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1: Prolegomena
what ways is the "textual system" created by Vertov and other artists of the October
revolution congruent in form and function with the marriage of theology, art, and liturgy
that is the textual system of the Orthodox church? Annette Michelson tantalizingly
proposed these parallels on the pages of October magazine in 1990,1 opening up a new
way of exploring the legacy of Byzantium in Modernist artistic practices, especially those
of the radical Left. Leaping over the usual art-historical account of the connection
between icons and Modernism, which credits the neoprimitivist appropriation of icons by
the early Russian avant-garde with contributing to the birth of abstract painting in the
Michelson's insights, which her brief prolegomena left largely unexplored, have
since been developed in the work of Marie-Jose Mondzain, who embarked on a profound
1
Annette Michelson, "The Kinetic Icon in the Work of Mourning: Prolegomena to the Analysis
of a Textual System" October, Vol. 52 (Spring, 1990), pp. 16-39.
2
journey of recovering the intellectual legacy of Byzantine iconology and Patristic image
theory. Mondzain has done more than anyone else to show that the Byzantine icon,
forged in the political and theological furnace of the Iconoclast Controversy, is not only a
far more sophisticated way of thinking about the image than the neoprimitivists ever
imagined, but is actually quite modern in its integration of theory and practice, aesthetics
and politics. Introducing the last section of her book Image, Icon, Economy, which is
In the brief chapters that follow this introduction, Mondzain touches on a wide variety of
modern image practices from the daguerreotype, to Man Ray and Kandinsky, to Andrei
Tarkovsky's film Andrei Rublev. She does not address, however, the answer to her
question that was hinted at by Michelson in her comparison between Vertov's cinema and
Byzantine art:
"[Vertov's film] Three Songs of Lenin corresponds to the register and order of imagery,
originating in the art of Byzantium, imported into Russia in the tenth century… I am
2
Marie- José Mondzain Image, Icon, Economy (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005)
pp.173-174.
3
claiming that we may speak of the transformation of Christian themes of martyr and
saint, of Saviour and Paraclete at the heart of a Leninist iconography constructed across
the Soviet culture generally, but most immediately and forcefully articulated in
Vertov's textual system."3
art and Soviet image-making, among which the view of Leninist iconography as a
continuation of Orthodox veneration of the saints is the most fundamental. However, her
engagement with Byzantine thought is limited, and her analyses remain on a formal level.
As I have said, she took a massive step forward in the art-historical discourse about
Byzantine art's impact on Modernism, but she does not get to the central dynamic of
iconophilia, iconoclasm, and idolatry that structures Byzantine art. While I do not find
her formal comparisons, such as the one between Three Songs of Lenin and an
iconostasis, to be very useful, there is a historical argument in play here that complicates
Mondzain's project and makes the Soviet case extremely important for defining the
legacy of Byzantium in the modern period. While Mondzain uses Byzantine thought as a
Christian iconography, and vice versa, on three levels: the formal, the theoretical, and the
historical. Art historians such as Andrew Spira4 have done extensive work on the formal
genealogy between Byzantine art and avant-garde abstraction; Marie-Jose Mondzain has
proposed that the Iconoclast Controversy "is the genesis of a way of thinking about
3
Michelson, p.26.
4
Andrew Spira, The Avant-Garde Icon (London: Lund Humphries, 2008).
4
images that we are still heirs to today,"5 and Annette Michelson has applied Nikolai
Berdyaev's thesis about Russian Communism being a Christian heresy6 to the study of
Soviet cinema. As I explore both Byzantine art and Vertovian cinema, I ask the reader to
keep all of these approaches in mind. Christian Iconicity is both a conceptual tool for
analyzing Dziga Vertov's attempts to theorize and create a truly Soviet cinema, and a
historical antecedent. My hope is that the following explorations in Patristic thought and
Soviet art history can stimulate unforeseen avenues of exploration within Mondzain's
The Byzantine devotion to images was formed, crucially, in dialog with the deep
suspicion of images that runs through the Judeo-Christian tradition as a whole. A similar
ambivalence about the image resides at the heart of the Modernist project, especially in
its more radical Leftist incarnations. The connection between Byzantine and Soviet art is
not merely one of iconoclasm in the broader sense; both Christian and Communist art
went beyond simply destroying the iconography of the ancien regime. In both cases, the
art that would represent the new society had to be pure enough to be worthy of the new
citizens. For both Christians and Modernists, if there was to be a new art, it would have to
be immune to the disgusting misuses of images that the old regime used to corrupt and
deceive its subjects—whether these misuses took the form of Pagan blood sacrifice to a
both cases, prominent intellectuals came together to theorize the new role of the image in
a transformed society, while artists attempted to put their theory into practice. What
5
iconographer par excellence, who saw in his beloved "camera-eye" the potential to create
an unadulterated, non-idolatrous image of the new divinity: the sacralized material world,
animated by the spirits of technology and class struggle, speeding along the tracks of the
2: Incarnation
Polemics against idolatry were present throughout antiquity, launched first and
maintained most stringently by the Jewish tradition but also articulated in various ways
divinity with mere sculptures made out of profane materials by potentially impure hands,
but deferred to the importance of respecting tradition,7 not to mention the necessity for
loyal Imperial subjects to publicly worship the Emperor's cult image. While the details of
the emergence and early development of Christian image practices remain murky, it is
clear that from the beginning Christians had to navigate the waters between Old
Testament prohibitions against images of God, and the rejection of all polytheist cults
(including that of the Emperor, which set off of their persecution) on one hand, and the
general popularity and usefulness of images on the other. Luckily for the Church fathers,
who fully systematized this theological argument in defense of icons during the
Iconoclast crisis of the eight and ninth centuries, the New Testament of Jesus Christ
overturned the old Law, and provided a loophole: in uniting His divinity with the
physical body of man, God created a sort of "image" of himself in the visible and tangible
7
Norman Baynes, "Idolatry and the Early Church" in Byzantine Studies and Other Essays
(London: Athlone Press, 1955) p. 120.
6
form of His son sent down to earth. The infinite YHWH, who previously could only be
indicated by text, condescended to human finitude and the visible nature thereof. Among
the Good News brought by the Incarnation was the possibility for man to worship the
The Judaic equivalence between God and the word YHWH as written in the
scriptures privileged the word as the site of contact between the human and the divine.
