CLEMENA ANTONOVA Towards a Christian Aesthetics: An Eastern Orthodox Perspective! In 1944, Dorothy Sayers published an article under the title “Towards a Christian Aesthetic” in which she observed that there was yet no “Christian aesthetic,” “no Christian philosophy of the arts” (4). Since then there have been various attempts to work out a theory that explains the aesthetic experience that lies at the heart of Christian art.’ Some of the most promising of these have evolved from within Catholic (Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jacques Maritain) or Protestant (Paul Tillich, Nicholas Wolterstorff, G. van der Leeuw) worldviews. The Eastern Orthodox perspective is distinctly less familiar. This is surprising given the rich, age-old, and almost uninterrupted tradition within the Eastern Church which draws on Late Antique pagan and Christian Neoplatonism, running through the Byzantine theology of the image in the Medieval period, and that continues into modem early twentieth-century Russian religious philosophy. In this essay I intend to highlight the contribution of this tradition by focusing on’some ideas on the religious image developed by the Russian thinker Pavel Florensky (1883-1937) in the 1920s. Florensky, a priest and an exceptionally gifted polymath, was executed in the purges of 1937. Thereafter, for decades to come, his writings remained little known both in the Soviet Union and abroad. Even though there has been a great renaissance in Florensky studies in the last several decades, his work is still not well integrated within the intellectual history of his time. This is most certainly the case with Florensky’s aesthetical thought. I will argue in this article that Florensky’s aesthetical position should be understood as a direct, critical response to contemporary formalism centering on the notion of “disinterested aesthetic attitude.” In his anti-formalist aesthetics, the Russian author explicitly draws on medieval Byzantine theology. This is well known. What is less appreciated is that he aligns himself with ideas from German Romantic aesthetics and also foreshadows later postmodern aesthetic theories. If this interpretation is accepted, Florensky’s writings on the art of the icon can be recovered as a forgotten chapter in the vast debate on what I will call “an aesthetics of presence,” i.e., the tradition of thought on the nature of presence in the image that goes back at least to the Romantics is taken up anew by postmodernism and is still alive in discussions unfolding against the background of the “pictorial turn” in the contemporary period. If Florensky has any concrete contribution to offer, it seems to me that it would lie in his bringing a typically Orthodox line of thought to the debate, which is missing at this stage. In Part I of this article, I will consider the “disinterested aesthetic attitude,” one of the basic but also much misunderstood notions of Western22 Cithara aesthetics. Part II will look at an alternative tradition, which takes seriously the dimension of presence at play in the work of art, especially religious art. The “aesthetics of presence,” underlying much of German Romantic aesthetics as well as trends within postmodernism, implies that a disinterested attitude, as it has been understood by a line of later interpreters of Kant, is an impossibility. In Part IIL, [will consider the notion of aesthetic intuition (which, admittedly, does not amount to a “system”) developed by Florensky at the beginning of the twentieth century that draws on a long tradition of Eastern Orthodox theological thought. For Florensky, all genuine art is symbolic, while the symbol is a “container” of presence. The Russian author’s theory builds on a dialectical and antinomic understanding of the nature of presence by using the terminology of essence and energies established for Orthodoxy by St. Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century. Ultimately, the symbol is the uncovering of the noumenon in the phenomenon, the presence of the transcendent in the immanent. I. The Power of Images and the Failure of Aesthetics In this article, I will examine the little-known Eastern Orthodox critique of traditional, Westem aesthetics which was advanced by Florensky in the 1920s. Under “traditional, Western aesthetics” I will understand a line of thought, inspired especially by Kant, which was the dominant paradigm for aesthetics until at least the 1960s. Even though this intellectual tradition has long since fallen into disfavor, it is relevant for the argument in this article, as it provides the background against which we should understand Florensky’s philosophy of art. It is, indeed, striking that so much of Russian thought from the second part of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century evolved in a head-on confrontation not just with Western philosophy in general, but with Kantian philosophy in particular (Kamenskij). Florensky’s passionate and persistent opposition to the Kantian divide between noumena and phenomena is a good illustration of this tendency. The Russian author's stress on presence in the image, the topic of Part II below, is, at heart, a response to the Kantian doctrine of “aesthetic disinterestedness.” The latter is, for Florensky, the result of the noumenon- phenomenon disjunction. As is well known, the notion of “aesthetic disinterestedness” goes back to the eighteenth century and specifically to eighteenth-century