If secular humanists drew and erected icons, who would be on their iconostasis?
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Posted originally at Street Prophets. Because I thought that this diary might have value to the intersecting but not identical readerships of Daily Kos and Street Prophets, I decided to cross post it here. This is an attempt to renew my "Secular Content" series from a few months ago, interrupted by major personal events.
Perhaps it is the somber reflectiveness that accompanies the approach to age 40, or that which overwhelms people in the midst of divorce (and turns them - us - into perhaps the most boring people on the planet.) But this atheist has found unusual source for contemplation in, of all unlikely places, the customs and history of the Orthodox Church.
I cannot say whether it's wanderlust, a desire to visit a place outside my "domicile" and source of "income assessed for spousal and child support." Or perhaps the wistfulness for what might have been, the same thing that gets one family friend to freeze his rear end off with a group of Confederate War re-enacters periodically just north of here in the piedmont of Gettysburg. The Hagia Sophia church in Istanbul, built by the Eastern Roman emperor Justinian in the 6th century, has survived multiple conquests, earthquakes, changes in rite and then indeed a conversion to a mosque 1453 and then to a museum in the 1920s under the Turkish revolutionary and reformer Ataturk. Justinian's original stone stands, minus a few breaks and some fairly repaired minor damage to its dome over the centuries. Its domed architecture - a true mathematical and architectural marvel without the convenient support of steel - has formed the basis for much of Byzantine and Orthodox architecture for a millennium and a half. I have never seen this church; it's not first on the list of too many lapsed Catholic atheist travelers from the States, undoubtedly behind most Caribbean booze beaches. But I would love to enter this museum, this church, this monument to human will.
Within the Hagia Sophia there remains a near unbelievable wealth of original art, frescoes, mosaics inlaid with gold - and a few remnants of its days as a mosque, the large Arabic murals a clear contrast to the Latin and especially Greek. At one time, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople presided over celebrations of the Byzantine Divine Liturgy here, crowned the multiple Eastern Roman emperors under its dome. Today His All-Holiness lives and works in a tiny Greek neighborhood in Istanbul in what amounts to a fairly small office building; he does not set foot in the Hagia Sophia and were he to do so, it might result in a coup d'etat in the militantly secular Turkish state. Secularism is a great thing in my view but one can make a vice of practically any virtue.
The iconostasis - the wall or screen of icons that separates the altar from the nave of the church in most Orthodox church services - predated the Hagia Sophia but that cathedral's example informed and promoted the use of permanent or movable "icon stands" through the Byzantine Empire. To this day they are a fixture of Orthodox worship and are seen in some Eastern Churches within Catholicism as well as occasionally in a few Anglican churches. While iconography itself was controversial at one point even within Orthodoxy, the "iconophile" view won out, holding that since icons are two-dimensional painting and are not carved or "engraved", they are not "graven images" in violation of the applicable commandment.
The purpose of the iconostasis and of icons generally is to promote reverence for shining examples of the faith, not to encourage worship of the icons or even of the saints whom the icons are to represent; such is strictly forbidden among the Orthodox faithful. Icons are placed for the same reason and in largely the same manner as one places a photograph of a loved one on one's wall: to remember and to promote good memories of a loved, honored member of the family.
For a secular-minded person, it may perhaps be easier in some cases to appreciate iconography without reservation. The concern, of course, is that one may render onto an image or to a mere person that which belongs to Almighty God alone, the risk of idolatry. For a secular person who does not have a belief in a God, the question is not God's existence but in the existence of women and men: do WE exist? Does each of us actually exist as a person of free-will, capable of doing good in this world and actually engaged in doing good? In a more explicitly sexist time we would ask whether someone was a "real man" or exhibited "virtus," manliness. Today we would probably hold the same sexist imagery in the back of our minds, sexism being endemic, but we would probably do as I have done: mouth the politically correct "women or men" in the hopes that our grandchildren would recognize moral excellence as a trait of women being, in fact, women, not girls. and of men, not boys.
So if secular-minded people drew icons of heroes, whom might we install on our iconostasis, our icon stand?
For us Americans now living in an era when a black American seems to have the best odds-on shot of becoming our next President, we would have to think back to the martyrdom of Blessed Martin of Georgia, whose martyrdom for justice took place 40 years ago. Blessed Martin died when he was my age today 39. He died before I lived, before the zygote that became me lived.
Yet he is present, everywhere still presente in the vigilant loving term of the survivors of the disappeared in much of Latin America. His icon is everywhere - on plaques, on my television, on my own website, his name graces boulevards and avenues and schools in many cities including my own. I do not have to explain to my children what a "colored water fountain" IS, only what it once was, thanks to Blessed Martin. When I make my new post-divorce home, free of certain other religious influences of late, I will place an icon of Blessed Martin of Georgia on my iconostasis.
Were it not directly disrespectful of Jewish tradition, I would want icons of civil rights martyrs Schwerner, Cheney and Goodman. Schwerner and Goodman were Jewish and Jewish law is quite strict about depictions of the human form.
I would want an icon of Blessed Sophie of Munich, the 21-year-old university student and anonymous "blogger" of her day, whose writings and those of her brother Hans and their friends against Nazi terror, totalitarianism and genocide resulted in her martyrdom and those of others in a Nazi beheading. She was killed at the age when most Americans may first lawfully drink alcohol, when some go for their "junior year abroad."
I can think of many others: the very Catholic Lech Walesa, the very secular Vaclav Havel, come to mind.
Again, what icons can help a secular-minded person to do is not so much to to answer, "Is there a God?" but rather "Is there in fact a woman/man?" i.e. one worth emulating, one who is not a sheep or a stooge or a hack or a go-along-to-get-along. In other words, a woman or a man who is not like almost all of us are when we make - or at least I make - daily compromises, failures, blown opportunities. I stay pissed off at my wife, for example, over a slight or a argument in our divorce instead of thinking about my autistic children, who need me instead to be "a man" since I am male or perhaps an "excellent adult" if you prefer the "talk-around" or a "Mentsch" if you don't mind a German-Irish guy stealing Yiddish without shame. And if the kids don't need me, maybe other people do. No one needs me staying pissed off at my wife. Blessed Martin knew of his possibly impending death, his death at an assassin's hand, and did not waste time. The reason that we remember the April 4th speech in which he stated that he had seen "the promised land" is that he in fact made that speech, rather than spending that evening, the last evening of his life, being pissed off at his wife (husband, plumber, lawyer, etc.) like an idiot, i.e. like me of late.
There is a Jewish proverb, "where there are no men, be a man." Its sexism may be a function of the Hebrew, the Aramaic, the Yiddish, the English or all of the above, so I would substitute:"be excellent where no one is excelling." If you are often alone as I am in my work and commute, this proverb will often apply to you, i.e. to me. "Excellent" does not mean "perfect"; we need not find an example without blemish in order to find one with excellence where we need it. Sophie Scholl was not perfect. Martin Luther King Jr. was not perfect. But that's actually a good thing, in a way. Without disrespect to the hagiographers of the millennia, we need not believe that our heroes are perfect to benefit from them. We need only recognize that we are not perfect. Perhaps icons point to the possibility of a more perfect world, a more perfect us, but icons are always placed where an eye can see them straight ahead, not nearly invisibly at the top of a distant mountain.
If your religious convictions don't bar you from erecting icons - since I have no religious convictions, I am safe in this regard - who would appear on your iconostasis? I leave you this question with my hopes that you may be an example for others' excellence self-improvement, most especially my badly needed self-improvement. Peace to all.