WHAT IS A RELIGIOUS ICON?

by Volkhard Krech

Imagine a Christian church, a Jewish synagogue, a Hindu temple, a Muslim mosque, and a Buddhist stūpa. Respectively, you might visualise a building with a tower, maybe with a cross on top of it, and another on which a Star of David is fixed, a third building in the shape of a square with concentric layers, one with at least one tower and a crescent moon, and another with a bell-shaped top. In short, you might associate specific religious buildings with the terms mentioned above. Why is there at least a chance that you will react in this way? The answer has to do with what one might call religious icons.

Icons are known from Christian Orthodox theology and practice. According to this view, an icon is held to be sacred or holy because holiness is intrinsic to it or at least strongly attached to it. This is why Christian Orthodox painters never adopted the central perspective when painting icons, and never depict a saint in profile rather than from the front. In Orthodox iconography, an icon is not conceptualised as a ‘window’ through which something else can be seen, but as a two-dimensional manifestation of holiness itself, with nothing behind it. The Orthodox icon opposes the distinction between the material signifier and the immaterial, spiritual signified so familiar to intellectual history since antiquity. Rather, there is understood to be an immediate relationship between God, the heavenly creator, and the mundane icon, or even an indistinguishable identity of the two entities.

The term icon is also used by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) in his semiotics or science of signs. His approach states that a sign always consists of three aspects: (1) a sign vehicle, which hints at (2) an object (i.e. the reference of a sign), while the relation between the sign vehicle and the object it refers to is mediated by (3) an interpretant as a given set of socio-cultural rules. Take the following example: Peter says to Mary during a sightseeing tour, “O, look at this beautiful mosque!” Mary replies, “Yes, it’s wonderful!” Mary is able to do so – and does not look mistakenly at the bridge next to the mosque – because of the connection between the word ‘mosque’ as the sign vehicle and ‘mosque’ as an identifiable physical object or building. The connection between these two sign aspects is the interpretant, a product of socio-cultural conventions such as language, the concept of ‘mosque’ as distinct from other architectural objects and so on.

Peirce complicates things further by differentiating these three sign aspects into sign classes. Regarding the second sign aspect (the object), he distinguishes between symbol, index, and icon. The second sign aspect is a symbol if the connection between the sign vehicle and the sign aspect that hints at an object ‘works automatically’, that is if Mary recognises the mosque due to known and shared social conventions. But the sign can also be an argument, when it comes to reasoning triggered for instance by misunderstanding or a conflict of interests. This would be the case, for example, if Mary answers: “Yes, it’s wonderful!”, but Peter realises that she is looking at the bridge rather than the mosque, and replies: “What are you doing? That’s not a mosque!” Peter here uses the relation between the word ‘mosque’ and the respective physical building it hints at as an argument by referring to a certain concept of ‘mosque’ as the third sign aspect. Furthermore, the second sign aspect can be an index if the sign evokes awareness of the object’s presence by more or less directly pointing to it (the semiotic term index is derived from the Latin word for trigger finger). For example, if Peter asks Mary to look at the mosque while pointing at it, and Mary does so, the second aspect of the sign ‘mosque’ acts as an index referring to the respective physical building. The second sign aspect can also be what Peirce calls an icon. A sign is an icon if the relation between the sign vehicle and the object it refers to is not – at least not explicitly – arbitrary and conventional, but if there is an unquestioned similarity between the two. The easiest way of understanding how an icon works in contrast to other sign relations is to look at a photograph of, let’s say, the Pope, and to recognise the Pope from this photograph. However, what the pope means to the one who looks is a question of further signification beyond the iconic relation.

In principle, no particular sign is intrinsically an icon, an index, or a symbol. It is determined to be so in a concrete context of usage. As the example of Peter and Mary shows, these modes of reference are not mutually exclusive alternatives. Although at any one time only one of these modes may be prominent, the same sign can be an icon, an index, or a symbol depending on the semiotic context. In addition, the relationships between icons, indices, and symbols are not merely a matter of alternative interpretations. They are after all only aspects of a sign and thus to some extent internally related to one another.

An icon either expresses or constitutes a strong resemblance between the signifier and the signified. But how can this be? Does any sign exist that bears a meaning in itself, a meaning that is similar to the shape or other properties of the sign? The answer to this question has to be ‘No’ – at least from a semiotic and social scientific perspective. In this perspective, every meaning is at least to some extent socially constructed, and no sign has a once and enduring reference. The meaning of a sign changes from one context of usage to another. Let’s take again a church, synagogue, Hindu temple, and mosque. Each may be regarded as a sacred building, as a ‘canopy’ for religious activities. Nevertheless, they also be attributed with various other meanings, such as an object of art history, a tourist attraction, a place for cultural activities (e.g., of music performances), political attention (e.g., if its existence annoys citizens, and they do lobby against it) or economic interest (e.g., if a respective building is to be sold). In other words, a sign is only a sign if it is translated into another sign, that is, if it is interpreted by another sign. A sign gets a certain meaning only by using it together with other signs under certain regulations.

