Eye of Angels

 

Reading this icon, you seems to make eye-contact with it. Your eye hits the page and is  immediately drawn into the dark center, the pupil, the obscurity at the middle. Once you manage to extricate yourself from the blackness and take in the surrounding field of vision, you feel taken aback, almost—having expected only to observe it, you find yourself the object of its observation. The image looks back at you, returns your gaze. But who is it that looks out from the page?

Setting aside the question of the eye for a moment, we must ask what is pictured here. This icon is understood as an image of creation. One way to read the dark void at the center is as earth, pictured from the words of Genesis 1:2, “And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters.” The black circle stands in contrast to many other icons we’ve looked at in class that portray God as a white circle, as if an impenetrably radiant light. If we understand the black circle as Earth, its darkness places it in contrast to God as an impenetrably dark obscurity. The blue angelic hosts are suggestive of an expanse of waters, undulating in shade and texture. As John 1 tells us, the radiant figure hovering in the foreground is Logos, inclining His gaze downward toward the darkness. “In the beginning was Logos, and Logos was with God, and Logos was God.” Although John goes on to tell us that “Logos was made flesh,” (in other words He didn’t start out as flesh), here the image prefigures His incarnate body, which is partially radiant and partially in shadow, resting an elbow upon the earth void even while blessing it with his right hand. 

The presence of angels and their circular formation suggests to me that the icon also pictures the beginning of time itself, which is visualized more often than not in circles (think of the orbits of the planets, the face of your watch, the curve of a sun-dial). This serves for an account of the angelic host present — Hugh of St. Victor tells us that “with the beginning of time, that is, when time itself began, there also began simultaneously the matter of all visible things, and at exactly the same moment the essence of the invisible things in the angelic nature” (Hugh). Angels are creatures, but not embodied ones. Though Genesis doesn’t give an account of their creation, many have speculated as to how and when Logos brought them into being. Margret Barker reminds us of the creation account in Job, where God asks Job “‘Where were you…when the morning stars sang together, and the sons of God shouted for Joy?’ (Job 38.7),” and she adds, “Angels making music accompanied the creation” (Barker). Combining these understandings, we can read the image as showing the celestial hosts, brought into being by the initiation of Logos and standing in measured rank, singing in worship as time begins to spin. 

I want to return now to the question of the eye, in part to assert that these angels are more than arbitrary embellishments in this image of creation—that their presence allows for two understandings of the eye. The iconographer could easily have filled in the iris of the eye with the waves of the sea or something like that; instead he chose angels. The angels are a part of the eye, their wings ribbed as the sinews of an iris, which we know as the sphincter muscle that contracts and dilates to moderate the amount of light allowed into the pupil. Dionysius the Areopagite writes that Angels are mirrors of the divine illumination, sort of like filters or veils between us and God (Dionysius, Caput IV, S2). They signal the presence of God, and as such are a way for humans to see and communicate with God. As an iris mediates between the light and the pupil, so can we understand the angelic host in this image as mediating between the inexorable light of God and our mortal vision. Seraphim are creatures of eyes. The heavenly host pictured here are not “full of eyes,” as many Bible passages and icons have them, but instead they themselves comprise an eye. They are creatures who watch, but are also creatures who allow us to see. 

Creatures who watch:

With the first in mind, the gaze of the icon can be newly understood as the gaze of God looking back at us from the page, the dark circle merely a veiled version of the white ones elsewhere. In this understanding, the sinewy rings of angels encircle God himself (as in Hildegard von Bingen’s  vision), focusing the image around He who is impossible to see, telling the viewer, look, look here at what you cannot see! We are veiling His light, but He is looking back at you! And of course in the foreground, Christ Logos stands revealed in his human body, God the Son unveiled to the viewer at the right side (hand) of God the Father obscured from view. 

Creatures who allow us to see:

Understood as the eye of the created earth, the gaze that meets yours when you look at this icon is that of your fellow-creatures, watching you while you pray with intensity, inquiring who you are and who it is that you worship. The eye of the earth looks past the figure of Christ in the foreground, unable to see, as you can, that his hand is raised in blessing towards it, unable to see his radiant right side. Instead it looks at you, the icon reader—are you, too, radiant with this unintelligible light? it asks, what is it that you see?

-Alice

Sources:

Holy Bible: Douay-Rheims Version (Charlotte, N.C.: St. Benedict Press, 2009) [ISBN 978-1935302056]

Hugh of St. Victor, On the Sacraments, trans. Deferrari, book I, part V (“On the creation of the angels”), pp. 74-93 [BX2200.H891 Hathi Trust]

Margaret Barker, Temple Mysticism: An Introduction (London: SPCK, 2011), pp. 63-96 (“The Many”) [BM655.B375 2011]

Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy <http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/areopagite_13_heavenly_hierarchy.htm>

https://www.arthistoryproject.com/artists/hildegard-von-bingen/scivias-i.6-the-choirs-of-angels/