Icon-Shaped Identity

The issue of Liturgy dealing with “Liturgy and Identity,” guest-edited by Matthew Lawrence Pierce, looks at how liturgical practices form the identities of individuals and communities. What follows is an excerpt from Daniel Winchester’s essay on Eastern Orthodox icons. –– Melinda Quivik

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Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of the sociology of religion, noted long ago that ritual objects often serve as a symbolic representation of the larger community. They help a group imagine and commemorate itself as a collective. . . . Indeed, for Eastern Orthodox communities, icons are a constant reminder that humans are positioned in a set of social relations that span the divides between life and death, heaven and earth. Indeed, within the deeply incarnational theology of the Orthodox Church, icons do not represent a reality that is wholly independent of the icons’ materiality. The subject of the icon is also, in some sense, at one with the icon: it has a spiritual presence beyond but also within the material object. In common Orthodox parlance, these icons are “windows into heaven,” extending the presence of holy persons into devotees’ everyday lives and allowing those who interact with them tangible access to otherwise invisible relationship with holy figures.

One of the most noticeable ways icons do this work is through their central place in Eastern Orthodox liturgical worship, particularly the Divine Liturgy—the centerpiece of Orthodox corporate ritual performed every Sunday. The liturgy ritually reenacts the biblical story and Christ’s life, crucifixion, and resurrection, culminating in the taking of Communion.

According to Eastern Orthodox tradition, not only humans but also sacred others are believed to play significant roles in the dramatic structure of the liturgy. Within Eastern Orthodox churches, icons of holy figures are present in every portion of the architecture and at every stage of the liturgy, serving as palpable reminders to the faithful that the ritual to which they are contributing their actions is also populated by holy characters.

Within the entrance to the churches (the narthex), icons depicting Christ, the Holy Trinity, Mary, and important saints such as John the Baptist and John Chrysostom surround the worshipers. Within the main hall of the churches (the nave), an icon depicting the patron saint of the church often stands at the entrance while, farther inside, an icon of Christ as well as important saints stand near the iconostasis—a veritable wall of iconography that separates the nave, where lay persons worship, from the sanctuary and the tabernacle, areas where the Eucharist is located and where only priests are allowed until the taking of communion at the end of the liturgy. Above, an even larger depiction of Christ inside of domed churches looks down upon all who congregate there.

The ubiquity of icons within corporate worship spaces and rituals makes perceptible the otherwise immaterial notion that worshipers’ actions are positioned within a religious community that spans the divides between life and death, heaven and earth. Icons make present what Eastern Orthodox refer to as the great “cloud of witnesses” existing in heaven but nevertheless able to commune with the faithful on earth. This experience of co-presence between worshipers and sacred others is not only a function of who the icons represent, but also how the material-esthetic dimensions of the icon make that depiction present to the senses in particular ways.

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Daniel A. Winchester, is assistant professor of sociology at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, studying how an individual’s identity, experience, and behavior are shaped by collective social and cultural processes.

Daniel A. Winchester, “Windows into Heaven, Mirrors for the Soul: How Icons Shape Identities among the Eastern Orthodox,” Liturgy 35, no. 2 (2020): 48-54.