The Million Masks of God
A Reflection on Icons, Liturgy and Seeing God
By Erik Eklund
“A Jew’s profile in the subway might be the profile of Christ; the hands that give us back change at a ticket booth may mirror those that soldiers nailed one day to the cross. Some feature of the crucified face may lurk in every mirror; perhaps the face died, faded away, so that God might be all faces.”
Jorge Luis Borges, “Paradiso, XXXI, 108”[1]
Growing up, we are often told to close our eyes during prayer, perhaps even during other portions of the liturgy. If I might suggest something new, something which might even be somewhat scandalous only because it flies in the face of popular piety, consider keeping your eyes open throughout every aspect of the liturgy, from procession to benediction, since the liturgy, indeed, the whole of the Christian life is an exercise in learning to see rightly.
Whether arising from habit or pious attitude, there is a sense in which the rather iconoclastic posture of shutting our eyes in prayer neglects, often inadvertently, the ways that the visual aspects of the liturgy not only condescend to focus our nomadic minds, but raise us up to see what otherwise could not be seen except within the peculiar space of the liturgy, as when during the Absolution we look upon the celebrant as upon Christ Himself (Num. 21:8–9); when our vision is clouded by incense, calling to mind the prayers of the saints which rise before God (Rev. 8:3–4) and the burning seraphs who encircle God in flame, into whose company the liturgy lifts us — for where there is smoke, there is fire, and we, in God, participate in that fire; or, as the bread is lifted up, all space and time come together so that we should see past the twin darknesses on both sides of our terrestrial lives to see both forward and backward into eternity, to the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8) and to that final meal, where “everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.”[2] In this and innumerable other ways, the liturgy teaches us to see in a way that is utterly unlike the way we are accustomed to seeing, but seats us “on the highest terrace of consciousness,” when, to quote Vladimir Nabokov, “mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.”[3] This is the secret grace of the icon, which frames the edgeless.
All things have edges. There is a point where I stop and you begin, and no matter how close we get to one another, there is no point where we become one and the same. God, however, has no edges. “From everlasting to everlasting you are God,” writes the Psalmist (90:2). Infinite, God transcends the sickening involutions of time and space, and so is not competition for space — we can no more squeeze God out of the universe than we can make room for God, for “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). That God is not finite does not mean, however, that God is merely finitude’s opposite, the obverse of the cosmic coin, and, therefore, that God lies beyond the finite. Rather, God so transcends the apparent difference between the finite and the infinite that the divine essence — what makes God, God — is free to impinge upon our edges without violence, without competing with our wills or subverting the uniqueness of our individual identities, but with the enlivening grace which enables us to be, in the words of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, “clear and spotless mirrors reflecting the glow of the primordial light and indeed of God himself.”[4] And even as the biblical witness denies that anyone has ever seen God (John 1:18; 1 John 4:12), but affirms instead the apparent paradox that God dwells in the dazzling brilliance of the darkest night (2 Sam. 22:12; Ps. 18:11; 1 Tim. 6:16), there is nevertheless a sense that, insofar as we are mirror images of the divine — more so even than our own conceptions of self — God in Christ, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “plays in ten thousand places . . . lovely in eyes not his.”[5] Ours are the edges which Christ assumed in life and death, and his, the ones to which we are being conformed.
This is among the secrets revealed by the icon, where “we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen” (2 Cor. 4:18). Precisely as it is not an image in the normal sense of the word, the icon has no desire to bring us closer to this world. Its purpose is rather to reveal, in the words of renowned iconographer Leonid Ouspensky, “a body which perceives what usually escapes human perception” — the resurrection body, the body which has come to participate in the very life of God.[6] Participation, as it is meant here, does not mean the simple act of cooperation with God, that we are doing the often mundane though nonetheless meaningful work which God has given us to do. Rather, when speaking of participation in relation to the kind of body presented by the icon, participation bespeaks the rich metaphysical notion that to be is to be in communion with God, and thus that the goal of human life is our deification in God, our being conformed to the edges of God in Christ — not being counted righteous, but, in the words of C.S. Lewis, being “veritably drawn into Deity,” actualized as one of the myriad “mirrors . . . made by Him, where He Himself now breaks, one in Himself remaining as before,” as Dante had it.[7] Hence the icon, as a mirror of the infinite, offers to us a glimpse of that kind of life which, without it, we would see only “in a mirror, dimly” but not “face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12). But since it has, as it were, a kind of face, the icon — very much like the funhouse infinity mirror — opens out beyond itself to submerge our gaze within a world of infinite extension, revealing, so far as we are able to see this side of consciousness, “what is the breadth and length and height and depth” (Eph. 3:18) of the glory of God.
The icon is, in this sense, a kind of prayer of sight, where we see, as it were, unseeingly. Just as we pray in the faith that the Spirit intercedes for us, enlivening our words beyond our power for speech (Rom. 8:26), we trust that the icon gives us to see more than what our fleshly senses can perceive, illuminating our power to see should sight fail, and it will. Nevertheless, we trust that the edges of the icon — its frame and its backing, even the wall upon which it rests — are but stumbling blocks which we must trip over to discover that they are, in a rather remarkable paradox, a frame which focuses our gaze upon the edgeless, eternal one. “We look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen” (2 Cor. 4:18), and we actually see it, though in a sense which, this side of consciousness, remains under the veil of mystery. Yet, precisely as a prayer of sight, indeed, as the sacramental form of sight, our gazing upon the icon is a true confrontation, a meeting of another’s gaze, for it is not we alone who are looking, but the icon, too, gazes at us “face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12), interrogating and summoning us into its deified world. To this gaze we must answer, as “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 another” (2 Cor. 3:18).
