Gazing on God: Trinity, Church and Salvation in Orthodox Thought and Iconography 9780227902493, 9780227174463

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Gazing on God

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Gazing on God Trinity, Church and Salvation in Orthodox Thought and Iconography

Andreas Andreopoulos

C James Clarke & Co

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To Tom O’Loughlin my Latin brother

James Clarke & Co P.O. Box 60 Cambridge CB1 2NT United Kingdom www.jamesclarke.co [email protected]

ISBN: 978 0 227 17446 3

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A record is available from the British Library Copyright © Andreas Andreopoulos, 2013 First Published, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this edition may be reproduced, stored electronically or in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Publisher ([email protected]).

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Contents

List of Illustrations Introduction: The Perspective

6 7

Part One: The Theology of Experience 1. Faith and Experience 2. Logos 3. Christ and the Trinity 4. Time, Space and Eternity in the Liturgy

15 24 32 39

Part Two: An Icon Exhibition 5. Icons: The Way to the Gaze of God 6. The Crucifixion 7. The Descent into Hades 8. The Protection of the Theotokos 9. The Life-Giving Fountain 10. The Burning Bush 11. The Bogolubskaya 12. The All-Seeing Eye of God

59 62 72 82 92 102 113 121

Part Three: Holding the Gaze 13. After the Icon Exhibition 14. Towards a Meta-Linguistic Theological Methodology

133 137

Referenced Works and Suggested Further Reading Index of Persons Index of Subjects

155 158 159

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List of Illustrations

The Crucifixion Antonis Fragkos, St George, Livartzi, Greece, 2000 (Image used by permission of Antonis Fragkos, © 2000)

63

Crucifixion and Resurrection scenes Rabbula Gospels, late sixth century

71

The Resurrection Chora monastery, Constantinople, fourteenth century

73

The Protection of the Theotokos Greek, twentieth century

83

The Life-Giving Fountain Argokoiliotissa, Naxos, Greece, nineteenth century

93

The Burning Bush Russian, nineteenth century

103

Bogolubskaya Mother of God Russian, nineteenth century

115

All-Seeing Eye of God Russian, nineteenth century

123

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Introduction: The Perspective

It is hard to know how to talk about modern Christian spirituality. Firstly, it is difficult to find and maintain a balance between the two extremes of academism and of pietism. A valid view must rely on a combination of the learning and the critical understanding that can come through a rigorous examination and a continuous engagement with the sources, but also of the ultimately pastoral orientation of Christianity. The task of the theologian, the priest and the writer, is always to address both of these concerns at the same time. Theological learning and understanding have something to say, but it is necessary to keep them in balance with what makes them important for our prayer and our spiritual life. This balance is as difficult as the question of how we understand and interpret our own experience. We face an additional difficulty when we realise that the West is not as homogeneous, in terms of religion, as it has been in the distant past, and therefore it is possible, and even necessary, to consider several different Christian traditions that exist in parallel. It is not possible to speak of Christianity in general anymore, if what we have in mind is the specific Christian tradition that passes through Augustine and Aquinas and considers exotic, or perhaps irrelevant, Christian traditions of equal or greater sophistication and equally faithful to the Biblical message, such as the strands that may be associated with Maximos the Confessor and Gregory Palamas, or Ephrem the Syrian and Severus of Antioch. Since now we have a much wider political, historical, cultural, and philosophical view of the ancient and medieval Christian world than we did forty or fifty years ago, it is necessary to compose a different picture of the sources of our immediate Christian experience and spirituality in the West. Nevertheless, this wider and more complex overview of Christian tradition brings forth some new problems. It is one thing to try to have a broader view of Christianity, and another to benefit spiritually

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from the various strands of the early Church, which along with a somewhat different theological and philosophical vocabulary, also developed a different set of expectations regarding the way worship is practised. Although in most parts of the UK for instance, we will not be able to discern a huge difference in the style and the experience of worship between a Roman Catholic and an Anglican community, this is not true for the rest of the Christian world. The Copts, the Greeks, the Armenians, the Arabs, the Russians, the Ethiopians, have developed quite diverse rituals of worship within the Christian tradition, at least if we compare them to the relatively narrower band of the Western liturgical experience. It is amazing how powerful the way of worship is, and for this reason it is useful to see that it offers a constructive perspective in church matters. The Greek and the Coptic Church have been formally separated for more than fifteen centuries, and yet, their mutual styles allow them to recognise their beliefs and their spiritual principles much more directly in each other, and much more effectively than what we see in the more philosophical relationship between the Latin West and the Greek East, although the latter is a more recent separation. Yet, because of the liturgical similarity between Greek and Coptic Churches, it is possible to hear several voices in each, for whom the formal union and the restoration of communion between these two traditions (at least if by ‘Greek East’ we mean the entire Orthodox world, which initially used Greek rather than Latin) is perhaps not an unattainable task. And yet, it is not possible to speak about experience in an abstract way. We refer to ideas and imaginary situations that do not originate from a specific and tangible expression of the Christian faith. In the same way there is no such thing as an average, generic human being, it is not possible to speak about spirituality without connecting it with the specific background that defines its expression. The statistically average human being is half male and half female, s/he is of mixed race (in fact all races), and speaks a language that includes words from all languages. Nevertheless, this is not the way we would speak about the human condition. Human beings are individual, they have a culture and a language, they have grown up in a neighbourhood, and they fell in love with a specific human being, someone who may have grown up two streets down. It is through these particularities that we can envision the universal condition of humanity. Likewise, I cannot speak about the spirituality of experience without referring to my own experiences and my own background. It is necessary to speak using my own language, and to refer to my

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Introduction: The Perspective

9

own experiences, and to speak about Christianity as I experienced it growing up, as a child in a medium-sized Greek town neighbourhood and as I still experience it, as a priest in an English town. Therefore what I offer here is based on and it expresses the experience of the Orthodox tradition, and it is offered without prejudice against other traditions. Nevertheless, it is not helpful to think of the human condition as a field that gives legitimacy uncritically to any idea that is planted in it, as if it is not possible to approach critically views and ideas that have originated elsewhere. In other words, while we may all come to a dialogue carrying our own particular cultural, spiritual and psychological luggage, and while it is necessary to try to understand each other’s background and trajectory, we should be able to assess critically other cultures, as we can our own. This is especially relevant when we talk about Christianity, a spiritual tradition with a universal claim. While it is certainly possible to explore its spiritual connections with other religions, and to find similar moral principles among them, in the end it will not be able to avoid the question of the divinity of Jesus Christ. Therefore, it is not possible to speak about the universal condition of the human being from a spiritual point of view, without respecting the central questions that define the various spiritual traditions. It is not possible to reconcile the identity of the Christian and that of the Muslim, the Jew or the Buddhist, because each one of them is based on a very different idea of who (or what) God is, and how we understand the meaning of salvation. For instance, it is undeniable that there are fundamental differences between the Jewish and Christian ideas about the divinity of Christ. You either believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, or you do not – there is no in-between position on this. Perhaps this alone is not so difficult to understand, but the issue becomes more complex when we take a look at the differences of the various Christian groups. Can we say that their differences are irreconcilable, and that to try to address them is futile? Or, conversely, could we say that the differences among the various Christian confessions are inconsequential and artificial, and it is their destiny to form, once again, the One and Undivided Christian Church? I am afraid that these are not simple or easy questions to answer. Although most Christian confessions acknowledge in various degrees the importance of Scripture as well as of the Tradition of the early Church, the spiritual or moral teachings we gain from the text are not the same. Even more importantly, the various ways to

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understand salvation and how to achieve it can differ dramatically. It is hopeful, and yet quite naïve to think that all Christian groups will one day discover that they have been proclaiming the same thing all along, using slightly different expressions, mostly because of cultural misunderstandings – even if it is true that many of the divides among Christian confessions follow linguistic and cultural alienations. Nevertheless, any long-term ecumenical view includes the need to recognise and transcend concepts that are trapped in a single culture or language. This may not automatically bring down all the boundaries across Christian confessions – it might even lead to greater disagreements on occasion. Nevertheless, it is not possible to envision a Christian theology with a serious and constructive ecumenical outlook that does not try to identify the message of the Gospel beyond its immediate cultural context. In other words, it is a useful exercise in ecumenical theology to try to express the experiences that we have acquired locally, in a global context. If one of the principles of the environmentalist movement of the 1970s was to “think globally, act locally”, perhaps for the purposes of ecumenical understanding and dialogue we can adapt it to think as if we have already overcome our cultural, linguistic and historical differences, think as if we have solved as many theological differences as it is ever possible to solve, and thus we have returned to a Church that understands itself as the same in all parts of the world, and then speak from personal experience, trusting that the local and particular expression of Christianity will be accepted in good faith, because it will resonate with any other genuine attempt to approach God. There are inherent difficulties with the ‘branch theory’ of Christianity, which render it unconvincing. I find the idea of different parts of the Truth in different parts of the Universal Church even more problematic. The problem with these views, in my opinion, is that they are based on a distorted understanding of salvation. Salvation, as the union with the Father in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit, is not meaningful if it does not refer to a complete union – and therefore to a complete spiritual healing of the soul and the body. To see how this would work in a different area, if we employed the branch theory in medicine for instance, we would never be able to cure anything, because only the entire body of all the physicians in the world would be able to gather the necessary knowledge and skill to cure something as simple as a stomach ulcer. Doctors from different traditions would possess only part of the knowledge necessary to heal – which is not the same as to have the same information expressed in different ways:

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Introduction: The Perspective

11

they would be restricted in their knowledge, as they would be able to view the problem from one angle only. Conversely, the mystery of the Church is that the entire Christ is completely present in every diocese, every parish, and every particle of the communion body.1 In the Patristic literature we find the image of Christ as the centre of an elaborate network that connects every human being with him. This image shows that there are as many ways as there are humans to approach him. The spiritual trajectory of each person towards Christ is unique and unrepeatable – as much as that person is unique. This image suggests that all of the particular human traits may have their place and they may play their role in salvation. It also suggests that in our way towards Christ these differences become gradually less important. However, if we could situate ourselves at the centre of this imaginary circle, with Christ, we would be able to observe and accept all these different trajectories. Perhaps this is something we learn to do as we proceed towards him. In this way, personal and specific experiences resonate more strongly than abstract, generalised ideas. It is easier for me to write taking a perspective beyond cultural boundaries, while being historically specific. My experience of Christianity begins with my experiences in the Orthodox Church, in a medium-sized Greek town. As a writer, I hope that my memories, my experiences and my reflections, expressed as they may be through their specific historical and cultural context, offer something that may be of interest to the Western reader. It is not my cultural or ethnic identity that I consider in the context of Christian theology. In many ways it is possible to move beyond them. Although many people think of Orthodox Christianity as an Eastern ‘import’, nowadays there is a good number of people who were born in the West and are not of Greek, Russian, Romanian extraction (or of any other traditionally Orthodox ethnic group). Moreover, an increasing number of Orthodox Westerners have not discovered their faith through conversion as adults, but have been born into it. Therefore, it is not satisfactory to still think of Orthodoxy as an Eastern import, whose main (if not exclusive) concern is to support immigrant communities from Eastern countries. 1 This idea is often associated with the Eucharistic ecclesiology of Metropolitan John Zizioulas, found in most of his books, such as Being in Communion (SVS Press, 1997), The One and the Many (Sebastian Press, 2010) and The Eucharistic Communion and the World (T&T Clark, 2011). Although the work of Zizioulas has attracted much criticism, it is hard to see an ecclesiological model that can replace it in modern Orthodox theology.

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Gazing on God

This means a few things for experience as a theological approach. The East has maintained the importance of worship through experience in a more obvious way: incense, bells, icons, gestures, vestments, candles, kneeling, all of those practices help us share in prayer with all our senses, and not just by recitation of prayers. And in this way, perhaps one thing that I would like to contribute to ecumenical dialogue as an Easterner, is the wish to take into account this experiential dimension of the Christian faith, which allows us to see faith itself as a reflection of the entire human being instead of our calculative reason only. I believe it can be beneficial for all Christians to be able to share the experience of what it means for them to live in the faith. Inter-religious and interdenominational dialogue cannot be only about theological formulas. We can certainly hope that one day we may achieve a deeper understanding of our Christian tradition and of our cultural limitations, which may allow us to engage in a critical and constructive friendly dialogue. Whether this happens or not, we can only offer our experiences, our views and even our objections to each other, hoping that at least we gain a richer understanding of the various ways that lead to God. This book is entitled ‘Gazing on God’, expressing precisely this wish. It reflects many journeys, personal and scholarly, some of which I shared with my students and with the students at the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts – which I thank warmly. In such journeys we desire to move towards God in order to see him, to hear him, to live and to participate in him. This is our own response to God’s love. In this journey we may discover that we need to change our expectations, and therefore admit that ‘understand’ or ‘know’ are too limited in front of the mystery of God. We may never be able to gaze on God completely, and grasp this mystery in its fullness. Hopefully however, by using whatever means we have in our possession that will help us in this journey, we may see that God is gazing on us instead. Always.

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Part One: The Theology of Experience

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1. Faith and Experience

We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life – this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us – we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us. And truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. (1 John 1:1-3). This is how John the Evangelist begins his first epistle. He goes on to talk about love, the Father and the Son, loving fellowship, and several other themes that are usual in his other letters and in his other writings. Right from the beginning of his letter, he gives us the foundation of his faith: instead of telling us that he has found convincing arguments that shed light to our theological and philosophical concerns, instead of recounting how he himself was convinced by the accurate and complete theological demonstration concerning the nature of God, which his teacher gave him, he simply tells us that his message reflects what he has heard himself, what he has seen with his own eyes, and what he has touched with his own hands. He repeats it immediately, stressing the fact that his message is based on direct experience, it is not what he or anyone else thought, but what he himself saw and heard. The Gospel according to John also begins with a similar plea. After the opening paragraph which announces to us that this book is written about the Logos of God who was from the beginning, and after he refers to the testimony of John the Baptist, who first recognised who Jesus of Nazareth really was, the author refers to his direct experience of the incarnated Logos: “the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Finally, when Peter and John were arrested by the Sanhedrin and

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were ordered to cease any teaching in the name of Jesus Christ, their response was simply “we cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard”. Here too, we see that instead of trying to engage in a dialogue with the theology of their time, they pointed to their direct experience, emphasised by the author of Acts in a very similar way as by John the Evangelist: through a reference to what they themselves had heard and seen. There are many other passages in the New Testament that demonstrate how important this empirical dimension was for the apostles themselves, as well as for the entire Church. It is impressive that this empirical foundation of the Christian faith persisted decades after the events. We can envision Luke, writing the history of the early Church starting with the birth of John the Baptist, and John the Evangelist, writing his Revelation, his Gospel and his epistles, in Ephesus or in Patmos, both of them in their late years, as they relived in their memory what had happened to them when they were young, and committing it to writing, so that their memory and their experience would not be lost. This does not mean that in the early Church we find no space for reading, thought, or the interpretation of signs and of Scripture – quite the opposite. There are several demonstrations of conversions that involve revelation through the study of Scripture, perhaps with most famous among them the case of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:26-40. Even so, his realisation and confession that he is unable to understand the revelation of Scripture without guidance from someone else, who would be able to bring an additional perspective to the text, casts all theological discourse and study since these days, in a precarious position. In other words, the Bible itself tells us that it is impossible to unlock its meaning without guidance from someone who, like Philip, had experienced the presence of Jesus Christ first. How relevant are these examples to us and to our age? To be a theologian nowadays is very different from the time when there was no distance between theology and prayer, when great ascetics such as Anthony the Great and Theodosios the Cenobiarch were known as Professors of the desert, and when Evagrios of Pontus encapsulated the experience of his monastic tradition with the often-quoted saying “if you are a theologian, you will pray correctly; and if you pray correctly, you are a theologian” (Treatise on Prayer, 61). By contrast, in the modern system, if you want to be a theologian, you need to prove this by pursuing studies in this direction. Three or four years of study after secondary or high school will give you the opportunity to obtain a Bachelor of Arts degree in Theology or Religious Studies,

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1. Faith and Experience

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a couple of additional years and the choice of a more specialised area can lead to a Master’s degree, and finally, if you wish to obtain a doctoral title, you need to write a dissertation that is almost 100,000 words long – incidentally, most doctoral students in my experience (and I was no exception when I was completing my PhD) are not worried about the minimum word count, but about the maximum of words they can squeeze in their dissertation, in order for them to say what they need to say. A rough calculation can show that the average student needs to write more than 200,000 words throughout all these levels of education, in order to obtain a BA, a MA and a doctorate in Theology or Religion. Also, depending on where you want to study and whether you intend to pursue a career as a priest after you graduate, your university may require you to spend a few years studying philosophy, before they let you go on with theology proper. In addition, if you take up a university position teaching theology, your university will require you to write and publish, write and publish, write and publish, not so much because they would like to keep your intellectual abilities and your skills active and honed, but because they’ll need to demonstrate to the government that it produces work – even if, from their perspective, quantity is preferable over quality. Where is faith in all this? Faith is not a requirement for a BA or a PhD in Theology, or even for a career in academic theology. Although perhaps it is not very usual, there are people with long and successful careers in the area of academic Christian theology, who are not sure whether they can consider themselves Christians at all – or even that they believe in God. But I do not wish to engage in a polarised polemic that pits faith against rationality, or to suggest that a statement of beliefs should be required along with your application to the BA in Theology. What is problematic however, is that modern theology understands and defines itself very differently from the theology of the early Church and the community that was founded by Jesus Christ, as we see it reflected in the Bible and in the Tradition of the Church. The letter of John or the chronicle of Luke and their emphasis on what “we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands” are alien to the methodology of modern theology. Instead, the way theology is studied and taught, is based almost exclusively on the way philosophy has been studied and taught for centuries. After all, philosophy and theology had a close coexistence for many centuries. Although in the Christian tradition we find ascetic figures for whom there is no distance between practice and theology; we also find learned theologians,

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who, absorbed the education and the philosophy of their time, stood up to the attacks of outsiders, and for this reason formulated the doctrinal background of Christianity. While such formulations followed the way and the methodology of philosophical exposition and argumentation, the Fathers who developed them were fully aware of the apologetic nature of doctrine. In other words, there is no such thing as ‘new doctrine’ in the early Church; doctrines were developed only as a response to problematic teachings that, in the eyes of the Church, threatened the unity of the Church, or endangered the way to salvation. Doctrines and teachings were not identified with the way to salvation and the Christian life.1 For this reason, we find no attempt towards a systematic exposition of the Christian faith until the eighth century, when the advances of Islam were felt not only at the level of military invasions, but also as a variety of views and ideas that confused the people who had no immediate access to the various Patristic writings. It is in that changing world that John of Damascus wrote his Exposition of the Orthodox Faith in the eighth century, which explained to his contemporaries the depth of their own faith. Even so, this approach strikes us as much more concerned with faith and salvation, rather than with the presentation of a system of ideas. In addition, although early theologians used philosophical terms such as ‘essence’, ‘hypostasis’, ‘consubstantial’, ‘apophatic’ and so forth, we can see that the way Christianity was practised was something that early Church councils deeply cared for, in addition to precision and correctness of doctrinal statements. Therefore, we can see that in what perhaps is the most important universal meeting of the Christian Church (because it established a template of such meetings that has been followed by all subsequent universal councils), the First Ecumenical Council that took place in Nicea in 325, after the representatives of the various Christian communities discussed the teachings of Arius and the divinity of Christ, they turned their attention to some other important matters, of no direct theological importance – or at least so it would appear from our philosophical/theological perspective: the date of Easter and how it would be calculated, and a somewhat surprising matter, which is recorded in the last of the canons that the Council left: the question of whether it is acceptable to kneel during the Divine Liturgy and 1 This point is developed by Andrew Louth in “Is Development of Doctrine a Valid Category for Orthodox Theology?” in Orthodoxy and Western Culture: A Collection of Essays Honoring Jaroslav Pelikan on His Eightieth Birthday, ed. Valerie Hotchkiss and Patrick Henry, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2005, 45-63.

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in the days between Easter and Pentecost. It is most likely that if the council had taken place today, such matters would have been approached through the lens of pluralism and diversity, which would leave such practical and liturgical matters largely to the discretion of the local communities, as long as an agreement on theological matters had been achieved. This is, of course, another way of saying that what we do does not matter as much as what we think. And yet, for the early Church the question ‘how do we worship God?’ was as important as the question ‘what do we believe?’. This became even clearer in the eighth century, when a series of councils, including an Ecumenical one, explored the legitimacy of the use of icons for worship. While it is true that this question attracted some of the best philosophical minds of its time, both among those who defended as well as among those who attacked icons, ultimately the entire debate shows that worship precedes rational thought: the debates came to justify or to modify something that had already become common practice. This is reasonable, for most people. When we worship God, we do much more than ponder philosophical expositions about him. Nevertheless, we cannot solely blame academic theology and the university system for this departure from the empirical revelation of the Bible. If we compare and contrast academic study with faith as it is often understood widely, we are not going to find much better results. Regrettably, the meaning of faith is not often interpreted in the same way that it used to be in Scripture and in the Fathers of the Church. Faith nowadays, more often than not, suggests the acceptance of certain arguments without the requirement of any proof – something quite similar to a mathematical axiom. In addition, a ‘good’ faithful is the one who receives the complete set of ideas without question, and serves it with the same dedication and enthusiasm that is found in the supporters of political parties. This ideal echoes the same blind and uncritical fanaticism that we saw in communist or fascist youth organisations. In this case we witness the understanding of faith as an ideology, which is a different expression of the same problem discussed above, of reducing faith to a rationalism of philosophy or of ideology. This identification of theology as philosophy (at best) or as an ideological system is a serious deviation from the life and the tradition of the early Church. A theological system or the formulation of a doctrine in many ways is an admission of failure, which becomes necessary when the way we live our Christianity is not self-evident, but requires authoritative interpretation. Of course, this was the case with the Christian Church right from the beginning. We can see

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sharp disagreements in the first Council of the apostles, when Paul and Peter argued forcibly, and defended two different directions that the young Christian Church might take. But whereas that council ended with an agreement for a common policy, the early Church defined itself by what it did and how the members lived their lives, how they related to each other and to the Church, and how they related to God. A certain mutual and wilful submission of every member of the Church to one another made their relationship a living and dynamic one – which is something we may say both about the relationship of the members of the Church with each other, and about the relationship of the whole Church with God. Things begin to change when the relationship of the members among themselves is weakened; it then becomes necessary to introduce doctrines and canons as objective parameters of their relationship with each other, and with God. This is precisely where rationalism becomes a problem for Christianity. Doctrine and canon emerge as objects. The living and dynamic experience becomes reified, independent of the faithful people. Faith, likewise, gradually becomes transformed into an objective rationalist system, which is the same for everyone, independent of people and of God. Subsequently, over the course of centuries, we see that non-rational expressions of faith are marginalised, or they are seen as unnecessary burdens of the pure message of the Rational Gospel.1 Yet, what we see in Scripture, in the early Church, and in the life of the Church even today, is an understanding of faith in very different terms. Not as a set of axioms or as a philosophical system, but as an invitation to a way of being, as an existentialist condition one might be compelled to say, and also, as the word itself suggests both in its Greek and its Latin roots (credo or πίστις), as an invitation to trust – to trust God, or those who handed down the faith to us, from the generation of the apostles. This condition – if we think of faith as a condition of existence – can only be holistic, and it needs to express itself and also to be nourished, by every possibility of human expression. This is where we return, from a different way, to the assertion of “what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands”. Faith in this context suggests a way of being that responds to the love of God. In the Gospel it is often associated with Peter, as in the 1 It is interesting however, that several major theologians of the twentieth century, such as Karl Barth, reacted against the increasing power of rationalism, and tried to reconcile faith and theology more strongly than the generation before them.

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narrative where Jesus walked on water, and then invited Peter to walk with him (Matthew 14:25-33). As we can see from this passage (and in most others where faith is mentioned in the Bible), the meaning is essentially to trust in God; entrusting one’s life to him, as in the steps of Peter on the water, until he became frightened and began to sink. This image is reminiscent of the child that learns to walk, and the father or the mother encourage him to trust them, to keep walking, to be assured that they will catch him if he falls, but nevertheless that he has to keep trying, otherwise he will never learn to walk. How can we describe the trust of the child in his mother? Certainly it would not be sufficient to picture it as a logical axiom or as an idea. In this case the child will try to do something that he sees the adults do. Peter, likewise, finds the strength and the composure to do what he saw Jesus do. He believes, because he saw with his own eyes, and not because he concluded rationally that he could do it. Once again, we return to the idea of experience as a source of faith. As we explore this experience, we need to be clear as to what constitutes a relevant kind of experience. There is a long tradition of not trusting one’s own ‘metaphysical’ experiences in the Christian tradition, especially in the ascetic tradition. As we see in the lives of the Desert Fathers, younger monks who have had visions have always been discouraged from reading too much into them. An experienced guide, whether a spiritual father, or someone otherwise experienced in matters of mystical theology, is always necessary. Perhaps nowhere else can we see this more vividly than in the case of Paul and his strong experience on the way to Damascus (Acts 22:611). Although much later he will be able to reflect on that moment and realise that he was given the experience of being in the presence of God, in a manner that words cannot describe (2 Corinthians 12:4), his immediate response was to seek guidance, to meet with Ananias and the body of Christians, and ask to be accepted by them. The spiritual experience that we find in Scripture and in the Fathers is always a shared experience. The experience of Christ is not given when one person extricates himself from the community, but only when two or three are gathered in the name of Christ (Matthew 18:20). The shared and common experience does not leave much room for self-delusion. Instead, it allows for the way of humility and submission of one to the other. More important, the shared experience is always in need of interpretation. Like the apostles on the way to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35), we cannot understand the experience and we cannot recognise the presence of Jesus Christ, unless he opens our eyes. That wonderful passage reveals two guides: first, the

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opening of the Scriptures (so that the apostles can see that they are all about Christ – in other words that the sole purpose of Scripture is to prepare us for the presence of Christ), and the breaking of the bread, the Eucharistic act which opens their eyes, even if Christ disappears from their sight immediately afterwards. There is something that allows us to see beyond the phenomena, and lets us see and experience things in a different way – or rather, to let us understand our experience in a different way. To be sure, going after an altered experience is a dead end. Several people unfortunately embark on an ascetic life, they take to heart the prayer experience of the ascetics of the desert, they study techniques of prayer that are connected with the visionary experience, and they hope that the way of prayer will lead them to an experience of the Uncreated Light, or of a private audience with Jesus Christ. This is misleading. Although there are certainly several testimonies of visionary experiences and experiences of the Uncreated Light in the tradition of the Church, there are many people who are recognised as saints by the Church, whose sanctity is sometimes indicated by miraculous means, for whom there has never been an indication of such an experience. The saints of the Church, as a rule, do not even suspect their sanctity. It is the others who recognise the reflection of God in them, and perhaps they too, in their sanctity, are able to discern the image of God in every human being. Their sanctity, following the change of the apostles in front of the Transfigured Christ, who were given spiritual senses by the Holy Spirit, allows them to see and recognise what is real beyond the phenomena, and discern the image of God in each other beyond the distortion of the Fall. This seems to me a very simple and easy way to salvation. We all struggle with passions that are distracting us from concentrating on the love of God. This is certainly one first level of ascetic struggle, but it never ends, and it never becomes a transformative stage by itself. We can see in the narratives of the ascetic Fathers, that the struggle against temptation persists until the very last step, until our last breath. The struggle to gain complete control of our passions, to become masters of our own souls, is not an end in itself. By itself it can allow us to live a good, moral, blameless life, but no more than that. If we do not see past the struggle against the passions, we may become indeed very moral persons – but not having given and received the love of the Bridegroom Christ, this moral person that we have become, in the end simply misses the eternal life and dies. Yet, what we hope to achieve with the struggle against the passions is to retrieve the clarity of vision that we meant to have. We live in a fallen world, and sin is like a heavy alcoholic drink.

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We hope that taking some control of our passions will allow us to lift the stupor and see where we are and where we want to go. But the next step can be a reflection on the image of God on everyone around us. If it ever becomes possible to discern the love of God and his reflection on every human being, despite and through their sinfulness, if we try to ignore how the others may hurt us, annoy us, argue against us, and if we are ever able to see the potential saint inside the sinner, we will already be in Paradise, surrounded by saints. This way is an ascetic of love, and we see it in the way saints care for the entire world. Yet, the difficulty in this ascetic way is to try to see beyond the stupor of sinfulness. Struggling against the passions is one way we can try to do this, but even after we manage to create a small space inside us, the question then becomes one of direction. Where do we go from there? What is the way home? It is easy enough to say that Christ will guide us, but if we simply look up to our God for a model to imitate, we will not be able to go very far. Instead, we need to discover the condition of faith and trust in God. Christ indeed shows us the way, beyond the limitations of the fallen world. There is one particular aspect of Christ that connects us with the complete freedom that we recognise in God: the Logos.

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2. Logos

What are we to make of the opening line of John’s gospel, which may be understood as an invitation to a rationalist interpretation of the Bible and the religious life? After all, when we read a phrase such as “In the beginning was the Word”, we are inclined to take this as a nudge to a literal or a rationalist reading of what is going to follow. The word ‘Word’, which is the most common translation of the Greek Λόγος (Logos) is misleading. But then, even if we left the Greek word untranslated in the English version of the Biblical text, its most usual understanding in the English language, suggested by its association with logic, would also be misleading. This seminal word is very problematic indeed, and although I generally prefer to leave it untranslated and thus to use ‘Logos’ instead of ‘Word’, perhaps because I feel that this is less invasive, I realise that this does not solve the problem. The reason for this confusion is that this word has multiple layers of meaning. Although the Greek word for ‘word’ (as in the words of a phrase) is not actually Logos but lexis (the two words come from the same root, at any rate), it is possible to understand it as speech, discourse, homily, sermon, and therefore also as word in its wider sense. It also means logic, reason (both in the meaning of the word as ‘cause’ and as ‘mind’), ratio, analogy, and principle. It also suggests, especially as we find it in Heraclitus, what is common among all humans, the sense that all human beings belong to a common principle. Finally, in its most primitive root, it is related with order and classification (and therefore the suffix ‘–logy’ that has become part of the English language suggests the organization and the systematic development of the field in which applied – systematic knowledge of earth phenomena for geology, of music for musicology, of ancient objects in archaeology, and so forth). The same root gives us the Homeric word λέκτρον (lektron) or bed (the implication being that at night everyone goes to their own place), and also Latin words with similar meanings such as lectus and lectio. On the other hand, logos implies a relationship: someone is speaking

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in order for another to listen and to accept the word – and if both parties offer their logos, what we have is a communication through the logos, or διάλογος (dia-logos – dialogue). The Logos, therefore, does not imply an existence closed in itself, but always in relationship with another. The fascinating thing about Logos is that it means all of those things at the same time. How would it be possible to translate all this with one word? ‘Word’ and (calculative) ‘reason’ are only two of its several meanings. By the time the Gospel according to John was being written, the Logos was already a concept with a long and important philosophical and spiritual background. The first clue about where to look for it is given to us by the place that is, most traditionally, associated with the composition of the Gospel according to John: Ephesus. Ephesus in the first century after Christ was an important commercial, cultural and spiritual centre. Shortly after John the Evangelist wrote his Gospel there, the senator Tiberius Julius Celsus established the library that bore his name, perhaps second only to that of Alexandria at the time. In Ephesus one could also see one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, in fact the one that the compiler of that list, Antipater of Sidon, singled out as more impressive than all of them: the temple of Artemis. A few centuries before John travelled to Ephesus, a man who distilled all of his wisdom (quite considerable for his time!) into one book of apophthegmatic writings, deposited that book to the Temple of Artemis. This was Heraclitus, a difficult and cryptic philosopher even at his time, who nevertheless influenced Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics.1 Little survives of the work of Heraclitus, only fragments. Yet, in these almost Zen-like crystals of wisdom, we can see that the concept of Logos holds a central position. The Logos for Heraclitus, as it is for much of Stoic philosophy that came after him, expresses the harmony and principle of the universe, which unites every human being, even if it is difficult for us to see and accept this. The Logos is common for everyone, and all things are in accordance with it, and yet, we live in disunity from it and from each other (DK 22B1 and 22B2). The Stoics read this as the hidden principle of the entire world, the stable centre of the world, which is not subject to change and decay. This tradition was quite strong in Ephesus, the place that was sealed for several centuries by the personality of Heraclitus. Perhaps we can 1 There is much modern literature on Heraclitus and the pre-Socratic philosophers. The reader who wishes to learn more can consult Guthrie, W.K.C., A History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. 1, Cambridge University Press, 1962, Kahn, Charles, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, Cambridge University Press, 1987, and several other sources.

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understand much more about the content of the first line of John’s Gospel, when we realise the charged content that this word had when it was used by the Evangelist. And yet, there is one more stop we need to make in the archaeology of the Logos, before we even consider it within a Christian context. This time, we need to turn our attention to another great figure, one who is almost ignored by history. Philo was a Jewish theologian who lived around the same time as Jesus Christ, although there is no evidence that he had ever heard anything about him.1 He grew up in Alexandria, where the first language of the Jews as well as of most populations who lived there at the time was Greek. He was quite versed in the philosophy of his time, but he also dedicated himself to the study and interpretation of Scripture – what is known to the Christian world as the Old Testament. The monumental significance of Philo is that he was the first person who combined these two streams, the stream of the Biblical tradition, and the stream of the philosophy of his time. Several other theologians followed in his footsteps, almost exclusively from the Christian tradition, who, for the most part, did not acknowledge their debt to him, perhaps with the notable exception of Ambrose of Milan, who followed Philo more closely than any of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, although some of the most notable and penetrating expressions of Philo, can be found thirteen centuries later in the writings of some of the most notable Church Fathers, his name was virtually unknown among Christians for a long time. Jewish theology, on the other hand, followed a different, less Hellenocentric direction in the following centuries, and therefore most of Philo’s insights were not followed by his own people. Philo discerned a complexity of being in God. Using philosophical terms of his time, he made a monumental distinction between the οὐσία (essence) of God, which is unapproachable by all counts, and the δυνάμεις (powers) of God, the ways by which he acts upon the world – later theology referred to them as ἐνέργειαι (energies). Speaking about the visit of the three angels to Abraham (Genesis 18), Philo recognised in them the three most important powers of God, the royal power, the creative power, and the power that stands higher than any other, which coordinates and expresses all the other powers – in other words, the power that can act as the part of God that may become visible and with which one may speak. He called that power the Logos of God: 1 There are many good introductions to the work of Philo. Perhaps the more systematic treatment has been done by David Runia in Exegesis and Philosophy: Studies on Philo of Alexandria, Variorum, 1990 and Philo in Early Christian Literature: a Survey, Fortress Press, 1993.

