Imagination and Spiritual Vision in Byzantium

Below, with the author’s permission, is an excerpt from Fr Dr Maximos Constas’ essay, “Beyond the Veil: Imagination and Spiritual Vision in Byzantium.” For the entire essay, including its detailed footnotes, visit the author’s academia page here. 

In the ritual setting of the Byzantine liturgy, walls, barriers, dividers, doors, curtains, and screens—in short, the vast array of screening paraphernalia—have the capacity to operate at structural and symbolic levels, generating a broad range of binary categories, such as here/there, earth/heaven, sensible/intelligible, etc. At the same time, the ability of screens and partitions to establish such binaries is matched by their facility to unite what stands on either side. If the veil “separates” it is also the very thing that enables contact, disclosing or revealing precisely to the same degree that it conceals. At other times this structure yields to more complex configurations, since these liminal sites also construe and choreograph gradations of sacred space, marking a dynamic continuity between the sensible and the intelligible.

As a paradigmatic symbol, the veil epitomized Byzantine intellectual and visual culture. Situated on a spectrum of closely related and often interchangeable symbols—the garment, the mirror, a reflection, an impression, the incised line, a representation, form and the instantiation of form—the veil (παραπέτασμα or καταπέτασμα) was seen as bodying forth the very nature of vision itself. Though Byzantine theologians believed that the physical and spiritual worlds were interior to each other and functionally uniform, this did not obviate the need for places of passage between them. It was here that the veil (and the veiled portal or gate) came to the fore. In the microcosmic temple of the human person, the veil is psyche, with its procession of forms and images, serving as both the boundary and link between the visible and the invisible. Like the screen of images that was its material counterpart in the liturgy, psyche constituted the borderline between corporeality and intellect; the mean term uniting the extremes of aisthesis and noesis; a cognitive screen (or mirror) on which images were both projected and invented.

To explore this ubiquitous metaphor is to enter a labyrinth of “Byzantine” complexity, a close overlapping of cosmos, temple, and the human body as so many fractals, as it were, of the cosmic body of Christ; a network of analogies in which the line between images and their referents is deliberately blurred (corresponding to the ambiguous place between sensation and thought). Our own responses to this vertiginous polyphony will vary, but the Byzantines had a decided taste for a kaleidoscopic experience of aesthetic forms, and never felt the need to mitigate their effects by confining them within a static system.

As the threshold between the upper and the lower worlds, the “firmament” (Gen 1:6) found symbolic expression in the installation art of the sanctuary portal, a veiled entrance dividing the space of the Byzantine church, analogous to the liminal role of psyche, the imagination, and of images themselves. For an iconophile writer like John of Damascus, images were neither here nor there, and were able to “image” precisely because of their liminal status as a locus of identity and difference. Iconicity itself is situated between two extremes, two temporalities, opening up on either side of a line or incision (γραφή), which, when turned, is the flat plane (the symbolic veil) receiving projected images and impressions. In addition to the fixed forms of geometry, the icon’s liminality could be further used to frame a dynamic, eschatological view of history, construed as “shadow, image, and truth,” with the image projecting itself backwards and forwards in time, or, better, with the truth of the image casting its shadow into (or as) history. Consequently, the Christian order does not possess the “truth” as such, but is merely an “image” or “icon” of that truth. On these terms even the incarnate Christ, veiled in flesh, is “an image of Himself.”

Revelation through images, the latter occupying the frontier between sensation and thought, would seem to place the “image” firmly in the realm of the “imagination” (φαντασία). In many languages, the words “image” and “imagination” present themselves as natural counterparts, but this is not the case in Greek. As we shall see, the Byzantines studiously resisted any facile connection between their sacred images and the power of (fallen) human imagination. To understand what was at stake here, it is necessary to consider the philosophical background.

Byzantines thinkers were heirs to a rich and highly complex philosophical tradition. Though broadly categorized as “Neoplatonism,” this tradition was not at all uniform. Central to the argument of this essay is the long-standing debate between (and attempts to harmonize) Aristotelian and Platonic epistemology. The problem was this: is knowledge built up from sense perception, through an empirical process of induction? Or does sense perception merely reawaken earlier (perhaps pre-natal) ideas within the soul? The Byzantines were able to agree in part with both sides in the debate and fully with neither. Apart from the obvious differences presented by Christian metaphysics, cosmology, and anthropology, the central problem was the nature of imagination. This is an important question, since it has become commonplace in modern scholarship to assert that the Byzantine defence of sacred images rests on a wholesale appropriation of Aristotelian categories, which are said to bear directly on the perceptual and aesthetic theories of Byzantine theologians. However, such assertions are largely unfounded.

