The Name: Christology, Language, and the Fragmentation of Metaphysics

 "He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes I will give some of the hidden manna to eat. And I will give him a white stone, and on the stone a new name written which no one knows except him who receives it" (Revelation 2:17)

A recurrent problem in any serious approach of Christian theology is to determine what exactly "person" means in the relation between nature-person in Chalcedon's Christology. This council (451) came off the heals of Ephesus (431) which shattered the bonds of the church. Cyril was neither a maniacal pharaoh nor a speculative nitpicker when he went after Nestorius. It was the serious concern, emergent from his subordinates attacking the title 'theotokos' for Mary, that something was deeply flawed in Nestorius' Christology. A student of Theodore of Mopsuestia, Nestorius embraced his "Antiochene" theology (not so much pertaining to Syrians but to the school/network in Antioch beginning with Diodore of Tarsus and his brightest pupil, Theodore). Theodore was no slouch, but a great hero of Nicaea's rectification at Constantinople (381). Both he and Diodore defended the faith from Julian the Apostate's refutations. They vigorously attacked Arianism, as well as insufficiently human christologies (like Apollonaris') which had made Jesus' humanity in someway fictive. But if Jesus is truly God and truly man, how is this possible? Without rehashing this debate, the concern really comes down to the question of "person".

Chalcedon's ambiguity (typified in the equally ambiguous christology of pope Leo's Tome) is in the increasingly technical terminology of "person" as distinct from nature. One sense of the term ('hypostasis') is more about an individuated substratum, an instance of a particular nature (this dog). For a long time this term was translated into Latin with substantia, not (as it became later) persona. However, another sense of this term ('prosopon') meant both a face and an actor's mask, an outward facing role. It was far less metaphysically inclined and supposed the fictive nature of identity, the way an actor "becomes" a character through a mutual identification. Theodore of Mopsuestia disaggregates these terms. In the first sense, Christ must have two "persons" because otherwise one would deny that Jesus is a concrete, individuated, human being (with particular face, body, eyes). In the second sense, Theodore talks of a prosopic union, analogically compared to a marriage. There is a single role, a single 'I', in the human Jesus and divine Logos acting as one. It makes sense that this seemingly less metaphysical (and more rhetorical) approach appealed to 19th/20th c. liberal Christians, who castigated the "Hellenic" turn in Christianity. At first blush, Theodore seems less interested in speculative questions, and more interested in the humanity of Christ in history (and not, as liberals accused, the mythology of divine incarnation, which they snarled at Cyril).

 But I would argue that it's precisely the other way around. Contrary to popular myth, the "Antiochenes" were not reflective of a greater semetic mentality (in contrast to the Hellenized philosophers of Alexandria). Diodore and Theodore were equally Hellenized. They not only heavily depended on Hellenistic schools of rhetoric, but also depended upon Aristotelian metaphysics. They were, through and through, Greeks (as they were known among the Syriac-speaking Christians in Persia). While Alexandria had a much stronger tradition of speculative philosophy (e.g. Philo, Ammonius Sacchus, Clement, Origen), such is often misunderstood as simply polished mythology. Even so, Cyril selectively inherited and deployed this tradition to serve his more fundamental concern: the identity of Christ. In other words: who is Christ?

To make a radical break: Giorgio Agamen provides an oblique entry into this question. In his What is Philosophy?, Agamben tries to determine the seemingly circular phenomenon of philosophy-qua-language. Philosophy (and thought) does not exist apart from language, but thoroughly muddled and mixed into it. To be a human being, a Homo sapiens (wise!), is to speak. And yet speech, as its theorized, has many fractures throughout it as it relates to an external world. To simplify (I think), such can be radically phrased as the gap (aporia) between sign and thing signified. In other words, there is the thing-in-itself and the human-linguistic denotation of it, but what allows man to cross this divide? Every attempt only deepens the problem, as language then develops the gap between sign/signified through semiotics and semantics, between denotation and gesture, between word and discourse. Agamben notes how this fracture only continues and spirals around and around. 

 However, Agamben sees this division ultimately deriving from a critical misunderstanding of Plato in Aristotle. In brief, Aristotle thought Plato had juxtaposed the 'idea' from the individual (and corrupted) instance of it along an ontological chain. This is precisely what most people imagine as Platonic theo-ontology: an Idea above (in heaven? a world of Forms?) radiating downwards into all its pluriform (and corrupted/imperfect) manifestations. Aristotle rejects this notion for an inductive approach which forces essences into existence through backwards reasoning. In other words, while there is no Idea 'Dog' from which all dogs draw from separate from individual dogs, we can see in an individual dog (and its similarity to all other dogs) an essence that exists in and through these disparate forms, but inseparable from them. For Aristotle, such is the "soul", the form of a given body. Existence wrenches essence into existence through the existing phenomenon's sheer existing. From this moment, according to Agamben, "being" becomes the puzzle of western philosophy. For those familiar with Agamben's larger corpus of work, one can see the glaring similarities to his works on politics. It's the same problem (one which Heidegger noticed and Agamben develops).