However, religions are under no obligation to share this semiotic and social scientific perspective. Science analyses religion from a point of view that is external to it, but religions have their own internal logic. Religions can and sometimes do claim that there are special signs in which the signifier and the signified are in an essential relation of resemblance or are even one and the same. I already mentioned the Christian Orthodox icon as an example. Others include the stūpa containing the absolute Buddha-body (dharmakāya) as conceptualised in some Buddhist schools, and the understanding of Jesus Christ as being essentially equal (Greek: ὁμοούσιος, Latin: consubstantialis) with God the Father. The Catholic concept of transubstantiation (Greek: μετουσίωσις, Latin: transubstantiatio), the transformation through which the host is (and not only represents) the body of Christ and the wine is his blood, also constitutes a religious icon, as does a physical copy of the Qurʾān, regarded as the most important divine sign (Arabic: āya) in Islam. However, it is belief alone that guarantees that these and other signs function as religious icons, and thus the respective faith is the interpretant of the strong resemblance between or even identity of the signifier and the signified.

The same holds true for other objects, for buildings, pictures, and actions as signs, which get their specific religious meaning only in a broader chain of religiously denoted signs. Let’s again take a church. First, it consists of three sign aspects, of a certain shape and other recognisable properties, of a respective physical building, and of a concept that connects the properties with the respective physical building. Yet these three sign aspects are accentuated and specified only in a concrete context. Secondly, as a result of this, a church never ‘stands alone’, either in a semiotic or an urban sense. This becomes evident if we consider the relation between physical space, which follows mathematical laws, and semiotic space, which constitutes socio-cultural meaning. Both kinds of space are related to each other through certain indexical signs. However, the two are not identical, because socio-cultural reality does not consist only of indexical signs pointing to physical matter. Religious space is a form of socio-culturally produced semiotic space among others. Furthermore, different forms of meaningful space might overlap with one another in one and the same physical space. This is certainly the case in an urban and highly diverse context with a high concentration of signs. Various meanings of the sign ‘church’ often overlap within a single building. It is not unusual for instance for pious people, who come to a church in order to pray or meditate, to feel disturbed by tourists who, in the same building and at the same time, wear immodest clothing, take photographs and speak loudly. Signs are not only polysemic by nature, in that they may have various meanings, but they are also contested. This is often the case for religious icons, because they claim a solid relation between a certain sign and a specific religious meaning.

From a religious perspective, religious icons are strongly if not essentially attached to a specific religious meaning, and thus their ‘inner’ sense can easily be identified by their ‘outer’ shape – but only if religion is at work as the interpretant. In contrast, from a point of view external to religion (e.g. from a scientific, political, or economic perspective), the respective signs are only conventionally attributed with religious predicates among other possible types of ascription. However, such conventional attributions are not totally arbitrary. Once established, they operate to a certain extent as socio-cultural constraints that are not easy to overcome. Converted churches (see Beekers) are a good example of the persistence of conventions, since the process of conversion might easily lead to a defence or at least to a lasting memory of their former function. Such constraints generate the possibility for some signs to act as religious icons. If this potential is realised, signs become a condensation of a broader spectrum of other signs with a religious meaning. Religious icons might then work as ‘attractors’ for establishing religious space. In other words, a sign is only a religious icon if it triggers religious signification processes. Once religious icons have stimulated these processes, the signs within the respective chain of signs determine each other as religious, and a solid religious space is constituted around the initial religious icons.

The signs depicted in the photographs shown in the exhibition and catalogue may or may not act as religious icons, that is, as signs to which a stable religious meaning is attached. It depends on the context of usage. Recalling that photographic artists were responsible for producing the pictures, our first thought might be to perceive the depicted signs in accordance with an aesthetic appreciation. Thus, we might attribute them for instance as ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’, as ‘fascinating’ or ‘boring’. Furthermore, in the context of our research project, “Iconic Religion”, we have treated such signs scientifically, as socially constructed. However, the objects depicted by the photographs may also function for some as religious icons. In fact, they do so under certain conditions, when other signs with the potential for religious meaning come into play and together trigger religious signification. And finally, as a result of the latent iconicity of a Christian church, a Hindu temple, a Muslim mosque, and a Buddhist stūpa, you might well act in the way described at the beginning of this essay when asked to imagine the respective buildings.