Ecce Homo: On the Phenomenological Problematicity of the Religious Image

Abstract

This paper deals with a problem that has been more and more perceptible since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment liberated whatever kind of image from the metaphysical framework of reality that had until then ruled artistic production, which took place together with the foundation of a philosophical aesthetics entirely grounded on a subjective feeling of pleasure: what is the status or sense of the religious image? This problem is axial for understanding the becoming of the religious image during the two last centuries and it must be set off and solved because that kind of image is by principle not a simple allegorical or artistic representation that rouses this or that state of mind in the beholder but the presentation of God Himself or of a celestial entity (whether the Virgin, an angel or a saint) that is endowed with a miraculous potency to help man in his tribulations: when the believer is before a religious image, he is supposed to be in the very presence of God, and that is why he can beg for mercy with the certitude that he will be comforted.

To my mother, In memoriam.