Through a glass, darkly: Responses to idolatry in medieval and postmodern thought

This dissertation will compare three different responses to idolatry, which, though situated in three distinct contexts, testify to similar strategies: the theology of the icon as it was developed to respond to the iconoclastic controversy; medieval apophatic mysticism as it responds to the onto-theological argument; and post-modern philosophies of the subject, which critique a certain idolatrous1 modern conception of subjectivity.;In the context of the iconoclastic controversy, idolatry referred to an understanding of the image as itself divine, which came to be formulated in terms of a consubstantiality with God. The icon was thus considered full of God, full of a self-presence that could be worshipped in the image. In order to free the icon from this conception, iconophiles sought to show that the icon could not be understood in terms of identity, for it shows not a static self-presence but the kenosis or emptiness that testifies to Christ's relation to the invisible Father, to a life of sacrifice and charity.;Similarly, the ontological argument2 sought to identify God as Being, as an ontological presence that could be understood by human reason and captured in a scriptural definition. Yet God cannot be understood as being, apophatic mystics held, for this ontology sets up God in man's image, to validate his own self-presence. By describing God as unreachable and unknowable, apophatic mystics can be understood as undermining this understanding of God, and seeking to show that God can be contained in words and rational proofs no more than in the painted frame.;These medieval conceptions are then compared with the modern subject, as described by post-modern philosophers Martin Heidegger and Jean-Luc Marion, and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. These thinkers critique a certain tendency at work in modernity that describes the modern subject as self-present and self-identical in terms similar to those used to describe the medieval onto-theological God. And they attempt to undermine this conception by describing a post-modern subject whose identity is constituted by its relationality to an alterity that cannot be sublated and controlled. Post-modern subjectivity is thus shown to share a good deal with the medieval mystical and iconophilic subject.;(1) I use the word idolatrous here to refer to any concept or figure, religious or not, that is taken for an ontological and autonomous entity cut off from inter-dependent relations. The modern subject can thus be an idol, as can an understanding of God. (2) The reference here is to the tradition from Anselm of Canterbury ("that than which no greater can be conceived") to Descartes (a "supremely perfect being" must exist, it being more perfect to exist than not to exist) and beyond, that sought to prove God's existence by the internal logic of a rational ontological proof and by means of that concept alone. God's existence, in these proofs, depends upon the fact that God can be conceived by the human mind, and truth must adhere to the logic of the mind's linguistic syllogisms. Though Thomas Aquinas was critical of Anselm, his own third proof for the existence of God posits God as the independent first Being in order to establish a cause for all the dependent human beings whose existence can be empirically verified. Though his proof is existential rather than rational, it remains ontological in the sense that with Aquinas as well, God remains a causal proof for the medieval subject's own existence.