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Image, Likeness, and the Ethics of Memory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Extract
Modern people make horrible contemplators of icons. This is not only because we have excised icons from the venues in which they were originally deployed, hanging them on the walls of this-or-that National-Gallery-of- Art. It has also to do with the way we see things. We trust sight in a way pre-modern people never could. Consider the contact lens: Small convex pieces of silicon we place over our pupils to refract light more precisely onto our retinas. We put them in and we forget about them—until our eyes begin to burn. But even then we rarely think of contacts as mediators that decisively affect our capacity to trust in sight. Or consider the television. With a tap of a button it comes on, bringing us images from … where? New York, Hollywood, London—one, two, three thousand miles away. This is mediation, and we trust it so much that we have forgotten to experience it as such. The relevant question is, Why?
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- Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2001
References
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26 I concentrate on Damascene, whose argumentation in these matters is more complex than Theodore's. While it can be argued that Theodore's refutations of the iconoclasts are more coherent than Damascene's apologies, Theodore attempts to render discursive and systematic elements in Damascene's arguments that resist discursivity. A prime instance of this is Theodore's attempt to distinguish between icons and idols. Whereas Damascene suggests that we all use icons, but put them to different uses, Theodore nails down an a priori theoretical distinction between icons and idols that has practical consequences: ‘What person with any sense does not understand the difference between an idol and an icon? That the one is darkness, and the other light? That the one is deceptive, the other infallible? That the one belongs to polytheism, whereas the other is the clearest evidence of the divine economy?’ See On the Holy Icons, trans. Roth, Catherine P. (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1981)Google Scholar, 27.1 assume Theodore did not think John was a person without any sense, although such an implication might indeed be drawn.
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31 On the Divine Images, 20.
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43 Damascene also quotes Basil in this regard: ‘Bless the martyrs heartily, that you may be a martyr by intention. Thus, even though you depart this life without persecutor, fire, or lash, you will still be found worthy of the same reward’ (38). Clearly, Basil understands the impossibility of imitating the saints' lives identically. Whether John finally agrees with him in this regard remains unclear.
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48 Thanks to Stanley Hauerwas, Louis A. Ruprecht Jr, and Geoffrey Wainwright for their generous aid in this essay. See Ruprecht's ‘Icons and Incarnation: Situating the Christian Debate About Representation in Mediterranean History’, (currently unpublished essay available from the author, Spring 1999) for further investigation of some of the themes discussed here.