The Un-secret

Thus spoke the man driven on in his quest, chasing a white whale, fueled by an electric mania, on all sides striving to strike through the mask of life.

The feverish urge to destroy icons is a haunting riddle. From what deep place does it proceed? Where does it come from? The Church was not rocked by controversy over the perceived failure to keep other commandments however universally broken. For example, how many Christians (in any age) religiously refrain from all work on Sundays? We've come to a point where people think that this is only practiced in monasteries.

Moreover, the case alleging icons as idolatry is a weak one. St. Luke was a painter of icons. And the Early Church acknowledged that gold images of the Seraphim adorned the Mercy Seat, which delighted YHWH Who sat upon it. And for centuries the Church had attested the Sacred Tradition of icons. From where, then, does this unease (perhaps I should call it disease) come from?

The proximate context of iconoclasm is the rise of Islam, which forbade all icons. For example, when the Emperor Justinian II ordered the Image of Christ to be stamped on the front of Byzantine coinage in 695, the Caliph Abd al-Malik, ruler of the Caliphate to the Empire's East and Southeast, objected. Speaking in our language today, we would call this "an international incident." For Islamic territories (though disunited) stretched to the east as far as Kandahar, to the north as far as the Caucasus, and to the south as far as Yemen and the Indian Ocean. By 634, the whole Levant, including Syria, had become Muslim.

Meantime, the Western Roman Empire since the early fifth century had disintegrated due to the rising power of antagonists on their borders, chiefly the Germanic tribes to the north. In 476 the Germanic king Odoacer deposed the last Western Roman Emperor. The succeeding centuries would become a free-for-all among rivals in the Roman West.

Assaults on the Eastern Roman Empire in the eighth century seemed to be following the same plot line. During the winter of 717-718 an armada of 1,800 Muslim vessels descended upon Constantinople, threatening to spread the Islamic ummah westward to Europe. The military hero who won the day was Leo III the Isaurian (r. 717-741), the new Emperor of the Eastern Empire.

Now, Leo was by nature a practical man, a general through and through. And as he looked out upon his newly acquired empire, he saw it in terms of inefficiencies that threatened to weaken military strength. Chief among his complaints was the Church, which (from his point of view) had been lavished with untold riches, enjoyed egregious privileges, and, most important, sapped the empire of manpower. The population of monks by the turn of the eighth century had surpassed 100,000, and their fealty was not to their emperor. Nor was their service to the polis. Theirs was a pledge of absolute faithfulness to an otherworldly kingdom. And their energies were directed perpetually upon icons, gazing through windows opening on to a fantasy land from Leo's perspective. Moreover, this counter-culture, composed of fabulously wealthy estates, was exempt from taxation — a double-blow to his war machine. The time had come, the emperor decided, to pull the plug on all these television screens (as we would say) and awaken these people from this "unwholesome trance."

When the Patriarch of Constantinople, ironically named Germanus, resisted the removal of icons, he was deposed and then exiled. So the fight had to be led from without. St. John of Damascus (c. 652-749) had written extensively in defense of icons. And he was beyond the reach of Leo III being a monk of the great Monastery of Saint Sabas in Palestine — a land controlled by Muslims. John Damascene's argument was a tour de force. The first icon painter, he argued in effect, was God the Father, Who painted the first Icon before all ages. But we must not say that the Father created the Son, for that would be to make Him a mere creature. It is better to say that this creative power is an inextricable part of the Divine Nature:

John is careful to contradistinguish "worship" (latreia) from "veneration" (proskynesis).

Seeing the allies of God being lined up against him, both inside and outside of the empire, and calculating the profound backlash that was gathering like an enormous ground swell, Leo III relented and permitted the controversy to die down.

He was succeeded by his son the Emperor Constantine V (r. 741-775), who saw himself as a theologian and arrogated to the title of "priest." He began a program of clearing the episcopate of iconodules and replacing them with iconoclasts building up an ecclesiastical army in readiness to strip the empire of icons. But other problems distracted him. In the year of his imperial accession, he faced a coup attempt by his brother-in-law, so he set about securing his son's claim to the throne by making him a co-emperor virtually from birth. At age twenty-five, this young man, Leo IV, succeeded his father and reigned for five years.

Leo IV's son acceded to the throne as a boy and crowned emperor at age nine under the regency of his mother the Empress Irene. But the boy behaved erratically, making catastrophic decisions, and was overthrown by his mother who gave orders to blind him and put him in prison. He died of his wounds.

Irene would reign for only five years, but in that time she managed to convoke an ecumenical council, the Second Council of Nicaea (seventh in the sequence of universal councils). As we know, this Council would issue decrees protecting icons down to our own time.

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Worldliness in its way is comforting. After all, it's what we know without effort. Now, I don't mean "comforting" in the sense of sensual pleasures (though there is that). I mean that nothing is required of us. We just drift along in a numb sameness each day pursuing the unchallenging and unrevealing familiar.

