Abstract
This volume of essays is the result of an interdisciplinary symposium on sacred art (held in three parts) hosted in 2013, by the Huffington Ecumenical Institute of Loyola Marymount University, titled Icons and Images. The meeting reflected in these pieces is the one held in Los Angeles in 2013. It is in turn subdivided into three parts: the first part offers scholarly and historical analyses of Byzantine and Roman art and iconography, the second part anthropological and cultural accounts of Roman, Armenian, and Chilean sacred art, and the third part two pastoral reflections on the work of iconographers and whether or not one can pray effectively before paper copies of icons (phew, it seems one can!). It is a very worthwhile book but like most volumes of this kind, the contributions vary in significance.
The two weightiest are by the late lamented Fr. Robert F. Taft SJ, undeniably one of the greatest modern historians and interpreters of Byzantine liturgy, and the art historian Bissera V. Pentcheva, of Stanford University, California. I do not know if this is the last published piece by Fr. Taft before he departed to concelebrate in the heavenly liturgy, the earthly imago of which in the Byzantine Rite he had spent over 50 years researching and describing so lovingly. There is little new in the piece partly because he had pretty much said it all already. However, his contribution, looking at icon and image in East and West from the point of view of basic Byzantine concepts such as taxis (which he translates as ‘order’), historia (‘rite’), and theoria (‘contemplation’), is a magisterial summary and synthesis of the Byzantine worldview and how it found expression in the symbolism of the Orthodox Church. Taft’s concluding words, in which he celebrates the power of the Byzantine liturgical ambience to transport the believer into transfiguration through the descent of divinizing grace, is a testimony to his own years of service, prayer, research, and teaching, as a Byzantine-Rite Jesuit at the Oriental Institute in Rome and a resident of the Russicum College. As the Orthodox sing: may his memory be eternal!
Pentcheva deals with iconicity as being ‘beyond representation,’ by examining three sources of the Byzantine view of the icon in the period before the iconoclastic controversy, i.e., Scripture, the writings of the Fathers, and the Vita of St Symeon the Stylite, the Younger. Her thesis is simple but profound, and hugely significant for how we understand the meaning of the icon before the strict canonical codification that it received in the Church after the ‘Triumph of Orthodoxy.’ She establishes that iconicity in the earlier period was basically about ‘an inspiriting with divine pneuma’ (p. 56). It is a vision of the icon as process rather than simply product, or, perhaps more precisely, as a product resulting from a process. The process is God’s performance as an artist, shaping through the sacred space of iconicity a participative work through which humans are transformed into mirrors for reflecting divine light—the product being sanctity and transfigured bodies.
She sees the heavily symbolic form of Byzantine liturgy as a series of moving icons, facilitating this Spirit-driven process. Her essay harmonizes well therefore with that of Taft. It is in fact the traditional Greek Christian understanding of the spiritual life as summarized by St Diadochus of Photice in the Philokalia : ‘To be in God’s image is given to all, but to be made into his likeness is reserved only for those who through great love have brought their created freedom into harmony with God’s will.’ It is small wonder then that she lays particular emphasis on the work of St Maximus the Confessor (particularly his liturgical commentary), since he was heir to and the most precise expositor of the tradition she describes here. Pentcheva invites us to rescue the icon from the frozen categories of ‘sacred art’ and see it afresh as the Byzantines saw it—as iconicity, a dynamic, transformative, and participative process.
The essay on Armenian art by Christina Maranci, is a fascinating and well written reminder of how little most of us know about that remarkable eastern tradition, with its terrible though glorious history of persecution. It also reminds us of the shocking neglect into which its art has fallen in modern-day Turkey and the danger of its ultimate disappearance. One can only hope that historians like Maranci will continue to warn the world of that disturbing possibility and spur the necessary authorities to undertake serious work of preservation.
Dorian Llywelyn SJ’s study of the devotional culture surrounding the famous cross-carrying statue of Jesus Nazareno in Chile is a forceful presentation of the power of such images to tap deeply into areas of the psyche not adequately provided for (or sometimes even met?) by more official types of religion. Drawing on the ground-breaking work on popular devotions by another Jesuit, Carl Dehne, Llywelyn argues for attention to context and the capacity such images possess to foster solidarity rather than merely to exalt morose presentations of suffering. In an almost Jungian way he argues that imagery touches parts of us that words can never reach, though he is also aware of the dangers (such as idolatry), that may lurk within an over-emphasis on images. That note is sounded again by Nicholas Denysenko (the volume’s editor) in his concluding reflections, with his warning that wonder-working images may also degenerate into miracle-working machines! It is hard to avoid a Barth-inspired comment: are we certain that such expression of religion are always actually to do with Christian faith, or are they perhaps more representative of other, ‘older’ layers of the psyche, in its expression of the sacred?
There are also interesting pieces in this book on the role of imagery in the whitewashed churches of the post-Vatican II period (some of which look like they might have won awards from iconoclastic emperors) and about the practical experience of an Orthodox icon painter, though the suggestion that he once heard the angelic Trisagion being sung to crown his artistic achievements stretches credibility and risks undermining the very taxis (‘order’) that the hierarchical nature of Orthodox iconography seeks to protect. This is an excellent volume with something for many: theologians, art historians, students of popular religion, and Byzantinists.