ABSTRACT

The practice of icon veneration is often either dismissed either as a superstitious ‘magical’ rite or relegated to the exclusive arena of theological metaphysics. Such reductive approaches discount the importance of embodied human expression both inside religion and outside of it. This article proposes instead a way of philosophically understanding icon veneration as a meaningful human practice. After evaluating the few existing philosophical attempts to answer the question by Terrence Cuneo, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Paul Moyaert, I first give a phenomenological analysis of substitutional practice in ordinary human experience. Then, guided by the legend of the acheiropoeiton, the first icon ‘made without hands,’ I develop a phenomenology of iconic substitution, showing how the act of prayer builds on and structurally modifies the ordinary cases of substitution I laid out above in order to form a new and meaningful practice aimed at communication which gains in significance as it is sustained over time.

摘要

圣像崇拜的实践常常被当作迷信的“魔术”仪式而被摒弃，或者被降级为神学形而上学的专有领域。这种简化的方法剥夺了在宗教内部和外部都体现人类表达的重要性。本文提出了一种从哲学上将圣像崇拜理解为有意义的人类实践的方式。在评估了Terrence Cuneo，Nicholas Wolterstorff和Paul Moyaert提出的一些现有的尝试回答这一问题的哲学尝试之后，我首先对普通人类经验中的替代实践进行了现象学分析。然后，在“无手制作”的第一个偶像acheiropoeiton的传说的指导下，我发展了偶像的现象学 替代，显示了祷告行为如何建立在我上面提出的替代的普通案例上并在结构上进行了修改，从而形成了一种新的有意义的实践，旨在交流，随着时间的推移，交流的重要性不断提高。