For theologians writing during the Iconoclast controversy, however, this linguistic
monopoly ever representation was broken by the Incarnation, "For the Word became
flesh and dwelt among us." 9 This movement of God from Word (law) to Image
(incarnation) opened up a space of legitimacy not just for holy images, but for the Church
orally transmitted knowledge about Christ, patristic teaching, liturgical practice, etc.
Since Christ was a visible, audible, tangible object in the world, the divine Word could
Overcoming the problem of representing the infinite was not sufficient to fully
8
St. Theodore the Studite, "First Refutation of the Iconoclasts", in On the Holy Icons (Crestwood,
NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1981) p. 21.
9
John 1:14.
7
justify holy images. The problem is not merely one of representing the unrepresentable,
which was overcome by the Incarnation, but of representation as such: what is the
relationship between the image and its subject? The issue of representation was also one
of veneration. Christians saw the Pagans as having been deceived by the devil into
worshipping the creation rather than the creator—they were accused of believing that
Gods actually resided within cult objects, of falling prey to an illusion of divine
indwelling and identity between being and representation. Of course one could not
completely deny the connection between image and subject if the image was to have any
efficacy in worship. So one of the most important tasks of the Iconophile theologians was
to create a doctrine of the relationship between Christ and the image of Christ. Once
again, the divine economy10 of the Trinity and the incarnate Son provided a conceptual
"You see, how it was on account of idolatry that He prohibited the fashioning of
uncircumscribable… But since this discourse is about the image and its veneration,
having some difference from it; the image is not like the archetype in every way.
The son is a living, natural undeviating image of the Father, bearing in himself the
whole Father, equal to him in every respect, differing only in being caused. For the
10
Following Mondzain, I use the term "economy" to mean oikonomia in the Byzantine sense of
the word. The first sixty pages of Image, Icon, Economy are devoted to analyzing this concept,
and it comes to describe a complex circular exchange of forms and values, channeled through the
"natural image" and the "artificial image" that structures the relation between the Divine, human
salvation, and imperial power. For now I will simply point out that our modern Marxian
definition of the economic, which is based on scarcity, debt, and exchange/use value is quite
different from oikonomia. The latter comes from the root oikos, which originally described the
familial space of the homestead in contradistinction to the political realm of the polis. Unlike
economy, oikonomia does not involve the accruing of abstract value by movement from areas of
surplus to areas of lack, but rather a shifting equilibrium within an intimate, relational sphere.
8
father is the natural cause and the son is caused."11
One of the earliest of the Orthodox writers to take up the defense of icons after the
outbreak of Iconoclasm, composing three major treatises from the early to mid eighth
body of evidence from scripture. Constantly citing both Old and New Testament
passages, as well as major Church Fathers such as Basil the Great, he was more
concerned with justifying icons by attaching them to more stable elements of Orthodoxy
than with articulating a philosophical argument that would lead to a theory of image
production. However, in the passage quoted above we see the beginnings of a complex
crisis, who pushed forward the development of Iconophile thought into a philosophical
11
St. John of Damascus, "Treatise I: Defense against those who attack the holy images by our
Father among the Saints John Damascene" in Three Treatises on the Divine Images (Crestwood,
NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2003) p. 25.
12
Marie- José Mondzain Image, Icon, Economy (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press,
2005) p.8.
9
The system proposed by Nikephoros hinges on the introduction of a distinction between
two types of image: the natural image and the artificial image. Whereas the Iconoclasts
consubstantiality as present only in the category of the natural image. In Christianity, the
two important examples of the natural image are the Son as the natural image of the
Father, and the Eucharist as the natural image of Christ (Iconoclasts, incidentally, argued
that the Eucharist was established by Christ as the only true image of himself, and that
creating mimetic images was a betrayal of his commandment). In the artificial image, on
the other hand, the link between image and subject is not one of consubstantiality but
rather a relational one which maintains the aspect of formal resemblance even though the
"The archetype is the principle and the model underlying the visible form that is made
from it, as well as the cause from which resemblance derives. This is the definition of
the icon such that one could use it for all artificial icons; an icon is a likeness of the
archetype, and on it is stamped, by means of its resemblance, the whole of the visible
form of what it is a likeness of, and it is distinct from its model only in terms of a
different essence because of its material. Or: an icon is an imitation of the archetype
and a copy differing from the model in its essence and in its underlying substance…
indeed, if the icon does not differ in anything from the archetype, then it is not an icon,
but nothing other than the archetype itself. Thus, the icon is a likeness and a replica of
beings who have their own existence."14
Laying aside for the moment Mondzain's fascinating analysis of Nikephoros's writings in
relation to images as the basis of the temporal power of the Church and the Emperor, we
13
ibid. p.72.
14
Nikephoros, Patriarch of Constantinople, Antirrhetics. Extracts reprinted in Mondzain, pp. 234-
245; 236.
10
see in Nikephoros the doctrine of the icon fully-fledged. While the indwelling of an idol
and the consubstantiality of the natural image are rejected in the theory of the artificial
image, the relation between icon and archetype in this system of thought is far more
powerful than what we today usually associate with a "picture" of something. Christ is
not merely the "subject" of a painting, he is not just "represented" in the painting. He is
the model, the principle, and the cause of the image; he differs from the image only in the
fact that it is made from a different material. The materiality of the icon does not have the
The intensity of the connection between icon and archetype, which is the basis for
the icon's right to veneration, is facilitated by the fact that "the whole of the visible form"
is "stamped" on the surface of the icon. This principle of creating presence by rendering
in line and color the "whole of the visible form of the archetype" is the theological core
that structures the whole formal system of Byzantine painting, which is dominated by
frontal, full-figure renderings of Christ, Mary, and the Saints. Such Byzantine "portraits,"
which are not strictly speaking portraits at all, differ radically from the traditional
Western definition of portraiture. Both aim in some way for an "idealized" form of the
personality, the Byzantine portrait does not aim for naturalistic resemblance of any kind.
Rather, it uses a canonical set of characteristic details that allow the archetype to be
instantly recognizable and fully present. One might call it, paradoxically, a form of
"abstract similitude" which forges an identity between icon and archetype that avoids
both the idolatrous consubstantiality and the scopic naturalism of Renaissance art.