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2. Logos

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In the one living and true God there were two supreme and primary powers – goodness and authority; and that by his goodness he had created every thing, and by his authority he governed all that he had created; and that the third thing which was between the two, and had the effect of bringing them together was the Logos, for that it was owing to the Logos that God was both a ruler and good. Now, of this ruling authority and of this goodness, being two distinct powers, the cherubim were the symbols, but of the Logos the flaming sword was the symbol. For the Logos is a thing capable of rapid motion and impetuous, and especially the Logos of the Creator of all things is so, inasmuch as it was before everything and passed by everything, and was conceived before everything, and appears in everything. (On the Cherubim, 27-28) It is clear that Philo gives to the Logos a metaphysical content that brings him very close to the Logos of John’s gospel and of later Christianity. Philo was not given the revelation of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, but he nevertheless anticipated him as only a prophet would. The theology of the Logos has a long history in Christianity. As it is used in the opening line of John’s gospel, it serves so as to say something about the relationship of the Father and the Son, but also in order to give us an insight of Christ as the Logos of the philosophical and spiritual tradition, the one who was “in the beginning”, before Creation. John’s gospel deliberately rewrites the narrative of Genesis, but it does so in a specifically Christocentric way. “In the beginning”, says the first line of the Hebrew Scripture, “God created heaven and earth”. John will take us one step back, before the act of Creation: “In the beginning was the Logos”. So, what do we know about the Logos, from all our sources so far? Something that we find in the tradition of Heraclitus, in the Stoics, in Philo and in the gospel according to John, is that the Logos connects us with a time before time began, before the Creation of the world, when the only thing that we can possibly envision in terms of existence, is God himself, of whom the Logos is a part. Does this mean that we can think of the Logos as a historical point of origin, as a source that refers to a distant past? The most complete answer to this problem was given a few centuries later, by one of the most philosophical of the Fathers, Maximos the Confessor. Maximos extends the Logos theology to all things in the universe (something that we had seen already in Heraclitus), and he develops its significance within the context of the end of time. He sees all things in the universe as bearing the touch of the Logos Christ, both

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Gazing on God

as a memory of their creation through him, and also as a compass for their destination in God. The seal of the Logos on every thing will reflect the presence of Christ at the end of time, when Christ will “gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1:10): When God, the Sun of righteousness, appears to the mind, then all the true logoi of intelligible and sensible things will also appear together with him.1 It is clear that Maximos based his theology, his entire theology, on the person of Jesus Christ. He gave his life to defend the accurate understanding of Jesus Christ as a full and complete connection between heaven and earth, with full and uncompromised humanity, and full and uncompromised divinity. We also see that he placed Christ in the centre of all Creation, connecting the origins and the end, speaking about him in one breath as the one who existed before the ages, and the one who exists after the end of all time. But here, with the connection that Maximos made between time and being before Creation and after the Second Coming, we are able to begin to understand something about the end of time and the time of God. We measure the passage of time in a linear fashion, which suggests a conceptual matrix of cause and effect, where it is important to note which event took place before another one. This is history; this is our history, a continuous dialectical transmutation of one way of being into another, through clash, struggle, compromise and synthesis. In our mind this history is expressed as a straight line, as in all historical diagrams, which can be measured in seconds, hours, years and centuries, by a ticking clock. And when we first try to connect our linear perception of existence with the clock of time, when we try to imagine the moment when the clock was created along with the rest of the universe in a ‘big bang’, we go to where our pen touches the paper in order to draw the imaginary line of time, and we think that the time when God decided to make the heaven, the earth and everything that exists in it, is just on the left of that starting point. Equally, we place the end of time at the very end of the line of time, just as we lift our pen from the paper, satisfied that we have demonstrated a long enough model of linear existence, which is either lost in infinity, or is violently stopped by a cosmic event. This may be. But what we often neglect is that God is not limited by our historical, linear time. The Creation – of the world or of the 1 Maximus Confessor, Selected Writings, tr. George C. Berthold, SPCK, 1985, p.84 after PG91, 1156AB.

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human being – is when we emerge within historical time, but God does not enter fully, or rather is not trapped within history. It is true that Jesus Christ entered historical time when he was born as a human being, and that God acted repeatedly within the confines of history in other ways as well (by making Covenants, by guiding his people, by calling people, by acting within the world as the Holy Spirit), but his divine existence is inextricably defined by freedom from the causality and the linearity of time. When Moses encountered God at the burning bush and asked him to explain to him who he was, what was his name (Exodus 3:14), God answered with three words that covered all grammatical times in the Hebrew language, and could be rendered literally as “I was, I am, I will be”, although for the sake of our understanding this is usually translated from the Hebrew as “I am who I am”. While the more widely known “I am who I am” reveals that God cannot be compared to anything else, he cannot be defined through anything else, and therefore Moses will have to accept his limitation in front of the boundless nature of God, the more precise (even if impractical) “I was, I am, I will be” makes a statement about God existing beyond time. But then, in the first instance when the Hebrew phrase was translated to another language – in this case by the translators in the service of Ptolemy II in the third century before Christ who translated the Torah to Greek – instead of a literal translation, we find a phrase that reveals in a different way what God was trying to say: “ὁ Ὤν”, which in English may be translated as “I am the one who exists”, or “I am existence”. The first introduction of God to his people is a phrase that takes us outside the limitations of time, space and existence as we know it. It is interesting, however, that God is always present in the world. Even when this does not refer to great theophanies such as the historical life of Jesus Christ, or the pillar of fire that was guiding the Israelites, the Holy Spirit is always present and active among us. This, as Georges Florovsky stressed, breaks the causality of history.1 We may be able to study the financial, military, geographical, cultural, anthropological factors of World War II for instance, in order to reconstruct the connection of the events that led to its onset and to its end. Since we will never be able to see, measure and evaluate the role and the effect of the Holy Spirit on these events, we will only have a partial view of the truth. We 1 This theme appears in several of Florovsky’s works. Indicatively, the reader may wish to consult his work ‘The Antinomies of Christian History’, Chapter III of The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, Nordland Press, 1976, pp. 67-100.

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Gazing on God

may point to factors such as the military might of the USA and the USSR, to the technological advancement of the free world, or to the continued disillusionment of the German people with Nazism as factors that brought about the end of the war, but how will we ever be able to tell what kind of difference was made by the prayers of the people? How can we know how instrumental was the prayer of an unknown ascetic in the depths of Asia Minor or Latin America, and whether the Holy Spirit illuminated the world leaders in the years of that great war? History will never be able to account for this factor, and as a result historical research can only be a limited attempt to trace the work of God after the effect. Like Moses, who was placed in the cleft of the rock and was able to see only the back parts of God, after he had passed in front of him (Exodus 33:22), we have no way to predict the operation of the Holy Spirit and the direction history will take. To return to the Logos theology, we can note that all conceptions of the Logos, from Heraclitus to the Stoics, and from John the Evangelist to Maximos the Confessor, express an unchanging principle of the world, which marks history and our individual being, and yet it is not limited by it. In addition, the Logos appears, especially in a Christian context, as a way to this level of truth. The seal and reflection of the Logos in everyone and everything, takes a central cosmological role, especially in Maximos the Confessor. It is nothing less than the way God himself, from his impenetrable place beyond all understanding, calls the entire Creation back to him. It is the presence of the Logos that in the end substantiates and gives body to the experience of faith. To live in the Logos of God is not an abstract principle of contemplation or an aspiration to a ‘good life’, and for this reason we cannot pursue it philosophically or morally. Recognising how deep a concept faith is – something that permeates our entire being, and is not limited to thoughts and ideas – and how immense are the cosmological dimensions of the God Logos, we can realise why Christian theology has always struggled against tendencies that tried to limit it. Our entire being, thrown to the depths of God. This struggle is what we recognise as the work of salvation for the Christian tradition. The approach that includes faith as a concept that speaks to the level of our entire being and existence, and the Logos as the way to the immense freedom of God, outlines how we understand the meaning of salvation itself: not as a moral justification; not as an escape from reality; not as the work of selfperfection; not as a reward of pleasure for a life based on the denial of pleasure; and finally, not in terms of an endless linearity of eternal

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life. Instead, salvation from this perspective is the communion with the hidden principle of all life and existence, with the One who was, is and will be. This is not an individual affair or a communion of one and One. The Logos calls to (his) existence every human being, every being, the entire Creation, through a calling of mutual indwelling and outpouring. Therefore, to share in the timelessness and love of God, is to engage in an ascent that converges with the ascent of love of the entire Creation. Maximos the Confessor has given us a wonderful image of Christ as the centre of existence. He expressed the relationship of Christ with the world in a visual way, as a circle with him in the center, and the human beings at the periphery: It is he who encloses in himself all beings by the unique, simple, and infinitely wise power of his goodness. As the center of straight lines that radiate from him he does not allow by his unique, simple and single cause and power that the principles of beings become disjoined at the periphery but rather he circumscribes their extension in a circle and brings back to himself the distinctive elements of beings which he himself brought into existence. The purpose of this is so that the creations and products of the one God be in no way strangers and enemies to one another by having no reason or center for which they might show each other any friendly or peaceful sentiment or identity, and not run the risk of having their being separated from God to dissolve into nonbeing.1 Maximos, following the Pauline tradition, saw the Church as an extension of the physical body of Christ – as another way to describe his body. To be close to Christ is to participate more fully in the bonds of love between him and the world. It is not possible to approach Christ the Logos without participating in the other individual reflections of the Logos as well. As John the Evangelist reminds us, “If someone says, ‘I love God’, and hates his brother, he is a liar” (1 John 4:20).

1 ‘The Church’s Mystagogy’, in Maximus Confessor, Selected Writings, translated by George Berthold, Paulist Press, 1985, p. 187.

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3. Christ and the Trinity

How can we try to know God? And what do we mean when we say we want to know God? Do we imagine the Holy Trinity as an old man in the sky, next to a younger man, and a white bird between them, who watch humanity from a distance, perhaps intervening every now and then, when the situation demands it, but mostly keeping away, in the loftiness of their divinity, which is strangely singular and Trinitarian? Very often this is precisely the case, if our idea of God is an impersonal supreme spiritual being, or if we start with the idea of God, or with the argument of a rational necessity for the existence of God – usually along the lines of if the world exists in such complexity, it must have been created by a great mind who designed and fashioned it as a great architect – or perhaps by a process akin to magic. And yet, this is not the approach we find in the origins of Christianity, or actually in the origins of most religious traditions. Nowhere in the origins of the Christian or the Hebrew tradition can we find an attempt to prove that God exists. Instead, all Scriptures begin with confidence: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”; “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God”; “In the beginning was the Logos”. In Christianity the way of faith is always by some sort of revelation. But what we see in the entire Christian Scripture and tradition, is that this revelation is always one that entails the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ, the Logos and Son of God – always. Even the theophanies of the Old Testament, the revelations to the Prophets, the visions in burning bushes or high mountains, are interpreted in the Christian exegetical tradition as revelations of Christ. The Hebrew Bible shows a good level of perplexity about whether God can be seen: although the majority of references offer the conviction that God cannot be seen in his true form by a human being, there are many cases where God is actually seen by human beings, who nevertheless survive to tell the story. Jacob could not have put it more plainly: “I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared” (Genesis 32:30).

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It is true that, as we see in the work of Philo, Hebrew theology was exploring the complexity of God; it even went as far as to suspect something of his Trinitarian existence. Nevertheless, without the Incarnation and the experience of Christ, it was not possible to receive the full revelation of the Godhead. Christ therefore, is the locus of the revelation of God. There is no revelation of the Father or of the Holy Spirit by themselves, and even the instances where the Holy Spirit is seen as a dove or as tongues of fire, are done in reference to Christ, as a revelation of the beginning of his public ministry in the first case, and as a revelation of the beginning of the ministry of his Church – his body. It would be tempting to say that the entire Christian tradition is the history of the revelation and activity of the Second person of the Holy Trinity, certainly with the occasional assistance of the two other persons, but essentially the economy of the Son alone. This is not entirely wrong. Although the Hebrew Bible in the Christian tradition is read as a book that prefigures and prepares the way of Christ, we can know this only after his revelation in the New Testament. After that, the centrality of Christ in Christian thought can be seen in the epistles of the apostle Paul alone: most of the chapters in his epistles, include a reference to Christ – a notable exception to this is 1 Corinthians 13 (the hymn of love), in which he speaks about Christ using the name of love. Certainly, in the entire New Testament, the references to the Father are much fewer, and to the Holy Spirit even fewer. Why is this the case? Does this mean that our view of the Trinity is somehow skewed? In the Fathers we can see a very developed description of the role of each person of the Holy Trinity, and also a very clear account of the Trinity against the monotheistic principle that Christianity inherited from the Hebrews. It is hard to see more complete interpretations than the ones we find in the fourth century, when both the dual nature of Christ and the relationship of the persons of the Trinity among them, were subjects of wide conversation and interest. I think the one which stands out among them is the much-quoted essay of Gregory of Nyssa On not Three Gods (GNO III, 1), a unique discussion of the role and the importance of the Trinitarian existence of God, which avoids the temptation to talk about his nature. Naturally, many other Fathers and theologians offered much in our comprehension – as much as it is possible to speak of a comprehension – of the mystery of the Trinity. It is interesting, however, that the development of the Trinitarian mystery explains why our worship is so much focused on Christ. The role of the three persons is distinct, and the way they contribute to our salvation is also distinct. It is often said that the Father, the most enigmatic and elusive

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person, is the fountainhead of divinity within the Holy Trinity. This seems to give him a pre-eminence of some sort, but despite the temptation to explore the Bible or the Fathers for passages that have to do with the inner life of the Trinity, and any kind of hierarchical organisation within it, this is a futile task. What pre-eminence we may recognise in the Father defines the way he participates in our salvation, his role, and not whether he is ‘more divine’ or ‘less material’ than the other two persons. We do not know anything about the inner life and the inner being of God, other than what has been revealed to us. And what has been revealed to us was so that we would be led to God. I will dare say that even the understanding of God as Trinitarian cannot be a comment about the inner life of God. The Father does not need to do anything for our salvation, it is sufficient that he exists, and that he safeguards all the things that are true for the divine nature. The role of the Father is to hold that place, to express God’s way of being, which is beyond the limitations of time and space. All the cosmic extensions of the role of the Logos for instance, are taking us only to the beginning of the place of God. The role of the Father is also to exist for the Son and the Holy Spirit and to pour himself to them. Perhaps it is because the role of the Father implies the boundless divinity, that we are forced to talk about the nature of divinity in his case, more than in the other two persons. And yet, there are only two things that we know about what God is, as they have been revealed to us in Scripture. The first is the passage from Exodus 3, where Moses talks to him at the Burning Bush, where he reveals himself as the constant presence and existence, before, during and after the world, the One who is. The other is in 1 John 4:8: “God is love”. This is very important to the Christian faith. This phrase does not refer to any of the things that God does, but instead refers to the nature of God, to the way that God exists. The statement is not that God loves, but that God is love. If by discussing the nature of a thing we wish to understand something about its way of existence, its potential, its behaviour and so on, the only thing we know about the Father is that he exists as love. This approach tells us more about God; it is more precise than a philosophical one, or one that uses the idea of God in an attempt to outline a Creator of the complex universe. The philosophical approach, which enters Christianity very late, will tell us that God is omnipotent, that there is nothing he cannot do. I am afraid that this is not much more than an empty witticism and a meaningless logical paradox. If we try to understand God as love, we will get a slightly different picture. It is not possible for God to hate, to be envious, to be egotistical, or to wish to make us suffer. What we read about love in 1 Corinthians 13, certainly applies to the Father as well.

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Likewise, the Biblical language for knowledge of God does not suggest knowledge as information, as the objective and distanced appreciation of something other than us. Instead, it implies the knowledge of Adam and Eve, the man and the woman for each other. The verb that is often used in the Hebrew Bible and is usually translated as ‘know’, is also used to suggest the deeply personal and intimate relationship of a couple. This is why both in the Hebrew and in the Christian tradition the Song of Songs of King Solomon has a special place, as it describes the love of God for his people.1 This very important text had been recognised as deeply catechetical, and was used in this way both by the generation of Rabbi Akiva in the first century, and also by early Christianity – which nevertheless wrote its own nuptial songs based on the image of God as the Bridegroom of the Church.2 Trying to understand the Father, we find ourselves making the same request that Philip asked in John 14: “Lord, show us the Father”. This is a very understandable request, one that we are always asking ourselves. But the answer of Christ to Philip is the same that would be appropriate for us now as well: “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me?” (John 14:9-10). We know the Father only indirectly, through what Jesus Christ does. We address him in the prayers of the Eucharist (most of them are addressed to the Father), but there is not much we can say about him without involving the Son or the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit has acted in various ways within history. It is because of this that, as discussed above, history in its full extent has to be considered chaotic, and not really or rather not completely subject to causality. We see the Holy Spirit in the first image of Genesis, hovering above formlessness and chaos, before the emergence of the world from it. The image that the Bible gives us is that of the Spirit hovering above the waters. And we also see the Holy Spirit in the beginning of the ministry of Christ, also hovering above Jordan, the river of life. We see the Holy Spirit inspire the Prophets and later the apostles. We see the Holy Spirit visiting Mary in Nazareth. And we see the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church, granting its spiritual gifts (or ‘charismata’) to the saints, transforming the individuals to a communion, and the bread and wine to the body of Christ. The Holy Spirit is an image of the freedom of God. A ‘Spirit’ is like 1 A development of these themes can be found in Andreas Andreopoulos, ‘The Song of Songs: an Asceticism of Love’, in The Forerunner, No. 57, Summer 2011, Orthodox Fellowship of St John the Baptist, pp. 17-26. 2 Cf Rabbi Akiva, “All the books of the Bible are holy; but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies” (Yadayim 3:5).

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air, it cannot be seen or caught and limited. And yet, its name, both in Greek (πνεῦμα) and in Latin (spiritus) suggests that its origin is elsewhere. A πνεῦμα or πνοή is a breath, and this suggests that it was breathed by someone else. In this way we can trace the relationship between the Holy Spirit, the breath of freedom, and the first person of the Trinity, the one who breathed it. We can try to understand the role of the Holy Spirit from the way it works within us, in the world. And yet, the gifts of the Holy Spirit as well as all the ways in which it operates, have something in common. The role of the Holy Spirit is always the same, even if it is done in various ways: to reveal Christ. We can see the revelation of Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit in every single of its historical manifestations. In the Creed we confess that the Spirit spoke through the prophets, and in this way we think of Scripture, of all Scripture, as inspired by God. However, at the same time we recognise that all Scripture reveals Jesus Christ. What is more, this is possible only through the guidance and the illumination of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit made possible the writing of Scripture, and it also makes possible its reading. Yet, as the Gospel according to Luke reminds us, all the scriptures of the Old Testament, starting with Moses and all the prophets, were about Jesus Christ (Luke 24:27). The Holy Spirit manifested Jesus Christ in the Incarnation. When the Holy Spirit appears in the New Testament, it also reveals Jesus. When it came upon Mary (Luke 1:35), it manifested Jesus as a human being in her womb – the Creed also confesses that “he was incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary”. The Holy Spirit revealed Jesus Christ as the Messiah in the Baptism. Sent forth by the Father and resting on the Son, it was the Holy Spirit that allowed John to recognise who that man really was and point to him saying “I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptise with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God” (John 1:33-34). This was done just before Jesus started his earthly ministry. The Holy Spirit revealed the divinity of Christ in the Transfiguration. Although there is no explicit mention of the Holy Spirit in Mark 9, Matthew 17 and Luke 9, the Fathers teach that in that event there was no change in the nature of Jesus. The change took place in the fallen apostles, whose inner eyes were opened by the Holy Spirit (implied by the luminous cloud). It is in this way that Peter, John and James saw the glory, the divinity of Jesus. The Holy Spirit revealed that there is another way to recognise

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Jesus Christ, at Pentecost. After the descent of the tongues of fire, the apostles came out and started preaching to the Christ about Jesus Christ. And when the ones who heard them speak and asked what they should do, the answer was “Repent, and be baptised every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ” (Acts 2:38). Moreover, this occasion marked the inauguration of a different kind of the presence of Christ, this time in his ecclesial body, as the Church. Following and expanding on the experience of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit is still doing now what it did on that date. By offering different gifts to the people who will respond to its calling, it creates the body of the faithful, the body of the Church. The same thing is also reflected in the change of the bread and wine in the Eucharist: the priest prays that the Holy Spirit will descend on the bread and wine and change them into the body and the blood of Christ. In the end, these two are the same action: the transformation of the people into body of Christ and the transformation of the Eucharistic elements into the body and blood of Christ, are two events that are dependent on each other, and are happening because of and through each other. In both cases we refer to the same body of the body of the Lord.1 As we can see from these examples, the role of the Holy Spirit is always connected with the manifestation of Christ, in terms of history, personal perception, ecclesiology or liturgy. The Holy Spirit is always making it possible for us to witness and experience Christ; as much as this is possible for us. In this, we can see a reprise of the role of the Father, who is also generating the Son so that we can have, through him, a glimpse of his divinity. The Father is the one who generates eternally the Son, and sends forth the Holy Spirit, but Christ is the one who is projected both by the Father and by the Holy Spirit. It is in Christ and through Christ that we recognise God. The role of Christ, the second person of the Holy Trinity, is to project the divinity onto our own realm, to open the door to a continuous and endless pursuit of God. The drama of salvation, of the connection between God and the world, is taking place on his body. Salvation means nothing less than becoming part of the body of Christ, and therefore if it is ever possible for us to envision the salvation of the entire world, we will say again what the Revelation says about the New Jerusalem: “I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple” (Revelation 21:22). In the end, although we make no distinction in the divinity of the three persons of the Holy Trinity, we call ourselves Christians because it is in Christ that we find the entry to the mystery of the Trinity. It is important however, 1 There is much literature on this theme. A good way to start is Alexander Schmemann’s The Eucharist, SVS Press, 1988.

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that this is given to us as something that speaks to and invites our entire being. Salvation is to love God with our entire heart, and with our entire soul, and with our entire mind (Mark 12:30, Matthew 22:37 and Luke 10:27, but also Deuteronomy 6:5). How can we consider salvation as an action that is reduced to an argument? Of course, we can look at it from the opposite side as well: to be in the presence of Jesus Christ, or to be part of his body, suggests that we are nourished spiritually by the Holy Spirit, and that we are given life by the life of the Father. To be with Christ is a dynamic condition that leads us to the union with the Father, the one who was, is and shall be, and with the Holy Spirit, which breaks any sense of causality and linearity. Therefore, Christ is the door that leads us to an endless pursuit and discovery of God: a dynamic plunge into eternity. We can see however, why God is acting in a Trinitarian way to bring us to him, and why the three persons of God safeguard distinct steps in our salvation. In Christianity however, we do not discover God as a result of reasoning and reflection. We do not try to infer what God is like, judging from the results of his acts, or to understand him by inductive reasoning. Instead, in the Christian as well as in the Hebrew tradition, we respond to something that God does first. God spoke to Abraham in order to create a relationship of trust, God spoke to Moses and asked him to create a people, and God, becoming man, invited his apostles to follow him. In Christianity we begin and end with Christ, because he is the one who became one of us and lived among us, and he is the one whom we can see and touch, and we can eat his body in order to be his body. Christ is God as he is perceived by our senses. And as Logos he guides them beyond them. Nevertheless, there is a potential source of confusion here: several traditions have tried to describe the spiritual ascent towards God in terms of a higher understanding, heightened consciousness or secret revelation and knowledge. The way of Christianity is not the way of one intellect ascending to God. Even saints who were given a glimpse of the Kingdom of God, had to go back to the world and take the way of the Cross. Christ himself quelled the enthusiasm of Peter on Mount Thabor, when Peter asked that he, John and James stay there, in the ecstasy of the Transfiguration, “for he did not know what he was saying” (Luke 9:33). Jesus had to return to the world and take the way of the Cross and the Resurrection, and the apostles had to drink the cup he drank (Mark 10:39). The same is true for all those who follow in the footsteps of the apostles. It is for this reason that the central and most important service of the Church has the Crucifixion, the breaking of the body of Christ in its centre.

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4. Time, Space and Eternity in the Liturgy

We can understand much of the heart of Christianity, when we approach its central ritual, the Divine Liturgy. Naturally, there are many analyses of the theology and the history of the development of the liturgical services, but they are mostly operating within the textual aspect of the service. This is not satisfactory; it is the equivalent of studying the emergence of Elizabethan theatre – the generation of Marlowe and Shakespeare – based on the texts alone, without a reference to the space, the delivery of the lines, or the effect that the show had on the people. The Divine Liturgy, similarly, has a dramatic structure, and it has to be considered within the context to which it belongs. First of all, the setup. The scene as it may be seen today is reminiscent of the typical scene setup of the ancient drama: in both cases we can see three doors, each of them with its distinct significance. The central door usually leads to the palace (if we take as our example a classical tragedy such as Oedipus Rex), whereas the convention for the two side doors was that one of them leads to the city and the other to the countryside. Very often, acts that cannot be seen, such as the blinding of Oedipus, take place inside the palace, behind the central door. The priest, the deacons and the choir then, correspond to the actors and the choir of ancient drama. And the whole service draws its theology from the Christian tradition, while its textual tradition is an extension of the Jewish blessing of the bread and wine, but its dramatic structure is taken directly from the ancient tragedy. We can see this at a deeper level, if we apply the classic Aristotelian definition of tragedy to the Divine Liturgy. Aristotle, in his Poetics, defines tragedy in these words: “Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions” (Poetics, 1449b).

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Starting with the points that are easier to study, the “language, embellished with each kind of artistic ornament” certainly applies to many poetic and dramatic forms. It certainly applies to liturgical services. “The several kinds being found in separate parts of the play” suggests a variation of tone and style, similar to the different part of a symphony, which are expected to have a different character. This we can also recognise in the Divine Liturgy: the dramatic tone of the litanies, the Cherubic hymn, the apolytikia of the day, the reading and the anaphora, certainly demonstrate a richness of expression. But of course, this is also a description that could apply to several artistic forms. Moreover, we recognise that although the text is an important part of the Liturgy, in the end it is a dramatic act, “in the form of an action”, and not simply a recitation of a text. The parts of the Aristotelian definition that are more important for tragedy, are the ones that refer to the “serious and complete action of a certain magnitude”, the incidents that arouse “pity and fear”, which will lead to a “catharsis”, and the “imitation” of the action it represents.1 We can see that the serious and complete action is the economy of salvation, which includes all the Christological events that precipitated it. The central action is that of the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and how, by sharing in it, the Church reaches the Kingdom of God. To speak in even simpler dramatic terms, the plot of the Liturgy seen as tragedy, includes all the elements that Aristotle has identified separately: the καταστροφή (catastrophe) of the fall, the περιπέτεια (peripeteia – reversal) of the sinful condition and the ἀναγνώρισις (anagnorisis – recognition) of the Bridegroom are also very familiar to the Christian narrative. The catharsis at the end had the sense of a renewal, a return to the realm of ordinary life, after the tragic heroes explored the depth of inner life, and returned with a new wisdom. It is misleading to think of ancient drama as a mere spectacle that the audience followed from a distance. When Aeschylos explored the fate of the Orestes, as he was pursued by the Furies, and when the goddess Athena, at the end of Eumenides, convinced the Furies to mitigate their anger and share in the responsibility and the government of the city, he offered this dramatic account of politics, psychology and religion to the citizens, in the context of a ritual festival of renewal, and it was received by the audience in this way. The Liturgy could be seen as similar to this concept. It is a shared, participated experience, that dives into the deepest level of the 1 A good introduction to this is Halliwell, Stephen, Aristotle’s Poetics, Chapel Hill, 1986.

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human condition – to the condition of death – only to re-emerge with a participated sense of resurrection and eternity, which is ‘acted out’. The difference here is that catharsis at the end of the tragedy is based on a political and psychological renewal, while the Liturgy is an ontological renewal, an event based on existence. This brings us to the last point of comparison. The word “imitation” usually refers to a re-enactment of something that has taken place in the past. The Divine Liturgy on the other hand, is not a re-enactment of an action, or a historical commemoration of an event, but the participation in the distribution of the flesh and the blood of the Lord, that event which took place once and for all. Here we would seem to have a serious difference as to what the nature of the dramatic event is. Nevertheless, “imitation” (μίμησις – mimesis) in the Aristotelian tradition usually has the connotation of a different expression of the same archetype. In this sense, an image of an object is not necessarily a second order object, but a different expression of the archetype that both the object and its image try to manifest.1 While it is possible to trace the historical development of the liturgical tradition and consider its theological connection with the Hebrew tradition, the dramatic sense of the participation with God is something that we can recognise in the context of the ancient tragedy, step by step. It needs to be said however, that the Liturgy is trying to achieve something that is otherwise impossible: to share in God’s life, and to exist as he does, beyond the limitations of time and space, and motivated only by strong love. Living in the time of God is a paradox for us. And yet, the transcendence of time is one of the things that liturgical life tries to help us experience, as much as possible. The first proclamation of the Divine Liturgy (“Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, now and forever, and to the ages of ages”) is changing the whole direction of our expectation. It says that what follows is in the Kingdom of God – in all places and not tied to one place – and it is, as God himself, the same now as it always has been, and it will always be. In other words, the first proclamation is for something that we want to live beyond the limitations of time and space. The ascent towards God cannot be expressed by words, it involves “inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell” (2 Corinthians 12:4). The closest description to the liturgical experience of early Christianity is the often misunderstood book of Revelation. 1 Cf. the discussion of mimesis in Tsitsiridis, Stavros, ‘Mimesis and Understanding: An Interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics’, 4.1448b4-19’, Classical Quarterly, Vol. 55 (2005) 435-46.

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Although Revelation is often read as a book that describes events of cosmic significance that will take place at some point in our linear future, after which there will be a change in this linearity, this is not what this ancient text itself tells us, nor is it unique in the way it was written. It is true that we can read it as a prophetic text, but only in the biblical sense of prophecy, as the voice of God through a person. Revelation gives us indeed a brilliant description of the ascent of the soul and of the entire Church towards God, with all the difficulties that this entails, but it does so using a language with which the early Christians were familiar (it echoes many prophetic texts of the Old Testament), and also a format with which the early Christians were familiar: that of a Divine Liturgy. Many of the events and the expressions of the book of Revelation were either informed by liturgical practices of its time, or they informed them. Unfortunately there is no way to retrace all these details. Moreover, since there was no standard liturgical text in the first three centuries after Christ, it is possible to see this particular Liturgy as a local variant, in its more technical details. And yet, this is not why the book of Revelation is important from a liturgical point of view. Moving beyond the particular forms, beyond the ordo, it describes in quite dramatic ways what is actually happening in the life of the Church, as it tries to prefigure and then to actualise the relationship with its Bridegroom Christ. It is not important that the form and the structure of the Divine Liturgy has changed over the centuries. It is actually quite impressive how little it has changed, when we compare it with other strands of continuity between the ancient world and us, such as our language. And yet, whether the beginning of the ancient liturgies corresponded to what is now known as the Little Entrance, or the Entrance of the Gospel, when it starts, we are, as John describes in Revelation, “in the Spirit” (Revelation 4:2). It is because of the way the Holy Spirit operates on us, and it grants its gifts, it awakens our spiritual senses, and it allows us to see more clearly, that we can proceed, step by step into the path of the Divine Liturgy. Even before this step, the seven letters to the seven Churches of Asia Minor, show something similar to the service as it evolved much later: that before we can dedicate ourselves to heavenly matters, before we find ourselves “in the Spirit”, we express our concern for the matters of this world, even if they have to do with our fallen nature. The Divine Liturgy as it has been formulated the last few centuries, begins with an acknowledgment of the divide between ourselves and God, which also translates to the more practical concerns of this world. We ask for the peace from on high, the same one that was brought to the people by the prophets (cf. Jeremiah 33), the peace of the Lord, the

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one that sometimes is experienced as a sword (Matthew 10:34). This is a difficult peace, which is not a call for unity at the social level, but the restoration of peace with God. Instead of leading to peace with the world, it often leads to a separation from the world and its ways, or even to martyrdom. Only subsequently, after we have asked for this peace, we ask God to help us stop our own divisions. Nevertheless, this is just what the text proclaims. The dramatic aspect of the liturgy shows us that something has already started. The litany of peace is setting the tone for many things that are going to follow. The priest says the words of the litany, but the very act of starting with a long intercession creates a moment of peace – one would be tempted to say ‘of peace and reflection’, but there is nothing that encourages a personal moment here. The priest or deacon becomes the focus of everyone’s attention. The body language and the peaceful and somewhat monotonous voice of the priest are addressed both to God and to the people. As the liturgy proceeds after the litany of peace, we start seeing this more clearly. The people are represented by and share the point of view of the chorus, the singers, and they start an antiphonal dialogue. They sing to each other, while the tone is set by the first one among them, the κορυφαῖος (koryphaios) of the chorus (a technical term from ancient drama, which is also used in reference to Peter, the first, or koryphaios of the Apostles). The priest interjects two more litanies when this happens, while his own prayers become gradually more intense, more focused on what is going to follow. Finally, after the antiphonal dialogue, the people posit something new. An ancient hymn, which was added to the liturgy in the years of Justinian, gives us the plot in a few lines, it explains who we have come here to meet: Only-begotten Son and Word of God. . . . After this, the drama changes gear. There is an entrance, reminiscent of the parodos, the entrance of the chorus in ancient tragedy, accompanied by song. This is the Little Entrance, which recalls the entrance of the clergy in the church, and its symbolic head is the Gospel Book, which precedes everyone else. This is the moment of the gathering: what follows brings together the living and the dead, the past and the present, and the entire creation. This is when the chorus sings the hymns of the people to whom this day and this church is dedicated. Long-gone martyrs, ascetics who lived a thousand years ago or only fifty years ago, soldiers who died for Christ, bishops and priests who spread his church to the world, live again through their apolytikia and kontakia. This becomes even more intense if the day is dedicated to an event from the life of Christ or his mother.

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Interestingly, these hymns are clearly not commemorations. Their tense is almost always set in the present: “Saint of God, intercede for us!” or “Today is hung on a cross, the one who hung the earth among the waters!” and “The Virgin gives birth today to the one who is above being!” There is no time past here. Only with events such as the Resurrection we sing them both in the present and in the past, declaring and confessing that this is a true event. The divide between the visible and the invisible world is not as clear anymore by this stage. The whole experience of the service points to this. I remember the first time I visited the Athonite monasteries, which start their services early in the morning, at 3:00 or 4:00 am. When I entered the church I could not see much. A couple of small candles in the middle of a huge church, a flicker of light in a great and unknown space. Looking at the dome above, too far from the faint light of the candles, was like looking at the deep of the deepest sea. And yet, every now and then it was possible to see some movement, although it was difficult to tell what it was. The monks in their black robes moved without any noise, as if they were coming out of the darkness. And the figures next to the flickering candles, just next to the Holy Doors, also seemed to move. Were they monks, or priests in their vestments? It was difficult to tell. Only when light came gradually through the windows I could understand what I was seeing. Some of the moving figures were indeed priests, deacons and servers, and some were icons, full-bodied mosaics of Christ and his mother, next to the priests. It was hard to tell, to use the words of Seferis who echoes the same question that Euripides first cried out centuries before him in his tragedy Helen, “Τ’ εἶναι θεός; τί μή θεός; καί τί τ’ ἀνάμεσό τους;” (“What is God? What is not God? And what is between them?”)1 To return to the Liturgy, after the gathering of the living and the dead, once again following the description of the book of Revelation, the entire creation sings to God the thrice-holy hymn. In Revelation this is symbolised by the convergence of the entire created world in the four living creatures, with the face of a lion, an ox, a man and an eagle (Revelation 4:7-8), who sing without ceasing, something very similar to what is sung today: “Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal”. With this, we address the Holy Trinity in terms that reveal something about the role and the contribution of its persons: the safeguarding of the divinity, the creation of the world, and the eternity of God. And, as in the Jesus prayer, the only thing we can ask of God, when we address him, and in a sense when we are in front of him, is simply “have mercy on us” – nothing else is needed. 1 From his poem Ἑλένη, from the collection Κύπρον οὗ μ’ ἐθέσπισεν, 1955.

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The stage is set, the characters have played the first act, the following step is the last that has a direct historic meaning: the reading of the Word, a reading from the Pauline epistles of or the Acts of the Apostles, and then a reading from the gospels. There is a distinct difference in the way these two texts are read: the first is read by the first of the chorus, the koryphaios, from the middle of the church or from the singers’ stand, while the people are seated. The second is read by the priest or the deacon, from the Holy Doors or from the ambo, while the people are standing, and after the church is censed. There is a clear escalation from the one reading to the other, which can be seen in the hierarchical status of the readers, in the body language, in the smell of incense, and even in the place from which each reading is given. Quickly after the end of the readings everything changes, once again. The gospel has been read, the message of God has reached the entire Church, and we have celebrated and witnessed the coming of Christ into the world. The point from here on is how to become part of him. It is possible, once again keeping in line with the book of Revelation, to see the ascent of the Church to God as a wedding feast. In this case, the second part of the liturgy is the nuptials, the celebration of the wedding between Christ and the Church. It is about our union with him. The table of the Lord is often likened to a wedding feast (Matthew 22:1-14 and Luke 14:15-24), and Christ is often referred to as the Bridegroom. The wedding between Christ and the Church is the central event in the Revelation as well, although the tradition of picturing God in this way, as a lover and bridegroom of the Church, has its origins in the Song of Songs. For some of the Fathers of the Church, what follows after the end of the reading of the Gospel is nothing less than realised eschatology, the presence of the Kingdom of God into the here and now. If it had been possible to find a symbolism with the life of Christ in the first part, it is misleading to try to do it now. The Cherubic hymn marks a transition, from the world that we can perceive with our limited senses, to the world that we can perceive through the help of the Holy Spirit. The hymn shows us that we are passing into the world of the angels: “We who are mystical images of the Cherubim, and who sing the thrice-holy hymn to the life-giving Trinity, let us now leave aside every earthly care, for we are about to receive the King of all, escorted by the angelic hosts”. Likewise, when John Chrysostom writes to the young priest, he tells him to be aware that angels follow him in his procession into the altar. The angelic world is not very far, and the spiritual realm is not

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a distant reality that we invoke only in times of difficulty. The hymn of the Cherubim signifies something much greater than an abstract, theoretical metaphor. It is an invitation to the world of angels to join us in our wedding feast with the Bridegroom of the Church, where, nevertheless, the central place next to Christ is reserved for the communion of the mortals. This image alone can show how our place in the Creation of God is higher than the angels – but also the responsibility of drawing the rest of the Creation with us to him. The Cherubic hymn leads us to another entrance, another procession. In ancient Christianity the Great Entrance was the offering of the gifts from the people, and in many ways this is still the case. The bread and the wine that are carried by the priests and deacons have been brought by the people. But the real offering is not a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine. The bread and the wine are the meeting point between God and the people. The bread includes in it the entire Christology, everything that happened to Jesus Christ, but also the entire Ecclesiology, everything that happens to the participants. The Nativity, the Annunciation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and even the Second Coming of Christ are made present all at once, through liturgical ‘remembrance’, through the power of the Holy Spirit. But at the same time, the Holy Spirit is not a different kind of magic which works in a vacuum. It operates in the hearts and the minds of the people; it transforms them individually into different possibilities of the body of Christ. The transformation of the people and the transformation of the bread are happening because of each other: without the people who offer themselves to Christ and to each other, there is no communion, no love to be given, and no space to be given to the Holy Spirit. Without the bread, and without the prayers, the ritual and the blessing of the priest, there is no Christology, no participation in the table of the Lord. All ancient traditions used sacrifice as the central act of their worship, as a token of the offering of the people to God – sacrifice of animals, but also of human beings. We can still recognise the sacrifice in the centre of the Divine Liturgy. The sacrifice begins shortly after the Cherubic hymn. The part of the sacrificial offering is held by a piece of the offered bread, known in liturgical language as the Lamb. Christ is here present as the lamb of the sacrifice, more specifically as the slaughtered Lamb of the Revelation. It is often said that Christ substituted the sacrificial offering, so that no more blood would have to be shed. And yet, the sacramental Lamb is at the same time death and resurrection. The sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, the same sacrifice as the piece of bread which is broken in small pieces to be offered to the communicants, is still a sacrifice. The

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Christian tradition did not do this to avoid the messiness of spilling blood in the temple, or as a compassionate move towards sacrificial animals. By substituting the sacrificial animal with the sacramental body of Christ, it made sacrificial death an even more central event. The sacrifice is not something external to the life of the community, and it is not expressed in terms of an object or a price that has to be paid to God. Instead, it is the Christian way, the continuous martyrdom and co-crucifixion with Christ. The Bridegroom Christ needed to die in order to give himself to his Beloved Church, but by the same token, the members of the Church need to put down their life, to die as individuals in order to accept inside them this union. The sacrifice is not a remnant of an ancient symbolism or tradition, but the way that will allow both the Bridegroom and the Bride to become one. Here we can turn our attention to something that is ignored by many liturgical theologians, and perhaps stressed too much by others: the relationship between sacrifice and redemption, or the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. It is easy to get carried away and consider the salvation that Christ brings as a loud triumph, separated from his death on the Cross, or also to focus too much on the Cross and the suffering, and miss the grace that shines from the top of the Cross. Too much triumphalism and realised eschatology on the one hand, too much suffering and religious desperation on the other. And yet, for the early Church these two events were inextricably connected to each other. For a very long time it seemed that it was impossible for Christians to separate the Passion and the Resurrection, and rather took them as two aspects of the same event. The Bible is quite helpful in this way. Christ in the Revelation appears as the slaughtered Lamb, or rather more precisely the slaughtered and resurrected Lamb, who bears in himself the signs of the Passion and the Resurrection at the same time. It is not the intention of the narrative to portray his triumph in the apocalyptic war as a result of the strength or the power of God. Instead, the image of the slaughtered Lamb shows that the victory of Christ is a result of his sacrifice. The apostle Paul is even more direct on this point. He reminds the Corinthians that “the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18) and that while other traditions define their spirituality in terms of signs or wisdom, for us it is “Christ crucified” (1 Corinthians 1:23). And elsewhere he explains that the very ritual of our entrance into the Church has the meaning of sharing in the death and the Resurrection of Christ at the same time: “all of us who were baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into his death. We

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were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:2-5). It is important for Paul to show this. Salvation is not simply the ascent of the soul to some higher sphere of existence through reflective contemplation, and the Kingdom of God is not a higher state of being that can be achieved by mystical wisdom. Our ascent has to start with a descent, the descent of Christ into the tomb. But perhaps another way to see this, in a way that speaks to us spiritually as well as psychologically, is the apocryphal narrative that describes the fate of the thief who repented on his cross, and asked Christ to accept him into his Kingdom (Luke 23:42). An interesting and quite poetic text that was written in the fourth century, speaks about the Crucifixion and the Resurrection of Christ from the perspective of the people who were dead, and describes what happened as Christ came down to Hades, as he broke down its gates, and liberated the people who were held captive by Death and Satan. The narrative also follows the repentant thief, the first person who entered Heaven after the Resurrection of Christ, as he was received by the two persons who were assumed by God according to the Old Testament, and were already there: And as Enoch and Elias spoke thus with the saints, behold there came another man of vile habit, bearing upon his shoulders the sign of the cross; whom when they saw, all the saints said to him: Who are you? For your appearance is as of a robber; and why do you bear a sign on your shoulders? And he answered them and said: You have rightly said so: for I was a robber, doing all manner of evil on the earth. And the Jews crucified me with Jesus, and I saw the wonders in the creation which came to pass through the cross of Jesus when he was crucified, and I believed that he was the maker of all creatures and the almighty king, and I besought him, saying: Remember me, Lord, when you come into your kingdom. And he received my prayer, and he said unto me: Truly I say to you, this day you shall be with me in paradise: and he gave me the sign of the cross, saying: Bear this and go to paradise, and if the angel that guards paradise does not allow you to enter, show him the sign of the cross; and tell him: Jesus Christ the Son of God who now is crucified has sent me. And when I had done so, I said all these things to the angel who guards paradise; and when he heard this of me, he opened the door and brought me in and set me at the right hand

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of paradise, saying: Lo now, stay here a little, and Adam the father of all mankind will enter with all his children that are holy and righteous, after the triumph and glory of the ascending up of Christ the Lord that is crucified. When they heard all these words of the robber, all the holy patriarchs and prophets said with one voice: Blessed be the Lord Almighty, the Father of eternal good things, the Father of mercies, you who have given such grace to your sinners and have brought them again into the beauty of paradise and into your good pastures: for this is the most holy life of the spirit. Amen, Amen.1 The image of the repentant thief is often an image of hope and faith in God, because a moment of confession and true repentance was enough to erase the sinfulness of an entire lifetime. The repentant thief is the Christian development of the model tragic hero: the heroes of the classical tragedy, like Oedipus, Orestes or Prometheus, usually had to encounter forces that were well above their level, sometimes even above the level of the power of the gods. And although it was not always possible to overcome these powers, like Job after his encounter with God, they emerged in a higher moral understanding, having internalised the tragic forces themselves. This conclusion corresponded with the catharsis, and in this way the tragic actor led the entire audience into a moral catharsis, as they too identified with the plight and the moral insight of the character. The repentant thief follows a trajectory that is almost opposite. He starts, rather than concludes, with the moral insight, confessing his sinfulness, and asking for the mercy of Christ. The grace of forgiveness comes immediately, and he is given a salvation that exceeds any other tragic conclusion of the fate of a hero – with the exception of Oedipus at Colonus, where Oedipus is, similarly, forgiven and received by the gods at his death. The repentant thief internalises the recognition of his sinfulness and his confession to Christ, but his salvation has to take place on the cross. Yet, we identify in him a life of sin, which was forgiven immediately, because he confessed and trusted his life to Christ, he then entered a different kind of morality and justification. Therefore, in the way he entered Paradise, recognising in one and the same stroke the participation in the Crucifixion of Christ and his salvation, we also hope to recognise the power of salvation of Christ that flows from the Cross. If we insist on the theme of recognition here, it is because this recognition that we come across at every step is not different from the dramatic recognition of Christ the Bridegroom. 1 The Apocryphal New Testament, M.R. James – Translation and Notes, Clarendon Press, 1924

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To return to the Divine Liturgy, the apocalyptic war is taking place precisely at the fraction of the bread. That bread is the focus of the act on the altar, but it is the symbol of the eternal Crucifixion of the Church with Christ. Christ has fulfilled his part, the Holy Spirit also fulfils its mission into the world, but what resists this union is the difficulty of the Bride Church to follow her Bridegroom into a love that is greater than death. The Church, as a whole, does it. The individuals struggle with it. The more we let ourselves go, the more we accept to become the bread that is broken and distributed, the more possible it is for us to keep inside us the communion with the eternal and boundless way of being. Our own sins and temptations stand in the way: the apocalyptic Beast is not a power that operates out there, independently of us. The only thing that tries to stop the heavenly wedding is our own egoism, our lack of trust in God. Our cautious, human, nature reacts and resists this invitation to death. A leap of faith is tantamount to jumping from the top of a cliff, as we believe that God will catch us. Why does salvation need to be such a violent thing? This is not something we can understand easily. And yet, every time we love we jump off a cliff, and we embrace willingly and joyfully some sort of death. We wish to die as the person we were before we met the beloved, and then be one with them. We wish to make space in our minds and in our hearts, so that the presence of the beloved becomes part of our life. Anyone who has fallen in love, regardless of whether it had a happy or a difficult ending, has a small model for the love of God and our leap of faith. The central part of the liturgical sacrifice, the offering or oblation, brings together the priest, the clergy and all the people, in an act that transcends all history and all time. The priest elevates the bread and the wine, sharing the phrase of the offering with the people. He starts the phrase, and the people complete it: Remembering therefore this our Saviour’s command and all that has been done for us: the Cross, the Tomb, the Resurrection on the third day, the Ascension into heaven, the Sitting at the right hand, the second and glorious Coming again, your own from your own offering to you, according to all and for all, we praise you, we bless you, we give thanks to you, O Lord, and we pray to you, our God. This is one of the most challenging, fascinating and difficult liturgical texts. The first thing we notice is that the commemoration of all the things that have been accomplished for our salvation includes the Second Coming of Christ. This means that we can only understand the offering, and the entire Eucharistic act, from the perspective of

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the Kingdom of Heaven beyond time. If we stayed at the level of the text alone, we could see this offering as the Aristotelian ‘imitation’, as a rehearsal of life in the Kingdom. Nevertheless, because of the gathering of the people and because of the Holy Spirit, this is much more than an ‘imitation’, it is an act that starts in historical time and is completed into the time of God. The whole offering is possible only because God gave himself to us first. The priest elevates the bread and the wine, indicating what the phrase “your own [things]” means. In this image we can find the entire theology of the Holy Trinity, and see how it operates towards our salvation: The Holy Spirit is sent from the Father to the people, but its (and our) final destination is the body of the Son, who has also been given to us by the Father. Both the Spirit and the Son are of the Father, and the entire divinity of the Father is poured to each of them. Our participation in the drama of our salvation is to receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit, to become part of the body of the Son, and to make the offering (of what has already been offered to us) to the Father. At this stage the bread, the people and Christ are one. Christ draws us into the internal life of the Trinity, which consists of a continuous and eternal self-offering. We cannot hold back anything: this offering is taking place “according to all and in all”, so that Christ will be all in all, which is the way Paul described the Kingdom of Heaven at the end of time (1 Corinthians 15:28; Colossians 3:11; Ephesians 1:10 and 1:23). The way the phrase is shared between the priest and the people shows that the offering, and the entire Eucharist, is a concelebration of the people and the clergy. The roles break down at this stage, because sacramentally and mystically we are already in the Kingdom of Heaven. Moreover, the Church as Body of Christ consists of distinct roles and distinct gifts (it is enough for this point to remember Paul’s description of the Church as Body of Christ and the distinct gifts of the Holy Spirit in 1 Corinthians 12), that nevertheless cannot operate separately. Although there has always been a distinction of roles in terms of liturgical celebration since the early Church, and therefore not everyone is (or can be) a bishop or a priest, in the end the priestly role of Christ is something that involves the entire Church as a unity, and not just the clergy. In other words, although the priest and the bishop hold the role of the dramatis personae, the sacramental, yet real presence of Jesus Christ can only be fulfilled by the collaboration, consent and active participation of the chorus – the people. The drama is completed after the communion of the faithful and the dismissal, but the dismissal in most Christian liturgies is openended. In some ancient Eastern Liturgies we can find a declaration

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of the end of the service, something similar to the Latin: Ite, missa est, but the tradition quickly decided to drop the announcement of conclusion, and close with a simple prayer “Through the prayers of our Holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on us and save us”, which in older times was a greeting among monks. There are several views as to whether this suggests a sense of continuing liturgy into the world, in the form of mission, of bringing the experience out into the world. This may be partly true, but at least at the level of experience there is a very distinct feeling of the end, which is also marked with the distribution of blessed bread. So, what is the point of having an end without a clear sense of closure? The Divine Liturgy, as the tragedy before it, explores the inner space, and touches on a transformation that takes place invisibly. The faithful lived an institutionalised ecstasy, and they tried to discern the presence of Jesus Christ in themselves and in each other. While they kept operating in linear time, they also tasted eternity, and they participated in the experience that cannot be translated to words – whether they were fully conscious of it or not. Where can one go from there? The danger here is to compartmentalise the liturgy as a different realm of experience, separated from the experience of everyday life. In other words, the challenge is to integrate the two realms. Two things happen after the end: firstly, when we return to mundane reality, we come back with a clearer understanding of its depth – like returning to the surface of the sea, being aware of its dark depths. We can understand that sanctity and the presence of God is not very far away. God is just beyond where we can see him, but his presence may be felt in all things. Secondly, we add to our overall experience of the liturgy. This is a model of life that becomes increasingly imprinted on us, as we keep repeating it. As the liturgical experience becomes internalised, and as it becomes a central pole of reference for the rest of our life, it occupies a greater part of our mind and our heart. Gradually, it is possible to find the hidden harmony of the parts of the liturgy, and to extend it to life beyond the liturgy. This is one of the images that describe for us the Kingdom of Heaven: sharing the table of the Lord, in other words participating in a continuous Eucharist. But this exchange of life extends to a cosmic dance, an exchange of life and love outside the church. Fasting and feasting, the sacred calendar, is an extension of Eucharistic time. Calendar time used to be festal time, not so much counted with three numbers – day, month and year – but through the celebration of the saints. This used to be the case in the West as well, but in the

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East until very recently the 6th of August was not the sixth day of the eighth month of the year, but the feast of (the Transfiguration of) “the Saviour”, the 17th of January was not referred to as such, but as “St Anthony’s”, and so forth. I remember that there was some confusion about when my father was born, and my grandmother, when she was asked for the precise date, said simply “one day before St Anne’s”, instead of saying “on the 8th of December”. Many of these saints are celebrated on the date that is known as the date of their death – a tradition that is even more meaningful in martyrs, who experienced their second birth at the moment of their death. And yet, this is not the only thought behind the structure of the calendar. It is fascinating that many of those dates reflect a connection between nature – or rather the agricultural life in whose context the sacred calendar emerged – and saints. Therefore, in October we find the feast of St Demetrios, whose name bears the memory of Demetra (Ceres), the goddess who protected agriculture and grain crops (cereals), although we have no precise historical information about the date of the martyrdom of Demetrios of Thessaloniki. Likewise, when the earth gives its first signs of a forthcoming production, towards the end of April – or after Easter – we find the feast of St George, whose name means agriculture (Georgia).1 We can see something similar with Marian and some Christological feasts. Perhaps the one that determined the rest was the feast of the Annunciation, which was calculated as the date of spring equinox. The spring equinox was also the date when Christ enters the created world, even as an embryo, the date of the Resurrection of Christ, and also the date which was believed to be the first day after God created the earth: in all these cases what is signified is a new beginning. The earth gives us the image of the new beginning, as the light becomes stronger after that day, conquering the darkness of the winter, and as the landscape changes into the green colours and the flowers of spring. The new beginning that is signified in the union of God and humanity (stronger and more meaningful than the Nativity, which reflects the manifestation and the revelation of this unity, but not the moment of the union itself), is also expressed with the emergence of Jesus Christ from the tomb, as he changes forever the rules of life and death. We can observe how the major feasts are connected with each other, in terms of meaning, but also reflecting the experience of the cycle of the year. The Nativity of Christ is celebrated nine months 1 Cf. Demetrios Mavropoulos, ‘The Year of the Lord’s Goodness’, in John Hadjinicolaou (editor), Synaxis, Alexander Press, 2006, vol. 3, chapter 17, pp. 165-170.

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after the Annunciation, but it is not surprising that this brings us to another important astronomical event, the winter solstice. This date marks the darkest night of the year, but what follows is the gradual increase of the sun – one might say that the sun itself is being reborn. Perhaps most of us live in places where light pollution means that it is not very easy to see the night sky. Yet, a few centuries ago, it was difficult to miss things like that: to use the birth of the sun as a metaphor in order to speak of the birth of Christ, the spiritual sun, was a straightforward connection, which was building on the direct experience of the people. Likewise, the celebration of the birth of Mary when the farmers were tilling their field, preparing it for sowing, draws a bold connection between the experience of the people of the land and the preparation of the field of the soul, so that the spiritual sun will be born in it. The earth, the cycle of tillage, sowing, reaping, as well as the light of the sun and the moon, are employed by the sacred calendar so that the entire world becomes a metaphor and a model for Christ, Mary, and the saints. The sacred calendar consists of several additional levels. In the life of the Church there are several cycles of time, other than the cycle of the year. First, there is the cycle of Easter, which starts several weeks before and ends several weeks after the day of Easter itself. There is a very interesting progression of preparation that can be seen in the meaning of every Sunday, starting from the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee, three weeks before Great Lent, and ten weeks before Easter. As preparation for Great Lent, the example of the Publican and the Pharisee draws our attention to humility and repentance. We get the sense that this is not just another Gospel reading, because during that week our diet changes: the usual Wednesday and Friday fast are cancelled. The following week, which is dedicated to the Prodigal Son, builds further on the theme of repentance and expands it to the return to God. A second step of fasting follows, as the Wednesday and Friday fast return. The third Sunday the narrative becomes more intense, as the theme of the day is the Final Judgement: before we embark on the journey towards Easter, we remember what our destination is. This week there is a further step in diet, as we give up meat, but we continue to eat dairy and eggs. That week culminates with the Sunday of Forgiveness, the final step before we start the strict fast of Great Lent. During Great Lent and Holy Week, theology and experience are particularly hard to separate. The strict fast is combined with more frequent and longer services, and yet it is common for many priests, singers and acolytes, who by the end of that period should be physically exhausted, to be carried by the services, to receive energy

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from them. That aside, fasting is a way to internalise in a bodily way the spiritual preparation for Easter. The first level at which fasting is often understood is as an exercise in self-control, as a way to work with our appetites rather than to be simply led by them – it is also an exercise of appreciation, which reminds us that most of the year we enjoy many delightful things. In this way any level of fasting can be effective, even if it simply entails giving up one thing only for that period. However, fasting also consists of additional layers. Presuming that the person who practises it has no health or dietary problems, the strict regiment of fasting (no meat, fish, dairy or eggs during Lent, while oil and alcohol are consumed only on weekends) affects the way one thinks and feels. According to the more experienced spiritual guides, it is this condition of being that is more conducive to prayer. This was known since the beginning of Christianity: there is no mention of fasting anywhere in the New Testament, which is not also accompanied by a reference to prayer. We fast because we want to pray better, to intensify our prayer. In addition, fasting is not an individual act, but one that brings together all those who practise it. Even outside the period of Great Lent, the Wednesday and Friday fast allow us to create points of reference within time, in terms of action, rather than of rational thought. The weekly fasts are reminders of the sacred way to experience time, more than they are occasions of individual asceticism. If the point were simply to cultivate our ascetic side, it would not matter when we fast. Nevertheless, as there are designated times to fast, there are also designated times when fasting is not allowed. All Orthodox Christians experience fasting and feasting together, at the appointed times for each period, transferring their act to the fasting days and transforming time. The same is true for days of feasting. The Church canons that describe fasting and specify when it should take place, also take a serious position regarding feasting: feasting on a fasting day, and also fasting on a feasting day lead to excommunication! After Easter there is a similar progression in which we try to make sense of what we have experienced, that starts with the Sunday of Thomas, and culminates with the Sunday of All Saints, eight weeks after Easter. It is particularly relevant that the first two Sundays after Easter are dedicated to an empirical confirmation of the Resurrection of Jesus. The first is dedicated to Thomas, who expressed the need to see and touch for himself the body of the risen Christ. The second, perhaps even closer to our own experience, is dedicated to the women who visited the tomb of Christ, hoping to anoint his body

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with myrrh, but they found an empty tomb instead. In many ways, this reflects the content of every Sunday and every Divine Liturgy: we come to church to celebrate the sacrifice of Christ, which takes place on the altar, a symbol of the tomb of Christ. Our testimony, every time, is that the tomb is empty, a reflection of the revelation to the Myrrh bearers. The need to participate and receive the revelation with our senses can only take us so far. Although experience is central to the life of the Church, ultimately it is not sufficient on its own. The early Church recognised that any kind of revelation would include the power of the Holy Spirit and a certain transformation of our senses, so that we can perceive the presence of God. It is very clear for the tradition of the Church that this level of revelation involves the entire human being, soul and body, and does not limit itself to an abstract idea of a disembodied dualistic spirituality. Along these lines, from the early Church we can find testimony of the way we perceive realities, beyond the grasp of the five senses as we use them in everyday life. The Fathers of the Church talk about spiritual senses, or rather about the way the Holy Spirit awakens a different level of perception. We find the first such model in the narrative of the Transfiguration (Mark 9, Matthew 17 and Luke 9), where the eyes of Peter, John and James were opened by the Holy Spirit and they saw for the first time Jesus Christ in his divinity. The various visions of the uncreated light that we find in a long tradition of saints, as well as other theophanic visions, are also understood as visions that have been granted by the power of the Holy Spirit. And yet, it is important that we do not understand these visions as metaphors or as ideological projections, even if their descriptions show that they do not belong to the same reality as our everyday experience. The difference does not have much to do with the experience itself, but with the participation of both body and soul in it. This reflects the Christian view of the human being: we need to refer to the soul and the body as distinct parts of the human person, because they often behave in a different way and they need separate attention. Nevertheless, the human being is neither a soul contained in a body, nor a body with a soul that animates it, but the union of the two, which produces something larger than the parts. The personality, the character, what makes us who we are, cannot be reduced or divided between soul and body, as if one of the two is an addition to our real self. The more we explore psychology and biology, the more we realise that it is hard to discern their limits.

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Part Two: An Icon Exhibition

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5. Icons: The Way to the Gaze of God

Perhaps studying the place and the significance of icons in the Eastern Christian tradition is the best way for us to observe and understand the theology of experience. A visit to an icon exhibition, as well as a guided tour of the icons of a church, often leaves us with an impression of awe, not so much in the same way as we might be impressed by the art of a distant, exotic and alien culture, but because we would often leave such an exhibition with a strange, almost unsettling familiarity. The icon certainly belongs to the East; it is coming from the East and it can still be found among communities with Eastern roots. Yet, does it also belong to the West? There is nothing different in icons that were made in early Christian Rome, compared to Eastern icons, stylistically or theologically. Moreover, many great English cathedrals bear the memory of a different time, when stylised and highly symbolic representations of the life of Christ adorned their walls – we can still see this in Durham, Winchester, St Alban’s and several other places. The icon and its tradition are surprisingly close to Western culture, and yet equally surprisingly relatively unknown to it. The position of the icon in the collective memory of Western European culture and its descendants is just on the other side of conscious, waking memory. The icon stirs strange feelings of familiarity, perhaps not very different from the feelings we have when we are looking at old family pictures, and we recognise relatives that we did not meet in real life, whose faces nevertheless bear a distinct similarity to our face and to the faces of our immediate family. Since the spirituality and the tradition of iconography do not intend to express a culturally specific version of Christianity, they belong to the East and the West alike. There are many good publications on iconography and the theology of icons. What follows here is not a systematic exposition of the theology of icons, or an updated version of the classic book The Meaning of Icons by Vladimir Lossky and Leonid Ouspensky,1 which 1 Crestwood, SVS Press, 1952.

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offers a series of templates in reading and understanding most icon types. Instead, here is a selection of icons whose study may give us an insight of the fundamental principles of Christian theology, and also of the kind of speculative theology that has not necessarily been expressed in the language of doctrine yet. The icons that are discussed here are not necessarily the most theological ones, or the most interesting from an archaeological or cultural point of view. Some of them are largely unknown and unusual iconographic types, such as the Bogolubskaya Mother of God, and the All-Seeing Eye of God. Others are quite commonplace, such as the Crucifixion or the Resurrection. It is possible however, to use them as entry points in our theological dialectic of aesthetics in order to touch on the spiritual principles that gave birth to them, the same spiritual principles that gave birth to our systematic theology. Traditional iconography is less about what we see, and more about who sees us. Although it is certainly part of the remit of the icon to teach and catechise the people, the primary function is to remind us of the presence of the invisible. The emaciated, silent, elongated bodies of saints, their hieratic poses (even in martyrdom), the lack of shadows and the way they emit iconographic light from the inside, rather than use any source of light in the painting itself, show that this is not a view of something that we could have seen simply with physical eyes. Icons are bathed in light – as we can see in the predominantly golden background they use – but this light does not come from a certain angle within the image, as would be the case with a naturalistic portrait. With a naturalistic painting, we would identify the dominant source of light, and in turn this would allow us to apply shadows, areas of excessive light and areas of darkness. This principle also takes place with iconography, but if we look carefully, the bodies of the saints seem to be lit from the inside, as if what we see on the surface of the icon is only a membrane that receives its lighting from the other end of the icon. Very often, this light makes the faces and the bodies of the saints seem bright, almost transparent. This is the case with the famous frescos of Manuel Panselinos in the church of the Protaton, on Mount Athos. Other times, as is the case with the Cretan school that used a more rough approach, the bodies of Christ and the saints seem to be lit by a strong light inside them. Because of this unnatural illumination, they almost look like negatives. In both cases, light gives substance (hypostasis) to the icons. This however, is no ordinary light. What is on the other side of the canvas as it were, is the Uncreated light of the Second Jerusalem, where

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“the city has no need of the sun or of the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God has illumined it” (Revelation 21:23). The icon takes its existence from the realised eschatology of the liturgical presence of Christ, and it tries to represent the way of seeing as it is in the Kingdom of God. Long ears that receive prayers, small and closed mouths that do not need to speak, restored bodies of the decapitated martyrs, and a frontal view so that we can address them, is how saints are represented. Events are represented as they make sense within the light of the Eucharistic Kingdom, as if the only point to remember them in painting is precisely to find the way to the Kingdom, and not as a historical memory. No icon tries to represent an event ‘as it would have been seen at the time’. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is the icon of the Crucifixion.

