Orthodox Services and the Icon

The services of the Orthodox temple are the way of ascent. Seen in the aspect of time, a temple service is an interior movement creating in us an inward separation at the fourth coordinate of depth and leading us into the highest realm. But a temple service is also an organized action in space, an action whose surface "membranes" continually direct us to the central kernel; and so temple space and temple time have, in the service, one and the same meaning. (More precisely, they have the same meaning along verbal and numerical coordinates, although they differ along other coordinates.)

The temple's spatial center, or kernel, is defined by "membranes": narthex, vestibule, the temple itself, sanctuary, altar-table, antemension, chalice, the Holy Mysteries, Christ, the father. As has been said before, the temple is Jacob's ladder, leading from the visible into the invisible. But the whole altar is (in its wholeness) already the place of the invisible, the area set apart from this world, separate, withdrawn, dedicated. The altar in its wholeness is heaven as sensible, as mind-apprehendable, as one with (in the phrase from the Divine Liturgy) "the most heavenly and spiritual altar." The symbolic meaning of the altar differs according to the different symbolic meanings of the temple: but the various meanings converge in aligning the incomprehensible with the actualities of the temple itself.

For example, when (following Simeon of Salonica) we see the entire temple in Christological terms as Christ God-Man, then the altar signifies the invisible God while the temple means the visible Man. If we use a purely anthropological approach, then the altar represents man's psyche or soul while the temple is his body. Theologically considered, the altar reveals to us the mystery of the Trinity in its incomprehensible essence, while the temple signifies the Trinity as comprehensible in the world's province and power. Finally, in a cosmological interpretation, the same Simeon recognizes in the altar the symbol of heaven 'while, in the temple, he sees the symbol of earth. Thus, the very diversity of these interpretations strengthens the onto-logical center of the altar's meaning as the invisible realm.

But this realm, by its very invisibility, is impossible to look at; and the altar, as noumenon, would for the spiritually blind be as impossible to see as would the flowing clouds of incense be for the physically blind - for the incense is a landmark which, because it is sensorily comprehensible, reveals the invisible world. Thus, the altar is necessarily limited in order to be something for us; but this limitation arises only through the realities of our dualistic power of perception. If these realities were wholly spiritual, they would be incomprehensible to our weak nature - and what exists in our consciousness would therefore not be made better. But if these realities were only in the visible realm, then they would be unable to indicate where lies the boundary between the visible and invisible: nor would they themselves know where that boundary existed. Heaven and earth, altar and temple: this separation can only occur through the visible witnesses of the invisible world, those living symbols of the co-inherence of this world and the other - i.e., through the holy people.

These holy persons, visible in the visible, are nevertheless not conformed to this world, for they have transformed their bodies and resurrected their minds, thereby attaining existence beyond this world in the invisible. Thus, they bear witness to the invisible as they bear witness to themselves by their holy countenances. They live with us, and they are more easily accessible to us than we are to ourselves. They are not earthly ghosts but persons standing firmly on our earth, not abstract, not bloodless.

But neither are they held in bondage to earth; rather, they are the living ideas of the invisible world. Thus, they are (we may say) the witnesses on the boundary between the visible and the invisible, the symbolic images of those visions that arise when passing from one state of consciousness into another. In this sense, they are the living soul of humanity by and through which mankind enters into the highest realm; for they, having left behind all the delusions and fantasies of the ascending passage, and having received the other world - they on their return to earth have transfigured themselves into angelic images of the angelic world. And it is no accident that these witnesses who, by their angelic countenances, have made the invisible close and accessible to us have, since ancient times, been popularly termed angels in the flesh.

When air currents of differing heights and speeds make con­tact, wavy clouds are formed at the point of contact. At the surface of such contact, the currents continue to flow contrariwise in layers one above another, and the winds that formed the clouds therefore cannot move them away—nor are the layers of air currents moved by their own swiftly moving flows. And so fogs are created that fall to cover the mountain summits; and though mountain windstorms may rage, the foggy cover does not move. Such a fog-cloud is a boundary between the visible and the invisible.

