The purpose of this essay is not exhaustive research concerning the iconic space and vision in Byzantium. Rather, the aim is to reshuffle the texts - from theological statements in defense of the image to liturgical, living ritual - to build up a polemical discourse with a tradition and a cognitive theory that have proved incapable of explaining the endurance of the Byzantine scheme of the icon and of its oxymoronic (paradoxical) definition, except through an appeal to primitivism.
I will attempt to put forward an alternative reading of the iconic space and show how vision itself is transfigured through participation. My thesis is that the icon belongs to another order of cognitive apprehension. It resists Kantian logic or any other categories of modern cognition. The paradoxical play between presence and absence in the definition of the iconic space is founded on a theology of kenôsis. Presence and absence, emptiness and fullness, are both "foiled" and transfigured in the icon - a theological and a doctrinal statement in its essence.