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6. The Crucifixion

If we could go back in time, and if we could take a camera with us, we could achieve all sorts of wonderful things that would be important for scientific and cultural reasons. Could we possibly take a photo of a dodo? Could we take a photo of the Parthenon, complete and painted in the earthy colours of Polygnotos, with the ivory-golden statue of Athena inside? Could we take a photograph of Socrates and decide for ourselves if he was as ugly as he was reputed to be? Could we take a picture of the Temple of Solomon or the Ark of the Covenant? Any of those photos could solve many historical mysteries and would be invaluable. What if we turned our lens to the life of Christ? We would love, of course, to take a photo of Jesus Christ himself, and yet perhaps we would be disappointed if we expected to look at it and recognise the hidden divinity inside him – otherwise, he would have been recognised by all as the Son of God, and he would not have been crucified. But while we are at it, what would we see if we were able to take a photo of one of the most influential events in universal history, the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ? Probably not much. A photo would show us a man tied and nailed on a cross or on a wooden pole. Perhaps we would see two other crucified men, on his left and on his right; perhaps more are in the background. The man in the middle would be naked, beaten and bleeding, barely able to support his weight on the cross. If we looked very carefully, we might see that someone had placed a thorny crown on his head. There should be an inscription nailed above him, in languages that could be read and understood by everyone there. Since nobody would care to make this a very big inscription, and if the soldier who placed there was ordered to write the reason for the death sentence of that man in Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Aramaic, that inscription would not be very legible. This might be a realistic description of the scene of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. If we were able to go back in time and capture

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The Crucifixion, Antonis Fragkos, St George, Livartzi, Greece, 2000

6. The Crucifixion

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this scene in a photo, we could find all sorts of information that would be useful for the archaeologist and the historian. There is nothing however, that would contribute to our understanding of the significance of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. There would be nothing to indicate that this death changes the entire perspective of the universe on death. That corpse became a joyful event, the reversal of natural and spiritual death, but no photograph would ever be able to capture that. This is precisely why iconography does not try to be realistic, and has no interest in recreating a scene as it would have been seen by the bystanders. Instead, it tries to convey all of those things that are not seen by the unsuspecting eye. John the Theologian and the soldiers, who tied and nailed the condemned man to the cross, saw the same thing. And yet, what they read into the scene was completely different. It is the same for us. Setting aside this futile quest for historical precision, we can see that what is not provided in a photo is provided in an icon: a visual analysis of the represented event, and an exposition of all the reasons that make it what it is. Most of all, to show why the dying man on that cross changes the rules of life and death, once and for all. It is difficult to speak about the Passion and the Crucifixion of Christ in the Eastern tradition, separately from his Resurrection. In the way they are presented in Scripture and in the early Church, these events were always taken together, as two aspects of the same event. In early iconography the victory of Christ over death was expressed by a triumphant depiction of the Crucifixion, which showed the conquest of Christ on death, with his own death, while the icon of the Resurrection emerged only in the ninth century. When that happened, the two images shared the role of the triumphant Crucifixion and started representing the divine drama in two different stages: the icon of the Crucifixion expressed the Passion and the icon of the Resurrection, the redemption. Nevertheless, the two icons remained intrinsically connected. There are many elements of the Crucifixion in the Resurrection icon, and a lot of the Resurrection in the Crucifixion icon, even if this is not always obvious. In the Crucifixion icon we can see a very clear anticipation of the Resurrection. The Crucifixion, the Passion and the Resurrection of Christ were the culmination and the fulfilment of his earthly ministry, as a series of events that lead to each other and anticipate each other. Liturgically, it is one long celebration. The Holy Week, the week of the Passion and the Resurrection, is now as it always has been, the most intense religious period in the East, much more than Christmas – and it was also the case in the English-speaking world until the

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nineteenth century, when the Victorian emphasis on family values was expressed through newly instituted Christmas customs such as exchanging gifts, sending cards, the Christmas tree, the roast turkey Christmas dinner, etc. (popularized by the imagery of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol) shifted the weight to Christmas. The Resurrection is not only an older feast than Christmas, but it has also extended itself to a weekly celebration: every Sunday is a liturgical reflection of the Resurrection, and every Friday is a weekly memory of the Crucifixion, and also a fasting day. The Crucifixion icon tells the story of the death of Jesus Christ on a narrative level, but it goes further. It includes certain details of theological interest, which are not very central within the Gospel narrative. Such minor deviations, as it were, from the literal level, include two angels that are often portrayed on the left and on the right of Christ; a representation of the sun and the moon; the representation of Adam’s skull under the feet of Christ (which actually echoes the identification of Calvary/Golgotha as “the place of the skull” (Matthew 27:33); the inscription on the top crossbeam of the Cross, and, especially in Russian iconography, the footstool, which is sometimes slanted. All of these elements urge us to consider a reading of the icon beyond the narrative/historical level. In addition, the icon of the Crucifixion often includes representations of the soldier who pierced the side of Christ or the soldier who offered him a sponge with vinegar and gall. It often includes two soldiers and the centurion Longinus (often identified by name on the icon), who according to tradition after the death of Christ believed in him, saying “‘In truth this man was the son of God” (Matthew 27:54, Mark 15:39), became a Christian and was later martyred for Christ. The Biblical text gives us two distinct persons, the centurion who saw the divinity of Christ, and the soldier who pierced the side of Christ. Nevertheless, the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus that gives us the name of Longinus (the name literally means ‘lance’), identified him with the soldier who pierced the side of Christ. In the tradition of iconography we see both the version of the two distinct persons, as well as the one person who combines the attributes of both. In addition, the icon also includes three soldiers at the base of the Cross, along with John the Theologian and Mary. This recalls the way Christ trusted his mother to John and John to his mother (John 19:26-27). This image, which is often placed at the top of the iconostasis, above the Holy Doors, shows us the connection between the cult of Mary and ecclesiology. Following the scene, we identify with the gaze of the narrator, in this case none other than John the

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Evangelist himself. In this passage, John identifies himself not by name, but as “the disciple whom Jesus loved”. Whenever he uses this expression in his Gospel, he invites us to share his point of view, to become ourselves “the disciple whom Jesus loved”. The scene of the adoption identifies Mary as the Ecclesia, the Virgin Mother who continuously forms inside her and gives birth to the body of Christ. She is the mother of Christ and the mother of his people at the same time. This detail is stressed and appears in all depictions of the Crucifixion, not so much because of its historical significance (if we approach it merely as a historical detail we do not see much more than Jesus making provision for his elderly mother after he dies), but because of the liturgical significance of the adoption of the members of the Church by Christ, in the context of the Crucifixion. The cross, the lance and the sponge are, in fact, often grouped visually as representations of the instruments of the Passion, especially in scenes of the Second Coming of Christ, or the ἑτοιμασία (hetoimasia), the Preparation for the Second Coming. Often represented in the middle of the icon of the Last Judgment, next to the empty throne of Christ, they remind us the strong connection between the salvation of humanity and the death of Jesus Christ, leading to his Resurrection. The instruments of the Passion are also found in a prominent position in the celebration of the Eucharist, as icons of a different kind. One of the parts of the Orthodox Divine Liturgy is dedicated to the ritual preparation of the bread and the wine that will be consecrated later. Some of the utensils used in the preparation of the Eucharist are called “lance” and “sponge”, and the tone is recalling much of the Passion narrative: in the preparation of the bread for instance, the priest pierces with a knife (which is known as the lance) the side of the piece of bread known as Lamb, describing the act with the words of the Gospel “one of the soldiers pierced his side” (John 19:34). Christ himself during the Last Supper referred to the bread and the wine he shared with his disciples as his body and his blood, but we understand this as specifically to his broken/crucified body and to his spilled blood (Matthew 26:26-29, Mark 14:21-25, Luke 21:17-20, 1 Corinthians 11:24-25), even if his Crucifixion had not taken place yet. There are three more soldiers in the icon, the ones who cast dice and divide the clothes of Christ among themselves. The soldiers are usually placed at the foot of the cross, under the skull of Adam. The skull of Adam in itself represents death, Hades, Hell, the fate of humanity before the Incarnation of Christ. Yet, this death is being

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overcome by the death of Christ: Adam is soon going to be raised by Christ in the icon of the Resurrection – he is the one that Christ draws out from his grave. The placement of the soldiers underneath the skull therefore, identifies this place as a place of death; or rather their condition as the real death, death as it may be understood as distance from God, and not just as physical death. This iconographic place of death anticipates the icon of the Resurrection, where the corresponding space at the bottom, below the feet of Christ and the broken gates, is clearly marked as the prison of the beaten Hades. We see this connection as early as the 6th century illumination from the Rabbula Gospels, which features the Crucifixion on the upper part, and three scenes of the announcement of the Resurrection underneath. Nevertheless, as the fresco of Antonis Fragkos from the Church of St George in Livartzi, Greece demonstrates, while the style and the technique of iconography has evolved considerably throughout the centuries, the basic structure and the grammar of this image remain the same. The presence of the angels, as well as of the sun and the moon (at the same time, against dry realism), which are quite common in the scene of the Crucifixion, are not supported by any biblical references. They are a reference however, to the cosmic dimensions of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection of Christ. The Gospel mentions signs that show that the whole of nature was shocked and reacted at the death of Jesus Christ. Such signs were the darkness that lasted three hours before the death of Christ, the earthquake, and the resurrection of many people (Matthew 27:45-52). Some icons of the Crucifixion include a depiction of open graves by the side, but the earthquake is difficult to portray. However, the sun and the moon represent, by synecdoche, the entirety of nature that witnesses and is shocked by the death of God. The angels, similarly, about whom there is no mention in the Passion narratives, represent the invisible world, which was puzzled by the sacrifice of Christ. Very often, the angels turn their faces away, as if it is difficult for them to accept what they see. The inscription above Christ, according to the historical account of the Gospel, should read “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”, or “INBI” according to the Greek abbreviation, or “INRI” according to the Latin. However, this ironic inscription does not correspond to the iconographic or theological significance of the Crucifixion, and for this reason it is replaced in the Byzantine tradition by the inscription “The King of Glory”. This is a bold statement that reveals a lot about the Crucifixion, but also about iconography. Iconography shows things as they really are, not according to a realist perspective, but as

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they are seen within the Kingdom of Heaven, from the perspective of God; yet, the expression “glorification” is a word that in John’s Gospel means the manifestation of the divinity of Christ through his voluntary sacrifice on the cross (Cf. “When therefore Judas was gone, Jesus said, Now is the Son of man glorified, and God is glorified in him; and God shall glorify him in himself, and straightaway shall he glorify him”, John 13:31-32, but also similar references in John 7:39, 12:16, 12:23, 17:1, 21:19). The death of Christ was an act of glory and divine revelation, and the Eastern understanding of the Crucifixion is based very much on this concept. The Crucifixion and the sacrifice of Christ were never interpreted in the East as the “ransom” that was paid to Satan, in order to appease the wrath of God. For the East, the Crucifixion was not an act that reinstated the fallen glory of humanity after the fall of Adam and Eve in a legalistic way, but the very act of the salvation of humanity from the sickness of sin and death. Original sin, or ancestral sin as it is known in Eastern theology, did not reduce humanity to a sexual beast that propagated the original guilt through procreation. Instead, it is seen as a disease that spread to the entire humanity after the fall, whose effect is death. John’s Gospel (John 3:14) and the Patristic tradition saw the Crucified Christ as something analogous to the bronze serpent that Moses raised in the desert, in order to heal the Hebrews from the poisonous snakes that had been sent to punish them (Numbers 21:4-9). The Crucified Christ was a similar paradox to that of the bronze serpent: the Hebrew people were healed by looking at the serpent, that is, by recognising their sin. The Crucified God is the antidote against the death that is the separation of man and God: by looking at him and by believing in him, humanity recognises what spiritual death is, and trust him to save them. The hymns of the Resurrection stress that Christ conquered death by his own death. Although Christ died the physical death on the Cross, he never died the spiritual death that is the effect of the fall and alienation from God. Physical death could not prevail where there was spiritual life, and for this reason it lost its meaning. The New Creation that Christ as the second Adam signified for humanity involved the death of the “old man” with his own death, to be followed by the Resurrection, as a new start. Christ gave, with his death and Resurrection, new possibilities for humanity, completing, as it were, the creation of the human being. In John’s Gospel the last word of Jesus Christ on the cross is τετέλεσται (tetelestai) – which means it is finished, or it is completed. This refers to the completion of the creation of the

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human being, which started in the book of Genesis, but it is not completed until Christ showed in his death what it means to be human, and to lay down his life for the love of the world. Jesus repeats and corrects the creation of humanity. It is for this reason that the Fathers of the Church call him the second Adam. This is also shown by the precise place of his death: Calvary or Golgotha means “the place of the skull”, because it was reputed that this is where the skull of Adam was found. Of course, the icon of the Crucifixion includes a very prominent representation of the skull of Adam under the Cross, as if it were the roots of the tree of the Cross. This is going to be reprised by the icon of the Resurrection, where Adam and Eve are raised by Christ. Christ did not accept his death altogether passively – although the prophetic vision of Isaiah 53 describes him as a lamb led to slaughter. In the garden of Gethsemane he reminds Peter that he could have “more than twelve legions of angels” if he wished so (Matthew 26:53). He walked willingly to his Passion, in order to complete his work: he assumed every bit of the human condition, down to his humiliation and execution, in order to reveal to us the Cross as the way to escape death and the bounds of sin. In a liturgical context, the Cross is the last symbol shown to the congregation at the end of the liturgy, as a reminder that its members would have to go out to the world now and let themselves be crucified, with the same active embrace of the sacrifice, as we see in Christ. The Cross was not so popular among the earliest symbols of Christianity (the Icthys fish, corresponding to the acronym that was formed by the words “Jesus Christ Son of God, Saviour” was more closely identified with Christianity for some time). But the way of salvation through the Cross and the participation in the death of Christ as a way to participate in his Resurrection was one of the reasons that made it the widespread and important symbol that it has been for centuries. Nevertheless, in addition to the theological significance of the sacrifice, the Cross is a symbol that unites what is above and what is below, what is left and what is right; it unites the entire world at the horizontal level, and then it unites the earth with heaven. Actually we do not know much about the historical Cross of Jesus, because there is no information as to its precise shape in the gospels. Historical information about the crosses used by the Romans at that time do not help. The cross on which Jesus Christ died could have been shaped as a ‘T’ (although Matthew 27:37 refers to the inscription “above his head” in, which suggests that the Cross extended towards the top, even a little bit), or even as a simple pole. Nevertheless, the

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familiar shape of the Cross gained its acceptance precisely because of its visual power, as the symbol of cosmic convergence. The four beams of the Cross symbolise the entire earth and the entire heaven that are drawn by the figure of Christ, in a cosmic invitation of union with him. There is a particular variant of the Cross, which we find in the Russian tradition. This version features a slanted footstool, pointed downwards, from left to right. According to the most popular interpretation, the slanted footstool signifies Heaven and Hell, and the fate of the two thieves who were crucified next to Jesus. The footstool is turned upwards at the side of the good thief (named by the Gospel of Nicodemus as Dysmas) who is sometimes identified by a halo, whereas it is pointed downwards at side of the unrepentant thief (identified by the Gospel of Nicodemus as Gistas – some icons include an inscription with their names). It is noteworthy that although the Gospel states that the two thieves were also crucified, we rarely see them crucified properly, but rather thrown on their crosses. Their arms are tied back and certainly not stretched open, something that contrasts with the fully stretched open arms of Christ, who seems to invite and accept humanity. Very often the entire body of the unrepentant thief is contorted unnaturally, something that indicates his agony and damnation. The downward slanted footstool is an inseparable element of the Russian Cross, and yet it is a fairly recent iconographic innovation. The most ancient form of crosses with a slanted footstool points the other way, and therefore it indicates an upward movement. We can see this cross as early as the fifth century, and it spread in Jerusalem, Constantinople, Greece and the Balkans. Until the seventeenth century it was much more common than the Russian variant. The Russian Cross is certainly a part of the Christian rich multitude of symbolism, and yet perhaps the older variant with the upward movement sends a more complete message, as it anticipates the upward movement of the Resurrection of Christ.

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Crucifixion and Resurrection scenes, Rabbula Gospels, late sixth century

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7. Descent into Hades

In the iconographic tradition there are three iconographic types that represent the Resurrection of Christ, in very different ways. The first one, and probably older than the other two, is the scene of the myrrh-bearers in front of the empty tomb, speaking with an angel, or sometimes with two angels. This scene is described by all four Evangelists (Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, John 20), and the icon of this type is the only one among the three iconographic types, which corresponds to a Biblical passage. In addition, the experience of the myrrh-bearers in front of the empty tomb is not very far from the liturgical experience of the faithful: every Sunday they come to worship in front of an altar which symbolises the empty tomb of Christ. This is, in this way, the starting point for the gathering of the Church in the name of the risen Christ. The second type is the one most known in the West, with Christ emerging from the tomb among the fallen soldiers, often holding a flag. Although there is no textual basis for it, this type tries to represent the Resurrection as it would be seen by a witness to the event. Therefore, its aim is to give us an image of historical accuracy, as much as this is possible. Although we find this image in Western Christianity, it was known in the East since the sixth century – we can see it as part of the rich iconography of an illumination in the Rabbulla Gospels, which also include the Crucifixion, the myrrh-bearers at the empty tomb, and the appearance of Christ to his mother and to Mary Magdalene. Nevertheless, the East did not alter this image very much. Although every now and then we find it in manuscript illuminations and church walls, Eastern Christianity developed a very different type as its main icon of the Resurrection of Christ. The third iconographic type, which is often known under a different name, as the Descent into Hades, is surprising to the ones who see it for the first time. Very different from the image of Christ emerging from the tomb, it is a very busy icon, with many people and rich symbolism. It is also a relatively late iconographic synthesis, which

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The Resurrection, Chora monastery, Constantinople, fourteenth century

7. The Descent into Hades

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appears after the ninth century, and in terms of its visual arrangement it is based, quite likely, on the icon of the Transfiguration. Perhaps the best representative of this type is the fresco at the apse of the chapel of the monastery of Chora, in Constantinople, made in the fourteenth century. This type presents Christ in glory, stepping on the broken doors of Hell. He is raising Adam and Eve (in some variants only Adam), while on the left and the right sides we can identify certain figures from the Old Testament, such as David, Solomon and Abel, the first dead. John the Baptist stands with the group of the Old Testament prophet-kings, and his points the triumphant Christ to them. It is a strange scene, with no scriptural basis. Instead, it is based on an apocryphal text from the fourth century, the Gospel of Nicodemus. In order to understand why the Church decided to adopt such an unusual image, and what it really represents, we need to take a quick look into the basic views of early Christianity on the Resurrection. The Resurrection of Christ is probably the most essential and fundamental event, without which Christianity would not even exist. The apostle Paul argued so much himself, basing the entire faith on the Resurrection of Christ when he said “and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain, and your faith has been in vain . . . and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. . . . If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died” (1 Corinthians 15:14-20). Similarly, the early Church in the East and the West alike, regarded the Resurrection of Christ as the most important feast of the Christian tradition, the Feast of Feasts. For this reason it has been important for all Christians to celebrate Easter together. The celebration of the Resurrection was the most important issue of liturgical uniformity in the Church in the first two centuries. Although since the nineteenth century Christmas has become a more widely celebrated feast in Western Christianity, it is a Westerner, Pope Leo I, among other writers, who describes the celebration of the Resurrection of Christ as a “festum festorum”. In the East we can still see the prominence of Easter over Christmas, at the liturgical and also at the cultural level. For instance, every Matins Gospel reading in the Orthodox Church always refers to the Resurrection or to one of the sightings of Christ after his Resurrection. Of course, this is because Sunday is the triumphant weekly celebration of the Resurrection. The joyful character of Sunday as ‘weekly Easter’ is shown by the ancient prohibition of kneeling on Sundays.

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The Resurrection has been seen by many writers and Fathers of the Church, similarly, as the single event, the key or the prism as it were, which allows us to understand the life and work of Christ. Without the Resurrection at the end, we would not have the Gospel. And even much earlier, starting from the book of Genesis and the first anticipation of the Resurrection and the crushing of the head of Satan by Christ (Genesis 3:15), the entire Bible anticipates and prepares us for this event. For this reason it has been suggested that there is something to be gained by reading the Gospel backwards, starting with the Resurrection of Christ, in order to see how all the other events in the life of Christ receive their meaning from it. It is not surprising then, to see that the icon of the Resurrection has a privileged position in the iconographic tradition. And yet, it is very strange that the Resurrection is not described directly in any of the Gospels. People talk about it, it is certainly accepted, and there are appearances of Christ after his death and Resurrection. Christ appeared to the eleven disciples in the closed room, where Thomas, the apostle with the last doubts, was given the chance to touch with his own hands the stigmata of Christ. In addition, the Epistles of Paul, written before the Gospels, show a very deep conviction in the truth of the Resurrection of Christ, as it is reflected in the above passage, as well as in many others. The views of Paul reflect the general attitude of the early Church, in the context of which the Gospels were written. It is fair to say, therefore, that we will not find any doubts about the event itself in the New Testament. Then, why is it so conspicuously absent from the Gospel narratives? We have to remember at this point that the Gospel is not, nor does it try to be, a historical document in the same sense that we understand historical documents today; at best it is consistent with the genre of narrative biography, which was not unusual at the time, and perhaps it is most famous in the writings of Plutarch. But beyond its historical value, it is primarily a theological piece of writing, a revelation, a divinely inspired text, which was written in order to reveal Jesus Christ in several ways, and to contribute to the salvation of humanity – something that, from a Christian perspective, is equally valid for the New Testament and for the Old Testament. Therefore, we cannot shrug off the absence of biblical descriptions of the Resurrection with a simplistic argument such as that there was nobody there to see it and bear witness to it. Something else must be happening here. There are several possible explanations for this strange omission. First, the events of the Resurrection and what exactly happened between the time Christ was buried and the time he was raised, falls

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under the category of “unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter” (2 Corinthians 12:4). Strictly speaking, according to what he said dying on the Cross (“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit”, Luke 23:46), and to the repentant thief (“today you will be with me in Paradise”, Luke 23:43), Christ was in Heaven with the Father immediately after his death. It is not possible to say much about the inner life of the Trinity, and therefore this is an area that theology cannot talk about. It is difficult enough to imagine how the Resurrection itself (the removal of the stone at the opening of the grave, Christ getting up, removing the burial clothes and so on) would be described in a narrative anyway. But the most interesting effect of the absence of the Resurrection narrative, is not that it has left the field open to imagination or speculation as to how it happened, but that it has left it to the individual reader to consider this metaphysical event in the context of its significance for Christology, the human race, and for the entire universe. The silence of Scripture on this invites and requires a personal leap of faith, which has meaning exactly here, at the event that represents the foundation of the Christian faith. Although this idea is interesting from a theological point of view, and it was sufficient in the first few Christian centuries, the desire of the people to fill in this gap later gave fertile ground to apocryphal texts that described all these missing events. The Gospel of Nicodemus, also known as Acts of Pilate, is a text filled with rich descriptions, was written in the fourth century, at a time when Christianity was coming out of hiding, soon to become the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. At that time, right after the age of martyrs, many people were learning about Christianity for the first time, and became Christian, although not necessarily with the spiritual preparation of the struggling Christians who lived a short distance from execution for their faith. The Gospel of Nicodemus was never taken to be anything more than apocryphal literature. It was understood that its narrative was the narrative of imagery rather than historicity and detail, and it was never given a status comparable to the canonical Gospels. Nevertheless, the increasing need to represent the Resurrection of Christ in iconography (something that was apparently as difficult as putting it down in words) led iconographers discover and use it for their purposes. Therefore, although it was initially not very well-known, it became famous, especially after the emergence of the icon of the Resurrection in the ninth century. The events in the Gospel of Nicodemus are narrated by some of the people who were raised between the time of Christ’s death and his

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Resurrection. These resurrected witnesses were in the underworld and saw a great light shine in their midst, which was recognised by Isaiah as the light of the Holy Trinity that he prophesied about. John the Baptist, the last of the prophets of the old dispensation, addressed the Old Testament patriarchs who were there, and told them that the fulfilment of the prophecies about Christ was nearing, and the Messiah they had anticipated was going to come soon. Meanwhile, Satan and his minions who also realised that something was going to happen soon, felt anxious and afraid, and tried to secure the gates of Hell, making sure nobody could get in or go out. Satan and Hades (death personified) prepared to receive Jesus, and to keep him there, sharing the fate of all dead humans, or to defend themselves against his coming. As all this was going on, and the underworld was in turmoil, a voice was heard from outside, demanding that the Gates of Hell open, and the King of Glory enter. Indeed, Christ and his angels appeared and broke the brass gates and the iron locks and bars of hell. Christ tied Satan and delivered him to the beaten Hades to hold, until his Second Coming. Christ then, raised Adam and all the patriarchs, prophets, martyrs and forefathers, who recognised him as God, by the power of his Cross. Adam was taken by the archangel Michael to Paradise, where he saw Enoch and Elijah, the two men who had not died according to the Old Testament, but were assumed to heaven with their body. And as the three of them were speaking, they saw a mysterious figure coming towards them, a shabby man with a cross. This was the repentant thief who identified himself to them and to the guarding angel through the cross he was carrying, and entered Paradise, as Christ had promised him. How much should we try to harmonise this beautiful narrative with the canonical Gospels? If we had to find the precise time when all this took place, we would necessarily conclude that all the events described in the Gospel of Nicodemus took place immediately after the death of Christ on the Cross, since the canonical Gospels attest that the resurrection of the dead witnesses took place almost at the same time as the death of Christ, even if they were seen only after the Resurrection of Christ: And Jesus cried again with a loud voice, and gave up his spirit. And behold, the veil of the temple was rent in two from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake; and the rocks were rent; and the tombs were opened; and many bodies of the saints that had fallen asleep were raised; and coming forth out of the tombs after his resurrection they entered into the holy city and appeared unto many (Matthew 27:50-53).

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It is significant that Christ is usually referred to as the “King of Glory” in the entire narrative, a title that refers to his glorification on the Cross, or rather to the revelation of his divinity through the act of his sacrifice. At the same time, in many places in the narrative the Cross of Christ is portrayed as a most effective and powerful weapon, something that extends even to the cross of the repentant thief. But this is hardly surprising given the theological connection between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection which we can see since the beginning of Christianity. Melito of Sardis in the second century even argued that the word Πάσχα (Pascha – Easter) comes from the Greek πάσχειν (paschein – to suffer), which means that it is another word for Passion, carried away by the force of the theological connection, or rather continuity, between the Passion and the Resurrection. The narrative of the Gospel of Nicodemus assumes a very cosmic or rather apocalyptic point of view, as it is a story with characters so diverse, from different historical times, such as Christ, John the Baptist, the repentant thief, Isaiah, David, Adam, Enoch and Elijah, Satan with his minions, and even a personification of Hades. The metaphysical conquest of Christ over death is demonstrated in a very visual way, which made it easy for iconography to be inspired by it and adapt it. This eclectic collection of so many characters downplays the historical dimension of this story, but nevertheless this strange narrative outlines the views of the Church on the death and Resurrection of Christ. Many Fathers connected the entire Old Testament with Christ in a typological way, and therefore it is not strange to see that their prophetic anticipation of the Messiah continues even when they are in the afterlife. The destruction of the gates of Hades is completely consistent with the symbolism of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection of Christ conquering over death. This event, as well as the ascent of the dead of old to Paradise does not suggest their individual vindication, but a metaphysical change in the universe, a partial reversal of the Fall of Adam and Eve. With the Resurrection of Christ the world becomes as it was before the transgression of Adam and Eve. The angel with the flaming sword who was placed as a guard at the gates of Paradise (Genesis 3:24) does not block the entry anymore. As a hymn from the Feast of the Exultation of the Cross declares, “the wood of the Cross quenched the flaming sword at the gates of Paradise”. Sometimes, in icons of the Resurrection of Christ that also include a series of marginal scenes we can see the angel at the gates of Paradise, who is welcoming rather than sending away those who were liberated from the power of Death by Christ. The Resurrection of Christ is a prefiguration of the resurrection

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of the entire humanity at the end of time. The resurrection of the body was not unheard of at the time of Christ, since this idea had entered late Jewish thought shortly before then (cf. 2 Maccabees 7, 4 Maccabees, Daniel 12, Acts 23:6-9). Moreover, there is a limited number of resurrections before the Resurrection of Christ, not only the celebrated resurrection of Lazarus and the resurrection of the son of the widow at Nain. In the Old Testament there is also the resurrection of the son of the widow by Elijah (1 Kings 17:17-22) and two resurrections performed by Elisha (2 Kings 4:32-53, 13:20), not to mention the resurrection of the people who witnessed the events described by the Gospel of Nicodemus. What is so different then, about the Resurrection of Christ, and why is it called “the first fruits of those who are asleep”? The Resurrection of Christ is of a different nature from all other resurrections. The previous resurrections were a step above healings, but not really very different. The people who were raised by Elijah, Elisha and Christ died again, so their resurrection was no more than reversion to their former healthy, living state, as if their first, accidental death had not taken place. Nevertheless, since they eventually died like any other human being (except Enoch and Elijah), these miracles are basically healings, perhaps more impressive than the healing of the blind and the lepers, but at any rate they did not challenge the status and the power of death. On the other hand, this is precisely the kind of cosmic reversal that we see with the Resurrection of Christ. Although his Transfiguration revealed his true nature and his full divinity to the apostles who witnessed it, and confirmed the glorious presence of his divinity even when it was not possible for anyone to understand it, there is a difference between his body before and after his Resurrection. The body of Christ was as material after his Resurrection, as it was when it was nailed to the Cross. But after the Resurrection, when people realise that he has conquered over death in a way that had never been done before, it is easier to see the body of Christ as a body of glory, a “spiritual body” as Paul described it: “As one of us he was born, as one of us he lived, as one of us he suffered and died. But unlike any other human being in history, he rose up from the realm of the dead and returned from the darkness of the tomb. For his Resurrection was not merely the resuscitation of a lifeless body; rather, by his Resurrection Christ transformed our humanity from an earthly form to a spiritual body. The flesh he assumed in the Incarnation, although sinless, was like our own, susceptible to death; the flesh that he raised in his three-day Resurrection is splendid and powerful, for he graced the perishable with imperishability and the corruptible with incorruption” (1 Corinthians 15:42-50).

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The Resurrection of Christ signals an ontological change of humanity, although the first step for this change was the union of the divine and the human nature, which was achieved at the Incarnation. Christ is called the second Adam, because he completed and fulfilled the creation of the human being. Adam represents the first stage of human ontology, what Paul called the “natural” man, whereas Christ represents the second stage of creation, the “spiritual man” – the human being who is united with God. As Paul says in the above passage, in the Resurrection we can see the full manifestation of the spiritual man in Christ. The Resurrection, as the manifestation of Christ as the spiritual man and the second Adam, is a revelation of Christ in Glory. It is in this way that we understand the Resurrection of Christ as the first fruits and the prefiguration of the resurrection of humanity. Yet, at the same time, as it can also be seen in the Gospel of Nicodemus, the Resurrection of Christ proclaims the defeat of Satan and death. How is this consistent with the fallen state of the world as we experience it? Do we not still live in a world of pain, suffering and sin? The answer is that the Church, especially after the Resurrection of Christ, introduces us to the Kingdom of God in the here and now, but this is not done automatically, mechanically, without active participation in the life of Christ. The Kingdom that is proclaimed in the beginning of the Divine Liturgy is present for those who seek it. Christianity, as well as other spiritual traditions, believes in the end of the world, in the “last days”, when linear time will cease to exist, but Christian eschatology does not only have to do with the end of linear time. The Church lives in a state of dynamic and realised eschatology. The Orthodox Church believes that Christ is really (and not only symbolically) present among the faithful in the Divine Liturgy. The spiritual resurrection of humanity takes place continuously, outside time. This is precisely the meaning of the Resurrection as we see it in the icon of the Descent into Hades. We look at this icon expecting to see the Resurrection of Christ – it is, after all, the festal icon for Easter. Our expectations often play a trick on us, but if we look at the icon carefully, we will see that what we are looking at is not the Resurrection of Christ, at all. Jesus Christ appears in glory, inside an iconographic mandorla, in glorified white garments. His garments are the same as the garments of light that Peter, John and James saw when he was transfigured in front of them, showing them his divinity, as much as they could bear it. They have nothing to do with the burial clothes that were left in the grave. It is clear that we see Christ after his Resurrection, and in some

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icons it is possible to see the stigmata, the wounds of the nails on his hands and on his feet. But the icon shows us another resurrection. There are two figures that emerge from their tomb, or rather who are pulled out from their tomb by Christ, the figures of Adam and Eve. What we see is not the Resurrection of Christ, but the resurrection of Adam and Eve, who represent the entire human race. In some icons that develop the theme further, we can see a long procession of people who walk from Hades to Heaven, with first among them the repentant thief. The Resurrection of Christ is understood by the Orthodox Church, first of all, as a historical event that gives meaning to the entire Christian tradition. This is seen clearly in the much-quoted passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. However, we do not stop there. The event itself happened once and for all, but in the life of the Church Christ is continuously born, continuously crucified and continuously resurrected. The icon of the Descent into Hades changes the context of the event and moves beyond the historical level. The theme and the meaning of the icon is the eternal, continuous resurrection of the human race by the resurrected Christ. The whole meaning of the feast of the Resurrection is precisely about how the sacrifice and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ flow beyond his own person towards the entire universe, how they affect the life of the faithful and how they bring them to salvation. The icon tells us that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ opened the way for our own resurrection, and the feast of the Resurrection is precisely the act of positioning ourselves with Adam and Eve, hoping to participate in the life and Resurrection of Christ. This task is not something that can be obtained or possessed. Participation in the death, the resurrection and the life of the Incarnate God consists of a continuous ascetic ascent towards him. The icon of the Resurrection expresses, perhaps more strongly and more clearly than any text, the eternal character and the eternal significance of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, not simply on the basis of its historicity, but primarily as the event that broke down the divide between the fallen world and the Kingdom of Heaven.

