to the canons of Lirey, to whom it had originally been
brought, so it is said, by the Knights Templar, and they offer it for popular
worship. The bishop of Troyes, Pierre d’Arcis, however, makes clear his op-
position; he warns Pope Clement VII of the imposture and requests that
ostensions of the false relic be prohibited. By a bull of January , ,
however, the pope authorizes ostension, although only on condition that
the object be proclaimed not a shroud but a painting: Pictura seu tabla.
The shroud is eventually returned to the Charny family, but thirty years
later, Geoffroy’s son again repeats the request for ostensions. Again, the
bishop of Troyes denounces the shround as mystification and states that he
knows the artist. The Vatican, however, demands that the bishop keep a
perpetuum silentium on the subject, and henceforth, with this silence as se-
curity, the shroud is placed on exhibit.
In the centuries that follow, many stories evidence a belief in the ex-
istence and authenticity of the shroud. None of these stories could be chal-
lenged, however, because the object itself was locked in a reliquary, im-
mured, and protected by iron gates at Chambéry’s Sainte-Chapelle. Any
direct contact with it or ostension of it was therefore impossible. Then, on
December , , a fire broke out. The shroud, however, was saved, and
even though the burn traces can still be seen, the Lord’s body remained in-
tact: “Many did not want to believe the unbelievable: the reliquary was
completely melted, but the divine effigy was intact.” It was at this mo-
ment, or shortly thereafter, that Calvin wrote: “When a sudarium has been
burnt, another can always be found the very next day. . . . It is even said
that this is the same one that had been there before, and that it had been
saved from the fire by a miracle; but the paint was so fresh that, had there
been eyes to see it, it would hardly have been worth lying about.”10 Subse-
quently, during the plague of Milan, Duke Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy
had the shroud removed to Italy, from whence it would never return. To
this day, it is still to be found in Turin.
 Ghost Story 

What, then, does the shroud look like? It is a linen cloth . meters
long by . meters wide, yellowing, with several patches. With the naked
eye, there is nothing, or almost nothing, to be seen: the confused traces of
a body . meters tall. The decisive ostension, however, took place on May
 or June  of  when a lawyer named Secundo Pia was eventually
granted royal authorization to photograph the shroud. A first attempt
failed because some frosted filters broke. Then,
On the evening of May , a pane of glass that had been positioned at the request
of Princess Clotilde to protect the sacred cloth from candle and incense smoke had
been causing some bothersome reflections. At  p.m. Pia took a fourteen minute
exposure, and then a second of twenty minutes. At midnight, he left the cathedral
and immediately enclosed himself in his darkroom. He dipped the glass plates in
a developing bath. Suddenly, the negative in front of a red lamp caused the true
face of Christ, which no-one had contemplated for more than eighteen centuries,
to loom before his eyes.

Pia wrote: “Enclosed in my darkroom, I experienced such intense emotion

when I saw the Holy Face appear on the plate for the first time that I was
paralyzed.”11
L’Osservatore romano of June , , greeted the Savior’s appearance
in the same terms that usually accompany accounts of a miraculous ap-
parition, and Pope Leo XIII declared that “this providential event is ap-
propriate to the present age and will favor the awakening of religious sen-
timent.” It is at this time as well that the science entitled sindonology was
born, patronized by the great names of Christian science: Paul Vignon,
professor of biology at the Institut catholique de Paris, René Colson,
répétiteur of physics at the École polytechnique, Armand Gauthier of the
Académie des sciences, and Yves Delage, also of the Académie des sciences.
Laws were formulated, phenomena were described. This culminated in
, when Vignon created an international commission for scientific re-
search on the shroud, consisting of  members.
Before returning to the recent demystification of the shroud, it is
worth noting the degree to which even the most experienced researchers
were swept along by a wave of fantasy. Here are some examples: “They cru-
cified cadavers in dissection halls. They experimented with whips and
crowns of thorns made of bushes from Palestine until they obtained im-
prints similar to the ones on the shroud. In this way they were able to iden-
tify the direction of the blows and the positions of the body that had re-
ceived them. During the s they hung volunteers who had a passion for
   

the same research on a patibulum. Legrand even had himself hung on a

cross. He contracted tetanus, and speaks discreetly of it in passing.”12
A strange ceremony was thus instituted, a sort of scientific liturgy in
which the doctors’ role makes one wonder about the necrophiliac complic-
ity of the surgical profession. For example, Dr. Barbet, who published La
Passion de Jésus-Christ selon le chirurgien (The Passion of Jesus Christ from a
Surgeon’s Point of View) repeatedly experimented on amputated limbs:
Having just amputated the arm of a healthy man one third of the way down, I
hammered an eight millimeter nail (a nail as used in the passion) into the center
of the palm, at the third intermetacarpal space. I gently hung forty kilos from the
elbow. After ten minutes the wound had stretched, and the nail was at the level of
the metacarpal heads. I then gave the whole ensemble a very slight nudge, and I
saw the nail suddenly break through the point in space narrowed by the two
metacarpal heads and easily tear the skin all the way up to the corner. A second
gentle nudge ripped through what was left of it.13

The “lightness” of the officiating touch will, of course, be appreciated

here! What is astonishing in this passage is the degree of medical relent-
lessness in the attempt to justify the miracle; for, after all, if a miracle there
had been, it would certainly justify leaving the bodies of amputees re-
spectfully in peace! There were, however, even greater obscenities to come
in connection with the historical events, and it is to Legrand that we owe
knowledge of them. A doctor himself, he had himself hung from a cross by
the wrists until he was nearly asphyxiated. He developed congestion as a
result and had trouble seeing.
In March, , after a lecture in the amphitheater of one our great national insti-
tutes in which I had described Christ’s positions on the cross as he struggled
against death, I was completely astonished when a student from Luxemburg, M.
R. Geiser, who . . . had been deported to Dachau, asked me if I myself had not
also spent some time there. . . . The description of the agonies of the crucified that
I had just given coincided exactly with the tortures he had seen inflicted on other
deportees in the winter of –.

This, in fact, is the terrifying formulation of both the natural and su-
pernatural effects of iconic mimésis: the deportees serve the cause of the di-
vine image. But this was not enough for Dr. Legrand, who published an ar-
ticle entitled “Du gibet du Golgotha à ceux de Dachau” (From Golgotha’s
Gallows to Dachau’s) in the periodical Médecin et Laboratoire on Decem-
ber , . “Notice,” he proclaims, “that since the angle of Christ’s arms
 Ghost Story 

is more open than those of the victims at Dachau, the traction force of the
arms would have been insufficient to raise the chest.” And he ends by not-
ing that neither Christ nor the deportees could have had erotic fantasies in
their death pangs, as some evil souls have suggested. The reader of this text
oscillates between nausea and suffocation; surely some spiritual or scientific
voice should have been raised to put an end this appalling delirium.
But no; a profusion of texts continues to describe the passion, to re-
constitute it minutely, minute by minute, as though it were a crime on tel-
evision: spittle, wounds, fractures, asphyxia, hemorrhages . . . nothing is
missing. Even the Nazis cooperate in this endeavor.
Nothing, however, comes close to the miracle of photography, which
remains the absolute paradigm of revelation. In , Enrie, nicknamed
“Christ’s photographer,” took the best trichrome photographs yet of the
shroud, and in  he published Le Suaire de Turin révélé par la photogra-
phie (The Shroud of Turin Revealed by Photography). From that point on,
a scientistic madness erupted on claims of a power that was magical. God,
the Father painter, had inspired the invention of photography in order to
reveal the realm of the invisible, the soul of the world. The chemical mira-
cle is thus transformed into a spiritual miracle, and science, which might
well have carried humanity off on a tide of luciferian or atheistic pride, be-
comes instead the ground of revelation itself. At just this time, the Virgin
herself was sighted on several occasions, and St. Theresa of Lisieux had her-
self renamed St. Theresa of the Infant Christ and the Holy Face. Photog-
raphy additionally proved to be an inexhaustible source of proofs of the
visibility of spirits, which fed a growing interest in magnetism, spiritual-
ism, and the occult sciences. Photographs were taken of auras, of ghosts,
ectoplasms, good and bad spirits, angels and the damned, and the souls of
the living and the dead—the shadows of the world emerged from the
shade. Photography thus became the providential unveiler of the invisible,
the netherworld, and the lens lent a scientific, unwavering character to
what would henceforth appear as the very object of photography itself.
Here is Paul Claudel, in “La Photographie du Christ” (The Photography
of Christ):
It is not only an official document, as the minutes of a meeting would be, an offi-
cial decree, duly signed and initialed: it is a tracing, an image carrying with it its
own guarantee. More than an image, it is a presence! More than a presence, it is a
photograph, something that has been imprinted and that is unalterable. . . . For a
photograph is not a portrait made by human hand. . . . It is, physically, he who im-
   

printed this plate, and it is this plate that subsequently comes to take possession of
our spirit. . . . It is difficult to believe that this detailed, negative impression of
Christ’s body, caused only by some randomly spread herbs on an unprepared
cloth, is a phenomenon that is purely natural.14

As this passage makes clear, once “it is physically he who imprinted

this plate,” then the authenticity of the shroud becomes a secondary prob-
lem: the miracle is produced solely by the direct intervention of God on
the photographic plate, which henceforth functions as the mandylion itself.
All the essential elements of this story are now in place, and the photo-
graph has come to replace the “Holy Veronica” of the Franciscan tradition.
We are at last in a position to be able to ask how photography came to
function, then as it still does now, as a producer not simply of acheiropoi-
etic images, but ones in which the effect of their “real presence” is accom-
panied by a rhetorical and scientific system that is wholly unique.
At root, the belief in this particular capability of photography is
based on the wholesale transfer of a technical vocabulary into a spiritual
one. Light, developer,15 darkness, lens—all these terms induce a dreamlike
state of being. The same is true of the photographic apparatus as was true
for the optical and specular vocabulary of the Renaissance: the technical
object is a doctrinal matrix. Here, however, the obscurantist incompetence
and stubbornness of the proselyte no longer have anything in common
with an intelligence at work as it attempts to grasp hold of a model of in-
telligibility. The collaboration between the mirror and a system of thought
is far from the giddy complicity of fantasy and photography. But let there
be no mistake: the church is not the victim of its unconscious desires,
which, after all, can only resemble our own. Rather, it consciously manages
the collective unconscious in order to derive redemptive profit from it:
these are times of doubt, of materialism, and of atheism, and something
must be done to mark God’s intervention in history.
The power of rhetoric is such that the keenest efforts and most ad-
vanced technical refinements were necessary in order to prove beyond
doubt that the shroud was a fake. At present, nothing is sufficiently rigor-
ous to overcome the deception of something that plain good sense had
been enough to refute for centuries. Let it be said in passing that we seem
to believe that we are not in a position to dominate an object until we un-
derstand how it was made and brought to a state of perfection. Qualis ar-
tifex periit!
 Ghost Story 

Photography, then, seems to be powerfully linked to a history of

credulity in, and attachment to, the real presence or existence of what it
shows. And it does this with infinitely greater force in relation to some-
thing that reveals the Truth in the negative. In effect, the terms in which
photography is described, the procedures by which it reveals what left an
impression on it—resemblance; two dimensionality; the passage from light
to a darkness that is so revealing, as is the one from the revelatory darkness
to the charismatic light of presence; the symmetric and specular nature of
the image with respect to its model; the seizing and holding of the mo-
ment that evokes eternity so well; the image of what died yesterday and
remains alive today; the image of what will live always, despite everything
that annihilates us today, in a word, this opposite world so similar to ours
that is shown to us, mimetic and painless—all this is everything that turns
photography, as a providential invention, into a redemptive and authenti-
fying technique. It is worth noting in passing, incidentally, that these are
all the selfsame features that provoke repulsion, terror, and sacred dread in
many other societies.
All this would be incomprehensible if it were not for the fact that we
have been so firmly attached to the image for centuries, and that this has
occurred under the all-powerful iron rule of the church’s economic imagi-
nation. For if the church, in its supreme authority, saw fit to push credulity
to the limit in the face of all likelihood, in the face of all the irrefutable
proofs concerning the dating of the shroud, this is because once again, ex-
actly as had taken place during the iconoclastic crisis, it could not bring it-
self to renounce the benefits that were thus made available to it. It is be-
cause this image has power that it is necessary to defend and protect it. It
is not because it is true that it has power. It is because it has power that it
becomes true, that it must be true.
What, then, is its power? It lies not only in the miracles that it has
performed, the protection it has dispensed, the conversions that it has ef-
fected. Indeed, far from it. All these things are secondary benefits, so to
speak, gathered along the course of history, and which it certainly has no
monopoly on. All relics or miraculous images of any sort can be invested
with equal or similar power. Rather, the Shroud of Turin has such excep-
tional, privileged status because it is related to photography, the imprint,
the reflection, to filiation and the resurrection, because it concerns the cap-
ture of shadows and therefore the transformation and salvation of science
itself by means of divine collaboration. Science and technology are put at
   

the service of faith; once again, it is the image that must be massively be-
lieved in, without protest and without speaking. Perpetuum silentium is the
watchword before the image that speaks the discourse of univocal, frontal,
and mimetic evidence.
Is the church, then, in the process of inventing the myth of photog-
raphy as mystical evidence and final proof of what is true? It would not be
for the first time. The iconophile victory was a violent and authoritarian
victory of symbolic power over those who, with the exception of the eu-
charist, rejected all the magic of real presence. The church, however, saw
things differently, because it took the long view of the issue: the iconic del-
egation of power, a filiation that is mimetic and redemptive, forges the iron
for the sword of victory from the production of images of all sorts. Thus is
belief procured, and obedience too, and silence with them both. No ob-
jection, no doubt. It is he who rejects the invisible who is blind. The
shroud makes the natural image visible without broaching its foundational
invisibility, and the proof of this lies in the fact that, by inversion, it passes
into negative form. Negative theology has at last found its photochemical
double.
Let us return now to two essential points regarding photography’s
iconic magic. The first concerns real presence, the second, negative
thought. What is the status of the acheiropoietic image? For an iconoclast,
the Holy Face is a direct and sacred imprint of the body. It is a sign of, and
memorial to, divine humanity that prohibits any other portrayal. If the
iconoclasts had been faced with the Holy Sudarium, they would not have
recognized it as an argument for figurative portrayal, because it concerns,
as does the cross, a negative sign, resemblance to which would be holy,
venerable, and nonreproducible. For an iconophile, conversely, the shroud
is a sign of divine assent to the criteria of similitude and the redemption of
that similitude. For the former, it is, as a negative sign, heterogenous to the
model of which it is the imprint. It can only refer to the passion. For the
latter, it is homonymous and homogenous with its humanity and with the
symbolic status that transforms (métamorphôsis) the negative (death) into a
positive (life). It is proof of the resurrection. Consequently, both the Holy
Face and the shroud permit doctrinal authority to transform an index into
an iconic symbol. Photography thus miraculously becomes the organon of
this specifically targeted economy, by means of a sort of lexical traffic be-
tween a technological vocabulary and a spiritual vocabulary. In conformity
with the economy in its most intimate modalities, and in the enigmatic
 Ghost Story 

brilliance of its manifestation, the cadaver becomes a sign of life, the

shadow becomes a source of light, the invisible is promoted to visibility,
and art is one with nature.
For the triumphant, iconophile church, photography is the scientific
coronation of that divine assent to redeemed similitude. The image of the
shroud makes God’s humanity truly present, and therefore his incarnation
and resurrection as well. Miraculously added to the sacramental magic of
the eucharist that transforms the bread and wine into the body and blood
of Christ, is an imprint of body and blood that deserves the same respect
as the host and to which it adds the criterion of similitude. Hoc est corpus,
hoc est sanguis. Photography is the modern tool of transubstantiation par
excellence; it is also a most extraordinary instrument for the treatment of
still life. I mentioned earlier that it was possible to see the still life as an
antieucharistic manifesto in its portrayal of the sacred species: in its silence,
our gaze gleans the signs of our “resounding futility,” and the body of our
appetites feeds on its figures of hunger and is enchanted by its iconic
melancholy. The negatives of the shroud show us the body and blood of
the sacrifice and engage in the work of animation, of reanimation. They
convince us that this corpse is breathing, and that each image is funda-
mentally miraculous. We are essentially imaginal and acheiropoietic by na-
ture, and photography invites us to rejoin with our own similitude, also
not made by human hand.
Photography, without word or gesture, but rather by the effect of
light only, performs a nonsacramental eucharistic operation because it can
manage without transformative words and can actually show the body and
the blood. The believer’s eyes commune with it and are opened by it. Yet
all this does not fully account for its magic. Added to it, amazingly, is the
fact that the revelation of the truth functions in the negative. The torture
victim’s body, invisible to the naked eye, suddenly appears clearly in the
darkness. For it is a corpse that we are dealing with, and that corpse has
now been revived. The image, in its mode of manifestation, must therefore
reverse its own content, and the negative is then interpreted as negation.
This is because the corpse in question is not that of a dead person, but the
body of he who is life, who revives and saves, who the shroud can only
show in a process of inversion. Photographic magic comes about by the
transition from a technological gesture (dip the plate into a developing
bath) to its rhetorical equivalent. It is nothing other than a homonymic
slippage, and the iconic economy has taken full advantage of its effects; it
   

is the homonymy of the visible negative and the negativity of the invisible.
To produce a negative—that is, a negation—is to act positively, because by
respecting the prototype’s invisibility, one gives oneself the means to re-
verse it into the positivity of the truth. Photography is a chemically
apophatic art!
Magical thinking always functions by equating the image with the
word, a making consubstantial with a saying. This is the magic of desire.
Photography acts without words like a magical formula, a deliberately mute
abracadabra that produces an abracadabra-ing that functions as a muzzle.
Before coming to any further conclusions, however, let us pause to
examine the procedures that determined that the shroud is definitely a
fake. NASA, the CNRS,16 and other bodies of world science had to set to
work in an attempt to establish the definitively historical origins of the
shroud by means of a precise dating. Before even entering into the details
of this issue, however, it is worth noting that these definitive conclusions
did not in the least shake the convictions of those who believe photography
to be acheiropoietic; the church still refuses to this day to make any official
statements on the subject. We will return to the question of just what the
difference is between an acheiropoietic fake and a true work of art once we
have discussed some of the facts concerning the dating of the shroud. Per-
haps one does not exist—except for the stubborn sindonophile.
Since , the dating of certain objects by means of the carbon 
method has been possible. Because carbon , a radioactive isotope, deteri-
orates progressively through the centuries, the percentage of its deteriora-
tion through time can be recorded. Its measurements are very sensitive and
relatively accurate. In order to determine the percentage of carbon  in the
shroud, however, it would have been necessary to cut a forty-centimeter
piece out of it, so a mass spectrometer, which allows the isotope to be
measured on the tiniest of samples, was used instead. On October , ,
in Turin, the mass spectrometer, which separates the carbon atoms by us-
ing a process of acceleration and magnetic traps, yielded a result: the cloth
was made of linen dating to a period between  and .
These results, however, were soon contested, and it is worth paying
attention to the objections. The scientist Eberhard Lindner, faced with the
conclusions of the spectrometer, took up a theory that had already been ad-
vanced earlier, according to which Jesus’s resurrection took place like a
flash, an atomic explosion, a thermonuclear emission, which turned the
proportions of carbon  in the sudarium upside down. In  Arthur
 Ghost Story 