 But Agamben argues that Aristotle radically misunderstood Plato. The "Idea" is not at the highest pinnacle of being (Being) from which all being flows. Such is only to posit a radical void at the heart of metaphysics, since being linguistically cannot be said to be (anymore than one can say, as Agamben quotes Aquinas favorably, running runs). Rather the "Idea" is identified with the anaphoric Name. Agamben sketches out Plato's major point here:

"The relation between phenomena and the idea is defined not by the participation in common traits, but by homonymy, the pure having a name. And it is this dwelling of the thing beside itself in a pure having a name that Plato tries to designate, against Anthisthenes, through the anaphor 'auto': the 'circle itself' (autos o kyklos), seizes the circle not at the level of signification but in its pure having a name, in that pure sayability that alone makes discourse and knowledge possible" (58)

From the gap between man's sensation (or a mystical intellectation through the "third eye") and his reasoning (viz. language) emerges the name. The sheer fact of sayability, to name something, is the thing itself. In other words, a circle is a circle because it is named circle. The Idea is circle itself, where universal and particular are homynymous. At the very least, this approach solves the radical insanity at the heart of Aristotelian science (which early moderns mocked): where does one draw the line between essence and accident? Dog is an essence, why not Chihuahua? What gives any category an ontological existence as essence and not one of its infinite subcategories? Moliere mocks this problem in his The Imaginary Invalid and the "scientific" circularity of the "dormative principle" as why Opium makes you sleepy. One does not get anywhere, where language and ontology simply collapse into each other. But, again, Plato did not entertain the fracture Aristotle read into him:

"Plato's strategy becomes at this point more comprehensible. He did not substantialize or separate a generality - as Aristotle assumed - but tried to think a pure sayability, without any conceptual determination" (63)

Again, Plato's interest that thing-itself is not hidden behind an infinite chain of words and names. Rather, the name brings about the thing-itself through an indirect gesture, an anaphor, a pronoun 'autos'. The Circle is the Circle, the "itself" ('autos') simply becomes part of its name as a gesture to the sheer essential existence through language. In other words, our words are not simply bungled attempts to describe reality, but actually draw (or, better yet, sing) reality into existence. The 'name' is a pre-ontic Real, opened to man through his self-consciousness. The particular's appearance (a discrete phenomenon) calls out, even demands, a name, which is precisely the essence of this existent thing. The intelligibility of the world precedes our own intellectual grasping towards it. Thus man is not so much an element (though a reflective one) along the chain of being, the mirror like ring of the Unmoved Mover staring at himself and oozing out all kinds of reality. Rather, man is a co-creator, crowning and glorifying the Real as it is. In this sense, Plato's theory of names is no different than Adam's priestly vocation to name the animals. Deep calls to deep as Adam forges the world as it actually is, the gap between name and reality healed. Or perhaps, better put, the God-given riddle that is creation is solved through man's participation in Wisdom.

But our world is still polluted with the dark pall of Aristotelian madness. The gap between sign-signified only intensified as Aristotelian science developed. Agamben sees a line tying this Aristotelian trend through the medieval ontotheologians and scientists, reaching a critical melting point with the Nominalists:

"On the other hand, developing the Aristotelian claim according to which the 'pathemata' and things are the same for all, while words and letters are different, Boethius specifies that, out of the four elements that form the linguistic-semantic knot, two (res and intellectus) are by nature (naturaliter) and two (nomina and litterae) are by convention (positione). This is the beginning of the process that will lead to the primacy of the concept and to the transformation of the sayable into a mental reality whose identity is totally independent of the word in its auditory materiality. The process of de-linguisticization of knowledge that would lead to modern science is possible only if the conceptual meaning of the word is, in this way, made autonomous from its variable signifier. As Ruprecht Paque has shown (1970), this is the case because modern science did not simply originate from the observation of nature, but was first of all made possible by the investigations of Ockham and the medieval logicians who isolated, in the experience of language, the suppositio personalis - in which the word refers in the act and only as a pure sign to a res extra animam - and privileged it over all those cases in which the word somehow refers to itself (suppositio materialis)" (66)

In other words, Agamben is arguing that as natural-language became separated from customary/historical-language (the actual name vs. the human name), thus language became separated from thought. And thought then requires a kind of pure intellectation, an act of pure untainted thought thinking, to grasp the thing-in-itself. Such breeds either the nihilism at the heart of Rationalism or ultimately a kind of pragmatic and skeptical agnosticism. It's helpful to remember that the Middle Ages was a highly materialistic and scientific era at its height. Albertus Magnus was not simply a theologian, but an engineer (and a very early theorist of AI). The debate that ended in the condemnation of Berengar's eucharistic theology and the enshrining of transubstantiation flowed from an educated materialism. The Aristotelian-compatible doctrine was a means to synthesize, and undermine, the Stercoranism that lurked in the shadows. Whether anyone actually believed that eating the eucharist turned the body of Christ into human waste, its presence formed a logical consequence of era. 

