The Crossing of the Visible

Eastern Orthodox icon depicting the First Council of Nicea (325). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the Crossing of the Visible, a provocative book about images, icons, and idols, the phenomenologist and Roman Catholic thinker Jean-Luc Marion observed, almost in passing, that: “the image-affirming doctrine of the Second Council of Nicaea concerns not only nor first of all a point  in the history of ideas, nor even a decision of Christiaan dogma: it formulates above all and perhaps the only, alternative to the contemporary disaster of the image. In the icon, the visible and the invisible embrace each other from a fire that no longer destroys but rather lights up the divine face for humanity.”