New Icon of Christ Pantocrator
The face of Christ is the human face of God.
The Holy Spirit rests on Him and reveals to us absolute Beauty, a divine-human Beauty, that no art can ever properly and fully make visible. Only the icon can suggest such Beauty by means of the Taboric light.
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“I will sing to my God as long as I live” (Sept Ps 104:33). It is for this kind of “action” that man has been set apart and made holy. To sing to God, to sing His perfections, in a word to sing His Beauty, this is man's unique preoccupation, his unique and totally free “work.”
The figure in the praying position, the Orant, found in the catacombs, represents the proper attitude of the human soul, its inner structure in the form of prayer. The command “to fill the earth and conquer it...” (Gn 1:28) is a command to transform the earth into a cosmic temple in which to worship God and then to offer that earth to the Creator. We have here a much loved iconographic subject. It sums up the gospel message in a single word XAIRE: “rejoice and worship... let every creature that breathes give thanks to God.”
In a masterly fashion, St. Paul sets out the ultimate goal of God's charisms: “You have been sealed in the Holy Spirit... and God has obtained [these sealed persons] for the praise of His glory” (Ep 1:14). There is no better way to express the transcendent vocation of man and his doxological and iconographic ministry. The Church expresses this same notion when she sings: “Gathered together in Your temple, we see ourselves in the light of Your heavenly beauty.”
Paul Evdokimov, The Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty