Epilogue

This study has argued for the recognition in the exemplary icon and work of art of a characteristic modality that brings it to a state of hypostatic existence, a condition associated since Greek antiquity with the term enargeia. Our study of enargeia in the Christian image has taken an aesthetic and theological direction, a necessary prerequisite, as we have just shown with Zen precepts and painting, for any aesthetics concerned with the distinctiveness of the religious work of art both as an individual and as an iconographic type. We have opted for clarity where clarity was possible and due, but have also refrained from bringing the theophanic image under a rigid, closed formula, preferring instead to leave its specific form(s) to art and tradition.

In drawing an analogy between persons and exemplary images, we are aware that we are working with a Christian view of the human person which emphasizes self-transcending identity, self-expressive action, self-determination and inherent dignity, qualities that as we have suggested take an aesthetic form in the enargic image. The analogy, I would suggest, not only is central to Christian art but helps redefine the way that we relate any art object to subjectivity. The relationship between the two remains superficial and arbitrary as long as the work of art does not become like its maker, a being capable of self-determination and self-expression and yet irreducible to the temporal forms taken by its expressive acts. Here, as with persons, we have recognized an invisible ground in the exemplary work of art from where and to where these acts originate and return–the movement itself being essential to the work's integrity or dignity. Thus, if persons matter in art, both in terms of its creation and in terms of its experience, they matter to the extent that like them, the work of art has a radical freedom from temporal determination, from subservience to the temporalities, spatialities and rhetorics of a subject (e.g., artist, viewer, patron), be it individual or collective. Our examination of images that resemble persons in this respect, has shown that this radical freedom is entirely compatible with the presence in the image of the artist's personality. This modality is also active, as we have seen, in the saint.

From an aesthetic point of view, the relationship between enargeia and beauty has not been explored to the depth that the latter deserves given its significance in Christian aesthetics. This is a subject that we hope to address in the future and that we see more expressly related to a discussion of the theotic image considered from the standpoint of Roman Catholic theology and art. Our objective has been to put the study of Christian art in a new key by centering it on the concept of theosis, and to expand our theological and aesthetic vocabulary in order to engage the exemplary images of Orthodox Christianity. Our turn to Modernism in this context may be viewed as dated by those who would have liked to see us engage contemporary art from Post-Modernism onward. But as with the case of beauty, our purpose was to clear the ground and show how Catholic and Orthodox circles have misunderstood Modernism. By establishing a dialogical rather than adversarial relationship between theology and this significant period in Western art, we hope to have set a precedent for considering subsequent developments in the same light.

Similarly, readers may find our study of the Zen image too cursory, considering its range and variety. Our focus has indeed been narrow and concerns only the intersection of aesthetic and religious dimensions in these works rather than their complex histories and social contexts. As we have shown, Chinese art theory and Buddhist painting in the Ch'an and Zen traditions consistently present a view of the art object that is very similar to views associated with enargeia in Greece and Byzantium and echoed in the experience of icons recorded in ekphraseis. This common ground becomes even more interesting when the fundamental differences between Ch'an Buddhism and Christianity are taken into account. The outlining of these differences is in my view crucial if we are to respect the distinctive character and particularity of artistic and religious traditions and resist the tendency to reduce them to a facile universality. In fact, the sharper the form these differences take, the more lucid the points of convergence, the more exciting the comparison and dialogue, and the more fruitful the outcome. In what remains of this study, I would like to return to this conversation, picking up from where we left off in the last chapter.

The sumiye painting that forms in an instant has a lightness and brevity that keeps the reasoning mind at bay. It is not possible to plan or interpret as one paints. The image is not open to explanation or speculation. It does not reveal a trajectory of intentions that it brings to completion. One may train for years in order to paint pine trees, but the moment the brush touches the paper, there is no memory, no «pine tree» and no room for deliberation (and thus no artist and no art). Once formed, the image is either received as it is or not at all. Sumiye is realistic since in Zen this is how things in the world happen: we catch them in a glimpse, fully but never firmly. In order to see them as they truly are we have to make seeing an impersonal act: remove the self from the scene and the plum blossom will be seen in its absolute form (but never conceptually, in its «essence»).

The rhythms of nature and those of painting (or poetry and calligraphy) are the same. Every moment in the bamboo's life has its plenitude and every moment is also empty since it will never be that way again. Zen has its own eternity to which things open their being entirely and become fluid and transient. The Orthodox ascetic, the hesychast who has entered the divine life, also encounters an open world. But here eternity belongs to all individually. Seen in their theotic existence, the tree, the rain and the flower are microcosms in which inhere spiritual virtues. They have their own mystical lives that are obvious to the ascetic but invisible to the ordinary mind. Humility in a cyclamen differs from humility in a child's gesture or expression. A flower's purity and that of a human heart exist in different frequencies and forms.

