A Philosophy of Images

An intriguing excerpt from Professor Torstein Theodor Tollefsen’s introduction to his monograph, St Theodore the Studite’s Defence of the Icons: Theology and Philosophy in Ninth-Century Byzantium (Oxford University Press, 2018).

From Theodore the Studite’s polemics there emerges a philosophy of images, a doctrine that demonstrates the theological relevance of images in Christianity. The icons are memorials of events of salvation history. On a deeper level the contemplation of images together with the hearing of the word of God facilitate access to the realities of faith, and both contemplation and hearing open to theological understanding and personal experience. Icons, it is claimed, witness to eternal truth and give access to this truth. As we shall see, this was a controversial issue in Theodore’s times. In fact, it seems to the present author that Theodore’s philosophy of images is worked out as a justification of the possibility for the believer of encountering the prototype of the image based on a certain kind of relationship between image and prototype, a relationship that will be investigated below. This perhaps sounds rather trivial, but is not. Several aspects of the image–prototype complex, highlighted by Theodore in illustrations and technical vocabulary, for instance impression and seal, effect and cause, belong to the Aristotelian category of ‘the relative’ (πρός τι‎). My point is that it is precisely by their nature as belonging to ‘the relative’ that Theodore is able to justify the believer’s access to his or her object of veneration. Identifying images as ‘relative’ is basic to the possibility of contemplating them in their theological function as sources of insight and personal devotion. For this reason it is argued here that the concept of ‘the relative’ is basic to Theodore’s doctrine of the icon. So far as I know, no other interpreter of his doctrine has worked this out in detail. When scholars comment on his use of relation they do so mainly in passing.

The central issue of the controversy was the icon of Christ and, secondarily, icons in general. The issue can be narrowed down even further: the controversy, as we find it in the relevant texts, was about the possibility of making a true image of Christ. If one studies the Definition of the iconoclast council of 754, the relevant passages from Nicaea II of 787, the arguments of Theodore’s iconoclast spokesman in his refutations, and his own counter-arguments, this becomes quite clear. As soon as this is acknowledged, Theodore’s texts make rather good sense since all the different arguments are related to one basic idea, the idea of the true image. This idea is the idea that an image relates us truly to the prototype, something denied by the iconoclasts. As will be seen, I am somewhat critical of some modern perceptions of the topic of Christian art that have been quite influential. In that regard it strikes me that in the treatment of the particular topic of Christian art and iconoclasm the hermeneutical presuppositions and approach matter quite a lot. Several historians seem to work from the hypothesis that Christianity as a religion originally opposed figurative art but eventually came to endorse it. For many art historians the endorsement seems to be due to certain influences from outside the church; this particular development is a special case of Hellenization. However that may be, the subject of the present book is Theodore the Studite and his teaching, but even so, there is a general hypothesis in the background of my approach: Christianity has particular features that make the development of art occur as a natural process. Christianity from the beginning was such that there was a potential for this kind of so-called material culture. For this reason this book has an appendix: ‘Why Should There Be Such a Thing as Christian Art at all?’ The scope of this appendix is broader than the general scope of the book. It belongs therefore at the end; but in this appendix Theodore will be put into the framework of the development of Christian art.