The idea of the archetype as a cause, a structuring force, and a presence within the
11
icon allows for the icon to function as a "portal" connecting the faithful to the saints
physically and spiritually rather than just visually. When an icon is venerated, it transmits
worship to the person depicted, rather than being the object of worship itself. To avoid
any misallocation of worship, all iconic figures must be instantly recognizable. This is the
reason for the canonical rigor demanded of iconographers, as well as the use of
denotative text, which together create an instant and unmistakable connection between
The face, dress, and position of individual saints bear formal markers of identity for
instant recognizability. This is, however a minimal, ascetic use of detail in an art form
that doesn't otherwise engage in detail-rich individuation. Eastern Christian art is not
corporeal— the bodies are all the same, since the saints depicted in them are all
approaching the spiritual ideal of theosis, of transforming the physical body by bringing
the soul closer to God. Byzantine art thus effaces the dissimilarity of the individual body
While the notion of capturing the entire visible form of the archetype is one of the
reference to icons as "likeness and replica of beings who have their own existence"
dictates the content of Byzantine imagery. Only things that have a real existence in the
world, that are or have been viewed by human eyes, are to be represented. This prevents
fictions like the Pagan gods and all their attendant nymphs, demigods, and monstrous
creatures.
The importance of the Incarnation for the possibility of representing the divine
12
comes to the fore here, as does the correlation between text and image. The Gospels,
because they contain eyewitness accounts of the life of Jesus, can be illustrated and
presented in visual form. If the Evangelists saw the Christ event taking place in front of
them as a visual form, why not use paint and mosaic to make copies of a visual
experience which was already present in the world, in the retinas of the eyewitnesses?
Images of on-corporeal beings that have been witnessed and recounted by prophets and
saints, such as angels and demons, as well as depictions of otherworldly events like the
descent of Christ into Sheol, said to have been witnessed by Adam and Eve, can also be
justified in this way. Images of God the Father, such as Renaissance images depicting
him as a bearded older man, are strictly forbidden—as are any other beings or events that
are perhaps known to exist but have not been "captured" by a human eye, and thus have
The absolute rejection of all fictions in the art of the Orthodox Church is the first
place where I want to draw a parallel to early Soviet art in general and Vertovian cinema
in particular. Later in this essay I will explore the way in which both the Byzantine
tradition and Vertov's the theory of the Kino-Eye anchor their renouncement of idolatrous
human hands:" the acheiropoieta of Christian lore on one hand, and the indexical imprint
of the cinematographic apparatus on the other. For now, however, I want to linger on this
radical injunction in both Vertovian and Christian imagery against the representation of
fictions. Fundamentally, images can either tell truths to the viewer, by replicating real,
verifiable visual experiences, or they can trick the viewer by creating a visual experience
that has no real existence. The potential of believing that a fictional image is actually true
13
had, in the Christian worldview, consequences greater even than life and death—it
threatened the salvation of the eternal soul. A man who is tricked into believing that an
idol is indeed real, and worships it, falls out of the divine economy of salvation, which is
critical readers of the media so that they don't get suckered into buying something useless
or voting for a rascally politician, but it's not often a matter of life and death. For the
representation were much higher. The salvation of the proletariat was dependent on their
ability to see the true, materialist essence of the world, and not be sucked in by the all the
false idols offered up by the exploiting class, that Great Deceiver, to keep them from the
With this in mind, I would like to propose the following text as an addendum to
Mondzain's preliminary excursions into modern battlefield of the ancient war between
idolaters and iconophiles, and to challenge the reader to find in its rhetoric other parallels
2) Down with the immortal kings and queens of the screen! Long live the ordinary
mortal, filmed in life at his daily tasks!
3) Down with the bourgeois fairy-tale script! Long live life as it is!
4) Film-drama and religion are deadly weapons in the hands of capitalists. By showing
our revolutionary way of life, we will wrest that weapon from the enemy's hands.
14
7) The scenario is a fairy tale invented for us by a writer. We live our own lives, and
we do not submit to anyone's fictions.
8) Each of us does his task in life and does not prevent anyone else from working.
3. Pedagogy
While the bulk of extant argumentation about the appropriateness of holy images is
Christological in nature, focusing on the doctrine of the incarnation and the issues
from the earliest centuries of Christianity that the pedagogical power of images to instruct
the illiterate and to supplement the textual narratives of the liturgy was a central concern
for the Church. For all their importance as conduits for veneration and for all the
theological scaffolding that was erected around them, icons were always valued most, I
would argue, as the visual equivalent of the Gospel texts. As Hans Belting has written,
theologians were often the weaker party in a constant back-and-forth with everyday
worshippers who experienced images on various practical levels. Belting sees the
theology of icons as being in large part a game of catch-up in which theologians gave in
to already established cultic practices, attempt to temper and control them by issuing
The following passage is from a 867 homily in honor of the inauguration of a new
15
Dziga Vertov, "Provisional Instructions for the Kino-Eye groups" (1922) in Annette Michelson,
ed. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) p.
71.
16
Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997) p. 1.
15
mosaic of the Virgin in the imperial cathedral of Hagia Sophia. It was given by Photius,
an important Iconphile thinker, who held the post of Patriarch of Constantinople during
the restoration of icons to churches after the end of the iconoclast period. Its rhetoric
"Christ came to us in the flesh, and was borne in the arms of His Mother. This is
seen and confirmed and proclaimed in pictures, the teaching made manifest by
means of personal eyewitness, and impelling the spectators to unhesitating assent.
Does a man hate the teaching by means of pictures? Then how could he not have
previously rejected and hated the message of the Gospels? Just as speech [is
transmitted] by hearing, so a form through sight is imprinted upon the tablets of the
soul… Has a man lent his ear to a story? Has his intelligence visualized and drawn
to itself what he has heard? Then, after judging it with sober attention, he deposits
it in his memory. No less—indeed much greater—is the power of sight. For surely,
having somehow through the outpouring and effluence of the optical rays touched
and encompassed the object, it too sends the essence of the thing seen on to the
mind, letting it be conveyed from there to the memory for the concentration of
unfailing knowledge. Has the mind seen? Has it grasped? Has it visualized? Then it
has effortlessly transmitted the forms to the memory."17
argumentation with the call for teaching in images. There is a very clever logic to the turn
of phrase about the iconoclast having to also reject the message of the gospels. Although
he goes on to make his main point about the equivalence between transmitting knowledge
through images and through text, my slightly speculative reading of this passage would
propose that he is actually describing the incarnate Christ himself as a form of "teaching
in images." Did not the Galilean who witnessed Jesus preaching to her have an image of
Jesus in front of her eyes as she heard the original words of the message transmitted in
17
Photius, Homily XVII. in Mango, C., ed. The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312-1453. Sources
and Documents. (Englewood Cliffs, 1972) pp.187-190.