Spiritual vision has discernment because it has humility. It does not sweep things under concepts but goes to each one of them individually and listens or watches neptically for their distinctive sounds and sights. In that moment, as we have seen in Maximus, one sees with reverence, without a centering self and yet with one's full senses and mind present. This is also where vision becomes aesthetic because, as in Zen, we get to see from inside the intimate lives of things. We enter deep into the dynamics of their form and find there the expressive powers that resonate with human emotion and experience. It is a form of descent or burial (taphe), to recall the way that Maximus described the intellect's loss of its ordinary life (and perception) in asceticism.

The image that has internalized this movement can stand on its own. It does not resemble anything and it does not represent anything. It exists beyond likeness because its act of being itself is an act of self-realization. This is at the core of enargeia and the point where the concept parts ways with beauty. The exemplary icon also has its moments. But they are not moments of dispersion as in Zen painting where beings dissolve in the atmosphere and never possess their form. They are, rather, moments of concentration and intense expression, in which the life of the thing painted takes over its form, inheres in it, and brings it to a state of perpetual presence. Time is absorbed by the image which possesses it entirely, containing it within its own space and life. This is how an icon comes alive, because it has absorbed and arrested what is transient in things and distilled it in a face, in a gesture or, as Theophanes reminds us, in the open wings of an angel and the effulgent blade of a knife resting on a mystical table.

There exist icons that open themselves to theophany in the same way, by making luminosity a state of being, an expressive act rather than a quality in things (a highlight or tonality). This explains why the frescos of Theophanes have a fleeting quality and a sketchy simplicity. The angels have just materialized. They have carved their form out of a light that leaves few shadows because it is in every thing's nature to receive it. Weightless and cautious, they sit at the table, cut the loaf of bread and fold their wings– except for the one in the center who has yet to settle or contain himself in that space.

In his film Andrei Rublev (1969), Andrei Tarkovsky has a final sequence that resonates with this aesthetic. It is shot in color and reveals the icons with which the identity of the painter and Saint is inextricably tied. Passing over a number of Rublev icons and frescos, the camera slowly «enters» the icon of The Savior. The sense is one of proximity, intimacy and anticipation. The camera here is tactile, as if it climbs the panel softly on its hands (rather than eyes). When he appears, he is like Theophanes' angels. Out of the image, he brings himself to the point where the eye can see him and touch him. He is intimate and yet distant, as if the face that he puts forward is his to withdraw at any moment and his also to reveal forever. He has the consistency of light and color. He is an icon and a man present. He is an image and the one who brings the image to life: who «iconizes» himself.

I am tempted to say that in these and other icons, art has surpassed what discursive theology has said about the mystical life. It has reached a level of tangible holiness that only the saint can muster. Just as the saint theologizes by simply lighting a candle, watering his garden, offering the visitor to his cell a glass of water, or by his silence, so too these icons theologize. As we have been suggesting all along, they are, like the Saints, exceptional beings. They live lives of tranquil obscurity in the midst of an art and a theology that are often too busy with their thoughts to pay attention. Celebrated as masterpieces, they hide behind these labels and worldly distinctions. Like all living things, they have an inherent fragility and yet they are also profoundly resilient. Enargeia is delicate and one who looks for «art» or a «message» or «holiness» will most certainly miss it. The analogy to the miraculous icon remains valid, I think, because there too, one must simply receive what is given rather than seek to explain it or deconstruct it.

If there is a problem with the contemporary scholarship of the icon that finds various types of deconstruction so attractive, it is the discursive vision that dominates it. With it comes an unwillingness to see aesthetically, as if this way of approaching the world and art (and God) is too basic, too innocent and uninteresting to minds that are overflowing with words and ideas. Why stand still when one can run? And yet, as in Zen, so too in Orthodoxy, it is stillness that opens the way to the perception of transcendent realities in art and life. The painter of the Paestum diver knew this well (Color Plate 1; Figure 12.1). If Japanese poetry, painting, calligraphy and theater are forms of religion, it is because at the center of their practice is a tranquil mind that allows things to emerge from obscurity (or delusion).¹¹¹⁷ In Christianity, this obscuration affects perception in the state of sin, when the world disappears because man will only see himself (and his ideas) in it. Modernists like Kandinsky and Malevich who looked for abstraction through concepts ended up losing painting. Those who like Picasso, Chagall and Rothko, looked for it in the being of things, pushed painting beyond representation and «art,» and at times made it more profound.

