Icons and Desktops

As I was wasting time waiting to hear back from my team this week before finishing up our project for class I happened across a blog post from a few months back to be found here: http://luxchristi.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/the-end-of-catholicity-ii/
The entry itself is very well written, but I found something toward the end that I had to take exception to. There is a little line, buried in all the rest, that caught my attention (the entirety is given for context, the bolded part is what caught my eye):  "We must think of Him not only as the true icon of the Father, but the true icon of humanity, and this in the One Person of the Mediator (and, it should be noted that icon is not mere symbol or sign, like the icons on the desktop of our PCs)"
I have to disagree, not with the author's interpretation of Christ as the True Icon, or with the place of icons in the Church, but with his understanding of what an "icon" is in the world of computers.


A computer icon is actually a near perfect way of expressing what Icons mean in Orthodox thought. True, divorced from its context and dissected in photo editing software as a .bmp file, a computer icon is indeed just a symbol or sign; but when found in the proper context, on the computer desktop or in the folder navigation, a computer icon becomes something more. It becomes the means of interacting with the computer, both a road map to tell us where we are and the gateway to where we wish to go.

It is no accident that computers became popular in the average home as icon-using interfaces became predominant. I, personally, can navigate through MS-Dos's textual landscape just fine with arcane codes, but the average person wants as little barrier between purchasing their computer and being able to use it. Studying a manual of codes to get the desired level of functionality is a chore, reading through line after line of files while searching for the proper executable file is a time devouring task. Icons make the task near instantaneous, they grab the eye and say, "Here I am, I will take you where you wish to go."

If one reads the Septuagint in its original Greek one finds the beginnings of the Orthodox theology of the icon: And God said, "Let Us make man in Our own image (eikona)." Adam was created to be God's icon to creation, he was given dominion over the earth, and through Adam the rest of creation found its life. When Adam fell he became like one of those icons one finds in the "Start" menu after one has deleted the program, or like an improperly coded weblink, the image was still there but the code no longer led to what it was supposed to. Mankind became a gateway to Error 404: File not found. 

Through the Incarnation, the course of human history was restored. Christ, the eikwn of the invisible God (Col 1:15) made it so that we could be the renewed as the eikona of our Creator (Col 3:10). Christ became the link, restoring the link in us, so that we could be a link to others.

This applies to icons as commonly understood in the Church. We honor our icons, as the Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council say, not because they are the prototypes (or originals) but because they are the representation of the prototype. A computer icon is not the file you wish to access, it is not the executable itself. But (all things on your system being correct) that icon is the means by which you access the file. The icon in my prayer corner is not our Lord, the Blessed Virgin, or the Archangel Michael, but the honor and respect with which I treat these icons is the honor and respect with which I treat the originals. To disrespect the image, to become an iconoclast, is to disrespect the original. Still, when I stand in my icon corner to pray, I am not praying to the icons- I am merely clicking on the link that takes me to where I wish to go. Icons are a visual means of navigation, whether in the Church or on the desktop.

Christ is different from this and icons as used in Church in one important manner- a computer icon is not the file, just as the icon one sees in Church or the prayer corner are not the originals they represent; an individual saint, living here or beyond, is not Christ (though together we are all the Body of Christ), we are all continually in the process of putting on Christ. Christ is the true Icon of the Father because Christ is truly God, Christ is the true icon of humanity because Christ is truly Man. An individual saint, living here or beyond, is not Christ (though together we are all the Body of Christ) we are all continually in the process of putting on Christ.