Longing in the flesh: a phenomenological account of icon veneration

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.