British writers (Stolnitz, Bohl). In fact, Jerome Stolnitz has suggested that Shaftesbury was “the first philosopher to call attention to disinterested perception” (131). Disinterestedness, however, has become most closely associated with Kant’s philosophy. It is worth noting that subsequent applications of the notion of disinterested aesthetic experience frequently have given a one-sided and simplified view of Kant’s own use of “disinterestedness.” The later tradition rarely makes it clear that Kant himself never talks about disinterestedness in relation to art but only with respect to the perception of beauty in nature. More importantly, for Kant, disinterestedness is contemplative—a notionTowards a Christian Aesthetics: An Eastern Orthodox Perspective 23 that could be developed in interesting ways in order to explain the contemplative meanings of religious art.’ In this sense, Frank B. Brown’s suggestion that “Kant’s theory of free and dependent beauty... can be modified so as to help us characterize varied traits of aesthetica and to understand the religious relevance to the milieu that we call the aesthetic” (49) should be taken seriously. My point here is that the aesthetics that has “failed” to explain religious art is not so much Kant's aesthetics as later interpretations of Kant, mostly of a formalist orientation. Thus, while “almost all of Florensky’s works’”— and this includes his aesthetical writings—are in “direct or hidden polemics with Kantian principles” (Dlugach, 187; my translation), the Russian author's direct engagement with Kant is rather superficial. Frequently Florensky’s adversary was not so much Kant himself, but the largely formalist tradition that Iam referring to here. The reception of the doctrine of disinterestedness is a good case in point. In his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment Kant outlines several necessary features which make an aesthetic judgment possible—universality, subjective purposiveness, necessity, and disinterestedness. In other words, if any of these aspects is not present, what we are dealing with cannot be defined as an aesthetic judgment. Indeed, Kant constantly draws a distinction between logical judgments on the one hand, and moral and aesthetic judgments on the other. Let us focus here on the case of the disinterested aesthetic judgment of taste or what has been called “the first moment” (Knox, 23) of Kant’s aesthetics. The viewer of an artistic representation is described as “indifferent to the real existence of the object of this representation” and as playing “the part of judge in matters of taste” (CAJ, 43). In simple words, it is not the object itself but its representation which pleases. In another work Kant discusses this problem specifically in the context of the distinction between moral and aesthetical judgments: “Pleasure, which is not necessarily bound up with the desire of the object and which, therefore, is at bottom not a pleasure in the existence of the object of representation, but clings to the representation only, may be called mere contemplative pleasure or satisfaction. The feeling of the latter kind of pleasure we call taste” (ME, 172). Kant has been inspirational to a whole line of aesthetic-attitude theories centering on the importance of the “first moment” (Dickie, 28-38). The Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer has noticed that “leaving out of the account the existence of the thing is precisely the characteristic and essential reality of aesthetic representation” (311), while Israel Knox states that “in a sense, Kant builds his entire metaphysical aesthetic upon the basis of the doctrine of disinterestedness’” (23 and 24). While this is true, disinterestedness has been understood and developed in different ways. There are, in fact, passages in Kant that give some good grounds for an interpretative tradition that, in Paul Crowther’s words, understands aesthetic judgment “as though24 Cithara it were in essence psychological... a kind of detached attitude or mental stance wherein one purges oneself of all considerations deriving from ‘real existence’” (69). Such an interpretation would do little to explain religious ast, the experience of which is most commonly intimately bound with the “zeal existence” of the object of representation. Clive Bell, the British art critic and a contemporary of Florensky’s, wrote in his famous book Art (1914) that art is the embodiment of what he called “significant form,” ie., “lines and colours combined in a particular way,” irrespective of content. Aesthetic experience, in Bell’s view and indeed in formalism in general, is about the appreciation of how a work of art represents an object or an idea and not about what exactly is represented. Indeed, we could say that, in this sense, there is no fundamental difference between the experience of the “significant form” of a landscape or of the Crucifixion of Christ. In the 1960s, Virgil Aldrich evoked, in a similar vein, the duck-rabbit figure in order to suggest that there are two mutually exclusive modes of “seeing-as.” An object, in Aldrich’s view, can be perceived as an aesthetical object or not, depending on whether it is attended to in a disinterested way or not. Eliseo Vivas makes a similar point. Quite consistently with his position, Vivas claims that The Brotlers Karamazov cannot be read as art, presumably because one cannot help but read it as social criticism. There is a subtle, but