The Theophanic Icon

Theophany is the natural and supernatural fruition of the ascetic life. The ascetics who strive to see God live simultaneously on the margins and center of the Church. They are often at odds with monastic and ecclesiastical authorities only to emerge in later years as exemplary persons or saints (e.g., the Holy Fools of Russia). ¹ Exemplary icons have a similar relationship to artistic conventions. They reflect and transcend them at the same time. Like the ascetic, they speak from a deeper ground and beyond the confines of what at their time is understood as traditional or normative. They embody ascetic modalities like humility, austerity and silence. They hide their art in profound simplicity. Symeon’s charismatic spirituality challenged Church authorities for two centuries after his death. ² His idiosyncratic, daring and deeply personal poetry remains unmatched in Orthodox hymnography. The icons of Theophanes (Feofan) the Greek (c. 1330–c. 1410) are to this day unique and mysterious. They seem projected and incorporated on walls and panels from an invisible source. They appear to form spontaneously in light and pigment, a quality that the work of his student St. Andrei Rublev (c. 1360/70–c. 1430) simulates but never captures with the same spontaneity and simplicity.