Contesting the Logic of Painting: Art and Understanding in Eleventh-Century Byzantium 9789004162716

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Contesting the Logic of Painting

Visualising the Middle Ages Editorial board

Professor Madeline Caviness, Tufts University (USA) Dr Eva Frojmovic, University of Leeds (UK) (series editor) Professor Diane Wolfthal, Arizona State University (USA) Professor Catherine Harding, University of Victoria (Canada)

VOLUME 2

Contesting the Logic of Painting Art and Understanding in Eleventh-Century Byzantium

by

Charles Barber

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2007

Cover illustration: The Mandylion and Keramion. Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rossianus gr. 251, fol. 12v detail. Source: courtesy of the Vatican Library. Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyrights holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISSN 1874-0448 ISBN 978 90 04 16271 6 Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishers, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

This book is dedicated to my wife and daughters Sophie, Cleome, and Josephine

CONTENTS List of Illustrations ...................................................................... Foreword ..................................................................................... Acknowledgements ..................................................................... List of Abbreviations .................................................................. Chapter One

ix xi xv xvii

The Synodikon of Orthodoxy and the Ground of Painting ...........................................................

1

Symeon the New Theologian: Seeing Beyond Painting ..................................

23

Chapter Three Michael Psellos: Seeing Through Painting ....

61

Chapter Two

Chapter Four

Eustratios of Nicaea and the Constraints of Theology .........................................................

99

Leo of Chalcedon, Euthymios Zigabenos and the Return to the Past ............................

131

Afterword ....................................................................................

159

Bibliography ................................................................................

165

Index ...........................................................................................

177

Chapter Five

Illustrations

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 1. St. Athanasios prays to an icon Christ. London, British Library, Add. 19.352, fol. 15r. Source: by permission of The British Library. Fig. 2. Reading of the Synodikon of Orthodoxy. Mt. Athos, Dionysiou Monastery, ms. 587m, fol. 43r. Source: after Stylianos Pelekanidis et al., The Treasures of Mount Athos: Illuminated Manuscripts, vol. 1 (Athens: Ekdotike Athenon, 1973), g. 220. Fig. 3. Crucixion. Moscow, State Historical Museum, cod. 129, fol. 67r. Source: Collection Gabriel Millet, École Pratique des Hautes Études. Fig. 4. Christ Antiphonetes. Koimesis Church, Nicaea (Iznik). Source: after Theodor Schmit, Die Koimesis-Kirche von Nikaia. Das Bauwerk und die Mosaiken (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1927), pl. XXVII. Fig. 5. Synodikon of Orthodoxy. Icon, London, British Museum. Source: copyright The Trustees of the British Museum. Fig. 6. Nikephoros tramples John the Grammarian. Moscow, State Historical Museum, cod. 129, fol. 51v. Source: Collection Gabriel Millet, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris. Fig. 7. Nikephoros of Contantinople, Theodore of Stoudios and the Iconoclastic Synod. London, British Library, Add. 19.352, fol. 27v. Source: by permission of The British Library. Fig. 8. Matthew the Monk prays to the Mother of God. Jerusalem, Patriarchal Library, Taphou 55, fol. 260r. Source: Panayotis L. Vocotopoulos, Byzantine Illuminated Manuscripts of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem (Athens and Jerusalem: Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, 2002), g. 31. Fig. 9. Monks in a Penitential Prison. Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, gr. 394, fol. 42r. Source: courtesy of the Vatican Library. Fig. 10. The Creation of Adam. London, British Library, Add. 19.352, fol. 162r. Source: by permission of The British Library. Fig. 11. Adam outside Paradise. Baltimore, The Walters Art Museum. Source: The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

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list of illustrations

Fig. 12. Michael Psellos before Michael VII Doukas. Mt. Athos, Pantokrator Monastery, ms. 234, fol. 254r detail. Source: after Stylianos Pelekanidis et al., The Treasures of Mount Athos: Illuminated Manuscripts, vol. 3 (Athens: Ekdotike Athenon, 1979). Fig. 13. Crucixion and Saints. Sinai, Monastery of St. Catherine. Source: reproduced through the courtesy of the Michigan-PrincetonAlexandria Expedition to Mount Sinai. Fig. 14. A Persian artist depicts the Mother of God. Jerusalem, Patriarchal Library, Taphou 14, fol. 106v detail. Source: after Panayotis L. Vocotopoulos, Byzantine Illuminated Manuscripts of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem (Athens and Jerusalem: Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, 2002), g. 69. Fig. 15. The Blachernae Theotokos detail. Sinai, Monastery of St. Catherine. Source: reproduced through the courtesy of the MichiganPrinceton-Alexandria Expedition to Mount Sinai. Fig. 16. Ambassadors before the Oracle at Delphi. Mt. Athos, Esphigmenou Monastery, ms. 14, fol. 396v detail. Source: Collection Gabriel Millet, École Pratique des Hautes Études. Fig. 17. The Magi and Christ. Jerusalem, Patriarchal Library, Taphou 14, fol. 106v. Source: after Panayotis L. Vocotopoulos, Byzantine Illuminated Manuscripts of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem (Athens and Jerusalem: Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, 2002), g. 69. Fig. 18. The Mandylion and Keramion. Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rossianus gr. 251, fol. 12v detail. Source: courtesy of the Vatican Library. Fig. 19. Abgar and the Mandylion detail. Sinai, Monastery of St. Catherine. Source: reproduced through the courtesy of the MichiganPrinceton-Alexandria Expedition to Mount Sinai. Fig. 20. Fathers in the Dogmatic Panoply. Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, gr. 666, fol. 1v. Source: courtesy of the Vatican Library. Fig. 21. Alexios I Komnenos before Christ. Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, gr. 666, fol. 2r. Source: courtesy of the Vatican Library.

FOREWORD What is it that we see when we look at a work of art? The answer seems obvious, a representation of a given subject, fashioned by an artist, mediated by the materials of painting, and recognized by those looking. This model is all too familiar. It sets the work of art within our perceptual horizon, demarcating the limits of human understanding, and thence embodying a modern conception of the world. It is a model that is assumed in much of our writing on the history of art, afrming the modernist foundations of this discipline.1 Yet, is this model always apt? What happens when the subject of a given painting exceeds the boundaries of human perception and thence of painting itself ? These questions come to the fore whenever we look at an image of the Christian God. This strangely doubled gure, human and divine, limited and limitless, visible and invisible, challenges our assumptions about representation, inviting us to think again about art’s possibility. While it is tempting to treat Christ’s face as a special case, cloistered away in the sub-category of religious art and lost in the mists of the medieval world, such disregard deprives those who would dismiss this category of image of an opportunity to challenge some commonplace assumptions regarding the possibilities of painting. Christ’s face provokes questions about what it is that we see in the work of art, and thus raises questions about the assumption of visibility that has grounded the modernist project of our art history. This book addresses these assumptions by examining a body of writings on art and vision produced in eleventh-century Byzantium. When studying the history of the icon in Byzantium, it is tempting to assume that the theological framing for the work of art had been settled by the years of debate during the iconoclastic crisis of the eighth- and ninth centuries. As we shall see in the course of this study, this assumption is given some grounds by the later reiteration of iconophile doctrine in such texts as the Synodikon of Orthodoxy and the various compendia of heresies produced in the Middle Byzantine era as well as by the lack

1 A useful critique of these foundations is to be found in Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art (College Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press, 2005).

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of actual iconoclastic episodes in the centuries that followed the end of iconoclasm in the ninth century. But beneath this appearance of a stable and unchallenged doctrine, the question concerning the icon did not remain uncontested. Without the opening shaped by the dramatic and familiar moment of actual iconoclasm, scholars have overlooked the vigor of this iconomachy (a discursive “iconoclasm” that does not imply the breaking of images). In so doing, we have perhaps missed the degree to which our understanding of the icon, the material manifestation of the human knowledge of sacred things, can be enhanced by the various manners in which key thinkers of the eleventh- and early-twelfth century contested the implications of the horizon both opened and framed by iconic depiction. This study will therefore invite the reader to reconsider a familiar problem through the lens and writings of these Byzantine authors, most of whom are probably unfamiliar to all but specialists in the eld. Each of these eleventh-century writers has asked whether the work of art is adequate to convey the truth of a sacred subject? In addressing this topic they also necessarily asked whether it was indeed possible for a philosopher or theologian or artist to claim that he or she could understand or dene or describe or depict such a sacred subject? At rst glance such questions appear limited to the narrow realm of sacred art in a distant and troubled land. I will, however, endeavor to show that the lines of enquiry opened by these authors remain pertinent to those concerned with conceptualizing works of art in the postmodern era. In particular, I believe that these writers invite us to reect upon the grounds of our discipline by drawing us away from the representational assumptions that underlie the practice of art history and that have so often failed to open paths to understanding the Byzantine icon. What we shall nd is that these eleventh-century writings enquire into the conditions that might or might not permit a painting truthfully to convey its subject. This was a primary concern of the texts examined here and so invites our attention. Rather than focusing on the constructed roles of the maker or consumer of the painting—whose fate is so often in the care of the art historian—, these texts will lead us to consider the dening role of the subject of an image. By these means, they draw our attention away from the human horizon of the artist or the beholder and ask us to consider the implications of the necessarily absent subject or ground that both precedes and exceeds the frame of the work of art. In so doing, these writers provide language that allows us to explore paths that might allow the more adventurous among us to break from

foreword

xiii

the horizon of our crumbling age of the world picture and thence to learn to understand an horizon dened by an age of the world icon.2 As much of the material found in this study is relatively under-used by art historians and is little known to non-specialists in the eld, I have provided the reader with lengthy passages from the original materials and have provided translations of all the Greek texts. I hope that by these means the readers of this book will gain some familiarity with the language in play in Byzantine discussions of art and that Byzantium’s surprisingly varied, exploratory, and contested contribution to the wider discussion of art will thereby become more widely appreciated.

2 I borrow these terms from: Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 57–85 and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2004): 302–307.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In the course of writing this book I have accumulated many people to whom I owe the debt of gratitude. I would like to thank Julian Deahl and Marcella Mulder for their willingness to publish this work. I would like to thank the participants in two workshops in Byzantine Intellectual History at the University of Notre Dame for listening to and discussing versions of some of the material contained in this book. I am grateful to have been able to discuss this material in various venues, including the University of Chicago, the Johns Hopkins University, the Institute of Fine Arts, the Courtauld Institute, the Byzantine Studies Conference in Athens, Georgia, and the College Art Association meeting in Boston. For numerous instances of help, encouragement and advice that contributed in a variety of ways to the making of this book I would like to thank: Robin Cormack, Catherine Jolivet-Lévy, Herbert Kessler, Derek Krueger, Henry Maguire, Robert Nelson, Glenn Peers, Maria Vassilaki, Panayotis Vocotopoulos. A very special debt is owed to my colleague at Notre Dame, David Jenkins, who is a constant source of encouragement. Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to my wife, Sophie White, and to my daughters, Cleome and Josephine.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Mansi = Mansi, J. D. Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio. Florence and Venice: A. Zatti, 1759–98. PG = Patrologiae cursus completus, Series graeca. Ed. Jacques-Paul Migne. 161 vols. in 166 parts. Paris: Migne, 1857–66.

