The iconodules staked their argument on the incarnation, but Besancon notices that after the iconoclast controversy, figures in icons became less carnal rather than more: “In the few primitive icons, which come for the most part from Egypt . . . , Christ or the saints have stocky, thick-set, vigorous, extremely carnal physiques . . . . But, after the crises, the forms become more elongated, the faces more holly. Even though the victory of orthodoxy in 843 was a victory of the incarnation, the icons - theoretically bearing witness to that victory - move toward the ethereal, the symbol, geometrism, hyperbolic asceticism. It often seems that the style adopted by the artists expresses a compromise between the full vision of Christ’s humanity and the symbolic abstractions tolerated by iconoclasm.”

Along with this disembodiment of the icon went a retreat from artistic depiction of creation: “Even though this world, as Western art has abundantly proven, also tells of divine glory, it is absent from the almost exclusively religious art of late Byzantium, the Balkans, and Russia prior to Peter the Great. An art that is wholly sacred, wholly made to be worshiped, forms a desert around itself.”

Besancon quotes Eugene Troubetzkoi’s reaction to viewing Rubens at the Hermitage: “The nausea I felt at the sight of Rubens’s bacchanalia made me immediately understand the property of icons I had in mind. The bacchanalia are an extreme form of life, which the icon rejects. The ample, quivering flesh that delights in itself, gorges itself on meat, and necessarily kills to gorge itself - it is all this that the fingers bestowing blessing reject . . . . So long as we are seduced by the delectations of the flesh, the icon will not speak to us.” Well, give me the quivering flesh.

Besancon also quotes from Troubetzkoi to indicate how the icon became a banner of Russian nationalism. He notes, “The danger comes from the fact that, through the exaltation of a particular theology, one allows the honor due to the icon to reflect not onto the prototype but onto the system, which is, in fact, the only thing represented. The face becomes a pretext to rejoice in being a disciple of Saint Gregory Palamas rather than of Augustine, to be Orthodox rather than Catholic or Protestant. A bad icon, utterly incapable of transmitting energies and the hypostasis, still transmits the schema.” As a result, “the icon becomes the ensign of an entrenched camp, a closed world within which it takes its meaning, for the learned, solely from an initiatory theology, or, for the simpler folk, from magic, but in both cases from an imperialist world, where it sounds the advances and retreats of correct doctrine. That iconolatry, like all idolatry, is worship of oneself and, rather than glorying in Christ, glories in its own idea of orthodoxy.”