Icons as the Fruit and Seed of Incarnation: Windows into the Mystery of Christ and His Mother

Praying with icons sanctifies our gaze and frees us from visual contamination

We are living in a world saturated with superficial images, flooded with “visual noise.” The problem with this situation is that prayer, which is the basic duty of the Christian, requires a certain interior stillness and detachment, a kind of expectant emptiness seeking to be filled. If we do not find ways to center ourselves on God, we will drift off into a million vain things and lose the vital connection with the source of our being and our salvation.

Undoubtedly, our turning to God is a work of His grace. But it is also at the same time a function of our free will, the voluntary application of our soul’s powers to acts of faith, hope, and charity. And since we are physical beings, we need physical aids, not just rarefied ideas and good intentions.

Enter the icon. Although the icon as people usually think of it is seen as the special province of Eastern Christianity, it is the common heritage of the first millennium of the Faith, and in modified forms remains part of the Western or Latin tradition as well. All Christians stand to benefit from the veneration of icons, inasmuch as they bring before the eyes of our body and of our minds Christ our God, His Holy Mother, and the hosts of saints and angels who populate the heavenly Jerusalem. As Linette Martin puts it:

The icon points us to something beyond itself; we recognize it and are expected to respond.… The icon insists that we respond as much with the mind as with the emotions. Icons are not directed only to the gut; they are the thinking man’s art. That is what makes an icon different in motive and in effect from some other religious pictures, and that is why some people dislike icons: they prefer Christian art to be decorative and undemanding. The Orthodox Church teaches that an icon is a two-way door of communication that not only shows us a person or an event but makes it present. When we stand in front of an icon we are in touch with that person and we take part in that event.… What we call ‘our world’ and what we call ‘the spiritual world’ are opened to each other.¹

In this Christmas octave, I would simply like us to stand a moment before the oldest extant icon of Christ Pantocrator (Judge of all):

Dating to the sixth century, this arresting icon is one of only a handful in existence today that precedes the ecumenical council that definitively proclaimed the legitimacy and indeed necessity of icons (the Second Council of Nicaea, 787 AD). It escaped destruction at the hands of the iconoclasts thanks to its remote location at the monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai, which possesses thousands of ancient icons, many of them, like this one, fashioned out of colored wax.

The face of a man, not his chest or belly or limbs, is the visual center of his body. Therefore the face of the God-man, accentuated by a halo, dominates this panel.