Icons
EDITOR’S NOTE: Julia Annas, Vestry member and Regents Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, shares her knowledge to offer insight about the cover of the seasonal bulletin for Easter.
Reading the icons in your Easter bulletin
Reading the icons? But they are images, not words!
Yes, but the maker of an icon is said to write it, and we can read it as we look at it.
Icons come to us from the tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Churches, whose ideas about the role of art in worship are different from ours. In using icons to illustrate our seasonal bulletins, we have a chance to experience and learn from a different way of looking at art and the sacred.
An icon is a devotional aid, not something to be judged as a work of art in its own right. Icon makers lack interest in many of our interests in Western sacred art, such as originality, virtuosity for its own sake and realism in depiction. Christ, Mary, the apostles and scenes like the Last Supper are always shown in certain fixed ways. Icons invite us to pray in a way that takes us through the familiar image, like looking through a window.
The cover of the Easter bulletin shows a magnificent elaborate icon.
In the corners are scenes from Christ’s Passion. Clockwise from top left: The Garden of Gethsemane, Christ carrying the cross, the Pieta (Mary weeping over the dead Christ), and the Crucifixion.
In the center is the resurrected Christ. His Anastasis, the Resurrection, is shown in a scene which in the west is called the “Harrowing of Hell.” Christ, before his bodily resurrection on Easter Sunday morning, descends from the starry heavens to Satan’s underworld. The gates of this realm lie broken under his feet, and below him two angels hold Satan down. Christ holds Adam by one hand and Eve by the other, raising them from their tombs. Kings of the Old Testament on our left, and prophets on our right, come towards Christ, who will take them all out of the realm of death. At the top two angels hold the cross to symbolize death, which the Resurrection has overcome.