The corporeal dimensions of prayer before icons are often attributed to superstition, antiquated beliefs, or a “graced” function of metaphysical participation. In contrast to this, I develop a phenomenological analysis of corporeal substitution as a real possibility of ordinary experience, for an absent person we love strongly can come to presence in a thing before us and provoke a corporeal response. Guided by the story of the acheiropoieton, the “icon made without hands,” I show how the structure of this ordinary human practice is altered when elevated to prayerful substitution, and through its repetition over time, this allows the icon to serve as a means of communion for the believer across both visual and corporeal dimensions.

This chapter revisits reception theory through an exploration of the metaphysics of presence and absence across time. Bringing together the ‘Letter to Horace’ of the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky and Horace’s own Epistles, it uses the theory of communication developed by John Durham Peters and the philosophy of the afterlife of Samuel Scheffler to elucidate the experience of, on the one hand, communicating with a past where one and so much of what makes one what one is was not present and, on the other, of projecting oneself into a future in which one will no longer exist so as to communicate with those who do not yet exist and whom one will never know. Recent metaphysical thinking has sought to make us sensitive to the existential incompleteness of people and things and the fragility of selves that are distributed across the multitude of ‘attachments’ which Bruno Latour suggests as one ‘mode of existence’ that makes us what we are. Latour suggests that we should not think of ourselves as simple, atomized, points of emission and reception for texts, and appeals to Étienne Souriau’s notion of instauration to suggest how our selves and what and whom we value are sustained.