I just finished reading Pavel Florensky's Iconostasis, and with the kind of bittersweet fervor that often accompanies my readerly conclusion of rare works of literature that grasp the essence of soulful yet earthly life, I kissed his printed name on the front cover. The last time I can remember doing this was when I finished A Room With a View, by E.M. Forster. I was on the public Metro in Seattle at the time, riding home from my minimum wage job that was getting me through my Master's degree.
The kiss was appropriate because I gazed upon the name "Florensky" in the way the author himself describes the true encounter with the icon: the icon is not an object in a world of objects, not a representation of another realm, but the actual presence of the saint or the divine in the life of the perceiving subject. I sincerely felt that having read this loving translation of his work by Donal Sheehan and Olga Andrejev that the words themselves were Florensky's presence in my thought and own life. "The icon that shows himself forth does not merely depict the holy witness but is the very witness himself. It is not the icon that, as a monument of art, deserves our attentive study; rather, it is the saint himslef who, through the icon, is teaching us. And if in that moment when, through the tiniest gap or break, the icon ontologically separates itself from the saint, then the saint hides himself from us in the unapproachable sphere and the icon becomes in that moment merely one more thing among the world's other things. In this terrible moment, a vital connection between earth and heaven disintegrates into a cancerous spot that kills that area of life in us where the saint once lived; and then there arises in us the dreadful fear that thic cancerous separation will spread" (Florensky 165). The radical claim here, of course, it that when the icon is correctly perceived, the icon IS the saint, or the Virgin, or Christ himself. In this claim we can sense the whole history of Protestant discomfort with the possibility of the power of idols and idol-worship. If the icon is the saint, that means the saint has an active and real presence not only in the life of the believer, but in the world as it is actually and objectively known, and that it is powerful, affective, and alive. And because an icon remains a work of metaphysics, to destory an icon in no way destroys the saint, but only the image of the saint. The icon both resists ontology and is the very essence of a representational ontology.
In the vein of performance studies, what might it mean to assert that, along with "the icon IS the saint," "the performance IS the performer"? Can it work in a similar way? I suppose this is a repetition of "How do you separate the dancer from the dance?" This is a truth performers have known forever. Performance is already iconographic, I would say, because as Stanislavsky says of the actor's work, the truth of the acting comes from the actor's actual experiencing of the role together with the means of production, and the art of acting relies on this experiencing, which is a holistic synthesis of all processes that come together in the creation and execution of a character. The icon IS incarnation of the saint. The actor IS the incarnation of the theatrical process and the role.
A word about Florensky himself (1882-1937, theologian, philosopher, engineer, inventor, mathematician): he began as a scientist in an atheistic family, and after years of study and brilliant output at a very young age, began to feel as though science had shown him all he could know about the physical universe. He applied to a monastary, feeling the next logical step would be to learn about the unknown. The abbot there wisely rejected him, suggesting he get married and go to seminary to become a priest instead. Florensky did this, and quickly became one of the most respected theologians in pre-revolutionary Russia. But with the onset of the revolution and the prohibition of religious study, Florensky again found himself without an intellectual or spiritual home. He worked for the Bolsheviks as a scientist and teacher, producing tremendous output, but all the while maintaining his priestly garb. Much in the way he describes a tempera-paint icon beaming with the light of creation, Florensky never gave up his cassock, his very being contradicting the secularism forced upon him, everywhere he went his presence beaming with the light of his faith. Eventually, he was imprisoned on trumped-up charges, and executed years later, along with thousands of other clerics and religious people.
Work Cited:
Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis, trans. Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1996).
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