This book is organized into two parts. Part I is entitled, “Image Theory as Metaphysics and Theology: The Emergence of a Tradition.” This part includes four chapters: 1) “A Brief Metaphysics of the Image: Plato—Plotinus,” 2) “Theology and Phenomenology of the Byzantine Icon,” 3) The Eschatological Image: Augustine—Bonaventure—Julian of Norwich,” and 4) “The Mystical Image: Platonism and Communal Vision in Nicholas of Cusa.” Part II is entitled, “The Image in the Era of Naturalism and the Persistence of Metaphysics” and encompasses the next four chapters: 5) “The Symbolic Image: Visualizing the Metamorphosis of Being in Goethe,” 6) “The Forensic Image: Paradoxes of Realism in Lyell, Darwin, and Ruskin,” 7) “The Sacramental Image: G. M. Hopkins,” and 8) “The Epiphanic Image: Husserl—Cézanne—Rilke.”

This book is “a sustained reflection on images,” which takes the term “in its widest compass, and on the kinds of knowledge uniquely opened up by their experience” (xiii). Pfau distinguishes the concept of “image (imago, eikon) … from (though not opposed to) its historically and materially contingent instantiation as ‘picture’ (Gk. Eidolon; Lat. Pictura; Ger. Gemälde, Kunstbild), that is, an artifact designed to produce an optical illusion of sorts or simulate an extraneous object or scene” (xiii). The image referred to by Pfau “presupposes an awareness of the ontological difference between the visible image and what it brings into our presence” (xiii).

Taking a macro approach to his reflection, Pfau covers a vast range of authors, including voices from the ancient world (Plato, Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, John Damascene, Augustine), the Middle Ages (Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Julian of Norwich, and Nicholas of Cusa), and contemporary literature and art (Dostoevsky, Husserl, Goethe, Ruskin, Turner, Hopkins, Cézanne, and Rilke).

Throughout this “sustained reflection” Pfau demonstrates how “profoundly images and their experience are implicated in both metaphysical realism and modern phenomenology” (xiii–xiv). The objective throughout this book “is to scrutinize the ontological place of images, the phenomenology of their experience, and the way that such experience came to be successively articulated in philosophical, theological, and literary writing from Plato to Rilke” (xv). Ultimately, Pfau argues that “for those taking themselves to inhabit a terminally postmetaphysical age, Rilke’s qualified retention of image and vision may well prove the only way to carry on without relinquishing art (and by extension hope) or, conversely, acquiescing in art’s instrumentalization and consequent trivialization for political ends” (723).

This book is broad in many ways. It uses voices from over 2000 years of history, who spoke different languages, and lived in drastically different political, social, and political contexts to speak to what can be described as a contemporary trend of de-emphasizing metaphysical realities. One wonders how much their voices were really allowed to reverberate on their own terms, or were they simply used and synthesized for a contemporary question that would not have been remotely intelligible to many of the authors themselves. While this historical question is likely tangential to the thesis of the book, the book itself is a beautiful and, more importantly, necessary look at how the conversation of art, beauty, ontology, and metaphysics is still very much a live question … or at least it should be. 

At over 700 pages of fairly dense reflection and $80, this book may be out of reach for those outside the academy. Sections may be accessible enough for advanced undergraduates and M.A. students, but those who will benefit the most from this book are Ph.D. students and academics interested in phenomenology, iconography, literature, and theology.