Image and Presence: A Christological Reflection on Iconoclasm and Iconophilia (Encountering Traditions)

But one also has to realize that when those who enjoy the full benefits of citizenship use their liberté to mock others to whom basic rights are abridged or denied, something has gone badly amiss.”

Hans Belting, in An Anthropology of Images, argues, in fact, that images are born in the ultimate absence of the loved one: death.

By definition then, every icon is both continuous and discontinuous with its source; both similar and dissimilar to that which it reflects” (25).

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.

Perhaps it is more accurate to claim that the pornographic image identifies a way of relating to an image that treats images as illusions. We might say that these images of literalized desire help train the viewer into relating to them as illusions.

these three degradations suggest two directions in which the search fails, by tempting the seeker to eradicate the visible (illusion) or to exclude the invisible (in contrasting ways, idol and object).

The vertical search seeks to jettison the everyday, to escape the ordinary into some immaterial realm. The horizontal search devotes itself to the material as the only reality. In both, the visible and the invisible are sealed off and alienated from one another.

How does one receive the abiding presence of Christ, who may appear in and as the everyday?

image. In this way, the pornographic image attempts to be both more and less than an image: seeking to substitute itself for the prototype (more) and closing itself off from transformation beyond itself (less). Like most illusions, the pornographic image is both more and less real than it should be.