How Icons Affect Worshippers
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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. . . In traditional Orthodox iconography, figures are enlarged as they go into the distance, diverging against the horizon and constituting a vanishing point that resides outside the painting, right where the viewer stands. The effect is a scene that expands and unfolds toward, instead of away from, the viewer.
The holy figures are depicted with disproportionately large eyes and ears and small noses and mouths. These material features have symbolic-theological significance, to be sure, but they have pro- found sensory effects as well. The combination of the large eyes and the inverted perspective produces a feeling that, when the viewer is looking at the icon, the person depicted in the icon is also looking back at the viewer, not only closing the distance between the worshiper and the depicted saint but also blurring the distinction between observer and observed. Eastern Orthodox in the communities I studied often reported experiencing saints “watching” or “looking over” them during liturgical rites. One Orthodox layperson named Kelsey described the role of icons in her faith experience.
“In Orthodoxy, we believe that we are truly in the presence of Christ and the saints during liturgy. And, to me, the icons helped turn that belief into something I can literally feel. When I walk into the church, I can feel the saints and Christ watching over me ... even when I’m not looking at them ... And, when I venerate the icons, there’s just something so moving to me about literally touching and kissing the faces of these people every Sunday ... It’s like, all of this is just so real.”
. . . By taking their icons into arenas of everyday life that are considered morally or spiritually problematic, Orthodox Christians use (and thus help constitute) icons as visible and tangible interfaces through which to align their own moral intentions and actions with those they imagine to be constitutive of the holy figures’ exemplary characters. Put differently, embedding icons into the routines of everyday life was a way to situate daily actions, perceptions, and emotional sensibilities into an intersubjective frame of reference shared by a saint or deity.
. . . During my interview with Brent in his small studio apartment, he showed me an icon of St. John Maximovitch (also referred to as St. John the Wonderworker), a twentieth-century ascetic and hierarch . . . Brent had first encountered St. John while spending several months at a monastery named after him in California.
“I just remember spending a lot of time looking at the icon [of St. John], and noticing that he didn’t ever seem to look the same. His eyes just, I mean, they’re just really full and they seemed to look at me with compassion. But there’s something very stern in him too that I felt I had to respond to too. And I think I needed both of those things. Someone to look at me with understanding but also not—at the same time, not to just feel sorry for me and let me wallow in my self-pity ... And, to this day, it seems that he knows what I need to see whenever things start getting rough.”
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Please check into this website in two weeks for more from the megachurch experience of Purge Sunday. The full article and issue of Liturgy 35, no. 2 is available by personal subscription and through many libraries.
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.