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Ecclesiology 4. Man becomes what it contemplates

rating on the current iconoclasm in Western churches, it may seem rash. Indeed years there rages fashion icons of the Eastern ... which precisely is just fashion (sic), so the mystery remains sealed Icons.

Duccio, Transfiguration

the occasion of the XII Centenary of the Second Council of Nicaea (878-1987) , the patriarch of Constantinople Dimitrios I , wrote an encyclical letter on the theology of icons, which condemns some distortions " reducing them to decorative elements " appreciated " only as works of art" and its reduction "to merchandise [...] according to the current methods of industrial reproduction ( Dimitrios I , The Council of Nicaea and the theology of icons , 28).

The secular West, but hungry for spiritual life, it retrieves the crumbs that fall from the richly laden table of the Christian, using the icons as mere "decorative " intolerable reduction and blasphemous to Orthodoxy, but already for those of us who have senses raped by smooth, uniform and flat, the (ab) use unitonale monochrome and color, ridottoti the aseptic white or gray concrete, simplified geometric shapes, reduced to empty concepts astrattti or deconstructed in tribute to the fads of the moment. Sometimes in the cold and unadorned contemporary churches, apparently abandoned and out of context, an icon shines in the lonely darkness liquid concrete poured in the box called church, giving even a faint hope to those who seek God

Then the Patriarch Dimitrios I reaffirms the necessary presence of three factors that you realize the mystery of the Icon: " the painter who puts into his subject [...] material creation in his capacity as special spiritual [...] the man who contemplates the image which becomes similar to that which is represented ( Idem, 31).

Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, Sistine Chapel

The iconographer contemplates the uncreated light that shines on the face of Christ and his work reveals field created by its spiritual function, the light becomes contemplative, contemplating written representation in iconography. Man, and contemplation, " becomes similar to that which is represented . This, unfortunately, it happens always, regardless of what is represented and how it is represented. Is because the man is not only what you eat (Feuerbach, The Mystery of Sacrifice), but also what he sees, as it is written of the idolaters: " Those who make them become like them and who trust in them! " (Ps 114.8).

The Fashion Icon on the one hand expresses the spiritual thirst that is rampant in western secularised the other paradoxically confirms the inability of Western contemplate, up from the visible to the invisible reality, because nothing is more data than the visible, into the narrow horizon which we have to. No vertical impulse, I dive into the depths, only one dimension, flat, boring and uniform as you die slowly, if ever lived. This is the main feature of the contemporary Church to the reduction of space only the horizontal plane, with the loss of height (dome, at a time) and length (the nave, apse), since for many centuries it has lost the dimension of depth (crypt).