Loth had already spoken of “an electrical action, a photofulgural photog-

raphy or some phenomenon of radiation,”17 and in  Geoffroy Ashe hy-
pothesized that at the moment of the resurrection, Christ’s body radiated
such heat that the shroud was scorched. In March  as well, Ray Rogers
spoke of a photolysis-flash of a thousandth of a second, the same one that
had forever fixed the shadows of those seized by the death flash at Pompeii
and Herculaneum, and Hiroshima to the ground. We have, of course, al-
ready seen several examples of the many infernos within which people have
been prepared to recognize the shadows cast by the resurrection and re-
demption. Photography, too, using either natural or artificial light, also
proved capable of providing a sacred image not made by human hand;
now the nuclear flash is close to finding its sacred model and permanently
fixing the shadow cast by our immortality.
In order to confirm the results of the mass spectrometer, the thermo-
luminescence technique was also used. A piece of the shroud was exposed
to a quartz or aluminum crystal emitting light at a certain temperature,
and the light then given off by the cloth was interpreted to establish a
chronology. Yet another test, the potassium-argon method, in which the
respective proportions of the elements that remain at the end of a given pe-
riod allow for an exact dating, was also employed. All the measurements
agreed: the Holy Shroud dates from the end of the thirteenth or fourteenth
centuries (–). The fantasy, however, remained resistant, with some
even querying how a fourteenth-century man had mysteriously been able
to endure the whole of Christ’s passion so that this bloody testimony
might be bequeathed to humanity.
The shroud, then, is a work of art bearing all the characteristics of a
fraud designed to provoke popular piety and to obtain all the familiar ben-
efits of pilgrimages to miracle-working relics. And if, indeed, it is a true
work of art, damaged and worn though it may be, whose contrasts really
are more legible in a photographic negative, then the problem is simple as
far as this particular object in itself is concerned, although questions re-
main regarding its production.
However, this description of the whole affair has been necessary in
order to allow us to formulate several more fundamental questions on the
subject of photographic magic. A little earlier I asked the question of what
the difference is between an acheiropoietic fake and a true image. Once it
has been recognized that the Holy Shroud is a fake, have we thereby estab-
lished what a veronica, a true image, is? Are those who flee before the cam-
   

era lens for fear that they will be deprived of their soul or that someone will
gain knowledge about their life—or rather, a power over their death—not
also truly alive to the question of the iconic economy? Their shadow, their
reflection, their double, beyond all rhetoric and narrative, whether hagio-
graphic or not; they do not want to give these things to the first ones who
happen to come along, the tourist, the ethnologist, the journalist, all of
them citizens of the empire of images, of that world in which how to dom-
inate, subjugate, and kill with their help is so well known. Are they always
so wrong when they see in these people predators who do not have the
least respect for similitude or shadows?
The problem that the Shroud of Turin poses concerns the cause of
the image and its double foundation in a gesture and a model. Whether
the model was, or still is, real, or whether we are dealing with a divine body
with perceivable or fabricated exteriority is not the problem. We are not
raising the question of faith, but of belief. Of what gesture, what author-
ity, is the image the effect? When the worshipers of the Holy Shroud claim
that it is an acheiropoietic image, they are saying two things: first, that the
beauty, the perfection of the result cannot be made by human hand. Even
more than this, though, they are saying that the very nature of the image,
on analysis, does not allow the trace, the mark of any producing gesture to
be seen. If photography corroborates this claim, it is because it itself is in-
terpreted as not being the result of any material cause, any gesture. Not
made by human hand thus means that the hand, specifically, counts for
nothing there.
In the nineteenth century, however, and particularly in its second
half, the identification, attribution, and recognition of fakes by art histori-
ans and experts became possible. What were their criteria? The dating of
matter and materials certainly did not possess the same rigor that it does
today. Instead, it was knowledge, the eye, that was exercised in order to de-
fine styles, themes, writing, graphologies, gestures, everything that con-
cerns the relation of touch to the hand that lays it down. Impressionism,
the works of Cézanne and van Gogh included, developed an oeuvre char-
acterized by gesture and touch put at the service of an optical impression.
A work is said to be by the hand of a painter, and several hands, even, can
be recognized in the works of a studio or in retouched objects. In short,
both signature and style are ranked in the same class of criteria for the au-
thentification and reading of works of art. In relation to this, photography
appears to be an instrument that objectifies a world seen by a body with-
 Ghost Story 

out hands, touch, or signature. Would this mean, then, that the true im-
age, the veronica, is the product of a cause without body or matter?
Linked to this fantasy of pure, divine productivity, luminous and
without a body, is the simultaneous birth of a painting that is pure, spiri-
tual emanation, liberated of all gestural subjectivity, and which brings the
question of the image back to the manifestation of inherent truth. I am
speaking, of course, about abstraction such as Kandinsky, Malevich, or
Mondrian thought about it. But if abstraction naturally follows the
acheiropoietic fantasy of photography, it turns its back on it in freeing it-
self from all specular and mimetic constraints. Painting’s ambitions were
never more closely tied to the veronica than in the abstraction of the be-
ginning of the century, and the canvas on which forms and colors are
placed henceforth functions, in fact as well as in thought, like a veil that
covers and uncovers. On the Spiritual in Art is the major manifesto of this
purely spiritual and sacred imprint. The trace of the spirit prevails over that
of the hand.
A supplementary proof that corroborates this fiction of photography
as productive of an iconic effect without a gesture is the absence of any
drawing. The photographic impression is nongraphic, or as might be said,
agraphic, just as we say aphasic. In a certain way, it concerns the same
thing. The impression leaves a stain rather than makes a line. The shroud’s
image bears the magic of something that has form without an outline. It
shows only values of shade and light to give two-dimensional evidence of
relief. In the Byzantine iconic tradition too, everything concerning the
graphic line, writing, and outline is called skiagraphè, writing in shadows.
The shroud is on the side of cloths and stains, that is to say, of those im-
maculate cloths on which women collect the bloody and living traces of
our mortality. The photographé of the shroud functions without gesture or
outline. Was it not iconicity’s maternal, fertile roots that abstraction’s great
thinkers and practitioners were seeking to rediscover? And was it not the
enigmatic place of the veronica that they desired to occupy? The haunting
presence of the Holy Face and its negative photography endlessly preyed
on the practitioners of modern iconography. Malevich and Jawlensky are
in some ways its elite thinkers, but there are several others as well.
The affair that has bound photography and belief so closely to each
other for a century is far from being over. What we know now is that noth-
ing is more enigmatic than the foundations of thought concerning the im-
age. The same is true for the claim that every image is an image of an im-
   

age, that truth is measured by the yardstick of the imaginary, and that it is
a long way from the image to the visible, from the gaze to vision. In pho-
tography, more than in any other process that produces images, the fun-
damental issues of the desire to see, and by the same token, the manifesta-
tion of what vision can only lack if the object that it chooses remains
faithful to its aim, all hang in the balance.
The figure of death cannot reveal itself in the negative to become,
miraculously, the figure of life. It can only lose itself in another figure, that
of the death of death, in that other night of which Blanchot wrote: “It is
the death that cannot be found.” At best, we are immobile dancers who
mark the common limit of two chasms with a suspense still mobilized by
our bodies. Between the caves of reassuring fiction and the veristic abysses
of trompe l’oeil there is enough space for all the anamorphoses. The Holy
Shroud is an anamorphosis, and the controversy surrounding it makes us
understand that all iconicity is fundamentally anamorphotic in nature.
This is what the economy has become: this topological coiling of word and
gaze that presents us with an ontological fantasy. The only possible reply is
Stella’s “You see what you see,”18 which does not, for all that, decree a halt
to the image.
Henceforth, every image that seeks to be seen can only show the
spectral essence of the veronica negatively.
Is every work of art a fake acheiropoieton?
 8

The Jew, Frontally and in Profile

One day a Greek painter by the name of Byzantios, on seeing me for

the first time in a very long while, said, “I would always recognize you be-
cause you look exactly the same from the front as you do in profile.” Is that
why I am interested in Byzantium? Through those words I first grasped the
ambiguity that would always mark the perception of my face by another.
What did he mean, exactly?
More generally, however, concealed within this witticism lay the
question of what constitutes both an outline and a look when one is gaz-
ing at another person. Speaking of which, that Greek, looking at me, Jew
that I am, also confessed that he wanted to keep open all the possibilities
of the undecidable, leaving me hanging between the promises and threats
that a painter’s eye can always bring to bear on the forms of our visibility.
At the worst moments of history, however, the scalpel of the gaze has
preferred to cut out of the other an image for itself to hate. Earlier I spoke
about the virtuosity of the “painter” Nikephoros when he decided to assas-
sinate his other. He made his decision without hesitation. Nothing resem-
bles an iconoclast more than a Jew or an Arab to suppress.
How can we understand the origins of the physical, perceptual sys-
tem that forms the basis for the face of horror, impurity, and shame that
through the centuries has been attributed to the facial features and bodies
of those who must be hated, assassinated, at all cost? In an attempt to ex-
plain this, I will draw on several caricatures of Jews that appeared during
the Nazi period. This is not, however, a study linked to racism or even
   

Nazism. That hideous moment in our history will for long exercise the
minds of others who refuse to forget. I will rather more modestly simply
reconsider a small number of texts and images, my goal being only to
demonstrate that strange complicity between science, fantasy, and subli-
mation in the structure of organized repulsion. Additionally, and perhaps
most importantly, I would like to examine the ideological roots of these
few miserable, prejudiced graphics and their link to a more general history
of caricature.
What are the indices that characterize the Jew’s face? Where do they
come from? Why do they form the intolerable portrait of a creature recog-
nizable by its profile alone? Why can a Jew not have a face? Why are Jews
unfit for a face-to-face encounter? How, according to their enemies, did
their own God condemn them to this obliqueness, to this deprivation of
the gaze, and is he too, perhaps, excluded from all frontality?
Let it be understood that if God prohibited the Jew from access to
the image, that is because he did not recognize himself in him. The Jew has
no image; yet despite everything, as was the case for Constantine, it is nec-
essary to paint his portrait. In order to investigate this, I will also consider
what were taken to be the most beautiful profiles of humanity and the
marvelous face-to-face encounters so decisively established by Christianity.
This study is based essentially on the propaganda publications pro-
duced in France and distributed by the NEF1 in . The assassins there
used the very principle of the game of massacre by employing silhouette
and outline as weapons in the annihilation of the face.
First, I will address the question of the profile; then I will briefly
comment on the triumphalism of Pauline visibilities concerning the face.
In a word, I will show that the poverty, the very wretchedness, of anti-Se-
mitic propaganda is based not on an archaic or puerile structure; on the
contrary, it is based on subtleties and refinements that are the very oppo-
site of Greco-Christian idealization, which is itself an ideology, that is to
say, a strategically coherent discourse about the body and about territory.

Profiles

The most striking feature about the caricatures we are considering is,
first, the fact that no matter what the position of the face, that famous nose
is always seen in profile. It is linear, enormous; it plunges downward. But
the importance of this caricatural emphasis, and a feature that I would like
 The Jew, Frontally and in Profile 

to stress here, is that it is the organ par excellence that stands out in the
shadow theater of the profile. The Jew is like his nose, a figure of the shad-
ows. A shadow in essence, he is the face of death without resurrection. His
forehead recedes and is almost nonexistent. His chin disappears too; he is
agnathous and has no neck. All that exists are exaggerated features: the
graph of the nose and lips or jaw, to which I will return shortly. As for his
eyes, they are said to have been made to look behind him.
It is clearly important that the Jew be recognizable, and recognizable
he is, by evidence that is, as the expression goes, “as clear as the nose on his
face.” The shape on display has such a minimal area, is so asymmetric, that
it is nothing more than a mortal, bestial promontory that transforms the
face into a maw. He is identifiable by the shadow or the graph that outlines
his profile in a space that has no depth. With a two-dimensional profile
that is pinned up and outlined like a sign, that is, like the linear form that
constitutes a written body, he is, as the church fathers would say, circum-
scribable. This scriptural condition is not at all surprising in a people of the
book and the letter who have never had access to the true similitude of
symbols. They are a people of the sign, always at a remove from meaning.
As for corporeal delineation, it is, of course, well known through the ways
in which the body is stylistically sublimated. Ugliness, like beauty, is, above
all, linear. “To look elegant, or not” (avoir la ligne, literally, to have a line):
here is an expression that speaks volumes, because it raises the question of
an identity that is integrated and complete, or one that is excommunicated
within a schema that can be either ideal or repulsive. This line in German
is Figur, by which it is understood that in order to show up well (faire
bonne figure, literally, to form a good face or figure) and to have access to
the face, it is necessary to be on the right side of the line; this, in turn, con-
cerns the silhouette where the unbreachable barrier between humans and
animals hangs in the balance. This is because in French, the term figure
refers ambivalently to the face and the silhouette, whereas in Anglo-Saxon
languages, it is completely swallowed up in the linearity of an outline, in
circumscription.
To have access to the face is to have access to visibility and the gaze.
Being invisible, the Jew is out of the frame, beyond the visible and the
gaze. Nonetheless, this intangible shadow must be located as quickly as
possible. This is the indexical function of the two-dimensional shadow of
the profile, whose specifics are, like a pointing finger, all those soft folds of
that face of the unformed; no more than a shadow, the nose dives down-
   

ward and obscures the mouth, the lip swells and obliterates the chin, the
forehead flees after having blocked the gaze. It is a face, a nocturnal,
crossed-out landscape, a shadowgraph that betrays itself despite itself to
those who can catch it by surprise from that angle where it can no longer
deceive anyone. Its profile, its finitude, its circumscribability are the para-
doxical correlates of what it signifies: the imperceptibility, the undefinabil-
ity, of death. The outer edges of his body are closed, it is a completed sign,
enclosed, defined. It refers to death, just as Christ’s uncircumscribable
body, in an entirely opposite way, promises the transfiguration of a border-
less face that refers to life: the borderlessness of the infinite, salvational Face
that is opposed to the enclosure of the profile of mortality. The Jewish
body is circumscribed, excluded from visible and redemptive inscription.
The profile is a line in a graphic and scriptural space. The Jew is rec-
ognized by his lines, writing, and form; he must be opposed, line by line,
to an antithetical profile of which he is nothing more than the emaciated
opposite, which is to say that he is excluded from the plan of incarnation
and salvation. His body is disembodied, which is to say, reduced to its non-
transfigured materiality only; he is constructed like an idol. A golden calf,
he is the gold and the animal that will be reduced to nothing. It is the God
of similitude who requires him for the economy of world salvation. A new
Delenda est.
Let us now turn our attention to some racist fantasies and commonly
used metaphors. Inevitably, we encounter the regressive, archaic uncon-
scious obsessed with animality and the diabolical. But it is also interesting
to move in the opposite direction, to return to the facts, both scientific and
imaginary, that once produced an ideal profile. The essentially non-Jewish
profile, that profile that is so un-Germanic, nonetheless haunts the corpo-
real image that the Aryan has of himself. I mean by this that famous pro-
file that obsesses and fascinates the West: the Greek profile. For if there is
indeed a profile that has dominated the spirit and process of the idealiza-
tion, the standardization, of the body, it is that famous Greek profile,
which emerges so gloriously in Greek sculpture. There, too, surprisingly, if
those who are obsessed with such canons are to be believed, from no mat-
ter what angle a Greek face is looked at, it always appears, like the Jewish
one, in profile. But the Greek face has the right kind of line. In Girau-
doux’s Intermezzo, the following extraordinary classroom dialogue takes
place: “What is a right angle?” And the class replies, “It is the angle that the
Greek nose makes with the Greek earth.”
 The Jew, Frontally and in Profile 