16
the gospel writings? What Photius is getting at is that in their original "staging" or
In any event, the point here is that Photius reveals the Church's concern with the
practical matter of using images to spread the Gospel message. Coming out of an
iconophobic scriptural and cultural tradition which privileged the text of the Scriptures
above all other sources of truth, Photius and other defenders of icons argued that images
and text were fundamentally equivalent. Not only that, images were in many cases
superior, both for their immediacy and the greater ease of apprehension—especially for
those who couldn't read. Photius is speaking to an elite Constantinopolitan audience, and
does not address this matter here directly, but the key role of images in proselytism and
The clear importance for the ecclesiastical establishment of teaching the Good
News of the Gospels to unconverted, illiterate people within and beyond the borders of
the Empire partially contradicts Belting's narrative about the struggle over images
between the ecclesiastics and the common believers. Belting claims that theologians
generally resented the power of icons: "Whenever images threatened to gain undue
influence within the church, theologians have sought to strip them of their power…
Rather than introducing images, theologians were all to ready to ban them."18 However,
all four of the Iconophile clerics I have quoted so far include in their discourses a defense
of icons based on the power of images to effectively spread the word of the gospel. If the
ability of images to increase the numbers of their congregations was so evident to these
18
Belting, p. 1.
17
theologians, they would really have to think twice before renouncing that power.
Generic convention would prevent the Iconophile writers' texts from discussing
the nuts and bolts issue of converting foreigners to the Orthodox faith, since they were
written in an elevated theological register. However, this task must have been on the
minds of many within the Church hierarchy. The formidable missionary efforts of the
Byzantine empire are well known—and were usually combined with an extremely
effective diplomatic apparatus that allowed the militarily and economically weakening
empire to survive in a hostile world and project power well beyond its apparent means.
Unlike the Western Church, which maintained that only the sacred tongues of Latin,
Greek, and Hebrew could be used as liturgical languages, and refused to translate sacred
texts into the profane languages of the barbarians, the policy of the Byzantines was to
"sacralize" the barbarian languages.19 The most notable example of the success of this
policy was the mission to the Slavs on which the brothers Cyril and Methodius were
dispatched in 862. The brothers created the first written Slavic language, executed a
series of scriptural translations, and were in part responsible for the conversion of the
The powerful interrelationship between text and image that Photius insists on in
his homily is paralleled in an interesting way in the story of the conversion of the Kievan
Grand Prince Vladimir, as told in the Primary Chronicle. The story of the Rus shows that
the combination of text and image is the most powerful pedagogical medium. From one
side, there was the spread of Orthodox texts through the Slavic lands initiated by Cyril
and Methodius, which allowed the Rus' to worship in their own language. From the other
19
Horace G. Lunt, Old Church Slavonic Grammar (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001) p.2.
18
side, there is the famous chronicle account of how Vladimir's emissaries, who traveled
the world on a mission to select the best religion, chose Orthodoxy. The first two trips, to
"Then we went on to Greece, and the Greeks led us to the edifices where they worship
their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there
is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We know
only that God dwells there among men… for we cannot forget that beauty."20
This account is a testament to the ability of Byzantine emperors to project power and
righteousness through the awe-inspiring spectacle of their court, which had as its
centerpiece lavish liturgies in the magnificent churches of Constantinople. But the deeply
affective power of images is not only used for the projection of imperial grandeur and
piety, but also for incorporating the viewer on a sensual and emotional level into the
teachings of the church. The Divine Liturgy of John Chrysostom directs the priest to
proclaim in the Final Litany, "Sanctify those who love the beauty of thy house…"
pointing to the importance of visual experience in the process of coming to know God.
The spreading of the Byzantine faith was thus a one-two punch of text and image,
and the power of this combination was not lost on the Soviet authorities either. The
earliest works of Bolshevik art were agitational posters which combined memorable
20
Primary Chronicle, translated by Samuel H. Cross
http://web.ku.edu/~russcult/culture/handouts/chronicle_all.html, accessed 2011.
19
Dmitri Moor, "You! Have you Volunteered?" (1920) ; El Lissitzky, "Smash the Whites with a Red Wedge" (1919)
Such integration of image and text into a single visual space, though present in Roman
use other formal techniques which can be traced back to a Byzantine influence: flatness
and abstraction in the case of Lissitsky, and the frontal, dominating figures of Byzantine
icons which create dynamic exchange of gaze and gesture with the viewer, in the case of
Moor). The mnemonic and persuasive potential of this formal technique of concisely
combining iconic image and accompanying text was well known already to the early
this day:
20
Contemporary icon of Christ the Teacher; Coin with Chi Rho symbol used by Constantine (353)
On first examination, it may seem obvious that the Bolsheviks would turn to
images to aid them in their revolutionary endeavors. They were, after all, operating in the
early twentieth century—a time of huge technical advances both in the production of
images (photography) and their distribution (mass production of printed posters). It made
tactical sense to appropriate the dynamic combinations of image and text that were used
by capitalist to powerful effect in their advertisements and war propaganda. But did this
mean that the Soviet state unesitatingly embrace all modes of image production, merely
seeking efficacy? And if so, is my comparison with the cautious (or downright fearful)
Christian attitude towards images unwarranted? That the Bolshevik Revolution was
iconoclast in the simple sense is evident in the public burning of Russian icons, the
21
dismantling of Tsarist monuments, and the calls by Kazimir Malevich and others to burn
the contents of all the museums. But where they Iconophile in the Byzantine sense of
being suspicious of images in general? The two iconoclasms do not necessarily go hand
in hand; all conquering powers are iconoclast, but they may simply replace the images of
the old regime with their own version of exactly the same types of idols.
A look across a range of aesthetic practices within the Soviet avant-garde shows
that the destructive wave of revolutionary iconoclasm had a profound effect on artists.