Having raised our sights to the resurrection life, the icon then returns us to our world with a dim memory of our future life in God. In so doing, the icon offers to the curious, the desirous, and the destitute, we who in obedience have fasted from the liturgical symbols which would otherwise communicate something of the dazzling darkness of God, the gift of a peculiar sight. It is not, as has been said, that the icon gives us only something that can be seen in the normal sense of the word, but that what the icon gives us to see — in this case, the harrowing of Hell and the resurrection — also exhausts our power to see, since the icon, like the infinity mirror which breaks free from the confines of its physicality, opens out to a world of infinite reflections of the primal light. Just as the receding darkness of the mandorla which frames the risen Christ figures Christ’s power to reveal, in Dante’s words, God’s “mirrored brilliancy,” the icon simultaneously makes what cannot be seen — the One who is beyond all power of imagination — visible by creating in us a gaze with the imagination to see, beyond the visible surface of the icon with its pigments and hues, past its backing and the wall of the sanctuary, the God who looks back (Gen. 16:13).[8] We really do see through the mirror, however darkly, and it is only because God looks back that we can look on. Enter the funhouse. Taste and see.
And insofar as the liturgy is a kind of theatrical performance of the Christian life, of our participation in God, the icon, by deifying the gaze, transposes the liturgical theater into a mystical hall of mirrors, where our gaze is raised to some infinite power by the iconic gaze of a coop of copulating mirrors: the communion of the saints. For wherever you look you see yet more mirrors bearing the insignia of their mischievous maker and which reveal, in the memorable phrase of the great Scottish mystic George MacDonald, “the secret things of the Father” in ways that only you — this peculiar, unique, and unrepeatable mirror of the divine — can.[9] Hence community is so crucial for the life of that prism of reflections that is the church, for when the gaze of two or more mirrors meet face to face there arises a gaze with the power to frame Him who is without edges. “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am among them” (Matt. 18:20). To live in community, then, involves a willingness and a desire to know the other as a pale fire of the imperishable flame — to discern the secret power of their reflection, to not only be Christ to the other, but to let the other be Christ to you.
All of which brings us to the problem which the icon presents and which is perhaps most clearly expressed in the passing of the peace, since the veneration of the icon leads invariably to the veneration of Christ in others. Who knows that the hands you shake may not resemble those which broke bread last Friday, which, by some twist of space-time, is also that other Friday; that the eyes which meet your own are not the same color as the those that cut through a crowd of eyes to look upon Peter as an actor breaks the fourth wall; that the timbre of their voice is not indistinguishable from the one who first said, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you” (John 14:27)? What Christ has not assumed, Christ has not healed, and since Christ has assumed all that is distinctly human, all our bodies He has borne; our faces, the million masks of God.[10] Look at each other, and really look, awkward as it is. Most people (of which I am one) are afraid to look, lest we be seen. But if you can see Christ in them, then perhaps there is hope; perhaps, by some swerve of vision, they will see Christ in you, too.
What, then, did we see on Good Friday when we came together to venerate the cross, to drench it with tears and petals of blood? Two planks of Texas wood in a game of devout though nonetheless deceitful pretend? We must rather say that we really did see that other cross, that the very edges of space and time which separated us from Galilee and Golgotha by some seven thousand miles and two thousand years collapsed and were brought to nothing. “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–39). To the hymnic question, “Were you there?”, we must answer quite literally and most emphatically: yes.
Erik Eklund
Erik comes to us from Scotland, where he has lived with his wife, Sarah, since 2017. He is presently completing a Ph.D. in Theology and Literature from the University of Nottingham, researching the problem of repetition and its relation to metafiction and metaphysics in the works of Vladimir Nabokov. He holds a dual appointment in the College of Ministry and the Department of English at Northwest University and has published multiple articles on the place of theology in Nabokov’s American works and on the medieval sources of C.S. Lewis’ doctrine of theosis.
Notes
Jorge Luis Borges, “Paradiso, XXXI, 108,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley, 316 (New York: Penguin, 1999), 316.
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Vintage, 1989), 77.
Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 50.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, The Celestial Hierarchy, in The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid, ed. Paul Rorem, 143–91 (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987), 3.1:165A.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame,” in Poems and Prose, ed. W. H. Gardner, 51 (London: Penguin, 1985), ll. 12, 13.
Leonid Ouspensky, “The Meaning and Content of the Icon,” in Daniel B. Clendenin (ed.), Eastern Orthodox Theology: A Contemporary Reader, 2nd ed., 33–63 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), 55.
C.S. Lewis, “Transposition,” in The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses, ed. Walter Hooper, 91–115 (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 113; Dante, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, trans. and ed. Robin Kirkpatrick (London: Penguin, 2012), Paradiso 29.143–45.
Dante, Paradiso 33.128. See also Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being: Hors-Texte, 2nd ed., trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 18.
George MacDonald, “The New Name,” in ἒπεα ἂπτερα: Unspoken Sermons, 100–17 (Alexander Strahan: London, 1867), 112.
See Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter to Cledonius (Letter 101), in On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius, trans. Frederick Williams and Lionel Wickham (Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002).