Could the ideal orthogonality of the body with the lands of empire
be any better expressed? Thus the abscissa and ordinate of the world have
become fixed and now await only an algebra of method for the two-di-
mensionality of reason to establish its well-tempered hegemony. In one
stroke, the Greek nose, that famous profile, engages the scriptural order of
rationality; such is the good line, the graph of the beautiful, delivered by
the Greek face.
In Gesture and Speech, André Leroi-Gourhan describes the probable
appearance of Neanderthal man: “Low wide skull, a receding forehead,
enormous orbital ridges . . . the lips set very high, and the chin nonexist-
ent.”2 The face evolves with the jaw drawing back and the facial bloc being
reduced relative to the forehead and the chin. In fact, the forehead comes
to dominate the entire facial structure. “The supraorbital bloc progressively
loses its function as the base of the facial structure diminishes in size until
it disappears altogether, for instance, as may be seen in most females to-
day.”3 In the process of freeing the frontal and temporal lobes from the
cerebral hemispheres, the key moment undoubtedly arrives with the well-
known prefrontal unbarring, which causes the bony supraorbital ridge that
overhangs the eyes to disappear at the same time as the brain is locked in
and the ensemble of symbolic functions develop. As Leroi-Gourhan notes,
“The most important palaeontological problem remains that of the freeing
of the forehead in Homo sapiens.”4
We can see from this description that the facial ideal of the Hell-
enized world corresponds to a celebration of that prefrontal unbarring as a
triumph of, first, hominization, and then humanization. In the Greek
Classical ideal, the nasal bridge is completely integrated into the structure
of the forehead. The Greek nose does not exist; there is only the triumph
of a profile absorbed into frontality, which functions as the signifier of the
concept of man himself, or more precisely, as the advent of the visible body
in its capacity as a sign that is identical to its own content. The conceptual,
theoretical hegemony of the Greek world thus constructed an imaginary
body that would continually keep at bay any paleolithic regression or ani-
mal debasement, and at the same time positioned vertebral straightening
and verticality as the correlate of frontality. The Greek body is neither bent
nor oblique; it is straight. It is an “orthotype,” as used to be said in .
In this connection, it is remarkable that the Greek ideal did not develop
any themes concerning face-to-face encounters, as did Christianity. In fact,
in visual terms, the face-to-face encounter was constituted, on the contrary,
   

in the very image of the unbearable face of the Gorgon, the mythological
figure of deadly sideration engendered by femininity. Its antitype is the
impeccably profiled face of Athena that faces up to things behind the
shield of its other face. What is set up here is rather an antagonism of pro-
file against profile, Semite against Greek, on the basis of a confrontation
between two scriptural conceptions. The ideal body is really the legible,
victorious sign of the logos that knows neither prefrontal barring nor bend-
edness, nor limpness, nor mortal shadow. It is a radiant image constructed
against an erased figure.
In the Germany of Lights, that face comes to occupy an exemplary
position that reliably prepares the sinister typologies of the future. Before
discussing how the Jew is excluded from the Face, however, let us consider
how he comes to be deprived of the right kind of profile.
The terms in which Greek sculpture is praised would be fitting for a
graphology of the intelligible, for the ideal inscription of the body in a
space with Leibnizian characteristics. The beautiful body is made of mar-
ble, that is, “hard and angular,” in the words of Winkelman, who admired
“the graceful geometrization of the face” in its ideal form in terms similar
to those of Schelling:
If we now look at this in more detail, we find that this abstract truth in the ren-
dering of the individual forms of the human body was based essentially on ex-
pressing the predominance of the spirit corporeally as well, and thus on empha-
sizing those organs that have spiritual or intellectual reference over those
possessing more a sensual or physical purpose. This is the basis of the so-called
Greek profile, which indicates nothing other than an emphasis of the more noble
parts of the head over the less noble.5

German philosophical texts praising the Greek corporeal ideal, too,

provide us with some understanding of the rationalized fantasy of the fu-
ture Aryan body. They also allow us to understand that ideological amal-
gam that constitutes the Jewish body as a non-Greek, indeed, even non-
Christian, body; on the one hand, we can discern his inaptitude for
thinking and knowledge, and on the other, his exclusion from any possi-
bility of redemption.
 The Jew, Frontally and in Profile 

The Positioning of the Jewish Profile:

Reversing the Signs

We can now see how, on the basis of the triumph of the orthogonal
and the linear, the profile became the corporeal paradigm of the regulators
of the knowable, governable universe. As result of this, a century later, the
Jewish profile would become both subject to control and abhorrent. It be-
comes controllable, theoretically speaking, by the very virtue of the profile
accorded to it. That profile attains the status of a theoretical equivalent be-
cause it relates to the double movement of writing and philosophical defi-
nition. In order for it to become abhorrent, all that had to be done was to
invert the canons that had initially been idealized. The Jewish profile is first
and foremost nothing but the reversal of discourse about the Greek profile.
It is the perverse reversal of bodily inscription, the writing of the body in
space, logos against writing. Neither of these two profiles exist any more
than the other, but the imaginary world that they relate to is inseparable
from the unique discourse that constitutes them, a discourse about the
body as a “pin-downable” linearity that is reversible at any moment. The
Jewish profile is nothing other than the dreaded opposite of the Greek pro-
file, so that both function mutually, as though in a mirror. Specularity
functions as an agent of reversal and inversion, and the inversion of signs
reveals the aberration that they hide. This reversal is remarkably illustrated
in a Nazi caricature: a charming young Englishwoman, nude, reads the
Times, and in the mirror opposite her, “Times” is quite naturally trans-
formed into “semiT.” The mirror itself is broken, and her misshapen re-
flection can also be seen in it.
Yet everything happens in this image as though in a new version of
the Narcissus story: he discovers his image, inverted. It is the image of his
own alterity, and this has the effect of shattering the mirror. And, as is of-
ten the case with tales of demons and ghosts, the mirror also serves to re-
veal depravity—whoever has no specular image belongs to hell and the
kingdom of the dead. What is remarkable in this instance, however, is that
the English girl, straight, fine, beautiful, and nude, turns out to be, sur-
prisingly, a bent, heavy, grimacing Jew, who diabolically offers her coun-
terpart the image of her own horrifying double, fully frontal, and with a
nose about which there can be no mistake. Here, it is the mirror itself that
is invested with the mission of unveiling the golden calf and of smashing
the deceitful idol. How better to express this duplication of the sign whose
   

meaning, by inverting itself, is unmasked as it delivers its truth? It is the

specular reversal of a graph that liberates the image into an abyss of horror.

The Face

There is, however, also a different standard that influences the ortho-
type. It is to be found in the Christian tradition of the Orthodox face, and
it is this face that opens the path to an impossible face-to-face encounter.
Here, a new reversal of signs concerns the Jewish body again: already exiled
from the logos and beauty, now it must be deprived of redemption.
Besides the fantasy sequence that constitutes the Jewish body into a
non-Greek body, an oblique, bent body unsuited to orthogonal inscription
with a thinker’s brow, another one, no less astonishing than the first, comes
into being that designates it as a non-Christian body. Just as the fate of the
Jewish figure cannot be understood without referring to the world of the
hellenized imaginary, so any consideration of the face must be based on the
dogmatic roots that established Christianity as the doctrine of a different
frontality, one of the visible image, a face-to-face encounter that succeeds
because it is redemptive. For this, we must turn to Byzantium, when the
question of the portrayal of a Jew’s face, Christ’s, was first debated. How
did that Jewish face come to have access to frontality? For simply by its
frontality, that Jew’s face is definitively abstracted from its roots. He is no
longer Jewish because he is seen face-on, as an enigma. One of the Persons
of the Trinity, he is prosopon, God’s eye and brow. He shows himself
frontally. It is he who passed on his Face: his Holy Face, a direct imprint,
the negative of a body that was able to win the rights to the New Testa-
ment sign, hence a salvational sign, on the two-dimensional surface of a
mandylion or shroud. Enveloped in its shroud, the body is inscribed there
in frontal symmetry.
Christ’s body is inscribed but not circumscribed. The ordinate of the
Greek nose and the abscissa of the Greek earth have become the coordi-
nates of a new graph of the divine face, trapped in the enigma of the Face.
It is Paul, the first craftsman of that face, who overcame the twin impasses
of Deuteronomy and the Gorgoneion. Deuteronomy does not allow repre-
sentation, a face-to-face encounter, or the mention of God’s name, and if
his name is not pronounceable, it goes without saying that the homonymy
on which iconicity is founded is impossible as well. Greece also did not al-
low an unbearable face-to-face encounter with the figure of death. The
 The Jew, Frontally and in Profile 

Greek profile is therefore also tied both to averting a face-to-face encounter

and mastering it by means of the graphic linearity of an inscriptive logos of
word and life. The homonymic iconicity of Christianity thus inverts the
signs of the Old Testament, just as it did those of Hellenism. Henceforth,
not only is the face-to-face encounter possible, it is both a doctrinal obli-
gation and the sign of the redemption.
Christ must never be represented in profile: body flat, frontal, face
without shading, each line or iconic trace producing a linear miracle. This
miracle is the triumphant honeymoon of the Greek profile and God’s face,
a profile without edges. Byzantine iconography shows this to its greatest
extent, this dazzling elaboration of the tangible operation that formalizes
both the face-to-face encounter in the visible and the legitimate and legit-
imizing pronunciation of God’s name. As Olivier Clément writes:
The icon offers us the truth of the face. . . . The forehead is broad and lumi-
nous. . . . It unites with the eyes; the luminous ridges and long, pure lines of the
eyebrows converge at the root of the nose, often marked by a sort of triangle. . . .
The movement of the wing-like eyebrows is extended towards the “terrestrial face”
of the mouth by the line of the nose: long, thin, composed of two lines. . . . The
mouth is perfectly well-defined, without heaviness but not without density, the
lower lip in general being a little shorter than the upper. . . . The cheeks are spaces
of silence.6

The technique of the icon is entirely normative, although whereas

Greek anatomy corresponds to its dialectical fate, Christ’s divine anatomy
deals fundamentally with economic concerns. The Greek profile has a log-
ical and ontological goal; Christ’s face has a soteriological goal. Once again,
the Jew is excluded.

The Prohibited Face

The Jews were not allowed to see God’s face. They were also sub-
jected to the prohibition of all representation and all homonymy, a prohi-
bition that deprives them forever of the gaze and makes them tip over into
the unpronouncability of their own name. Their regimental numbers will
suffice, their lack of distinction marked with a star. Then, by a sort of new
reversal, Judaism is interpreted by its opponents as being a sign of God
against his own people, as expressed in their own law. In Byzantine iconog-
raphy, on the other hand, the portrayal of God in profile is forbidden.
Conversely, several other subjects, including some profane scenes, Old Tes-
   

tament figures, and demons, are portrayed in profile: the woman carrying
a pitcher, and the child and ass from the fifth-century mosaic pavement in
Constantinople may be taken as illustrative examples.
Other examples of this phenomenon can also be found. In last judg-
ment scenes of the twelfth century, sinners in hell are portrayed in profile.
At Nerezi in Macedonia, Jews in profile can be seen entering Jerusalem,
and a Jewish woman holds a kitchen utensil at the birth of the Virgin. In
this connection as well, Leonid Ouspensky criticizes as uninspired a Ro-
man medallion from the third century with Sts. Peter and Paul in profile.
A fifteenth-century icon, by contrast, in which the same saints are frontally
represented, he praises because it is truthful: “Generally [the saints] are
turned to face the viewer frontally, or in a three-quarter view. This trait has
characterized Christian art since its birth. . . . In addressing our prayer to
a saint, we must do it face to face, we must converse with him. This is
doubtless the reason that saints are almost never represented in profile. . . .
The profile in some way interrupts direct contact.”7
Why, though, were the Jews subjected to this prohibition on seeing
the face and representing it? The reply is categorical: because they are a nat-
urally idolatrous people. God only imposes this categorical prohibition in
order to save his people from idolatry. But this will make no difference,
and they will founder in the sin of idolatry, doomed to the sacrificial fate
that is the mark of the idol.
The formal advantages of the profile are thus combined with gnoses
on the exchange of the gaze. The circumscribable character of the profile
disappears to the benefit of a face whose marks, linearity, are at the service
of the gaze, and signs are deployed that are both anthropomorphic and
conventional. The doctrine that supports this advent of God’s face clearly
states that the inscription of his gaze is the iconic equivalent of his speech.
Here is Clément again:
The icon is not a portrait. . . . It could be said that a portrait is a meeting at
the periphery, even if “realistic” appearances are still visible. . . . The icon shows
the person fully realized and open. . . . This is why one of the fundamental rules
of iconographic representation is frontality. An icon represents somebody face-
on. . . . A profile is already an absence. Or a domination: emperors and kings had
themselves represented in profile on medals and coins. We speak of those who ap-
pear in profile in the third person: he, him, the master, or not without contempt,
“that one, there.” But the icon introduces itself by pointing to me; it calls out to
me, says “you” to me, without itself being a me who is a subject. It is rather an in-
teriority that is both effaced and luminous, and from which the infinite can shine
 The Jew, Frontally and in Profile 

forth. . . . And last but not least, the Christian face gazes and welcomes. The du-
ality of the gaze that has become good is maintained. Silence feeds the promise of
a word, while the Buddhist non-face with its eyes closed gathers its thoughts in a
silence that can have no further limits.8

There is not much point in commenting here on the Buddhist non-

face, the contemplation of which Clément finds not very welcoming; what
is important in this description of the Christian face is the immediate as-
sociation that he makes with naming. He interprets the two-dimensional-
ity of the face-to-face encounter as the union of the earth and sky, and the
warding off of absence. Clément also speaks for the faceless sinner, aproso-
pon; whoever does not have God has no face. He speaks, too, of Christ’s
maximum face: whoever rejects Christ has a minimum face. All that re-
mains to him is the wisp of life given him by the thread or line from which
his existence sways, imageless and nameless, deprived of the gaze.
Psychoanalysis would be able to follow the imaginary development
of the forbidden, wicked body step by step, and to explain its archaic roots
quite clearly. Everything that has been said here about the impossible im-
age of the Jew deprived of essential similitude could also be restated in
terms of the pure and the impure. The Jew is a dividing spirit who can
never mix the sacred and the profane together. His whole ritual consists in
avoiding mixture and preserving what is holy from any contaminating
contact and contagion. The things of this world to which he is said to be
so passionately attached consequently become the sign of his true attach-
ment to idolatry and the devil. A man of division, he cannot reconcile
temporal interests with spiritual benefits. I would argue that it is most im-
portant today to link the dreadful construction of the Jewish body not to
an unconscious, regressive will or animal fear, but on the contrary, to an
ideological system powerfully formulated by the foundational authorities
and institutions of the West: Greek thought and Christian vocabulary. It is
certainly clear that both made unrestrained use of the frissons of horror
aroused by a fear of bestiality and death. Thus it came about that the im-
age of a body that had lost its rights in the name of humanity and in the
gaze of God was created, using the most seemingly coarse methods.
We thus catch a glimpse of just what the image of the Jewish body
was, and there was certainly nothing simple about it. We also see that it can
only be understood on the basis of another imaginary body partly identi-
fied with the church, and partly with Reason. Although Nazi imagery in its
most repugnant form is no longer explicitly widespread today, the under-
   

handed and devastating hegemony of “ideal” images of the body spread by

the different media still attacks us relentlessly, and in a universe filled with
canons threatens the intimate perception that each of us has of ourselves. In
, while in Cracow to make a film about the ghetto, Steven Spielberg
had a notice posted recruiting “extras with a Jewish profile.” The recon-
struction of the scene must have been convincing indeed, because, as Le
Monde recounted the story, the producer shouted at the exhausted, frozen
extras, “Who let these people out of the camp? Get back to your places im-
mediately! From now on, the guards will lock the camp gates.”9 It can only
be hoped that America the Redemptive will be able to provide American
Jews with a harmonious body finally worthy of immunity and salvation.
Organized repulsion today stamps the paths of a standardized ideal-
ization and an aesthetic aimed at global forms of seduction. Far from the
heterogenous forms that the essential similitude of the image tolerated, the
exhibition of flawless bodies deprives us of the enigma of the flesh. Visi-
bility has taken the place of the image, to the point of breaking the mirror in
which those who were refused a gaze dared to look at themselves. The mir-
ror is nothing more than a mimetic agent. Responsible for resemblance, it
also kills similitude. In this way, resemblance becomes, paradoxically, a
weapon of discrimination: not bearing resemblance can be a crime, and
consensual thought comes to haunt uniform bodies.
Thus has the imaginal economy completely sunk beneath the indus-
try of visibilities. But have we forgotten that it is in the mercantile belly of
collective narcissism that the sordid beast has always laid its first eggs?

