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

When we deny literal desire, we enact an iconoclasm of temptation. When we literalize desire, we relate to the image as an illusion that is both more and less real than the prototype. Both responses attempt to protect our independence, our autonomy, by denying the way our desire makes us dependent upon life beyond us.

All this, I submit, generates a vision of the cross and its achievement so large and all-embracing that we really ought to stand back and simply gaze at it. All the “theories” of “atonement” can be found comfortably within it, but it goes far, far beyond them all, into the wild, untamed reaches of history and theology, of politics and imagination.

The popular use of iconoclast is important not just because it helps identify the ambivalences of iconoclasm. The description of an iconoclast as a breaker of cultural images—a blasphemer—is additionally important because it resonates with Scriptural descriptions of Christ as a skandalon or stumbling block (1 Corinthians 1:23).

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).