Revisiting the Patristic Theology of the Icon. Part 1: Setting Aside our Western Assumptions.

The third articulates the intertwining of iconoclasm and iconophilia represented by Christ the Image that is determinative for the Christian imaging tradition and echoed at some level in all images.

As the Byzantine iconomachs worried about the inability of the image to hold together the divinity and the humanity of Christ, so contemporary conversations around the image exude anxiety about the image holding together immanent encounter and transcendent meaning.

Rather than a problematic polarity of us (iconophiles) versus them (iconoclasts), I want to discern iconoclasms of fidelity and resist iconoclasms of temptation by reflecting on the ambivalences of Christ the Image.

I hope to show how iconoclasms of temptation are misguided, unfaithful even. They cannot achieve what they want to achieve, and they betray both the commitments of Christ the Image and the desire of the iconoclast herself. Still, it is also important to acknowledge the truth of these iconoclastic impulses: that expressions of desire can get away fr

By seeing the ways that iconoclasm is internal to both Christianity and the Modern West, we can cease from using the label as an easy way to distance others. We have to reckon with our own iconoclastic impulses and sort through what we want to affirm about others’ iconoclasm. For while Modern Westerners might laud the iconoclasm of Robert Mappletho

to name and discern both iconoclasms of fidelity and iconoclasms of temptation.

The view of images as sharing a substantive relationship with both the faithful and the prototype is not the dominant one in the Modern West.

We continue the Nestorian and modern philosophical projects of keeping desire at bay. In our life with images, we have found ways to maintain the illusion that we can remain insulated from the winds and waves of desire.