above: *Anastasis*, c. 14th century, Hagia Sophia

This is the second of two posts—you can read the first one HERE. I hope you will come and seek with me on Zoom on August 1 through another workshop on art and faith. Click HERE to register, if you haven’t already.

In the first workshop, we focused on Christian art up to the Renaissance. I used an article on Russian Orthodox theologian, Sergius Bulgakov for an outline and an opportunity to consider icons of the Eastern Orthodox tradition along with the western religious art with which I am more familiar.

The word icon is from Ancient Greek εἰκών (eikṓn) . It means image, resemblance, as in "He [Jesus] is the icon of the invisible God." (Col 1:15) The uncreated light that was at the beginning of creation and came into the world in Christ Jesus is what icon writers (not painters) seek to show.

Our liturgy retains the kissing of the gospel book before it is read much as icons are kissed in Orthodox churches. Our action of kissing image and word venerates God’s action toward us because image, word, and God were more connected in the early Christian consciousness than those concepts tend to be in our own. In scripture, Christ is both the logos (word) and also the Icon of God.

Above is the oldest known icon, Christ Pantakrator (“ruler of all”) from the 6th century. It survived iconoclasm at St. Cathrine’s monastery on Mt. Sinai. An icon is often referred to as a “door” or a “window,” which helps us to pray as we meditate on it, opening a passage in ourselves through which God communicates. All three persons of the Trinity are imaged in Christ. Other than by the face of Christ, God is not depicted but rather is present through saints and symbols.

Orthodox theologians have mostly been dismissive of western religious art as a means of prayer and meditation, and have seen its naturalism as contradictory to the “ideal realism” of eastern icons. I am certainly generalizing, but it seems to me that these theologians believe the visual language of eastern icons to be made almost purely of symbols, in contradistinction to the palette of ideas and emotions with which western artists conceive of their work.

But I see a common language in eastern icons made during the Renaissance and western religious art, even though divergence of eastern and western Christianity and reformation brewing in the latter is evident. Below is a painting of Christ Healing the Blind by iconographer turned western painter, El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), painted around 1570, which is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Going back to our Orthodox theologian, the realism of a painting by Henry VIII’s court painter, Hans Holbein, brought Sergei Bulgakov into a deeper awareness of the humanity of Christ when he became ill with throat cancer and felt he was dying. Holbein’s “Dead Christ” below is a painting Dostoevsky also referred to in his novel, The Idiot. There was something in its naturalism that aided the faith-seeking-understanding of these Russian author-theologians.

It made the humanity of Christ accessible to them in a way that the idealized images of their tradition could not. On a personal note, I have been a hospital chaplain intern for six months and I have met the model for Holbein’s painting. I have also met his mother and friends. It is a teaching of Christ, I believe His only teaching explicitly concerning the Last Judgment, that we love Him by caring for the needs of others. I have found I regularly experience Christ in caring for the dead, as well as for the living.

My favorite day in Holy Week is Holy Saturday. Its icon is called the Anastasis, which means standing again or resurrection. Usually, as at the top of this post, Christ is depicted pulling Adam, and sometimes Eve, from the grave. The image of Christ as victor, seen below in this mosaic from 6th century Ravenna, is retained in the Anastasis, as it is in the Apostle’s Creed.

Something strange is happening - there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and He has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and Hell trembles with fear.
He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, He has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve, He who is both God and the Son of Eve. The Lord approached them bearing the Cross, the weapon that had won Him the victory. At the sight of Him Adam, the first man He had created, struck his breast in terror and cried out to everyone, “My Lord be with you all.” Christ answered him, “And with your spirit.” He took him by the hand and raised him up, saying, “Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.
— Homily on Holy Saturday: The Lord Descends into Hades, St. Epiphanius, Bishop of Cyprus (403 A.D.)

This way of looking at the resurrection is different from what many western churches have done with Christian imagery since the Reformation—abolishing Christ’s body altogether by showing an empty cross. (Now sometimes there isn’t a cross at all.) I was still attending such a church when I saw this painting below of Holy Saturday and the Resurrection by Andrea Mantegna, painted between 1492 and 1493, at the British Museum. Not knowing the creed at that time, it tapped my desire for a deeper understanding of my faith, which led me here.

To believe in the miracle of his resurrection is to believe that Jesus was truly dead, as in Holbein’s painting, and sooner or later we know by our own bodies that we must die before we rise again. Similarly, because both the meditative-spiritual and the realistic-bodily images of Jesus in death are true, we use the art of the resurrection for our deceased loved ones—we use the colors, words, and music of Easter in our requiem masses.

It seems to me that for art to be spiritual it must reflect (whether through apparent beauty or the beauty it evokes by its absence) the light in which we spy the risen Lord. But far be it from me to remove our sightings in art from the realm of seeking, metaphor, poetry, and meaning-making to the dystopia where good and degenerate art are defined for us.

I think that much art criticism is like a brew fermented from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which imbibing overmuch can make us unresponsive and fearful of creativity. Let us not get drunk, as the Bible says, but rather, while it is day, use our freedom to seek God in all that is made. Below is The Sun, by Edvard Munch (1912) on exhibit at The Clark in Williamstown, MA, until October 15, 2023. Peace and joy be yours.