Descartes' attempt to found Rationalism upon sheer intellectation (an impossibility, which acted as a ticking time-bomb) was a response to the civil war raging in France among Roman Catholics and Huguenot-Calvinists. Reason, accessible to all men, could act as the common denominator. But it also sought to end the acid skepticism emerging from this nominalist approach to knowledge. It's not so much a problem of metaphysics, but the collapse of metaphysics into epistemology (the aporia reaching a breaking point). Smashed to pieces by the historicist humanism of many Reformers, Roman Catholics turned to philosophic skepticism. The human voice wavered before the unknowability, the aporia between sign and thing signified, between human projects and the subliminal terror of divine Real. Not a few Protestants shared a similar concern (many embracing the same sign/signified dynamic, manifest in Reformed sacramentology) and they turned to their own projects. Humanism gave way to an Aristotelian-inflected scholasticism, building their system upon the circle of knowledge found in a collection of texts, juxtaposed to Roman Catholics who did the same upon a magisterial institution. It's striking to compare the Reformation creeds of the 16th c. to the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646). The former begin in confessing (naming) the triune God, sometimes in relation to the appearance in Jesus Christ. The latter begins with the problem of epistemology, the need to anchor on a fixed and given list of books.

It was this medieval-modern continuity of scholasticism that set up the radical problems at the heart of philosophy and science. Language is defined apart from reason, and reason becomes rapidly defined apart from empirical reality. The thing-in-itself appears as part of a dichotomy, which, again, either demands man's build his Babel to grasp it, or abandons all hope for function. The latter leaves man in the fog described in Humean skepticism, irrational man garbed in his ragged traditions, an ape in a tailored suit. However, for the former, for those who have hope, they continue to explore this depth, and yet in doing so become tyrannical and murderous. Creation as such is vivisected to find the Real behind, going deeper and deeper through logic and the physical sciences. This project seems to come alive again in every generation, and also brings about the same despair. Yet it, in the process, dehumanizes man (and obliterates the nobility of creation). For Owen Barfield, who saw the problem in the same way, modern science is the ultimate form of idolatry: its models rape reality, violently taking its place. Science becomes scientism and technique (in Ellul's sense), it no longer cares to "save the appearances", but to destroy them and replace them with its own mechanized constructs. And in the mean time, philosophy aimlessly wanders into an abyss of metaphysical abstraction and logical irrationality. Strangely, Aristotelian revivalists parallel Positivists in constructing paradigms that increasingly say nothing about Reality, but get farther away the more they try to approach it. It's this problem that Agamben sketches out:

"It is only starting from this aporia, that is, from the loss of the passage ('poros') and the experience ('peira') that could reconnect philosophy and science, that we can explain the apparently unlimited domination of a technology that both philosophers and scientists seem to observe in dismay. Technology is not an "application" of science: it is the consequential product of a science that no longer can or wants to save appearances, but obstinately tends to replace its hypotheses with reality, to "realize" them. The transformation of the experiment - which now takes place through machines that are so complex that they do not have anything to do with real conditions, but purport to force them - eloquently shows that the translation between languages is no longer at stake. A science that renounces saving appearances can only aim at their destruction; a philosophy that no longer calls itself into question, through the ideas, in language [lingua], loses its necessary connection with the sensible world" (84)

Framed another way: the Aristotelian fracture (as a reformulation of his understanding of Plato) only intensifies. Existent properties threaten an infinite chain of essences, and thus existent properties can be condemned to the dump of sheer materiality (potentiality, not actuality) in the category of "accident". And in so doing, existence is ironically forced out of existence. Modern science continues this trend through making visible phenomena simply nonexistent products of our evolved reptile/ape brains. As Barfield made it clear in his example of a rainbow: since the rainbow does not exist according to the categories/toolkits of modern science, it does not exist even though one sees it. Philosophy and science become infinitely distant, as the former builds a kingdom of the clouds and the latter becomes an infinitely destructive machine. In the latter's case, it results in radical dehumanization or breaks down into myopic pragmatism (depending on broken categories that are self-consciously false).

The only way out is overcoming this divide through the name. To name something is to recognize it in its very Reality. The fragmentation of Aristotelian categories is actually the liberation of reality, that every existent thing is its own essence precisely in its being named. The dots and lines that make up the circle essentially exist in the same way the circle does, just as the Barfieldian rainbow essentially exists as much as the lightwaves that constitute it. Their essence is in their name because essence is not an ontological category. Agamben concludes his essay thus:

"The truth that is expressed in language - and given that we do not have other ways of expressing it, the truth that is at stake for us as speaking humans - is neither a real fact nor an exclusively mental entity, nor a 'world of meanings'; rather, it is an idea, something purely sayable, that radically neutralizes the sterile oppositions mental/real, existent/nonexistent, signifier/signified [significato]. This - and nothing else - is the object of philosophy and thought" (89)

Philosophy is, essentially, philology because sophia is none other than the logos. Wisdom is to recognize and speak the names. As much as they exist, they are. The circle testifies to "the circle itself", the anaphoric gesture that appears in, yet exceeds, any individual appearance. It's not because there's a perfect circle somewhere "up there", but because the circle itself is not an ontological category. It is a name and a name is the domain of language and is properly thought as such. The name is literally the subject of a given phenomenon, its pre-ontic founding, under (sub) through project with a voice (jectum).