(One must allow for some leeway here in periodizing this, since the roots of the avant-
garde extent back many years before October 1917, as does Russian Communism. The
relationship between the avant-garde and the Revolution is a complex one, and the fairly
pluralistic atmosphere of the early years of the Soviet project meant that many fellow-
traveling artists who were not themselves Bolsheviks were empowered by state to
develop a new art for the new society. I think it's reasonable to claim, however, that
context, and the cresting of the Bolshevik wave brought the two together in an extreme
ratcheting-up of the stakes). Around the period of the Revolution, one sees everywhere
proclamations about the end of old image practices. Dziga Vertov announces the death of
fiction film; Kazimir Malevich paints his "Black Square," hanging it in the traditional
corner spot of the icon at The Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10, and proclaims that he has
reached the "zero-point of representation" and the end of the history of painting; Vladimir
Tatlin, who also exhibits in 0,10, gives up painting altogether; and most radically of all,
the Constructivist movement discredits the artist himself as an obsolete figure, calling for
the end not only of autonomous aesthetics but of art itself, and attempting to lead an
22
exodus of artists into the proletarian workforce as designers or facilitators of industrial
non-objectivity, and then retraces his steps back through art history, filling in the gaps in
his progression between Cubism and Suprematism. Tatlin develops a new form of
unrealized model for a "Monument to the Third International" and the non-functional
disappears into the factory to help rationalize industrial production, most members of the
LEF group continue to produce images of one kind or another, whether they are
angle photography.
aesthetics as a whole, at least initially, seems to hold water. Further evidence is provided
by Andrés Zervigón, who has recently used the term iconophobia to describe the
Weimar period, especially the official organs of the KPD, were completely bereft of
images.21 Zervigón's thesis is that having experienced the horrifying manipulative power
of German war propaganda, the KPD leadership was hesitant to employ the deceitful,
21
Andrés Mario Zervigón "Russian Iconophiles and German Iconophobes". Paper delivered at the
Workshop “Berlin-Moscow 1913-1933,” Department of the History of Art and Architecture,
Harvard University, April 2, 2011.
23
themselves as far as possible from the revolting misuse of images perpetrated by the
imperial and capitalist powers, the KPD appropriated the Protestant and Judaic dogma of
sola scriptura, thinking that the written word could be the bearer of Marxist critique
but it was inspired by the Soviet experience and partially funded from Moscow, which, as
In contrast to the Germans, the Soviets were true Iconophiles, casting down the
idols of the old regime, but creating a way to tame the power of images through a new
doctrine of the image that would negate the legacy of Capitalist manipulation. Although I
am tempted to attribute this difference between the CPSU and the KPD entirely to a
historical continuity with the iconophilic culture of Orthodox Christianity on one side,
compared with the influence of the more iconoclast religious backdrop of Lutheranism
and Judaism which inflected German Communism, it seems that the driving force behind
Bolshevik acceptance of image production was a more practical one. In 1917 Lenin and
his associates found themselves ruling over a vast population of mostly illiterate peasants,
and realized that it would take an immense propaganda effort to bring these extremely
traditionalist people into the revolutionary class consciousness of the twentieth century.
Not long after achieving complete power, in the waning moths of the civil war,
Lenin proclaimed the cinema to be the most vital strategic weapons system in the arsenal
of the continuing struggle for hearts and minds. In his famous directive to the Commissar
of Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky, Lenin stated that a new cinema, suffused with
24
continued: "You must develop production to a larger scale, and especially work to
propagate healthy cinema among the urban masses, and even more importantly—in the
villages… [keeping] firmly in mind that of all the arts, cinema, for us, is the most
important."22 The idea of a "healthy cinema" and its importance for the Communist
education of the masses came to Lenin, who was beginning his career just as cinema was
being born, as he observed the booming cinema scene of Western Europe. In 1907, he
wrote:
" As long as cinema remains in the hands of base speculators it causes more harm than
good, often perverting the masses with the disgusting content of the films. But… when
the masses take command of cinema and it falls into the hands of true champions of
socialist culture, it will be revealed as one of the most powerful means of enlightening
the masses."23
These words strike an imposing imperative note coming from the pen of the Great Leader
of the World Proletariat. More so than the practitioners of other arts, a huge amount of
to develop a cinema that was maximally pure and maximally effective for the conversion
By far the most successful of those who stepped forward to develop this radically
new Soviet newsreel, Dziga Vertov is the Soviet image maker who felt perhaps more
keenly than any other the difficulty of navigating between idolatry, iconoclasm, and
iconophilia that also confronted Orthodox art. Painters like Malevich and other avant-
garde visual artists working in traditional media, including photographers, were slightly
22
Vladimir Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii Vol. 44. p. 579.
23
Vladimir Lenin, Samoe vazhnoe iz vsekh isskustv. Lenin o kino. Sbornik dokumentov I
materlialov, (Мoscow, 1963). p.93.
25
buffered from the commissars' demands for an efficacious form of mass propaganda by
the walls of the new Soviet art schools. The effect was such that the other artists could
afford to err on the side of the pure and the new—e.g., retreat into abstraction and purely
formal experimentation— while Vertov had to constantly walk a tightrope between the
imperative to tame the idolatrous potential of cinema, and the need to maximize its
Amazingly, he and his collaborators were able to entrench themselves for years in
the pressure cooker that was early Soviet newsreel, and made some magnificent films in
the process. But despite his innovative brilliance as a filmmaker and film theorist, the
stringent and shifting nature of the ideological demands ultimately wore him down; the
late-career success of Three Songs about Lenin was the exception to a constantly
contentious and difficult career that ended in obscurity. Perhaps the collapse of his
cinematic system (which was given new in the 1960s among the Left Bank faction of the
French New Wave, has seen a revival in recent decades within cinema studies, and is
currently being studied24 and celebrated25 in the contemporary art world) proves nothing
else but the ultimate impossibility of creating both a theory and a practice to meet the
politico-aesthetic needs of a new society within the space of a single lifetime. After all, it
took the Byzantines eight centuries, seven ecumenical councils, and two civil wars to get
it right.