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8. The Protection of the Theotokos

Eastern Christian culture has a particularly interesting understanding of time. Time does not correspond only to the linear view of historical progression. The idea of historical progress itself was never very much at home in the East. To be sure, the only reason to think of the future as an improvement was that we are aware of the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church, which brings us closer to the Second Coming. But aside from this, we can also find the opposite dynamic as well: every generation of churchmen and theologians was one generation removed further from the time Christ and the apostolic teachings than the previous one. Thus, from this point of view, the older a theological position, the more respect it commanded. In fact, any “new idea” was suspected of deviation from the original teachings of Christ and the Church. Forward linear time in general was not very important in the Middle Ages, and the usual way to calculate the passage of time, the Imperial Indiction system which was set up for taxation purposes, was not very reliable. Yet, time is experienced in two other ways in the Church. The circular liturgical time of the year still reflects the changes of the seasons, as was also the case with natural religions. For this reason we find an agricultural context in many of the annual feasts, as was discussed earlier. Many Christological feasts, such as the Nativity of Christ, the Resurrection, and also the Annunciation, are developed along the metaphor of Christ as the spiritual sun, and for this reason they follow older celebrations with an astronomical content. The birth of Christ in the end of December for instance, coincides with the shortest days of the year, and therefore with the annual ‘birth’ of the sun. The Annunciation on the other hand (which in the early Church coincided with the celebration of Easter) marks the day of the creation of the world, when the day and the night were in balance, and when the earth was bringing plants and life from within. This was an appropriate date to celebrate the new creation that Christ would bring, as he entered history in the womb

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8. The Protection of the Theotokos

The Protection of the Theotokos, Greek, twentieth century

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of his mother. Many more of the feasts of the Church have a similar agricultural or astronomical context, which allowed people to use older metaphors in order to understand the new message and the presence of Jesus Christ. Beyond this, circular time in the Church is based on a system of Christological and Marian feasts as well as feasts of saints, which are connected to each other in many intricate ways, taking the congregation through alternating periods of fasting and feasting. Furthermore, the observance of Wednesday and Friday as fasting days and the joyful character of Sunday is a weekly reliving of the Passion and the Resurrection of Christ. There is however, a third way to understand time, more difficult to define, perhaps described as “mystical” or “flat” time. This may be a legacy of the ancient Greek distinction between χρόνος (chronos) and καιρός (kairos), or of the Platonic Ideas as entities existing beyond the confines of time and space. But as much as it is possible for us to comprehend this, God who created the Universe is, likewise, not bound by time. Among the few things we actually know about God in his divine essence, is that he exists as unlimited freedom, beyond the limitations of time and space. The saints, who participate in the glory of God, also share in his freedom beyond time and space. The tradition of the Church often speaks of miraculous appearances of saints, and yet this poses a theological problem. How is it that these saints, many of whom died centuries ago, are able to appear as if they were resurrected? Were the people who were visited by St Demetrios, St Panteleimon, or the Theotokos, seeing phantasms? Are we touching on the kind of anthropology that sees the human being as an immaterial soul trapped in a body? For the Fathers of the Church this is certainly not the case. The Church fought repeatedly against this dualistic view, which had nevertheless enchanted most of the ancient world – and it is usually associated with Plato, who spoke of the body as the tomb, or the prison of the soul. For Christianity the human being consists of both soul and body, and cannot be defined by one of the two only. The idea of a soul that is hovering above the people and the places it wants to visit, is not consistent with the Christian idea of the human being – modern science likewise, cannot easily separate the biological and the psychological parts of the human being. Therefore, these miraculous visions cannot be the disembodied souls of the saints. On the other hand, how can they appear in their bodies before the resurrection of the dead? For the Eastern Christian tradition the explanation is that these apparitions come to us from the end of time, carried by angels. The resurrection of the dead has taken place at the end of time, or

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rather in the Kingdom of God, where there is no linear, historical temporality. God may send, if necessary, the memory of the presence of the saint, in order to perform a miracle or to respond to the prayers of the faithful. Be this as it may, it is only through the a-temporality of the Kingdom of God that we can understand any presence of the miracle in the life of the Church. The icon of the Protection of the Mother of God is an example of this perspective of flattened time. It consists of two or three basic levels from different times that have converged in the visual event of the icon. The central figure is the Theotokos in glory, surrounded by apostles, bishops and angels. As with most icons of Mary, Christ is also included in the image, usually in a roundel above her. Everyone on this level is supported by clouds. Most of these elements, Christ and Mary in a mandorla, the group of apostles, bishops and angels and the clouds, are also constituent elements of the icon of her Dormition. In that icon, Mary’s dead body is laid on a bier, surrounded by angels, apostles and bishops. Christ, who appears surrounded by light, receives her soul (depicted as a baby) in his arms, is a reversal of the more famous scene of Mother and Child. Her death and the way Christ received her soul in his arms is an image of glorification, and the icon of the Protection builds on that glorification and develops it even more, portraying her eternal place of glory in heaven. Here we see how the young girl who was once betrothed to Joseph now has a position of honour in heaven. The simultaneous depiction of Mary, John the Baptist, apostles, bishops and kings, shows that this triumphant heavenly scene is removed from human history. In that sense, it could be connected with events or visions of the second century, as well as with events from the ninth or the fifteenth century, without any change whatsoever. There are three other levels in the icon, and they refer to three different historical events. The central figure in the lower tier is that of Romanos the Melodist, vested as a deacon and standing on the ambo in the middle of the church, and it refers to the Akathist hymn, of which Romanos is traditionally believed to be the composer. The Akathist hymn was written in honour of the Theotokos, or rather as a thanksgiving hymn to her, after Constantinople was saved from an unexpected Avar invasion from the sea in 626. At that time the imperial capital was almost defenceless, as the Emperor with most of his army was away, and Patriarch Sergios appealed to Mary, the protector of the city. The veil (μαφόριον – maphorion) and the girdle (ζώνη – zoni) of the Mother of God were kept in the imperial church of Vlahernai and they symbolised the protection of the Mother of God –the veil especially, has been a symbol of protection since the

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times of ancient Rome. The patriarch and the people processed on the city walls, holding these relics and the icon of Mary. When they reached the sea, the patriarch soaked the veil in the water, and then miraculously a storm sank the enemy fleet. This miracle of the veil of the Mother of God may be seen in some older Byzantine icons that depict the event, where it is painted with waves, like a turbulent sea. It is not very certain if Romanos was indeed the composer of the Akathist hymn. One of the reasons, however, that tradition decided to attribute this particular hymn to him, is because along with John of Damascus and Ephrem the Syrian, he is the hymnographer par excellence of the Theotokos. Romanos certainly composed other famous hymns in her honour, which are still sung today, and he influenced through his bold metaphors and his poetic innovations, the entire course of Greek poetry – even today modern poets such as Elytis echo the expressions and the style of Romanos. The scroll he holds in the icon of the Protection, usually has a piece of his most recognisable hymn, written for the Nativity of Christ: “The Virgin today gives birth to the one who is above being”. But in this icon he is not presented as the master of words, but as the visionary, as the poet whose art captured and reflected the heavens for the sake of the earthly Church. In that sense he is placed next to another prophetic and visionary figure of a very different kind, Andrew the Fool for Christ, who appears to his right, clothed in rags or in an ascetic garment, pointing to the Theotokos who is hovering above, to his disciple and confessor Epiphanios. Andrew the Fool is one of the most well-known saints in a special category of Eastern saints, the holy fools or fools for Christ. The holy fools were people who severed their ties with the world as an extreme practice of humility and asceticism, not by removing themselves physically from the world, as monks and ascetics did, but by pretending to be idiots and sinners, while they lived in the world. They welcomed the derision and scorn, in fact they did anything they could to solicit them. Very often they exposed themselves in public, they talked nonsense. They publicly insulted emperors, bishops and “upright Christians”; for whom religion was a matter of culture, social recognition, pietistic pride, or plain hypocrisy. For this reason holy fools usually appeared in times of spiritual decline. Privately however, their faith and their humility was so strong that they saw all this suffering as an imitation of the suffering Christ, and they performed all sorts of good deeds or healings and other miracles in secret, consoling and ultimately saving heavy sinners, criminals, prostitutes, those people on the fringes of society, whom the official Church avoided. Holy fools were only recognised after they died, when the few people who had

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seen them for what they really were could talk about them openly. Many of them were eventually canonised and are revered till today, giving us a new model of sanctity. Of course, because of the nature of this particular calling, we know only the ones whose humility, asceticism and ultimately sanctity, were recognised accidentally. Perhaps the greatest ascetics who have followed this path will never be known to us. We can never know how many fools for Christ have existed. Andrew was such a saint, who lived in the ninth century in Constantinople. It is a joke of history that Andrew the Fool lived during the reign of Leo the Wise (886-912), the Emperor who may be also portrayed in this icon. The reason Andrew is depicted in the icon of the Protection of the Theotokos, is that he had a vision, which is the basic theme of the icon. According to Epiphanios, who is also portrayed in the icon, next to Andrew, they entered the church of Vlahernai, where the relics of the Theotokos were kept, early in the morning, during the time when Constantinople was under siege – this time probably by the Kievan Rus. Andrew entered the church, as his biography says “doing what was usual to him” and stood at the back, with Epiphanios. They saw a vision of the Theotokos, suspended in mid-air surrounded by John the Theologian, John the Baptist, and other apostles, saints and angels. She knelt on the floor in front of the altar and prayed. Andrew asked Epiphanios “Do you see, my brother, the Queen and Lady of all praying for the whole world?” He replied “Yes, holy father, I see her, and I am astonished.” Then she proceeded to the altar where she took her veil from where it was kept, and she held it over all the people as if she was protecting them under it. The vision faded away after some time, but soon after the invading army left the city. The bishop we see on the left is often identified by an inscription as Tarasios. Tarasios was the Patriarch of Constantinople who presided over the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787, the Council that reinstated the use of icons after five decades of persecution. In many icons the person who is depicted next to him holds an icon. This is, most likely, a reference to the Seventh Ecumenical Council, as it evokes the image of a procession with icons, as it takes place on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, the annual commemoration of the reinstatement of the icons. This part of the icon is a little more difficult to connect with the other parts on a theological level, because neither Tarasios nor the Council of the icons have any particular connection with the Theotokos or with the vision of the protection. John of Damascus, on the other hand, whose thought permeated the Seventh Ecumenical Council,

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would be more likely to be associated with a “Marian” cult of icons, because he was the main intellectual force in support of the icons in the eighth century, and also because he composed a good number of his hymns in honour of the Theotokos. Why then, is Tarasios chosen to be represented here, and why is there an allusion to the theology of the icons here? Perhaps the first is easier to answer. The vision of Andrew the Fool revealed a slice of heaven as it were, in which apostles, distinguished saints, bishops, monks, and kings surround the Mother of God as her heavenly entourage. The earthly Church mirrors this, with the representation of a saintly imperial couple, a deacon-hymnographer, and a saint from the special category of the Fools for Christ. This is a diverse selection of the people of the Church. The representation of a bishop, someone who would represent symbolically the hierarchy of the Church, gives a more complete image of the Church. As for the cult of the icons, the Theotokos was always somewhat connected with the history and the concerns of iconography. She is among the first favourite icon themes; tradition even attests that the first Christian icons were the ones made by Luke the Evangelist, of Mary holding the baby Christ. But perhaps it is significant to note that iconoclasm was the last attack in a series of attacks against the belief in the full humanity of Christ. Mary gave him his human nature, and it is not accidental that the title Θεοτόκος (Theotokos, literally meaning the birth-giver of God) was given to her not in the midst of a wave of theology or historical research that was about her, but as part of the theological debate on the humanity and the divinity of Christ. The title Theotokos is actually of Christological interest, because it really says that a human being, a woman, gave birth to God, and stresses the human nature of Christ. Iconoclastic theology attacked icons, mostly because, in a similar way, they put forth a union between the two natures of Christ. The first generation of iconoclastic arguments revolved around the divine and the human nature of Christ, and whether they could be depicted. Iconoclasm repeated and proceeded in the theological strand that had plagued Christianity since its beginning, either as gnosticism, as docetism or as monophysitism, and the various waves that had disputed the humanity of Christ. If we remember that iconoclasm was basically a Christological challenge, we can see the relevance of the Theotokos. Furthermore, icons contributed an additional aspect on the theme of the protection of Constantinople by the Mother of God. Miraculous “victorious” icons of the Virgin were taken into battle, like war flags, and were believed to secure the victory of the Christians. The

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protection of the Mother of God was made evident through her icon, when it was important to display it to the troops for encouragement. The icon of the Virgin was given the honours of the invincible military general of Constantinople. The icon of the Protection usually includes the depiction of a royal couple, on the left side of the lower tier. In many cases the inscription identifies the Emperor as Leo, and the Empress as Zoe. Leo is probably a conflation of Byzantine Emperors, mostly based on Leo VI the Wise, who was reigning when Andrew had the vision, and was married to a Zoe. This is not very clear though. The reason for this is that Leo often is portrayed with a halo. Leo VI was not canonized, and in fact Zoe was his fourth wife, in defiance of the canons of the Church, which recognized only three marriages, even for the Emperor. The other possibility for the identity of the Leo of the icon, is Leo I (457-474), the only Byzantine Emperor by the name of Leo who was canonized. Except for his portrayal with a halo, there is something else that makes this plausible: it was during his reign, and with his personal interest that the veil of Mary was brought to Constantinople and placed in the church of Vlahernai. Leo I was therefore, the Emperor who had introduced the relic that symbolised the protection of the Mother of God into Constantinople. But the name of the wife of Leo I was not Zoe, and it is difficult to imagine that the Zoe of the icon is not related to Leo and corresponds, for instance, to the infamous Zoe of Byzantium of the tenth/eleventh century – a quite well known and strong Empress, but very unlikely to be remembered favourably in the Church. The only possible imperial couple of Leo and Zoe must be Leo VI and his wife. But is it possible that the iconographic tradition just ignored the historical information about the imperial couple and decided to clad them in halos just for the sake of the icon? Or, is it possible that the Emperor is really Leo I, and a mistake has made in the name and perhaps significance of his wife? Is it possible that the identities of the two emperors were (con)fused into one because of ignorance? There is something else to consider before we pass this harsh judgment. Both Leos had defended the empire during difficult invasions, the first against Avars and Vandals, and the second against Arabs and the Kievan Rus. This was not very unusual, as Constantinople, the Βασιλεύουσα, the Queen City, was the most coveted city in the world for many centuries, and attracted the attention of many foreign armies. It was the responsibility of the Emperor to defend the City and the Empire, by the grace of God. The Emperor was the instrument of God in matters that had to do with the safety of the Empire. Since the time of Constantine in the fourth century, he was

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also the guarantor of the unity of the Church. It was believed that the Emperor was chosen by God (although if a revolution was successful, the usurper was also believed to have been chosen by God!) in order to manage the worldly affairs of Christendom – doing the work of Martha as it were, so that Maria as the church would be free to perform her duty. This had little to do with the personal qualities of the Emperor. Scheming, murderous or slave to passions, he was still the Emperor. It is very likely, therefore, that Leo and Zoe represent the institution of the Emperor rather than the actual historical figures of Leo I, Leo VI and Zoe. What is represented here is the timeless Emperor, the defender of the Empire, who plays an important role in the protection of the Queen City against invasions. This conflation suggests the same flexible stance about time, that we have seen with the other levels of the icon and is consistent with the accumulation of important figures from the hymnographic, the prophetic and the ecclesiastical realm, from different time periods, all of them to witness the timeless vision of the Protection of the Mother of God. What can we conclude from this meandering and difficult presentation of such diverse and sometimes confusing figures? The protection of the Mother of God may not have proven to be so eternal in its historical context. Constantinople fell to invaders twice, the first time to Christians, the knights of the Fourth Crusade, who sacked and looted it and took all the relics to the West; the second time it fell to the Ottoman Turks. Perhaps the collapse of Constantinople also meant the collapse of the understanding of the protection of God as a guarantee of temporal power. The power and the glory of Byzantium may be long gone, and the invincibility of the Queen City may have been proven to be a beautiful myth that nevertheless lasted longer than any other in the history of mankind. Inasmuch as we are forced to consider a spiritual interpretation of the miracles and the visions of the Mother of God, the truth is that this protection was understood as something similar to the Old Testament protection of the Hebrew people by God. The processions of the relics and the use of victorious icons of the Virgin leave us no doubt as to how literally she was believed to be the ὑπέρμαχος στρατηγός (ypermachos strategos), the invincible general of the Queen City. But perhaps because of the longevity or the mythic beauty and power of Constantinople, its memory passed to the collective unconscious of the Orthodox Christian people as something similar to the Heavenly Jerusalem. It is interesting that the icon of the Protection of the Mother of God became very popular among Slavic people even after the fall of Constantinople. By that time many people among the Kievan Rus believed that God had stopped protecting

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the Greeks because they had tried to mend the schism and achieve reunification with the Roman Church, and that the role of the Queen City as defender of the faith, was now falling on Moscow, the “Third Rome”. But this time the protection came with a warning. If the Kievan Rus were to follow in the steps of late Byzantium and compromise the faith that was entrusted to them, the favour and protection of God, could be withdrawn in the same way. Thus, the image of the Protection of the Empire by the Virgin evolved into what could more accurately be described as the Protection of the Faith. This icon, however, shows us something more. As we mentioned in the beginning, the whole scene takes place in the time outside time, something that explains the simultaneous depiction of people from different times. This time outside time extends itself to the present: the faithful who pray for the Protection of the Mother of God, place themselves at the same level as Tarasios, Leo and Zoe, Andrew and Epiphanios and Romanos the Melodist. The prominent position of Romanos has, beyond the historical significance that was discussed above, a liturgical significance as well. Romanos, is mostly known as a great poet and hymnographer but now, in his role as a deacon he stands in front of the heavenly altar, leading the people to prayer. His position is more important than the position of the Patriarch, and much more important than the position of the imperial couple. In the same way, the icon makes an interesting statement about the hierarchy of the saints in heaven. Earthly offices, even ecclesiastical offices, are not very important in heaven. The two-tiered arrangement of the icon (threetiered if we notice that Christ above the Virgin is not on the same level as anyone else) resembles the programmatic arrangement of icons in a church. Christ is on the highest level, inside the dome – as in the image of the dome Pantokrator – while Mary is immediately underneath, leading the way to him – as in the apse image of the Platytera. The next position is dedicated to the apostles, John the Baptist, and the Fathers of the Church (interestingly, bishops from early Christianity do not wear a mitre; the mitre became part of the Episcopal vestments only after the fifteenth century, and the portrayal of unmitred bishops suggests that they are ancient). Apostles, Fathers of the Church and angels are usually portrayed in the higher levels of the church. The level underneath corresponds to lesser known saints, as in the lower tier of the church, but the platforms of Romanos and Tarasios probably have to do with their hieratic role. In the church they are not just the hymnographer and the administrator. The mitred (therefore contemporary) bishop and the deacon are not part of the iconography of the church, but they are leading the prayer of thanksgiving and supplication to the Mother of God.

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9. The Life-Giving Fountain

It is sometimes surprising to see how a cultural memory may be transformed by offering itself to the tradition of the Church. It can cross over from the realm of national tradition to the realm of spiritual tradition, leaving behind all or most of the characteristics that kept it tied to an accidental particularity, and then it can even allow itself to be grafted onto the spiritual and cultural tradition of another people. The icon of the Mother of God as the Life-Giving Fountain is such a case. The Life-Giving Fountain is a theme particularly connected with Constantinople. It refers to a Constantinopolitan site and it started as a feast from Constantinople. It has naturally survived within Greek Christianity, but this theme has also been adopted by the Russian Church in such a way that it expresses Russian religiosity as if it had emerged in Russia. This is not the only such case that reveals the old alliance between Byzantium, Russia and other Eastern nations, a cultural confederation known as the Byzantine Commonwealth. A similar case is the icon of the Virgin of Vlahernai, or Vlaherniotissa, an icon of Mary with the young Christ in her lap, enclosed in a roundel. That characteristically Constantinopolitan image, which emerged as the icon of Mary in the imperial church dedicated to her, is also quite popular to Russian Orthodox Christians, perhaps even more than it is to Greek Orthodox believers, and it is known as The Sign of the Theotokos. This adoptive phenomenon, however, is something we can find very frequently in the early history of Christianity. The character of early Christianity was, very clearly, above and beyond any ethnic or national identity. The Christian Church started its course from within the Jewish Tradition and Law, and thus it naturally inherited a lot from it in its theological language and liturgical expression, but it was quickly made evident that it addressed all sorts of national groups, not limiting itself to Hebrews or Romans. One of the most beautiful texts of early Christianity, the Epistle to Diognetos, tells us that the early Christians shared the customs of the country in which they lived, but their true citizenship was beyond all countries, and

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The Life-Giving Fountain, Argokoiliotissa, Naxos, Greece, nineteenth century

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could only be described as citizenship of heaven (Epistle to Diognetos, 5). In addition, in the following centuries Christianity offered itself to as many cultural versions as the cultures that accepted it, and for many of which it became one of the definitive characteristics of their emerging national identity. In the end, from the perspective of the average Russian, Serbian or Greek Christian, there is not much in Christianity that reminds them of the Hebrew cultural background. The Life-Giving Fountain, as an icon and as a feast (celebrated on the first Friday after Easter) is closely connected with the history of Constantinople. The original fountain still exists, in the Greek neighbourhood of Balukli, in a monastery and church by the name of the Life-Giving Fountain. As is the case with many Christian shrines, the fountain was, and still is, revered among Muslim Turks as well as Greek Christians. The sixth-century historian Procopius mentions that Justinian built the shrine and dedicated it to the Virgin, while the place was already known as the Fountain (Buildings I, 2, 6). Justinian, according to Procopius, saw how beautiful the place was, at the time no more than a dense grove of cypress trees and a flower meadow with a spring, and thought that it would be fitting for a sanctuary. But the historian did not give us any more information. He merely added that it was difficult to describe the church building and said nothing else about it. This statement however, suggests that the church (and perhaps also the fountain?) was rather complex, too complex for Procopius to describe in a few paragraphs. The second, much more detailed testimony, comes from Nicephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos, a priest of St Sophia, who wrote an extensive ecclesiastical history of Byzantium, as well as the liturgical hymns for the feast of the Life-Giving Fountain, in the fourteenth century. Xanthopoulos attributes the foundation of the sanctuary and the church to the Emperor Leo I, also known as the Great or the Thracian, in the fifth century (PG 147: 25-26, cols 71-77). According to this account, long before he ascended to the imperial throne, Leo was wandering in the dense forest, where he met a blind man who was suffering from thirst, and begged him to help him. Leo tried to find some water, but did not succeed. As he was about to give up hope, he heard the voice of a woman telling him that there was a fountain in the area. Leo tried to locate it, but was still not successful, because the fountain was covered by mud and it was not easy to see it, although he had walked right beside it. Then, he heard the same voice again, this time calling him Emperor, telling him that this place was chosen by her, asking him to beautify it, while she would make sure that it would become a place of healing from illnesses and demons, for those who come in faith.

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Then, she instructed him to take some of the mud in front of him and place it on the eyes of the blind man. Leo did so, and the man regained his sight. At the same time, the removal of the mud revealed the spring. Interestingly, the word Xanthopoulos used for “blind” was πηρός (peros), a word that could also be interpreted as “invalid”, thus implying that the healing power of the Virgin and of the fountain was not restricted to blindness, but to all kinds of infirmities. Later, after Leo had ascended to the throne, he remembered the miracle and honoured the request of the Theotokos. He cleared the mud from the place, constructed a solid fountain, and erected a church around it, which he dedicated to the Mother of God. The dome of the church was made of pure gold, while the walls of the church were made of white marble. The fountain was the focal point of the church, and consisted of two parts, a square marble enclosure at the bottom, from where people could drink, and a hemispherical upper part, with steps leading up to it – presumably looking somewhat like a baptistery, and perhaps people could wash or immerse themselves at the top part. Water flowed through two openings to the lower part, while through two marble and stone ducts it also flowed to the altar. The fountain probably bore a superficial likeness only with the way it appears in most icons of the Life-Giving Fountain, but the main structural parts as they appear in the icon are at least consistent with the description of Xanthopoulos. The church and the fountain were destroyed by the Turks after the fall of Constantinople in the fifteenth century, but it was reconstructed in the nineteenth century following closely the description of Xanthopoulos. For some time in the Ottoman period it seems that there were fish in the pond, after which the entire neighbourhood was named Balukli or Balikli, which means “fish pond” in Turkish. This was famous enough, because several of the later icons of the Life-Giving Fountain depict the fish in the pond. Xanthopoulos obviously drew his information much later than Procopius, but his description of the area before the miracle that revealed it to Leo seems informed, to say the least, of the description of Procopius. Most likely then, he was aware of it, but based on the oral tradition of the fourteenth century, he credited Leo instead of Justinian with the discovery of the fountain and the foundation of the church – although it is also possible that he had access to a source that is not available to us today. While Justinian had several times built churches on the site of older, aging or dilapidated churches or shrines, and thus at least the discovery of the fountain and perhaps the initial building could have been done by Leo, the written evidence and the fact that this site would have been well known from the beginning, does not support something like that. In other words, it is not very likely that

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Procopius could make such a claim, if there was already a magnificent church on the site. It is much more likely that the church was actually built by Justinian and that the connection of the church to Leo was made later. At any rate, the church and the fountain became famous for their healing power, although they underwent several adventures and reconstructions over the centuries. The fame and the icon of the LifeGiving Fountain or Ζωοδόχος Πηγή (Zoodochos Pege) however, spread far beyond Constantinople, especially to places with healing fountains. Naturally, one of the main themes of the feast and the icon is healing. There are two levels of healing here however, corresponding to the promise of Mary in the narrative of Xanthopoulos to heal people “from illnesses and from demons”. The first one has to do with the miraculous healing power of God against infirmities and illnesses, according to the hopes and the prayers of any person in suffering. The Mother of God is seen in this context as an intercessor, as the human being that is closer than anyone to Christ, who takes pity on those who suffer and heals them. It is most likely that the icon is as popular as it is due to this element. The healing power of Christ and the fountain bring to mind, inevitably, the miracle at the pool of Siloam, a connection Xanthopoulos brought forth clearly in his narrative. The reference to the Life-Giving Fountain of Constantinople, the “modern” Siloam with the grace of Christ and his mother, was no more than proof that such healings were possible everywhere, because they have been possible there. The icon of the famous Constantinopolitan fountain, placed above several reportedly healing fountains in Greece or Russia, referred to the original miracle-worker, the Mother of God, as the fountain of mercy, healing and miracles who takes pity and graces all those who pray to her. The other level is more theological. Christ himself offered us a symbolism of himself and his spiritual work as a water spring, in his conversation with the woman from Samaria at the well of Jacob, during which he said “whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall become in him a well of water springing up unto eternal life” (John 4:14). We may see the connection between Christ and spring water in other places as well, such as the typological identification of Christ by Paul as the rock of the Old Testament that gave water – and life – to the Hebrew people in the desert (1 Corinthians 10:1-6 and Exodus 17:3-7). Christ is clearly seen in both these cases as the spiritual water that brings salvation. The encounter with the Samaritan woman especially, looks like enough of a theological basis for the symbolical conception of Christ as the life-giving water and his mother as the fountain. Nevertheless, the icon of the Life-Giving Fountain never brought forth this connection, nor is this gospel passage read in the feast of the Life-Giving Fountain. Possibly one reason for this

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is that the idea of Christ as the life-giving water is widespread enough, something we may see for instance in a very different connection between Christ and water, that may be seen in the icon of the Annunciation. This icon usually includes a depiction of a water spring in the background. But probably the main reason for this is that both the feast and the icon are focused on the idea of healing (the epistle reading for the feast is the passage from Acts 3:1-9, which recounts a healing of a lame man, performed by Peter and John in the name of Christ). The icon of the Life-Giving Fountain brings forth both levels of meaning. The lower tier of the icon portrays a multitude of suffering people in various poses, drinking water, having water poured over them, being held by others or presumably brought closer to the fountain, all of them apparently hoping to be cured of their illnesses. There is little at this level to suggest that this is an image of the Constantinopolitan Fountain and not of the pool of Siloam. On the other side of the pool there is a quite different gathering. Bishops, monks and kings stand next to it, apparently praying for spiritual guidance and the spiritual life that is associated with and flows from Christ. On this level we can see that iconography has taken some liberties regarding reality, and it has made an innovation for the sake of spiritual truth. The description by Xanthopoulos, as well as most Greek icons of the Life-giving Fountain, refer to a rectangular lower part, basin or pool. In addition, the nineteenth century reconstruction of the fountain, which still stands today, matches Xanthopoulos’ description closely, and it consists of a rectangular, partially covered lower part. What we see here however, which is the case more often than not in later icons, is a cruciform one. This deviation from historical truth is not without a good reason. The statement here is that the focus of attention of the suffering people as well as of the clergy and God-fearing kings is not just a miraculous spring, but the very spring that flowed from the cross of Christ, and can save humanity both in body and in spirit. This is a Christocentric development of the tradition of the pool of Siloam: our icon identifies the sign of the Cross as the source of miracles, and the theological ramification of this statement is that the healing of the fallen humanity can come through Christ by the way of his Cross. The fountain in this light is quite different from the animistic springs of antiquity: this is not a new version of the pagan Castalia, or the Hebrew Siloam. The healing given by the Cross is not always the same as the healing of medical science. It is true that Christ, his apostles and their successors performed miracles and healings, but they did so, as Christ himself said just before he healed the blind man at Siloam, so that “the works of God are revealed” (John 9:3) in those miracles. But otherwise, the “healing of soul and body” is mentioned as a reason for communion

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in the preparatory prayer that precedes Holy Communion in the liturgy of John Chrysostom, and it is in the restoration of human nature into God that we should look for the true meaning of healing. The Cross at the bottom of the Fountain in our icon indicates the basis of all spiritual and bodily healing, the source and the way of true healing. There is an additional characteristic of our icon that has an obvious theological meaning. The lower part of the icon depicts sick people drinking water from the fountain, but the cups they are all using often look like a chalice, more specifically like the chalice of the Eucharist. This is not an accidental similarity, because the theological significance of what it is they are drinking is too powerful to ignore. The water of the fountain, like the water Christ offered to the Samaritan woman, is a symbol of Christ himself, and the symbolism of drinking Christ for the healing of body and soul is, as we saw above, closely associated with the Eucharist. In addition, the icon has once more departed from historical testimony in order to make a theological point: although Xanthopoulos wrote that the original fountain was, as its later reconstruction, made of marble, the upper part in our icon looks not only as if it is made of metal, but as an oversized chalice. By the same token, the person at the bottom of the icon, who looks almost dead, on whom someone else empties a bucket of water, echoes and perhaps consciously represents the sacrament of Baptism. It is not only the use of this (holy) water that suggests we make the connection, but especially the almost lifeless condition of this person, something that in the language of “spiritual illness” denotes someone who is not even a Christian. The vertical structure of the icon, as it is gradually revealed to us, starts, from the bottom to the top, with the ones who are “like dead” and are baptised into the Church, then moving on to the laity who partake of the healing power of Christ through the Eucharist. Slightly higher are the monks, priests, bishops and kings (who, especially in Byzantium and Russia were given an almost hieratic role, as the protectors of the state of God). The gathering of bishops over a pool of holy or sanctified liquid corresponds to the third of the traditional Eastern Christian sacraments, the sanctification of the myrrh (during the Middle Ages the Eastern Church defined only these three as sacraments; the addition of four more resulting in the standard seven sacraments was done much later, as a result of Western influence). This is a rite that can only be performed by a bishop, but in practice it is only performed by the Patriarch, assisted by his episcopate, every ten years. Laity, royalty and clergy, representing the sacramental life of the Church, are gathered around the symbol of the Cross, but the spiritual hierarchy continues further, in the divine realm that includes the Virgin with Christ and the angels.

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The healing of the body, just like the healing of the soul, refers to the (re)turn of the body to the glory God intends for it, to its proper use and glorification and, cruel as this may sound, this does not have much to do directly with the suffering of the sick people who ask for a miraculous healing. Beyond the deeper theological message that calls Christians to carry their own cross following Christ, pain and illness are part of the suffering that is particular to our fallen nature, but they are not less real or less severe for this reason. The faithful ask for the presence of Christ, and they reach God, but also turn naturally to the saints and especially to the Mother of God for intercession to God to ease their suffering. The epithets that express the hope of mercy given to her in the Greek tradition surpass by far the epithets that have been given to Christ! Some of the names that have been given to her in hymns, churches or icons are “Hope of the hopeless”, “Protection”, “the one who responds quickly”, “Consolation”, “Merciful”, “Cane of the blind”, “Joy of the sad”, “Protector of the wronged”, and so on. For this reason, the symbol of the Cross, which is implied in the shape of the pool, is only the spiritual and metaphysical basis, but not the main theme of our icon. The focus of prayer as it were, is the Mother of God in the upper level. The image of the Virgin with Child, on its own, is not very different from most images of the Platytera, the icon that is usually found in the apse of a church. Mary here is enthroned, holding the young Christ on her lap. Christ is usually seated as if on a throne, and is blessing the crowd below the fountain but also the viewer of the icon, often in the way of a bishop, with both hands. This, despite the young age of Christ, is a highly hieratic image, and is augmented by the two angels flanking the Virgin and Child, who hold the liturgical references to themselves, the two round fans known as ἑξαπτέρυγα (hexapteryga), that symbolize the presence of the ministering angels in the liturgy, and are placed in the way we see them in the icon in several important points of the liturgy. This supports further the reading of the upper part of the fountain as a Eucharistic chalice. Christ is at the same time the celebrating hierarch and the sacrificial lamb, the “offering and the offered” as the Liturgy of John Chrysostom describes him. His mother has a similarly hieratic role here. The sacramental role of the Theotokos is ascertained by the very name of the icon, the feast and the fountain. Ζωοδόχος (zoodochos) literally means “life-receiving”, although it is not unusual for Greek words to shift their meaning from active to passive and vice versa. The primary meaning, connected with the miraculous properties of the fountain, was indeed always understood as “life-giving”, but it is striking that the name that was chosen has the double meaning, implying both the receiving and the giving of life. Strangely, the expression Zoodochos does not appear in the historical account of Xanthopoulos, who referred to the church built

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at the site simply as the church of the Fountain. The word “Fountain” is also the dominant reference to the Theotokos in the hymnography of the feast, which was composed by Xanthopoulos, and it appears 51 times, whereas the expression ζωηφόρος (zoephoros, life-giving or life-bringing) appears 4 times, and the expression zoodochos only once.1 This is only indicative of what is more evident in the hymnography itself: that the significance of the offering of grace is mainly from the Theotokos to the world. The expression Zoodochos Pege probably gained ground much later, but in its double meaning it reflects the sacramental relationship of humanity and the world. The Theotokos is offering herself as a way for Christ to enter the world, offering herself as the throne of the humanity of Christ, but also offering Christ to the world and to the Eucharistic chalice. She is the supreme hierarch, the model of priesthood, the first Christian priest after Christ himself – there are even a few icons that depict her in the vestments of a bishop. Similarly, reprising her liturgical position as the apse Platytera, she stands as a connection between the faithful and Christ, as the par excellence intercessor who passes our prayers to her son. The historical account and the hymnography of Xanthopoulos do not offer any information as to why the celebration of the feast takes place the first Friday after Easter, in the Paschal (Bright) week which, ecclesiastically, is taken as one day, the day of the Resurrection of Christ. The rubric of the Zoodochos Pege service mentions that this service is not to be found in older service books (typika), and is not therefore a part of ancient tradition, but it was inserted there “for the love of the All-holy Theotokos”. The Synaxarion for the day makes a reference to the foundation of the church of the Pege (Fountain), but there is no evidence that the foundation (by Leo or Justinian) took place on the week after Easter. Even if that were the case, the date was not chosen by accident. The feast falls in the extended day of the emergence of Christ from the tomb, and the hymnology is filled with images of the Resurrection. This brings to the foreground the same theological connection that exists between the Lenten period and the Akathist, or the Resurrection and the Annunciation. 1 Indirect references to the Theotokos as a Zoodochos Pege can be found much earlier, in the hymns of Joseph the Hymnographer, in the ninth century. Joseph was one of the most dedicated and productive hymnographers of Mary and his work includes references to her as the inexhaustible fountain of the water of life (Cf. Canon 6, Ode 3, PG 105, 1020), of lifegiving (cf. Canon 6, Ode 8, PG 105, 1025), as a spring of holy water (Cf. Tuesday Matins, fourth week of Lent, double canon, PG 105, 1369) or as the receptacle (docheion) of Christ (Cf. Thursday Matins, fifth week of Lent, double canon, PG 105, 1372), even as the fountain of healing (Canon to the holy martyrs Samonas, Gourias and Avivos, PG 105, 1244).

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The Resurrection and the Annunciation were very closely connected in the ancient Church. In the Annunciation Christ entered the darkness of the womb in order to emerge in Bethlehem nine months later, while in his death he entered the darkness of the tomb in order to emerge in the Resurrection. The Annunciation, the submission of the will of Mary to God, so that she became the Theotokos and the Zoodochos Pege, was the act which made possible the salvific act of Christ, culminating in his Resurrection. The early Church set the feast of the Annunciation on the day that was believed to be the date of the death of Christ – and the date of Christmas was set subsequently, based on the date of the Annunciation.1 The hymnography of the Paschal Friday brings together all these themes, the Annunciation, the nativity, death and Resurrection of Christ, and the Zoodochos Pege provides a focal point for the theological significance and contribution to the Theotokos to the salvation of humanity. In the Annunciation she offered herself to God, willingly, and accepted to become the Fountain of the Water of Life. In this light, the Zoodochos Pege may be seen as the Eastern equivalent to the Western title of CoRedemptrix. Nevertheless, Eastern theology, which never adopted the Western view of the supernatural conception of the Theotokos, has been careful not to promote a view of the Theotokos that may suggest that she was either a source of divinity or a receptacle of divinity in a categorically different way than anyone else. She was a model of spirituality and an endearing icon for people, precisely because she, a person as human as any, showed the way that everyone could follow, accepting the invitation of God and allowing him to be born inside them. The icon of the Life-giving Fountain is taking the reference to a traditional miraculous site and, while it preserves that level, it transforms it into a sermon on the continuous life-giving flow of Christ into the Church, especially through the sacraments. The Constantinopolitan fountain becomes a symbol that describes the temporal and the eternal, the miracle in Constantinople and the miracle of the Church, and at the same time, it is a supplication “for the healing of body and soul” to the Mother of God. 1 Many ancient writers, such as pseudo-Cyprian of Carthage and Polycarp of Smyrna believed that the spring equinox (believed to be on the 25th of March) was the date when the birth of Christ took place, exactly because this was the date the world was created by God, as well as the date God entered the world through the womb of the Theotokos, and also the day he died on the Cross (cf. De Pascha Computus, PL 4, 964). The celebration of Christmas in the winter (the 25th of December in the West and the 6th of January in the East) shifted the meaning of the spring equinox to the Annunciation and its connection with the Resurrection.