Here we return to the original question: what is a "person"? Theodore's theology (through Mopsuestia) created a serious fragmentation in Christ through his Aristotelian metaphysics. The individuated natures then assume a prosopic unity, as a husband and wife become one. Yet such is supposed to solve a metaphysical question as to how God and man are united in Jesus Christ. But if Christ is the name of this joint dyophysic prosopon (the two-natured face) then it begs the question how this came about. How can Christ be the name by which we're saved, if the name is fundamentally a created reality. As Theodore would never countenance God as eternally human (his theology is precisely to counter such a proposition, despising all theopaschite language), he must mean that Christ qua Christ is created. That's what horrified Cyril. Christ qua human was created, but not Christ as such (the name). To call Mary 'theotokos' was to call the Antiochene bluff. It was not a mythological account of how a divinity appeared as a human (plenty of these tales existed among the Hellenes). Rather, it was identifying the man Jesus Christ with the eternal God in such a way that left no remainder. Jesus was not simply the newest name for God (a development along God's providential history). Rather, Jesus is God.

Framed another way: God was not Christ before the union. Before the union, man knew God independently from the man Jesus by other names. While such may be acceptable, what happens to the name for the flesh of Jesus? St. Paul names him repeatedly as Jesus Christ, a significant fact that the adjective becomes almost anaphoric. Jesus Christ is the Circle itself, the pronoun as a revelation through indirect means, God's name identified with His salvific priestly-kingship. Theodore wants to create an artificial triadic distinction, between Logos (divinity), Jesus (human), and Christ (prosopic unity). But given the looming problems in the Aristotelian fracture, what happens if we begin to name other "parts" of Jesus. And even more importantly, what happens to Jesus? Per the misogynistic climate of Hellenic philosophy, women were simply subsumed (their existence turned into the unnameable remainder). Accordingly, Jesus (as man) is banished from existence through the prosopic unity of Christ. Antiochene christology is thus, counterintuitively, misanthropic.

To restate the point once again: Theodore's Christology becomes littered with various problems, most importantly it seems to deny the eternality of the name "Jesus Christ". For Theodore, the atonement is not the revelation of history, but its (penultimate) climax.

Cyril's approach is radically unlike this point, maybe because he learned the best from Origen's platonism. Man is saved always by Jesus Christ, both before and after the atonement. He is the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. But more importantly, if the name if actually a revelation of the Real (not describing a more real phenomenon behind it) then the 'person' of Christ can be wholly identified with God. One can describe the varied parts, but in relation to the Name they're inseparable. Hence Cyril's uneasiness of talking about two natures after the incarnation; it is, at best, an abstraction. And just as the bits of rain, the waves of light, and the human eye form a matrix from which the rainbow exists, yet do not constitute the rainbow (which exists in its own right), so too does Christ exist in His own right. He is not stitched together, but is. Cyril, along with the Cappadocians, links 'hypostasis' and 'prosopon' together into 'hypostasis', but this subjectum is none other than the name, the face, the mask. Who is not simply ontological (which must be distinguished from nature), but preontic. Hence the need to identify God not as Being, but as beyond Being. In Christ, the Name appears, we have full and effective revelation not only of God, but of the Real. All of history is opened and manifest.

Now, I diverge from Agamben's anarchism (theologically and politically), see that in this naming, not only does the Real exist, but man effectively creates the real. At one point, Agamben covers anthropologists who saw naming ceremonies that create gods in their naming, tied to ancient Roman deities which were none other than named activities. However, if what lay behind ontological reality is not simply a fertile void, but a full and radiant light, then it's not simply another myth, but an actual account of the Real. Agamben toys with the idea of coming up with own mythopoetic account of why man is fundamentally a linguistic animal, yet only learns language from others (and without this social learning, man withers and dies, as the wolf girl in France did). Agamben is more right than he knows when he says that, for language to exist, God is the first man. It's why ancient iconography depicted God as Jesus Christ in the creation of Adam. It was not simply anachronism, but the eternally true Real, which stretched onto history's canvas when Jesus of Nazareth walked the land. All of history revolves around this axis. Hence Hamann's criticism of Herder's theory of language that depends upon a self-creative fecundity. No, God first spoke to man and called man's response into being. Genesis is thus the true myth in that man's creation is fundamentally because God speaks a human language.

Cyril's christology is precisely in overcoming this metaphysical fracture that Aristotelians like Theodore continue. And it's in this way that Lutheran Christology (following Luther's heavy word-based theology) similarly overcomes this problem through loyalty to Cyrillian thought. Perhaps clearest in the account of the sacraments, Luther does not accept the sign/signified concept, but depends on the sheer given promise of the Word. Do this and it's real. The "in, with, under" language should thus be understood not in a metaphysical sense, but in the name. To name this bread and wine, ritually and in the prescribed words, the Body and Blood is that it is so. There's no gap between sign/signified, which bedeviled Reformed scholastic theology and its various metaphysical attempts to sketch out this problem (whether Calvin's heavenly ascension, an ecclesiastical transformation viz. Zwingli, or the creeping memorialism of others). Christ appears in His word.