4. Iconomachy
26
between the desire for purity and the demand for pedagogical efficacy, was something of
to justify and contain long-established artistic practices, Leninist image policy laid out
criteria for how a truly "orthodox" Communist cinema should function, and imposed
them as the law of the land. In this sense, Lenin is a theologian-prince, comparable to the
proclaiming an edict against icons and destroying the image of Christ on the palace
gate.26
Unlike the slow development and gradual rise to power of Christian imagery, the
Bolshevik takeover instantly cast down the Tsarist system of representation in Petrograd,
and the race was on to build a new system of representation that would both reflect the
eternal truths of Marxist-Leninist teleology, and project the temporal power of the Soviet
state. For Lenin, the most important element of this new system was to be the cinema—
and like the bishops and church decorators who had to scramble to discern how to best to
adorn their churches in obedience to the new ban against icons, the Soviet film industry
scrambled to fill the cinema temples with the Communist newsreels envisaged by Lenin.
Both Lenin and Leo initiated their iconomachy in the context of an actual war,
and were able to accomplish the overthrow of the old regime of representation only with
the help of an army at their back. The Byzantine army, which marched into battle
carrying icons that were supposed to aid them in their victory, had suffered a series of
humiliating defeats at the hands of an Arab enemy that seemed to worship the same God
26
Belting, p. 147.
27
as they did but which was radically aniconic. A majority of the soldiers thus supported
the Emperor's iconoclast edict, 27 believing that God was punishing them for idolatry and
hoping that setting things right would help them to reclaim their lost territories. Of
course, as various authors have suggested, the Emperor's fears about idolatry may have
been an excuse to strike a decisive blow in a centuries-long tug of war between the
Imperial throne and the Patriarchal seat. Though lacking access to the reins of military or
economic power, the Byzantine Church exercized a strong moral authority over the
Emperors, and had say over important public images—a power which any prince covets
for himself. The ban on icons stripped the church of its iconic power, and gave the
representation. Apparently in response to this, three years after Leo's edict The Patriach
conceptual longevity of the Byzantine tradition, both Leo and Lenin technically had as
their adversary in their battles over public representation the Patriarch of Constantinople.
When the Bolsheviks set about destroying churches and burning icons in an effort to
subjugate the Russian Orthodox Church and destroy it’s the power of its images, the
Constantinopolitan see still had primus inter pare status, making the Patriarch there the
honorary head of the Orthodox communion against which Lenin was at war. Strangely
enough, as both Imperial and Communist symbols of power have fallen into the dustbin
27
ibid.
28
28
The Bolshevik iconomachy was not directed primarily at the Orthodox church,
although the overthrow of Christianity was a hugely important element of the symbolic
violence unleashed by the Revolution. While Tsarist power incorporated Orthodoxy into
the structure of its symbolic authority, by the twentieth century Imperial Russia had a
very secularized state apparatus in which the church played a rather marginal role.
Instead of founding its iconocracy on a symbiosis with Christian divine economy as did
the Byzantine Emperors,29 the Tsars after Peter the Great projected symbolic power using
the Western imperial model. Vast palaces and plazas, statues of Tsars and classical
statuary including Roman collumns, military pageantry, and the ubiquitous crest of the
double-headed eagle radiated from the imperial seat in Petrograd—a city built on the
Western coast of Russia and designed to imitate and draw closer to the capitals of the
great maritime empires of the West. In the face of all this, it is clear that for the
overthrow the exploitative, corrupting, yet powerful images of Captial and Empire.30
29
For a full discussion of the interrelationship between the earthly power of the Emperor, iconic
representation, and the divine economy, see the chapter 5 in Mondzain: "Iconic Space and
Territorial Rule." There is not space here for a full account of this subtle and important
philosophical project, which begins with a semantic study of the Greek concept of oikonomia.
Suffice it to say that by inscribing his own image into the divine image-economy of the Trinity,
the Emperor grounds his finite temporal and territorial power in an eternal hierarchy of
representation that already extends across all of space and time. This notion of divine economy
and the role of the state within it is comparable to the eternal, superhuman economy of the
materialist Dialectic, from which the Soviet state derives a transcendent, trans-temporal
legitimacy by claiming for itself a specific place within the historical process. While the Christian
economy of salvation is less linear and more relational than Communist teleology, they serve
similar functions in their respective societies. Both the Incarnation and the Dialectic contain the
promise of salvation, whether in God's kingdom or a utopian final synthesis of the material world.
By allowing the state to inscribe its images into representations of the historical movement
towards salvation, these structures justify profane, temporal power simply by granting it a
supporting role in a sacred eschatology.
30
For a striking visualization of Revolutionary iconoclasm see Eisenstein's 1928 film October,
wherein he mobilizes the avant-garde technique of montage to animate a statue of Peter the Great,
forcing it to fall apart on screen—a scene of dynamic, new media technology and revolutionary
technique of representation dancing on the grave of old media and imperial iconography which
29
In the period of the Civil War, Bolshevik image production directed its energies to
propaganda for the war effort, using the new technology of poster art to flood public
spaces with images of heroic Reds, baby-killing Whites, and healthy, muscular
Newsreel programs such as the Kino-Nedelya, where Vertov got his start as a filmmaker,
were primarily practical and agitational in purpose, as were most of the other films
produced during the war. Alexander Medvedkin, Vertov's peer in the Soviet film
industry, got his start as a director while serving in Budyonny's Red Cavalry, directing
entertaining agit-theater shows involving horse masks and shooting agitational films on
how to maintain proper hygeine—another militarily important early use of the cinema.
Early in their careers, Vertov and Medvedkin both traversed the new Soviet land in
favored by the Red Army— they must have felt quite heroic, chasing the remaining
phantasms of monarchism, capitalism, and religion to their hiding places in the darkest
corners of Siberia and blasting them with the piercing light of a dynamic new technology
that rolls over ossified illusions with it's spinning film reel of untainted images captured
5. Incorporation
As the civil war ended and an increase in resources allowed the Soviet film industry to
expand, there was a shift in cinematic production from agitational propaganda designed
has been stripped of all its power.
