A Publication of the ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN LAITY
|
|
|
| Volume 6 Number 15 - Tuesday, April 13th, 2004 |
A Publication of the ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN LAITY |
|
• Search Engine
The 2003 Angel Fund Appeal • OCN Website
• The Video - "A New Era Begins"
|
The Orthodox Christian News Service |
|
|
Opening a Byzantine Door to the Divine
By Bill
Broadway Many people know little of Eastern Orthodox Christian teachings yet recognize the colorful human figures that adorn the walls, floors and ceilings of Orthodox churches and peer hauntingly from painted blocks of wood in museums and magazines. Those images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the Apostles and saints are meant to show the religious figures as they looked, or might have looked, when they walked the Earth, and to bring the viewer into communion with them. The hoped-for result is transcendence of time and place to an encounter with spiritual truths. "Icons in their purest form are a way to contemplate the divine," said Helen C. Evans, curator of a monumental show on Orthodox iconography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. "Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557)" presents more than 350 works from the last years of Byzantine culture, including frescoes, coins, jewelry, metalwork, manuscripts, textiles and mosaics. Many of them never have been shown outside the churches and monasteries where they have been housed for centuries as part of the communities' liturgical and contemplative life. The exhibition's opening two weeks ago was timely, given this year's coincidence of Easter celebrations on Eastern Orthodox and Western calendars. Most Orthodox Christians celebrate Easter tomorrow, as do Roman Catholics and Protestants. But Orthodox churches -- more than a dozen exist worldwide, including Greek, Russian, Armenian and Coptic -- calculate their liturgical calendar differently, often celebrating Easter a week to a month later than Western Christians. Among the exhibition's vast offerings, a few images stand out as instructive introductions to Orthodox liturgy and theology, especially as they relate to Jesus's Passion and Resurrection. Western depictions of the Resurrection typically show Jesus rising from the tomb, appearing before His disciples or ascending to heaven. Orthodox paintings and mosaics most often show Jesus descending to the netherworld to stomp on the gates of hell and liberate Adam and Eve. Sometimes, for good measure, he bashes Satan in the head with his cross. Such images are based on the "harrowing of hell," a non-biblical but widely held Christian belief (East and West) that Jesus journeyed to hell after his crucifixion but before his ascent to heaven. By rescuing humanity's parents, who have fallen in original sin, Jesus demonstrates his victory over death and the salvation of mankind. One of the show's largest and most significant works is a 13th-century wood-and-gold icon with the crucifixion on one side and the descent into hell -- what Orthodox Christians call the anastasis -- on the other, Evans said in a telephone interview. The 21/4-by-4-foot icon never has been shown outside its home, the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine in Egypt. The 6th-century Greek Orthodox monastery is at the base of the mountain that many believe to be Mount Sinai, where Moses saw the burning bush and later received the Ten Commandments. It is the world's oldest continuously active monastery and one of the oldest Christian pilgrimage sites. The monastery owns thousands of manuscripts and icons, most donated over the centuries by various pilgrims, including Crusaders, kings and popes. The icon includes Latin as well as Greek inscriptions -- a rarity on Eastern Orthodox icons. The Latin suggests that the icon might have been created by someone from Rome, a Crusader perhaps, or fashioned at St. Catherine's, Evans said. Whatever the icon's origin, the two languages suggest an ecumenical accord at Sinai 200 years after the patriarchs in Rome and Constantinople excommunicated each other and their realms began waging wars over land and theology. The icon is one of the earliest examples of use of the mandorla, a motif in which spiky rays emanate from Jesus's head, Evans said. It's the artist's effort to depict the bright spiritual form that Jesus took during the Transfiguration, an event described in the Gospels in which Jesus meets with Moses and Elijah on a mountaintop. Orthodox iconographers combine the Transfiguration with the descent into hell to demonstrate the blinding light of salvation, Evans said. And this particular icon could be tied to a mystical movement that some think originated at the Sinai monastery. The Hesychast movement, as it was called, held that a believer, through controlled breathing and repetitive prayer -- much like saying a mantra during Buddhist meditation -- could perceive the divine light that shone on Jesus during the Transfiguration. The practice was debated widely in the East and rejected by the West, Evans said. The East, in turn, refused to accept a belief that later became doctrine among Roman Catholics: that Mary was physically taken into heaven after her death. Orthodox theology doesn't allow for what Catholics call the Assumption. Instead, it states that Mary never died but rather fell into a deep sleep and that Jesus took her soul to heaven. In a typically Eastern representation of this event, the Dormition, another icon from St. Catherine's, shows Jesus standing behind Mary's bier, holding her soul in the form of a baby. The Metropolitan has several examples, on loan from other churches or monasteries, of what Evans calls "the great images of Easter." These large textiles, called epitaphia (epitaphios in the singular form), are large, embroidered images of the dead Christ that are carried in processionals on Holy Friday and placed on a carved representation of the tomb. Most of them depict the incumbent body of Jesus on a stone slab, but a 14th-century epitaphios in the exhibition shows Jesus lying in a sea of stars surrounded by seraphim and other celestial beings. Also included in the exhibition is an example of the Mandylion, an image of Jesus believed to have been miraculously impressed on a cloth placed over the face of the crucified Jesus, created, like the Shroud of Turin, "without aid of human hands," the tradition goes. That image appears as a wood icon, but it is said to replicate the original cloth image sent by Jesus to the Armenian king of Edessa. In keeping with Byzantine tradition, even copies of copies, if carefully created, carry the same spiritual power as the original. "Few will visit it here expecting to see the very form of the face of God," Annemarie Weyl Carr, professor of art history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, writes in the exhibition catalogue. "But many will search it earnestly to see what was seen as the face of God." "Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557)" continues through July 4 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For an overview, including a virtual tour of the Monastery of St. Catherine, go to www.metmuseum.org or call 212-535-7710.
© 2004 The
Washington Post Company |
|
Home • Archives • Search • Submissions • Support Us |
||
|
Orthodox News, PO BOX 6954 |
