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The icon, like all artworks, enacts an aesthetic transformation of the world, which is structured by the community, space, and time of those who engage with it. As the use of icons in church architecture suggests, these worldly dimensions are also transfigured in an eschatological way when the icon is taken up in the liturgy, joining in the community of saints centered around Christ. As the iconostasis helps illustrate, the eventual result is a “transfiguration of the gaze” which transforms the entire world of experience, making every finite thing a site of potential “iconic mediation.”
How can something finite mediate an infinite God? Weaving patristics, theology, art history, aesthetics, and religious practice with the hermeneutic phenomenology of Hans-George Gadamer and Jean-Luc Marion, Stephanie Rumpza proposes a new answer to this paradox by offering a fresh and original approach to the Byzantine icon. She demonstrates the power and relevance of the phenomenological method to integrate hermeneutic aesthetics and divine transcendence, notably how the material and visual dimensions of the icon are illuminated by traditional practices of prayer. Rumpza's study targets a problem that is a major fault line in the continental philosophy of religion – the integrity of finite beings I relation to a God that transcends them. For philosophers, her book demonstrates the relevance of a cherished religious practice of Eastern Christianity. For art historians, she proposes a novel philosophical paradigm for understanding the icon as it is approached in practice.
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