The making of faith: human intentions and material influences in the orthodox christian practice of iconography

Abstract

American Protestants participate in Eastern Orthodox iconography workshops and use icons. What do these practices and objects mean to the practitioners and how do these meanings materialize? This article answers these questions by demonstrating how participants in the workshops consciously utilized their previous religious and secular knowledge to understand their experience of creating and engaging with icons, and how these practices, at the same time, influenced these practitioners to imagine new understandings of and adopt new uses for these sacred objects. Demonstrating how Protestants who made icons treated them primarily as objects that help to express personal religious agency, and how, on the other hand, icons opened up a space for these practitioners to embrace them as lively presences, this article insists that religion is as much about human intentions as material influences of objects.

Keywords:

• orthodox Christian iconography
• cross-cultural encounters in the U.S.
• religion and material culture

Notes

1 See Bender (2003) and Pérez (2016) for a discussion of “everyday talk” as an embodied practice. Of value is their emphasis on “talk” as a set of transformative actions that helps social groups to cultivate, affirm, and pass on cultural ideals, rather than simply an act that allows individuals to communicate their pre-existing internal commitments.

2 I use pseudonyms for all interlocutors. However, in those instances where the practitioners have public presence in online platforms such as blogs, or have given interviews for the newspapers, it is not possible to preserve their anonymity completely by using a pseudonym. All interviewees were given a brief introduction to the nature of this project and have given verbal assent to be interviewed and have interviews audio recorded.

3 For example, Rosa was scheduled to conduct seven weekend workshops, four six-day workshops, and one five-day workshop during 2018, which averaged from just a few to around fifteen participants.

4 I thank David Morgan for suggesting that I address the process of commodification that iconography undergoes in the United States.

5 For a productive discussion of how images work to bring to the present the sensory memories of the past see Seremetakis (1994) and Morgan (1998).

6 For a robust discussion of the theological justifications for making the eyes of the saints disproportionally large in Orthodox icons and of how this attribute propels American converts to Orthodox Christianity to treat these sacred objects as life “companions” see Winchester (2017).

7 For sophisticated discussions of the processes of anthropomorphizing and treating images like living persons see Freedberg (1991), Mitchell (2005), and Morgan (2014).

8 In her work on iconography and icon veneration in Russia and the U.S., Weaver (2011) uses Freedberg’s (1991) theoretical approach to images to suggest that icons gain special meaning because of their “particularity”—each icon and the saint depicted in it has a “particular story” that speaks to the individual practitioners, and, therefore, one icon cannot be easily exchanged for another, even if it is of the same saint. I have, on the other hand, argued that icons become meaningful because the personal issues that individual practitioners reveal to and remember with the help of icons are “particular” (Kravchenko 2014b). This helps to explain why even an identical copy cannot work as a proper substitute for a given icon: it will always lack and fail to bring back to memory that which was shared with the other icon. It seems productive to me to consider these two approaches to “particularity”—of the icons and of the practitioners—in tandem to better understand how attachments to icons are formed over time. For a related, yet distinct, theorization, which suggests that Orthodox practitioners embrace icons because these objects help to create coherent religious biographies/narratives, see Winchester (2017).

9 What is striking about these Protestant practitioners is that despite only limited engagement with icons, it becomes possible for them to replicate the attachments the seasoned Orthodox Christians form with these sacred objects in the U.S. For a thorough discussion of these attachments, see Kravchenko (2014b, 2017, 2020).

10 By “new meaning,” I simply mean a different one from the one intended by the practitioners. Other scholars have productively suggested that we should not assume that material objects’ agency lies solely in their ability to pull us into a new (in a sense of pre-existing, but unfamiliar to us) culture, but rather create something new entirely (a brand new culture). For a clear and convincing outline of this approach, see Hazard (2013).

11 See Eichler-Levine (2020) for a similar discussion of how objects we no longer need take hold of us and make it impossible to discard them. Of particular value is her discussion of religious materiality as a “depository of sentiment,” memory-holder, and a bonding social glue. In my own work (2014b), I have used an analogous analytical term “cataloguers of memories” to explain how Orthodox Christian women in the United States from enduring attachments to icons.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elena v. Kravchenko

Elena V. Kravchenko is a Lecturer in the Religious Studies program at the Washington University in St. Louis, working on the project “Recovering Orthodox Christianity: Material Productions of Religion and Race in the U.S.” Her doctoral work at the University of Texas at Austin explored how contemporary Orthodox Christian women in the United States use religion to construct contextually specific models of equality, agency, and empowerment. [email protected]