It renders inaccessible to our weak sight that which nevertheless it reveals the real presence of; and once we open our spiritual eyes and raise them to the Throne of God, we contem­plate heavenly visions: the cloud that covers the top of Mt. Sinai, the cloud wherein the mystery of God's presence is revealed by that which clouds it. This cloud is (in the Apostle's phrase) "a cloud of witnesses" (Heb. 12:1), it is the saints. They surround the altar, and they are the "living stones" that make up the living wall of the iconostasis, for they dwell simultaneously in two worlds, combining within themselves the life here and the life there. And their upraised gaze bears witness to the operation of God's mystery, for their holy countenances in themselves bear witness to the sym­bolic reality of their spiritual sight - and, in them, the empirical crust is completely pierced by light from above.

The wall that separates two worlds is an iconostasis. One might mean by the iconostasis the boards or the bricks or the stones. In actuality, the iconostasis is a boundary between the visible and invisible worlds, and it functions as a boundary by being an obstacle to our seeing the altar, thereby making it accessible to our consciousness by means of its unified row of saints (i.e., by its cloud of witnesses) that surround the altar where God is, the sphere where heavenly glory dwells, thus proclaiming the Mystery. Iconostasis is vision. Iconostasis is a manifestation of saints and angels – angelophania - a manifest appearance of heavenly witnesses that includes, first of all, the Mother of God and Christ Himself in the flesh, witnesses who proclaim that which is from the other side of mortal flesh. Iconostasis is the saints themselves. If everyone praying in a temple were wholly spiritualized, if everyone praying were truly to see, then there would be no iconostasis other than standing before God Himself, witnessing to Him by their holy countenances and proclaiming His terrifying glory by their sacred words.

But because our sight is weak and our prayers are feeble, the Church, in Her care for us, gave us visual strength for our spiritual brokenness: the heavenly visions on the iconostasis, vivid, precise, and illumined, that articulate, materially cohere, an image into fixed colors. But this spiritual prop, this material iconostasis, does not conceal from the believer (as someone in ignorant self-absorption might imagine) some sharp mystery; on the contrary, the iconostasis points out to the half-blind the Mysteries of the altar, opens for them an entrance into a world closed to them by their own stuckness, cries into their deaf ears the voice of the Heavenly Kingdom, a voice made deafening to them by their having failed to take in the speech of ordinary voices. This heavenly cry is therefore stripped, of course, of all the subtly rich expressiveness of ordinary speech: but who commits the act of such stripping when it is we who fail to appreciate the heavenly cry because we failed first to recognize it in ordinary speech: what can be left except a deafening cry?

Destroy the material iconostasis and the altar itself will, as such, wholly vanish from our consciousness as if covered over by an essentially impenetrable wall. But the material iconostasis does not, in itself, take the place of the living witnesses, existing instead of them; rather, it points toward them, concentrating the attention of those who pray upon them a concentration of attention that is essential to the developing of spiritual sight. To speak figuratively, then, a temple without a material iconostasis erects a solid wall between altar and temple; the iconostasis opens windows in this wall, through whose glass we see (those of us who can see) what is permanently occurring beyond: the living witnesses to God. To destroy icons thus means to block up the windows; it means smearing the glass and weakening the spiritual light for those of us who otherwise could see it directly, who could (we could figuratively say) behold it in a transparent space free of earthly air, a space where we could learn to breathe the pure ethereal air and to live in the light of God's glory: and when this happens, the material iconostasis will self-destruct in that vast obliteration which will destroy the whole image of this world and which will even destroy faith and hope - and then we will contemplate, in pure love, the immortal glory of God.

From: Iconostasis by Pavel Florensky, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, Crestwood, NY 2000

Born in 1882, Fr. Pavel Florensky was a brilliant philosopher, theologian, scientist, and art historian who, in 1911, became an Orthodox priest. By the time of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, Fr. Pavel had become a leading voice in Russia's great movement in religious philosophy, a movement whose roots lay in the rich ground of nineteenth-century Russian monasticism and whose branches included the work of Bulgakov, Berdiaev, and Solovyev. In the 1920s and 1930s the Soviets violently destroyed this splendor of Russian religious thought. In 1922, Fr. Pavel was silenced, and, after a decade of forced scientific work for the regime, he was arrested on false charges, tried, imprisoned, and, in 1937, murdered by KGB directive. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn honored Fr. Pavel in The Gulag Archipelago.