Conclusion

When one is still in the process of thinking through an issue, it al-

ways feels artificial, or even presumptuous, to end on a definite note, to
close off the subject. This is all the more true here, because this study was
conceived in the form of an open meditation, an ongoing questioning.
This applies as much to the subject we have been examining as to the cur-
rent, singular condition of the image. I had rather wanted to speak about
the current condition of the visible, which ceaselessly demands that we re-
flect on what there is of the image in it at the heart of a world submerged
by techniques of visualization. The image never allows itself to be fully
grasped. There is always an uncircumscribability within it that the church
fathers continually claimed was at the heart of the very inscription of the
 The Jew, Frontally and in Profile 

visible. What they religiously described as invisible is undoubtedly that

enigmatic resistance to any closure. We will never succeed in subjugating
it; in this sense, it shines like the figure of liberty. The extraordinary theo-
retical virtuosity of the first great thinkers about the image is to have tied
this living insubordination of the image so closely to the visible inscription
of temporal power, thanks to the concept of the economy. This was so suc-
cessfully carried out that through iconicity a double-sided object was
formed, a Janus of both liberty and despotism. Visibilities became the
means to subjugate, and in many cases the wars prosecuted against idola-
try were inspired by the sole concern of choking off the turbulent insubor-
dination of troublesome or vanquished visibilities. The question that must
be posed today is this: in the rising tide of things to see, what image will we
be left with on the shore when it retreats? Where is that rebel who will be
the embodiment of our current freedom?
Astonishingly, those who are delighted by this state of affairs are
tempted to believe, and to have us believe, that what we see on the screen
has the right to the name of image. The technical ability and digital preci-
sion that underpin these visual effects are almost enough to convince us
that, from now on, a faultless image will produce a true image. By the same
stroke, the screen becomes the site where the simulacrum of the truth is dis-
played. And to go into ecstasy about resemblance and simulation! Nothing
is stranger to the image than this perfect intelligibility of a model that un-
reservedly gives itself up to iconicity. This equivalence of the visible to its
model makes us believe in the equivalence of vision to the gaze, creating tri-
umphant intoxication and anguish by turn concerning the loss of the sense
of self. But inventions born of a desire to see should not be confused with
scenes motivated by the desire to show. A nonenigmatic display can harbor
no invisibility other than that of the procedures that produced it. It is only
a trick of the professional magician, with the pleasure of the spectacle being
shared between the spectator’s belief and the complete power of the ring-
master showman; the issue is therefore one that concerns the relationship
that ties belief to power. We have already seen the way this plays out in a
secular context. The system is ecclesiastic, even if the church no longer has
a monopoly over it. But it was the church that provided the model.
Against the new clergy of this economy of the visible, there arises a
group of people who would like to return its enigma to it. Yet they find
themselves reduced to the old standby, produced whenever a worldview is
rejected, of crying idolatry. That, however, is a regressive reaction that will
never be able to enrich our icons, to give them the free, creative dynamism
   

that they need. It is even possible that this iconic inflation may also bring
about a profound reevaluation of speech itself and of real contact.
The object of our inquiry has been the image, but we have been re-
duced to knowing it only in its perceptible manifestations, that is to say, in
terms of whether its enigma is maintained or betrayed; always at a distance
from the visible, it is also inscribed in our carnal reality. The image is in-
separable from the incarnation, whereas simulacra make us doubt the flesh
and deprive us by the same stroke of our mortality and our liberty. Visual
communion, by contrast, is truly an incorporation.
What makes the image enigmatic is its absence of mystery. The in-
visibility within it is not hidden; on the contrary, it shows itself. Its
enigma is not a secret; it does not rest on any hidden or private knowl-
edge. It is the enigma of all living flesh haunted by the voice. That voice
articulates the manifestation of what the very desire to see, in and of itself,
produces: desire.
Christian thought has the major distinction of having provided a for-
mulation for the linkage between our carnal intimacy and the imaginal
voice, and therefore the world of the imaginary as well, for the very first
time. But that is not its only merit: by the same stroke, it also produced a
globalizing system for the administration and management of visible arte-
facts. The spiritual and political ambivalence of the iconic economy is not
a perverse effect of that doctrine, but an intrinsic consequence of our rela-
tion to the visible. The reign established on the truth of the image cannot,
in any way, be a reign of ontological truth. Truth is an image: there is no
image of truth.
An economy of resemblance can only be based on the concept of a
nonmimetic invisibility of similitude. This does not mean that it is an
empty concept; rather, it is a concept of the image that requires an empti-
ness at the heart of visibility. Real resemblances are only ever relative to
imaginary similitude and never its duplicate. The flood of modern visibil-
ities and the most sophisticated technologies of simulation are still only the
most naive tricks of duplication and substitution. Nonetheless, the finan-
cial and political power that these tricks mobilize turns them into lethal
weapons arrayed against the world of the imaginary itself, as long as those
apparitions empty us of our flesh instead of incarnating the emptiness that
would allow our own image to arise. For some time at least, the desire to
show and subjugate will prevail over respect for the desire to see and the re-
quirement to incarnate. Perhaps it is there that the ethical question in the
management of the visible lies.
 The Jew, Frontally and in Profile 

What is the Christian church doing today in relation to the manage-

ment of the iconic question, that is to say, of worldly visibilities? How can
it remain faithful to the incarnational economy without thereby depriving
itself of an instrument for spreading its message? For worldwide subjuga-
tion was always its primary concern. To be interested in ecclesiastic
thought does not necessarily mean agreeing with the anxieties of the faith-
ful or the concerns of the prelate, but rather rediscovering in the vocabu-
lary of their questions and the economy of their reasoning a problem com-
mon to the entire world covered by the media. The church perfectly
understood that whoever monopolizes visibility conquers thought itself
and determines the shape of liberty. From the specific standpoint of pro-
voking belief or obtaining obedience, there are no great differences be-
tween submitting to a church council or to CNN. Yet while CNN deploys
its weapons through the obvious monopoly of its news and with the clear
determination to dominate, the church continues to hold forth about the
incarnation and the living enigma of the image. It is not looking for the
simple effect of credulity, even if it is sometimes content with it; rather, it
spreads its charisma liturgically, although it is a charisma in which faith is
distinct from belief. Yet for several centuries, it has simultaneously man-
aged both faith and belief. The producers of visibilities are themselves only
interested in our belief, our powerful adherences, our consensus. The
church still maintains a double discourse of spirituality and conquest.
Overflowing with those who have followed it too closely for more than a
thousand years, it can only fear losses on the same terrain where it had pre-
viously won it all. Will it have to remain faithful to its message, or will it
adapt to a world that dictates new conditions of supremacy to it? Wanting
to remain faithful to the desire to make manifest an enigma, it cannot re-
solve itself to abandoning the benefits of the visible. Parousia or spectacle?
Communion or communication? The ecclesiastic economy thus faces a
major problem whose formulation and solution concern the entire human
race, whether Christian or not. What becomes of human bodies, of their
participation in an imaginary life of similitude, what becomes of their de-
sire to see, and in what place can they still constitute a face for themselves
to make manifest their intimate and existential resistance to large-scale re-
semblance? In a world of simulation, what does our flesh become? What
can we resemble? What appearance of ourselves are the screens screening?
We saw earlier that the incarnation is not the materialization of thought,
but on the contrary, the transfiguration of the flesh that gives substance to
the imagination. Long ago, ghosts were figures of death; from now on,
   

ghosts will form the flesh of the living. If the pope can bless one of the
faithful on his knees in front of the television set, if the eucharist can radi-
ate its grace simply by digitizing or cloning the image of an officiant, it is
because the whole of our world has tipped over into a new worldwide Do-
cetism. The era of simulacra has taken the place of the era of the image, of
icons, and the word, all of which were originally indistinguishable from
each other.
Between the praise of those who believe without seeing and the cele-
bration of those who docilely adhere to everything that they see, every-
thing that they are shown, Christian thought finds itself in the difficult sit-
uation of having to renounce either its message or its authority. This is a
purely economic problem that the hierarchy will undoubtedly be able to
resolve through encyclicals and pastoral warnings, just as it did a thousand
years ago when it became necessary to negotiate between doctrinal rigor
and the imperatives of reality. Our concern does not lie there. It relates,
rather, to meeting our philosophical responsibility within the doctrinal ed-
ifice that has shaped our world, which consists in thinking through, at the
very heart of visual tyranny, the management and administration of our
incarnation and the vitality of our desire for the image. Can we ever
emerge from the traditional network of the imaginal economy? The exam-
ple of the Jewish face demonstrates that as long as one is within that econ-
omy, any distance from it is paid for at the cost of a massacre. The enemy
of dominant visibilities is always expelled and sent to the camp of idolaters
and idols destined for ritual sacrifice. Have we not theatrically described as
“holocaust” something that should only be labeled a crime, something that
should never be allowed to evoke the sacred? The collective unconscious re-
mains subjugated to the reign of iconicity.
There is a great temptation in situations such as this to return to na-
ture and to attempt to bring about in the domain of the image what ecol-
ogy dreams of doing to save the planet. It is in this sense that I have spo-
ken from the outset of an abrupt return to iconicity under the auspices of
a return to an imaginal and redemptive truth, a sort of ecology of the im-
age that would come to take over from the economy, or that would occupy
the same conceptual terrain that the “spiritual” did at the turn of this cen-
tury. Humanity will return to its similitude in the same way that the earth
will be given back to humans, the forest to the trees, and the sea to the fish:
an era of decontamination and global moralization conceived as the salva-
tional hygiene of a return. Nature and icon will once again become a uni-
 The Jew, Frontally and in Profile 

versal language, not without paschal tonalities. That, however, is the worst
of the ideological consequences of the disarray engendered by the panicked
despondency of philosophical thought. When the world changes, it must
carry thought along with it; thought must follow the world and give it its
living intelligibility. It must reformulate both its enigma and its meaning.
Nikephoros interests me because, finding himself in the same situation, he
threw himself into a struggle with his own system of thought at an inop-
portune moment. He created his object, he fashioned his enemy, he strug-
gled with language and concepts. In his eyes, the imaginary power of the
visible was under threat. The world’s thought, and the world along with it,
were at risk of disappearing. He feared for life as a whole more than for his
own, and his motivation was passionate.
The imaginary annihilation of the realm of the visible can only re-
launch the existential claims of the word more violently than ever; it is that
which guarantees the presence of the enigma, or in other words, it is that
which inspires the shape of new invisibilities in the visible. At present,
everything can be seen, and the whole world devotes itself to itself as spec-
tacle. In this new space, however, it is incumbent on thinkers and creators
alike to devote themselves to fostering the emergence of sites where the im-
age can curl up and await us to show itself. It is up to us to compose our-
selves for the new face-to-face encounter, up to us to be done with belief
and its “holocausts.”
Extracts from the Iconoclast Horos of Hieria

[ C–D] The aforesaid creator of evil, not wishing to see her [the
church] being comely, did not refrain from using at different times differ-
ent means of wicked ingenuity in order to subdue the human race to his
power; thus, with the pretext of Christianity, he reintroduced idolatry un-
noticeably by convincing, with his subtleties, those who had their eyes
turned to him not to relinquish the creation but rather to adore it, and pay
respect to it, and consider that which is made as God, calling it with the
name “Christ.”

[ D] For this reason, therefore, Jesus, the author and agent of our
salvation, as in the past he had sent forth his most wise disciples and apos-
tles with the power of the most Holy Spirit in order to eliminate com-
pletely all these idols, so also now he raised his devotees, our faithful
kings—the ones comparable to the Apostles, who have become wise by
the power of the same Spirit—in order to equip and teach us, as well as to
abolish the demonic fortifications which resist the knowledge of God,1 and
to refute diabolic cunning and error.2

[ D] We considered it, therefore, right to demonstrate in detail,

through our present definition [horos], the error of those who make and
those who pay respect to the icons.3

[ E] What is this senseless contrition on the part of the painter of

caricatures4 who, for the sake of cheap profiteering, has occupied himself
in doing something that cannot be done, that is, with profane hands giv-
ing form to things that are believed with the heart and confessed with the
mouth?5
 Extracts from the Iconoclast Horos of Hieria

[ A–B] For he has made an icon that he has called “Christ.”6 But
“Christ” is a name [indicative] of God as well as man; from which it fol-
lows that the icon must be an icon of God as well as man. Consequently,
along with describing created flesh, he has either circumscribed the uncir-
cumscribable character of the Godhead, according to what has seemed
good to his own worthlessness, or he has confused that unconfused union,
falling into the iniquity of confusion. Thus, in two ways, with the circum-
scription [périgraphè] and the confusion [synkhysis], he has blasphemed the
Godhead. The one who has venerated them [the icons] is also responsible
for the same blasphemies. Both [he who paints and he who venerates] are
equally to be condemned because they have fallen into error along with Ar-
ius, Dioscorus, and Eutyches, and into the heresy of the Acephaloi.

[ A] From those, therefore, who think that they are drawing the
icon of Christ, it must be gathered either that the divinity is circumscrib-
able and confused with the flesh or that the body of Christ was without di-
vinity and divided; and also that they ascribe to the flesh a person with a
hypostasis of his own—thus, in this respect, identifying themselves with
the Nestorian fight against God.
[ B] Those, therefore, who make, and those who desire, and those
who pay respect7 to the icon of Christ, which falsely is made and called so
by them, should feel ashamed and embarrassed, and should be reproached
for falling into such an impiety and blasphemy. Let them be far from us—
Nestorius’ division and Arius’, Dioscorus’, Eutyche’s, and Severus’ confu-
sion—two evils diametrically opposite to each other, but equal in impiety.

[ E] Let those who enact, desire, and respect the true [apseudès:
nondeceiving] icon of Christ with a most honest heart, and who offer
themselves to salvation, both soul and body, rejoice, exalt, and become out-
spoken. It is the celebrant himself and God who, when he assumed from
us our entire composition, handed this [icon] down to his initiates, at the
time of his voluntary passion, in place of [himself ] and as a most visible re-
membrance [of him]. For, when he was about to offer himself voluntarily
to his ever memorable and life-giving death, taking the bread, he blessed
it, and, after he gave thanks, he broke it, and passing it on, he said: “Take,
eat, for the remission of sins; this is my body.” Similarly, passing on the
cup, he said: “This is my blood; do this in remembrance of me.”8 He did
so because there was no other kind or visible form under the sun selected
 Extracts from the Iconoclast Horos of Hieria 

by him which could depict his incarnation. Here is, therefore, the icon of
his body, the giver of life, which is enacted honestly and which has the
right to be honored. For what else did the all-wise God want to achieve
through this? Nothing else but to show, to make abundantly evident to us,
the mystery accomplished in his economy. That is, in the same way as that
which he assumed from us is a mere matter of human substance, perfect in
every respect, which, however, is not characterized as a Person with a hy-
postasis of its own—in this way no addition of a Person may occur in the
Godhead—so did he command [ B] that the icon also be matter as
such; that is, he commanded that the substance of bread be offered that
does not yield the shape of a man’s form, so that idolatry may not be in-
troduced indirectly. Therefore, as the natural body of Christ is holy, as it
has been deified, so, obviously, is the one which is in its place [by conven-
tion]; that is, his icon is also holy as one which becomes deified by grace,
through an act of consecration.9 For this is what the Lord Christ specified,
as we have said; so that, in the same way that he deified the flesh which he
assumed by the union of it with the sanctity of his own nature, so did he
the bread of the eucharist. He consented that this become a holy body—
as a true [nondeceiving] icon of the natural flesh—consecrated by the de-
scent of the Holy Spirit and through the mediation of the priest who
makes the offer in order that the bread be transferred from the state of be-
ing common to that of being holy. Thus, the physical and cogitating flesh
of the Lord was anointed with divinity through the Holy Spirit. Similarly
also, the icon of his flesh, handed down by God, the divine bread along
with the cup of his life-giving blood from his side, was filled with the Holy
Spirit. This is, therefore, the icon that has been proven to be the true icon
of the incarnate economy of Christ our God, as it has been stated before;
and it is this one that the true Creator of the life of the world has handed
down to us with his own words.

[ B] The ill name of the falsely called “icon” neither has its exis-
tence [ C] in the tradition of Christ, or the apostles, or the church fa-
thers, nor is there any prayer of consecration for it to transpose it from the
state of being common to the state of being sacred. Instead, it remains
common and worthless, as the painter made it.

[ C] How do they also dare to depict through the vulgar art of the
pagans the all-praised mother of God, upon whom the fullness of the God-
 Extracts from the Iconoclast Horos of Hieria

head10 cast his shadow and through whom the inaccessible light did shine
on us—she who is higher than the heavens and holier than the cherubim?
Or again, those who will reign11 with Christ and sit along with him to
judge the world,12 and who will be as glorious as he13 of whom, as the
Word says, the world was not worthy?14 Are they not ashamed to depict
them through a pagan art? For it is not lawful for Christians, who have
their hope in the resurrection, to use the customs of nations that worship
demons, and to treat so spitefully, by means of worthless and dead matter,
the saints who will be resplendent with such glory.

[ C–E] Having been constituted firmly by these blessed scriptures

inspired by God, and by the church fathers, and having fixed our feet with
certainty on the stone of worshipping in spirit and in truth, we all, who
have been vested with the office of the priesthood, having reached one
opinion, we decree unanimously, in the name of the holy and supersub-
stantial Trinity, the principle of life, that every icon, made of any matter
and of any kind of gaudiness of colors by painters, is objectionable, alien,
and repugnant to the church of the Christians.

[ B–C] No man should ever attempt to occupy himself with such
an impious and unholy endeavor. He who from now on attempts to make
an icon, or to venerate one, or to set one up in a church or in a private
home, or to hide one, if [he be] bishop, presbyter, or deacon, let him be
unfrocked; if monk or layman, let him be anathematized and subjected to
the royal laws, as an opponent of the commandments of God and an en-
emy of the doctrines of the church fathers.

[ E] If anyone endeavors, through material colors, to understand

the divine impress of God the Word according to his incarnation, and not
to offer adoration to him—who is beyond the brightness of the sun and is
seated at the right side of God in the highest on a throne of glory—with
his spiritual eyes and with all his heart, let him be anathema.

[ C] If anyone endeavors to circumscribe with material colors in

icons, in an anthropomorphic way, the uncircumscribable essence and hy-
postasis of God the Word, because of the incarnation, and not to predicate
him as God—being not less uncircumscribable, even after the incarna-
tion—let him be anathema.
 Extracts from the Iconoclast Horos of Hieria 

[ C] If anyone attempts to paint in an icon the undivided hypo-

static union of the nature of God the Word along with that of the flesh—
which two resulted in one, which is unconfused and undivided—calling
this “Christ,” while the name Christ implies God and man, and as a result
of this one proclaims absurdly a confusion of the two natures, let him be
anathema.

