Beauty of Icons Draw us Toward the "pure light."

"Icons are simply paint on a board, but they are also windows into heaven. Orthodox Christianity regards them as teachers who draw us to God by their beauty. We can love only what we can experience in our bodies. Metaphysical realities are hard for finite humans to grasp, which is why God reveals himself to us in metaphors and symbols. God does not have hands and feet, but Scripture says he does to make it possible for us to understand, in terms that make sense to us, something of his nature. God’s ultimate expression of himself was as a flesh-and-blood man, Jesus of Nazareth, whose incarnation teaches us that the eternal Father relates to his creatures at the most intimate level through matter, through which the divine light shines. We humans are like fish dwelling at the bottom of a pond. We perceive the sun’s light filtered imperfectly to the depths. Sometimes we catch a flash of light reflected in a piece of matter drifting down from on high, and our attraction to it causes us to rise toward the light beyond the surface. The higher we rise, the more clearly we see. The beauty shining through great art—painting, poetry, sculpture, dance, music, architecture, and so forth—calls us out of the depths of our spiritual slumber and up toward the pure light."

Dreher, Rod. Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age (p. 172). (Function). Kindle Edition.