All in all, such is to explain the mysterious (yet salvific) word: the lamb of God was slain before the foundation of the world.

Sign of the Cross: An Essay on Art and Fidelity

 The image has had a complex place within Christian theology. Despite the reduction of the debate to crudities in the 16th c., with the uncritical use of the 2nd Commandment to foster a "building-storm" against Roman idolatry, the question has dipped below the radar for most. It has become essentially a non-issue for most Protestants (with exception of devout Reformed committed to the Regulative Principle of Worship). On it's face, this quiet victory is good: the image is here to stay. But this empirical victory erases the far more difficult and challenging question: what is an image? can an image be false? can an image become an idol?

It's this point that's most important from the 17th c. The late Medieval era did not simply see a proliferation of ecclesiastical art open to iconodulia, but saw a boom in new image technologies. Tinkerers installed clockwork in crucifixes, allowing the statue to move. Similar mechanization made statues of saints move their eyes, hands, or head, creating a "pious fraud" in an experience of the miracle. These developments flowed from a long history of hagiography, where departed saints exert great power in the world through their relics and their images. While theoretically a gulf existed between palace theology and village practice, they often intersected. As one example, in 9th c. Byzantium, Theodore the Studite (a saint and pioneer of iconodulia apologetic) admired an inquirer who planned to use an image of St. Demetrios as his child's baptismal godfather. Theodore applauded this use of an image, for who better to defend and raise up the child than a heavenly defender of cities? Iconoclasts in this era did not dispute the image qua image per se, but the role the image had in piety. From the perspective of Byzantine historian Leslie Brubaker puts it:

"as soon as we leave the rarefied atmosphere of learned theological treatises, the properties of the sacred portrait so carefully distinguished by Byzantine churchmen collapse. This is true not only of 'popular' literature such as saints' lives and miracle accounts, but also of non-theological texts written by the same elevated churchmen" (Inventing Byzantine Iconoclasm, 111)

It was for this reason that the Carolingian church in the west refused to sign on to the Second Council of Nicaea (787). In historian Thomas X. Noble's Images, Icons, and the Carolingians, Noble argues that contrary to previous accounts, the Carolingian theologians (led by Theodulf of Orleans) precisely knew the problems in Nicaea II. Theodulf did not find the distinctions between "reverence" and "worship" sufficient to protect Christians from expecting the miraculous from wood and paint. In the tradition of Gregory the Great, Theodulf stood astride icondulic positions (embraced by the Byzantine era of the Roman papacy) and more iconoclastic positions. Claudius of Turin, a mainstay at the Carolingian court, received opposition for his more aggressive position. Agreeing with Theodulf that the boundary between reverence and worship was paper thing, the bishop removed images that attracted popular attention. More concerned about false worship, Claudius was not an iconoclast strictly. He sought to replace the images with more abstract ones (geometric) which would call out for intellectual worship and resist any collapse between sign and thing signified. Noble interprets Claudius as embracing an anti-materialist view of worship (hence his opposition to pilgrimages and holy relics). Whether or not this claim is true, Claudius' opposition raises the question of what the image actually is and how it relates to us.

The image is a form of language, but it is subsequent to language qua language. A picture may speak a thousand words, but mankind must first know those words. The unique vision of Christianity (which includes the faith of the OT saints and patriarchs all the way to Adam) is that the ear precedes the eye, not the other way around. The Christian knows God speaks first (ear) and then man sees, his attention directed to the sources of the Voice. The devil inverts this command structure: in man's disobedience his eyes are opened, now shuddering before the divine Voice. The Word is the Word eternally before the Word takes flesh. The ear is the organ of reception and obedience. It's not simply passive (hence the concept of being an active or good listener), it takes work. In contrast, the eye is the organ of judgement. Throughout Scripture, the eye of God can be a terrifying reality. As the broken psalmist puts it: "Remove Your gaze from me, that I may regain strength, Before I go away and am no more." (Ps. 39:13). It is judgement. However, an undeveloped eye, one which lacks the preceding grace of Wisdom crying out, will judge poorly. Thus, the image requires prior understanding. It is true that the image is a book for the unlettered, but the unlettered must first hear the word. One must hear in order to see. The written word is itself pictorial, a series of characters and signs that themselves chastely harken to the spoken word, to language. Simultaneously, the painted image is something to read, requiring a hermeneutic to properly understand its voice. The frozen word descends down from the living word, whether spoken or not (meaning it flows through the hands of the author).