important, difference in the way that Crowther renders Kant’s concept— "what kind of thing the object is; its relevance for our practical interests; indeed, whether the object is real or not; are questions which have no necessary bearing on our enjoyment of its mere appearance” (68). In other words, we enjoy the Brothers Karamazov quite apart from the social criticism that the novel offers. To suggest, as Vivas does, that because social criticism is an important aspect of Dostoevsky’s work it follows that the novel can no longer affect us aesthetically is a rather odd proposition. For many readers, Dostoevsky is fascinating exactly because he can be read at several levels simultaneously. In other words, “reading as” just as “seeing as” can very well be—and usually is—a multi-layered experience rather than a single mode that excludes all others. While there is this line of formalist thought that usually looks for support in Kant and stresses the idea of the autonomy of art, there is also the tradition that grows out of German Romantic philosophy and develops in a different direction. As, in my reading, Florensky belongs to this latter tradition, it would make sense to give at least a brief outline of some of the main ideas around the “aesthetics of presence.” II. The Power of Images and the Aesthetics of Presence One of the main problems of traditional aesthetics is that the doctrine of the autonomy of art entails, by definition, the separation between art and religion. The very concept of religious art and the possibility of a Christian aesthetics become, therefore, deeply problematic. At the same time, it isTowards a Christian Aesthetics: An Eastern Orthodox Perspective 25 Christian art that poses, in the strongest terms, the question of presence in the image. Clearly, the idea of divine presence in the icon is of paramount significance to the Christian believer praying before this icon. This is why an aesthetics of presence arises so frequently in intellectual contexts at the intersection between art and religion. For Schleiermacher, Schlegel, and Schelling, as later for Schopenhauer and Wagner, art is the language of religion. The concept of Kunstreligion or art-as-religion belongs here. Now, this tradition can be interpreted, in Nietzsche's vein, along the lines of the idea that religion has come to an end and is replaced by art, which goes on to express what had previously been the domain of religion. This understanding cannot be accepted by a Christian aesthetics. After all, when pursued consistently, it denies the very possibility of a serious religious art. As Nietzsche says in Human, All Too Human, “that species of art can never flourish again which—like The Divine Comedy, the paintings by Raphael, the frescoes of Michelangelo, Gothic cathedrals— presupposes not only a cosmic but a metaphysical significance in the objects of art” (102). At the same time, the notion of an overlap between art and religion, which keeps cropping up in Romantic literature, can be pursued in interesting ways. There are still authors who argue, in a Romantic vein, for the “congruity between the disinterestedness [of the aesthetic attitude] and the detachment [of the religious attitude]” (Nieuwenhove). Rik van Nieuwenhove, for example, puts a strong emphasis on the distinction between “disinterestedness” and “indifference” and claims that the disinterested aesthetic attitude, in fact, implies a degree of involvement of some kind. The notion of the anti-aesthetic, proposed in a collection edited by Hals Foster, is a reaction against the idea of an autonomous art: “The ‘anti-aesthetic,’” Foster says, “also signals that the very notion of aesthetic, its network of ideas, is in question here,” in particular “the idea that aesthetic experience exists apart, without ‘purpose’” (X and XV). In his study on “religious aesthetics,” F.B. Brown is specifically interested in a “broad notion of aesthetics” (22-23) which uncovers the “junctures [at which] aesthetics and religious reflection converge” (54). After all, “our aesthetic response always entails at least peripheral awareness of what the object may be beyond our particular experience, and even beyond anything immediately aesthetic” (64). Whether we refer to these ideas as “the anti-aesthetic” or as “the broad notion of aesthetics,” they all drive in the same direction. Somewhere along the way, they invariably question the doctrine of disinterestedness and pose the problem of presence. One of the most sustained challenges to disinterestedness as it has been understood by traditional, Western aesthetics is David Freedberg’s The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (1989), which represents, in many ways, a refined elaboration of Gadamer’s notion of “picture magic.” ‘As Gadamer said, “if it is only at the beginning of the history of the picture, in its prehistory as it were, that we find picture magic, which depends on the identity and non-differentiation of the picture and what is pictured, still26 Cithara it does not mean that an increasingly differentiated consciousness that grows further and further away from magical identity can ever detach itself entirely from it.” Rather, he continues, “non-differentiation still remains an essential feature of all experience of pictures” (TAM, 123). In other words, the response to the image is colored by the ancient belief that the image is, in some manner, a container of the preseice of the object of