In the Neoplatonic interpretations of Aristotle that were the dominant form of philosophy for most of the Byzantine period, Aristotle’s doctrine of the imagination fell on hard times. Syrianus, for example, in his Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, describes a transition from sense perception via the imagination to the universal. However, “conceptual thought” (ἔννοια) plays an important role in this process, and effectively limits the role of the imagination, which is reduced to a kind of waiting room for images:

And in general while we may admit that our mind is provoked to recollection from sensible objects, it is improper to contend that we receive within ourselves a shape from that source (i.e., from sensible objects); for the forms that are conveyed to us through sense perception can extend only as far as the imaginative faculty, and indeed even in the imaginative faculty they tend to remain individual (ἄτομα) and such as when they first entered. But when conceptual thought subsequently transfers itself from these to the universal and to those objects that are contemplated by exact reasoning, it is plain that it is viewing its proper objects.

Syrianus reflects a long-standing Neoplatonic restriction of the imagination to the lowest levels of psychic activity, barely distinguishable from sensation. The imagination was located in the non- rational part of the soul, was subject to error and deception, and was just as likely to invent images of centaurs and goat-stags as it was to record accurate impressions of a man or a horse. Syrianus’s student Proclus, on the other hand, who was tremendously influential on Byzantine theology, grants some positive value to particular forms of imagination, although still within carefully defined limits. Imagination for Proclus is situated at “the top” of the non-rational soul, being the highest point that the non-rational can attain before it converges with the lowest reach of the rational, the latter in the form of lowly “opinion” (δόξα), a rudimentary form of reason. Proclus suggests that, in geometry alone, the imagination can receive certain “principles” (λόγοι) from discursive reasoning (διάνοια), and in his Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements, he speaks of the imagination as a “plane” or “surface” upon which images are projected:

For this is the reason that Euclid gives his work the title of ‘plane geometry,” and thus we must think of the plane as projected and lying before our eyes, and of the understanding (διάνοιαν) as writing everything upon it, while the imagination becomes something like a plane mirror to which the ideas (λόγων) of the understanding send down impressions of themselves.

Just as nature stands creatively above visible figures, so the soul, exercising its capacity to know, projects on the imagination, receiving in pictorial form these impressions of the ideas within the soul, by their means affords the soul an opportunity to turn inward from the pictures and attend to itself.

The soul was never a writing-tablet bare of inscriptions; it is a tablet that has always been inscribed and is always writing itself and being written on by intellect.

This limited recovery of the imagination in geometry, however, was not directly relevant to figural art, and did little to rehabilitate the imagination’s lowly and problematic status. For Byzantine theologians, and especially those committed to defending the validity of sacred images, the problems exposed by the philosophical tradition were compounded by their own moral psychology, which had long implicated the imagination in an interiorized form of image-based idolatry.

As noted above, it is often said that the Byzantine theory of icons rested on an appropriation of Aristotelian categories, and that ninth-century proponents of sacred images, such as Theodore the Studite and Nikephoros of Constantinople, relied directly on Aristotle in their defense of images and the imagination. However, it is difficult to support such a view on the basis of their writings. The following passage from a letter (ep. 380) by Theodore is the chief evidence cited for the “Aristotelian” interpretation of the icon:

The imagination is one of the five powers of the soul, and imagination itself is a kind of image (εἰκών), insofar as both of are likenesses (ἰνδάλματα). From this it follows that the image is not without value, being similar to the imagination, since, if the higher (i.e., the imagination) were without value, how much more so that which is lower (i.e., the image)? And if it were nothing more than a futile appendage to nature, its various concomitants would also be futile, such as sensation, opinion, discursive thinking, and intellect. [He then cites the story of Jacob’s sheep in Genesis (30:31-42), to the effect that] the visual imagination (εἰκονοειδὴς φαντασία) can exercise and bring about a concrete effect in the physical world (πραγματικῆς ἐνεργείας ἀποτέλεσμα).

This passage, however, is the exception that proves the rule, since it is the only time that Theodore seeks to justify the importance of images by referring to the imagination. When we look at his writings as a whole, “imagination” is attested around thirty times, and almost always designates an untrustworthy capacity of the non-rational part of the soul (producing, for example, the bizarre images we see in dreams); little more than an irrational sensation having nothing to do with the artistic production of sacred images, thus and hardly evidence of a broader retrieval of Aristotelian psychology.