Now the biblical justification for images qua images is present, the question now moves from the 2nd Commandment to the 8th/9th Commandment: You Shall Not Bear False Witness. What if an image lies? The pagan idols are not damnable simply because they're images of the divine world (otherwise the Cherubim and architecture of the Temple would be idolatrous) but because they lie. These sites claim privileges and powers that the "gods" (demons) claim to themselves. They rob the true Temple. Hence the golden calves that Aaron forges are not wrong because they depict other gods, but falsely depict God. Moses mediated between God and the People, not these golden calves (who were dead and dumb). But this imagistic idolatry is different than simply imagery. Most of the Temple's images were not mediatorial. In fact, the precise space where mediation took place (the Mercy-Seat) was empty. The Cherubim enthroned a space where the God of Israel would make himself present. But, again, this fact does not encapsulate all images, lest one thinks one speaks through the image to the one imaged; there are many words, even in sacred scripture and the songs of God's people, but only one covenantal name for Israel's God.

It's this problem that runs up against the later developments of iconodulic theology. Theodore the Studite (along with Patriarch Nicephoros of Constantinople) continued the iconodulic fight against semi-resurgent iconoclasm (semi-resurgent because, as Brubaker argues, the policies from the palace seem less theological than Constantine V's and more about copying a previous and successful reign). While there was no iconoclastic persecution (the sources are highly dubious), it still became an issue of ecclesiastical (and thus imperial-governmental) policy. Theodore, as mentioned above, could thrive in both the world of highly refined theologians and the vulgar laity. Theodore supported the use of an image for a godfather, but also made intelligent advances on the concept of an icon. For Theodore, the icon was a necessity from Christ's incarnation. Mankind had moved from the age of hearing to the age of seeing. Thus, just as God made Himself visible through flesh, man too could see God through the image of God's flesh. Through the use of Aristotelian categories, the icon became a "window of Heaven" a type to reflect the proto-type. Such art was not historicist, but realist: it was not God in Christ as He was in the 1st c., but a vision of God as He truly is now. The images of scripture were not simply "back then", but living words. Thus, Christ and the saints receive due reverence through their images when the images are revered. Of course, as later critics would note, philosophical pagans made the same arguments about temples and sites. But is this a problem?

Theodore's iconodulic arguments raise important questions about the "words" spoken in the image. The prosopic-portrait is quite popular in Byzantine iconography. While symbols of who this particular saint litter the iconic portrait, it is rather an abstract imaging of a particular person. It is a revelation of their face. 

Before I proceed further, I want to make a point about these images themselves. Brubaker makes a good point about the icon as a form of popular piety against the imperial restrictions. In her judgement, the iconoclastic regime of Constantine V was not anti-image per se, but against the images being reverenced. Later regimes continued a similar policy, with images sometimes covered or moved away from where they could be reverenced. In a few extreme cases, images were covered with lime or plaster (however, later iconodules recovered many of these). The emphasis from the palace (and his bishops) was the sanctioned cult. Reverance was for the eucharist, the office of the ministry, and relics; all of which required the official hierarchy. Like the research of Peter Brown about holymen in loosely regulated monasticisim, the icons could appear anywhere and offer an alternative source of authority/legitimacy outside of Roman government. There was little prescribed form for iconographs (with exceptions from semi-ecumenical council of Trullo that banned symbolic art for prosopographic-realistic art). Brubaker sees the iconodules as grassroots cult against established religion. Some icons had particular holiness through stories of the miraculous, but anyone could reproduce most icons. This notion of the sacred in the reproducible is almost Benjaminian, rejecting the sacred aura of an original for a type that could be copied over and over and over again. It reflects the common (even kitchy) defeating the sanctioned and official.

The point above, and its relevance for what follows, is that the question of norms becomes abstract. In a Benjaminian twist, the icons restrain the power of the emperor, emphasizing the role of the people in the Byzantine republic (something later ratified in Nicaea II and its reemergent victory in the Triumph of Orthodoxy (843). However, this analysis depends upon an abstract notion of power relations within a governmental system. At one level, I too grant that iconodulia is a revivical for the demos within the eastern Roman republic, balanced with the monarchic palace, the aristocratic senate and church, and the exceptional monastics. However, to leave the question here is to remove any specific Christian content from the question of icons. In an ethico-theological turn, are these images "true" words? Do they actually reflect reality as such?

The fact Byzantine iconography adopted the face is very important. The face is prosopographic, it is (as the word suggests) personal. Thus, to see the face of Christ is to see the Person. To be without a face is to be without a person. In the classical terminology of patristic theology, a person is subjecthood and concrete issuance. To be faceless is not only to lack concret characteristics, but to lack any 'I'. Thus, any revelation of the face is essentially a bid to manipulate the person towards ends. It's this question Marie-Jose Mondzain tackles in her book on the theopolitical consqeuence of the Iconoclastic controversy:

"The stakes of the image are therefore not only of concern to Christological 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 spiritually 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" (Image, Icon, Economy, 8)

Mondzain's work primarily explores the theological apologetics of patriarch Nikephoros, who operates not only as a defender of iconodulia (after it's ratified in council) but as ally to the Byzantine state. Mondzain fears that this ecclesiastical logic can serve the purpose of whomever controls the state. Without her misplaced fear of statism linked to Nazi genocide, her point remains very poignant. He who controls the face controls the person. And if one obscures the connection between the natural face and the artificial face, one may faithlessly tarnish the face. In her case, it was the creation of the artificial Jew face as faceless, one given in profile, diminutive and subpersonal (and thus subhuman). But the dehumanization process is not so crude as erasing someone's face. For Mondzain, the interplay between natural and artificial to create revulsion is found in the a-prosopographic icon in profile. Seeing only half a face, usually in flight or revulsion (of one being revealed, a holy and righteous person), reveals a shadow-dweller. Given that mankind is never literally faceless, but ocassionally obscured, in profile, hidden, dubious, straddled, this breeds a kind of distrust. Where the prosopographic icon claims visibile and clarity, the image in profile is not. It's in this moment that a person can slip beneath personality, simply a thing.