representation. The experience of religious art is very probably the most extreme example of this phenomenon. According to Gadamer, “only the religious picture shows the full ontological power of pictures... in it we see without doubt that a picture is not a copy of a copied being, but is in ontological communication with what is copied” (TAM, 126). Gadamer’s term “picture magic” is rather unfortunate, as it could be misleading. After all, there are sophisticated notions of presence, which do not necessarily imply elements of magic. Ina recent book, Varieties of Presence, Alva Noé devotes a chapter to “Presence in Pictures” and suggests that the power of images resides in their “presence-in-absence structure,” i.e., images convey “a visual sense of the presence of something in its manifest absence” (82-114). Freedberg’s thesis, on the other hand, starts from the familiar challenge against the very distinction between the “magical” or “religious” function of the image versus the “aesthetical” functions (XXII). The response to the image, in Freedberg’s reading, is complex and it includes the element of presence, which traditional aesthetics has failed to account for. So long as presence is a vital component of our response to certain images, aesthetic judgment cannot be disinterested. And, according to Freedberg, “there is nothing in the history of response to suggest the possibility of complete disinterestedness” (74). Further, the attitude of a viewer before a religious image has little to do with a pure judgment of taste. As Gadamer has pointed out, “ritual and ceremony, all forms and expressions of religious observance that are already established, can be repeated again and again according to hallowed custom without anybody feeling it necessary to pass judgment upon them” (The Relevance of the Beautiful). Inhis Art and Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic (1980) and several later works, Nicholas Wolterstorff raises the problem of religious art and the failure of traditional aesthetics to describe the experience that it produces. As Wolterstorff says, “secular accounts [of aesthetic experience] do not explain my feeling of exaltation [provoked by works of art]” (“Art and the Aesthetic,” 331). Elsewhere, he observes that while “some art comes into its own when it becomes the object of engrossed contemplation; most art does not” (“Is Art Salvific?” 17-18). Religious art most definitely falls in the latter category. This is where traditional, Western aesthetics fails, as it cannot provide us with the conceptual tools to analyze the great bulk of art produced in the course of history, as well as to explain the reactions of religious communities to their art which have been recurrent in modernity. There is the famous incident of the Plague Riot in Russia at the time of Catherine the Great. In 1771, while the plague was raging in Moscow, the Empress decreed that forTowards a Christian Aesthetics: An Eastern Orthodox Perspective 27 the time being people stop touching and kissing icons in the church. This enlightened decision caused a violent upheaval among the population of the city, in the course of which thousands were killed. The people expected to be cured by their icons and threatened to kill all the doctors and anyone trying to enforce the measures of prevention (Pares, 259, see also Alexander, 154ff). Cases attesting to the power of images are very much part of contemporary history as well. Only a few years ago, the Russian newspaper Pravda (January 5, 2005) published an article under the attention-catching title “Crying Icons Perplex Both the Catholic and the Orthodox Clergy.” The readers were informed of the latest findings about miracle-working icons by the Commission for the Description of Divine Miracles set up by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1999. Interestingly, the Chairman of the Commission was one of Florensky’s grandsons. Probably not as dramatic, but certainly thought-provoking are the frequently noticed incidents of visitors to art museums and galleries solemnly praying before icons on display there. The popular reception of religious art in these cases and many others has nothing to do with disinterestedness in its common interpretation. On the contrary, it is exactly interest understood as “pleasure obtained from the idea of the existence of an object” (Knox, 21) (though “pleasure” is not quite the right word here) that is at play here. What I have been suggesting so far is that it would be useful to understand Florensky’s writings on the philosophy of art as a critical response toa strand of Westem aesthetics, which offered a certain, usually simplified, interpretation of Kant that became the basis of formalist art criticism which flourished until the 1960s. At the same time, there is another line of thought within Western aesthetics that bears close affinities to some of Florensky’s ideas. Both German Romantic aesthetics, which exercised a direct influence over Florensky and other Russian thinkers at the time, and later postmodernism tackled the problem of presence in the image that was a major concern for Florensky as well. What makes Florensky stand out amidst this Wester intellectual tradition is the Orthodox background against which he developed his ideas on the image. The Russian religious philosopher's account of aesthetic experience is original in its modern reinterpretation of typically Eastern Orthodox material. III. The Nature of Presence in the Symbol: A Russian Orthodox Perspective It is worth noting that Florensky’s definition of the icon as symbol developed mainly in the 1920s was a continuation of work done on the philosophy of language a decade earlier and provoked by the case of the Name-worshippers.’ In 1914, Russia sent soldiers to Mount Athos to bring back to the country the monks who, on the basis of the hesychast practice of the Jesus prayer, had embraced imiaslavie (Name-worshipping). The Russian Church had proclaimed the monks’ belief that the Name of God was God Himself heretical. The unrepentant Name-worshippers were excommunicated. These dramatic events caused passionate reactions among28 Cithara religiously-minded intellectuals, as can be witnessed by the outburst of writings in direct response to the incident.’ Florensky started looking at the concept of the synibol in language in a systematic way exactly in this historical and intellectual context.“ Ina text written in defense of the Name-worshippers the Russian thinker defined the symbol in the following way: “A symbol is an essence energy which is joined, or, more precisely, commingled, with the energy of another essence, more worthy in a given respect, and which thereby carries this other essence in itself” (quotation 1; “Imiaslavie,” 279, translation from Bychkov, The Aesthetic Face of Being, 70). As he further says, “a symbol is something that manifests in itself that which is not itself, that which is greater than itself and is nevertheless manifested through itself” (op.cit.) A few years later, Florensky became increasingly engaged in the problem of the vistial image. In the Icoriostasis (1922), the icon is defined as a symbol, which is both identical with the prototype and different at the same time. On the one hand, it discloses the presence of the person or the thing depicted. As Florensky says, “Now I look at an icon and I say to myself: ‘Behold, this is She—not her picture, but She Herself, contemplated by means of, with the aid of, iconographic art. As through a window, I see the Mother of God” (quotation 2, “Ikonostas,” 548; translation from Bychkov, Aesthetic Face of Being, 80, which I find better than the translation in Iconostasis, 69). On the other hand, however, an icon “on its own’—i.e., apart from the spiritual vision—'is neither an image nor an icon, but a wooden board” (“Ikonostas,” 545, my translation; translation in Ikonostasis, 65). The Russian writer clarifies this antinomy with the example of the window, which on its own is no more than “wood and glass,” but, once we are able to see the light through it, becomes “that very light itself” and not just ““like’ the light” (quotation 3, “Tkonostas,” 545; Iconostasis, 65). In a passage that brings the two themes— the Name of God and the icon—together, he states that "I acquired the basic thought of my worldview: that what is named in the name, what is symbolized in the symbol, the reality of what is pictured in the picture, is indeed present” (quotation 4, “Ikonostas,” 625; Iconostasis, 164). The importance of the symbol for Florensky is nowhere as clear as in his highly intimate text Detiam moim (To My Children) (1923) where he discusses the symbol in the context of the relationship between the phenomenon and the noumenon. “All my life I have thought about one thing—the relationship between the phenomenon and the noumenon,” the Russian writer says and almost immediately after that, “the Kantian separation of the noumenon and the phenomenon... I rejected with all my being” (153). So, for Florensky, the phenomenon and noumenon are not separated but they belong together, are unified and one. The unity of the two is the symbol since "every phenomenon expresses a spiritual essence, ie.,a symbol.” This understanding of the symbol makes possible Florensky’s belief that “the mystery of the world is not hidden, but is precisely revealed through symbols in its true essence... thatis, as a mystery” (quotation 5, Detiant moin, 153; my translation).Towards a Christian Aesthetics: An Eastern Orthodox Perspective 29 There are several ideas that come across in the above quotations. First, the symbol is defined exactly in terms of presence, while the nature of this presence is dialectical and antinomic (quotations 2, 3, and 4). Second, this dialectical presence is conceptualized through a theological terminology, which was established by St. Gregory Palamas (quotation 1). Thirdly, the symbols nothing less than the presence of the noumenon in the phenomenon (quotation 5). The name is a symbol in the sense that it “contains” the presence of what is named, just as the icon as symbol “contains” the presence of what is represented. Thus, the Name of God is God, while the image of the Mother of God is “not her picture, but She Herself” (quotation 2). At the same time, the nature of this presence is relative—God is present in his Name and the Mother of God is present in her icon only in terms of energies but not in terms of essence (see below). The presence of the transcendent in the immanent, of the spiritual in the material, of the noumenon in the phenomenon is, ultimately, what constitutes the symbol in Florensky’s philosophy. It is significant that Florensky’s large and unfinished intellectual project under the title U vodorazdelov miysli: Cherty konkretnoi metafiziki (At the Watersheds of Thought: The Outlines of a Concrete Metaphysics), which included his essay Iconostasis among, others, was