The Orthodox Icon and Postmodern Art: Critical Reflections on the Christian Image and Its Theology

This study examines the theories of postmodern visuality and representation and identifies concepts that resonate with Orthodox theology and iconography.

C.A. Tsakiridou frees the Orthodox icon from iconological precepts that limit its aesthetic and expressive range. The book’s key argument is that poststructuralist thought is not alien to Orthodox theology and iconography. Dissonance, liminality, and ambiguity are essential for conveying the paradoxes of Christian faith and recognizing the hagiopneumatic vitality and openness of the Orthodox tradition. Perichoresis or coinherence, a concept in patristic theology that defines the relationship between the three persons of the Holy Trinity and the two natures of Christ, acquires a feminine dimension in the person of the Theotokos. Like the ascetical concept of nepsis, it has aesthetic implications. Intermedial qualities present in iconography, photography, and cinema help explain how icons become hosts to transcendent realities and how their experience in Orthodox liturgy and devotion has anticipated and resolved the postmodern disorientation of visuality and representation.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, postmodernism, philosophy, theology, religion, and gender studies.

Cornelia A. Tsakiridou is Professor in the Department of Philosophy, La Salle University, Philadelphia, USA. She specializes in aesthetics, Orthodox theology, and metaphysics. Her most recent publications include Tradition and Transformation in Christian Art: The Transcultural Icon (Routledge, 2019) and Icons in Time, Persons in Eternity: Orthodox Theology and the Aesthetics of the Christian Image (Routledge, 2013).