CHAPTER ONE

THE SYNODIKON OF ORTHODOXY AND THE GROUND OF PAINTING It is always difcult to recover the commonplace understanding of an icon at a given moment in the past. When examining an icon, numerous questions arise concerning what it shows (g. 1): what is it that one sees here? Is it Christ, or a painting of Christ, or perhaps a painting and Christ? If this is Christ, then what exactly is it that we see of him? Since Christ is both human and divine, does the depicted face show both of these natures or just one? If it shows both natures, then can we presume that the divine can be depicted? If so, then how is the divine in the painting? If not, then what does the depiction of the human nature alone imply regarding the relation of the painting and its subject? Does painting permit an accurate and adequate account of this subject? Or rather, what does this subject disclose of itself through the painting? How, then, ought one to look at or pray to this icon? Undoubtedly, the answers to such questions will vary from time to time, place to place, and person to person. They might be found in the traces left on the objects themselves, or considered in light of related works of art, or through the evidence of practices and beliefs brought to bear upon the image. By these means one can accumulate an array of data that permits a varied and nuanced account of the icon. Rather than follow these paths, this study’s primary focus will be upon a series of theoretical texts that attempted to police one’s perception of the icon by dening competing interpretations of the play of the painted image in eleventh-century Byzantium. While we shall in due course nd that these claims on the icon are varied, it will also become clear that they contest a common ground, namely the implications of the icon’s relation to the visible. This relation dened the icon quite narrowly, limiting the potential of the icon to an imitation of that which was visible to the human senses.1 This reading was a legacy of the iconoclastic era (730–87, 815–43) and was reiterated annually on

1 Most recently: Charles Barber, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

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chapter one

the rst Sunday of Lent, when the Synodikon of Orthodoxy, one of the key texts for dening the theology of images, was read out in the churches of Byzantium.2 It is this theological statement and its attendant readings that can give us an entry to a commonplace understanding of the icon and can describe for us the implications of the common ground of painting, the visible, in eleventh-century Byzantium. The Synodikon achieved its rst denitive form in the late-ninth century. Beginning in the mid-eleventh century and then increasingly during the Komnenian era (1081–1185), the document received a series of additions. These changes redened the limits of orthodoxy, building upon the fundamental question of the image that rst shaped the Synodikon. This point of departure was reinforced by the procession of icons that preceded the actual reading.3 The regular feast is rst mentioned in the Kletorologion of Philotheos, which dates to 899, and is rmly established in the imperial Book of Ceremonies of the mid-tenth century.4 While this performance was notionally commemorative, recalling the ending of the iconoclastic dispute in 843, the changes noted above indicate that the text was also a living entity that described and revised an orthodoxy that was built upon the notion that the icon itself embodied and manifested this same orthodoxy and thence the culture as a whole.5 A glimpse of the performance of this text is offered in g. 2. Taken from an eleventh-century lectionary, this image shows an ambo upon which nine lectors and priests stand.6 One of these holds open a scroll from which he reads the Synodikon of Orthodoxy. Neither the manuscript

2

Jean Gouillard, “Le Synodikon de l’Orthodoxie. Édition et commentaire,” Travaux et mémoires 2 (1967): 1–316. 3 Gouillard, “Synodikon:” 14. 4 Nicolas Oikonomides, Les listes de préseance byzantines du IX e et X e siècle (Paris: CNRS, 1972): 195; Constantine Porphyrogenitos, De ceremoniis aulae byzantinae, ed. Johann Jacob Reiske, vol. 1 (Bonn: E. Weber, 1829–30): 156–60. 5 The theoretical basis for my analysis of the cultural signicance for the icon lies in Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 1–56 and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd revd. ed. (New York: Continuum, 2004). 6 Kurt Weitzmann, “An imperial lectionary in the Monastery of Dionysiou on Mount Athos. Its origins and its wanderings,” Revue des études sud-est européenes 7 (1969): 239–53; S. Pelekanides, P. Christou, Ch. Tsoumis, The Treasures of Mount Athos, vol. 1 (Athens: Ekdotike, 1973): 439; Christopher Walter, “The date and content of the Dionysiou lectionary,” Deltion tes christianikes archaiologikes hetaireias 4/13 (1985–86): 181–89; MaryLyon Dolezal, “Illuminating the liturgical word: text and image in a decorated lectionary (Mount Athos, Dionysiou Monastery, cod. 587),” Word and Image 12 (1996): 23–60.

the SYNODIKON OF ORTHODOXY and the ground of painting

3

tradition of the Synodikon itself, nor our liturgical sources are clear regarding the precise moment for this reading of the text. Some sources place it in the course of the eucharistic liturgy, either before the reading from the Epistles or from the Gospels. Other manuscripts place the reading after the orthros (dawn) service. Our image does not settle this dispute, but it does provide an eleventh-century icon for the feast, one that is clearly focused upon the public reading of our text. It is fortunate that we are in a position to reconstruct an eleventhcentury performance of the Synodikon. The Synaxarion of the Theotokos Evergetis monastery in Constantinople describes quite fully the subsidiary texts that would have framed a reading of the Synodikon.7 While this monastery was founded in 1049,8 the liturgical document dates a little later. The latest saints mentioned are Lazaros of Mt. Galesion who died in 1054 and Timothy the second Abbot, who died after 1067. The liturgical practices of this community were available for imitation by such mid-twelfth-century foundations as the Kosmosoteira (1152) and St. Mamas (ca. 1146–58). It is reasonable, then, to assume that the core of the liturgical practice that has come down to us dates within this time period.9 Given this, the Synaxarion offers us an opportunity to recover the performance of a public reading of the Synodikon in the monasteries of eleventh-century Constantinople. In Evergetine practice the Sunday of Orthodoxy began at vespers on the Saturday. Specic hymns regarding the feast were sung. Two of these were addressed to the prophets, as the day was also dedicated to Moses and Aaron, and two to the icons. The Synaxarion is unclear about the precise identity of these verses. Later in this service we nd two texts that specically address the meaning of the feast. The rst of these introduces the link between orthodoxy and the image:

7

Aleksandr Dmitrievskij, Opisanie liturgiceskich rukopisej, vol. 1 (Kiev, 1895): 520–22. The fundamental study on this monastery: Jean Pargoire, “Constantinople: le couvent de l’Évergétis,” Echos d’Orient 9 (1906): 371–72; 10 (1907): 155–67, 249–63 is being superseded by a research project undertaken by the Center for Byzantine Studies at Queen’s University, Belfast. Publications from this project include: The Theotokos Evergetis and Eleventh-Century Monasticism, eds. Margaret Mullett and Anthony Kirby, Belfast Byzantine Texts and Translations 6.1 (Belfast: Belfast Byzantine Enterprises, 1994); Work and Worship at the Theotokos Evergetis, eds. Margaret Mullett and Anthony Kirby, Belfast Byzantine Texts and Translations 6.2 (Belfast: Belfast Byzantine Enterprises, 1997). 9 On issues in dating this text see John Klentos, “The Synaxarion of Evergetis: algebra, geology and Byzantine monasticism,” Work and worship at the Theotokos Evergetis, ed. Margaret Mullett and Anthony Kirby, Belfast Byzantine Texts and Translations 6.2 (Belfast: Belfast Byzantine Enterprises, 1997): 329–55. 8

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chapter one

     ,            ! " # $ %& ' , %' ( )  *  $   %   ,  & + %%!  $ ./ 0 1 ,  23,   # 45 ,  6# 3' ,  1  7 83  # 81 !6 * 9 $  7  0  , ; 6 < ,  = 13 8  *  +  &     %3 3 >61 , .? @ )= 9 #,   # 45 , 86! 9 & =  A .10

Advancing from ungodliness to the true faith, and illumined with the light of knowledge, let us clap our hands and sing aloud, offering praise and thanksgiving to God; and with due honor let us venerate the holy icons of Christ, of the all-pure Virgin and the saints, whether depicted on walls, on wooden panels, or on holy vessels, rejecting the impious teaching of the heretics. For, as Basil says, the honor shown to the icon passes to the prototype it represents. At the prayers of your undeled mother and of all saints, we beseech thee, Christ our God, to bestow upon us your great mercy.

What is striking about this prayer is the focus on the quality of worship brought to bear on an icon. This is dened as veneration, a relative form of worship, rather than the adoration addressed to the Trinity. Furthermore, this relational aspect is validated by reference to Basil the Great’s fundamental denition of the meaning of the veneration addressed to an imperial10image.11 The second short text serves as a frequently repeated motif throughout the liturgy of the day. This is the apolytikion, a verse used to mark the end of discrete sections within the liturgical performance:12 C7 D%  1 3 3/  E5!,  +  3%6 #   9 #, .? @ )1 * 3' $ 6816  !&   3, F G+H I A   83  / %!/* J! %  #  * .K ' $ , @ L7 9 #, 1   = # = 1 .12

We venerate your holy icon, loving Lord, asking you to forgive our transgression, Christ our God. For you of your own will was pleased in the flesh to ascend upon the Cross in order to deliver from the bondage of the enemy those whom you have fashioned. Therefore in thanksgiving we cry aloud to you: You have lled all things with joy, our Savior, when you came to save the world.

10 Triodion (Athens: Apostolic Diaconias of the Church of Greece, 1960): 134; The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 1978): 301. 11 Basil of Caesarea, Liber de Spiritu sancto, 2nd ed., ed. B. Pruche, Sources chrétiennes 17bis (Paris: Cerf, 1968): 406.19ff. 12 The Lenten Triodion: 302; Triodion: 133.

the SYNODIKON OF ORTHODOXY and the ground of painting

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Here the practice of prayer before an icon is neatly linked to the economy of salvation opened by Christ’s death and resurrection. This introduces a favored iconophile theme in that it is the death of Christ’s human nature—the nature that is seen in the image—that opens the possibility of Christian salvation. In addition to these brief troparia, the meaning of the feast was elaborated by a series of readings performed during the orthros (dawn) service. These readings provide a carefully constructed account of the icon and its history. They not only serve as a preface for the more theoretical reading of the Synodikon text, but also remind their audience of the importance of the icon to the celebration of Orthodoxy itself and provide them with the narratives with which to articulate this evaluation. The rst two stories reveal the power of images. They do this in the context of the competition between Judaism and Christianity and so draw on a range of anti-semitic stereotypes. The rst of these passages was a well-known narrative of an icon from Beirut renowned for having resisted attacks made on it by its Jewish owner. The story was used in the fourth session of the Seventh Oecumenical Council in 787 and perhaps dates from the seventh century.13 The narrative tells the story of a Christian who has rented a room in the Jewish quarter of Beirut. There he had hung an icon of Christ. A little later, when this Christian moved to a larger dwelling he left the icon behind. Next, a Jewish man moved into the room containing the icon. He did not notice its presence or perhaps recognize its subject until a fellow Jew saw the painting and identied its subject. The rst Jew was then reported to the Chief Priests and the Elders of the Jewish community, who then expelled him, believing him to be a devotee of Christ. The rest of the Jews then began to spit at, mock and beat the image, declaring: “Whatever our fathers did to him, we will also do all of it to his icon (J  6    9 ,  ' 3  9 & M  = /).”14 They then “crucied” the icon, putting nails through the portrait’s hands and feet, offering it gall and vinegar, beating it with a reed, and spearing it in the side. As the spear pierced Christ’s side,

13 The story was told at the Seventh Oecumenical Council: Mansi 13.24E–32A. The date might be suggested by the description of blood and water owing from Christ’s side: Anna Kartsonis, “The Emancipation of the Crucixion,” in Byzance et les images (Paris: La Documentation française, 1994): 164–169. 14 Mansi, 13: 28B.