meant as a sort of philosophical symbolism. What Florensky called “concrete metaphysics” postulates exactly the unity between the phenomenon and the noumenon. The whole project, I suggest, is, in fact, precisely an aesthetical one and represents Florensky’s attempt to work out an Orthodox aesthetics, based on the notion of presence which counteracts the prevalent, Western paradigm that has disregarded exactly this aspect of aesthetical experience. All three ideas running through the quotations that I mention above— the antinomical categories of thought, the essence-energies relationship, and the idea of the spiritualization of matter—are in the spirit of, or even derive from, Eastern Orthodox theology (Meyendorff, 224-5; Bychkov, “Icon,” 393- 4). This is not the only intellectual background—indeed, as I have suggested elsewhere, Florensky’s understanding of the symbol draws on the German Romantic definition in which symbol is opposed to allegory (“Beauty Will Save the World”). The Orthodox theological framework, however, is important in view of our discussion as it is from there that one can derive the longue durée history of insights and ideas that can work toward an Orthodox Christian aesthetics. Let us consider briefly one aspect of this Orthodox theological background—Florensky’s specific use of the terminology of “essence” and “energy” (quotation 1), which is directly borrowed from St. Gregory Palamas. Now the pair essence-energy goes back to Aristotle who in the De Anima explicitly says that the essence (ousia) can be known through the ener, (energeia). However, while with Aristotle there is a connection between the essence and energy, the two are not opposed. It is only in the early Middle Ages that ousia and energeia are opposed in terms of knowable (energy) and unknowable (essence). It is this distinction, which is a medieval contribution,30 Cithara that becomes fundamental to Orthodox theology (see the excellent outline in Christov, also Bradshaw). For Orthodoxy, all entities interpenetrate through their energies (but not their essences!). As the profession of faith worked out at the Council of Nicaea I (325) demonstrates, the three hypostases of Godhead share one ousia (“essence” or “substance”): “We believe... in one Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, only-begotten, begotten of the Father; God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God; begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father, through whom all things are made.” In other words, God the Father and Jesus are “consubstantial” as they share the same substance or essence. At the same time, the Church Fathers such as St. Athanasius drew a distinction between divine essence and God’s powers orbounty. In the eighth century, St. John of Damascus wrote about the action or “energies” of God as revelations of God Himself. Following in the footsteps of Greek Patristic theology, St. Gregory Palamas applies the distinction between essence and energy to God and his relationship to man (Yannaras, Ware, Williams). In the spirit of apophatic theology, he stresses over and over again that God is absolutely unknowable in his essence. This is an idea especially familiar from the Cappadocian Fathers and St. John Chrysostom. At the same time, God makes himself accessible to us in his energies. According to Palamas, “God is one, He is at the same time incomprehensible in His essence and comprehensible in His energies” (cited in Papademetriou, 34). Not only the antinomy (in a certain sense of the term) at the heart of these statements does not wor y Palamas, but he considers it crucial for Orthodox theology in general. As he maintained, “to say now one thing [in this case, God is knowable] and now another [God is unknowable] is natural to any man who would theologize aright” (cited in Pelikan, 264). Orthodoxy, for Palamas, becomes “the capacity fo observe both aspects of a truth that was dialectical,” while heresy is “not so much outright denial of dogma as adherence to one pole of a dialectical dogma at the expense of the other pole” (Pelikan, 264). In the same vein, knowledge for Florensky is possible only via the antinomical structure of the human mind, since Truth itself is antinomical.” In the Letter on “Contradiction” in his The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (1914), Florensky cites Nicholas of Cusa who famously defined Truth as coincidentia oppositorum, i.e., coincidence of opposites. The contemporary Russian philosopher Sergei Khoruzhii has taken a strongly critical attitude towards Florensky’s recourse to Palamite theology, which he has called “theological nonsense” (“The Idea of Energy,” 73-74). It is outside the scope of this article to go systematically into this problem, which is extremely complicated not only because of the nature of Florensky’s borrowings from Palamas, but because of the contradictions and ambiguities within Palamas himself (Bradshaw, 273ff). For example, Rowan Williams has drawn attention to problems inherent in Palamas’ attempt to impose a Neoplatonic ontology upon Christianity. However, one point that Khoruzhii makes is directly relevant to our discussion. According to Khoruzhii,Towards a Christian Aesthetics: An Eastern Orthodox Perspective 31 Florensky extends—clearly illegitimately in Khoruzhii’s view—the essence- energies distinction beyond Palamas’s own usage (“Filosofskij simbolizm’). Florensky certainly applied Palamite terminology