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10. The Burning Bush

The title of this striking icon is misleading, at least if we try to look at it from a purely theological point of view. The title of the burning bush refers us to the incident from Exodus 3:2, where God revealed himself to Moses in a bush that was burning and not consumed. And yet, this encounter is usually represented only in one of the four scenes that appear in the corners of the icon that bears this title. Therefore, the prima facie visual evidence hardly supports the traditional name of this type of icon as The Burning Bush. On the other hand, if we read the several features of this complex icon carefully, and if we tried to synthesize the narrative it is trying to tell us, we would conclude that a more appropriate title for this icon would be something like Mary, Mother of God: The fulfilment of the Old Testament prophecies. Having said this, we can notice that very often the central figure of Mary appears surrounded by stylised tongues of fire, and in this way we can see that there is a layer of the icon that has to do something with fire, perhaps more strongly than the other Old Testament representations that are included. We can see an echo of the burning bush in the circular octagon of the image, regardless of the historical background of this shape. What we see here is an open flower. The rounded edges of the four quarters of the complex shape resemble flower petals, separated by the more narrow, and often darker sections that look like sepals. In the centre, the round medallion that contains Mary looks like a stigma/ovary of a flower. The image of an open rose brings to mind another poetic title that was given to Mary since the time of Romanos the Melodist, the Ρόδον Ἀμάραντον (Rodon Amaranton), or Unwithering Rose. Yet, this flower retains its unwithering beauty against red and orange fiery hues. This fiery rose may not be a literal visual interpretation of the Bush of Exodus, but it certainly posits the idea of the unconsuming fire. Overall, this is an unusual representation of the burning bush, in a symbolic way that has little to do with the Greek iconographic

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The Burning Bush, Russian, nineteenth century

legacy and, in spite of any historical connections of this type of icon or what it represents with the Byzantine past, it strikes us as more of a Balkan, Romanian or Slavic, or (most likely) Russian innovation. Likewise, this icon and this view of Mary have been quite influential within Russian theology for a long time. It is noteworthy that the only Marian study of the Russian theologian Sergei Bulgakov is titled The Burning Bush.1 But in the case of this icon, we have to go beyond the title and ask what the real theme is, and what is the theological view presented to us here. 1 Published as Kupina Neopalimaya, YMCA Press, 1927.

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The central figure of Mary is surrounded by many smaller scenes, carefully positioned around it. Our iconic text invites us initially to read it from the periphery towards the end, like a Christian mandala, a symbolic representation of the world, which likewise reveals its secret symbolisms through a trajectory from the outer periphery towards the central image. Here too, we have to start with the four peripheral scenes, in order to understand the depth of the significance of Mary who is depicted in the centre. One of them is particularly suited as our entry point, because it is an easily identifiable representation of the titular scene of the Burning Bush from Exodus 3:2. The design is unmistakably given in such a way that the Marian typology cannot be missed, as Mary is shown in the middle of the burning bush (or rather identified with it), and the angel or the voice of God that came from it, is shown separately. In other words, this echoes the Patristic identification of the Theotokos with the burning bush, as it was possible for her to receive and contain in both cases the Word of God, and not be consumed by it. The other three peripheral scenes are usually the ladder of Jacob, the vision of Ezekiel, and a visual reference to the root of Jesse. All four images represent scenes from the Old Testament, which are routinely interpreted as typological prefigurations of Mary in Patristic literature – we can find, for instance, the typological identification of the Theotokos as the rod from the root of Jesse at least as early as Irenaeus’ On the Apostolic Preaching1 written in the second century – as well as in the liturgical and hymnological tradition of the Orthodox Church. The Akathist hymn, written in the sixth century in honour of the Theotokos,2 would be the most obvious source for the dissemination of these views, and it includes several references to her as the ladder through which God descended to the earth (Ode 4 and Fourth Ode and Third Chant Oikos 2). There is something about protection from a certain kind of fire there: one of the many ways Mary is described in the long Akathist hymn is as she who extinguished the worship of fire (referring to pagan religion) and as she who rescues from the fire of passions (Oikos 5). Nevertheless, these two brief verses in what is a quite long poem which exalts the Theotokos in many different ways, do not seem strong enough to warrant a particular identification of her as a protector against fire, which is how the icon of the Burning Bush was received in folk religious tradition. Instead of trying to look for any theological reasons why Mary might possibly be seen as providing protection against fire, we can simply explain this by referring to the 1 Irenaeus of Lyons, On the Apostolic Preaching, 59, SVS Press, 1997, p. 79. 2 The text of the Akathist hymn may be found translated into English in The Akathist Hymn and Small Compline, Holy Cross Press, 1991.

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pre-modern principle of similarities or signatures, according to which one treats an affliction or wards off a danger, by using something that looks like it.1 This method, which has survived in our days in homeopathic medicine, views physical resemblance as a sign of an intrinsic connection which reveals something about the metaphysical connection between the two objects, and ultimately about the power of a certain object over an affliction or danger associated with the other object. From this point of view it is not so much Mary who is presented in her traditional role as intercessor, mediatrix or protectress, but the icon of the Burning Bush, that displays the similarity to real fire and thus is used as a folk talisman against fire. It is not so much the Mother of God who is invoked here, as it is her particular symbolism and depiction as the one who withstood the fire of God, even if it was in the Old Testament prefiguration. The theological significance of the icon of the Burning Bush is quite different. In addition to the aforementioned examples of Old Testament scenes that reveal a Marian typology, many icons of this type repeat the reference to the ladder in the central image. Mary inside the round medallion often holds a small red ladder in her right hand, while in other icons she holds the model of a Church. Jacob’s ladder and the Church are both typological representations of her. Yet, there is a slight difference between the two symbols, which may suggest a preference of one variant over the other according to the context: The ladder is a symbol of ascetic ascent, popular especially among monastics. The most famous demonstration of this is the sixth century Ladder of Divine Ascent written by the monk John who became known through his work as John of the Ladder, or John Climacus.2 This work describes the ascetic ascent to heaven in thirty “rungs”, after the thirty years Christ lived on the earth before he commenced his ministry. It was written at the request of another John, abbot of the monastery of Raithu, and it is addressed to monks, and was meant to be read by monks. For this reason it has been one of the most popular monastic readings of all time. The image of the ladder in an icon therefore, has a distinct monastic overtone. The image of the Church, which sometimes appears instead of the ladder, has a very different connotation. The Church is also a typological image of Mary, but it is a symbol of much wider use than the ‘ascetic’ ladder. It could be, therefore, more appropriate for a parish church than the image of the ladder. 1 Cf. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, Random House, 1970, pp. 17-30, esp. p. 26. 2 John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Paulist Press, translated and edited by Colm Liubheid and Norman Russel, Paulist Press, 1982.

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Although this icon is not simply dedicated to Mary but it also explores several aspects of Marian iconography, the fire-like framing of the central image gives her an unusually elevated place of honour. The most likely visual predecessor for this fire-like framing is the ‘hesychastic mandorla’, which was used only in the iconography of Christ in glory, in other words in his most metaphysically significant and triumphant depictions, such as the Resurrection, the Ascension or the Transfiguration. At any rate, images that may be said to be precursors or prototypes for the icon of the Burning Bush, generally appear at the same time and follow the spread of hesychastic imagery. The thirteenth century image of the Theotokos holding Christ in the monastery of Chora in Constantinople is adorned with a ‘protohesychastic’ mandorla very similar to the one that may be found in contemporary images of the Transfiguration in northern Greece (such as the fresco in the monastery of Olympiotissa in Elassona, Greece).1 Images of the Virgin with Child with a gradually more pronounced hesychastic mandorla around both of them can be found throughout Greece and the Balkans in the following centuries, clearly anticipating the iconographic type of the Burning Bush.2 On the one hand Mary is indeed given a special place of honour within Orthodox theology, but this kind of elevation to an almost divine status is on the fringes of Orthodoxy. The Orthodox Church never went as far as to imply that Mary was ontologically different from the rest of humanity. This does not reflect a lesser Marian devotion, since Mariolatry is equally strong in Greece as it is in Italy for instance, but a different way in which she is important to the Church. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin belongs only to (fairly) recent Roman Catholic theology, at least as an official doctrine (this is reminiscent of the difference between the Roman Catholic Assumption of the Virgin and her Orthodox Dormition), but the Eastern Church had always insisted on her humanity and her special place as an intercessor for the human race exactly because of it. The humanity of Mary is a guarantee of the full humanity of Christ, and for this reason, from an Orthodox perspective it is unusual to see her associated with a symbol that implies (her) divinity. Therefore, the mandorla-like frame most likely betrays a Western theological influence, or at least, a development of an idea that was never accepted as a doctrine in the East. Nevertheless, we have to note that Mary is not exalted here – or 1 Efthalia Constantinides, The Wall Paintings of the Panagia Olympiotissa at Elasson in Northern Thessaly, Athens 1992, Vol. 2, p. 238. 2 Cf. Joby Patterson, Hesychastic Thought as Revealed in Byzantine, Greek and Romanian Church Frescoes: A Theory of Origin and Diffusion, Revue des études sud-est Européennes, Vol. 16, 1978, pp. 663-670.

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anywhere else in Eastern Christian iconography for that matter – in her own right. The vast majority of the theological attitudes about Mary in the early Church saw her importance mainly in relation to Christology (something that can be seen in the debates about her title as Theotokos, a term which had Christological rather than Marian ramifications). For this reason, icons of Mary that do not also portray Christ are extremely rare – the only exceptions are the icons that represent her early life, in the episodes before the Annunciation. In the icon of the Burning Bush we do not see any of the scenes that are usually associated with her cult, such as the Annunciation, the Dedication to the Temple, her Nativity or her Dormition. The peripheral images are not taken from her own life, but refer strictly to Old Testament prophecies on the Incarnation of Christ. The iconographic synthesis of the Burning Bush combines her presentation as the Mother of God (in the most usual form of Mary and Child in the centre), with the fulfilment of the Old Testament prophecies about the Incarnation of Christ. Christ is present everywhere in this icon, in the four peripheral scenes as well as in the central one, and even when his presence is not directly evident, it is still at least implied symbolically. It is therefore obvious that the theological significance of Mary in the icon of the Burning Bush does not reflect a general Marian interest, but the very specific theme of the Incarnation of Christ as it was typologically anticipated in the Old Testament. In addition, the four selected Old Testament scenes stress, directly or indirectly, the human lineage of the incarnate Christ, something that makes the Marian overtones more appropriate. As in most Marian images and theology, her significance here is directly connected with the Incarnation of God and his union with human nature, but in this iconographic type this theme is particularly explored from the point of view of prophecy. This particular version of theological importance of Mary leads us to the next question: why is it necessary to approach the Incarnation from the perspective of the Old Testament? The value, the significance and the interpretation of the Old Testament was one of the most intriguing problems in early Christianity. Some splinter groups, especially within Gnostic circles, challenged the value of the Old Testament altogether, and argued that after the Incarnation of Christ the Old Testament was not important for Christians.1 Mainstream Christianity however, explored the relationship between the Old and the New Testament in several ways, something that was important not only for the theology of the emerging Church, but also for its liturgical tradition which still owes a lot to the Old Testament legacy, particularly in the Psalms of David. The New Testament and the Old Testament were connected in many ways in the early Church, liturgically and theologically. Perhaps 1 Cf. Henry Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society, OUP, 2001, pp. 89-90.

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the most successful way, which commanded a lot of respect in the early Church, was to view the Old Testament as a typological anticipation of the New Testament and the tenure of Christ. To be sure, the Old Testament was always read through the lens of the New Testament and the revelation of Christ. Perhaps the best way to demonstrate this is the narrative of the two disciples on the way to Emmaus in Luke 24:13-35 and specifically 24:27, in which we read that when Jesus opened the Scriptures for them, he showed them that the entire Old Testament tradition is about him. From this perspective, the Law, the Prophets, and the books of Wisdom, are Christian books for the Christian Church, rather than books of an alien tradition, which also portray something about Jesus Christ. God revealed himself in different ways and different degrees in the Old and in the New Testament. The Incarnation, the ministry of Christ on earth, his Passion and Resurrection, were extremely important events regarding the revelation of God to the people, but they did not come about in a void. The advent of Christ was, in certain ways, prepared by the Old Testament, prophesied directly in some parts, at least in the way Christians read the Old Testament, and implied indirectly elsewhere. In addition, scriptural research for the early Christians meant, almost exclusively, their critical engagement with the Old Testament and a more complete understanding of Christ and his work, as they are revealed in it. A remainder of this attitude can be seen even today: the article of the Creed that mentions that Christ “rose again the third day according to the scriptures” does not refer to the Christian literature but to the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures. The typological school reads the entire Old Testament in this light, interpreting many parts of the Old Testament as prefigurations of events and characters related to the life of Christ. This connection was solidified with the liturgical use of certain passages of the Old Testament in the context of Christian feasts based on the New Testament. The Mother of Christ was also seen in the context of typological discernment. A number of passages from the Old Testament were mined by the Christian Fathers and were related to her, especially around the time of the Third Ecumenical Council held in Ephesus in 431, which proclaimed her as Theotokos, i.e. the birthgiver of God. These themes were usually explicative of her perpetual virginity, her relationship with Christ, and her being the preparation and the way by which God entered the world. It is traditionally accepted that Old Testament images such as Jacob’s ladder (Genesis 28:10-17), the Temple of Solomon, or sometimes specifically the Eastern door of the Temple (Ezekiel 43:2744:4), or the Holy of Holies, the Tabernacle of Moses, the urn that held

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the manna, the root of Jesse (Isaiah 11:1-10), the Burning Bush where Moses spoke with God for the first time, the tablets of the Law, and others, prefigure Mary. All of these references were not only found in the writings of the Fathers, but were also used liturgically in the readings and the hymnology of the four Marian feasts (her Nativity, the Entrance into the Temple, the Annunciation and her Dormition). This means that the Marian theme in the context of the Old Testament tradition was not restricted to learned theologians, but it was made available, through liturgical practices, to the entire Church. All of these images are powerful in their own way, and all of them are used as metaphors for what the Theotokos was. The image of the Burning Bush was associated with her because she contained God inside her without being burned herself, and also because she conceived and gave birth without losing her virginity. The literal translation of the original expression φλεγομένη καί μή καιομένη βάτος (flegomeni kai mi kaiomeni vatos) that the Fathers used, “flaming yet not burning bush”, and it refers exactly to the miraculous preservation of the bush inside the fire. At the same time, the narrative of the Burning Bush in the book of Exodus is a very strange theophany. Initially it seems that Moses is not quite sure what exactly he sees. The Exodus passage begins with a sighting of an angel in the bush (Exodus 3:2), but there is no further mention of an angel thereafter: it seems that the angel was there as a beacon, just to catch the attention of Moses. But then, as if to disperse any doubt as to what follows, the passage states explicitly that the voice that was heard out of the bush was the voice of God, and that Moses turned away in order not to see God. However, since Moses saw the bush and only subsequently turned away, it is obvious that the bush was not God, but somehow contained his presence. The bush was the vehicle, as it were, out of which came the voice of God, and yet the divinity (the fire) of God did not consume it. The close similarity with the role of Mary in the Incarnation of Christ is unmistakable. There are two levels to the significance of the preservation of the bush, in a Marian context. One has to do with the preservation, or rather the perseverance, of the Theotokos herself, in that she could contain God inside her and give birth to him. It is this paradox that gave her the title Πλατυτέρα τῶν Οὐρανῶν (Platytera ton Ouranon), loosely translated as ‘Greater than the Heavens’. The mystery of the Incarnation is closely related with Mary in that way. Moreover, Eastern Mariolatry is always closely connected with the birth of Christ: she is honoured and venerated because of it, and even her choice to accept the will of God, or her dedication to the Temple and subsequent life of prayer, were seen by the Church Fathers as instrumental to the Incarnation. Even when she was used by St. Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth

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century as the model of the Christian life, the emphasis was on the dedication, the life of prayer and the submission of her will to God, which allowed the Word to be born inside her: it is in this way that the Logos, Word, is continuously born within the Church. The vast majority of her non-narrative icons in the East (i.e. icons that do not represent her own Nativity, her Entry into the Temple, the Annunciation or her Dormition) represent her in some way showing her relation to Christ, either holding him, or addressing him (in images where she addresses Christ, while usually John the Baptist addresses him on the other side, or even as a Platytera: whenever she does not hold Christ, her image addresses the image of the Christ Pantokrator in the dome). And as we have already seen, other typological images of Mary taken from the Old Testament, are also based on her as the Mother of God. The Ladder of Jacob for instance, is a direct connection between Heaven and Earth, as it were, something that may be said both about the Theotokos and about Christ. The Temple of Solomon and the Holy of Holies were the earthly containment inside which God was believed to be. The root of Jesse (the father of David) is a symbolism and a reminder of the human lineage of Christ, which came through Mary. The second paradox is the preservation of her virginity. Her perpetual virginity was first affirmed in the second century, backed up by the apocryphal, yet widely respected, Protevangelion of James, and most effectively argued by Tertullian. It may seem strange to us now why this was ever such a big issue, and what difference it would have made to ascertain that the natural physiology and the sexual life of Mary was the same as that of any woman, at least after the birth of Christ. Tertullian starts his argument saying that such views are not invented because they are consistent with Christian or personal beliefs, but that it is because of the historical truth of such events that certain beliefs are formed (De Carne Christi, PL 2, 790). In other words, he says that the miracle of her virginity was one of the factors that shaped Christian beliefs, and in this way he places the origin of Christian faith with God who acted first by doing the miracle, to which humanity could only respond by accepting it and moving towards him. The views of Tertullian and other writers can show us how the perpetual virginity of the Theotokos was understood and why it was an important part of her cult, a task that could take us through many different phases. But in this case, since the icon of the Burning Bush is a late introduction to iconography, it is better to examine the significance of Mary in late Orthodox theology. The role of the ascetic in early Christianity combined an aspiration to learning and solitude, as well as an aspiration to serve the community (although the latter not so much for reasons that today would be

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understood as social sensitivities, as for how this ministry of servitude can cultivate humility). For this reason, the Fathers often used Moses as the model for the life of the Christian, because his life was divided into three stages, each one of each consisting of forty years. In the first forty years of his life, Moses learned and excelled in the wisdom “of the world”, living as an Egyptian prince. He spent the following forty years in solitude, in the desert of Midian, tending the flock of Jethro. Finally, for the last forty years of his life, he returned to the world in order to help his people and lead them through the desert into the Promised Land. Basil the Great and Gregory of Nazianzus, among other writers, had exactly this model in mind when they studied the wisdom of their time (they both studied philosophy in Athens) and then they withdrew for some time in monastic solitude, before the Church called them to assume a more active role and become bishops. In later Christianity however, the model of Moses gave way to the model of Mary, who, according to the Protevangelion of James, after she was dedicated to the Temple by her parents, she withdrew to the Holy of Holies in prayer, and was fed by an angel. It is the life of prayer that prepared her for the grace of God, and thus by consenting to the action of the Holy Spirit, God was born inside her. This way of reading the Marian story, where prayer, ascetic ascent, dedication and submission to the will of God superseded worldly wisdom, became prevalent in the fourteenth century as a model for the spiritual ascent of every Christian. A life of prayer, spiritual preparation and purification was encouraged in order to invite the grace of God, so that Christ, who is also present in the Eucharist, is born inside every Christian, and transforms individual Christians to the Church in its Pauline understanding as the body of Christ. The virginity of Mary here refers to the purity and strength of her prayer, which is then applicable to the purification of every Christian by a life of prayer. This new spiritual model helped to define the Eastern version of Mariolatry. She was not only an intercessor to God for our behalf, as she had always been; she was certainly not a co-redemptrix, as she was occasionally seen in the West; and she was never seen less human (or more divine) than any human, ontologically speaking. Moreover, as mentioned already, she was not venerated (just) for the person she was, but always in connection to her motherhood to Christ. But it is exactly because of her full humanity that she was seen as the quintessential human, the quintessential saint (and thus her most usual name is Παναγία (Panagia – which could be rendered as ‘all holy’ or ‘completely saintly’), the one who shows the way to Christ – something naturally reflected in her most popular iconographic depiction, the Ὁδηγήτρια (Hodigitria). In many ways it is because of her humanity that she, rather

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than Christ, is seen as the model of the Christian life. The difference between Mary and Christ as a model of ascent is ecclesiological rather than historical or moral: by following the example of Mary we invite the grace of God which transforms us into Christ. Conversely, an imitation of Christ (at least in the way we can understand the word in a non-biblical context) is untenable although it has scriptural basis: we cannot rise to the level of God by our own means. Therefore, the model of Mary allowed the Church to promote widely the life of prayer, removing any possible Pelagian tendencies – the kind of theological view that sees salvation primarily in moral terms. What we have here is very different. Instead of judgment we have compassion. Instead of condemnation we have forgiveness and acceptance. The figure of Mary in the middle has a dynamic relationship with the images in the periphery: on the one hand the prophecies prepare us and help us to understand the significance of Mary and the mystery of the birth of Christ, as it takes place eternally, not only in the manger of Bethlehem, but also continuously within the Church as the Virgin mother. In this way we start with what we are given in history, and we move towards the eternal. Following the way of the mandala, which often represents a sacred trajectory from the periphery towards the eternal centre, we have been able to extend our reflection through history, in order to touch the ineffable made palpable. In terms of the spiritual life, this is our destination. Having traced this movement, we can see the opposite direction as well. The whole history, or rather the world that lives in linear, historical time, is receiving its meaning from the central figure of Mother and Child. This is a figure of love and compassion, compassion for the world. The image in this way is not an image of an inward trajectory, but an image of continuous birthing, an omphalos. The transfigured vision of the image, this Christian mandala/omphalos, allows us to look at our own history in a different way, having acquired some small part of the compassion of God. If the icon of the Burning Bush represents a border between two different kinds of existence, it brings to mind the fiery sword of the Cherubim that was placed in the Gates of Paradise, after the expulsion of Adam and Eve (Genesis 3:24). The hymnography of the Holy Friday says that this fire was extinguished by the wood of the Cross of Christ: after the Crucifixion and the Resurrection of Christ, the Gates of Paradise were opened. If this is the icon of the Burning Bush, of the flower that is surrounded by fire and yet not consumed by it, then we can see that the love and compassion of God change what was once an unrelenting limitation into a dynamic entry point, an invitation to the continuous pursuit of God.

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11. The Bogolubskaya

This icon is named after Prince Andrei Bogolubov (1110-1174), one of the most devout leaders of medieval Russia. Bogolubov is known for acquiring an icon of the Theotokos in Constantinople, and bringing it with him to Kiev and then to the city of Vladimir, which he founded. Because of that, this magnificent and quite famous icon (probably the most immediately recognisable icon of the Theotokos) which was painted in the twelfth century in one of the icon workshops of Constantinople, is known as Vladimirskaya. In addition, Bogolubov reportedly had a vision of the Mother of God, and it is on this vision that the Bogolubskaya icon is based. Be this as it may, this relatively simple icon puts forth an interesting theological view on Mary and the Church. The icon does not represent a particular event or miracle. It is not one of the usual variations of the Virgin with Child. One of the first things we notice, which is rather unusual, is the multitude of people on the right side, saints from all times and places, including apostles, the Three Hierarchs (Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus and John Chrysostom, who were especially honoured and revered in the Orthodox world as a group), two contrasting groups of ascetic saints and crowned saints, and a representation of bishops who are almost contemporary with the icon itself. As with the vast majority of the icons of the Theotokos, Christ is also included in the icon. In this case, Christ is placed on the upper right corner, as if he opens the heavens so that he can be seen, and usually blessing with his hand. The geometric shape of the community of the saints forms continuity with the figure of Christ who is standing right above it. The line that can be extended from the Moscow metropolitan at the bottom left of the space of the saints does not end with the upper tier of saints, but is extended all the way to Christ. Therefore, we are guided to think of this visual continuity and separation as something important here. Visually, we can see the movement from the bottom right quadrangle of the icon towards the top right corner figure of Christ.

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Nevertheless, Mary, Christ and the saints that are included in the right part of the icon are not turned towards the viewer, as is often the case with icons that receive the prayers of the faithful, but they are facing each other. The faces of the saints are turned towards Mary, while the face of Mary is turned towards Christ, and the face of Christ is turned towards Mary. Therefore, we can identify movement from the entire right part of the icon towards Mary on the left, but also, taking into account Mary’s gaze as well, from the saints at the bottom right part to Mary on the left, and from Mary to Christ on the top right corner. Obviously, Mary is the centre of this dynamic exchange of gazes. In addition, her figure is the largest one in the icon, and it is presented as almost equal in size to the entire community of saints. Despite the complex arrangement of the icon, the size of her figure, together with the convergence of gazes on her, make it very clear that Mary is the real theme of the icon, and everything else that is included in the icon explains and explores an aspect of her significance. This could be a complicated task. The cult of the Mother of God is a complex and multi-layered phenomenon, with some parts of it corresponding to a ‘higher’ theology, and some others simply steeped in folk tradition. There are countless names in the tradition of the Church for Mary, apart from the more ‘theological’ ones such as the Theotokos or Mother of God, and many of them are directly associated with an iconographic type – the ‘Unwithering Rose’, and the ‘It is meet and right’ for instance. We understand something important about Mariolatry in the East however, when we note that Christ is present in almost all of the icons of Mary, suggesting that both in the official theology of the Eastern Church and in popular piety, it is her special relationship with Christ that gives her the exceptional status of the ‘All-Holy’, or Panagia (the usual name for the Mother of God in the Greek tradition). Mary was drawn into the theological debates of early Christianity (especially in the Third Ecumenical Council) only indirectly, in order to affirm the human nature and lineage of Christ, and as proof of the unity of the divine and the human nature of Christ in one person. Although a lot of the theological language of the time was concerned with the recognition of Mary as a Theotokos (Birthgiver of God), the nature of that debate was, essentially, Christological. Therefore, we see that some of the first arguments surrounding her role in Christianity touched on some of the biggest building blocks of the Christian Church. Nevertheless, although it is impossible in the Orthodox tradition to consider the Theotokos separately from Christ, her theological significance is certainly not limited to Christology. Similarly, her importance is not limited to the young silent mother of

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Bogolubskaya Mother of God, Russian, nineteenth century

the Nativity, or to the weeping figure next to the Cross. It is important to understand that in early Christianity and (still) in the Orthodox world, elements such as her virginity, her role in the Annunciation and especially the understanding of her motherhood, were not mere unrelated pieces of lore in the fringes of Christology, but they were tightly connected with the theology of salvation. Therefore, examining the early Christian literature on Mariology, we can see another important theme develop, even before the Christological Theotokos of the Third Ecumenical Council: the typological identification of Mary with the Church, as the virgin mother who continuously gives birth to Christ. This is the theological view expressed in the icon of the Bogolubskaya.

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To understand this, we have to consider how we understand the life of Christ, not simply from an examination of the texts and not only using the biblical and the historical sources in order to reconstruct in our mind the various events as if we had just watched them from a short distance. This kind of historiography is not always useful, although it is part of the modern theological arsenal. As an extreme example of this, a certain part of modern theology, associated with what is known as the ‘Jesus seminar’, and an even greater part of Christian historical writing as it is presented in films, the media and popular books, is interested in discovering “what really happened” at the time of Christ, how did the events described in the Bible actually happen, what was the motivation of the people involved in them, especially from a financial or political point of view, how could we possibly reconstruct these events if we could transport ourselves back in time in order to keep a detailed record that would include all sorts of historical, cultural, or sociological information. In other words, this approach would like to go beyond the Bible and the traditional (patristic) commentaries, in order to recreate, in the manner of a historical documentary, the life of Christ. This extreme historical approach has received a lot of criticism from theologians. Perhaps the most respected opposition comes from a position that asserts that the Bible, the New Testament especially, was not written in order to provide any kind of historical, cultural or sociological information. The historicity of the Gospels is only the historicity of the divine revelation of God through Jesus Christ, and the information provided in them is only the information sufficient for the salvation of humankind. Everything else, any other bit of information, was considered irrelevant at the time the Gospels were written, and for many centuries later. Regardless of whether we agree with this view, or whether we want to apply archaeological methods to the writings of Esdras, Moses, or the apostles Paul and Matthew, in order to extract information that might be considered useful to us, we cannot overlook the spiritual and liturgical context in which the Bible was both written and received within the Christian community. Instead of trying to move ‘beyond’ the Biblical text, we can try to move closer to it. Instead of looking for the motives of the people whose acts are described, we can query the intent of the text itself, and reflect on the points it conveys. In addition to the numerous methodological problems the ‘Jesus seminar’ approach entails, there is something important that cannot be ignored in the context of the early Church, which is particularly important in our understanding of the ‘ecclesiological Mariology’ that is portrayed in the icon of the Bogolubskaya: that in addition to the

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historical Christ who was born in or around the year 1 in Bethlehem and was crucified in Jerusalem 33 years later, the historical presence of Christ was also understood, right from the beginning as we may see in the epistles of Paul, in terms of an incarnational ecclesiology, as the identification of the Church with Christ. Paul often uses the term “body of Christ” meaning the Church (Romans 7:4, 12:5, 1 Corinthians 10:16, 12, Ephesians 4, 5, Colossians 1:24). In a most revealing passage (Galatians 4:19), he refers to the Church of the Galatians as the Christ to whom he is giving birth. This impressive insight into the mind of the early Church tells us much more about the significance of the Nativity of Christ in the early Church, than any historical recreation of the manger and the grotto of Bethlehem. Similarly, the various events of the life of Christ and also of all the feasts of the early Church were understood as events and feasts that applied at the same time to the historical and to the ecclesiological Christ, and, by extension, to the way the early Church defined itself. The Resurrection, in this context, does not only refer to the bodily resurrection of Christ that took place in Jerusalem “under Pontius Pilate”, but it refers at the same time to the resurrection and the continuous renewal of the faithful in the Church, and of the Church in Christ. From an Orthodox theological point of view, these two are not two different events, but the same event, taking place both historically and eternally. Similarly, the Annunciation and the Nativity respectively, do not only refer to the meeting of Mary and Gabriel or to the birth of Jesus Christ in the flesh, but also to the acceptance of the Word of God and his continuous birth in the faithful and in the Church, at the same time. It is in this context that we can appreciate the typological and doxological identification of the young girl from Nazareth with the Church as a virgin mother, and the theological significance and the central position of Mary in the ecclesiological understanding of the Body of Christ. We can see two different representations of the Church in the icon of the Bogolubskaya. The Church is present as a building behind the Mother of God, offering a kind of identification between the two, which is usual to Russian iconography, and can be observed in its full extent in the famous icon of the Holy Trinity by Andrei Rublev, where each of the three angels is associated with a figure in the background, which gives some information about its particular hypostatic identity (the Church, the tree of life, or the mountain of spiritual ascent). The Church is also represented in the Pauline, ecclesiological understanding of the Body of Christ on the right (consisting of the clergy and the people), but it is interesting to note that this representation too, is given to us according to the general rules of

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the liturgical, iconographic program of the church building. The hierarchical arrangement of the represented saints follows broadly the order in which saints are represented on the walls of the church (more ancient or more respected saints in higher tiers), but where the similarity is hard to miss is in the figure of Christ, who both by his blessing posture and by the iconographic dome that extends outside the frame of the icon behind him, looks like the icon of the Pantokrator, the foremost icon of importance in the Orthodox church building, reserved for the inside of the dome. Both in the semiotics of the Eastern Christian architecture and iconography, and in the depiction of Christ above the communion of the saints in the icon of the Bogolubskaya, Christ is represented as the head and the Church as his body (cf. Ephesians 1:22, 4:15, 5:23 and Colossians 1:18). The second place of honour in an Eastern Christian church is in the apse, and it is now usually reserved for the Theotokos. Here we come across a point that needs some explanation. If the architecture and the iconographic programme of the church building reflect the ecclesiology of the Church, what does this say about the prominent position for Mary? After all, it may be possible to read the Pauline definition of the Church as the body of Christ, without a single reference to Mary. It is exactly on this point that the Bogolubskaya offers an invaluable theological insight. In order to appreciate this finer point in ecclesiology, we have to remember what the exact meaning is of the words we use to refer to the Church. The English word ‘church’, as the German Kirche, the Russian cerkov and many other Northern European variants, comes from Κυριακόν (Kyriakon), one of the Greek words that were used in early Christianity to refer to the church building. The word Kyriakon literally means ‘[house] of the Lord’, but also ‘of the day of the Lord’, i.e. referring to Sunday (Κυριακή – Kyriaki). The same word is still in use in Greek speaking monasteries, and it refers to the particular church building where monks celebrate the Divine Liturgy on Sunday, the day of the Lord. The word ‘Church’, therefore, with its root words, give us a first understanding of the Church as a ritual gathering in the name of the Lord. Taking it one step further, the Russian word Sobor, which tried to provide a translation of the Greek word Ἐκκλησία (Ekklesia), is a word that can be understood both in an ecclesiological and a political context. Although it is used to describe the Church, it also refers to one of the two houses of the parliament. The words Sobor and Sobornost suggest an assembly, and thus they reflect accurately the kind of Eastern ecclesiology that has its roots in the Pauline understanding of the Church, but also extends to catholicity as it was understood in

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Eastern theology, and to the collegial understanding of the authority of bishops within the Church. The social and communal overtones of Sobor and Sobornost give us a sophisticated understanding of the catholic spirit of togetherness that makes the Church. This is something we can observe in the way the saints of the Bogolubskaya are arranged: kings and queens are placed next to naked martyrs, and slaves and fishermen next to bishops. Obviously, the catholicity of the Church as we can see it here transcends any kind of social or even ecclesiastical rank. The Greek word Ekklesia however, which is usually regarded as the source for the understanding of the communal character of the Church, is a little more nuanced. Its original use in ancient Athens as well as in other city states (Ἐκκλησία τοῦ δήμου, Ekklesia tou demou, or general assembly of the people) meant the assembly of all the free citizens who came together as a body, in order to discuss and decide the good of the community. In some of the phases of the Athenian political system, the ekklesia of the people was the highest executive power of the state. In this context, it is not very different from Sobor, the term which likewise has a spiritual as well as a political content. There is something more to be said about ekklesia, however. The original literal meaning, which throughout the history of the word within the Greek language, from antiquity and all the way to modern Greek, was not too far from its political and ecclesiological content, was that of a ‘calling’, evident in the root of the word, in the verb καλεῖν (kalein), to call. Similar words such as ἒκκλησις (ekklesis, appeal), ἐπίκλησις (epiklesis, invocation), ἐγκαλεῖν and προσκαλεῖν (egkalein/proskalein – to invite) show this very clearly. In the ancient political vocabulary, it was understood that the state was responsible to call the free citizens into the body of the ekklesia. An interesting political and ecclesiological point is that freedom was defined precisely by participation to the assembly of the ekklesia – in other words, to be free meant that one was a member of the ekklesia. In the Christian context of the word however, the calling comes from above. This is the community, the people and the body of Christ, and the calling is the same as that by which Christ called his apostles one by one. The Greek Christian understanding of ekklesia, which reflects in its history the full meaning of Christian ecclesiology, combines the universal assembly in the name of the Lord, with a response to the calling that comes from Christ and is actualised, as we see in the Pentecost, by the Holy Spirit. In other words, Orthodox ecclesiology consists of two important characteristics: the assembly in the name of the Lord, which is synonymous with the historical

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and the Eucharistic body of Christ; also of the movement of this assembly towards the Father and the fulfilment of the Church in the eschatological Kingdom. It is important that any understanding of what is the Church includes both those elements: the gathering of the people in community with one another, and the movement towards the Father. Without the first element, it is individual prayer and it does not reflect the love of God for humanity. Without the second, the Church is reduced to a social club. To return to the icon of the Bogolubskaya after this detour into the levels of ecclesiology, with this kind of knowledge in mind, we can say that the community of the saints on the right, even with Christ as the head, is not enough to represent what the Church is and how the Trinity operates within the Church. This community, or rather the communion of the saints on the right certainly represents the assembly in the name of Christ, but the operation of the Holy Spirit, the continuous ‘birthing’ of Christ in the Church, and the movement of the assembly towards the Father are expressed by the Theotokos and her identification with the Church. What the image of the Mother suggests and contributes is that the assembled members are adopted by Jesus Christ as his friends and brothers, and through this adoption they are born again, in the way that Nicodemus could not understand, when he asked Jesus how would it be possible for anyone to enter the womb of his mother a second time and be born again (John 3:4). This second birth is precisely what is provided by the Church as the Virgin mother, precisely as the Virgin who gave birth to Jesus Christ in historical times, through the Holy Spirit. The whole process is an ascent, a movement towards God. The Bogolubskaya demonstrates the ascent towards God, which involves the body of the people and Mary, through a dynamic movement of gazes. We can break this down to two steps: first there is the way the people address the Mother of God. The whole icon is based on the idea of addressing her, of praying to her to intercede to Christ. And indeed, although her face is slightly tilted upwards, she receives the prayers of the faithful, but the second step is that she addresses Christ, who receives her prayer and blesses her. In this icon she is bigger than Christ, not because she is more important theologically, but because the theme of the icon is her intercession. The Bogolubskaya is not an icon of protection as are the Protection of the Mother of God, the Akathist Hymn or the Holy Veil, even if its history is related to such icons. Instead, it is an icon that presents a much older and more fundamental theological view, which is in a way timeless, and with just a few figures presents the depth of Orthodox ecclesiology and the position of Mary within it.