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blood and water began to ow from the icon. The Jews collected these liquids, as they planned to show that they had no miraculous healing powers. But when the liquids were applied to the paralyzed, the blind, and others, they were all healed. Rather than undermining Christianity, the story recounts that these miracles led these Jews to convert. They took the damaged icon and their tale to the local bishop and asked him to baptize them. The entire community was then baptized and their synagogue became a church dedicated to Christ.15 The other synagogues in the city became martyria. The second story continues the Christian-Jewish thread of the rst. The story is set in the early seventh century and is identied with the image of Christ Antiphonetes, a much-favored miraculous icon in Constantinople. In this instance, the narrative concerns a merchant named Theodore who was shipwrecked as he returned from Syria to Constantinople.16 Having lost his merchandise, Theodore despairs and wishes to leave the mercantile world and to become a monk. He is, nonetheless, persuaded to try one more trading trip. To do this, he borrows money from a Jew called Abraham. The transaction between them is made before the image of Christ Antiphonetes. Unfortunately, this trading expedition also fails. Abraham then loans Theodore another sum. Once more, this takes place before Christ’s icon. This time, Theodore journeys to an island in the Atlantic (perhaps the British Isles). Here he trades for a cargo of lead and tin. He also receives fty pounds of gold, which he throws into the sea. This gold oats all the way to Abraham in Constantinople. Upon Theodore’s return to Constantinople, he nds that his cargo has turned to silver. Following these miracles, Abraham converts to Christianity. Both texts present the image as something more than a simple portrait. In both instances the image is shown to be a site of power. In the case of the narrative of the Beirut icon the image is treated as if it were Christ and then responds by bleeding and thence providing the materials for miraculous healing. The story relates well to the emphasis

15 One can suggest that the icon provided the identity for this church, cf. Charles Barber, “Early Representations of the Mother of God,” in Mother of God: Representations of the Virgin in Byzantine Art, ed. Maria Vassilaki (Milan: Skira, 2000): 253–61. 16 Fr. Combes, Historia haeresis monothelitarum (Paris: A. Bertier, 1648): 612–44. An English version of this story can be found at: Sabine Baring Gould, Historic Oddities and Strange Events, First Series (London: Methuen, 1891): 103–20. See: Cyril Mango, The Brazen House: A Study of the Vestibule of the Imperial Palace of Constantinople (Copenhagen: i kommission hos Ejnar Munksgaard, 1959): 142–46.

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upon Christianity’s materialism in the Adversus Judaeus literature of the seventh century.17 It also underlines the narrow divide that separates and icon from its subject, quite clearly afrming that what happens to the icon affects its subject.18 An anti-semitism that presents the Jews as models of both otherness and redemption then frames these descriptions of the icon’s power. They are here turned into Christ-killers, a theme that occurred with some frequency in the polemical construction of the iconoclasts. This is seen most clearly in the ninth-century Khludov Psalter’s presentation of the Crucixion as being both an act committed by Jews and as a parallel to the fate of the icon at the hand of the iconoclasts (g. 3). The Antiphonetes narrative is less dramatic (g. 4). Nonetheless, the story reiterates the themes we have seen in play, with the icon presented as a locus for the performance of divine power and as a material proof of Christianity’s superiority over Judaism. Together these stories emphasize the particularity of Christianity and the power of the icon. The Evergetes Synaxarion then asks for a text that provides an historical account of orthodoxy. It is probable that this was the Life of St. Theodora, wife of the Emperor Theophilos (828–42) and mother of Michael III (842–867).19 Her signicance for the celebration of this feast is vividly shown in a Palaeologan icon for the Feast of Orthodoxy now owned by the British museum icon (g. 5).20 Here, the presence of the Hodegetria icon has emphasized the centrality of the icon to the meaning of this feast. Theodora and Michael are shown in a foremost position among the heroes of the iconoclastic era. The text of Theodora’s life presents an account of the end of iconoclasm, one that provided a key source for the Chronicle written by George the Monk, ca. 867.21 Theodora’s 17 For a recent discussion with reference to further literature see Charles Barber, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002): 13–37. 18 Glenn Peers, Sacred Shock: Framing Visual Experience in Byzantium (College Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004): 35–58. 19 Athanasios Markopoulos, “<     )8 (BHG 1731),” Symmeikta 5 (1983): 249–85; trans. Martha P. Vinson, “Life of St. Theodora the Empress,” in Byzantine Defenders of Images: Eight Saints’ Lives in English Translation, ed. Alice-Mary Talbot (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1998): 361–82. 20 Robin Cormack, “Icon of the Triumph of Orthodoxy,” Byzantium: Treasures of Byzantine Art and Culture, ed. David Buckton (London: British Museum Press, 1994): 129–31; Dimitra Kotoula, “The British Museum Triumph of Orthodoxy icon,” Byzantine Orthodoxies, ed. Andrew Louth and Augustine Casiday (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006): 121–30. 21 Discussed at Vasilii Regel, Analecta Byzantino-Russica (NewYork: Burt Franklin,

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story portrays iconoclasm in graphic terms as an instance of disorder and disruption: These were not images of the kind whose destruction results in no great peril or even little harm; on the contrary, they were images whose installation was a mark of pious zeal and whose abolition was a bitter form of tyranny. As a result, church thought was perverted, books were altered, sanctuaries were stripped of decoration, priests replaced, innocent men subjected to legal investigation, criminals placed in positions of power and the most illustrious sees. Nor was this all: whole regions were torn by civil strife, monasteries were deserted, people took to the hills, their family property conscated by the state. This is how far the heresy of the iconoclasts went.22

As was typical of the iconophile literature of the mid-ninth century, the iconoclastic Patriarch John VII (838–43) was presented as the primary force behind the Emperor Theophilos’ personal turn to iconoclastic policies. Here, the Patriarch is accused of being “the chief conspirator or rather chief sorcerer and chief demon” as well as a new Apollonios of Tyana and Balaam. This theme was to be found in an array of visual and verbal sources from the end of iconoclasm. The Patriarch Methodios (843–47) cast John in this light in his engagingly hostile hymn written for the Feast of Orthodoxy.23 John was portrayed in a similar manner in the Khludov Psalter (g. 6), where he is shown with the wild hair of a sorcerer and is compared to Simon Magus.24 By such means, the iconoclasts were to become “enemies of the truth” who had sought to undermine and alter the tradition of the seven oecumenical councils.25 Having described the evils of iconoclasm, the Theodora narrative then introduces a number of iconophile heroes from the second phase of iconoclasm: Ioannikios of Mount Olympos (752/54–846), Patriarch 1964): iv–x. The Life of Theodora and The Absolution of the Emperor Theophilos are included in a collection of saints’ lives in the British Library (BL Add. 28.270). The manuscript was completed in 1111 by the scribe Nicholas. It contains a marginal note that the Life of Theodora was to be read on the Feast of Orthodoxy. For a recent evaluation of these texts, their dates, and the discussion of the Emperor Theophilos see: Athanasios Markopoulos, “The rehabilitation of the Emperor Theophilos,” in Byzantium in the Ninth Century: Dead or Alive? ed. Leslie Brubaker (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998): 37–49. 22 Markopoulos “<  :” 258; Vinson “Life:” 362. 23 Methodios, Canon on the setting up of the holy images: PG, 99: 1767–80. 24 Kathleen Corrigan, Visual Polemics in the Ninth-Century Byzantine Psalters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992): 27–28. 25 Markopoulos “<  :” 260–62; Vinson “Life:” 367–69.

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Nikephoros (ca. 750–828), Theodore of Stoudios (759–826), Patriarch Methodios (2nd half 8th c.–847), Michael Synkellos (ca. 761–846), Theophanes the Confessor (ca. 760–817/818), Theodore Graptos (ca. 775–841/844) and Theophanes Graptos (ca. 778–845).26 It is notable that these gures, together with Isaiah of Nikomedia (. mid–9th c.) are represented on the British Museum icon seen above. In number and kind these are understood to provide an overwhelming contrast to the isolated and idiosyncratic iconoclasm embodied in the person of John the Grammarian. The text then introduces a further comparison. This begins when the military disasters of the 830s were blamed on Theophilos’s iconoclastic policies.27 This ill-starred account of the emperor continues until Theophilos is presented being tormented on his deathbed for his adherence to iconoclasm. This suffering is only brought to an end when he embraces an image of Christ found on an enkolpion worn by the kanikleios Theoktistos.28 The Life then contrasts the reign of Theophilos with that of his son, Michael III, who, having acceded to the throne, immediately restores the cult of icons and achieves military success. The restoration of the icons is also attributed to the Patriarch Methodios, who replaced the deposed John the Grammarian, and three hermits from Mount Olympos in Bithynia, Arsakios, and the already introduced Ioannikios and Isaiah.29 The text characterizes Methodios in these terms: “he conrmed and proclaimed our blameless orthodox faith after demolishing [iconoclasm] in its entirety, using the clearest and most forceful arguments.”30 Lastly, the nal sections of the book dwell on Theodora’s enforced monastic retirement, which began in 856 and lasted until her death.31 The Evergetes typikon then asks for a reading concerning Theophilos. Given the generally dark portrayal of him in the Life of St. Theodora, this can perhaps be understood as a supplement to restore his reputation.32 The text is focused upon what can be described as Theophilos’ return

Markopoulos “<  :” 262; Vinson “Life:” 369–70. Markopoulos “<  :” 263; Vinson “Life:” 370–71. 28 Markopoulos “<  :” 263–64; Vinson “Life:” 371–73; Martha Vinson “The Terms 1 and  and the Conversion of Theophilus in the Life of Theodora (BHG 1731),” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 36 (1995): 89–99. 29 Markopoulos “<  :” 265–67; Vinson “Life:” 373–77. 30 Markopoulos “<  :” 266; Vinson “Life:” 376. 31 Markopoulos “<  :” 267–71; Vinson “Life:” 377–382. 32 Regel, “Analecta:” 19–39. 26 27

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to truth.33 In this regard it can be read as a continuation of one of the themes found in the rst two readings discussed above. The rst part of the narrative follows closely upon the account of Theophilos’ death and the restoration of icons found in the Life of Theodora.34 The story adds Theodora’s requests for forgiveness for her husband.35 Having heard these requests the Patriarch Methodios goes to Hagia Sophia to pray with other orthodox clerics, monks, and laymen.36 That night Theodora had a dream in which she sees Theophilos naked, beaten, and facing judgement before the Chalke Gate of the Great Palace. In her dream, Theodora appeals to the enthroned and awesome judge on behalf of her husband and the judge then forgives Theophilos.37 In the meantime, Methodios, having completed his prayers, inscribed Theophilos’s name in a volume that listed all the iconoclasts and then placed this beneath the altar cloth of the high altar in Hagia Sophia.38 Having done this, Methodios went to bed and there dreamed of an angel. This angel tells Methodios that Theophilos has been forgiven. On hearing this, the Patriarch then hastens to Hagia Sophia where he nds that Theophilos’s name has already been removed from the stillsealed book.39 Thanks to these two visionary interventions Theophilos’ absolution is assured. It is only then that the orthodox are able to celebrate the rst Feast of Orthodoxy.40 These two narratives provide a history of the formation of the feast itself. While they do not enter into precise accounts of the icon and its worship, they offer models of good and bad behavior in regard to images. These show the society surviving heresy and the restoration of due order. The narratives also draw the audience’s attention to the second phase of iconoclasm. Leo III, Constantine V, the Patriarchs Germanos and Tarasios do not feature in the list of those condemned or praised. Rather those that shaped the icon question in the ninth century take the attention. By these means we see the commemoration of iconoclasm become oriented toward its later phase and the denitions that arose then. In this regard, it is notable that the Synaxarion for

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Regel, Regel, Regel, Regel, Regel, Regel, Regel, Regel,

“Analecta:” “Analecta:” “Analecta:” “Analecta:” “Analecta:” “Analecta:” “Analecta:” “Analecta:”

20. 21–32. 28–30. 31–32. 33–35. 36. 36–37. 37–39.