In Mondzain's case, she's equating the manipulation of the image in the Byzantine republic (a strong state) with the totalitarian use of the image. This equation is somewhat ridiculous when one appreciates what the Nazis, as a state, were. It's precisely that the Nazis were not statists that they became a monstrous killing-machine. The Nazi regime never abolished the Weimar Republic or its constitution, only suspended it. Hitler never built a new constitutional regime, but was simply a parasite upon a weak and highly liberalized government. In this way, Hitler is more like Robespierre than Napoleon. It was in this twilight, between law and lawlessness, that Hitler ruled. He was the sovereign without law, which attracted the jurist Carl Schmitt, who admired Hitler's willingness to enact his political will. But as Schmitt later reflected, he rapidly felt like Benito Cerano, a captor to the escaped slave-mob and its fuhrer. While racialized (and no doubt, Schmitt was an antisemite), the point is quite clear. The Nazis did not end the liberal regime of Weimar, but exploited it. Again, this scenario is more like than not Robbespierre's seizure of the National Assembly. Both were revolutionary, both advanced a "leftwing" agenda through an appeal to a legendary and naive appeal to antiquity, both violently destroyed their "left" (Montagnards-Herbertists//Nazis-Communists). The point here it's precisely in the confusion of a law deactivated that a certain kind of deathmachine is unleashed. No laws means little to no state control (since Hitler gained control of the state like a fetish), which attracted a level of international capital investment (Sullivan & Cromwell's involvement in Nazi finance is a story worthy of note). It's precisley this ambiguity that Giorgio Agamben explores in his Homo Sacer series. While he, I think, collapses the cosmic into the political, his point about the way out is still prescient:

"What opens a passage towards justice is not the erasure of law, but its deactivation and inactivity - that is another use of the law [...] what is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or of play" (State of Exception, 64)

This conceptualization has everything to do with images as they exist (as Mondzain says) not only theologically, but politically and philosophically. While Byzantine orthodoxy rightly defends the image, the question is how this image is to be put to use given the imperially established church. Where do norms come from if at all? How is the church not simply become a product of the republic, which becomes completely corrupt when the republic falls into feudalization/privatization as happened during the later eras of Byzantine history? It's precisely this state of collapse that breeds the a-nomic deathmachine of genocide and murder. And even so, the equivocacy of the altar with the throne often leads to a crude sense of identity between church and empire. So goes the empire, so goes the church, since the emperor is the image of Christ (as not a few Byzantine panengyrists sung). While not exactly idolatrous (are not Christians images of Christ in our particularities in the Body?), it sets the stage for it. Additionally, there's a creeping sense of paganism, where the image precedes the word, that piety could depend upon image instead of word (and its a sad fact that, despite venerating the life of John Chrysostom, his style of preaching is lacking in most Orthodox churches). The image takes a life of its own, putty in the eye of the beholder, whether standardized from above or cacophonously composed through lay piety.

If the word precedes the image (even the spoken word preceding the written word), then the word itself becomes the norming norm for all of our subsequent images. While strange for outsiders, it's precisely this reason that Orthodoxy has "canonical" icons for the church. The point is not that these icons are equivalent with scripture, but that their revelation is normative for what the church prays and teaches. It's in the same way favorite authors become norms among Christians. However, this standard only begs the question: what about Canon? Are these norms simply a product of the church's will (however that's discerned)? Such is the position of Papal Catholicism. But traditional Orthodoxy affirms scripture's primary canon status (which is not as far, even though different, from medieval dissenters and the early Reformation). The words of scripture are the norming norm. Applied, it means the prosopographic emphasis should not be allowed to run amok. It is the images of scripture that norm the Christian's understanding. Whether Adam's creation, Abraham among the angelic visitors, Moses receiving the commandments, Elijah being taken into heaven, Jonah being swallowed by the fish, or Daniel among the lions, all of these faithfully draw the viewer back to the original word (whether through understanding or through perplexion). Additionally, the Christian's understanding of Scripture is thoroughly Christological. Ephraim the Syrian compares the words of scripture to the clothes Christ wears; Luther compares the words to the swaddling cloths of our dear Lord. The point is that the various narrative strands and developments within scripture find union and meaning in the Cross. The entirety of Israel's history is recapitulated in Christ's life and passion. As Irenaeus says, rightly arranged according to Christ, scripture is the mosaic of a beautiful king. Without Christ, it is either "so many myths and fables", or becomes, in the hands of heretics, the ugly image of a fox.

