The Iconic Imagination by Douglas Hedley;

Author:Douglas Hedley;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781441176073
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2019-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

6

Idolatry and Iconoclasm

‘The true Neoplatonist is at once an idoloclast and an iconodule’.1

Idols and Icons

The distinguished French phenomenologist and philosopher of religion Jean-Luc Marion brought the theme of idolatry to the forefront of the phenomenological tradition in philosophy. From his earliest writings, Marion wishes to emancipate God from the bogus restrictions of ontology. The idol limits God and serves as a mirror of the human gaze. The icon, by contrast, opens up the vision of the invisible – the irreducible transcendent God of love. Whereas the idol is the product of the gaze, the icon admits the transcendent invisible. While the idol, for Marion, serves to abolish the proper distance between God and creation, the icon points to the infinite. Through the icon, human concepts are overwhelmed.

Through the influence of Heidegger, the opposition of idol and icon is linked to a bypassing of the tradition of metaphysics. Deeply influenced by both the ‘Death of God’ in Nietzsche and by Karl Barth and von Balthasar, Marion fuses an emphasis upon primacy of Divine self-revelation with the insistence upon freeing that self-revelation from the bounds set by metaphysics or modern subjectivity (which according to Heidegger are cognate phenomena).2 Marion stresses the denial of presence.3 Not that even the young Marion was held entirely spellbound by the ‘Meister aus Deutschland’.4 Heidegger himself comes under fire for his residual philosophy of subjectivity qua Dasein and the exclusion or prescription of God through the overarching concept of Being. Marion’s critique of the ‘idol’ relies upon this theological critique of the domestication of God, i.e. the restriction of divinity itself to the pale of human subjectivity.5 Rather than the gaze of the human subject, the icon is constituted by the reversal: Christ the paradigmatic icon is God looking at the human subject.6

I cannot do justice to Marion’s rich phenomenology of the saturated phenomenon and his critique of Kant, nor to his complex relationship with Levinas. The strong aesthetic and contemplative, indeed liturgical, dimension of Marion’s work is a powerful corrective. The relentless polemic against epistemology, however, means that Marion is reluctant to discuss the experience or the imagination of God apart from invoking the familiar Neoplatonic paradoxes, derived in the main from Pseudo-Denys, and Marion’s theological mentor, von Balthasar.

Marion’s insistence is that God’s revelation is incomprehensible. Is this compatible with the tenets of Christian theology, with St Paul in Romans 1.20. Indeed for revelation to be understood as revelation, it requires some point of contact with the recipient. If the icon is supposed to supplant the activity of the imagination, then this will collapse into a theological positivism. The problem can be seen in relation to the self. His recent book on Augustine is entitled Au lieu de soi.7 Much hangs upon the interpretation of the self. John Smith insists that ‘Self-Will is the greatest Idol in the world: it is an Anti-Christ; it is an anti God.’8 Such self-will is the striving of a false self, the bloated ego. Yet for Augustine the interior ascent

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