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the Evergetes monastery does not include a celebration of the Seventh Oecumenical Council.41 The monks in the Theotokos Evergetes would then have listened to two theoretical texts regarding icons. The emphasis in both is on the veneration of images. The rst of these has its origin in the rst phase of iconoclasm. This is identied in the Evergetine text as the letter of Gregory Dialogos to Leo the heretic. This can be identied as one of the two letters written by Pope Gregory II (715–31) to the Emperor Leo III (717–41).42 While the authenticity and dates of composition of these letters has been much debated, it is evident from the manuscript tradition that both were available to an eleventh-century audience in the form that they have come down us. The two letters present a lengthy defense of icon veneration. The rst letter begins by expressing Gregory’s surprise at Leo’s critique of holy icons.43 He then touches on some of the themes prevalent in the early defense of icons. First, Gregory rejects Leo’s literal reading of the second commandment’s prohibition of divine images, suggesting that Leo ought to be aware of the tradition of Christian interpretations of this text, which has argued that the commandment was only directed at false idols and not legitimate Christian images.44 Second, Gregory noted that the incarnation had changed our means of knowing God, hence: “Having seen the Lord, as they have said, they painted his form (N81 = O+, !P (8 ' Q6).”45 Third, Christians were not deceived into worshipping matter when they prayed before images, as they did not adore the stones, walls, or boards that conveyed images, rather—following Basil the Great—worship was

41 The Horos of the Seventh Oecumenical Council was, however, to be read in Hagia Sophia on October 11th: Juan Mateos, Le typicon de la Grande Église, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 165 (Rome: Ponticium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1962): 66–67. 42 Jean Gouillard, “Aux origines de l’iconoclasme: le témoignage de Grégoire II?” Travaux et Mémoires 3 (1968): 243–307; H. Grotz, “Beobachtungen zu den zwei Briefen Papst Gregors II. an Kaiser Leo III,” Archivum Historiae Ponticiae 18 (1980): 9–40; H. Grotz, “Weitere Beobachtungen zu den zwei Briefen Papst Gregor II. an Kaiser Leo III.,” Archivum Historiae Ponticiae 24 (1986): 365–75; H. Grotz, “Die früheste römische Stellungsnahme gegen den Bildersturm (Eine These, die es zu beweisen gilt),” Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum 20 (1988): 150–61; H. Michels, “Zur Echtheit der Briefe Papst Gregors II. an Kaiser Leon III.,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 99 (1988): 376–91; Alexander Alexakis, Codex Parisinus Graecus 1115 and Its Archetype, Dumbarton Oaks Studies 34 (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks, 1996): 108–10, 119–23. 43 Gouillard, “Origines:” 277.3–279.29. 44 Gouillard, “Origines:” 279.30–281.68. 45 Gouillard, “Origines:” 283.69–285.109, esp. 283.91–92.

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addressed to the ones represented there and was conveyed to them by means of homonymy.46 Fourth, images are benecial to mankind as they provoke a love of God when the narratives of Christ’s life continue to be seen in them.47 The letter then recounts the destruction of the icon of Christ Antiphonetes at the Chalkoprateia church, using this instance to underline the bad reputation that Leo had gained by his attacks on images.48 The letter then reports Leo’s threats against the Papacy should they fail to support his policies.49 The second letter reiterates several themes in the rst. Images, for example, are said to edify those that look at them and thence lead them up towards God.50 In addition, Gregory asks Leo to maintain the traditions and the state of the church that he had inherited. This leads Gregory to devote the greater part of his letter to an argument for a strong distinction between the roles of the emperor and the bishops in formulating doctrine.51 The second more theoretical text was a catechetical homily written by Theodore of Stoudios.52 This introduces a few themes that were prevalent in the second phase of the iconoclastic dispute. Theodore begins by addressing the dispersed Stoudite community, exiled because of their resistance to the renewed iconoclasm of the ninth century.53 He then argues that those who do not accept images cannot know Christ.54 A point predicated on the belief that an icon commemorates and afrms the visible aspect of the incarnation. Theodore then condemns those who are willing to accept images, but who refuse to venerate them.55 This appears to have been a compromise position proffered by the iconoclasts in the early years of the second phase of iconoclasm. The letter of the Emperors Michael II and Theophilos to the Emperor Louis the Pious raises this possibility.56 In response, Theodore argues that such iconoclasts deny the logic of representation, which would demand

46

Gouillard, “Origines:” 287.121–37. Gouillard, “Origines:” 289.153–291.166. 48 Gouillard, “Origines:” 293.218–295.235. 49 Gouillard, “Origines:” 295.236–297.275. 50 Gouillard, “Origines:” 301.310–11. 51 Gouillard, “Origines:” 301.316–303.366. 52 Theodore of Stoudios, Parva Catechesis, ed. Emmanuel Auvray (Paris: Victor Lecoffre, 1891): 53–57. 53 Parva Catachesis: 53.1–54.13. 54 Parva Catachesis: 54.13–15. 55 Parva Catachesis: 54.16–22. 56 Mansi 14: 422 for the letter. 47

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that an image receives the worship that is appropriate to the person represented therein.57 Indeed, he adds, images should be considered to be better than relics in dening a relation to the holy: “How much better is it to honor and venerate the icon of Christ, on which, as in a mirror, he is himself manifest and venerable. For it is the nature of the icon itself to convey the one represented according to form (1R  K 7  1 ./  6  36, ’ S, T  1R, 1  @ 1 1   3+  * + $ U6  1 = Q1  ’ F8 ).”58 This last denition, which reminds the audience of the formal relation between an icon and its subject, is a typical expression of an understanding of icons that was claried by the iconophile fathers of the ninth century. Finally, Theodore urges his ock to live a proper monastic life and thence receive their rewards.59 These texts offer authoritative testimony to the main lines of iconophile doctrine. These distinguish an image from an idol while retaining value for the material icon as a means of conveying visual witness to the incarnation. The nature of the relation between an icon and its subject was carefully described. The icon portrayed the formal particularities of its subject, thus establishing a relation that was mediated by a common likeness and a common name. This relational model of representation then necessitated that worship was also to be described as relational. Following the singing of the Trisagion Hymn the monks would nally hear the text of the Synodikon read from the ambo.60 The consistency of this text is suggested by a mid-eleventh century recension that apart from some brief references to the context of its delivery clings closely to the core of the Synodikon as it has come down to us. This is a homily on the Feast of Orthodoxy attributed to Patriarch Michael I Keroularios (1043–1058).61 The composition of the text dates after the death of

57

Parva Catachesis: 55.30–34. Parva Catachesis: 55.39–42. 59 Parva Catachesis: 56.58–57.70. 60 The Synaxarion does not specify this, but this was the normal moment for reading the synodika produced by the church councils that were commemorated in the liturgy: Gouillard, Synodikon: 6–7. 61 PG, 120.724A–736C. Discussion at Gouillard, “Synodikon” 20. Gouillard’s text provides a few improved readings of this earlier edition: lines 1–183, 753–762, and 767–770. Since the publication of Gouillard’s edition a German translation of a Georgian version of the primitive Synodikon text has been published. The Georgian text belongs in a complitation formed in 1028: Michael van Esbroeck and Nural 58

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the Empress Zoe in 1050 and before the death of Constantine IX Monomachos in 1055.62 This witness allows us to glimpse the text prior to the changes that began to be made to it in the second-half of the eleventh and to which we shall return later in this study. What the text betrays is an understanding that Orthodoxy has its origins in the correct interpretation of Christ’s icon. The text of the Synodikon read before the monks of the Evergetes monastery reiterates an understanding of the icon that was formulated at the end of the iconoclastic era. It is not a lengthy statement, running to some 170 lines in the modern edition, but it is rich in the ideas it embraces. The Synodikon immediately marks a link between the material and the spiritual church when it begins by proclaiming a new founding of the church.63 This is expressed by borrowing themes from Gregory of Nazianzos’s homily In novam dominicam.64 This renewal is not limited to the fabric of church buildings, but must also embrace all the activities performed within the church.65 This restoration was necessitated by the thirty-years of iconoclastic rule that had dishonored the cult offered to holy icons.66 This chronology reminds us that the Synodikon was concerned with the second phase of iconoclasm, encompassing the reigns of Leo V (813–20), Michael II (820–29), and Theophilos (829–42). The Synodikon then asserts the equivalence of icons and homilies as means of knowing the Christian understanding of salvation: “the great work of economy is made known by means of both verbal homilies and iconic figurations (8  13 6+    , 3 , 8’ V =      W & 3  ).”67 This brief phrase touches on two key issues in discussion in the ninth-century. The rst of these was the relative value of visual and verbal knowledge. The iconoclasts had argued that images were an insufcient means of knowing the divine, as they could only describe external appearances and so could not offer more than a

Karadeniz, “Das Synodikon vom Jahre 843 in georgischer Übersetzung,” Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum 19 (1987): 300–313. 62 PG, 120.732D. 63 Gouillard, Synodikon: 45.1–3. 64 For example there are echoes of this homily (PG, 36.608–21) at Gouillard, Synodikon: 45.4–5, 11–19, 47.38, 46–47. 65 Gouillard, Synodikon: 45.7–9. 66 Gouillard, Synodikon: 45.20–47.23. 67 Gouillard, Synodikon: 47.27–28.

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supercial knowledge. In response, the iconophiles argued that images were an essential proof of the reality and fullness of the incarnation.68 This then leads to the second issue raised in this phrase, which is the relation between icons and the economy of salvation. Iconoclasts had offered a very spiritual and verbal account of salvation, in which the words of the Gospel narrative were to impress themselves upon the heart of the believer and raise them towards their salvation. Iconophiles argued that such a model ignored the importance of the incarnation as a moment when such salvation became assured. Icons were thereby presented as having particular value as a record of the fact that Christ was incarnate as a particular and individual human and thus served to afrm this new reality.69 Both the verbal and visual knowledge of Christ were also understood to provide ethical assistance to those listening or seeing. As we have just seen, iconoclasts had privileged words as the medium that could best guide Christian behavior. For iconophiles, on the other hand, it was the icon that provided the best model for humans to imitate as they offered a condescension to our corporeal nature and the somatic ground of our knowledge.70 The Synodikon then develops this interest in the icon’s relation to the body by proposing that icons and their subjects both share in the wounds inicted on either. The narrative of the Beirut icon has already prepared such a possibility. It clearly implies a close relation, if not an identity between icon and subject. A point that is further underlined by the claim that the wound suffered by the icons should be deemed a form of second martyrdom.71 The precise nature of this relationship is discussed later in the text. Having made these points, the initial conclusion drawn is that it is thanks to such images that Christ’s sufferings and those of his saints become available to us for us to see.72 By these quick steps the Synodikon is able to make the point that images are a legitimate means of Christian knowledge. They

68

Barber, Figure and Likeness: 61–81. The importance of this point for the ninth-century iconophiles is particularly well articulated by Ken Parry: Kenneth Parry, “Theodore Studites and the Patriarch Nicephoros on Image-Making as a Christian Imperative,” Byzantion 59 (1989): 164–83. 70 Gouillard, Synodikon: 47.30–31. The ethical function of images was much discussed in the period of iconoclasm: Barber, Figure and Likeness: 131–35; Milton Anastos, “The Ethical Theory of Images Formulated by the Iconoclasts in 754 and 815,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 8 (1954): 153–60. 71 Gouillard, Synodikon: 47.32–38. 72 Gouillard, Synodikon: 47.44–47. 69

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are intimately tied to the incarnation and are a necessary and specic means of understanding the continuing implications of this event. The precise grounds for this brief denition are elaborated in a series of blessings and anathemas that address particular topics regarding the denition and cult of images. These are carefully ordered so that the audience can understand the precise steps taken in the unfolding of this doctrine. The text begins by praising those who know that the Logos became incarnate and who profess this by verbal and visual means.73 In offering this praise, the Synodikon draws the discussion immediately to Christ’s incarnate manifestation and the manner in which this can be described in words and images. The rst anathema reiterates this, but emphasizes the particular value of images as witnesses to the incarnation. Hence, it condemns those that claimed to accept verbal witness of the incarnation, while denying visual witness. Those professing this opinion are said to be denying the reality of salvation.74 This point is extended in the second blessing, which praises those who understand fully the Christological implications of this incarnation. These implications are then introduced succinctly. Christ’s human and divine essences are understood to be distinct within his one hypostasis. The presence of these two essences mean that Christ is always dual, being both created and uncreated, visible and invisible, passable and impassable, limited and unlimited. Of these, the uncreated and similar terms apply to his divine nature, while the limited human nature is professed in both word and images (M 8? ! H +   D  = =  +  1R     ).75 This returns us to the proper role of the verbal and visual in that we are reminded that they are able to offer a positive account of Christ’s human nature alone. On the other hand, the Synodikon condemns those that overemphasize the uncircumscribability of God in its application to Christ. In the view of the iconophile authors they should be condemned for not admitting the fullness of the incarnation in the esh.76 A third and fourth blessing follow upon this point by offering praise for different but equivalent experiences of word and image. Once again, homilies and icons are treated as interchangeable means of imparting knowledge as there is praise for those who proclaim words in writing or 73 74 75 76

Gouillard, Gouillard, Gouillard, Gouillard,

Synodikon: Synodikon: Synodikon: Synodikon:

49.61–62. 55.138–141. 49.63–67. 55.141–144.

