Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: This review essay explores the central thesis of Thomas Pfau's Incomprehensible Certainty.It explores, specifically, the basic distinction between picture and image that shapes the book as a fundamental apparatus.1 But I am in tension with that distinction.Non est falsum et verum in rebus sed in mente. 2 I do not know that Pfau disagrees with me, strictly speaking.But it is also the case that he desires for images a sort of substance that allows them independence, a sort of ontic solidity in themselves that establishes their prominence.3 Or at least, images are-as long as image and not mere appearance-the gateway to ontic solidity.Pfau argues for "a Neoplatonist and Christian conception of the image as the medium granting us access to noncontingent (or 'pre-predicative') meaning." 4 But I am in tension with this claim, too.I take metaphysics to be, for the most part, the science of contingence.So I am at once fascinated by and uncertain about this need for noncontingence, which Pfau often elides into metaphysics itself, into being and its science.5 Below I wrestle with my fascination and uncertainty, performing what is, I hope, a tribute to the long hours and the careful art that fill the book.I converse with two poets (Rainer Maria Rilke and Sappho) and with Hans Urs von Balthasar in order to discover the sorrows and the dreams that line the pages of Incomprehensible Certainty, and in order to discover what might be illuminating in my-as they will turn out, ultimately Balthasarian-lines of difference from Pfau.1 "Throughout this book, the concept of the image (imago, eikōn) is distinguished from (though not opposed to) its historically and materially contingent instantiation as 'picture' (Gk.eidolon; Lat.pictura; Ger.Gemälde, Kunstbild), that is, an artifact designed to produce an optical illusion of sorts or simulate an extraneous object or scene.Whereas the eidolon rests on a logic of illusion or simulation, with the picture substituting itself for 'its' object, talk of an image or icon presupposes an awareness of the ontological difference between the visible image and what it brings into our presence.Being squarely focused on the latter, this book is not, at least not primarily, concerned with pictorial techniques and their historical permutation."
Source: Modern Theology
DOI: 10.1111/moth.12901
Author: Anne M. Carpenter
Institution: Saint Louis University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4387500652