Sacred, Profane: Icons

Obituaries identified Michael Jackson as an icon. Stories called a certain poster of Farrah Fawcett iconic.

What is an icon, pray tell?

In the popular sense, icon refers to just about everything a baby boomer liked during youth and arrested adolescence. The New York Times seemingly cites icons several hundred times a day.

We have had iconic burgers, iconic commercials, iconic sodas, iconic movies, iconic cartoons, iconic television series, iconic songs, iconic jingles, and on and on.

Real icons have a religious dimension. They have more than a dimension, to tell the truth. Icons are religious. They depict images such as Christ, the Virgin, the saints, crosses, and other symbols. Although icons typically are associated with the Orthodox Church, various Western traditions venerate them. An icon is not identical to a religious fresco or to a masterpiece from the Renaissance. To believers, the divine presence inhabits an icon in a way it does not inhabit, for instance, a Fra Angelico painting on a religious theme. An icon is substance, not metaphor. It not only portrays but is.

Greek, Russian, and other Orthodox traditions have churches beautified by interiors covered with icons, sometimes floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall. The main sanctuary of the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai is something we would love to see face-to-face, not merely through the inadequacies of the photograph. The movie, "Andrei Rublev," relates the life of an icon artist from a golden age. It is a film lovely and intense yet not of the genre popular in cineplexes and would not be everyone's cup of kvass. Ideally, icons should be viewed in silence. The next best approach is to view them while listening to the singing of Eastern liturgies.

In their most modern usage, icons are little pictures on computer screens. Users can click on them with a mouse. What more can we say?