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deeds in venerable images and vice-versa, and also for those who preach by means of words and conrm the truth by means of images (# 31  8633  X Q  Y 13   , $    %6 ,    Z 3& 7 [* '  8$ 1 '3  7 8’  1  6!    ). As can be seen, slightly different operations are given to word and image. Images are equated with the representation of deeds and are also granted the role of afrming the truth of what is imparted by verbal means. This interest in imparting both value and difference to these media was a particularly important aspect of the ninth-century discussions.77 The text then draws attention to the somatic aspect of the delivery and acquisition of such knowledge. It blesses those whose lips are sanctied by holy words and whose words sanctify those listening to them. In a similar manner, those who know and proclaim that icons sanctify the eyes of those who look, elevating the mind to the knowledge of God, should be blessed ( 81   631 T 8$ # #  1 @   \Q ? $ ]  # @,  8? 8’ # @ / = ! ). By these means, both the ears and the eyes are granted value as conduits that allow for both the reception of information and for initiating the ascent of the mind towards God. While icons are offered as a primary vehicle for such an ascent, the Synodikon also notes that spiritual knowledge can also be attained through the images found within the divine churches and on the sacred vessels and other holy objects.78 The Synodikon then turns to the relation between the forms of knowledge available in the worlds of the Old and New Testaments. This is introduced when a blessing is offered to those who distinguished between pregurative types for the Virgin Mary, such as the staff of Moses, the tablets of the law, the ark and the menorah and the actual Virgin who was born a woman and chose virginity after the birth of Christ. The reason given for this blessing was that it was better to portray the corporeal Mary than types that were unlike her ( 8$ / K 16 7 &     1 ^ & +

77 Charles Barber, “The Body within the Frame: A Use of Word and Image in Iconoclasm,” Word and Image 9 (1993): 140–53 and then Charles Barber, “Mimesis and Memory in the Narthex Mosaics of the Nea Moni on Chios,” Art History 24 (2001), 323–337. 78 Gouillard, Synodikon: 49.68–75.

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+).79 A distinction is thus drawn between a symbolic and an iconic knowledge. This point is taken further when the text praises those who accept prophetic visions of God as an authentic iconic experience. This had particular value in that it helped to establish the possibility of a visible deity in the usually aniconic religion of the prophets. The iconoclasts were anathematized for having accepted the textual record of such visions, while denying the possibility of iconic depictions of such pre-incarnational iconographies as Ezekiel’s vision that have derived from these accounts of visions. On the one hand, the iconoclasts had argued that the Old Testament visions, which were manifest as images or gures or delineations, were of the invisible essence and so could not be reproduced in the material medium of an icon (’ ^ 7  6 7 _61   1   `! & !  /, ^  1 ? /  6!   +  %'   ! & Z%1 3!  ,  & 8? !' = a1  $ b? 9 # / !6  %  ). On the other hand, the iconophiles felt that such experiences provided a precedent for and continuity with the depiction of the incarnate Christ and his passion, while the iconoclasts denied this possibility.80 As such the Synodikon then offered a condemnation of those that were willing to accept the validity of verbal prophecy, but were unwilling to accept the representation of the incarnation that had been seen.81 This series of statements on the Old Testament show that the play of word and image has remained in question, with the iconoclasts strongly privileging verbal testimony and the iconophiles arguing that visual witness both follows upon and exceeds such verbal grounds.

79

Gouillard, Synodikon: 49.76–51.81. Gouillard, Synodikon: 55.145–150. Theophany was a subject of some interest in the second phase of iconoclasm. For example, Methodios included a lengthy discussion of this topic in his Life of Euthymios: Jean Gouillard, “La vie d’Euthyme de Sardes (d. 831),” Travaux et mémoires 10 (1987): 75.771–98. Notable discussions on this topic include: André Grabar, L’Iconoclasme byzantin: Le Dossier archéologique, revd. ed. (Paris: Flammarion, 1984): 252–69; Jacqueline Lafontaine-Dosogne, “Théophanes—visions auxquelles participent les prophètes dans l’art byzantin après la restauration des images,” Synthronon. Art et archéologie de la n de l’antiquité et du moyen âge (Paris: Bibliothèque des Cahiers Archéologiques, 1968): 135–43; Jean Gouillard, “Art et littérature théologique à Byzance au lendemain de la querelle des images,” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 12 (1969): 1–13; Leslie Brubaker, Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzantium: Image as Exegesis in the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999): 281–307. 81 Gouillard, Synodikon: 55.151–158. 80

the SYNODIKON OF ORTHODOXY and the ground of painting

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The Synodikon then blessed those who accepted one of the traditional arguments in support of icons. This was the common supposition that a written and an unwritten tradition existed. This assumption allowed the church to develop practices and doctrine that were not self-evidently present in the Biblical text. For iconophiles the icon was a part of this long unwritten tradition. Indeed, much of the Seventh Oecumenical Council had been devoted to this question.82 In contrast, the iconoclasts had argued that the written tradition had specically disallowed the representation and veneration of God and his saints in images.83 The concluding blessing and anathema offer quite different nal notes. The blessing is offered to those who could distinguish between that which had been forbidden by the Law and that which was now possible thanks to Grace. This distinction is presented in primarily visual terms with the Law being associated with invisible knowledge, Grace with the visible. Here, the visible is strongly privileged.84 The nal anathema was laid against those that continued to be iconomachs (or Christomachs) and had thus continued to reject a tradition that reached from the prophets to the present church. These iconomachs are deemed to be beyond the pale, having allied themselves with Jewish and Pagan thought. Furthermore, they are reminded that the harm they do to images is a harm done against the one depicted there.85 This lengthy account of the meaning and performance of the Synodikon of Orthodoxy allows us to reconstruct some of the reiterated stories and concepts that annually prepared this monastic audience for an understanding of the icon. What they heard, until the insertions that began in the second half of the eleventh-century, was a document that was specically rooted in its ninth-century origins, commemorating the thirty years of persecution prior to its rst delivery in 843.86 This underlines the point that when the Patriarch Keroularios delivered his homily on the Feast of Orthodoxy he was not presenting an account of images that was the product of the mid-eleventh century, rather he

82

As recently reiterated in Ambrosios Giakalis, Images of the Divine: The Theology of Icons at the Seventh Ecumenical Council, revd. ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2005): 22–50. A useful discussion of the question concerning written and unwritten tradition can be found at: Kenneth Parry, Depicting the Word: Byzantine Iconophile Thought of the Eighth and Ninth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1996): 156–65. 83 Gouillard, Synodikon: 51.82–86. 84 Gouillard, Synodikon: 51.87–97. 85 Gouillard, Synodikon: 55.159–170. 86 Gouillard, Synodikon: 47.40–43.

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presented words and concepts that were probably written by the Patriarch Methodios (843–47).87 In the rst instance, then, the performance of the Synodikon was a reiteration of an understanding of the icons that was written at the end of the iconoclastic era itself. In the course of this study we shall see that this should not lead us to assume that this was an anachronistic event, commemorating ideas from a distant past. The Synodikon not only summarized the fundamental understanding of the icon, but, thanks to the additions that began to be made to the document in the course of the eleventh century, was clearly also a living text engaged with contemporary denitions of correct belief. The Synodikon text has, therefore, maintained the currency of a core understanding of the icon. The text reminds its audience that icons were not idols. Rather, legitimated by Christ’s incarnation, they served as witnesses to and records of the reality of Christ’s historical life. Furthermore, while such images had the potential to become the site for the manifestation of miracles, the material object was not itself deemed to be holy. To avoid any confusion between the material image and its subject the text proposes a relationship, mediated by likeness and homonymy, that both connects and distinguishes the icon and that which it portrays. In a similar manner, the veneration brought to bear on an image was considered to be a relational activity that led from the icon to its subject and did not imply an adoration of the material object itself. The terms used to dene and to describe the icon reiterate a ninth-century understanding. This had been most fully articulated by such theologians as the Patriarch Nikephoros and Theodore of Stoudios. Their signicance is underlined by their being represented together in an image of the iconoclastic council of 815 that dates to 1066 (g. 7). Both theologians had brought the logical categories of Aristotle to bear on the image question. In so doing, they not only denitively altered the discourse on icons but also established a fresh ground for theological practice in Byzantium. The central role of art within this system is perhaps best shown by a canon produced by a church council that met in Constantinople in 869–70. Sometimes called the Eighth Oecumenical Council, this meeting produced some of the last statements on the long running period of iconoclasm.88 One of these was the seventh canon that had declared:

87 88

On the question of authorship see Gouillard, Synodikon: 157–58. Barber, Figure and Likeness: 114–115.

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21

Setting up holy and venerable icons and teaching the similar disciplines of divine and human wisdom are very benecial. It is not good if this is done by those who are not worthy. For this reason no one is to paint the holy churches who has been anathematized by what has been decreed, nor to teach in a similar place, until they have turned back from their deceit. Therefore, if anyone after our declaration were to allow these in whatever manner to paint holy icons in the church or to teach, if he is a cleric he will endanger his rank, if he is a layman he will be banished and deprived of the divine mysteries.

Here, painting, theology and philosophy are placed on the same plane and are subject to the same policing. The Synodikon of Orthodoxy helped to dene the precise terms by which the painting of a sacred subject could convey the truth. It presented the icon as an embodiment of human knowledge. As a made thing, detached from its subject, the icon was understood to encompass that which was possible for human understanding. As such knowledge was built upon the visible, a point re-asserted by the condescension of the incarnation itself, and therefore the icon had to become the primary space for the description of human understanding.89 When one looks at an icon, it is the face of the subject that looks back at one (g. 1). It is this body perceived by the viewer’s body that marks the bounds of understanding. Throughout the texts above, we have seen that the icon is closely equated with the body. This not only provides its ground, but also its limits. In this instance, the icon presents a depiction of Christ. This describes the particular human aspects of his incarnate person. These open a relation that links the painting and its subject, but does not admit the confusion of these distinct entities. The icon, as a product of human thought and capacities, is bound to these origins and limited by them as the visible both circumscribes and prescribes the horizon of human knowledge. Further, given the icon’s 89

148.

Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta, ed. P.-P. Ioannou (Freiburg: Herder, 1962):

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centrality to the description of Orthodoxy as well as its manifestation of the human horizon, any conceptualization of the icon that differed from the narrow prescription set forth above could be conceived as a fundamental challenge to traditional belief and thence traditional order. In what follows, we shall see that this narrow denition provoked a desire to exceed its narrow connes, an abyss of excess that overows the painting’s frame and human perception. It is here in this abyss that the disquiet that marks the eleventh-century discourse on art found its point of departure, namely in that which is always masked by the coming-to-be of the visible object.

