The French Catholic phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion characterizes the encounter with such beings of religion by contrasting the sacred icon to the pagan idol. The idol, he argues, is all about our gaze: in holding and fixing our gaze on the level of the visible, the idol sustains our selfhood and its egoic grasping, and therefore acts as a “mirror, not a portrait.” In contrast, the “icon does not result from a vision but provokes one.”40 The self who encounters an authentic icon is no longer the owner of its gaze; instead, the icon confronts us with an “invisible gaze that subverts us in the
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