Christ's revelation in the words of scripture manifest the norming norms of all our speech. Christ's victory accomplishes what Agamben envisions: a new use of the law which leads to true justice, not through more law, but through the law's deactivation. The law becomes a means to truly live free and righteously in the task of study and play. The Torah becomes not a book of statutes, but a revelation of Christ's cross and the life we must live if we too wish to be free and just. Rather than a ponderous tome of juridical restraint, the scripture becomes a boundless mansion to explore and fully realize the freedom won for mankind through the blood of the eternal and spotless lamb. However, lest one get too far ahead, the conquering lamb is none other than the slain lamb, who retains his scars into eternity. And not only that, the Word of God, the Logos creating and governing every cosmic order, is the lamb slain from before the foundation of the world. Man's cosmic supremacy matures in the Christ who overcomes man's origins from the dust. Adam's sin leads him back to the realm of death: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Christ assumes this reality, conquering it once and for all. Thus, the faithful image (whether word or paint) must reveal this eternally scarred reality. It's the cosmic dimension of the cross, which Romanian Orthodox priest, Dumitru Staniloae:

"The cross with its two lines, one vertical, the other horizontal produces a wound in the total reality of creation; and through the wound God, who is at once beyond creation yet pierces into its midst, is made visible" (in Miller, The Gift of the World, 78)

Lest I be misunderstood, God is not wounded eternally in need of dialectical completion (per a Hegelian theology). Rather, God assumes the world's wounds, even from the very beginning. Thus, in terms of the image, God even assumes the dubious face of the image in profile. The Word never ceases to be true, but in taking the place of the sinner on the cross, the man cursed under the law, Christ was "made sin for us" (as St. Paul says 2 Cor 5:21). Hence, the "Evangelical" (Lutheran) artists of the Reformation truly understood this point. In Christ, God died, God assumed a profile, God allowed his face to be obscured, that the eternal Prince of Glory was humiliated and destroyed. It was in this act that God reconciled man to himself, purifying the sins of the elect and the entire world. In assuming mankind's plight, our collective facelessness, God reveals the world's vileness and sinfulness, a world where men debase and rob eachother of their face. And yet, in that moment of abjection and godforsakenness, the Lord mounts a throne to issue judgements, Deus regnavit a ligno. Salvation is thus baptism, having a potency through God's command, entering this realm of death. To lose our face in God's wrath against a world of demonic sin is to find it truly, beautified and divinized in God's resurrection power. The image which is faithfull shows this Christological truth. The image which is faithless denies it.

Christian art, whether literature or painting, must first hear the word of the Baptizer: ecce agnus dei, qui tollis peccata mundi. It is the word of Pilate: ecce homo. Behold! The divine word to shake the universe. Behold! Everything is made new. Behold! The conquering lamb unseals the scrolls of time and space. It's from this vantage, receptive and obedient to the word of God, where we may truly see, lifting up to God with our own bodies a living sacrifice through the fruit of our labors. The images make known the eternal Son of God who sprinkled his blood on the heavenly altar for mercy. From these signs, let man be led to grasp the word, not high above or far below, but near, ringing in the ear and dwelling in the heart.

Fragments from Jacques Ellull's "Meaning of the City"

-"[Adam and Cain having sex after the curse] is man's desire to find life, eternity, again. He transmits his life to his children" (5)

-"[Israel's] revolt is ever so much [defined as theological meaning attached to historical or psychological fact; does not mean false or ahistorical] more profound in this myth than in Prometheus...It is much more than taking God's power. It is the desire to exclude God from his creation. And it is this solidarity in a name[...]which was to keep men from ever being separated on Earth" (16)

-"The city is a place of physical war, but also of spiritual war. And the men who live there are sacrificed to her destiny" (22)

-"Sin is for the chronicler principally a political act of disobedience to God - worship on the high places, covenants with foreign people" (39)

-"As long as the human heart has not been transformed by the Holy Spirit, it is impossible for him to be convinced of God's excellence [...] Man acts reasonably in every area but one: that of his relations with God, where he acts contrary to all reason and knowledge because the roots of his heart are bad" (40)

-"Jerusalem is called upon [...] to show that the reality of God's grace is for the very object of man's revolt" (107)

-"[Jesus] is not one witness among others of man's long quest [...] He is not an example to be followed. He is not a momentary translation of man's permanent hope [...] He is himself, himself alone, the answer, the goal, and the kingdom of God present on Earth" (130)

-"No other religion has so severely condemned the origins of civilization and man's civilizing acts and industrial progress [...] nevertheless, it is the city, death's domain, which appears as the crowning moment of history. And more importantly, it is not the natural, normal ending, but the result of God's intervention" (162)

-"Only the death of the very Son of God is sufficient to change the facts of history. Only the resurrection is sufficient to dispossess the demon powers of their domain. Thus it is only God, by his act, who made the city into a neutral instrument" (170)