The Art of the Icon and the Theology of Beauty

L’Art de l’icône: Théologie de la beauté, Evdokimov’s last book, published at or just after his death, rests on a single principle: beauty is a divine name. Following St. Gregory Palamas’ distinction between God’s inaccessible essence and His communicated energies, Evdokimov treats beauty as the radiance of the divine presence through creation — in the Old Testament theophanies, in the Transfiguration, in the saints, and in the icon, which he calls not a picture but a sacramental: a wooden board that has nothing in itself and becomes a reality of irradiation.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Book

L’Art de l’icône: Théologie de la beauté was published by Desclée de Brouwer in Paris. [Disputed: the publication year. The English Wikipedia bibliography gives Desclée de Brouwer, 1972 — that is, posthumously, two years after Evdokimov's death in September 1970. Other notices give 1970 (*Encyclopædia Universalis*, listing "*L'Art de l'icône*, 1970"; OFPRA, describing it as "published posthumously in 1970"). Since Evdokimov died on 16 September 1970, the two datings differ on whether the book appeared in the last weeks of his life or two years after it; the sources agree that it is his final work and that he did not live to see its reception. The guide reports both dates.] The English translation, by Fr. Steven Bigham, appeared as The Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty (Oakwood Publications, Redondo Beach, California, 1990); there are also Spanish (1991) and Russian (2005) versions (Wikipedia, “Paul Evdokimov,” bibliography).

It is not a manual of iconography and not an art history. The subtitle is the book: a theology of beauty, of which the icon is the crucial instance.

Beauty as a Divine Name

The foundation of Evdokimov’s argument is the ancient theological category of the divine names — the tradition, classically stated in the Divine Names of St. Dionysius the Areopagite, that God, unknowable in Himself, is named from His self-manifestations: Good, Being, Life, Wisdom, Power, and among them Beauty (to kalon). Dionysius derives kallos, beauty, from kalein, “to call,” because beauty calls all things to itself; and he identifies God as at once the Beautiful and Beauty, the cause of all harmony and radiance. Evdokimov’s whole book stands on this and works out its consequences (see St. Dionysius the Areopagite).

The second foundation is Palamite. Evdokimov draws on St. Gregory Palamas’ distinction between God’s incommunicable essence and His communicated energies to frame beauty as a real radiating of the divine presence through creation, and not as a subjective impression or a merely symbolic pointer (Omnes, “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon,” which sets out precisely this: that he draws on the Palamite distinction “to frame beauty as radiating divine presence through creation, Old Testament theophanies, Christ’s Transfiguration, and the sanctified lives of believers”). This matters, because it is what keeps his aesthetics from being an aesthetics. Beauty in Evdokimov is not the pleasure taken in an arrangement of forms; it is an energy of God made perceptible, and its paradigm is not a work of art but the light of Tabor (Matthew 17:1–8), which the fourteenth-century councils confessed to be the uncreated glory (see St. Gregory Palamas).

The series he assembles is therefore continuous: theophany, Transfiguration, saint, icon. Each is a case of the same thing — created reality made transparent to uncreated light.

Matter Transfigured

The third pillar is the doctrine of creation, and here Evdokimov is at his most characteristic. The Incarnation and the Resurrection, he argues, do not merely rescue human souls; they transform material reality itself. Matter has received the body of Christ and therefore participates in eternal glory; the cosmos is on its way to transfiguration, not to abolition (Omnes, “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon,” on cosmic redemption and matter’s participation in glory; Evdokimov, L’Art de l’icône, 1970/1972).

This is standard Orthodox theology — it is the argument St. John of Damascus made against the iconoclasts, that the God who has become matter for our sake may be depicted in matter, and that to despise matter is to despise the Incarnation (see St. John of Damascus and Icons and Iconoclasm). Evdokimov’s contribution is emphasis and extension: he pushes the argument out from the icon to the whole created order, and back from the whole created order to the icon.

The Icon as Sacramental

From this Evdokimov reaches his account of what an icon is. It is not primarily a representation, an aid to memory, or a devotional illustration. It is a sacramental — a sacred vessel that mediates a presence. His own formulation, as reported in the theological literature on the book, is exact and worth quoting:

“The icon is a simple wooden board, but it bases all its theophanic value on its participation in divine holiness: it contains nothing in itself, but becomes a reality of irradiation.” (Evdokimov, L’Art de l’icône, as quoted in Omnes, “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon.”)