[ A] If anyone sets aside the flesh that was united with the hy-
postasis of God the Word, thinking of it as mere flesh, and consequently,
endeavors to describe it in an icon, let him be anathema.

[ C] If anyone divides the one Christ into two hypostases, placing
in one part the Word of God and in the other the Son of the Virgin Mary,
and if he does not confess that there is one and the same Christ, but rather
that there was only a nominal union between them, and if he consequently
describes in an icon the Son of the Virgin, as if this had a hypostasis of its
own, let him be anathema.

[ E] If anyone depicts in an icon the flesh that was deified by the
union with the divine Logos, let him be anathema, because he separates
the flesh from the divinity that assumed and deified it, and as a conse-
quence he renders it undeified.

[ C] If anyone attempts to reform with material colors God the

Word, who though he was in the form of God took upon his own hy-
postasis the form of a servant, and became like us in every respect, without
sin, for being supposedly a mere man, and if one separates him from the
inseparable and unchangeable divinity—this way introducing a fourth Per-
son in the Holy Trinity, the principle of life—let him be anathema.

[ A–B] If anyone does not acknowledge that the ever-virgin Mary
is indeed and truly the mother of God, and that she is exalted above any
creature, visible and invisible, and if he does not entreat her intercession
with sincere faith, as having audience with our God to whom she gave
birth, let him be anathema.

[ C] If anyone endeavors to reinstate the effigies of the saints in

inanimate and speechless icons made of material colors, which bring no
 Extracts from the Iconoclast Horos of Hieria

benefit—for the idea [of the icon] is vain and an invention of diabolic cun-
ning—and does not rather reproduce in himself their virtues through
what has been written about them in books, like animate icons, conse-
quently to incite in himself the zeal to become like them, as our church fa-
thers inspired by God have said, let him be anathema.
Extracts from the Antirrhetics, by Nikephoros,
Patriarch of Constantinople

[ A] So the Iconoclast adds immediately: “and if the icon is good,

it is consubstantial with what it is the icon of.”1 Therefore, you do not sim-
ply object that an image is made of Christ, but [you object] [ B] that
the iconic copy is heterogenous to him, because Christ is one thing and the
material out of which his icon is made is another. Is it not ridiculous to fo-
cus on this? Because not even second-rate actors, or those entertainers that
people strike on the head to make fun of would have talked such nonsense.
But he, in the Bacchic drunkenness of an unbeliever, and being mad by the
power of impiety, did say such things. But this is extreme sophistry and
everything that has been done by him is in vain. Yet there are some who
have reached such a degree of ignorance and irrationality that they think
that they have observed something interesting in it. Therefore, it is neces-
sary for us to examine things that are really unnecessary. Indeed, what is
more irrational or [ C] more unintelligible than the things that have
been said? For they are not from a man who respects logical coherence. If
his intention were the natural image, which is absolutely opposed to the ar-
tificial image [icon], and I mean the Son who is the image of the Father, his
argument might have been tenable. He has failed, though, by using the
copy here in an unintelligent way, because there is no need here for copies
nor for objects to be aimed at by our sight. This is not the place to talk
about copies: this is more unintelligible and more impious than that. He
explicitly appears to make his argument starting from strange and irrecon-
cilable premises.
Now, because his argument is about copies and artificial images,
which consist of [ D] the material base, and the technique and the tal-
ent of the artisan, who among sensible people will tolerate hearing him
saying that the copy and the icon are consubstantial with the prototype?
First, he is mistaken in regarding as one and the same thing essence and
 Extracts from the Antirrhetics

art, which differ from each another considerably. Indeed, the creator and
the craftsman of all things, God, brought nature from nonbeing into be-
ing. Art imitates nature without the former being identical to the latter.
On the contrary, having taken the natural, visible form as a model and as
a prototype, art makes something similar and alike, as is possible to see in
most artworks. But then he is diverted away from plausible reason when he
asserts in his definition that the animate does not differ at all from the
inanimate, that their essence is identical. [ A] Thus, because man, for
example, is animate, so must his icon also be animate, and so must his
copy. Both the colors and the remaining inanimate material from which
the icon has been made must have exactly the same nature as man. It
would be necessary, then, according to this argument, that the man and his
icon share the same definition and be related to each other as consubstan-
tial things. So, just as a man falls under the same definition as another
man, so does the copy. And if man is a rational animal, mortal, capable of
intelligence and knowledge, then the icon will be a rational animal, mor-
tal, and in a similar way capable of intelligence and knowledge without the
slightest difference. But it is impossible that what only resembles some-
thing else can entirely reach the whole truth of the model. This is con-
firmed by truth itself and also by the best theologians.2 Truthful discourse
knows that man himself differs from himself, for he is composed of het-
erogeneous natures, by which I mean the soul and the body, [ B] even
if the man composed of those two elements is one and the same. Each of
these elements has its own proper definition. The definition of the soul dif-
fers from that of the body, and each of them has its own differences and ac-
cidents. For we are composite, but we are also opposite to ourselves and
also to one another. But he believes that copies do not differ in anything at
all from the models that they are the copies of, and that the identity of na-
ture and substance between elements that share only resemblance is purely
maintained. But how could someone distinguish the image from the copy
if there is no difference between them, resulting from their different na-
tures? He has therefore been completely separated from the truth, this wis-
est man of all, and he has failed greatly in his understanding of reality. It is
worthwhile to say to him: “It has escaped your notice, you, the greatest
philosopher, [ C] that here you are caught in your own arguments.” In-
deed, according to you, insofar as the image must be consubstantial with
the prototype, and insofar as you yourself will agree in every way that the
image is circumscribable (for none would be as mad as to argue that this is
 Extracts from the Antirrhetics 

not the case), then you will agree that the prototype must be circumscrib-
able, because it is consubstantial with the image. For it is absolutely not
possible that consubstantial things differ from one another as far as the
principle of substance is concerned, unless you yourself subsume both the
circumscribable and the uncircumscribable under the principle of sub-
stance. So, if you maintain the principles of your doctrine, your con-
trivance is ruined and your arguments are thrown to the ground, merci-
lessly overthrown by the slingshot and weapons of truth. Indeed, it would
have to be the case that the disciples [ D] who have emerged today
from teachers like these are similar to them. “The crops are similar to the
soil from which they emerge; the worst come from bad soil, and the foulest
come from foul soil.”
Having still the same ideas, or to put it better, the same madness, he
says: “in order to save the totality, there must be no icon.”3 All these result
from his insanity and his stupidity. Indeed, those who have sane minds and
who maintain coherence and congruity in their words will argue, rather, the
opposite—that if the totality is saved, it is not the icon but what is itself de-
picted in the icon [that is saved]. [The icon and its model’s] identity is only
manifest in the visible form, not in their underlying substance. It is assumed
by him that if the icon is not animate and does not move itself, [ A] and
if it does not have all the attributes of its archetype, it cannot be an icon. If
all these attributes do not belong to the icon, then for him the raison d’être
of the icon is altogether lost. What then is the consequence? It follows that
one and the same thing is at the same time both one and two, but also that
icons and archetypes find themselves identified with each other, and that
the icon resembles the archetype and, inversely, the archetype resembles the
icon. As if, for example, when talking about a man, it were said not that his
icon resembles him but that he resembles his icon. It is as though even if the
existing relationship between the icon and the archetype were reversed, their
relationship would remain the same and unchangeable, and it could be said
that not only is there an icon of a man, but also that there is a man of an
icon. On this premise, from this point on, one could wonder which of the
two is the cause of the other and antecedent to the other. All these clearly
prove his intelligence! [ B] Do such inventions not result from a dis-
honest and misled mind? Such a risk he took of being so inattentive to the
true nature of things and of inhabiting places so far from the truth. These
[inventions] are not better than the rambling tales sung by drunken old
women in the gynaecium,4 in endless verses.
 Extracts from the Antirrhetics

[ A] It is clear to those who are sober that it is possible to say, with
respect to the topic under discussion, that the archetype is the principle
and the model underlying the visible form that is made from it, as well as
the cause from which the resemblance derives. This is the definition of the
icon such that one could use it for all artificial icons: an icon is a likeness of
the archetype, and on it is stamped, by means of its resemblance, the whole
of the visible form of what it is a likeness of, and it is distinct from its
model only in terms of a different essence because of its material. Or [an-
other definition]: an icon is an imitation of the archetype and a copy dif-
fering [from the model] in its essence and in its underlying substance. Or
[it is] a product of art portraying the visible form of the archetype by imi-
tating it, but it differs from the model in its essence and its underlying sub-
stance. Indeed, if the icon does not differ in anything [from the archetype],
then it is not an icon, but nothing other than the archetype itself. Thus the
icon is a likeness and a replica of beings who have their own existence.

[ B] But the idol is the formation of nonexistent and insubstan-

tial things, forms that the Hellenes, because of their stupidity and atheism,
invented, such as tritons, centaurs, and other nonexistent phantoms. This
is why the icon and the idol differ from each other, so that those who do
not accept the difference between them could justly be called idolaters. But
icons can be icons of both good and bad people, and so the honor that is
due to them is variable. The icons of the good are to be honored, but those
of bad people are to be dismissed and to be avoided as much as idols, above
all, those which some ancients, immersed in evil and atheism, venerated
impiously, [ C] failing to recognize the God of the universe and the pri-
mary cause. Such is the result of the obsession of those addicted to their
passions and to material things, and it is also the result of the tyranny that
transgresses the institutional limits of the honor that he deserves.5 This is
why one cannot use the word idol for a good icon, because that term is
specifically reserved for the pagan cult rendered to demons through sacri-
fices, as the Apostle says.6
It is not inopportune now, I think, to add to my speech that the icon
is related to the archetype and that it is the effect of a cause. Therefore, it
is necessary that the icon both be one of these relatives and be called such.
The relatives, these very same things, depend on things other than them-
selves and change their relationships reciprocally.7 [ D] For example,
the father is called the father of his son, and inversely, the son is called the
 Extracts from the Antirrhetics 

son of his father. In a similar way we can talk about the friend of a friend,
and about the right of the left, and, inversely, about the left of the right.
Similarly, the master is the master of the slave and inversely, and the same
can be applied to all similar cases. Anyone who asserts that the icon does
not concern a relation could no longer assert that it is an icon of some-
thing. The icon and the archetype are introduced and are considered si-
multaneously, the one with the other. Even if the archetype is absent, the
relation does not in the least cease to exist.
[ A] Indeed, the principle of the simultaneous abolition of the
terms of the relationship does not apply to all such cases. There are times,
indeed, when relationships are maintained unchanged, even when they are
torn away from and deprived of the real terms of that relation, as in the
case of the father and son, and in similar relations. Making visible, as if it
were present, what is absent through similitude and memory of the out-
ward form, the icon preserves the relationship with its model, which is ex-
tended in time. Consequently, then, the resemblance is a kind of middle
relation that mediates between the extreme terms: I mean the thing re-
sembled and what resembles it, uniting them by the visible form and re-
lating them, even if the terms are different in nature. For one of them is
“one thing” and the other is “another thing” in nature.8 But we cannot talk
about one person and another person, because [only] the model itself is
one (other) person. Indeed, the knowledge of the primary visible form
emerges by means of the graphic impression, and [ B] the hypostasis of
the inscribed person can be seen in this impression.9 This is the very thing
that is not possible to see in some other cases, as in that of the father, the
son, or the friend. Exactly the opposite happens here, for it is not one thing
here and another there, because they participate in the same essence. But
there is one person here and another person there, each having different
hypostases. If, then, the relationship between the terms of the preceding
examples does not completely vanish, the relationship between [the icon
and its model] will be maintained to a far greater extent. Moreover, the re-
semblance confers homonymy [on them]. The name is one and the same
for both [the icon and the model]. The icon of the king is called “the king.”
The icon could say: “the king and I are one thing,” despite the evident fact
that they are different in essence. We have said these [things] in order to
demonstrate the way in which the image, which is considered together
with the archetype, is related to it. [ C] Neither has the image acquired
the same identity as the archetype in terms of its essence, nor are the prop-
 Extracts from the Antirrhetics

erties that are attributed to the archetype said to belong to the icon. It is
not the case, anyway, that attributes that belong to the icon can be attrib-
uted to the archetype. Indeed, the model may be animate, but the icon is
inanimate. The model may be rational and able to move, but the icon is
without reason and motionless. Consequently, these two are not identical,
but they resemble each other in their visible form and differ from each
other in essence. It is because the icon is one of the relatives that it is glori-
fied jointly with the glorified model, and, inversely, why it is dishonored
along with the dishonored model. Thus, once the difference between them
has become known by means of reason and of definition, and because in-
scription [graphé] shows the external form and does not participate in the
least in the definition of essence, then why are our adversaries so vainly ag-
itated, preaching that things that are naturally united are separated here?
They will be justly considered as mad and deranged.
[ D] And it is necessary to say where the term icon derives from
and how it was formed according to its etymology, we say that it comes
from the verb eikô, which has other meanings, but properly means: “I am
similar.” Thus, the letter “n” is added to the verb eikô, resulting in the word
eikon, which signifies likeness. That is why the enemies of truth treat [the
icon] that resembles Christ spitefully. From this verb, exactly from one
principle and one root, the verb eoike is formed, which itself means “to be
(or to make) similar.” [ A] Because this is the case, who among the
knowledgeable is not aware of the fact that the icon of Christ is different
from Christ himself ? Only that “wisest” of all men, ignoring things that
everybody knows, who follows his own personal impulses and personal in-
structors; but if he had the least sense of conventional propriety, he should
venerate and embrace this icon of Christ, at least on account of the rela-
tionship that Christ’s icon has with the archetype, if for no other reasons.
It seems clear, then, that his impiety and his ignorance make him not only
tolerate, but also proclaim, such absurdities. In fact, it would be necessary
to use the terms similar and dissimilar, which are included in what we have
said, and which relate to the category of quality, as those who have devoted
themselves to learning about these matters would say; and from that posi-
tion, [ B] he would be able to express his arguments on this subject. In-
stead, however, he introduces identity, which is yoked together with alter-
ity and which is considered in terms of the essence. But none of these is
necessary to demonstrate what has preceded it. It seems to me that he does
not talk about the alterity of things, which distinguishes between different
 Extracts from the Antirrhetics 

natures, but introduces the alterity of persons. Because he emphasizes the

hypostases (according to which one person is distinguished from another),
he will necessarily have to give many hypostases, and there will be as many
Christs as there are icons. And so the sons will be multiplied, and the name
Only-begotten will be removed. How should one feel about these argu-
ments: criticize them for their impiety—or, rather, laugh at their folly?
[ A] Because he talks triflingly and repeats what has been said, we
too intend to talk triflingly with him about his own proposals. And be-
cause he repeats the same arguments on the same topics, so we too will
again make the same objections to him. The case is as follows: according to
him, “How can we give the name of both God and man to the icon, [this
name] which designates both the divine and human nature, because the
icon can portray only the human nature and not the divine and incompre-
hensible one?”10 This “how”—to converse with you as if you were here, if
the ears of your soul had not grown deaf, if the eyes of your soul were not
blinded, if your mental faculties were not corrupted, if your rationality
were not perverted, if you preserved the limits of religiousness intact, if you
maintained the tradition of the catholic church unblemished, [ B] if you
retained at least some spark of faith within your heart and were not en-
raged against our blameless and impeccable confession, persuaded by those
who lead you towards the precipice of faithlessness and ruin—this how
would be demonstrated to you in the most obvious way, if there were really
such a query, and if it were not rather kept only as a means of trickery or
crafty dishonesty.
Thus, in order to take up the same arguments on the same questions
again, as the crucifixion and the passion and the tomb and all the rest (in
order not to be prolix, violating reasonable limits, and in order not to wear
out the ears of the audience) are said to be Christ’s, we do not say in any
way like you that, [ C] because of the fact that the name of Christ des-
ignates the duality of [his] natures, what is attributed to one nature must
be always attributed to the other. The cross can torture only the human na-
ture, yet it is called “the cross of Christ.” Let the one who says the follow-
ing convince you: “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our
Lord Jesus Christ.”11 Circumcision can divide human flesh, and the tomb
can circumscribe this same flesh, enclose it, and keep it hidden from sight,
but all these things are said to be Christ’s. Nevertheless, none of them will
be properly and essentially said about the divine and ineffable nature, for
this divine nature is pure and impassive, and completely free [ D] from
 Extracts from the Antirrhetics

any such concept whatsoever. If such a thing is apparently said, it is said ei-
ther in the way of reciprocity or appropriation, something with which you
do not agree now, because you ignore it altogether. But it is said that Christ
suffered the passion not as God but as a human being, even though he is
one and the same, united as far as hypostasis is concerned. Thus, because
the body, which he took from us, is called Christ’s body, in which body it
is believed that he suffered all [this passion], and because this body had ab-
solutely and in every way a precise form (it could not be without form, be-
cause then it would not be a body), it is necessary that both the form of the
body and the resemblance be called Christ’s. [ A] As indeed that body
is Christ’s own body, so it does not have any relation with the nature of the
Word, about which we know that it is without visible form, has no relation
and no configuration, but [it is related] to the body of the Word, the hu-
man nature and its visible form itself, from which Christ is composed.
That is why the figure is designated with the homonym, manifesting itself
according to its resemblance to the prototype.
But the name taken by Christ, which demonstrates that there exist
two natures, urged you on to swell up and to boast about your doctrines,
and to believe that neither of the two natures that this name manifests can
be expressed by name without the other, in whatever practice or doctrine,
or in whatever way it is used, or that if the one is isolated from the other,
they are separated completely. How do we respond to this? At this point it
could be proposed to you that Christ is called only a simple man or only
the son of a human, [ B] so he could be designated with a simple name.
But if you do not believe in anyone else, you could (if you wish, of course)
at least believe in Christ himself when he said to the Jewish people: “Why
are you trying to kill me, a man who has told you the truth?”12 and also,
“Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man,”13 and “Now the Son of Man
will be glorified,”14 and “The Son of Man is going to be betrayed,”15 and
also “For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost,”16 and fi-
nally, “They called him the Son of David.”17 And many phrases similar to
these can be found in the Gospels, if, of course, you do not consider the
words of the Gospels childish and mere nonsense.
Thus, because what is designated with the simplicity of a name given
to a man is not one double thing but one singular thing, as is the case with
the name Christ [ C] (because this word designates to us only one na-
ture, the human one), what will happen to you next, and what will you
add as something new and great and admirable? Being an adversary of
 Extracts from the Antirrhetics 

Christ even more than of his name, you are allowed to preach that the
Lord is only a common man and one of us, something that you have done
zealously both in the past and now, and that that man was accused and
tried in a court of justice, that he suffered the tortures of criminals and was
condemned to violent death. And I deliberately omit the rest for fear of
blasphemy. You might say that that man is also a God. Thus the problem
has been solved, because that God is also a man. But if, on the contrary,
when you hear only God being mentioned—“In the beginning [ D]
was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,”18
and “We saw his glory, the glory that he has from the Father,”19 and “just
as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life
to whomever he whishes,”20 and “Father, glorify your Son, so that your Son
may glorify you,”21 and “The Father and I are one,”22 and to the one who
was born blind this is said: “Do you believe in the son of God?”23 and other
similar things to this—[if ] you understand God [in all this] only as de-
prived of our [human] essence, you also deprive him completely of the
body and you take away from him everything human. Therefore, clearly,
you are allowed to get rid of the entire economy.