CHAPTER TWO

SYMEON THE NEW THEOLOGIAN: SEEING BEYOND PAINTING When a blind man gradually recovers his sight and notices the features of a man and bit by bit ascertains what he is, it is not the features that are transformed or altered into the visible. Rather, as the vision of that man’s eyes becomes clearer, it sees the features as they are. It is as though they wholly imprint themselves on his vision and penetrate through it, impressing and engraving themselves, as on a tablet, on the mind and the memory of the soul. You Yourself became visible in the same manner when by the clear light of the Holy Ghost You had completely cleansed my mind. Thence seeing more clearly and distinctly, You seemed to come forth and shine more brightly, and allowed me to see the features of Your shapeless shape. Having said these things You became silent and little by little, O sweet and good Lord, You were hidden from my eyes; whether I became distant from You or You departed from me, I know not. I returned once more wholly into myself and entered into my former dwelling, whence I had thought to have left. When I recalled the beauty of Your glory and of Your words, as I walked about, sat down, ate, drank, and prayed, I wept and lived in an indescribable joy, having known You, the Maker of all things. How could I have failed to rejoice? But I again fell into sorrow and so desiring to see You again, I went off to embrace the spotless icon of the one who bore You and having bowed down before it, You became visible to me within my wretched heart before I could stand up, as if You had transformed it into light, and then I knew that I knowingly have You within me. Therefore from then onwards I loved You, not by recollection of You and that which surrounds You, nor for the memory of such things, but I in very truth believed that I had You, Substantial Love, within me. For You, O God, are love indeed.1

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This evocative passage is found in the Second Thanksgiving written by St. Symeon the New Theologian. It offers a rich and quite precise account of this monk’s experience of spiritual vision. The passage’s signicance lies in part in the importance of Symeon, who was the key voice for a new model of monastic spirituality that developed in the late tenth- and early-eleventh century in the monasteries in and around Constantinople. Central to this new spiritual economy was the belief that it was possible for one to experience God while still in this world. Visual metaphors frame this experience, giving rise to a rich analysis of vision, such as can be found in the text quoted above. Yet, given this interest in visual experience, it is notable that one of the most striking features of Symeon’s writings is the very limited place granted to the

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37

he starts to become used to the light, and his original astonishment begins to recede . . . the rst man comes to learn through the sun’s light that he has been conned from birth and lives in a gloomy prison. From that little bit of light, he begins to sense the existence outside of certain wonderful things, but he is unable to reason out or understand what in truth they are. Whenever, though, it happens that he is released from his jail, then he comes to the light together with everything and everyone who dwells within it. Even so, picture with me the one who is now released from the bondage of the body’s needs and, for a while, comes to be altogether outside the world and the wretchedness of visible things. Further, picture this whole world as being in fact a dark and lightless prison, and the light of our sun as like that of a little lamp, while outside there lies the inexpressible and ineffable light of the Sun in Three Persons, the light which transcends word and thought and every created light. The things in the world which are lit by that sun are both invisible and unknowable, ineffable and unsearchable, for everyone who inhabits our prison . . . In seeing heaven both day and night, the soul is taught from it, and every day learns from it that it is without evening, innite, and inexpressible. Returning to this prison again the soul no longer desires the world, but longs to see once more that other place and that which it contains.

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In this important passage, Symeon both underlines the visual ground of knowledge—it is through sight that the prisoner engages with the world—and undermines the value of the visible. For he portrays the prisoner’s advancement to self-knowledge as an overcoming of the visible world and the discovery of the pure illumination that lies beyond, a “light that transcends word and thought and every created light.” It is an image of heaven that surpasses reason and that provokes, upon the prisoner’s return to this world, a profound longing. The prisoner must then discipline himself to maintain this experience as a new permanent condition of his existence:3233

32 33

Traités: 298.364–302.415; Golitzin, On the Mystical Life, vol. 1: 76–77.

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And, when he has thus further persevered so that, little by little, he becomes used to the light and lives as if he had always been within it, then, if I may put it so, that which follows may be reckoned as this: he both sees and knows, is initiated into and taught wonders upon wonders, and mysteries upon mysteries, and visions upon visions. And if he were to want to write them all down, there would not be enough paper nor ink to sufce him. I think that he would lack the time even to tell of these things in any detail. Indeed, how could he in any case write down what cannot be spoken, but which is entirely inexpressible and ineffable? Now, as in the light or—better—as united with it, and as no longer in ecstasy, he instead comes to perceive himself and what is his own. He sees his neighbors as they are in their own right. He knows and predicts that, when he comes to depart this prison and, in particular, after the general resurrection, he will also look upon that unwavering light as it is, and that all the good things within it “which no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love Him,” will be revealed to him the more clearly through the same light within him now and by which he is illumined. We shall not be deprived then of knowing or seeing, but, as we have demonstrated above, according to the measure which each has of the radiance and vision of the light, both the knowledge and vision of God, and the recognition and knowledge of one another shall grow ever greater and more clear in joy inexpressible and rejoicing forever and ever.

Traités: 302.424–304.448; Golitzin, On the Mystical Life, vol. 1: 78.

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Conditioned by the possession of divine light, the prisoner has now come to know himself, the things of the world and divine things. Such knowledge cannot be communicated, it can only be possessed. This is understood to be a visual experience, but is not to be confused with the perception of visible things. Needless to say, it has not gone unnoticed that this text bears a remarkable resemblance to Plato’s famous allegory of the cave in the Republic.34 While the extent of Symeon’s direct engagement with Plato’s text is hard to judge, it can be suggested that Symeon’s echo of such a famous passage was an attempt to dene his own account of human knowledge by means of a familiar example. Like Symeon, Plato has placed his men in a subterranean cavern. Plato’s is a more complex space. For example, it is open to the light along its entire width. Unlike Symeon, Plato positions his prisoners within an elaborate staging. These men are only able to look at what is immediately in front of them. There they see the shadows cast by puppets that have been illuminated by a light burning behind the prisoners. They see nothing of themselves or of each other. Hence, Plato concludes that: “in every way such prisoners would deem truth to be nothing else than the shadows of the articial objects.”35 This experience conditions the knowledge that Plato’s prisoners might obtain. Hence, if one of Plato’s prisoners were to be freed from his bonds and was thus able to see the illuminated objects themselves, he would be at a loss as to what it was that he was seeing and would remain dependent upon the prior knowledge obtained from the cast shadows to describe the newly seen object. Given this condition, Plato believed that the prisoner would probably seek to return to the “comfort” of his bonds and the cast shadows. Thus both Plato and Symeon use the cave to describe the conditions of knowledge in this world. For both of them, it is a limited space that needs to be left behind. For Plato, the prisoner must be forced to ascend from the cave before rst looking into the light and thence becoming accustomed to its brilliance. Step by step he could progress from shadows to reections to the

34 Golitzin, On the Mystical Life, vol. 1: 74 n. 5. The secondary literature on Symeon has, however, not explored this signicant echo of Plato’s cave in any depth. My reading of this text and Plato’s have been inuenced by Martin Heidegger, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 155–182. 35 Republic 515b–c.

symeon the new theologian: seeing beyond painting

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things themselves. A process of formation, akin to what can be termed an education, achieved this knowledge of things on the earth and in the heavens. Finally, this prisoner would be able to look directly at the sun, the source of the light, and so understand its nature as a manifestation of the Good. In contrast, the light of illumination is made available to Symeon’s cave dweller from the beginning. Thereafter, the prisoner must become acclimatized to this light, adapting to its unchanging nature. For Symeon, this light was that of the Creator. As such it pervaded everything and was prior to and beyond the material light of Plato’s sun. Finally, when Plato follows his prisoner back to the cave, he is left doubting whether his fellow prisoners could understand this man’s mode of seeing, for he had changed, while they had remained in the shadows. While Plato wished that his prisoner could return and guide his fellows, Symeon deemed the experience of the light to be solitary, exclusive and incommunicable. At the heart of both accounts is the formation necessary for the acquisition of truthful knowledge. For Plato such knowledge had its origins in the Good, which was the origin of all things, including reason and truth: And if you assume that the ascent and the contemplation of the things above is the soul’s ascension to the intelligible region, you will not miss my surmise, since that is what you desire to hear. But God knows whether it is true. But, at any rate, my dream as it appears to me is that in the region of the known the last thing to be seen and hardly seen is the idea of good, and that when seen it must needs point us to the conclusion that this is indeed the cause for all things of all that is right and beautiful, giving birth in the visible world to light, and the author of light and itself in the intelligible world being the authentic source of truth and reason, and that anyone who is to act wisely in private or public must have caught sight of this.36

To achieve this vision, Plato’s prisoner must turn from the shadows to light and thence learn to see its object: Then, if this is true, our view of these matters must be this, that education is not in reality what some people proclaim it to be in their professions. What they aver is that they can put true knowledge into a soul that does not possess it, as if they were inserting vision into blind eyes . . . the true analogy for this indwelling power in the soul and the instrument whereby each of us apprehends is that of an eye that could not be converted

36

Republic 517b–c.

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chapter two to the light from the darkness except by turning the whole body. Even so this organ of knowledge must be turned around from the world of becoming together with the entire soul . . . until the soul is able to endure the contemplation of essence and the brightest region of being. And this, we say, is the good, do we not?37

For both Symeon and Plato, higher knowledge involves a transformation of the prisoner, who must become accustomed to the light that opens the objects of their vision to visibility. The knowledge that derives from this experience is built from two conditions. First, the one looking must adapt and change in order to see. Second, the thing seen makes itself available to sight. This conuence of adaptation and availability privileges the object of vision. It is this that determines the conditions of its being seen and therefore of its being known. For Plato, this is determined by the Good. For Symeon, it is God who delimits the boundaries of the visible. Correct vision, determined by its object, has thus become the means of accessing the truth. Granted these similarities, there are also key differences. For Plato, it was important that the prisoner returns with knowledge of the forms and attempt to disseminate these among his fellow prisoners. Symeon, on the other hand, offers no sense of such a possibility of educating his fellows. Rather, the experience of the light is conceived in very personal and incommunicable terms. It cannot be expressed and in an important sense, cannot be a communal knowledge. Instead, each prisoner must await his or her own personal illumination. The path to this illumination also diverges from that proposed by Plato. For Plato, the prisoner, once released from their chains in the prison, must be forced into becoming accustomed to the light. This is a form of education, whereby the prisoner learns and changes so that he might come to understand this light. While, for Symeon, this turning is brought about by penitence. This is less an acquisition of knowledge and rather more an emptying of the self, such that the penitential act opens the human body of the prisoner, so that it might receive the divine vision and accept the conditions of this unveiling. Once this process has been successful, then all vision and all knowledge are subsequently altered. This difference of preparation inserts a distinctively monastic theme into the narrative of the allegory. Symeon’s concern in all his discourses

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Republic 518b–d.

symeon the new theologian: seeing beyond painting

43

is with the preparation of a monk to receive the kind of divine vision that Symeon had himself received. A key aspect of this preparation was the process of penitence: “hurry to cleanse it [the soul] and wash its spiritual eyes and face with hot tears.” The persistance of the penitential path suggests a second cave that might have inuenced Symeon’s Allegory of the Prisoner. One of the formative texts for Symeon the New Theologian was the seventh-century Ladder of Divine Ascent written by John Klimakos.38 This was a key spiritual text in Byzantium and was popular among lay and monastic readers.39 The fth step of the ladder, a chapter entitled On Penitence, offers a visit to another cavernous prison. In graphic detail, John describes the self-inicted torments of those within the cavern. The purpose of this is dened in the following manner: Repentance is the renewal of baptism and is a contract with God for a fresh start in life. Repentance goes shopping for humility and is ever distrustful of bodily comfort. Repentance is critical awareness and a sure watch over oneself. Repentance is the daughter of hope and the refusal to despair. (The penitent stands guilty—but undisgraced.) Repentance is reconciliation with the Lord by the performance of good deeds, which are the opposites of the sins. It is the purication of conscience and the voluntary endurance of afiction. The penitent deals out his own punishment, for repentance is the erce persecution of the stomach and the ogging of the soul into intense awareness.40

It is notable that this is one of the most heavily illuminated sections of an eleventh-century manuscript of the Klimakos text produced in the Stoudios monastery in Constantinople. This visual emphasis underlines the signicence of this penitential theme for the Stoudite community and its conception of proper monastic practice.41 The manuscript in question is Vatican gr. 394 and it can be dated to the later eleventh

38 Symeon read a copy of this work that was held in his parent’s library. He cited it extensively in his writings. 39 Charles Barber, “Icons, Prayer, and Vision in the Eleventh Century,” Byzantine Christianity, ed. Derek Krueger (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006): 160–163. 40 Climacus, Ladder: 121. 41 Penitence has been helpfully discussed at Irénée Hausherr, Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1982). Stoudite spirituality is introduced at Irénée Hausherr, Saint Théodore Studite: L’homme et l’ascète (d’après ses Catéchèses), Orientalia Christiana Analecta 22 (Rome: Ponticium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1926).