Enargeia does not belong exclusively to Orthodoxy, but one of its forms does. To see depth and movement in color and to paint it or photograph it in that way, is not by itself a spiritual act. It becomes spiritual when it arises out of an Orthodox or a Buddhist cosmos where it assumes the subtle frequencies of the life-forms that exist there. A world living on the verge of transcendence, in the midst of an eternity that God himself has made tangible for humanity, is aesthetically different from one in which eternity is mediated only by human consciousness. Here perhaps lies a major difference between Orthodoxy and Zen Buddhism.

In Orthodoxy, the image grows out of the ways that lines, colors and shapes co-inhere with acts of fasting, lighting candles or standing for hours in vigils and quietly breathing the Jesus Prayer. Words also paint. Addressed to a personal God, they bring a resonance of personhood to things (and to language) that is absent from a world in which this conversation has never taken place. It is not difficult then to see the image that has enargeia emerge spontaneously as if it were in that aspect of its existence something of a miracle, an image made without human hands. Of course it is not, if by miracle we understand the radical discontinuity or disruption of nature rather than its fulfillment in grace. Theophany does not bring rupture and ecstasy to the ascetic (only to the novice). Enargeia does not break out in flashes of expression. The angels sitting at the table in the Theophanes fresco are barely there, but their presence is as eloquent as that of the knife, plate and bread in which the divine glory has awakened a luminous and joyful existence.

In Orthodox iconography, nature is not always as intimately engaged in the divine life as are persons and, in some instances, objects. This perhaps is an area where the comparison with the Zen image can open new possibilities for Orthodox iconography. The same, as we have noted, applies to poetry. This too should be explored in a similar vein, as it seems unnatural to confine languages (Greek especially) so deeply involved in poetry and theology for centuries, to liturgy and worship. The Orthodox poem that is not only a hymn but assumes in its own modality, poetically, the life of holiness and prayer, and theologizes by form as well as content, will have its own exemplarity and its own type of enargeia. Poetry may resemble painting in the visual intensity of its imagery, and its ability for brevity, ambiguity and movement, but it has its own visual logic and unique rhythms. It is therefore wise, I think, to let it grow out of tradition and emerge spontaneously, like the exemplary icon, as a theological being in its own right.

The tendency to pack too much in the icon and the poem, to load them with theological significance is inconsistent with the profound sense of tradition that Lossky so eloquently describes. It is in the incompleteness of things, in their elliptical appearance that we may intuit their mystical lives and resonating fullness. The theophanic icon has sparsity and void in its form. It subsists «in part» (ek merous) in order to reveal in ever incomplete moments of being a deeper ground from where an elusive fullness arises. It cannot be complete, finalized and closed but must move toward a fullness of which it is the expression, but with which it can never, qua image, be equated. The challenge posed by Iconoclasm centuries ago has been met by these extraordinary icons. They show how an image can participate in the divine life rather than imitate it. That it can do so aesthetically, in its own life, rather by induction in holy spaces and holy acts. In the presence of these theophanic beings, it makes little sense to turn to the world of ritual and performance in order to give the icon life.

There are on the Holy Mountain of Athos and elsewhere in the Orthodox world ascetics who live lives of holiness. They speak the terse language of the Desert Fathers (Gerondika) where, according to the Orthodox tradition, theology begins and ends. This terseness comes from years of silent prayer and obedience to an Elder, communion in the holy mysteries, fasting, humility and discernment. Their words have a life of their own, as those who heed them discover. Sometimes they are not words; they are simply gestures. But they cut through one's mind and heart, as if speech were a form of spiritual surgery and the ascetic a physician of souls. The nature of theology becomes then all too transparent and intimate to one's life. It is the same with exemplary icons. Orthodox aesthetics begins and ends there, in the world that these icons open and the mystical lives that they encompass in their intimate space. Like the ascetic's words of counsel, exemplary icons enter theology and awaken it to its true life.

To approach the icon in this manner is to approach it within Orthodox tradition. It may be argued that this approach does not allow one sufficient detachment or «objectivity.» But this distinction, as we have seen, loses its meaning when the icon is taken as a life-form. To get to know the exemplary icon and the saint is to put ideas aside until we learn to follow, watch and listen. One who returns from such a journey to the theology of Maximus, Symeon and Palamas, or to the arguments of theologians and philosophers about Christian art, knows what it is that she is looking for. The argument must lead to the icon and the saint, not to the concept and the author. In the same way, Orthodox tradition teaches, theology must lead to God.