[ C] In view of the contentiousness and shamelessness of these

fools, we consider that it is necessary to examine those points in a more
elaborate way. Without conferring any dishonor on anything [neither the
icon nor the cross] and as results from the examination of the following, we
shall prove in a short time and in a particular way that is preeminent be-
tween them. So in order to start from the [issue of ] resemblance, because
the icon is also this, we say that:
. The icon of Christ is a likeness of him, and it resembles his body,
and it sketches out for us the form of his body, and it provides the visible
form and it expresses clearly by imitation quite often the mode of his ac-
tion, of his teaching and [ D] of his passion. The form of the cross, on
the other hand, neither resembles his body, nor does it make visible to us
any of the aforementioned [things]. But what is similar is closer and more
appropriate [to the model] than that which is not similar, because, thanks
to the resemblance, it makes the model more familiar and therefore wor-
thier of honor. Therefore, because the icon of Christ is more appropriate
[to him] and makes him more familiar, and because the form of the cross
deserves to be honored and venerated by us, that icon should be even more
honored and more venerated.
 Extracts from the Antirrhetics

. The icon of Christ, primarily and immediately, and from the first
look, manifests to us his visible form, and conveys his recollection. Indeed,
we behold him [ A] who is placed in the icon [as] being reflected, as in
a mirror.24 But it is not the same with the cross. For, when we look at the
cross, in the first place we fix our mind on appearances. Then we reflect on
what it is, and examine carefully how it is sanctified and by whom. Then,
in the second place, we turn toward the one who was crucified and who
sanctified the cross. What passes over to something in a primary way and
makes it familiar in a primary way is worthier of honor than that which
does so in a secondary way; thus the icon of Christ is worthier of honor
than the cross that is indeed worthy of honor.
. It is agreed by all those who are intelligent that what sanctifies is
better than what is sanctified. Indeed, the Apostle’s speech says, “It is be-
yond dispute [ B] that the inferior is blessed by the superior.”25 Thus if
the body of Christ sanctified the cross when he was lying on it at the cru-
cifixion, he also implanted sanctification in us by means of the cross, which
was sanctified by him. Those things whose prototypes are worthier of
honor are themselves worthier of honor too. Because there are two forms,
and because the form of the sanctified cross is worthier of honor, so the
form of the body that sanctified it is even more worthy of honor.
. Also, the form of the extension of Christ’s hands and the form of
his positioning is holy. As the body differs from its positioning, so those
that derive from them will differ from each other. Those things whose ar-
chetypes are worthier of honor are themselves worthier of honor too. In
fact, the positioning and the extension [of the crucifixion] exist on account
of the body of Christ and not, contrariwise, the body on account of its po-
sitioning. For the body is essence and underlying substance while the po-
sitioning is accident and consequence. As the essence is superior to the ac-
cident, or as the soul is superior to knowledge, so the body is superior to its
positioning. [ C] It can be said that the body has been positioned, but
none among the wise will say that the positioning has been given bodily
existence. Thus, it could be also said that the body has been colored, but
we cannot talk about the body of the color, nor about color to which bod-
ily existence has been given. Thus, what belongs to the body is superior to
what belongs to its positioning, and if this is the case, the form of the body
is worthier of honor than the form of its positioning.
. The cross conveys to us the passion of Christ in a simple and un-
adorned way. To the rustics, the cross could hardly be understood as a sym-
 Extracts from the Antirrhetics 

bol of the passion. But the sacred forms not only adorn with [ D] col-
ors and depict in detail the passion, but they also indicate to us in fuller de-
tail and more clearly the miracles and the prodigious feats that Christ ac-
complished. Thus, things that manifest to us these prodigious
achievements in a more explicit and more obvious way are more honorable
and more praiseworthy than the ones that show them to us in a more ob-
scure way.
. Also, the cross is a symbol of the passion, and it hints at the way in
which the one who suffered the passion endured it. [ A] Indeed, what
else does the following mean to express: “Lift and take your cross and fol-
low me,”26 if not that the one who is transfixed with the fear of the Lord,27
and who renounces the vanities of this world is ready to suffer patiently
everything for the love for him? So he who bears on his flesh the stigmata of
Christ boasts,28 and thinks highly of the passion, says: “May I never boast of
anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,”29 indicating to us in this
way the crucifixion, that is to say, the passion of Christ. But the icon of the
person himself who suffered is an impression and a likeness, and what de-
picts a person him or her self is more proper and worthier of mention than
what indicates only the exterior and the periphery of that person. Thus, the
icon, because it manifests to us Christ himself, is worthier of mention than
the cross, which indicates to us the way of the passion.
[ B] . The name Christ is also used homonymously to express the
icon of Christ himself because the icon is also called “Christ,” as the icon
of a king is called “king.” But it is impossible to say this about the cross.
Indeed, nobody among sensible people would in any way call the cross
“Christ.” Thus, what shares the same name and what equally already has
in common the form of the body is worthier of honor than that which
does not share any of these. Therefore, the icon deserves more honor than
the form of the cross.
. The cause precedes the effect, and even more so the efficient cause.
But what precedes something is worthier of honor than [ C] what fol-
lows. Thus, because the cause of the form of the cross is the passion of the
body of Christ, and because his body is the antecedent cause30 of the form
of the cross, consequently, the icon of the body of Christ, as the efficient
cause, is worthier of honor than the form of the cross.
. Moreover, what exists on account of something else is inferior to
the one on account of which it exists. Thus, if the cross exists on account
of the body of Our Lord, it is necessary that the inferiority of the form of
 Extracts from the Antirrhetics

the cross be transferred to its signs, because the things whose antecedents
are inferior are themselves inferior too. Consequently, it has been shown in
numerous ways that the icon of Christ, in accordance with the [reasonable]
sequence of the arguments given and with our examination, is even wor-
thier of honor than the form itself of the life-giving cross, which is [also]
honored by us. Thus, he who professes to honor the cross will then honor
the icon of the Lord. And if he does not honor this icon, he is far from
honoring the cross.
[ D] . We see in a great number of places the crucifixion of the
Lord depicted in an icon, and, as is reasonable, in accordance with the way
in which the act was carried out, [we see] the body suspended, the hands
stretched out and pierced by nails; by means of all these, the most mar-
velous miracle and the most significant way in which we have been saved,
that is, the saving passion of Christ, is shown to us. What could the ene-
mies of the cross of Christ31 do in front of this? One of two things must be
done: either prostrate themselves before the cross [ A] and also prostrate
themselves before the icon, if they do not want their profession of faith to
fall apart, or, by destroying the icon, throw down the cross at the same
time. But those who have chosen the second option, because they have at
the same time completely drawn a line through both the cross itself and
the whole economy of Christ, are rejected as accepting no economy at all,
and they make the falsehood of their profession of faith public. Indeed, if
there were just a little truth in them, it would be necessary for them to
honor the icon in the first place as the efficient cause and producer of the
cross. For everything that is said on account of something is inferior to that
on account of which it was produced. And if the cross is worthy of honor,
as it really is, the icon must be even more worthy of honor because it is the
cause in relation to the cross. Indeed, the cross exists on account of the
icon, and not, inversely, the icon on account of the form of the cross. In
fact, in the first place, the icon was drawn and marked out, and then the
cross itself was formed along with it, [ B] with the position of the up-
right body of Christ and the stretching out of both of his hands. It follows
that the cross by necessity and in consequence displays at the same time
the shape of the body. And one would not be led astray from the truth by
saying that someone who scratches the icon of the Lord in this way also
scratches the form of the cross, even if he does not want to. How is it, then,
that on account of all this, the insanity and the impiety of those Chris-
tomachs is not obvious? On the one hand, they pretend to venerate the
 Extracts from the Antirrhetics 

form of the cross as worthy of honor, but on the other hand, they despise
what is more honorable than it. But it is not in honoring the cross that they
do such things: indeed, how [could they honor it], those people who throw
down everything and burn up and trample everything under their profane
and impure feet? But in order [ C] not to give the impression that they
disturb at their foundation all the things venerated by the church, they pre-
fer opportunely and inopportunely32 to remove the divine form of Christ,
because Christ is a burden for them, even seen in his icon. As someone
who wants to get rid of his natural ugliness makes himself up with orna-
ments for embellishment, [in the same way] they put forward the principle
of the cross as the most gracious pretext.
Notes


. [“Le trait.”—Trans.]
. “A new political and ideological orientation dominates the period that
stretches from the beginning of the eighth century to the middle of the ninth.
This period is known by the misleading name of iconoclasm. In effect, the con-
troversy over images constitutes, in my opinion, only an exterior aspect of, or even
a simple pretext for, the changes and profound convulsions that put the Byzantine
empire, its state, its church, and its society to the test for more than a century.” H.
Ahrweiler, L’Idéologie politique, .
. G. Ladner, “Origin and Significance”; and “Concept of the Image.”
. P. Lemerle, Premier Humanisme byzantin, .
. Mansi, XIII. See the translation in the Horos at the end of this book.
. These questions, or Peuseis, in the Antirrhetics were cataloged by G. Ostro-
gorsky in Studien zur Geschichte den byzantinischen Bilderstreit, then by H. Hen-
nephof in Textus byzantinos. They are also provided at the end of my translation of
the Antirrhetics, –.
. [“La ruse”: this word has generally been rendered as guile throughout this
book, except for the rare occasion where trick or ruse is better suited to the con-
text.—Trans.]
. R. Khawam, Livre des ruses.
. On the life of Nikephoros, see Vita Nicephori, by Ignatios the Deacon
(BHG ), in Nicephori Archiepiscopi Constantinopolitani opuscula historica,
–; PG , –; P. J. Alexander, Patriarch Nicephorus.

 
. G. Dagron, “La Règle et l’exception,” , .
.  Cor. :;  Cor. :; Col. :.

 
. Aristotle, Economics, II..
. Hippocrates, Corpus Hippocraticum, Épidém. VI...
. Dionysios of Halicarnassus, De compositione verborum, , Epistula ad Cn.
Pompeium, ..
 Notes 

. Sophocles, Electra, .

. [“Économe” in French.—Trans.]
. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, .
. Plato, Phaedrus, e.
. Theodore of Stoudios, Antirrhetics, II, PG ,  D.
. Pseudo-Dionysios, Celestial Hierarchy, II..A.
. Hippolytos, Against the Heresy of One Noetus, , PG , A.
. John Chrysostom, On the Providence of God,  and passim.
. St. Augustine, Trinity, XV.vi..
. Eph. :, :.
. Hippolytos, Against the Heresy of One Noetus, , PG ,  B.
. J. Moingt, Théologie trinitaire, vol. , chap. , –.
. G. L. Prestige, Dieu dans la pensée patristique.
. Tertullian, Against Marcion, V..
. Tertullian, Against Praxeas, II.
. “Oikonomia sacramentum, quae unitatem in trinitatem disponit.”
. Moingt, Théologie trinitaire, .
. St. Augustine, Trinity, XII.vi.. The citations are from Gen. :–.
.  Cor. :. [This is a slightly unusual rendering of the famous quotation.
The New Revised Standard Version translates the first phrase as “For now we see
in a mirror, dimly.” In this respect, I follow the author, who forgoes the standard
French translation of obscurément, using instead the phrase “en énigma.” In this re-
spect, she is following the Greek original, which is “en ainúgmati.” She returns sev-
eral times to the terms enigma and enigmatically, always in reference to this key
text.—Trans.]
.  Cor. :.
. St. Augustine, Trinity, XV.viii..
. Ibid., XV.ix..
. Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit, XII..
. Athanasios, PG ,  A.
. Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit, XVIII.
.  Cor. :.
. Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit, XIII..
. Ibid., XVIII..
. Ibid., XVIII.. B.
. All the following quotes are from Cyril of Alexandria, Two Christological
Dialogues.
. Athanasios, On the Incarnation of the Word, , .
. John Chrysostom, On the Providence of God, IV.–.
. Ibid., VII..
. Ibid., II.; citing Rom. :.
. Ibid., II..
. Ibid., III.; citing  Cor. :.
 Notes

. Ibid., IV.–.

. Ibid., XII, –; citing  Cor. :.
. Ibid., XII.– and .
. Ibid., II..
. Ibid., XVII, ‒.
. Ireneaus of Lyon, Against the Heresies, V.–.
. Ibid., V...
. Meletios, Peri tou anthropou kataskeuès, PG , –.
. Ibid., .
. Ibid., .
. Ibid., .
. Ibid., .
. Eusebios, Martrydom of Polycarp, PG ,  A.
. John of Damascus, PG ,  A.
. See Gregory of Nazianzos, letter  to Kleidonios, in Lettres théologiques;
and Tertullian, La Chair du Christ.
. Garnerius of Saint-Victor, De homine, patrologia latina, . Thus in chap.
, “De Carne,” the word caro is enumerated in the following way:
“Carnis nomine natura humana designatur . . . ” (Human nature, in opposition
to God.)
“Carnis nomine, cordis sensibilitas . . . ” (Sensitivity with respect to the insensi-
tivity of minerals.)
“Carnis nomine, vita carnalis . . . ” (Carnal life submitted to corruption and
pleasure with respect to the spiritual life.)
“Carnis nomine, delectatio carnalis . . . ” (The temptation and pleasure of the
body in opposition to contemplation.)
“Carnis nomine, carnalitas . . . ” (The carnal state that one must turn away from
in order to turn towards spirituality.)
“Carnis nomine, infirmitas operis . . . ” (The imperfection of our works in op-
position to the perfection of creation.)
“Carnis nomine juxta naturam . . . ” (Nature in opposition to the creator.)
“Carnis nomine reprobi, carnes enim diaboli sunt . . . ” (The devil, then the dis-
ciples in the act of betrayal, etc.)
The flesh and muscles are thus progressively excluded from the plan of salvation.
. Ibid., chap. : “Viscerum nomine hi qui spiritualibus sacramentis in Eccle-
sia deserviunt designantur. . . . Quid enim aliud Sanctae Ecclesiae viscera debe-
mus accipere nisi eorum mentes, qui ejus quaedam in se mysteria continent?”
. John of Damascus, On Female Vampires (Peri Stryggon, De Strygibus), PG
,  A.
. H. Sorlin, “Stryges et géloudes.”
. Eph. : ff.
. Col. : ff.
 Notes 

. [“Parler par economie.” Note the related English phrase “to be economic
with the truth.”—Trans.]
. Matt. :.
. Rom. :–.
. Plato, Republic, II.d–e.
.  Cor. :.
. Origen, Commentary on the Gospel According to Matthew, X..–.
. St. Augustine, Commentary on the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, I., PL , .
. Origen, Commentary on the Gospel According to Matthew, X..
. Origen, Contra Celsum, II...
. Matt. :.
. Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit, French ed., p. . Emphasis added.
. Theodore of Stoudios, PG ,  C.
. Athansios, letter to Palladios, PG ,  D.
. Basil of Caesarea, letter , PG ,  A.
. Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit, XXX.–. The quotation is from
Matt. :.
. [Apateis in the Greek original, translated in the French as ruse.—Trans.]
. John Chrysostom, On the Priesthood, I.–.
. “Prévoyance.” [The English translation renders the word as “good manage-
ment.”—Trans.]
. John Chrysostom, On the Priesthood, II.I.–.
. Ibid., II.I.–.
. Ibid., IV..–.
. Ibid., IV..–.
. Athanasios, Dogmatic History, PG ,  B- C.
. [This is what is known to philosophers and logicians as “kettle logic.” The
author provides the following explanation: “You tell me that I returned to you the
kettle that you had lent me with a hole in it. First, there was no hole in it when I
returned it to you, second, it already had a hole in it when you lent it to me, and
third, you never lent me a kettle at all. This ‘absurd’ argument is often cited to il-
lustrate syllogisms made in bad faith, which render the interlocutor guilty in all
cases, even contradictory ones.”—Trans.]
. [The text here plays on the fact that in French, glace means both ice and
mirror. The author comments on this in the following paragraph.—Trans.]
. See above, ‒.
. [“Gouvernement.”—Trans.]
. [“Prévoyance.”—Trans.]
. John Chrysostom, On the Priesthood, III.. [The English translation ren-
ders the word here as stewardship.— Trans.]
. Ibid., VI...
. [“Puissance.”—Trans.]
. [“Pouvoir.”—Trans.]
 Notes

. John Chrysostom, On the Priesthood, IV...