to a much wider variety of cases than the relationship between God and man conceived in a strict manner. In the particular case of the writings in question, however, it seems to me that he is creatively appropriating Palamas in order to suggest a religious-aesthetical experience which is profoundly Orthodox in nature. After all, both the hesychast Jesus prayer and the experience of the believer before the icon are about a relationship between God and man. Both are prayerful attitudes in which man seeks union with God. It is in this Orthodox sense that one should understand Florensky’s writings on Name-worshipping which emphasize the idea that the Name of God is God, or his theory of the icon which stresses the presence of the prototype in the image. If the icon contains the presence of Christ, then the viewer is indeed facing the Son of God Himself. Presence, however, is to be understood in terms of energy (ie., Christ is present in his image in his energies) and not in terms of essence. Itis worth noting that the Orthodox background of Florensky’s writings on religious art as symbolic can fit in with some of the major assumptions of postmodernism. After all, Florensky’s work unfolded at a moment when many in Russia and the rest of Europe felt that modernity was in a state of ctisis. The sense of crisis frequently took the form of a concern that modern, Western culture has lost contact with higher being. This theme, started by the German Romantics, becomes one of the refrains of postmodernism—for instance, in Walter Benjamin’s notion of the work’s loss of aura in a technological age, in Heidegger's late writings on art, in Theodore Adorno’s thesis that the loss of the name as a primary constituent of language is an indicator of the alienations of modemity. Heidegger, in particular, discusses this problem explicitly in terms of the symbol. That the sculpture of a God “is not a portrait whose purpose is to make it easier to realize how the god looks, rather, it is a work that lets the god himself be present and thus is the god himself” (20) is another way of insisting, as Florensky had done, that in the icon we see the Mother of God, “not her picture.” Florensky would have readily agreed with Heidegger's claim that “the work is a work, as long as the god had not fled from it” (43) and that art serves to “accomplish being” (138) and “unconcealedness” (56). Thus, in terms of affinity of ideas, Florensky could be seen as a forerunner of postmodernism. However, what makes Florensky specific in this line of thought is the Orthodox background against which he unfolds his theory of the symbol. Not only is the Russian author concerned with issues that have been an organic part of Eastern Orthodox theology for centuries—the icon, the Name of God—but his application of Palamite terminology to aesthetics could be, believe, directly relevant to the problem of religious art. The nature of presence as conceptualized in this Russian Orthodox line of thought32 Cithara touches on the problem of the relationship between the subject (viewer) and the object (representation), which is fundamental to aesthetics. The disjunction between the two is overcome through the flow of energies that intertwine the subject and the object in a much more intimate relationship. It seems to me that Florensky’s approach, if developed further, might lead to interesting results. For example, the very terms on which visual experience has been postulated are questioned. In order to have visual experience, we need a seeing subject contemplating the seen object. Since at least Kepler and later in Cartesian philosophy this has been interpreted as a split between the subject and the object. At the same time, the experience of the subject contemplating an image that discloses presence seems to revolve not only around the act of seeing but more significantly, around being seen. In a manner, the image “stares back.”* It seems that a much more intimate and active interaction takes place when the viewer is faced with a re-presentation of the deity. Bruno Latour has made a useful distinction between re- presentation and representation in his thesis that in the Renaissance the latter mode superceded the former or, in other words, the image was no longer seen as a container of presence. In this process, according to Latour, the heavens were turned into a sky or, to invert Heidegger’s expression, the god fled from his image (43). The Orthodox model of the unity between the Subject (viewer) and the object (icon) by way of energies can be developed in ways that add a valuable dimension to postmodem discourses on presence and the relationship between the subject and the object in the process of visual perception. At this stage, as Viktor Bychkov has noticed, there is no “clearly formulated and consistently explained aesthetical system” (The Aesthetic Face of Being, 12) in Orthodoxy and even Florensky has not offered one. For example, while the main thrust of Florensky’s argument in the writings under our attention centers on “energies,” it is still not clear how exactly presence works in terms of “energies.” At the same time, Bychkov makes a convincing case—in what can be regarded as his trilogy, Vizantiiskaia estetika (Byzantine Aesthetics, 1977, reprinted 1999), Dreonerusskaia estetika (Medieval Russian Aesthetics, second edition, 2012) and Russkaya teurgicheskaya estetika (Russian Theurgic Aesthetics, 2007)—that an Orthodox aesthetics is