Over time, though, we realize that we do not know who we are or what we are, and the familiar is no longer as comforting as it was. The deeper meaning of our life and our identity is lost to us. We say, "life has passed us by," for we have never taken hold — not bothering to reflect on our lives, forgoing an examination of conscience each day, not addressing God in prayer, and, most important, not hearing the word of the Living God, which enters us

Our God speaks into each of our lives. We must respond. We must not ignore our God Who calls to us. Otherwise, we commence living not life, but a living death. God lays us open and examines every aspect of our lives in the blinding light of His perfect gaze. All things are known. Nothing remains hid. And finally, we have traction. Here life begins.

When I was called to the priesthood, friends said to me, "Why would you do that? That world is nothing but guilt trips? Catholics don't know how to get past their hangups. They're hung up on guilt!"

What they were saying is this: a man of faith lives in intimacy with his re-awakened conscience. But worldly people have gone through the process of silencing their consciences. Yes, at first it is a painful process .... but after a while the alarms of conscience stop ringing so loudly until at length they do not ring at all.

This re-wakening, this coming to know things as they are is "icon life," is life among the saints in light. No longer are we content to live life in a semi-darkness .... until we die and pass on as a shade among shadows. No, we reject two-dimensional life in "Flatland" choosing instead to live with God and His holy ones "with deeps calling to deeps." Suddenly, the familiar no longer reassures. The homey becomes vaguely threatening. The hospitable becomes inhospitable.

F. W. J. Schelling (who began his university studies specializing in the Greek Fathers) said this:

and he appended a word to it Unheimlich, which he defined as "the un-secret."

The common definition for the German word Unheimlich, "unhomely," says more: the familiar has become unfamiliar. The comforting has become unsettling. And what we saw as an uneventful world has become a threshold to revelation. The "postcard world" falls away opening on to a maze of God's making.

Nothing is wasted in God's art. Nothing is disposable. All things are revealing. There is no random or meaningless, and above all there are no coincidences.

It is the work of Christian life to peel off the shallows to reveal the deeps. After all, our Lord Jesus Christ has commanded us to move on from the quotidian world:

Elsewhere Jesus says that those who have set their sights on family and an expected inheritance are "not fit for the Kingdom of God" (Lu 9:62). Literally, they do not fit into Divine life. And He warns off such plans with unsettling words:

The initial steps one takes in entering the monastery, where re-awakened life proceeds, is to burn down your whole world and to follow the saints in light. It is a life of inner reflection, of prayer, and a world of mystery and revelation. Shall we depart from what we know — hearth and home — to enter into realms which at times seem surreal? Shall we embark on the last great adventure which is to follow God — unfamiliar at first but then deeply reassuring.

But if we choose the quotidian familiar, mistaking it to be the real, we shall find that it changes hideously in our very hands, becoming a grotesque. William Faulkner's short story, "A Rose for Emily," depicts a young woman who cannot bear to let go of the familiar in the person of her father who has died. She keeps his corpse at home in secret, desperate to cling to sameness and dedicated each day to keep up appearances. But the truth will out.

Perhaps better known to our post-literate society is the case of Norman Bates (a creation of Alfred Hitchcock), who cannot bear to be parted from his dead mother but chooses rather to be ruled by her decayed corpse. He craves the unchanging orderly turning his back on normal development, whose primal forces break through anyway in hideous form.

Or let us consider the family at the center of the iconoclast controversy, the Isaurian Dynasty. Their history reads like a Greek tragedy .... you know, in one play featuring a king who has eaten his own sons secretly baked into a pie or in another play featuring a king who finds himself in a carnal bed with his own mother.

Familiar and reassuring domesticity have given way to the surreal and bizarre. In the Isaurian world, and in ours, a chaos lurks behind the surfaces. The grotesque is to be expected. After all, isn't this irretrievably the final state of all material things? The essence of the material world is withering finitude, the grotesque. But the essence of the Divine is life, beautiful eternal life. The Apostles are clear on this point: "two ways there are, life or death (Didache, 1). Jesus' prayer to His Father (Jn 17:2) is the basis for our ancient prayer, "To know You is eternal life."

Icons are not art. They are not the comforting familiar. They are instances of Schelling's Unheimlich. They are the un-secret. They are the eyes of eternity looking out on the unredeemed world and on the world's desperate attempts to paper over the unspeakable and to domesticate the unutterable.

And in our grave sins against God, vainly eradicating the holy (as if we ever could) — whether they cry out to Heaven from eighth-century Byzantium or from Soviet atheism burning churches, smashing icons, and murdering 100,000 clergy or, in our own time, defiling and desecrating the Eucharist in giddy public ceremonies .... we seek in the throes of our desperation to smash through the mask of life, like wounded animals, like living souls lashed to a dying dog.

But be sure of this: the sober eyes of eternity watch. They continue their holy witness, and they mercifully set before us a mirror disclosing the real even as we deny our true natures, the true nature of life, and the ultimate reality of everything.

But the eighth century has vanished like a dream, and all empires turn to dust. Without fail, the eyes of the Holy Ones look on forever through their windows from Light. In the poet's words,