Two things are being held together. The board has nothing in itself — this is the Orthodox refusal of idolatry, and it is why the Seventh Ecumenical Council was careful to distinguish the veneration (proskynesis) given to the image from the worship (latreia) due to God alone (see The Seven Ecumenical Councils). And yet it becomes a reality of irradiation — the honour passes to the prototype, and the presence is real. For an icon of a saint, Evdokimov says, it bears witness to the presence of the person of the saint and to his ministry of intercession and communion (Omnes, “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon”).

Why Icons Look As They Do

Evdokimov then reads the formal conventions of Byzantine and Russian iconography as theology in visual form, and this is the part of the book that has been most used by painters and teachers.

The refusal of naturalism. Icons deliberately avoid naturalistic “beauty” — sensual modelling, illusionistic depth, individual charm — in favour of stylization and a certain spiritual austerity (Omnes, “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon”). This is not incompetence and not archaism. It is a doctrinal decision: the icon does not show the saint as he appeared to a camera but as he is in the Kingdom, his body already conformed to the resurrection. Naturalism would depict exactly what has been left behind.

Reverse perspective. The lines of an icon converge not behind the picture plane but in front of it, in the viewer. Evdokimov reads this as the reversal of the modern relation between subject and object: the viewer of a Renaissance painting stands at the apex of the visual cone and organizes the world around his own eye, whereas the beholder of an icon is the one looked at, drawn into the space of the image rather than surveying it (Omnes, “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon,” on reverse perspective and the deliberate proportions expressing transcendent rather than earthly concerns).

The unsigned icon. Icons “are not usually signed,” and Evdokimov gives this theological weight: the icon expresses ecclesial and not individual creativity (Omnes, “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon”). The iconographer is not an artist expressing a vision but a member of the Church transmitting one; he fasts and prays before painting, follows the canonical types, and does not put his name to what is not his. Evdokimov contrasts this sharply with the post-Renaissance conception of the artist as an autonomous creator of private worlds — a contrast he pursued in his essay on modern art, published in Contacts under the title “L’art moderne, ou la Sophia désaffectée” (“Modern art, or Wisdom deconsecrated”), in which he reads the trajectory of modern painting as the story of a beauty that has lost its ground.

Beauty and Salvation

Behind all of this stands the Dostoevskian sentence Evdokimov never stopped thinking about — the words given to Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, that beauty will save the world. Evdokimov takes it not as an aesthete’s slogan but as a christological claim: the beauty that saves is not the beauty of things but the beauty of the Crucified, “who had no form nor comeliness” (Isaiah 53:2) and who is nonetheless “fairer than the children of men” (Psalm 45:2, LXX 44:3) — a beauty that has passed through disfigurement. That is why the icon of the Crucifixion is not ugly and the icon of the Resurrection is not sentimental.

And it is why Evdokimov’s aesthetics terminates in a doctrine of the human person. In a world where the classical proofs of God have lost their persuasive force, the remaining “proof,” he argued, is the transfigured human face — a person in whom the light has become visible (the formulation is reported in Encyclopædia Universalis, “Paul Evdokimov,” which presents “the transfigured human face as the modern world’s primary ‘proof’ of God’s existence”; the theme runs through L’Amour fou de Dieu, 1973). The final icon is not painted.

References

Encyclopædia Universalis. “Paul Evdokimov (1901–1970).” (L’Art de l’icône dated 1970; the transfigured human face as the modern “proof” of God.)
Evdokimov, Paul. L’Art de l’icône: Théologie de la beauté. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1970/1972. English: The Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty, trans. Steven Bigham. Redondo Beach, CA: Oakwood Publications, 1990.
Evdokimov, Paul. “L’art moderne, ou la Sophia désaffectée.” Contacts: Revue française de l’Orthodoxie. (His reading of modern art as beauty deprived of its ground.)
Evdokimov, Paul. L’Amour fou de Dieu. Paris: Seuil, 1973.
Office français de protection des réfugiés et apatrides (OFPRA). “Paul Evdokimov, theologian.” (The Art of Icons: Theology of Beauty described as published posthumously in 1970.)
Omnes. “Paul Evdokimov and the Art of the Icon.” (Beauty as a divine name; the Palamite essence–energies grounding; matter transformed by the Incarnation and Resurrection; the icon as sacramental; the quotation “The icon is a simple wooden board…”; the refusal of naturalism; reverse perspective; unsigned icons as ecclesial rather than individual creativity; icons of saints as witnesses to presence and intercession.)
Wikipedia. “Paul Evdokimov.” (Bibliography: Desclée de Brouwer 1972; the Bigham translation of 1990; Spanish and Russian versions.)
Scripture: Isaiah 53:2; Psalm 45:2 (LXX 44:3); Matthew 17:1–8.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Idiot (1869). (“Beauty will save the world.”)