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century.42 Between folios 41v and 48v there are nineteen images of penitents in a monastic prison.43 If we look at the images on folio 42r (g. 9), we can be drawn into the imaginary world of this monastic space. The text on this folio describes two different groups of prisoners: Others raised their eyes to heaven, wept, cried, and implored help from there.44 Others prayed with their hands tied behind their backs, like criminals, their faces blackened with grief and bent earthward, since they thought themselves unworthy to look up to heaven. Overcome by their reections and the weight of conscience, they could not speak, could not pray to God, could not even make a beginning of prayer; and lled, as it seemed, with darkness and empty despair, they could offer God only a blank soul and a wordless mind.45

These texts and their accompanying images offer a spectacle of abasement. The goal offered by Klimakos for these monks was that they should purify the senses through their acts of penitence.46 As such the prison functions as a key monastic site for overcoming our present sensible conditions. Central to this operation is penitence, and central to penitence is the economy of tears. As such, we are returned to the eyes. The centrality of penitence for Symeon’s visual economy is brought forth by the role of tears. We have already been introduced to this in the First Ethical Discourse. There, Symeon asks that his reader cleanse the passions from his heart by washing his eyes and face with hot tears. For Symeon, it is Adam who embodies the play of vision and penitence. The gift of life to Adam was mediated through his eyes (g. 10). Here in this image from the Stoudite Theodore Psalter, completed in 1066, we see God reach down and touch Adam’s eyes. This is the moment of his animation, when the soul enters his material body. Since the eyes were granted such a central place in the Creation, they remained

42 John Rupert Martin, The Illustration of the Heavenly Ladder of John Climacus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954): 47–87 and 177–81; Kathleen Corrigan, “Constantine’s problems: the making of the Heavenly Ladder of John Climacus, Vat. gr. 394,” Word and Image 12 (1996): 61–93. Note also Henry Maguire’s important discussion of sorrow in Byzantine art: Henry Maguire, “The Depiction of Sorrow in Middle Byzantine Art,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 31 (1977): 123–74. 43 These were to become the basis for the later distinct illustration of the penitential canon: Martin, Illustration: 128–49. 44 Climacus, Ladder: 122. 45 Climacus, Ladder: 122. 46 Climacus, Ladder: 131.

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crucial to the imagery of the Fall. The tears that Adam weeps as he sits outside Paradise, seen here on an ivory plaque from Baltimore (g. 11), mark our present condition.47 His weeping marks the loss of the sight of God that had been available to him from the moment of Creation. In Paradise he had been with God and had seen and conversed with God. Outside of Paradise’s gates, God was to become a distant and hidden voice mediated by angels and symbols. The tears shed on leaving the Garden of Eden thus mark this loss. At the same time they also introduce the penitential quality of human existence and the path of return to the sight and presence of the divine. The value of the eyes for this visual economy of salvation is exemplied in Symeon’s Hymn 53.48 The hymn, probably written after 1009, opens with an exchange of looks. The author invites Christ to look upon him. This is necessarily prior to Symeon’s ability to look at Christ:49 €+7    6 +   4 7 S  F   T #4   &- , .  ! .49

Shine on me even now as before and illumine my soul, enlighten my eyes to see You, Light of the world.

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Why do You hide Your face? Why do You separate Yourself from me, O my God, who never wish to be separated from those who love You?

Sight thus becomes a means of reassurance, assuring one of a mutual presence. This economy of common yet orderly vision is underlined by this description of the saints:

47 Henry Maguire, “The Panels from Adam and Eve Caskets,” in The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era A.D. 843–1261, ed. Helen C. Evans and William D. Wixom (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997): 234–36. 48 Symeon the New Theologian, Hymns of Divine Love, trans. George Maloney (Denville: Dimension Books, nd): 267–73; Symeon the New Theologian, Hymnes 41–58, ed. Johannes Koder, Sources Chrétennes 196 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1973): 212–235. 49 Symeon, Hymns: 267; Symeon, Hymnes: 212.7–10. 50 Symeon, Hymns: 267; Symeon, Hymnes: 214.18–21.

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With them You share and seeing them You are seen by them in turn.

Christ’s51response is to deny that he has separated himself from man.52 Rather, Christ, who was light before all creation is everywhere and in all things.53 The nature of this presence is then examined:54 -    ?$F % &-  3N & S0, " &-  + 9, 6   M$ !0,  0  % ) +, K0  n  " %$. :_   N - , … ) 3N -,    %  0 S , p Y, S 9.68

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If you do not see Him, know that you are blind and, though you are in the midst of the light, you are completely lled with darkness. He shows Himself to those who are worthy of it. They do not see the One who lls everything but they see Him in an invisible manner, as a unique ray of light, and for them He is perceptible, He the imperceptible by essence. It is the ray that we see —He, the sun, blinds instead— and its ray is perceptible for you, as we have said, in an imperceptible manner.

Hymnes II 194.86–196.102; Hymns 115. Here we might note the similar description of vision offered by Plato in the section of the Republic that immediately precedes, and indeed prefaces, the allegory discussed above: Republic VI.18–19 (507C–509B). 68 Hymnes II 202.226–204.239; Hymns 118. 67

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Thus, those that are worthy, are able to see God by means of a ray of light that is both perceptible and imperceptible. This experience is highly individualized and surpasses both the material and intellectual levels of perception:69 †[ & 9 @?9 + 9  ! ! @   %3N . + 9  & . *  9F !0 ' L+3 .69

And he who sees Him, outside of everything, is alone with the Alone and he sees nothing of all the visible and intellectual things. It is the Trinity alone that he sees.

Having thus limited and elevated this visual encounter with the Trinity, Symeon then returns to the double nature of human vision:70 c.  3  B+  3 T @ T ‡, A0 T  4 , 6 3 . M$9 ` 9  3  9  64 9, A0   0  , ˆ A , 6  $00  "   K9 @W. PA 3N A0  N , 0  %3. 3N …, M' + + 9.70

Know then that you are double and that you possess two eyes, the sensible and the spiritual. Since there are also two suns there is also a double light, sensible and spiritual, and if you see them, you will be the man as you were created in the beginning to be. If you see the sensible sun and not the spiritual sun, you are really half dead.

Here Symeon argues that man has both an intellectual and sensible capacity. If he exercises both as fully as he ought, then he will be like Adam. But if he only sees the sensible sun, then he is limited, almost lifeless. As is clear from these quotations, Symeon deploys oxymoronic language to police a paradoxical knowledge.71 Hence, we nd the following passage in the fourth Ethical Treatise:

69 70 71

Hymns II 216.425–429; Hymns 122. Hymns II 218.448–458; Hymns 123. Fraigneau-Julien, Sens spirituels: 109.

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Having been made rich with Him, they shall see invisibly the inexpressible beauty of God Himself. They shall hold Him without touching. They shall comprehend incomprehensibly His imageless image, His formless form, His shape without shape which, in sight without seeing and in beauty uncompounded, is ever varied and unchanging.

By these means Symeon continually challenges the limits of human knowledge, bringing attention to that which is beyond the ordinary boundaries of our perceptions. By keeping both the intelligible and the sensible in play, Symeon succeeds in delineating and disrupting the connes of sensible experience. This dualism pervades his discourses. When it is brought to bear on the senses themselves, Symeon argues in the Third Ethical Discourse that the different knowledges mediated by the senses need to be both superceded and brought to some unity by the intellect working within a divine order that organizes them:72 $ Y0 @9  / 7 U  ‰  !D, A   . 3$R  )  ) +   ,  N 9  3 .   3 0 3 9 AS9, u    9  0 '  3$ ,   % % S,  3’ %  M 7 S, 8 9 3N  4   #0   0  U ]U 3$ . ’P 3N )   ) %   $ AS9 3)  +R , %  R0 )  T #T  A3) u  . ` 9 +, %3N Š  ! A3?, %3N `0 - A  #?9 #$F %3N 3)  9 *  0  '    *   &  3+, %3N .

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[Man] possesses a single perception in a unique soul and intellect and reason. While this perception is divided up ve ways according to the physical necessities of the body, it manifests its activity by changing unchangeably, such that it is not sight which sees, but the soul which sees by means of sight, and the same holds true for hearing and smelling, for tasting, and for distinguishing by touch. With regard to spiritual matters, however, the soul is no longer obliged to discern through the windows of the senses. It no longer seeks to open the eyes in order to see or contemplate some existing thing, nor the ears in order to admit discourse. Neither does it require lips or tongue in order to distinguish

Eth. II 68.856–70.861; Mystical Life 2.39.

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sweet from bitter, nor hands in order to know by means of them what is rough, or soft, or smooth. Rather, perception goes outside all of these and is gathered together wholly within the intellect, as being naturally consequent upon the latter and inseparably one with it. To put it more precisely, it possesses the ve senses within itself as one rather than several . . .Therefore, when the one God of all appears in revelation to the one and rational soul, every good thing is revealed to it and appears to it at one and the same time through all is senses. He [God] is both seen and heard, is sweet to the taste and perfume to the sense of smell; He is felt and so made known. He both speaks and is spoken. He knows and is recognized, and is perceived as knowing. For the one who is known by God knows that he is known, and he who sees God knows that God sees him. He who does not see God, however, does not know that God sees him, in that he does not see, though he may see everything else and miss nothing.

Thus while sensible perception is unied by the soul following its mediation by the ve senses, intelligible perception is singular and beyond the sensible domain. Thence, its object, God, unies this spiritual perception.73 It is apparent from the texts discussed above that sight was foremost among the senses for Symeon.74 He builds this point from an understanding that knowledge begins with vision. It is an assumption that embraces both the things in the world and divine matters. Hence: “There is no other way for anyone to know about God unless it is by means of the contemplation of the light which is sent by Him.”75 The reason for this is that:

73

Eth. I 400.153–404.197; Mystical Life 1.122–123. This point is discussed at length in the Fifth Ethical Discourse: Eth. II 96.224–106.354; Mystical Life 2.51–56. 75 Eth. II 98.254–257; Mystical Life 2.52. 74

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God is light and the vision of Him is as light. Thus, in the vision of the light there is knowledge rst of all that God is, just as in the case of a man there is rst hearing about him, then sight of him, and with the sight of him the knowledge that the man about whom one has heard does in fact exist.