30
to win the war to a self-presentation of the new state to its citizens. As Evgeny Dobrenko
recounts in his essay "Creation myth and myth creation in Stalinist cinema,"31 a first wave
historical narrative for the Soviet people. The state's interest in the power of images
evolved from the War Communist model of agitation and iconoclasm to the Five Year
role in the new society. A film like October simultaneously projected the power of the
Soviet authorities through the grandeur of its spectacle, and forged a unity between the
state and the people by staging the origin myth of the Revolution. The now established
Soviet state exploited the potential of media, especially narrative cinema, to manufacture
consciousness. The result was a textual system that inscribed individuals into a common
Vertov's film Three Songs about Lenin (1934) is one of the most powerful
examples of using media to incorporate the individual subject into a greater whole, doing
so through the singularity of the person of Lenin. In this film, which shows pride in the
great legacy of Lenin among people living their lives in the bright, new world of the
Soviet Union, and mourns his loss by depicting weeping faces at his funeral, combines
these images with a litany of intertitles to create a hymn of praise and mourning in which
the Soviet people as a whole, as well as each individual, becomes a living testament to
Lenin's greatness. At the same time as it creates the people as an organic whole by
31
Evgeny Dobrenko, "Creation myth and myth creation in Stalinist cinema." Studies in Russian
and Soviet Cinema, Volume 1 Number 3, 2007, pp. 239-264.
31
linking each individual to their communal legacy of Lenin, the film situates the individual
heirarchically within this whole. As Michelson has pointed out, the film essentially
anoints the Stalin as the successor to Lenin and the earthly steward of his revelation.
It is crucial to note that Michelson uses her concept of the "textual system," which
also applies very well to the unified and heirarchical representation of the cosmos in
Christian iconography, only in her analysis of Three Songs, and does not apply it to
Vertov's earlier work. While a work like Man with a Movie Camera (1929) may have
something like a language or system of its own, it is not inscribed within a specific
Communist cosmology. The movie camera does not preside over the establishment of a
new symbolic order, but rather rearranges the world into an expression of pure dynamism
and a delerious catalog of cinematic effects. The viewer may be totally immersed in the
radically restructured world revealed to him by the kino-eye in Man with a Movie
Camera, but the effect does not last after he leaves the theater because it is not inscribed
appear in his visual space, taking him out of his incorporation in the world of the camera-
eye. This clash of representational systems that marked the early period of Soviet avant-
garde art may have been diverse or even democratic, but it lacked the systematization
necessary to allow a subject to feel incorporated into something larger than himself—a
feeling cultivated by both the Soviet state and the Orthodox church.
Creating such a coherent textual system has clear benefits both for statecraft and
religious devotion. The Orthodox Church developed a sophisicated synthesis of the arts
to take advantage of the formal qualities of every concievable medium in the task of
presenting Christian cosmology to its audience. The architectural space of the cathedral
32
itself plays a key role in various aspects of this incorporation machine, the first of which
is creating a regulated visual space wherein the Church could exert the level of control
necessary for a coherent staging of its narratives, heirarchies, and symbols. In Likeness
and Presence, Hans Belting has written a short history of how the Church began to use
"The church was confronted with existing images that were credited with
miraculous power. In order to control their effect and to distract attention from magical
expectations, images had to be explained rationally, emphasizing the immaterial
presence of the archetype and devaluing the material presence of the image as object.
Such theological efforts, however, were far from being understood by the common
people and no powerful weapon against idolatry. The church therefore resorted to the
practical solution of taking the images under firm control and using church decoration
as what we might call an applied theory of images. There always had been churches
with images, but now images were presented in the framework of a well-devised
program that allowed for a carefully guided, strictly limited kind of worship… They
had a predetermined location in the churches and were given a specified function in
church ritual. The church directed attention first and foremost to the official liturgy,
which contributed to the control of the image and was the primary means of
ecclesiastical self-presentation."
Belting's narrative seems to attribute the development of the liturgy almost completely to
the need for controlling and containing the use of Christian imagery, with perhaps the
secondary reason. However, I would argue that the installation and movement of icons
between specified locations in the temple is one of a number of techniques used by the
church to create a powerful feeling of a unified world that involved the entirety of human
sensory experience. The Orthodox liturgy combines imagery with architecture, and
engages all of the senses in order to create the feeling of entering into an ordered, eternal,
33
otherworldy sphere of relations, wherein the lowly worshipper is as much a part of the
unified cosmic representation of God's creation and as the figure of Christ Pantokrator
crowning creation and looking down upon it from the dome of the church.
harmonious heirarchy of angels, prophets, martyrs, and saints, topped with the
aforementioned Christ image in the dome, and extending outward and down from central
image of the Jesus and the Theotokos. Elaborately conceived arrangements of icons
represent the theology of the church through image and space. The different spaces of
church also become representations, and are set off in relation to each other in order to
"The signification of each part of the Orthodox church is derived from its
architectural location and its function in the course of the liturgy. The interplay
between the immaterial and the sensory worlds is denoted by the sanctuary and the
nave. At the same time, both these parts constitute an indivisible whole in which the
immaterial serves as an example to the sensory, reminding man of his original
transgression. For Saint Simeon of Thessalonika, the narthex corresponded to earth,
the church to heaven, and the holy sanctuary to what is above heaven. Consequently,
all the paintings in the church, especially those constituting the iconostasis, are
arranged according to this symbolism."32
While the theological aspects of Orthodox church decoration and liturgical practice are
emphasized, and have often been written about in the West, most scholars overlook the
purely visual, affective power of the icons in their staging within the liturgical cycle. The
icons and the liturgy are not just there for controlling the veneration of images, or merely
as analytic representations of abstract theology. They are powerful works of media that
successfully achieve the task of incorporation to a degree that, perhaps, only cinema can
32
Michelson, p.27.
34
rival today. The interplay of icons installed in a church space creates spatio-temporal
effects based on the principle of architectural montage, with narrative and symbolic
meaning emerging from the icons' position relative to one another. Their positioning
relative to other images in the space not only present the church as a hierarchical unity,
but also create dramatic tension within the montage space of the church. The economy of
gazes between icons and viewers, as well as among the icons themselves, creates
energetically charged pathways that act on the participant as he moves through the
liturgy. This elegant ballet of gazes that is staged in a temple is one of the key visual
effects of iconographic art, and has an almost physiological effect.33 When one spends
time over the course of an entire liturgical year standing in front of the iconostasis, a
participatory energetic feedback and a sense of intimate contact the ever-present, familiar
The power of the iconic portrait to create a sense of intimacy was also employed
extensively by the Soviets, first and foremost in the so-called personality cults of Lenin
and Stalin. The ubiquity of their faces, hanging in almost every private and public space,
went hand in hand with the familial and endearing terms like "mustachioed papa" that
were applied to them. They became family members. All accounts attest to massive and
genuine outpourings of grief after the deaths of both Lenin and Stalin, and the love that
people felt for them was directly related to the power of portraiture to create intimacy.