. Ibid., IV..–.
. Titus of Bostra (fourth century) uses it in this same sense in book  of his
work, Against the Manichaeans (PG ,  B): “Christ came not to break the law
but to fulfill it; he enters the temple to drive out the reprehensible economies.” He
thus drives out those who pervert the purpose and function of the temple. Christ,
considered as a steward [économe], that is to say the Father’s administrator, causes
justice and the true law to reign.
. Basil of Caesarea, in letter  to Sophronios, calls oikonomia administra-
tion (PG ,  A). In letter  (PG ,  C) the same word refers to what the
church distributes; footnote  specifies: “Saepe apud Basilium oikonomia dicitur
id quod pauperibus distribuitur,” and refers to Basil’s Commentary on the Prophet
Isaiah (PG ,  A), where he talks of and condemns those who make use of the
money of the poor. In the same author (PG ,  C,  B), oikonomia refers to
the ecclesiastic administration and the management of the pecuniae sacrae, that is,
not only the sacred character of charity but also the sacredness of the goods of the
clergy.
. Encyclopédie théologique, , vol. .
. Ibid., .
. Gregory of Nazianzos, letter , in Correspondence, :–.
. [“Économe” in French.—Trans.]

 
. On this subject, see N. Baynes, “Icons Before Iconoclasm”; and E. Kitzinger,
“Cult of Images.” The remarkable article of P. Brown, “Dark Age Crisis,” presents
the benefit of linking the intensive development of the iconic cult closely to the so-
cial and spiritual history of the holy man in Byzantine society, starting in the sev-
enth century.
. [“Graphe.”—Trans.]
. G. Ladner, “Concept of the Image,” .
. [Mammon is the term by which Nikephoros routinely refers to his enemy,
Constantine V.—Trans.]
. Nikephoros, Antirrhetics, I,  A–C. [Translated by V.D.]
. Ibid., I,  D– A. [Translated by V.D.]
. É. Hugon, Mystére de la Sainte Trinité, .
. Aristotle, Fragments, .b...
. Gregory of Nazianzos, Discourse, , PG , .
. Akakios of Berroia, PG , , n. .
. Cyril of Alexandria, Dialogue on the Holy and Consubstantial Trinity, PG , .
. John of Damascus, Orthodox Faith, PG , .
. Aristotle, Categories, b., b..
. PG , , , ,  . . .
. Aristotle, Categories, b.
. Plato, Timaeus, b, c.
 Notes 

. G. Florovsky, “Origen, Eusebius,”  ff.

. Painter’s Manual,  and .
. Aristotle, Categories, b..
. E. Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth.
. See Chapter .
. Nikephoros, Antirrhetics, I,  A. [Translated by by V.D.]
. Ibid., I,  A. See my article, “Autour de quelques concepts
philosophiques,”  ff.
. Ibid., I,  C- D. [Translated by V.D.]
. Aristotle, Categories, a.–.
. Nikephoros, Antirrhetics, I,  D.
. Ibid., I,  A. [Translated by V.D.]
. Aristotle, Categories, b..
. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Quod ..a..
. Ladner, “Concept of the Image,” .
. John of Damascus, On the Divine Images, PG , .
. E. H. Kantorowicz, “Deus per naturam.”
. W. Kandinsky, “On the Question of Form.”
. See E. Kitzinger, “Byzantine Art,” in which he notes constant divergences
and interferences between what he names classicism and abstraction. What aston-
ishes him, however, yet what confirms our hypotheses, is that on the eve of the in-
conoclastic crisis, the tendency that prevailed was what he calls abstract. In effect,
Kitzinger believes that only an excessive development of the realistic, Hellenistic
image would have been able to justify such anti-iconic reactions. But if, as we have
attempted to do, the icon is approached in terms of an existential relation, it be-
comes clear that its power increased with its very “abstraction,” owing to the
power of its theoretical status.
. W. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy.
. Phil. :.
. [Bourrelet: “roll” as in “roll of flesh” or “roll of fabric.”—Trans.]
. See below, “Idols and Veronicas.”
. Painter’s Manual.
. Nikephoros, Antirrhetics, III,  D.
. PG , , .
. John Chrysostom, Homily on the Epistle to the Hebrews, PG , .
. John of Damascus, Second Apology of On the Divine Images, PG ,  A.
. Cyril of Alexandria, PG ,  B.
. J. Paris, “L’or de Byzance,” Esprit, March .
. Pseudo-Dionysios, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, PG ,  C.
. Mansi, XI, E, A. This injunction was repeated at Nicaea (Mansi,
XII,  E, and XIII,  E ff.).
. The question of the symbol is obviously tied to what would become of the
image. Before the iconoclastic crisis, the church fathers dealt extensively with the
 Notes

relations that perceptible signs maintain with the heavenly world. Pseudo-Diony-
sios is the major figure who dominates this theoretical tradition; on this, see J.
Pepin, “Aspects théoriques du symbolisme.” We must, however, disagree with the
appendix devoted to the iconoclast controversy. In effect, according to the author,
the iconoclasts privileged the symbolism of the dissimilar, although as Pepin also
recognizes (), they never stated this explicitly. Conversely, the iconodules, by
opting for a symbolism of the similar, distanced themselves from the Dionysian
tradition. The problem loses its contradictory character, however, if one envisages
it from the aspect of mimésis in the Nikephorian sense. The iconodules, by insti-
tuting a doctrine of the image, gave a new meaning to the very term of symbola.
Nikephoros uses symbolikôs and skhètikhôs frequently in the same way. Thus sym-
bola becomes pros tí by nature, no longer semiologically, but ontologically. The fig-
ure of Christ in the icon no more resembles the real Christ than did the lamb; on
the contrary, it is more abstract. Losing all of its metaphoric and narrative charac-
ter, its formal codification means that it participates not in the rhetoric of distances
separating sign and signified (Old Testament writings), but the new economy con-
cerning the relationship of contemplator and contemplated who continually ex-
change gazes across iconic space. The linguistic analogies that symbolism today
lends itself to are linked to a psychology of representation that was not yet at work
when Nikephoros, John of Damascus, and Theodore of Stoudios developed their
defense of the icon.
. See Chapter .
. On the épigraphè, see below.
. Gregory of Nazianzos, letter  to Kleidonios, in Lettres théologiques.
. Nikephoros, Antirrhetics, III,  B. The text quoted (Prov. :) says: “Hear,
my child, your father’s instruction, and do not reject your mother’s teaching
[torah].”
. John :.
. [“Dessaisissement”: a term referring specifically to the removal of a case from
a court or a judge.—Trans.]
. Nikephoros, Antirrhetics, I,  B. [Translated by V.D.]
. Athanasios, Discourse Against the Arians, ., PG ,  A.
. Matt. :; Mark :; Luke :.
. Aristotle, Categories, a.–: “Homônouma legetai hô onoma monon
koinon, ho de kata tounoma logos tès ousias heteros oion xôon ote anthropôs kai to
gegramménon.”
. E. Martineau, “La Mimésis dans La Poétique.”
. “Allos kai allos . . . allo kai allo”; see Gregory of Nazianzos, letter  to
Kleidonios, in Lettres théologiques.
. Nikephoros, Antirrhetics, III,  A.
. The noninstrumental character of Byzantine music also meets up with the
question of the incarnation. Christ’s body cannot in any way be considered as the
instrument (organon) of the incarnation. Thus Cyril writes clearly in his Epistle to
 Notes 

the Nuns: “However, if someone assigns to him only a simple instrumental serv-
ice, he deprives him (without wanting to) of being truly the Son. Let us take as an
example a man who has a son who knows how to play the lyre and who sings well.
Would this man rank the lyre and the instrument on the same level as his son? For
one takes up the lyre to show one’s art; but the son is still the son of his father even
without the instrument” (PG ,  D).
. All the insults cited are translated from the Greek. The lexicon of these
terms can be found at the end of my translation of the Antirrhetics.
. This is a late (twelfth century) epithet that refers either to Constantine’s
taste for excrement and manure or to a story according to which he dirtied the
baptismal font. See G. Gero, “Byzantine Iconoclasm.”
. A. J. Festugière, Les Moines d’Orient, : ff.
. Nikephoros, Antirrhetics, III,  A–B.
. Ibid., II,  D.
. Ibid., II,  C– B. See Chapter .

 
. É. Benveniste, Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européens.
. Ibid., .
. Ibid., . See also G. Dumézil, Idées romaines,  ff.
. Nikephoros, Antirrhetics, I,  C.
. See below, “Extracts from the Iconoclast Horos of Hieria.”
. Mansi, XIII,  B–C.
. Nikephoros, Antirrhetics, III,  A.
. Ibid., III,  C.
. Mansi, XIII,  C: “ois basilikois nomois hupeuthunos esto, hos enantios ton
tou theou prostagmaton kai ekhthros ton patrikon dogmaton.”
. Ibid., XIII,  E– B, and  B.
. Nikephoros, Antirrhetics, II,  D– B.
. Ibid., II,  E.
. Ibid., II,  B.
. See below.
. Nikephoros, Antirrhetics, I,  E,  C,  C,  B; II,  C.
. Ibid., II,  B.
. Ibid., II,  A: “pothen to hiereion to mega, to amômon kai sebasmion, to
katharsion thuma kai pantos tou kosmou sotiriou.”
. Ibid., II,  C.
. Ibid., I,  B.
. Ibid., I,  A.
. Ibid., I,  A.
. Ibid., I,  C.
. Mansi, XIII,  E,  B.
. Nikephoros, Antirrhetics, I,  A–C.
 Notes

. Ibid., I,  D.

. Ibid., III,  D.
. Ibid., III,  C.
. J. Kotsonis, Problèmes de l’economie ecclésiastique.
. Photios, Ta Amphilochia, questions  and .
. Kotsonis, Problèmes de l’economie ecclésiastique, .
. Theodore of Stoudios, letter  to Athanasios, PG , .
. Ibid., letter ,  to Naukratios, PG ,  (quoted in Kotsonis, Prob-
lèmes de l’economie ecclésiastique).
. Photios, Ta Amphilocha, questions  and .
. Photios, letter , PG , .
. Gregory of Nazianzos, Homily  for Saint Basil, PG , .
. Ibid., III,  D.
. Ibid., III,  B.
. Ibid., III,  B.
. Ibid., III,  B–C.
. Ibid., I,  B.
. Ibid., III,  D.
. Ibid., III,  D– B.
. See R. Cormack, Icônes et société à Byzance. This work, which inventories a
great number of texts about icons, repeats over and over again that the issue con-
cerns “iconolatry.” Nikephoros himself is not spared, being labeled “the iconola-
trous Patriarch”!
. Nikephoros, Antirrhetics, III,  A– C.
. Ibid., III,  C–D.
. A. Grabar, “L’Esthetisme d’un théologien humaniste byzantin.”
. Nikephoros, Antirrhetics, III,  D– B.
. Kitzinger, “Cult of Images.”
. Ibid., –.
. Plotinus, Enneads, II...
. The expression recurs continuously in the Life of Steven the Younger, a
martyr of iconoclasm. In the passage that we are currently analyzing, Nikephoros
uses it as well: “ho de tôn septôn morphomatôn.”
. P. Brown, “Dark Age Crisis,” .
. Ibid., .
. Ibid., .

 
. E. H. Kantorowicz, “La Souverainté de l’artiste.”
. Rom. :–.
. A. Grabar, L’Empereur dans l’art byzantin.
. M. J. Mondzain-Baudinet, “Autour de quelques concepts philosophiques.”
. Gregory of Nazianzos, letter  to Kleidonios, in Lettres théologiques, I..
 Notes 

. Origen, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, ..

. A. Grabar, L’Iconoclasme byzantin,  ff.
. P. J. Alexander, “The Iconoclast Council of St. Sophia.”
. St. Jerome, Tractatus in librum psalmorum, LXXXI, , edited by G. Morin
(Maredsou; ), vol. III-, p. ; cited in Kantorowicz, “Deus per naturam,
Deus per gratiam.”
. Eusebios, In Psalmos commentaria, LXXXI, PG ,  B.
. Kantorowicz, “Deus per naturam, Deus per gratiam.”
. Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit, XVIII.. C.
. G. Ladner, “Origin and Significance.”
. John :.
. Matt. : confers on Peter only a spiritual authority, and entrusts the keys
of the kingdom of God to him.
. Nikephoros, Antirrhetics, II,  A– B.
. Isa. :–.
. Gregory of Nyssa, PG ,  B.
. Isa. :.
. Ps. :.
. Ps. :.
. Ps. :.
. Matt. :, citing Zech. :.
. Zech. :.
. Zeph. :.
. Ps. :.
. See Chapter .
. S. Gruzinski, La Guerre des images, .

 
. To Christians, of course, such an unconditional adoption of portrayal could
only lead to an extremely idolatrous perversion of iconicity.
. J. Pouillon, “Fétiches sans fétichisme.”
. J. -P. Vernant, Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs, –.
. Ibid., .
. See Chapter .
. M.-J. Mondzain, “Le Destructeur était idolâtre,” in the catalog of the
Musée d’Ixtelles, .
. What can be said of this recent sentence by a judge condemning Bernard
Tapie with these words: “He who lived by the image will perish by the image?”
That very evening, that image was shown on television, shattered.
. I. Goldberg, “Jawlensky ou le visage promis.”
 Notes

 
This chapter is an adaptation of a paper given at Rennes in , which was
published in La Photographie inquiète de ses marges (Rennes: Éd. Le Triangle, ).
. A. Legrand, Linceul de Turin.
. Evagrios, Church History, IV., PG , –.
. Eusebios, Church History, I.. ff.
. W. Cureton, Ancient Syriac Document.
. Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth, .
. [I.e., after having been enclosed in the wall for some time, its location was
lost to the inhabitants, before being rediscovered thanks to Eulalios’s dream.—
Trans.]
. P. Pedrizet, Seminarium Kondakovianum, :–.
. Mgr. P. Savio, Ricerca storica sulla Santa Sindone.
. I. Wilson, Le Suaire de Turin.
. J. Calvin, Traité des reliques.
. Quoted in Legrand, Linceul de Turin.
. Ibid., .
. Dr. P. Barbet, Passion de Jésus-Christ.
. P. Claudel, “Toi, qui es tu?” letter to M. G. Cordonnier, acheiropoiete,
Paris, .
. [“Revelateur,” which is also related to revelation.—Trans.]
. [Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique, approximately equivalent
to the National Science Foundation in the United States.—Trans.]
. A. Loth, Photographie du Sainte Suaire.
. [In English in the text.—Trans.]

 
This chapter was previously presented at the colloquium Judaïsme et Judaïcités,
held at Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), , and was pub-
lished in Traces, special number –, –.
. [Nouvelles Éditions Françaises, a publishing company.—Trans.]
. A. Leroi-Gourhan, Le Geste et la parole.
. Ibid., .
. Ibid.
. F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophy of Art, II...
. O. Clément, Visage intérieur, –.
. L. Ouspensky, Théologie de l’icône dans l’église orthodoxe, .
. Clément, Visage intérieur.
. Le Monde, May , .
 Notes 

  HOROS

Mansi, XIII,  D and following. [The following text is drawn from the trans-
lation of the Horos of Hieria by Daniel Sahas, which appears in his Icon and Lo-
gos—Trans.].
.  Cor. :–; Eph. :–.
. Eph. :.
. Wisd. of Sol. :.
. Skaiographè. A play on the word Skiagraphè (the writing in shadows of the
Old Testament prefiguration).
. Rom. :.
. This is the problem of the homonymy and pseudonymy of artificial images.
. Wisd. of Sol. :.
. Matt. :–; Mark :–; Luke :–.
. Apseudès. Truth is thus directly linked to consubstantial homonymy.
. Col. :; Col. :.
.  Tim. :.
. Acts :.
. Rom. :.
. Heb. :.

  ANTIRRHETICS

The following text is translated by V.D.
. First Peusis of Constantine V. See Ostrogorsky, Studien zur Geschichte den
byzantinischen Bilderstreit, , fragment ; Hennephof, Textus byzantinos, , frag-
ment .
. For example, Gregory of Nazianzos, Oratio, .: “mèdemia eikôn phthanei
pros tèn alèthian” (PG ,  A).
. First Peusis of Constantine V. See G. Ostrogorsky, Studien zur Geschichte den
byzantinischen Bilderstreit, , fragment ; H. Hennephof, Textus byzantinos, ,
fragment .
.  Tim. :;  Tim. :.
. Wisd. of Sol. :–.
.  Cor. :–.
. Aristotle, Categories, a.–; b.–.
. Gregory of Nazianzos, letter  to Kleidonios, in Lettres théologiques,
I.–.
. Athanasios, Discourse Against the Arians, III. (PG ,  A).
. First Peusis of Constantine V. See Ostrogorsky, Studien zur Geschichte den
byzantinischen Bilderstreit, , fragment ; Hennephof, Textus byzantinos, , frag-
ment .
. Gal. :.
. John :.
. John :.
 Notes

. John :.