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12. The All-Seeing Eye of God

The icon titled All-Seeing Eye of God is an exceptionally complex and unusual icon that combines several layers of theological and symbolic meaning, in order to express the mystery of the divinity and the humanity of Christ in the context of the universe, using the succinct and highly symbolic language of icons. The icon uses images from the Old Testament, the book of Revelation and the writings of the Fathers. It attempts a synthesis of elements that are not usually brought together. The overarching theme of the icon is the divine and the human natures of Christ, the cosmic dimensions of his being, and the divine gaze. The icon of the All-Seeing Eye of God is not only an icon that reveals the cosmic dimensions of the Godhead, but it is also, or rather mostly, an icon that protects the viewers and opens the gaze of God towards them. This is a strange icon, which does not depict a scene or anything of earthly origin. Nothing here reminds us of any creature or earthly object. Instead, the series of the concentric circles with the highly sophisticated symbolism create a level of abstraction, which we rarely see in iconography. While it is true that iconography does not try to be naturalistic, and therefore it has an inherently abstract strand (something that may be seen in a variety of themes, anywhere between the emaciated ascetics, the minimalist iconographic hillocks, and the complex mandorlas), there is no other iconographic type that can rival the level of abstraction that we see in the All-Seeing Eye of God. The age of the icon is also surprising, as it emerged probably as late as the eighteenth century and was probably an evolution of the icon of the Burning Bush.1 First of all, this icon is a sacred representation of the universe. In this way, it follows the tradition of the medieval Mappa Mundi. The Mappa Mundi (map of the world) were maps which were not useful for travelling or sailing as the information they presented was 1 Cf. I. Bentchev, Engel Ikonen, Luzern, 1999, p. 181 and N. Kondakov, Russkaia Ikona, Vol. IV, 4. p. 363.

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too schematic to be practically useful, but they reflected the sacred cosmology of their time. In this icon the universe is represented in a series of superimposed disks, usually a dark blue disk in the back, a lighter blue or green disk in the middle, a red disk adorned with a solar corona, and a roundel with Christ in the middle. This is not only a progression from colder to increasingly warmer colours, but also an arrangement that represents heaven and earth. The blue disk, in some cases also with stars, signifies heaven, something that is not only made obvious by the presence of the stars, but also by the generally accepted symbolic meaning of the blue colour in icons as the colour of heaven. In addition, God the Father is often placed inside a roundel on the top of this disk, as if he oversees everything from his celestial throne – something quite usual with the medieval Mappa Mundi. On the other hand, the next disk represents the earth, as the green colour suggests. Here we often see a daring connection with Mary, the Mother of God, who is represented directly under the Father. This is unusual for iconography, and yet not without basis. The archetypal pairing of Heaven and Earth and their identification with the male and the female can be found in many ancient cultures, but for the most part it has not survived in Christianity. Nevertheless, the Incarnation of Christ shows something similar. The difference is that Mary did not act as a representative of the universe, the created world or the earth, but only as the recapitulation of the human race. The identification of Mary and the Earth that we see here expresses a different view. The next level is specifically connected with Christ. The next disk is red or yellow, and it is often augmented by a smaller, jagged disk, which is made to look like the sun or rather the solar corona. Christ is also represented in the central roundel, as a sun with rays stretching to the edges. This is a reference to Christ as the Sun of Righteousness (Malachi 4) and also to the book of Revelation, (Revelation 12) and the “woman clothed with the sun”, who is identified by the patristic tradition as the Theotokos, or as the Church. The central disk, the body of the sun as it were, is about Christ. The image of the sun is fused here with the image of the triangular ‘Great Eye’ or ‘All-Seeing Eye’, which often appears at the top of the iconostasis. The Great Eye is a strange symbol. It exists in many ancient pre-Christian civilisations, as the eye of Ra or Horus, or as the eye of God as we can find it in the ancient synagogue of Dura-Europos, for instance. We can also find the Greek background, in the phrase that is attributed to the fourth century BC poet Menander: “There is the eye of divine justice, that sees everything”. Moreover, the Roman

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All-Seeing Eye of God, Russian, nineteenth century

apotropaic ‘evil eye’ has survived in the Eastern Mediterranean, and even if it is not understood as the eye of God, it has helped spread the imagery. Although more recently the Great Eye is associated, almost exclusively, with Freemasonry, we can find examples of its use in Christian imagery at least nine centuries before its adoption by Masonic symbolism (cf. its use in the Aachen Cathedral). The Great Eye can be found in abundance in Eastern European iconostases, usually just above the Holy Gates, especially in Athonite churches. Most of them were built in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, at around the same time the Great Eye was becoming

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associated with Freemasonry. Although it would be interesting to support that the use of the symbol in Eastern Europe has its own trajectory since antiquity, it is most certainly an import from Western Europe, probably without any connection with Freemasonry, although even this is not certain, since some of the first fighters for the independence of Greece and the Balkans appropriated the Masonic structure of organisation for reasons of safety, as well as some Masonic symbols. At any rate, what we see here is quite different. The icon of the All-Seeing Eye does not usually feature the eye of God enclosed in a triangle, which is the standard style of the Great Eye, both in the West and in Western-style depictions above the Holy Gates. Instead, in the central, solar disk, we see two sets of eyes, a nose and a mouth. There is no complete face, and this gives us the sense that the face of God is looking at us, rather than that we can look at it. Therefore, it manages to maintain its opaqueness, its apophatic mystery, even if it stares right at us. The two sets of eyes also create an effect of uneasiness. This double gaze is much more intense than any human gaze, and perhaps it can be compared with the theriomorphic depictions of God, or with the many-eyed Cherubim. The word Θεός (Theos – God), for Gregory of Nyssa, implies the etymology of the one who sees everything (from the verb θεωρεῖν, to see) and yet whose nature is impenetrable to us. This is certainly communicated with this mysterious double gaze. The depiction of Christ as a young boy and the red disk that surrounds him imply that here we see him as he was before the Incarnation: it is possible to see the red disk as a representation of the womb that held Christ. This is not completely without precedents, as the quite famous and well spread out icon of the Sign of the Theotokos, or the Vlaherniotissa type also includes a representation of Jesus Christ in the womb of his mother. This is a tempting hypothesis – although one wonders how conscious this would have been – since the presence of the Father and the Theotokos stress heavily the sonhood of Christ in this icon, and also because of the Old Testament imagery, which urges one to think of Christ in his state before his Incarnation. To understand this better, we have to turn our attention to the issue of the visual experience and representation of God in the Old Testament. The visual experience of God is not as straightforward an issue as it is thought to be. Although according to the explicit views we find in the New Testament it was just not possible to see God before the Incarnation, there are certain passages in the Old Testament that are quite confusing. Christ himself said repeatedly in the Gospel of

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John (John 1:18, 6:46, 12:45, 14:8-10) that nobody saw God the Father ever, and it is only through him that we can have some knowledge, or rather a vision of some sort, of the Godhead. This is supported by several passages of the Old Testament where God does not allow humans to see him, the most famous among them being the case of Moses on Sinai, where God did not allow Moses to see him, not for any other reason, but that Moses himself would not be able to “see God and live” (Exodus 33:20). But then what are we to make of biblical passages that contradict this apparently simple and universal prohibition against icons? Elsewhere in the Old Testament we read that Moses had seen God “face to face” (Exodus 33:11, Deuteronomy 34:10, Numbers 14:14), as had other people who did not perish as a result of their encounter with God (cf. “And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.” Genesis 32:30, “Then went up Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel. And they saw the God of Israel. They saw God, and did eat and drink.” Exodus 24:9-11, “And Manoah said unto his wife: We shall surely die, because we have seen God” Judges 13:22). These breaches of the prohibition do not apparently include symbolic manifestations such as the Hospitality of Abraham with the three angels, the burning bush, the pillar of smoke and fire and so on; the biblical text in the preceding examples could not be more explicit. This is a difficult problem for Judaic theology, which has been addressed in certain exegetical ways, but the issue was much simpler for Christianity. After the incarnation of Christ it was understood that God could indeed be seen, through his Son and Logos who was present with the Father since before the creation of the world. Early Christian theology struggled for some time with the exact state or hypostasis of the existence of Christ before the Incarnation. Something that was made very clear in the discussions that involved the divine and the human natures of Christ was that what the Old Testament prophets were actually seeing whenever they had visions of God, was Christ, the Logos, the second person of the Holy Trinity, and not the Father. This even extends to visions of the Godhead, and divine revelations. According to some theologians it is possible to read the visit of the three angels to Abraham as a visit of Christ only and not the other two persons of the Trinity, accompanied by two angels, in order to reveal by inference the Trinitarian nature of God. The biblical narrative actually encourages this possibility, because when the three angels arrive, they speak as one, and Abraham respects all of them equally. Nevertheless, as the narrative proceeds, the other two leave, and the one who remains speaks as God to Abraham.

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Now, this is a hypothesis that takes into account the different roles of the Trinity, in order to explain how God can be seen and unseen at the same time. When Jacob and Daniel say that they have seen God, this cannot mean the same God who refused to reveal himself in front of Moses. The Trinitarian roles are very specific: while the Father maintains the invisibility and unapproachability of the Godhead, Christ himself takes on the role of the revelation of God to the people. It is somewhat simplistic, but according to this view, if any aspect of God becomes visible, what is actually seen is the Son, the Second person of the Trinity, even before his Incarnation. Here we need to say something about the representation of the Father, since it is part of this iconographic synthesis. It is true that this image is not quite acceptable within Orthodox theology. Iconographers did not portray the Father for many centuries – in fact if that image were commonplace in the eighth century, it would have provided a very convincing argument against iconography, in the context of iconoclasm, as it would have been attacked for trying to limit the boundless God in a specific form. There are some discrete occurrences of this image in Greece, usually inside a small dome on the northeastern corner of the church, where only the priests can see it, but since even these representations are rare, it never created a spiritual problem. In Russia, however, where there was a trend to include the figure of the Father along with Christ and the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, in what was known as the New Testament Trinity (as opposed to the Old Testament Trinity, which consisted of the three angels visiting Abraham), the Church had to deliberate whether this is something they would accept and develop, or something not consistent with its theological views, that had to stop. In a council held in Moscow in 1551, they decided the latter, and although it is still possible to see images of the Father made after that time, as we see him in the All-Seeing Eye, these representations become more sparse. This makes the image of the Father here an exception. It was made probably two hundred years after the council’s prohibition, and therefore the situation might have become a little flexible since then. Besides, the image of the Father is discrete, in the background, not trying to draw much attention to itself. Nevertheless, the inclusion of the Father in this icon is a little daring, as it clearly defies the decision of the sixteenth century Council. It is difficult to talk about the/an original iconographer, since the precise origins of the icon are difficult to trace, and also because what is filtered and maintained by the iconographic tradition is more important in the long term than the single moment of inspired, yet individual, creation. Instead, we can speak about what ‘the icon’ aims to do. In the case of the representation of the Father, the

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icon intends to develop a theological view that stresses the presence of the Father, especially at a cosmic level. In terms of the theological content and the stylistic methodology that are at work here, this icon is not trying to express any of the fundamental doctrines of the Christian tradition, although it certainly rests on them. Instead, it takes a deliberately speculative direction, trying primarily to express a view and an insight that are being crystallised as their expressed. This kind of speculative iconography combines traditional iconography and some of the principles of abstract painting. Despite the unusual depiction of the Father, the focus of the icon is clearly Jesus Christ, the Sun of Righteousness, whose rays extend to the ends of the universe. Above him we see both his parents in an unusual gathering, the celestial Father and the human Mother. Christ is placed in the centre of the schematic universe, uniting the material and the spiritual realm. The design and the symbolism of the icon try to convey the cosmological dimension using images from the Old Testament. What is mostly identifiable as an Old Testament image is the tetramorph, the four symbols that Christianity used to symbolise the four gospels. The description of the four beasts is first found, in two variants, in the visions of Ezekiel (1:1-14 and 10:1-22), and is reprised in the book of Revelation (4:5-11). The four creatures precede, announce and demonstrate the presence of God, and reflect some of the qualities that are proper to him, as the Christian tradition identified them, such as his royalty, his sacrificial and sacerdotal character, the flight and the wings of the spirit, and finally his incarnation. All these characteristics were read in a Christian light when the Church was defining its sacred and canonical texts; it was generally accepted that the four gospels reflected the teaching and the presence of Christ in a way that corresponded to the qualities of these beasts. The connection between the particular books and beasts with which we are mostly familiar now (Mark and the lion, Luke and the ox, John and the eagle, Matthew and man) comes from St Jerome and is slightly different from the one we see in other icons, which follow a tradition based on the writings of Irenaeus of Lyons, the first theologian who made the connection between the four gospels and the tetramorph.1 The vision of Ezekiel goes on to describe God on a throne, surrounded by an amber light, and fire around the amber light. He also mentions a blue or sapphire firmament. These elements are conspicuously present in the icon of the All-Seeing Eye. In addition, although Ezekiel’s description of a category of angels known as 1 In Irenaeaus’ Against Heresies 3:11:8; John’s gospel is associated with the lion; and Mark’s with the eagle.

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thrones, as “wheels inside wheels” was rendered in a very specific way in the tradition of iconography from at least the sixth century (cf. the Rabbula Gospels illumination of the Ascension), which does not bear any similarity to anything in our icon, the circular structures of the icon seem to echo it on some scale, even if the particular symbolism of the thrones is not here. It is difficult to find a “complete” caption for the icon of the AllSeeing Eye, a simple phrase that describes its main theme. This is the case not only because of its layered complexity, but mostly because of its difficult or highly sophisticated message. The icon attempts to represent the entire Christological mystery, expressing the ineffable in the abstract, and it finds several ways to symbolise the human as well as the divine nature of Jesus Christ. The highly symbolic representation of the dimensions of his divinity is particularly striking and unusual – as opposed to, say, every image of the Virgin with child, which affirms the human lineage of Christ. Nevertheless, all this focus on the cosmological and the eternal is presented to us not just with a human face – the human face/person of Christ – but with a face that watches over everyone and everything; the metaphor of the sun in this case does not only imply the Sun of Righteousness, but the sun that “shines on the wicked as well as the good” (Matthew 5:45). The sun here symbolises the omniscience of God, which is expressed in the Great Eye that sees everything, but also the double effect his judgment and his energy have on the sinners and on the righteous. This is closely related to the Byzantine doctrines on afterlife and judgment, distinctly different from the views of Western theology. Although it is possible to see fragments of this idea in certain Greek Fathers, Eastern Christian theology never adopted the doctrine of purgatory. Moreover, it never tolerated the view of Hell as a created place, created specifically for the torment of sinners. Western theology developed this idea, found initially in the writings of Augustine, in some ways certainly reflecting the concept of God as a ruler who governs the world and whose justice is similar to the justice of this world. This shows belief in a legalistic divine economy that promises and administers rewards for the righteous and punishment for the wicked, according to their actions in this lifetime. Some theologians, like Peter Abelard, even posited that since God will reward the righteous in a manner above the good they did, he will also punish the sinners in a way disproportionate to their sins. God then, according to this view, will harm the sinners much more than the harm they inflicted. This is an extreme view that not all Western theologians would be happy to accept, it also presents a structural problem from an Eastern

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point of view. The difference between the two sides became evident in the fifteenth century discussions on purgatory between Greeks and Latins, in the context of the Council of Ferrara-Florence, which met under political pressure, as the Emperor wished to see an ecclesiastical union between the East and the West, which could result in a political and military union as well, something quite desirable in the face of the advancing Ottomans, who nevertheless sacked Constantinople after two decades. Mark of Ephesus was the main voice of opposition against the politically forced unification of the Churches, which was not accepted by the people, and he expressed a very different view on the torments of the afterlife. Mark’s objections to purgatory and the created Hell were following a strand of Greek eschatological theology that goes back to the time of Clement of Alexandria in the early Church, but had been repeated in the same spirit by many Greek Fathers. According to this view, simply put, God is incapable of harming anyone, he is not responsible for sin and evil, and therefore it is not reasonable for him to have created a place with the explicit purpose of torturing sinners. In addition, the only reward given to the righteous is their communion with God – their participation in his glory. In the afterlife condition, the resurrected people are exposed, as it were, to the glory and energy of God. The energy of God can be very clearly seen in this way as the rays of the sun shining on the good and also on the wicked. The effect however is different for the people that receive them. The fire of God warms, pleases and glorifies the saints, but conversely, it burns the sinners. It is exactly the same fire, the same energy, the same action from the part of God, but the effect depends on the condition of the one who receives it. The icon of the All-Seeing Eye has an eschatological character. The tetramorph, the image of the Father as Lord Sabaoth and the connection of Mary with the sun may be interpreted in other ways as we have seen, but they are also strongly reminiscent of the book of Revelation. All this is quite consistent with the image of the sun as it was discussed above, but we also have to recognise that the gaze of God is not exiled in the eschatological future, or, to put it differently, it is not just collecting evidence for the case against us or in our favour. Every icon is a reflection of the gaze of God. Byzantine and Russian iconographers very often started every single icon, after they had prayed and fasted, by drawing a simple version of the same AllSeeing Eye on the board. That eye, the gaze of God, is an inextricable part of what constitutes an icon. In our case this gaze is brought to the surface, and its function is twofold: it demonstrates the presence and gaze of God, but it also provides a way to this presence and gaze, so that the faithful may address it and pray to God.

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This is, in some ways, a semiotically advanced step for iconography. The icon was always a window of a certain metaphysical reality, most decidedly reality as seen by God – something revealed in the presence of the iconographic Great Eye. The icon of Christ or John the Theologian evokes the presence of Christ or John, and the icon of an event such as the Nativity of Christ or his Crucifixion exposes this event in front of us, according to its metaphysical significance, using a code that is not concerned with historicity, visual impression and three-dimensional perspective. Similarly and yet so differently, Western painting after the Renaissance, religious or not, tried to operate as a window to another world, even if this world is not always the one that corresponds to what God sees. Religious events were portrayed in a way that certainly did not ignore their religious significance, as they used very often complex system of symbolic connections. But for all its worth, postmedieval painting consisted, almost exclusively, of an exposition. Eastern Christian iconography, on the other hand, lifted the curtain allowing for communication towards the other direction too. Realising the impossibility of representing the numinous as it really is, and remaining faithful to the symbolic principles of Dionysios the Areopagite, who warned against the use of symbols that bear a similarity with the prototype,1 it encouraged the understanding of the icon as a window from the other side, as a presence of the metaphysical in this life, and as a reminder of the imminence of the kingdom, the power and the glory of God. The icon of the AllSeeing Eye achieves this task very clearly. Its semiotic uniqueness however, lies in the fact that it tries to take the gaze of the viewer one step ahead, one step closer to the numinous. Here we see an attempt to represent the metaphysical reality of the here and now, of the present and eternal position of Christ within the cosmos. In this sense, it is more realistic than any painting by Michelangelo. It tries to reach a reality that was never approached by early medieval iconography, but it does so completely from within the concept of what an icon is and what it tries to represent. The Dionysian preference of dissimilar over similar symbols may not be underlying the icon consciously, but the result was inevitable. An icon with such lofty goals could only result in a highly “unrealistic” (as Western painting understands the word) representation.

1 Celestial Hierarchy, 2.

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Part Three: Holding the Gaze

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13. After the Icon Exhibition

A journey among these icons has taken us through different stages of the spiritual history of Eastern Europe, and has reminded us that the icon does not so much show us how to look, but it shows us how to pray, how to respond and how to situate ourselves within a world where God is firmly present and almost visible. We examined the Crucifixion and the Resurrection or Descent to Hades, and in the end we used the icon as a canvas that weaves high Christology as well as secular, cultural and folk sensitivities. This allowed us to open the world of the icon, and to challenge the more rigid, historical approach to Christianity, in favour of a more Biblical one, which tries to reveal the mystery of salvation. In the icon of the Burning Bush we saw the figure of Mary in the context of the anticipation of the world for her in the Old Testament, but in the icon of the Protection we also saw her extend beyond the confines of time, in a glorification beyond history. In that icon, and especially in the Bogolubskaya, we saw her as the Church, the intercessor for all humanity. We also explored the connection between Christ, the Church and the sacraments, in the icon of the Life-giving Fountain. Finally, in a composition that would rival the abstraction of modernity, we saw what looks like the eye of God staring us from the other side of the surface of the icon, and Christ revealed as the metaphysical axis of the entire universe. Each one of these icons has a different story to tell, and each one of them expresses a unique, fresh look at its subject matter. The historical circumstances, the particular interests, the fears and hopes of the generations that created them are reflected in these icons, whether this means community of the church in the background of the Bogolubskaya, or the people that are gathered around the Lifegiving Fountain, most of whom are dressed as peasants from a couple of centuries ago. Here we see the historical past, the anachronistic present and the time beyond time fused into one. The time of the icon is both the distant past and the distant

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future, and this reflects a wider understanding of liturgical time. According to this, the present is not so much defined by the past as the last step in a logical causal succession of different events that lead into each other, as it is defined by the future, through the longing of God for the world, who calls it into his eternity. Nevertheless, the Kingdom of God that exists “now and ever and in the ages of ages” is almost present, but not just yet – to use a strange Patristic expression. It is this gap between the “almost here” and the “not just yet” that allows history to be transmutated into eternity, and for the gaze of God to be sensed – rather than understood – and drawn with lines and colours. The dramatic narrative of the icon is precisely the need to look at people, symbols and events as fully historical and as fully transhistorical at the same time. We saw many times this dynamic meeting between history and eternity in these icons. In the end, although it is often and correctly said that icons articulate a theology without words, this is not the kind of theology that requires much knowledge (other than familiarity with the basic narrative). It does not even require faith – at least not in the way faith is often taken to mean the acceptance of certain axiomatic ideas on which we base the edifice of religion or even of (religious) science: Instead of fulfilling our usual expectations about religious symbolism, or following the language of visual representation where the roles of spectator and object are clearly defined, the icon outside its directly liturgical context operates in a deeply seductive way. Icons in legends and traditions often have a will of their own. There are many stories where a monastery was founded where an icon was discovered, or stories of icons choosing the place in which they want to be. Something similar happens in the museums and exhibitions of icons. The colours and the shapes are the first step in their allure. The unusual way to draw the lines and depict faces, buildings and light has a story to tell. Nothing is hidden, nothing is secretive, and yet what is shown demands some degree of empathy, of trying to experience the almost melancholic smile of Christ, Mary and the saints from the inside. This is not much to ask and to give; to begin with it is not much more than the way to share a folk tale. Then everything makes more sense, as the buildings and the whole iconic space reveals a different perspective which works dynamically with the gaze of the viewer. One more step, and the world of the miracle becomes immanent. The figures of the saints are made of flesh and bones, but they are also made of light. We begin to make more sense of the world, which is not limited

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by the four dimensions. So far, rather than show a different way of looking, the icon has suggested, very gently and not without our acquiescence, a different way of existing. It is there, in that transfigured space that the invitation to meet God is issued. One follows naturally the thread of the seduction of the icon, which leads all the way to the revelation of an entirely different way of being. Although many great icons and especially magnificent mosaics in early churches were commissioned by powerful donors who sometimes had their own ideas about what they would like to see in them, iconography for a long time kept its lustre in the domain of the anonymous iconographer, who exercised his art as a labour of repentance. Although in the years after the fall of Constantinople we often concentrate on the names and the innovations of certain iconographers, the art itself was created and brought to its apogee by anonymous monks and painters who never suspected that anyone might ever be interested in them. But even the less skilful among them, or the icons with less artistic value, save in them all the principles of the sacred space of what is almost here but not just yet. The particular icons we examined may have not been the ‘best’ of their kind. They are neither too old, or too famous, or too unusual. But exactly for this reason they can provide us with a more precise insight to the world of iconography, rather than a collection of works by Aggelos Akontatos or Andrei Rublev. These icons did not adorn any big or rich churches; the people who saw them every week were probably not particularly educated. And yet, these humble examples were sufficient points of entry in our attempt to discern the extent of the spirituality of iconography. The theology of salvation that is so richly depicted in the icon of the Resurrection, or the complex typology of the Burning Bush, were shared by all and were imparted to all who could see them. As part of the sacred centre of their community, they define the very way this community understands itself, where it comes from and where it is going. As the church provides the sacred centre around which the community extends and develops socially, the icon stand does the same for the home. No relation among people is complete, if it does not refer to the axis of the sacred. For this reason, while the most magnificent examples of iconography give us a good idea of the extents and the possibilities of the art and the theology of iconography, the humbler icons of the small parish church and the home icon stand can give us a clearer idea of their position in the hearts and minds of the common people.

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And perhaps one of the most interesting things about icons, which express precisely the spirituality of the common people, is that they provide the key to the mystery and the sacrament of icons clearly enough for us to see it, but not in a light so dazzling that would distract us from it. The wider context of this approach has been the theology of experience. It is fascinating to see that the depth and the extent of the theological and spiritual insights that we can gain from iconography, rival the study of any sermon or any treatise. The most interesting thing is that this theological knowledge is available to anyone who reflects on the icons, even if it is not articulated. Just like the Gospel readings or the hymns of the Liturgy, in which we keep discovering additional levels of meaning for years, praying the icon, to put it like this, is an entry point to the discovery of its mysteries.

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14. Towards a Meta-Linguistic Theological Methodology Questions that can be asked after such an exploration into the theology of experience are: ‘how can this approach be helpful to us today?’, ‘What is the significance or the contribution of the theology of experience in modern theological thought?’, perhaps even more daringly, we can ask a similar question about the position, and the contribution of, the Orthodox Church in the modern world. These questions are interconnected. The Orthodox Church is not very organised in terms of social work, which is championed by some Protestant groups. Likewise, it cannot compete with the philosophical education of Roman Catholic priests. Beyond the participation of the Orthodox Church in interdenominational dialogue on matters of faith, which can at least aim towards a continuous and dynamic contact between the separated traditions, the Orthodox tradition can bring something unique to spiritual life in the West: the experience of the presence of Christ in his Church. The greatest gift that the Orthodox Church can give to the West is precisely the approach of experience as the way towards salvation. This is a unique area that cannot be found elsewhere. Other aspects of the Christian life can be found in other traditions as well: even if the East has maintained its own views in the study and importance of the Bible, or the tradition of the Fathers, or on Christology and Trinitarianism, these areas of interest can be found in the Western tradition. However, the Orthodox position is that otherwise difficult theological ideas, such as the full humanity and divinity of Christ, or the death and salvation of his mother, do not need to be explained in an abstract way. They are already part of the collective experience of the Church, in such a way that even its least advantaged members can understand. The relative place of the human being in the universe, the presence of Jesus Christ among us, the conquest of Christ over death and so forth, are part of the architecture and the iconography of the church building.

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The church building has to be designed in such a way that even someone who visits for the first time should be able to realise the purpose and the orientation of the Eucharistic community. Furthermore, it is possible to develop a research and teaching methodology that does not start with abstract philosophical ideas, but with the presence of Jesus Christ within the Eucharistic community, and how all the activities of the community reflect this. Demetrios Mavropoulos wrote such a textbook fairly recently, where the entire theology of the Orthodox Church is revealed through a reflection on each of the parts of the church building, starting from the steps that connect the courtyard and the church, and ending with the altar and the priestly vestments.1 This is not as easy or as simple as it sounds. The basic theology textbook from within any Christian denomination follows a systematic structure that corresponds to a more or less crystallised list of topics that define Christianity. Usually this includes chapters on the making of the Bible, on the Trinity, on Christology, on the importance of the Church (ecclesiology), and about the cult of the saints. Next to the list of such ‘hard’ theological chapters we often see some chapters that cover the history of the early Church and the Church at the time of the Reformation (roughly between the fifth and the sixteenth centuries), and also something about religious art and architecture, inasmuch they demonstrate in artistic form the theological ideas that were developed earlier. In addition, a respectable textbook in our days would necessarily include sections on the challenge or development of liberation theology, feminist theology and multiculturalism. A survey of the textbooks that are used in most theological schools can demonstrate this template quite easily. The treatment of theological thought in this way does not differ in anything from the examination of any idea or philosophical school with its own crystallised ideas, the history of their development, any dissenters from the group who followed their own path, and a critique of how this set of ideas fits within modern social values and our multicultural world. Despite my respect of Trinitiarianism, Christology, Church history, etc., I am afraid that this scholastic approach is misleading in several ways. First, the only way to study something in a systematic and objective way is to divide it into several parts, which then may be studied separately. There is a necessary fragmentation of the ecclesiastical experience here, which we can see quite clearly in the case of the study of the sacramentality of the Church: the usual number of seven sacraments enters theological thought quite late, 1 Demetrios Mavropoulos, Διερχόμενοι διά τοῦ ναοῦ, Domos, 2009.

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first in the West and then in the East – without much resistance, as it has to be noted. Therefore we separate ritual acts such as baptism, wedding and confession, from the central sacrament of the Eucharist. This implies largely that the Eucharist is basically a ritual like all the others, as one sacrament among seven. Strangely perhaps, the Christian tradition flourished for several centuries without a need for a specific and definite list of sacraments. Instead, what we find in the writings of the early Fathers is that the Church lived a sacramental life, which included the seven sacraments, but also an indefinite number of ‘lesser’ sacraments or traditions, such as the making and the worship of icons, the sign of the Cross, or the making of kollyva (offerings for the memory of the dead). Yet, all the sacraments are not at the same level. It is impossible to appreciate and understand fully the six out of the seven sacraments, as well as the ‘lesser’ sacraments, if we separate them from the Eucharist. The Eucharist, as the expression of the continuous presence of Jesus Christ in the Church and in the world, is the one and fundamental sacrament, which gives meaning to a sacramental life, a life in Christ, which includes but is not limited to several of the rituals that we now usually think of as sacraments in their own right – or rather, since the connection with the Eucharist is not as obvious as it should be, we think of them as quasi-magical acts. Nevertheless, this fragmentation of the sacramental life, which was done so that it would be easier for us to study its parts, has resulted to an incomplete understanding of sacrament and the presence of God among us. We can see something similar in the way we approach spiritual life through parts that are developed separately, along the template of ideas. Instead of talking about the ascetic recognition of the person of Jesus Christ in the community that is gathered in his name, we talk about the balance between his human and divine nature. Naturally, when the Fathers of the Ecumenical Councils defined the balance and the correspondence of the two natures of Christ, they did so for very good reasons, which are important for those who study theology and who try to discern any possible mistakes in the spiritual trajectory of the modern Christian community – after all, if we forget our past, we are condemned to repeat our mistakes. However, the participation of bishops rather than theologians to local and Ecumenical Councils, says something important about how the Christian tradition defines itself. Although the role of the bishop in our days entails the administrative responsibility of his diocese, and also the coordination with other bishops, the significance of the priests and bishops in early Christianity flowed out of the presidency of the Eucharistic community. The celebrant was chosen as the best

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representative of the Eucharistic community, someone who could transmit the experience of the gathering, in all its components, and also as someone who would be able to appreciate the witness of another community, which expressed itself in different linguistic and cultural codes, yet with an eye to the same Christ. Therefore, it is important to consider the members of the Local or Ecumenical Councils of the Church as carriers of their particular spiritual and Eucharistic local experience. This experience had manifested itself in various ways within the community: with a particular taste on images; with different hymns and hymnographic styles; with music and architecture that would be conducive to prayer and worship; with views on ethical matters; and even with certain liturgical practices. All of these elements reflect the development of a certain understanding of Christian worship and spirituality, even when it had not been put to words – more specifically, to the philosophical language that allowed the members of the councils or simply the people who were involved in theological dialogue, to crystallise and communicate to each other their thought with precision. This means that often we have to look at the level of the local experience for the source of our theological ideas. When the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council met in Nicea in 325, to use this as an example, they did not intend to produce new theology, but to describe the theological experience as they had known it in their dioceses. They arrived to Nicea with some implicit views about the divinity and the humanity of Christ, even if these views were not fully formed, and subject to dialogue. The battle for the divinity of Christ was not so much fought in Nicea, as it had been in the way the Christian communities had been gathering around the altar for a few centuries already, in order to give witness to the figure of Christ as the complete and seamless connection between heaven and earth. Therefore, if we would like to have the complete picture on the views about the divinity of Christ, we should try to see how these views are reflected and expressed in worship and prayer life, and not limit our observations to philosophical theology only. How we paint, sing, and how we celebrate Christ is as important as how we proclaim his divinity in doctrines and teachings. There are two questions that flow from these observations. The first is how to study our past in order to understand our spiritual roots. Our methodology should include the directions of liturgy and expression – this is relatively simple. But what about the witness of spiritual life as it may be found beyond the usual fields of systematic theological thought? It is increasingly accepted that apophatic

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theology – one of the greatest gifts of Orthodox theology to modern Western theological thought – leads us to express our theological views in poetic rather than philosophical language.1 Yet, this is not reflected in our theological methodology. In other words, is it possible to understand modern Orthodox Christianity without studying the work of Dostoyevsky and Papadiamantis? And if this is the direction we would like to take, how should we modify our methodology? Dostoyevsky has given us some very powerful images in his writings, which express bold theological ideas. Perhaps the most famous among them is the monologue of the Grand Inquisitor in the Brothers Karamazov (1880), which is often read as a theological commentary on secularism and the invasion of secular ethics into the Christian world. This is one of Dostoyevsky’s most famous and also most frequently analysed passages. However, this is one of many such images, which in addition to their value from a literary point of view, they reflect theological ideas comparable to the views of the Fathers of the Church. One such example is the image of the Second Coming of Christ in Crime and Punishment (1866), when Marmeladov gives a challenging and difficult insight of the compassion of God: He will pity us who has had pity on all men, who has understood all men and all things, He is the One. He too is the judge. He will come in that day and He will ask: ‘Where is the daughter who gave herself for her cross, consumptive step-mother and for the little children of another? Where is the daughter who had pity upon the filthy drunkard, her earthly father, undismayed by his beastliness?’ And He will say, ‘Come to me! I have already forgiven thee once. . . . I have forgiven thee once. . . . Thy sins which are many are forgiven thee for thou hast loved much. . . .’ And he will forgive my Sonia, He will forgive, I know it. . . . I felt it in my heart when I was with her just now! And He will judge and will forgive all, the good and the evil, the wise and the meek. . . . And when He has done with all of them, then He will summon us. ‘You too come forth,’ He will say, ’Come forth ye drunkards, come forth, ye weak ones, come forth, ye children of shame!’ And we shall all come forth, without shame and shall stand before him. And He will say unto us, ‘Ye are swine, made in the Image of the Beast and with his mark; but come ye also!’ And the wise ones and those of understanding will say, ‘Oh Lord, why dost Thou receive these men?’ And He 1 Cf. Christos Yannaras, Elements of Faith: an Introduction to Orthodox Theology, T&T Clark, 1991, p. 71, a point also developed by Andrew Louth in Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology, SPCK, 2013, p. 114.

