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Icons in Time, Persons in Eternity: Orthodox Theology and the Aesthetics of the Christian Image. C. A. Tsakiridou. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013. Pp. xiii + 355. $119.95 (cloth).
For some time now, we have been encouraged to see the relationship between modernism and religion as dialogic rather than oppositional. Recent work, notably by Pericles Lewis and Erik Tonning, demonstrates how modernist art and literature engages deeply and thoughtfully with forms of organized religion and orthodox theology as well as with the forms of occult belief seen most famously in the work of W. B. Yeats.1 C. A. Tsakiridou's Icons in Time, Persons in Eternity is a welcome addition to this literature. Her book significantly extends and deepens the field of enquiry by asking not only what modernist artists make of religious sources, but what theologians make of modernism in their turn.
For Tsakiridou, misunderstanding and partial comprehension prove as illuminating as understanding. In Catholicism's failure to accommodate modernist art, for example, she discovers a bias for figuration which subtends the church's tolerance for a plurality of styles. Equally, avant-garde artists such as Goncharova and Malevich, who make direct use of the folk-art of the icon, use the icon programmatically, answering to a pre-conceived theory rather than respecting the autonomy and self-disclosure of the icon itself. The irony proves identical to that which Tsakiridou finds in the Orthodox defense of the image against iconoclasm; the image is saved but only on the condition that it is turned into text, an "illustration" of a disincarnate truth akin to the parables in the Bible. Modernists, she observes, talk about transcendence all the time, but their work is often devoid of the...