For76Symeon such a gift of vision opens divine presence in the world. This light is understood to be unmediated. A point that is underlined when Symeon offered a comparison of the knowledge of God with the knowledge of man. God is only known by the immediate vision of divine light, while in the case of a man vision serves as an afrmation of a knowledge rst introduced by verbal means. This distinction is important, as can be seen when we now turn to the second major account of an icon that can be connected to Symeon. This was not written by the New Theologian, but was given a central place in the Life of Symeon written by Niketas Stethatos. The icon appears toward the end of Niketas’s account of Symeon’s lengthy dispute with Stephen of Nikomedia, which culminated in debate over the proper status of an icon of Symeon’s spiritual father, Symeon the Pious.77 The events that precede this debate begin with the death of Symeon the Pious in 986 or 987.78 Soon after this date, and prompted by divine inspiration, Symeon initiated a cult of this father. This consisted of the normal trappings for the cult of a saint: a feast day marking Symeon the Pious’s death, encomia written in praise of the man, hymns sung in his honor, a biography, and an icon.79 When the popularity of the cult had brought it to the attention of Patriarch Sergios II (1001–1019), he invited Symeon the New Theologian to explain the basis for his devotion. Symeon presented him with his writings on Symeon the Pious. Once these were read and approved, the Patriarch undertook to send candles and incense on the feast day of the holy man. The cult and

76

Eth. II 100.276–279; Mystical Life 2.53. Hausherr, Vie de Syméon: 98–128. This is examined at length in: Barber, “Icon and Portrait” from which this section of the chapter is drawn. 78 For an introduction to the life and writings of this gure see Hilarion Alfeyev, Syméon le Studite, Discours Ascétique, Sources chrétiennes 460 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2001). 79 Vie de Syméon: 98. 77

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all its trappings thereby received Patriarchal sanction at the start of the eleventh century, perhaps in 1001 or 1002.80 In 1003 Stephen of Nikomedia, a synkellos in the Patriarchate of Constantinople whose particular province was to advise the Patriarch on theology and teaching within the church, challenged this new cult before the Holy Synod. Two related issues were discussed at this meeting. First, Sergios II criticized Symeon for having allowed the cult to become excessive. Signicantly, Sergios noted that while the celebration of Symeon the Pious had become popular, the status of the holy man, even granted the existing Patriarchal sanction, remained open to question. Given this, the Patriarch asked Symeon to limit the cult to the precinct of his own monastic community. Stephen of Nikomedia elaborated on this point. He claimed that Symeon the New Theologian had wrongfully proclaimed “a sinner, his spiritual father, a saint among saints.” In response to this double charge, Symeon said little regarding the specic nature of the holiness of Symeon the Pious. As we shall see, silences play signicant roles in the narrative of these events. Symeon focused upon the question of an excessive cult. Using a series of Biblical and Patristic quotations, he argued that the practice of veneration was an important Christian act as the honor directed towards his spiritual father was passed on through him to Christ. Furthermore, Symeon contended that the cult was benecial, as it provided in the person of the saint a model of holiness for those that participated in it.81 Niketas presents this second trial as a victory for Symeon, even though it appears to result in a re-privatization of the cult of this particular saint. Furthermore, while this meeting did not specically address the role of the icon in the cult, the issue of the saint’s holiness was to return as a crucial turning point in the distinction between the icon of a holy man and the portrait of a beloved forebear. At the end of 1008 Stephen of Nikomedia persuaded the Holy Synod to return to this matter. This time, the icon itself was made the central issue in the dispute. Immediately preceding the trial, renegade monks from Symeon’s own community had taken the icon of Symeon the Pious from the church of the monastery of St. Mamas, Symeon the New Theologian’s monastery. They brought it to the patriarchal

80 81

Vie de Syméon: 100. Vie de Syméon: 112–118.

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palace and there subjected it to a remarkable visual test. The icon was compared to images of other saints and of Christ himself. This action implies that, in a very specic manner, they were trying to provide a visual test to dene whether Symeon the Pious could literally be seen to be “a saint among saints.” Unfortunately, the participants in this examination could come to no rm conclusion. One party felt that Symeon could indeed be imagined among these saints, while a second party argued that the icon did not in fact show a saint. This difculty is important for the narrative being constructed by Niketas, as it reiterates the disputability of human knowledge. Since the matter remained unresolved after this act of comparison, the icon was then brought before the permanent patriarchal synod.82 The Life then jumps to Symeon’s defense of the icon and its cult. This is largely a recapitulation of his earlier case, but with the icon inserted as a point of reference. Hence he argued that it was not only important to honor the saints, but also to honor them through their icons. The notion of the “saints-as-models” introduced in the rst trial is similarly given a more precise visual framing when, for example, he notes that he also painted the saint on the walls of his monastery as a “model and archetype of virtuous conduct.”83 Once he has made this more visually oriented case, Symeon then turned to the icon itself and prays before it in these terms: Saint Symeon, thanks to the participation of the Holy Spirit you have come to resemble the icon of my Lord Jesus Christ. Following a long struggle, you are dressed in the brilliant garb of the passionless. You are bathed in your own tears, which in their abundance are like the waters of baptism. You bear Christ within yourself, whom you have loved, and who loved you so very much. You whose holiness, which equals that of the apostles, was revealed to me by a voice from on high, come now to my defense. O wretched me, who is on trial for your sake. Bring me the strength that I need to struggle on behalf of you and your image. Or rather on behalf of Christ, as he has taken upon himself all that is ours except sin, and takes upon himself, being God, all the affronts and mockery that men do to us. Until I also will share in the glory that you have already had in this life; as I witnessed when I was shown you standing at God’s right hand. A glory that you among all the saints deserve even more now.84

82 83 84

Vie de Syméon: 120. Vie de Syméon: 124. Vie de Syméon: 124.

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Following this prayer, Symeon falls silent. Without any reported argument and without any resistance, Stephen of Nikomedia then simply walked up to the icon and erased half of the inscription that named the saint. As one would expect in a post-iconoclastic icon, the saint was named on his icon. This would have read: [ ]$ ƒ , literally “The Holy Symeon.” Stephen removed the rst part of this, leaving only the personal name, “Symeon.” The portrait was then returned to Symeon the New Theologian. The following day, he was sent into exile, his homilies and hymns on the holy man were banned from public performance, and all other icons of Symeon the Pious were destroyed.85 While this narrative tells us a great deal about the formation of a cult around an icon and the person it presents, it is even more important, in the context of this chapter, for the manner in which it illustrates the fundamental distinction between the thought world represented by Symeon the New Theologian and that of Stephen of Nikomedia. Stephen’s role in this text is to embody the style of theology that Symeon is seeking to overturn. Stephen can be dened as a scholastic theologian. As such he deploys Aristotle’s logic to the analysis of language in order to perfect human description and therefore knowledge of holy things. Symeon rejects this model. Where Stephen offers discourse, Symeon falls silent. In so doing, he discloses one of his fundamental assumptions. Namely, that the knowledge of divine things is ineffable. They might be experienced, should one open oneself to such a participatory experience, but such experience cannot be communicated. Furthermore, Symeon believed that those who attempted to describe and dene divine things could not even begin to do so unless they had rst experienced the mystery of the divine. In the case of this icon of Symeon the Pious we can witness Stephen of Nikomedia applying a traditional conception of the power of language to designate an human understanding. This has been suggested in the text from the Third Ethical Treatise quoted above. But Symeon does not accept language’s power to designate. He is silent because the experience of Symeon the Pious’s holiness cannot be transmitted by graphic means, whether visual or verbal. Niketas’s text reminds us that Symeon the New Theologian made use of icons, even though he rarely discussed them. This use falls into traditional patterns. The icon provides a focus for prayer as well as a

85

Vie de Syméon: 126–128.

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visible model of holiness. Yet, as was seen at the start of this chapter and also in Symeon’s lack of defense for the icon of his spiritual father, Symeon sought something more than was possible from the man-made icon. If we now return to the evidence for the use of icons by Symeon we can understand the terms of this rst encounter a little more. Symeon has looked at the icon in the hope of recovering the original vision of Christ that is now lost to him. While the immediate object of vision is an icon of the Theotokos, Symeon’s actual experience is of Christ alone. This distinction between the visible object and the visual experience once again reinforces the point that what we see is that which is given to us to see rather than that which we choose to see. The point is summarized in this passage from the First Thanksgiving:86 L   M-  Q  +, 3$. ’;9 3N M.    , %  6  !  K * $3 & K  $3 @  * '  $  K?  9  %  9U  M- +R . ’; .; ’P U , ' QF Q 3N %  S  *   , "   S D  0+D  !D 9 9  ] 3$ —%3N    A) *

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Symeon, Cat. III, 320.196–322.211.

Brothers, these are the wonders of God toward us! When we ascend toward the More Perfect, the shapeless and formless appears to us, but not as previously shapeless or formless, nor does He silently bring forth in us the presence and the coming of his light. But how is this so? In a certain shape, a divine shape nevertheless. God is not in a drawing or a representation, but has taken shape in an incomprehensible and inaccessible and shapeless light—about which we are unable to say or evoke any more. He shows Himself as He is and makes Himself knowable in an altogether conscious manner. The invisible One, lets Himself be seen in full. Invisibly He speaks and listens as friend to friend, face to face. The One who is God by nature converses with the gods born of Him by grace. He loves his sons like a father and is loved by them. He becomes to them a thing strange to see and even more awesome to hear, no longer being able to be expressed by them and not wanting to be buried in silence.

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Symeon’s writing, while celebrating the possibility of divine vision, contains a profound critique of the limited quality of human vision and knowledge and the iconic culture that is produced in relation to these. Icons, as man-made things, are bound by these limits and so are not able to participate in Symeon’s visual economy of the divine. The writings of Symeon the New Theologian have bequeathed a very rich account of mystical vision. In examining this Christian visual experience, Symeon develops a strong distinction between the human and the divine as they exist in themselves and in each other. Symeon seeks to recover man’s original condition, understood as being a state of being with God. This was known by means of sight. But here Symeon drew a distinction between spiritual and material vision. Both were possessed by man in Eden. However, spiritual vision, the means by which one might see God, was lost at the Fall. Man was left with the limited possibilities of material vision and the visible world. While God might be present in this world, he was not visible there. This condition could only be overcome by divine intervention and was signalled by an experience of formless light. The formless, immaterial, and inexpressible quality of this light removes it from the realm of the visible that can be represented in an icon or conveyed by language. Thus the monk does not look at an icon and thence ascend to that which lies behind it. Rather, he disregards this manufacured object and opens himself to receive a visual experience that lies beyond the visible limits of the given icon. Clearly, then, while Symeon privileges visual experience, his understanding of this must lead him to limit the value of the all-too-human icon.

CHAPTER THREE

MICHAEL PSELLOS: SEEING THROUGH PAINTING Therefore on one occasion he set up her [the Theotokos’s] icon before him and having looked at it earnestly, he spoke to her with the voice of the Archangel saying both parts of the “Hail.” And in this manner he shaped a rhythmic song of praise, so that while he looked at the divine icon (and now trembling and astonishment have seized me) she changed completely into her eshly nature. And then when she rst gazes upon him with her eyes, O awesome countenance and voice and such gracious eyes, she speaks gently, whispering softly through her lips: “Hail you as well, father!” With a calm soul he said: “Hail! For I see you, the cause of joy!” If someone does not believe these things, I might not argue. But, if one might be disposed to accept this [account], one should not stop at this [acceptance]. Rather, [one should] imitate the virtue of the man and yearn for his dispassion, with which, or by means of which, one might achieve these things. For the struggle and exertion better enable one to conquer nature, to rise up above struggles of all kinds until one sees the divine visibles. When this has been achieved, one speaks with the higher things, for then while the mind has contemplated the unchanging, the corporeal eyes have received the manifestations of the divine. There is nothing that spirits embedded in matter are more anxious about than being separated from matter (which is the outcome of these actions). Hence, they that come near and act spitefully to us are clothed in the complete darkness of matter. For as long as we are in the esh we are in the middle of extremes, the material and the intellectual, and are neither purely intellectual nor purely material; for something is contributed to us by each of these. As we are a mixture of the intellectual and the material it is necessary that our actions be in accordance with God. For if we cease to act in this way, then we will not achieve the city of the living God, and shall be cast into the furnace of re. But if we are satised with ignorance, we might see light, but replete with deceptions and trickery. Rather, we ought to be in divine darkness whence the light without dissimulation and the truth shine. For the intellect has revealed that what is in the body is neither wholly natural nor material, for the burdens that are united to this [body] disclose the assaults, like the stalk and the husks and the beard [disclose] the corn. The devil does not remain distant from spiritual vision. For the devil knows that that which is in the material, is that from which he gains his power.1

1

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The above text is taken from an Epitaphios written by the philosopher Michael Psellos for Nicholas, the deceased Abbot of the Monastery of the Beautiful Source on Mount Olympos in Bithynia. The text perhaps dates to 1055, when Psellos endured a brief and unhappy monastic life on Mount Olympos. This Epitaphios is much more than a commemoration of the deceased abbot, as it also serves as a kind of manifesto for Psellos’s belief that philosophy could be brought to bear on Christian theological problems and practices and thence lead to a more intellectually rigorous monasticism. As such, his thought and writings stand in marked contrast to those of Symeon the New Theologian. When Psellos states: “But if we are satised with ignorance, we might see light, but replete with deceptions and trickery” we should understand this to be a reiteration, in opposition to Symeon, of his belief in the value of intellectual preparation for a proper understanding of spiritual experience. The story of Nicholas’s prayer can also allow us to begin to dene how Psellos’s accounts of icons exemplies his wider intellectual project. The story occurs in the part of the text that discusses Nicholas’s rst

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