. Matt. :; Mark :; Luke :.
. Luke :.
. Matt. :.
. John :.
. John :.
. John :.
. John :.
. John :.
. John :. The Byzantine text allows the reading “Son of God.” The read-
ing usually accepted today is “Son of Man.”
.  Cor. :.
. Heb. :.
. Matt. . ; Mark . ; Luke . .
. Ps. :.
. Gal. . .
. Gal. :.
. An expression borrowed from Stoicism. See Chryssippuss, Stoicus, .;
Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrhonian hypotyposes, II..
. Phil. :.
.  Tim. :.
Bibliography

Aeschylus. Agamemnon. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, .

Ahrweiler, H. L’Idéologie politique de l’Empire byzantine. Paris: Presses Universi-
taires de France, .
Alexander, P. J. “The Iconoclast Council of St. Sophia () and Its Definition.”
Dumbarton Oaks Papers  (): –.
———. The Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople: Ecclesiastical Policy and Image
Worship in the Byantine Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, .
The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers down to AD .
Edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Grand Rapids, MI: W.
R. Eerdmans, .
Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Revised Oxford translation. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, .
Athanasios. On the Incarnation of the Word. Text and French translation by C.
Kannengiesser. Sources chrétiennes, vol. . Paris: Éd. du Cerf, . Eng-
lish translation in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, nd ser., :–.
Augustine. Commentary on the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount. In Patriologiae cursus
completus, Series latina, edited by J. P. Migne. Paris, –. Translated by
D. Kavanagh in The Fathers of the Church, vol. .
———. The Trinity. Translated by S. McKenna in The Fathers of the Church, vol.
.
Auzépy, M. F. “Traduction et commentaire de la Vie d’Étienne le Jeune.” Ph.D.
thesis, Paris, Sorbonne, .
———. “Une Lecture ‘iconoclaste’ de la Vie d’Étienne le Jeune.” Travaux et Mé-
moires  ().
Barbet, Dr. P. La Passion de Jésus-Christ selon le chirurgien. th ed. Paris: Médias-
paul, . Originally published by Issoudun, .
Basil of Caesarea. On the Holy Spirit. Text and French translation by B. Pruche.
Sources chrétiennes, vol. . Paris: Éd. du Cerf, . English translation in
Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, nd ser., :–.
 Bibliography

Baynes, N. “The Icons Before Iconoclasm.” Harvard Theological Review –

().
Benveniste, É. Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européens. Vol. . Paris: Éd. du
Minuit, .
Brown, P. “A Dark Age Crisis: Aspects of the Iconoclastic Controversy.” English
Historical Review  (January ): –.
———. “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity.” Journal of
Roman Studies  ().
Calvin, J. Traité des reliques. In La Vraie Piété: Divers traités de Jean Calvin et con-
fession de foi.
Clément, O. Le Visage intérieur. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, Stock, .
Cormack, R. Icônes et société à Byzance. Paris: Éd. Gerard Montfort, .
Cureton, W. Ancient Syriac Document Relative to the Earliest Establishment of Chris-
tianity in Edessa and the Neighbouring Countries, from the Year After our
Lord’s Ascension to the Beginning of the Fourth Century. . Reprint, Ams-
terdam: Oriental Press, .
Cyril of Alexandria. Two Christological Dialogues. Text and French translation by
G. M. Durand. Sources chrétiennes, vol. . Paris: Éd. du Cerf, .
Dagron, G. “La Règle et l’exception.” In Religiöse Devianz, Untersuchungen zur
sozialen, rechtlichen und theologischen Reaktionen auf religiöse Abweichungen
im westlichen und östlichen Mittelalter. Frankfurt, .
Dionysios of Halicarnassus. De compositione verborum. Leipzig: Usener-Raderma-
cher, –.
Dumézil, G. Idées romaines. Paris: Gallimard, .
Encyclopédie théologique. Edited by J. P. Migne. Paris: J. P. Migne, –.
The Fathers of the Church. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press,
–.  vols.
Festugière, A. J. Les Moines d’Orient. Vol. , Culture ou Sainteté. Paris: Éd. du cerf,
.
Florovsky, G. “Origen, Eusebius and the Iconoclastic Controversy.” Church His-
tory  ().
Gero, G. “Byzantine Iconoclasm During the Reign of Constantine V.” In Corpus
Scriptorum christianorum orientalium, :–. Louvain: Peeters, .
———. “Byzantine Iconoclasm During the Reign of Leo III.” In Corpus Scripto-
rum christianorum orientalium, . Louvain: Peeters, .
Goldberg, I. “Jawlensky ou le visage promis.” PhD thesis, Université de Paris-I,
.
Grabar, A. L’Empereur dans l’art byzantin. Fasc.  of Publications de la Faculté des
Lettres de l’Université de Strasbourg. Strasbourg, .
 Bibliography 

———. “L’Esthetisme d’un théologien humaniste byzantin du IXe siècle.” Revue

des Sciences religieuses (). Special issue, “Mélanges Andrieu.”
———. L’Iconoclasme byzantin, Dossier archéologique. Paris: Klincksieck, .
Gregory of Nazianzos. Correspondence. Text and French translation by P. Gallay.
Paris: Les Belles Lettres, .
———. Lettres théologiques. Text and French translation by P. Gallay. Sources
chrétiennes, vol. . Paris: Éd. du Cerf, .
Gruzinski, S. La Guerre des images: De Christoph Colomb à “Blade Runner”
(–). Paris: Fayard, .
Hennephof, H., ed. Textus byzantinos ad iconomachiam pertinentes. Leyden: E. J.
Brill, .
Hippocrates. Corpus Hippocraticum. Paris: Éd. Littré, –.
Hippolytos. Against the Heresy of One Noetus. English translation in Roberts and
Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers, :–.
———. Philosophumena. French translation by A. Siouville. Milan: Archè, .
English translation of select works in Roberts and Donaldson, Ante-Nicene
Fathers, vol. .
Hugon, É. Le Mystére de la Sainte Trinité. Paris, .
Ignatios the Deacon. Nicephori Archiepiscopi Constantinopolitani opuscula historica.
Edited by C. De Boor. Leipzig: .
Ireneaus of Lyon. Against the Heresies. Text and French translation by A. Rousseau.
Paris: Éd. du Cerf, .
John Chrysostom. On the Priesthood. Text and French translation by A. M. Mal-
ingrey. Sources chrétiennes, vol. . Paris: Éd. du Cerf, . English trans-
lation in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, st ser., :–.
———. On the Providence of God. Text and French translation by A. M. Malin-
grey. Sources chrétiennes, vol. . Paris: Éd. du Cerf, .
John of Damascus. On the Divine Images: Three Apologies Against Those Who At-
tack the Divine Images. Translated by D. Anderson. Crestwood, NY: St.
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, .
Kandinsky, W. “On the Question of Form.” In The Blaue Reiter Almanac, edited
by W. Kandinsky and F. Marc, –. New York: Viking, .
Kantorowicz, E. H. “Deus per naturam, Deus per gratiam.” Harvard Theological
Review  (October ): –.
———. “La Souverainté de l’artiste.” In Mourir pour la Patrie, –. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, .
Khawam, R. Le Livre des ruses: La Stratégie politique des Arabes. Paris: Phébus,
.
Kitzinger, E. “Byzantine Art in the Period Between Justinian and Iconoclasm.” In
Akten des XIen Internationalen Byzantinistenkongress. Munich, .
 Bibliography

———. “The Cult of Images in the Age Before Iconoclasm.” Dumbarton Oaks
Papers  (): –.
Kotsonis, J. Problèmes de l’economie ecclésiastique. Collection “Recherches et syn-
thèses.” Gembloux: Duculot, .
Kuryluk, E. Veronica and Her Cloth. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, .
Ladner, G. “Der Bilderstreit und die Kunstehren der byzantinischen und
abendländischen Theologie.” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte  ().
———. “The Concept of the Image in the Greek Fathers and the Byzantine Icon-
oclastic Controversy.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers  (): –.
———. “Origin and Significance of the Byzantine Iconoclastic Controversy.” Me-
dieval Studies  (): –.
Legrand, A. Le Linceul de Turin. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, .
Lemerle, P. Le Premier Humanisme byzantin. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, .
Leroi-Gourhan, A. Le Geste et la parole. Paris: Albin Michel, . Translated by A.
Bostock Berger as Gesture and Speech. Cambridge, MA: October, .
Loth, A. La photographie du Sainte Suaire. Paris, .
Mansi, J. D. Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio.  vols. Florence
and Venice, –.
Martineau, E. “La Mimésis dans La Poétique.” Revue de métaphysique et de morale
 (): –.
Moingt, J. Patriologiae cursus completus, Series graeco-latina.  vols. Paris,
–. Abbreviated PG.
———. Théologie trinitaire de Tertullien. Paris: Aubier, .
Mondzain-Baudinet, M.-J. “Autour de quelques concepts philosophiques de l’i-
conoclasme et de l’iconodoulie.” In Nicée II, –: Douze siècles d’images
religieuses.
———. “Économie et idolâtrie durant la crise de l’iconoclasme byzantin.” In Im-
age et Signification: Rencontres de l’École du Louvre. Paris: La Documentation
française, .
———. “La Relation iconique à Byzance au IXe siècle d’après les Antirrhétiques de
Nicéphore le Patriarche: Un destin de l’aristotélianisme.” Études philosoph-
iques (January ). Special issue, “Aristotle.”
———. “L’Incarnation, l’image et la voix.” Esprit  (February ). Special issue,
“Le Corps.”
———. “Visage du Christ, forme de l’Église.” In Du visage, edited by M. J.
Baudinet and C. Schlatter. Lille: PUL, .
Nicée II, –, Douze siècles d’images religieuses. Actes du colloque international
Nicée II. Edited by F. Boespflug and N. Lossky. Paris: Éd. du Cerf, .
 Bibliography 

Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Edited by Philip Schaff. st
and nd ser. Grand Rapids, MI: W. R. Eerdmans, .
Nikephoros, Patriarch of Constantinople. Antirrhetics. French translation by M. J.
Mondzain in Discours contre les iconoclastes. Paris: Klincksieck, .
Origen. Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. PG .
———. Commentary on the Gospel According to Matthew. Text and French trans-
lation by R. Girod. Sources chrétiennes, vol. . Paris: Éd du Cerf, .
———. Contra Celsum. Translated by H. Chadwick. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, .
Ostrogorsky, G. “Les Débuts de la querelle des images.” In Mélanges Charles
Diehl. Vol. . Paris, .
———. Histoire de l’état byzantin. Paris: Payot, .
———. Studien zur Geschichte den byzantinischen Bilderstreit. Historische Unter-
suchengun, vol. . Breslau: M. H. Marcus, .
Ouspensky, L. Théologie de l’icône dans l’église orthodoxe. Paris: Éd. du Cerf, .
Painter’s Manual, The. Translated by Paul Hetherington. London: Sagittarius
Press, . First published , , by A. Papadopoulos-Kerameus, Saint
Petersburg.
Pedrizet, P. Seminarium kondakovianum. Prague, .
Pepin, J. “Aspects théoriques du symbolisme dans la tradition dionysienne, an-
técédents et nouveautés.” In Settimana di studio del Centro italiano di studi
sull’alto medio evo. Spoleto: Panetto and Petrelli, .
Photios. Bibliothèque. French translation by R. Henry. Paris: Les Belles Lettres,
.
———. Ta Amphilochia. Athens: Soph. Oikonomos, .
Pouillon, J. “Fétiches sans fétichisme.” Nouvelle Revue de psychanalyse  (Autumn
): –.
Prestige, G. L. Dieu dans le pensée patristique. Paris: Aubier, .
Pseudo-Dionysios. The Celestial Hierarchy. In Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete
Works. Translated by C. Luibheid. Mahwah, NY: Paulist Press, .
Roberts, Alexander, and James Donaldson, eds. The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Transla-
tions of the Writings of the Fathers down to AD . New York: Charles Scrib-
ner’s Sons, .
Sahas, Daniel. Icon and Logos: Sources in Eighth-Century Iconoclasm. Toronto: Uni-
versity of Toronto Press, .
Savio, Mgr. P. Ricerca storica sulla Santa Sindone. Turin, .
Schelling, F. W. J. The Philosophy of Art. Translated by D. Stott. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, .
Schönbrun, C. von. L’Icône du Christ, fondements théologiques. nd ed. Paris: Éd.
du Cerf, .
 Bibliography

Sophocles. Electra. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, .

Sorlin, H. “Stryges et géloudes: Histoire d’une croyance et d’une tradition.” In
Travaux et mémoires, :–. Paris: Éd. de Brocard, .
Tertullian. Against Marcion. English translation in Roberts and Donaldson, Ante-
Nicene Fathers, vol. .
———. Against Praxeas. English translation in Roberts and Donaldson, Ante-
Nicene Fathers, vol. .
———. La Chair du Christ. Text and French translation by J. P. Mahé. Sources
chrétiennes, vol. . Paris: Éd. du Cerf, .
Theodore of Stoudios. On the Holy Icons. Translated by C. P. Roth. Crestwood,
NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, .
Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica.
Vernant, J.-P. Myth and Thought Among the Greeks. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, .
Wilson, I. Le Suaire de Turin. Paris: Albin Michel, .
Worringer, W. Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style.
New York: International Universities Press, .

ultural Memory in the Present

Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: Theodor W. Adorno, Can One Live after
The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, edited by
Imaginary Rolf Tiedemann
Cecilia Sjöholm, The Antigone Complex: Ethics Patricia Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture:
and the Invention of Feminine Desire Working with Deleuze in Film Theory
Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:
What Tomorrow . . . : A Dialogue Christianity, Islam, Modernity
Elisabeth Weber, Questioning Judaism: Interviews Dorothea von Mücke, The Rise of the Fantastic
by Elisabeth Weber Tale
Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou, Marc Redfield, The Politics of Aesthetics:
Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism
Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape
Nanette Salomon, Shifting Priorities: Gender and Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology
Genre in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting Rodolphe Gasché, The Idea of Form: Rethinking
Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul Kant’s Aesthetics
Jean-Luc Marion, The Crossing of the Visible Michael Naas, Taking on the Tradition: Jacques
Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany Derrida and the Legacies
of Deconstruction
Anne Freadman, The Machinery of Talk: Charles
Peirce and the Sign Hypothesis Herlinde Pauer-Studer, ed., Constructions of
Practical Reason: Interviews on Moral and
Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes
Political Philosophy
Stuart McLean, The Event and its Terrors:
Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a
Ireland, Famine, Modernity
Phenomenology of Givenness
Beate Rössler, ed., Privacies: Philosophical
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer,
Evaluations
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Bernard Faure, Double Exposure: Cutting Across
Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy
Buddhist and Western Discourses
Martin Stokhof, World and Life as One: Ethics
Alessia Ricciardi, The Ends Of Mourning:
Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film and Ontology in Wittgenstein’s Early Thought
Gianni Vattimo, Nietzsche: An Introduction
Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of
Universalism Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and
Interviews, ‒, ed. Elizabeth
Gil Anidjar, The Jew, The Arab: A History of the
Rottenberg
Enemy
Brett Levinson, The Ends of Literature: Post-
Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb, eds., Just
transition and Neoliberalism in the Wake of the
Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the
“Boom”
Public Arena
Timothy J. Reiss, Against Autonomy: Global
Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, edited by
Dialectics of Cultural Exchange
Simon Sparks
Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Religion Kaja Silverman, World Spectators
and Media Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation:
Niklas Luhmann, Theories of Distinction: Expanded Edition
Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity, ed. Jeffrey S. Librett, The Rhetoric of Cultural
and introd. William Rasch Dialogue: Jews and Germans in the Epoch of
Johannes Fabian, Anthropology with an Attitude: Emancipation
Critical Essays Ulrich Baer, Remnants of Song: Trauma and the
Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire
Philosophy of Christianity and Paul Celan
Gil Anidjar, “Our Place in Al-Andalus”: Samuel C. Wheeler III, Deconstruction as
Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab- Analytic Philosophy
Jewish Letters David S. Ferris, Silent Urns: Romanticism,
Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils Hellenism, Modernity
F. R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation Rodolphe Gasché, Of Minimal Things: Studies
F. R. Ankersmit, Political Representation on the Notion of Relation
Elissa Marder, Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in Sarah Winter, Freud and the Institution of
the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Psychoanalytic Knowledge
Flaubert) Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud: Expanded
Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual Edition
History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts Aris Fioretos, ed., The Solid Letter: Readings of
Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media Friedrich Hölderlin
Hubert Damisch, A Childhood Memory by Piero J. Hillis Miller / Manuel Asensi, Black Holes / J.
della Francesca Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading
Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a Miryam Sas, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and
History of Painting Japanese Surrealism
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Speculative Remark (One of Peter Schwenger, Fantasm and Fiction: On
Hegel’s Bons Mots) Textual Envisioning
Jean-François Lyotard, Soundproof Room: Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History,
Malraux’s Anti-Aesthetics Technology, Art
Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other;
or, The Prosthesis of Origin
Hubert Damisch, Skyline: The Narcissistic City
Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation,
Isabel Hoving, In Praise of New Travelers:
Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural
Reading Caribbean Migrant Women Writers
Politics in Yugoslavia
Richard Rand, ed., Futures: Of Derrida
Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The
William Rasch, Niklas Luhmann’s Modernity: Codification of Intimacy
The Paradox of System Differentiation
Mieke Bal, ed., The Practice of Cultural Analysis:
Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation
Hospitality
Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds.,
Jean-François Lyotard, The Confession of Religion
Augustine