The Excess of the Icon

"The icon recognizes no other measure than its own and infinite excessiveness; whereas the idol measures the divine to the scope of the gaze of he who then sculpts it, the icon accords in the visible only a face whose invisibility is given all the more to be envisaged that its revelation offers an abyss that the eyes of men never finish probing. It is, moreover, in this sense that the icon comes to us from elsewhere: certainly not that it should be a question of recognizing the empirical validity of an icon 'not made by the hands of me,' but indeed of seeing that ackeiropoeisis [not hand made] in some way results necessarily from the infinite depth that refers the icon back to its origin, or that characterizes the icon as this infinite reference to the origin. What characterizes the material idol is precisely that the artist can consign to it the subjugating brilliance of a first visible, on the contrary; what characterizes the icon painted on wood does not come from the hand of man but from the infinite depth that crosses it--or better, orients it following the intention of a gaze. The essential in the icon--the intention that envisages--comes to it from elsewhere, or comes to it as that elsewhere whose invisible strangeness saturates the visibility of the face with meaning. In return, to see, or to contemplate, the icon merely consists in travesing the depth that surfaces in the visibility of the face, in order to respond to the apocalypse where the invisible is made visible through a hermeneutic that can read in the visible the intention of the invisible. Contemplating the icon amounts to seeing the visible in the very manner by which the invisible that imparts itself therein envisages the visible--strictly, to exchanging our gaze for the gaze that iconistically envisages us. Thus, the accomplishment of the icon inverts, with a counfounding phenomenological precision, the essential moments of the idol."

Jean-Luc Marion. God Without Being: Hors-Texte. University of Chicago, 1995, p.21.