possible, while the last two works demonstrate the importance that Florensky’s writings could play in such a project. Conclusion and Implications The motivation behind this article was to add an Eastern Orthodox perspective to the much more familiar developments in the West toward a Christian aesthetics. The Eastern Orthodox intellectual tradition of reflection on art, which goes back to Late Antique pagan and Christian Neoplatonism and then, via Byzantine theology, enters Russian religious philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century, is still little known among Western scholars. My focus was Pavel Florensky’s theory of the icon as symbol workedTowards a Christian Aesthetics: An Eastern Orthodox Perspective 33, out in the 1910s and especially the 1920s in Russia. I draw special attention to the Palamite background of Florensky’s writings on the symbol in order to highlight this Orthodox perspective. The thesis put forward in this article suggests that Florensky’s notion of the symbol as disclosing presence should be understood as a critical response, and an alternative model, to a line of formalist aesthetical thought, which was dominant at the beginning of the twentieth century and, indeed, well into the 1960s. Further it is suggested that Florensky’s interest in the problem of presence should be placed within the intellectual tradition of an aesthetics of presence, going back to German Romantic aesthetics and later postmodernism. The present thesis, therefore, has several larger implications. First, Florensky’s theory of the icon, as well as the tradition of Russian religious philosophy that if belongs to, is seen as an original stage in the evolution of Orthodox theology. Second, Florensky’s version of Orthodox theology is interpreted as a critical response not to Western philosophy in general, as is usually assumed, but to one trend of Western aesthetics and philosophy, which aligned itself with what Habermas has called the “the modern project” (9). In this sense, it is anti-modern. At the same time—and this is the third implication—it makes points of contact with another line of thought in Western philosophy which was inspired by a similar concem with the crisis of modemity and the failings of “the modern project.” Florensky’s writings on the icon were directly influenced by German Romantic philosophy, while as was proposed in this article they also look forward to postmodernism in terms of certain ideas (as the notion of presence in the image). In other words, in Florensky’s largely fragmented and frequently unfinished writings we might find the seeds of a Christian aesthetics, which could engage directly with the problems of modernity from a perspective which is both Orthodox and postmodern. Centre for Patristic and Byzantine Cultural Heritage, Sofia University34 Cithara NOTES 1) This article is a revised version of my presentation “The Problem of Religious Art: Re-thinking Secular Modernity and Aesthetic Experience” given at the European Conference on Aesthetics “Societies in Crisis and the Concept of Aesthetics,” Prado Museum, Madrid, 10-12 Nov. 2010. I thank Prof. Paul Crowther (Department of Philosophy, National University of Ireland, Galway) and Prof. Ivan Christov (Theology Faculty, Sofia University, Bulgaria) for their help with the present text. 2) Exg., Edward Farley, Faith and Beauty: A Theological Aesthetic. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001; Gordon Graham, The Re-enchantment of the World: Art versus Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007; Patrick Sherry, Spirit and Beauty: An Introduction to Theological Aesthetics. 2 ed. London: SCM, 2002; Richard Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics: God in Imagination, Beauty, and Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 3) Communication from Prof. Paul Crowther from 24 March 2014. 4) The Russian imiasiavtsyhas been translated into Englishas “Name-glorifiers” (asin Oleg Bychkov’s recent translation of Losev, A-F., The Dialectic of Artistic Form (Munich and Berlin: Otto Sagner, 2013) or “Name-worshippers” (as in Graham and Kantor, Naming Infinity). I use “Name-worshippers” in this article 5) OnName-worshipping, see Dmitrii Leskin, Spor ob imeni Bozhiem: Filosofia imeni v Rossii v kontekste Afonskikh sobitii 1910-kh gg. (The Debate about the Name of God: The Philosophy of the Name in Russia in the Context of the Athonite Events in the 1910s) (St. Petersburg: Aleteia, 2004); Tatiana Senina, Imiaslavtsy ili imiabozhniki? Spor o prirode imeni Bozhiia i afonskoe dvizhenie imiaslavtseo (St. Petersburg: T. Senina, 2002); Scott Kenworthy, The Heart of Russia: Trinity-Sergius, Monasticism, and Society after 1825 (Washington and New York: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010) 6) Ihave paid some attention to this topic in my article on “Neo-Palamism.” 7) On this see Slesinski, 63, 140ff. Christoph Schneider has argued recently that Florensky’s conception of truth as antinomy represents “the third way” in relation to ontotheology and fideism. 8) I borrow James Elkins’s expression from his The Object Stares Back.Towards a Christian Aesthetics: An Eastern Orthodox Perspective 35 WORKS CITED Aldrich, Virgil. Philosophy of Art. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963. Alexander, John T. Catherine the Great: Life and Legend. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. 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