33
The combination of architectural space and the use of painting to replicate the effect of eye
contact is just one of the formal means by which the orthodox church achieves the feeling of
incorporation—the one that functions in the realm of sight. The liturgy also uses incense, choral
music, bodily movements like communal prostration, and the illusion of living vibrancy created
by gilded and pearled surfaces lit by candlelight to involve all of the senses and the entire body in
a unity with the Church. Communion, which is the centerpiece of the liturgy, uses the sense of
taste—the most promordial of the senses—to cap the experience of oneness with God.
35
portrait as well, but combining it with biographical narrative and the Romantic hero. He
writes that the deliberate use of close-ups in films like Chapaev (Vasil'ev Brothers, 1934)
served to plug the viewer in to the mythologizing effect of the film by creating an
intimacy with the hero and following his biography. Dobrenko quotes this brilliant
analysis of the cinematic close-up from an essay by the semiotician Yuri Lotman:
Vertov's Three Songs works on this same principle by marshalling the power of the
incorporate the viewer into a communal Leninist myth. It differs from Chapaev in that it
does so not through narrative but rather through a form of Soviet montage technique
wherein people in spaces all around the USSR are connected through editing into an
imagined space-time where the whole nation unites in a chorus of praise and mourning.
5. Acheiropoiesis
collaboration with the Stalinist media apparatus of the Lenin personality cult, and
34
Yuri Lotman, ‘Mesto kinoiskusstva v mekhanizme kul'tury,’ in Lotman (ed.), Ob iskusstve, (St.
Petersburg: Iskusstvo), pp. 658–661.
36
therefore as a betrayal of his earlier works, which are imagined to be inherently more
innovation. In general, the power of art to incorporate the human being into something
greater than himself, into an imagined totality, is difficult to deal with because its moral
status seems to shift depending on the time and place of its use, and on the ideological
frame from which the moral evaluation takes place. Stalinist and Fascist spectacle
obviously took this effect of incorporation to an extreme, and did so in ways that caused
people to act immorally. On the other hand, contemporary commentators often bemoan
the lack of a modern substitute for lost traditional institutions such as religion, without
which many people suffer from a lack of greater meaning in their lives.
But regardless of how much stock one wants to put in the moral polarity between
critical, reflexive art and affirmative, mythologizing art that appears in contemporary art-
historical debates about Modernism, it's clear that both Byzantine art and Marxist-
Leninist cinema attempted to create images that could bring people together as a
teleology, and do so in a way that would demonstrate the true, non-manipulative, non-
In this framework, one could assert that Three Songs About Lenin is Vertov's most
emotionally anchored, centered around the intimately known face of a person rather than
viewer into a Soviet textual sytem more effectively than any of his other experiments.
Yet unlike the narrative fiction films which attempt to do the same thing using an actor's
37
portrayal of Lenin, Three Songs remains true to the iconophile canons laid out in Vertov's
manifestos. Vertov made this film in 1934, at a time when the melodrama he hated so
much was flooding back into Soviet cinema with a vengeance. Meanwhile, he stuck to his
documentary guns, and managed to achieve his first great popular success with Three
Songs.
The powerful effect that Three Songs of Lenin had on Soviet viewers, and the zeal
with which it was embraced and promoted by the authorites, demonstrated that the
documentary image did have a crucial role to play in Soviet aesthetics. Only this fuction
was not, perhaps, what Vertov had first expected it to be. Documentary film, rather than
The verified, true imprint of Lenin came to serve the same function as the acheiropoietic
image did in Christianity: as the indexical anchor that supports an entire textual system
Thus, both Byzantine art and Vertovian cinema use the legend of the uncreated
widespread in Christianity because they gave a compelling answer to the question, how
does one produce a true image of Christ? The Byzantines, writes Belting, venerated two
categories of non manufactum images35 whose absolute verifiability made them important
both as proofs of the truth of the Incarnation, and as models from which all other icons
derived and by which they were justified. The first category was that of miraculous
images, which either appeared out of nowhere or were made by an eyewitness who was
35
Belting, p. 49
38
guided by the Holy Spirit to make a perfect resemblance. The second category was that of
an imprint made by direct contact with the face or body of the person represented.
The modern relevance of this ancient idea of the indexical image as the true image
is picked up on by Mondzain, Michelson, and even the very historically minded Hans
Belting, who allows a rare moment of anachronism into his discussion of the Mandylion,
"The analogy of today's photography seems appropriate. Priority was given not to art
itself or the artist's invention but to the utmost verisimilitude. This attitude takes us to
the heart of the early use of images. The beholder was in touch with the real presence
in, and the healing power of, the image. These could be guaranteed, however, only by
an exact match between likeness and original, the intervention of the artist being
unwanted."36
For a brief moment, Belting begins to move towards a glimmer of recognition of the
fundamental similarity between Christian and modern artistic practices and the
theoretical terms which framed the debates of both eras as they searched for their
version of the veronica, the true image. But he immediately retreats back behind the
conceptual barrier between ancient and modern images that structures his entire
project, beginning with the book's subtitle: A History of the Image before the Era of
Art. For him, there is a radical break between Christian cult objects and modern art
objects. As if in denial of the obvious parallels with contemporary debates about the
falsifiability of photographs and their status as record or proof that emerge in his
very own writing, Belting feels compelled to remind us that these Christian concerns
about indexical origin of icons were specific to the "early use of images," and tied to
36
ibid., p. 52
39
attraction to photography and the Christian obsession with miraculous images, but
believes ultimately that the cult image and the photograph exist within two
But are the issues and at stake in the veneration of the Mandylion so much
different from those that play out in the glorification of Lenin's indexical image in
Vertov's films? This question can only be approached by thinking about the ways in
which something like the technology of photography is, for us, related to a category
of experience that we no longer have a name for, but which could be called magic, or
the sacred. What was sacred for Dziga Vertov, and how did he construct his art so
that the sacred could be legitimately represented without betraying its essence and
purity? What is sacred for us today? Before we can establish what are the idols and
icons that live in today's world, we must answer this question, and ask ourselves:
what truths are important enough to us that we would renounce the temptations of
illusion in order to defend them and preserve them in their truest state.
40