ABSTRACT
It will be shown in the rst section of this chapter that in the age-long tradition of thought on man’s union with God, going back to pagan Platonism and beyond, visuality has an ambivalent status. On the one hand, the ultimate aim of man is to achieve a perception beyond human vision. On the other, to do so he needs the help of material, visual symbols which God, in his love for humankind, created as a concession to our state. In the second section, I will consider a Russian tradition of thought on deication with a focus on Pavel Florensky’s (1882-1937) theory of the construction of pictorial space in the icon. Florensky’s contribution to Eastern Orthodox thought on deication and the theology of the icon is that he drew the visual implications which underline this intellectual tradition.