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will say, ‘This is why I receive them, oh ye wise, this is why I receive them, oh ye of understanding, that not one of them believed himself to be worthy of this.’ And He will hold out His hands to us and we shall fall down before him . . . and we shall weep . . . and we shall understand all things! Then we shall understand all! . . . and all will understand, Katerina Ivanovna even . . . she will understand. . . . Lord, Thy kingdom come! It is possible to find the background of Dostoyevsky’s views on the compassion and the forgiveness of God, in the writings of the Fathers, and also in the tradition of the monastery of Optina, which provided him with models for several of his characters. It is possible to recognise the doctrinal patterns in this narrative, and even to attempt to trace the way they found their lace in Dostoyevsky’s narrative. Nevertheless, the narrative gives us something more than the context of doctrines and ideas. It gives us an image of the spiritual life itself, which includes the doctrines and the traditions of the Church as a way of life rather than as a way of thought. Although there is always a dynamic interaction between spiritual life and catechetical teachings, the power of the narrative suggests that spiritual formation rather than knowledge of the teachings of the Church is the source of the hopes of Marmeladov – a character in the story who is not particularly well educated. Dostoyevsky’s narratives are studded with similar profound spiritual reflections, which say much about the spiritual and sacramental life of his time. If the challenge of every generation is to preserve and express it in the language of its time, and to offer a confession of faith, Dostoyevsky’s writing can be compared with the contributions of the early Church Fathers. As a craftsman of words, Dostoyevsky wrote in a style that was not unusual for his time. Some of his most famous works are written in the way of the ‘Great Novel’ that we recognise also in Dickens, Hugo, Tolstoy and many others. In such works we follow the acts, but also the thoughts and the motives of the characters, and the literary value of many of them lies exactly in their exploration of the psychological depth of the characters. Dostoyevsky is an acclaimed master of these literary paths, but this is not what distinguishes him from other writers. The theme that he explores more often is repentance and regeneration,1 but also forgiveness and sharing in the suffering of others. The exploration of psychology for him becomes a way to discover forgiveness and grace, as the passage from Crime and Punishment illustrates. 1 Cf. Khrapovitsky, Antony, Dostoevsky‘s Concept of Spiritual Rebirth, Synaxis Press, 1980, p. 11

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Although Dostoyevsky uses guilt, justice and punishment to build the narrative structure, ultimately he is not a moralist. It is possible to see punishment in his work as a means of expiation, as a work of repentance, but ultimately it is clear that it is grace, and not punishment that brings forgiveness. In that, his literary contribution is similar to the contribution of medieval hagiography, the lives of saints – and in fact in several places it is obvious that he is copying, or at least he is inspired by some of them. In order to appreciate this however, we need to notice that many hagiographies are not simply triumphalist texts, but often show this salvation through and beyond the sinful condition, as a work of grace and repentance. One of the most inspiring such texts is the life of St James the Ascetic, who is also given the epithet “the fallen ascetic” by Nicodemos the Hagiorite.1 James was a reputable ascetic, but he defiled a girl who was brought to him for healing, and following this rape, he killed her and her brother, and threw their bodies in a ravine, in order to try to cover his crime. When he realised the extent of his sin, he was so overwhelmed by it that he thought he was beyond salvation, and was ready to give up his struggle, when a more experienced ascetic reminded him that nobody is beyond salvation. Following that, he lived in a grave, praying for the grace and the forgiveness of God. Years later, when the country was hit by a prolonged draught, God revealed to the bishop of the neighbouring city that it would rain again only if James prayed for it. The bishop and the people found James in his grave of repentance, and asked him to pray. When he did, the drought was broken. Instead of taking this as a sign of sanctity, James merely took it as a sign of encouragement, and doubled his efforts, until he gave up his soul to the hands of God. This is a story of sin and repentance, and as his vita says, God allowed James to fall to grave sins, so that many virtuous who think it would be difficult for them to fall, would be cautioned by his example. By the same token, many sinners who think that they are beyond forgiveness and salvation, would also be inspired by his return to grace. Dostoyevsky writes in a very similar way, even if his characters are mostly fictitious – albeit many of them based on real persons. Even crime may become an instrument of salvation: if it leads to the realization of the sinful condition and of one’s distance from God, the repentance it can bring can break a crack on the prison of self-containment, so that grace can shine through. 1 His vita can be found on the 28th of January in the Synaxarion of Nicodemos the Hagiorite. A recent edition of the Synaxarion is Ἁγίου Νικοδήμου Ἁγιορείτου, Συναξαριστὴς τῶν δώδεκα μηνῶν τοῦ ἑνιαυτοῦ, Domos, 2005.

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Dostoyevsky has used several sources like that in his writing. The story of the sinful woman who was almost saved from hell, that Grushenka tells Alyosha in the Brothers Karamazov, can be found among the legends that surround the mother of St Phanourios.1 In both stories God allows a single act of kindness to weigh more than an entire life of evil: a woman who suffers in the river of fire asks for the mercy of God. This strand of writing can bring forth several important theological views, without the need to use the language of philosophical theology. Instead, it is based on the narrative – real or fictitious. Yet, it is possible to communicate and explore themes that philosophical language can perhaps define, but not really express. Of course this is the case with many other parts of life that exceed the limits of our words. If we need to explain to someone the nature of love, we could try to use what science tells us, something about hormones and sexuality, or something about psychological needs and projections. Or, we could read Romeo and Juliet instead. We can see something similar in the writings of Alexandros Papadiamantis, a Greek writer who lived at around the same time as Dostoyevsky. Very little of his work has been translated to English, and yet Papadiamantis is one of the best and most widely read modern Greek writers. His writing gives us a good insight of the life of faith. His faith has followed the way of tradition and sacramental spirituality, but precisely because he did not need to challenge or to prove his position within the Eucharistic community, he developed a dynamic relationship with it, not shying away from expressing his disagreement with the more institutionalised form of Christianity. It is obvious that he did not follow Church authority slavishly and uncritically, but he dared to question the deeper spiritual meaning in several situations. In this excerpt from his book Οἱ Ἒμποροι τῶν Ἐθνῶν (Merchants of Nations), in which he portrayed a confession that lead the old and experienced confessor to consider confession much more carefully than he ever had in his life. This is an example of how Papadiamantis internalised the tradition of the Church to such an extent that he could be immersed in it and offer personal views and emotional responses at the same time. — I want to confess, father, said the woman. — Are you suffering? — Who knows if I’ll live? I wish to take no secrets with me to the grave. 1 Cf the relevant tradition from Crete in Νῖκος καί Μαρία Ψιλάκη, Τό ψωμὶ τῶν Ἑλλήνων καί τά γλυκίσματα τῆς λαϊκῆς μας παράδοσης, Καρμάνωρ, 2001.

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— You’ll act well, my child. The secrets sinners hide in confession eat the living, as the worms will eat us when we die. The nun sat at the bed and in doing so her calves showed, very beautiful for a nun. She sighed silently and quickly, rested her head on her right hand, and started speaking with a calm voice. — I have narrated my life to you often, father. But the outer look of the events is not the same as the inner condition of the soul, and the one who narrates his life and speaks in length about what happened to him or about his sins, is lying, because he talks about himself, of necessity. What I regret that I never dared tell you, and to my shame will confess now for the first time, is this: although the Venetian nobleman abducted me by violence and treachery from the house of my husband, I was happy from the first day to live with him and to be his lover. He had something commanding and fiendish about him, which overwhelmed me and overturned my conscience. I had never loved with a youthful passion my husband. He seemed to me heavy and annoying, although he loved me. And in front of God I am more guilty than the Venetian for having followed him, rather than he for abducting me. He seized me having given in to a temporary intoxication, to a violent and tyrannical passion. I, on the other hand – alas! – was deceiving myself and everyone else, because I pretended to be in sadness, while my heart deep down was delighted and was intoxicated by the pleasures of love. — This is certainly an error my child, said the confessor, looking at her perplexed, but it is enough that you repented long ago. — I never repented honestly, said the nun, sighing. If I left the count, it was because of spite and jealousy, and not because I wanted to save my soul. — It does not matter, my child. If you did not repent in the past, you certainly repent now. — There is no repentance, father. — What are you saying? You blaspheme, woman. — I don’t think there is true repentance father, unless what we mean by that is the semblance of repentance, and hypocrisy. Fr Ammoun stood up, he made the sign of the cross, and did not know what to say.

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— Then why did you ask me to come here? What is the use of the physician in a disease that cannot be cured? — To confess, father. — Confession without repentance? — And to ask you to teach me repentance, if it is possible. — But repentance cannot be taught, it is spontaneous, my child. — Yet, I tell you that this is impossible. — You have the evil spirit of blasphemy inside you. — Listen carefully, my confessor, and forgive a weak woman. Think of me as drunk and delirious. I admit that sometimes there is a moment when the soul becomes contrite and weeps in silence or cries loudly in front of God, who is beyond every mind. But that moment passes, as all moments do, and then the flesh rebels and demands its own things. Pity me father, and do not condemn me. I have been suffering for a long time on this bed the tortures of Hades. My heart oozes blood, my head is in darkness. Often a wicked temptation descends to my lips and an intense desire rises. My sighs translate this temptation and this desire to the fiery language of passion and despair. My blasphemy is a natural product of my misfortune and not of my unfaithfulness. I do not believe that there is a woman more damned than I am in the entire world. As a prisoner is tied to the pale that will be his execution, my soul is tied to this love, which is my punishment in this age as well as in the next one. I love him who destroyed my family happiness and ravaged the heart of my husband, I love him so fervently and madly, that this love is a demon living in my flesh, it is a legion of demons, sucking my blood and my breath as an octopus with his tentacles. I never repented for this crime father, nor do I believe it is possible for me to repent. I wonder, father, how God, in the universe he created, allows the existence of a feeling stronger than faith in him, as if it were another god, higher than divine omnipotence. In vain, father, I fast for long periods, in vain I make a thousand prostrations every day. The flesh cannot be conquered, desire won’t give in. My lips whisper mechanically the prayers that I learned by heart as a child, but my heart echoes his name. . . . Fr Ammoun was hearing all this as if he had left his body and he had been transported to a different, completely incomprehensible world. It seemed to him as if the deserts of Thebes, which he

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had visited in a pilgrimage when he was young, had opened their gloomy caves, and that out of them millions of demons were coming out and were throwing themselves at him, in order to destroy him. This dialect was unknown to him. Several confused and labyrinthine thoughts were diverging in his mind. First of all, was this confession? If it was, it sounded nothing like the usual confessions that he had heard during the long tenure of his profession. Either the confession of this woman was no confession, or the confessions of the other women were no confessions. — I have heard confessions of many women during my lifetime, Fr Ammoun thought. But what do they confess? Bickering, lying, arguments with their husbands, sometimes jealousy, never stealing. They frequently list proudly their virtues or they accuse their friends and neighbours, pretending to confess. They never confess the evil temptation of adultery, or the act itself. They say that they drank water before they received antidoron, that they were speaking in church, that they were menstruating, and things like that. They confess these. But which one among them ever made such a terrible and unbelievable confession as this woman? Fr Ammoun continued thinking in this way, and wondered if men are more honest in confession than women. Then he wondered if he himself ever confessed honestly, with true and sincere honesty, to his own spiritual father. Then, he came to a conclusion in the form of a question: What is the point of confession and why do we do it? Yet, he could not say this out loud to his spiritual child, because in this way he would switch roles with her, becoming the one who confesses to her. Therefore, not being able to find anything else with which to end this, he resorted to what he had mentioned earlier, and proclaimed that this woman was obviously and continuously attacked, as she had confessed, by the evil demon. — A demon, a demon is what you have miserable woman. You said it. Or rather, the demon said its own name. Fr Ammoun stood up, he took the prayer book and he started reading over her head the exorcisms of Basil the Great. “The Lord compels you devil, to leave this creature. Yes, Lord, evict from her every evil and unclean spirit that hides in her heart; a spirit of error, a spirit of pride, a spirit of unfaithfulness, listlessness, idolatry, a spirit of fornication, adultery, lust, concupiscence, lasciviousness and every uncleanliness. . . . ”

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The sound of these imposing and mysterious words attacked the ears of Agape like fire. She could sense the “evil and unclean spirit” enraged inside her. She wanted to protest, yet she could not. She wanted to take the hand of the elderly monk and to kiss it, and then she wanted to grasp him by the beard and throw him out of her cell. She felt two powers that were throwing her towards and away from nothingness, as she was standing just above the abyss. She was falling in the abyss, and then she was lifting in the air. Then religion, life, love, deception, sins, sadness, dreams, everything mingled in her imagination as a confused composite image. She raised her hands to grasp the vision, but it fled like a shadow and disappeared from her eyes. The priest nevertheless continued the reading of the exorcisms. “And make her denounce Satan and all his angels, and all his worship and all his works… and do not let an evil spirit hide in her heart or overwhelm her. . . . ” Agape broke down, weeping. She started shedding rivers of tears. The priest took pity on her, and stopped the reading of the exorcisms. — Continue, father, she said, wiping her tears. Ammoun repeated “I compel you in front of God to leave this creature according to the Lord’s time . . . a spirit of darkness, a spirit of anger and jealousy and murder, a spirit of desire, a spirit of dispute . . . let it leave this servant of God”. Then, there was a timid and hesitant knock on the door of the cell.1 In this excerpt, just like in the examples we saw in the writings of Dostoyevsky, we can see an expression of the living, dynamic spiritual tradition of Christianity. Papadiamantis presents the most profound theological views, using situations that often had their origin in real events that he came across, or that he had heard of. We know that this was often the case in many of his short stories, which comprise the biggest part of his work. Yet, this is not important. He uses stories he has heard, or stories he invents himself, as a canvas for his exploration of spirituality and the presence of the grace of God. Although the miracle is part of this canvas (as in the case of streams of myrrh that flow from the graves of some of his heroes), and although his narrative sometimes opens up in 1 The excerpt is from the novel Οἱ Ἒμποροι τῶν Ἐθνῶν, from the critical edition of Papadiamantis’ works by N.D. Triantafyllopoulos, Domos, volume 1, pp. 227-231. This is my translation and it has been published in ‘Alexandros Papadiamantis: the Saint of Greek Literature’, Sobornost Vol. 32, No. 2, 2011, pp. 19-36.

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front of the reader suddenly, as an unexpected revelation of the spiritual depth that exists below the threshold of consciousness, the narrative always returns to the surface, never separating the two realms. For both Dostoyevsky and Papadiamantis, grace is not “out there”, dispensed by a distant God, but present everywhere, ready to accept and forgive the most scorned, the most disadvantaged, and the most despised character whose ego is broken. The Merchants of Nations, one of the earlier works of Papadiamantis, is based on the historical presence of the Venetians in the Aegean after the Fourth Crusade in the thirteenth century, but there is no indication that any of his characters was based on people he knew. Yet, the scene of the confession seems to flow out of a long ascetic experience, as in this case he contrasts the official teaching, the guidelines and instructions that the confessor tries to adhere to (or rather the teachings and the instructions that stay at the level of the letter only), with the deeper level of the spiritual experience – or, as sometimes this is known in Patristic literature, the “movement of the soul”. The scene is built on a paradox of transcendence, but it is the same transcendence through the pursuit of repentance and forgiveness that we find in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector in Luke 18:9-14. Perhaps it is a little harsh to compare the venerable confessor with the Pharisee, because at least he tried to find a way for the forgiveness and absolution of the troubled nun Avgousta/Agape. Nevertheless, the way of the Pharisee and the way of Fr Ammoun are similar, when they are contrasted with the self-humiliation of the tax collector and the confessing nun. While the former way is the way of actions that may be demonstrated and counted (so many days of fasting, such a percentage for tithing for the Pharisee, but also so many times someone lied, so many times they felt jealous and so forth for the women whose confession Fr Ammoun was used to hearing), while the other is a continuous ascetic way that gives up the expectation of reward or justification. The Gospel reading shows that the justification of God is with the tax collector, and Papadiamantis similarly shows that the moral achievement belongs to the woman who struggles with the depth of her repentance. Nevertheless, if the Gospel parable gives us the teaching (itself given in a narrative rather than in philosophical or in judicial form), the scene of the confession demonstrates the experiential struggle, the psychological depth and, ultimately, the impossibility of justification by external, measurable acts only. Instead, it is the transformation of the nun – who faces her own limits and her failings – that makes it necessary for her to look for a deeper meaning in the sacrament of confession. The old and

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experienced confessor is humbled by the sudden revelation of the depth of the confession of the woman who tries to find repentance, and although both of them act according to their roles, in reality their roles have been reversed, and the actual spiritual guidance has passed to the woman who tries to descend to the depths of her soul in order to find repentance and forgiveness. This scene is a gem of modern Greek literature, both for its dramatic structure and for the exploration of the sacrament of confession, and it reaches the same theological standards as the work of any systematic or liturgical theologian on the meaning and the significance of confession. The novel ends with her self-sacrifice, after she realises that by staying on the burning ship she may save the life of the man who contributed to her moral downfall, thus transforming her sinful passion into a noble act, and at the same time she can put an end to the passion itself by her death. This expiation does not come so much as a punishment, but as an extreme form of an ascetic transformation of the self. She dies in front of the husband she left and the officer she followed, bringing all her passion to God. The imagery and the immediacy of the writing of Papadiamantis evoke the language of icons. The thoughts of the venerable ascetic and his recollection of his visit to the Egyptian desert illustrate his background and the ascetic “dialect” that was familiar to him. On the other hand, the passion and the struggle of the troubled nun also come across powerfully in a few lines in her confession. The scene has an almost visual quality about it, both in terms of the presentation of the narrative, and in terms of the dynamic relationship between the two characters, which represent different spiritual approaches. Yet, Papadiamantis rarely shows that salvation can be achieved by the acts of the characters themselves – and in this he proves to express traditional Orthodox spirituality more accurately than Dostoyevsky, where the action moves according to what the characters do. In Papadiamantis the morality of the people is even more closely connected with the morality – or rather forgiveness – of God. Compassion has a prominent position in the spirituality of Papadiamantis, and although he never passes judgement on any of his characters, his compassion flows from the inside and transforms the entire scene, in every difficult situation. In his writings we can see the distance between the letter and the content of the tradition, or rather the difference between Christianity as a textual tradition, and Christianity as a way of life. We can see this in the Widow of the Priest (Χήρα Παπαδιά)1 and even more dramatically in The 1 This story can be found in the critical edition of Papadiamantis’ works by N.D. Triantafyllopoulos, Domos, volume 2, pp. 83-87.

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island of Ouranitsa (Τό νησί τῆς Οὐρανίτσας),1 where he struggles weighing canon law against love and a pastorally difficult situation in the first case, and against the impossibility of a teenage suicide in the second. In that story we have a rare, for Papadiamantis, divine revelation: the place where the villagers buried the young girl who killed herself, had become fragrant a year later, when they visited it. The grace and the forgiveness of God are manifested here by a miracle, without a need to justify it theologically. Although Papadiamantis always identified himself as a “genuine child of the Orthodox Church, as it is represented by its bishops”, he applies the same kind of discernment that we also find in the greatest ascetics. Echoing the warning that is often placed either in the beginning or at the end of many collections of canon law, which explains that the desired effect in the application of this law is the salvation of the people and not their annihilation, Papadiamantis sees through the legalism and into the compassion of God. Papadiamantis and Dostoyevsky (and many other writers of their generation) communicated the Christian experience and thought through their writing. If we go beyond the fact that Dostoyevsky, Papadiamantis and several similar authors wrote fiction rather than history, we can look at what they expressed (even in these examples alone) as impressive illustrations of the themes of repentance, forgiveness and salvation. Although their literary skills, their storytelling and the development of their characters may be enjoyed by people who have no interest in religion and spirituality, the crux of their writing is an exploration of the pathways of the grace of God. Their writing offers a great insight into Christianity, and for this reason it stands next to the writings of the greatest theologians and ascetic writers of the Church. For this reason, Dostoyevsky and Papadiamantis, more than any other writers of their generation, fulfil a role that in the past was covered by the Fathers and Teachers of the Church, and they need to be considered next to them. In fact, in some ways it is possible to consider that the spiritual tradition of early Christianity that included the exploration of the human soul and its ascetic ascent towards God, has found its continuation in this kind of poetic and ascetic writing. It may be possible to see a correspondence between modern systematic theology and the more philosophical writings of the Fathers – which is how they wrote when they had to communicate with Christian and pagan philosophers – but in this case we need to 1 This story can be found in the critical edition of Papadiamantis’ works by N.D. Triantafyllopoulos, Domos, volume 3, pp. 383-387.

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turn our attention to Papadiamantis, Dostoyevsky, but also Part and Tavener, if we wish to find the equivalent of ascetic works such as the Lausiac History of Palladius, or the Ladder of John and the Spiritual Meadow of John Moschos. The way we define and understand theological thought has only recently started to catch up with the wider context of modern spiritual expressions. The recent introduction to Orthodox Theology by Fr Andrew Louth demonstrates a serious attempt in this direction.1 The author does not try to ignore the last few centuries of Western systematic theological thought, which he knows and understands very well,2 but he tries to steer it away from the dead ends of sterile philosophism, by enriching it with the experiential element of Orthodox theology. Likewise, Christos Yannaras writes often about the limits of philosophical theological expression.3 More than merely making such an observation, his approach to the Song of Songs is developed in a poetic format.4 In this way he manages to respond to the spirit of the Biblical text Still, writers such as Dostoyevsky and Papadiamantis are known for their religious strand, and therefore it is not so surprising that we turn our attention to them. Sometimes in their work we can find long passages where they develop explicitly their theological views – although probably more theology may be revealed in their more theologically subtle pages. We can find more writers whose work likewise reveals a spiritual interest, whether they placed themselves within a certain religious tradition or whether they expressed somewhat dissenting views, such as George MacDonald and Leo Tolstoy. The Christian views of C.S. Lewis (not only in his Narnia stories, but also in highly sophisticated works such as Till we Have Faces (1956), or G.K. Chesterton has been known for some time, but our methodology could lead us to areas beyond literature. Would we be able to consider religious thought in the twentieth century, and include sources as diverse as Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Arvo Pärt’s Te Deum (1984)? The trajectory of theology has steadily moved away from the time when the most sublime theological ideas could be expressed with parables rather than with arguments. Yet, spiritual life itself has not lost its character; it has merely found different ways to express itself. In 1 Andrew Louth, Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology, SPCK, 2013. 2 Cf. his Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology, Clarendon, 1989. 3 Cf. Christos Yannaras, Elements of Faith, T&T Clark, 1991, p.17. 4 Published in English as Variations on the Song of Songs, Holy Orthodox Press, 2005.

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the end, theological thought always needs to be measured against the good of the people of God. The theology that we received from the Ecumenical Councils, the Fathers and the saints, and also the answers we are trying to explore in our age, ultimately have to do with our life of prayer, faith and love. There is no point to try to develop the edifice of modern theological thought, if it does not help us to understand our faith and if it does not help us to pray better. In the last few decades we have started to recover the notion of the “apophatic” in English-speaking theology. The study of the early Fathers who started using this philosophical term in order to stress that there is a superior level of theology beyond affirmative, positive knowledge, has helped us situate it better within our theological vocabulary. This term was used by the Fathers in order to show that there is a distance between the expression of the experience of the Church, and the experience itself, and that there are no words that can describe the presence of God. Paul’s ecstatic experience on the way to Damascus, was that he heard “inexpressible words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter” (2 Corinthians 12:4). After twenty centuries, we see the same image in the pre-sanctified Liturgy, when the Great Entrance (when the priest carries the sacramental Body and Blood of Christ), is done in complete silence, as no words can be said in the presence of God. This image of the silent procession is more eloquent than many treatises on apophaticism. Apophatic theology is not something that comes easily. It can be reached after a long ascetic struggle and engagement with the things that we know, what has been revealed to us by God. But perhaps the theology of the future will be written as poetry.

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Referenced Works and Suggested Further Reading

Andreopoulos, Andreas, Metamorphosis: the Transfiguration in Byzantine Theology and Iconography, SVS Press, 2005 Andreopoulos, Andreas, The Sign of the Cross: the Gesture, the Mystery, the History, Paraclete Press, 2006 Andreopoulos, Andreas, ‘The Song of Songs: an Asceticism of Love’, in The Forerunner, No. 57, Summer 2011 Orthodox Fellowship of St John the Baptist, pp. 17-26 Andreopoulos, Andreas, ‘Alexandros Papadiamantis: the Saint of Greek Literature’, Sobornost, Vol. 32, No. 2, 2011, pp. 19-36 Andreopoulos, Andreas, This is my Beloved Son: The Transfiguration of Christ, Paraclete Press, 2012 Andreopoulos, Andreas, ‘All in all’ in the Byzantine Anaphora and the Eschatological Mystagogy of Maximos the Confessor, in Studia Patristica, Vol. 68, edited by Markus Vinzent, Peeters, Leuven, 2013, pp. 303-312. Antonova, Clemena, Space, Time and Presence in the Icon, Ashgate, 2010 Axelos, Kostas, Ὁ Ἡράκλειτος καί ἡ Φιλοσοφία, Ἐξάντας, 1975 Barber, Charles, Figure and Likeness: on the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm, Princeton University Press, 2002 Beckwith, John, Early Christian and Byzantine Art, Penguin Books, 1979 Belting, Hans, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, University of Chicago, 1997 Besançon, Alain, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, University of Chicago, 2001 Bentchev, I., Engel Ikonen, Luzern, 1999 Blane, Andrew, Georges Florovsky: Russian Intellectual and Orthodox Churchman, SVS Press, 1997 Bouyer, Louis, The Christian Mystery: From Pagan Myth to Christian Mysticism, T&T Clark, 1989 Breck, John, Scripture in Tradition: The Bible and Its Interpretation in the Orthodox Church, SVS Press, 2001 Bulgakov, Sergei, The Burning Bush: On the Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God, Eerdmans, 2009 Bunge, Gabriel, The Rublev Trinity: The Icon of the Trinity by the Monk-painter Andrei Rublev, SVS Press, 2007

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Constantinides, Efthalia, The Wall Paintings of the Panagia Olympiotissa at Elasson in Northern Thessaly, Athens, 1992 Chadwick, Henry, The Church in Ancient Society, Oxford University Press, 2001 Cormack, Robin, Byzantine Art, Oxford University Press, 2000 Evdokimov, Paul, The Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty, Oakwood, 1990 Florensky, Pavel, Iconostasis, SVS Press, 1997 The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, Nordland Press, 1972 Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things, Random House, 1970 Grabar, André, Christian Iconography: A Study of its Origins, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969 Guthrie, W., A History of Greek Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 1962 Hadjinicolaou, John (editor), Synaxis, Alexander Press, 2006 Halliwell, Stephen, Aristotle’s Poetics, Chapel Hill, 1986 Hotchkiss, Valerie and Patrick Henry (eds.), Orthodoxy and Western Culture: A Collection of Essays Honoring Jaroslav Pelikan on His Eightieth Birthday, SVS Press, 2005 Kahn, Charles, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, Cambridge University Press, 1987 Kartsonis, Anna, Anastasis: The Making of an Image, Princeton University Press, 1986 Khrapovitsky, Antony, Dostoevsky‘s Concept of Spiritual Rebirth, Synaxis Press, 1980 Kondakov, N., The Russian Icon, Clarendon Press, 1927 Lossky, Vladimir and Leonid Ouspensky, The Meaning of Icons, SVS Press, 1952 Lossky, Vladimir, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, SVS Press, 1995 Loudovikos, Nikolaos, A Eucharistic Ontology: Maximus the Confessor’s Eschatological Ontology of Being as Dialogical Reciprocity, Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2010 Loudovikos, Nikolaos, Ἡ Ἀποφατική Ἐκκλησιολογία τοῦ Ὁμοουσίου, Ἁρμός, 2002 Louth, Andrew, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, Clarendon Press, 1983 Louth, Andrew, Discerning the Mystery: an Essay on the Nature of Theology, Clarendon, 1989 Louth, Andrew, Wisdom of the Byzantine Church: Evagrios of Pontos and Maximos the Confessor, Paine Lectures in Religion, 2000 Louth, Andrew, ‘The ecclesiology of Saint Maximos the Confessor’, International journal of the study of the Christian church, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2004, pp. 109-120. Louth, Andrew, Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology, SPCK, 2013 Maguire, Henry, The Icons of their Bodies, Princeton University Press, 1996 Mango, Cyril, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312-1453, University of Toronto, 1986 Mantzaridis, George, The Deification of Man, SVS Press, 1984

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Mathews, Thomas F., The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art, Princeton University Press, 1993 McPartlan, Paul, The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri De Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue, T&T Clark, 1993 Meyendorff, John, Orthodox Church: Its Past and Its Role in the World Today, SVS Press, 1996 Mavropoulos, Dimitris, Διερχόμενοι διά τοῦ ναοῦ, Domos, 2009 Nellas, Panayiotis, Deification in Christ: The Nature of the Human Person, SVS Press, 1997 Ἁγίου Νικοδήμου Ἁγιορείτου, Συναξαριστὴς τῶν δώδεκα μηνῶν τοῦ ἑνιαυτοῦ, Domos, 2005 Ouspensky, Leonid, Theology of the Icon, SVS Press, 1992 Papadiamantis, Alexandros, Ἃπαντα, critical edition by N.D. Triantafyllopoulos, Domos, 1988 Patterson, Joby, ‘Hesychastic Thought as Revealed in Byzantine, Greek and Romanian Church Frescoes: A Theory of Origin and Diffusion’, Revue des études sud-est Européennes, Vol. 16, Bucharest, 1978, pp. 663-670 Papanikolaou, Aristotle, Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism and DivineHuman Communion, University of Notre Dame Press, 2006 Pelikan, Jaroslav, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture, Yale University Press, 1998 Pentcheva, Bissera, Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006 Psilakis, Nikos and Maria, Τό ψωμὶ τῶν Ἑλλήνων καί τά γλυκίσματα τῆς λαϊκῆς μας παράδοσης, Καρμάνωρ, 2001 Runia, David, Exegesis and Philosophy: Studies on Philo of Alexandria, Variorum, 1990 Runia, David, Philo in Early Christian Literature: A Survey, Fortress Press, 1993 Sahas, Daniel, Icon and Logos: Sources in Eighth-Century Iconoclasm, University of Toronto Press, 1986 Sendler, Egon, The Icon, Image of the Invisible: Elements of Theology, Aesthetics and Technique, Oakwood, 1988 Sevcenko, Nancy, The Celebration of the Saints in Byzantine Art and Liturgy, Ashgate, 2012 Schmemann, Alexander, The Eucharist, SVS Press, 1988 Sherrard, Philip, The Sacred in Life and Art, Golgonooza Press, 1990 Staniloae, Dumitru, The Experience of God, 5 vols, Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2005-2012 Tradigo, Alfredo, Icons and Saints of the Eastern Orthodox Church, Getty Publishing, 2006 Tsakiridou, C.A., Icons in Time, Persons in Eternity, Ashgate, 2013 Tsitsiridis, Stavros, ‘Mimesis and Understanding: An Interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics 4.1448b4-19’, in Classical Quarterly, Vol. 55 (2005) 435-46 Uspensky, Boris, The Semiotics of the Russian Icon, Lisse: Peter de Ridder Press, 1976 Weitzmann, Kurt, The Icon: Holy Images, 6th to 14th Century, Chatto and Windus, London, 1978

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Yannaras, Christos, Elements of Faith: An Introduction to Orthodox Theology, T&T Clark, 1991 Yannaras, Christos, Variations on the Song of Songs, Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2005 Yannaras, Christos, On the Absence and Unknowability of God: Heidegger and the Areopagite, T&T Clark, 2006 Yannaras, Christos, Orthodoxy and the West: Hellenic Self-Identity in the Modern Age, Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007 Yannaras, Christos, Person and Eros, Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007 Yannaras, Christos, Relational Ontology, Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2011 Yannaras, Christos, Πείνα καί δίψα, Γρηγόρης, 1997 Yannaras, Christos, Ἓξι φιλοσοφικές ζωγραφιές, Ἲκαρος, 2011 Zacchaeus, Archimandrite (ed.), A History of Icon Painting, Orthodox Christian Books, 2005 Zizioulas, Metropolitan John, Being in Communion, SVS Press, 1997 Zizioulas, Metropolitan John, The One and the Many, Sebastian Press, 2010 Zizioulas, Metropolitan John, The Eucharistic Communion and the World, T&T Clark, 2011

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