The Icon of the Feast

Every Great Feast has its icon, and the icon is not illustration but doctrine: it sets before the eyes exactly what the hymns confess in the ear. This file treats the festal icon as a form of theology — “theology in color” — showing how the icons of the Twelve teach their feasts, why they depart from historical realism, and how they are gathered into the festal tier of the iconostasis.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The icon as theology, not illustration

The Orthodox tradition does not regard the icon of a feast as a picture that happens to accompany the celebration. The icon is a bearer of the same revelation the feast proclaims, addressed to the eye as the hymn is addressed to the ear. The Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II, 787) established the dogmatic ground: the holy images are to be venerated because the honor passes to the prototype, and because the very possibility of depicting Christ rests on the Incarnation — the invisible God, having become visible in the flesh, can and therefore should be portrayed (Nicaea II, 787, the Definition; and see Orthodoxy: Icons and Iconoclasm, and The Seven Ecumenical Councils). Leonid Ouspensky’s classic formulation is that the icon is “theology in color,” a confession of the faith in line and hue no less than the councils’ definitions were confessions in words (Leonid Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, SVS Press, 1978, esp. the chapters on the meaning of the image; Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, rev. ed., SVS Press, 1982, Introduction). The festal icon, accordingly, is composed not to record how a scene looked but to show what it means — and this is why its conventions so often override historical appearance.

Why the festal icon departs from realism

The departures of the festal icons from naturalistic report are theological decisions, and they can be read. Several patterns recur across the Twelve, and were noted feast by feast in the earlier sections of this collection.

  • Multiple moments in one frame. The icon of the Nativity of Christ shows the birth, the shepherds, the Magi, Joseph’s doubt, and the bathing of the infant simultaneously; the icon of the Entrance of the Theotokos shows both the ascent of the steps and the child fed by the angel in the Holy of Holies (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, on the Marian and Nativity icons; and see The Nativity of Christ, The Entrance of the Theotokos). The icon is not bound to a single instant because it depicts the meaning of an event, which is not confined to a moment.
  • The image of the Church rather than the historical scene. The icons of Pentecost and the Ascension include St Paul among the apostles, though he was not present at either event, because the icons depict the apostolic Church, not the day of Acts alone; the Pentecost icon replaces the historical crowd with the personified figure of “Cosmos,” the world in darkness awaiting the Gospel (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, on the Pentecost and Ascension icons; and see Pentecost, The Ascension).
  • Doctrine encoded in form. The mandorla of the Transfiguration — dark at its center, radiant at its edges — confesses the Palamite distinction of the unknowable divine essence and the participable divine energies: the rays of uncreated Light stream out, but the source remains beyond seeing (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, on the Transfiguration; and see The Transfiguration). The cave in the Nativity and the watery grave of Theophany rhyme visually with the tomb of the Anastasis, binding the feasts of the Incarnation to Pascha (and see Pascha: The Feast of Feasts).
  • Reversal and rhyme between feasts. The icon of the Dormition is the deliberate mirror of the icon of the Nativity of Christ: in the Nativity the Mother reclines beside the swaddled infant; in the Dormition the Mother reclines on the bier while Christ stands holding her swaddled soul — the one who held the infant is now held as an infant (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, on the Dormition; and see The Dormition of the Theotokos).

In each case the “unrealism” is precision of another kind: the icon is exact about theology at the cost of being loose about photography, exactly as the councils intended when they made the image a vehicle of dogma (Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, on the canon of iconography as doctrinal).

The icon as the visible correlate of the hymn

The festal icon and the festal hymn say the same thing in two media, and often in nearly the same words. The kontakion of the Transfiguration — the disciples beheld the glory “as far as they could bear it” — is exactly what the icon shows: the apostles overthrown, shielding their eyes from a Light too great to bear (kontakion of the Transfiguration; The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary and Ware, Faber, 1969, p. 483; and see Hymnography and the Shape of a Feast). The troparion of Theophany names the Trinity manifested at the Jordan; the icon draws the vertical of Father, Spirit-dove, and Son (troparion of Theophany; The Festal Menaion, p. 356; and see Theophany). This correspondence is not coincidence: hymn and image were formed together, in the same liturgical workshop, to teach the same feast, and the Orthodox worshiper receives the doctrine through both at once — hearing it chanted and seeing it enthroned in the midst of the church.

The festal icon in the church: the veneration and the tier

On the feast-day the icon of the feast is placed on a stand (proskynētarion, or analogion) in the center of the church, where the faithful venerate it on entering — kissing the image, lighting a candle, bowing before it — so that the feast is not only heard and read but met, greeted, and touched (Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga, 1900, on the festal icon and its veneration). The veneration is the dogma of Nicaea II lived: the honor given to the image passes to the prototype, to the event and person portrayed (Nicaea II, 787, Definition; Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon). In the fully developed iconostasis, moreover, an entire tier is given to the feasts: the festal tier (the prazdnichny chin) sets the icons of the Twelve Great Feasts in a row, usually above the local tier, so that the whole cycle of the year’s celebrations stands before the congregation at every service — the calendar itself made visible, the Twelve arrayed as a single confession of the economy of salvation (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, on the iconostasis and the festal tier). To stand in an Orthodox church is thus to stand before the year of feasts painted in a row: the icon of the feast is not an accessory to the celebration but the celebration’s abiding face.

See Also

References

  • Leonid Ouspensky. Theology of the Icon. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1978.
  • Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1982. (The individual festal icons; the iconostasis and its festal tier.)
  • The Festal Menaion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1969. (The troparia and kontakia paralleled by the icons.)
  • Second Council of Nicaea (787), the Definition on the holy icons.
  • Bulgakov, Sergei V. Nastolnaya Kniga. 2nd ed., 1900.