https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=CD3E7ZjgxqQ
It’s my first time at Santicons. Really happy to be here. And I’ve never been to any of the other seminaries, so I have a little microphone here. I’m really happy about that as well. So what I want to talk to you about is I figured I had a whole room full of seminarians who will probably be the future priests. And what I’d like to take you through is the theme of our conference is beauty. And what I want to try to do with you is try to unpack that a little bit. One of my contentions has been that our own tradition, our artistic tradition, the iconography, the architecture, the liturgy, it is a way for us to participate in the Kingdom of God, but it ends up also being an image of reality itself. And it can help us to pierce, help us understand the way that the world actually unfolds in front of us. And we can understand the world through the lens of our tradition. So what I want to do is I want to kind of take you through the basics of iconography, how you can build iconography out of the very image of Christ, and how it kind of lays itself out and becomes the iconographic programs of the church, how it all works together. It’s not going to be something that I’m going to go through in detail, but rather I’m going to kind of give you a line that you can follow and then explore on your own once we’re done with it. And so what I want to start with is the deusis. So most of you will know what the deusis is. The image of the deusis is any image usually that has Christ in the center, and then we’ll have saints on each side of Christ. Sometimes you can have a row of saints like we do in the great deusis in the iconostasis where you have this row of saints that go all the way to the end. Sometimes there are angels in there as well. And so the notion of the deusis is one of the oldest images that we have in Christianity. Right away in the 4th century when things started to open up for Christians, we see this image appear even before the crucifixion, for example. The crucifixion came much later, much later, let’s say at least 100 years later in the history of Christianity. But some of the first images we have are the images of the deusis. And what’s interesting about the deusis, and this is why I’m focusing on this, and why I want to bring you along this particular line, is that there’s a way in which iconography represents certain events. And so you have the icons of the feasts, you have the icons of the lives of the saints, icons of stories from the Old Testament or from the story of Christ or the story of the Virgin. But there’s also a manner in which iconography represents the relationships of beings to Christ. The relationships of beings to the logos. So you can understand a certain aspect of iconography as an ontological hierarchy. As a hierarchy of beings that lead us towards the source of their own being and towards the culmination of their coming together. And that is of course the image of Christ. And so obviously then some things will become evident once you start to think about it that way. You’re going to start to see why it is that things are the way they are. And sometimes the way things are the way they are, it’s so natural, it’s so obvious that we don’t even think about it. Because it’s just obvious to have Christ in the middle, right? Of course we should have Christ in the center. Of course it just makes sense. But it’s important to understand it as well, especially in a world like ours which is so fragmented and so de-centered. It’s important to understand what is that center and why it is that Christ is there and how is it that it relates to everything else. And so this image… So this image is from an apse in Rome, 4th century, one of the first mosaics that we have. So if you look at it, you have Christ, you know, it could be almost an icon today. You have Christ sitting in the center, he is in glory, he is pantocrator, he’s dressed as a noble Roman, ultimately he’s dressed as the emperor, he holds in his left hand, he holds a book, it could be a scroll, usually it could be a closed book, an open book, but he’s holding writing in his left hand and in his right hand he is gesturing. He is blessing, he is doing… There are different gestures that Christ makes, but what’s important is to understand that he is gesturing with his right hand. Now this typology already existed in the Roman times, it was something that was already there. In the image of the emperor, you would see the emperor or an important senator or someone who was important in society holding the scroll in his left hand and gesturing with his right hand, and usually it was a gesture of address. So the senator would be addressing the people and he’s holding in his hand this writing. And what it represents is it represents two aspects of reality. And already I’m going to start to point you in that direction. You have Christ in the middle and then on each side of Christ is representing complementary or opposite or aspects of reality which mirror each other, okay? And that’s what we’re going to start to see as this whole diocese unfolds. And so the notion of the gesturing with the right hand and holding the book or the scroll was in Roman legal terms, in Roman power, was understood as what we would say authority and power. And those two aspects were seen complementary and they would become the basis of all legal systems in the Middle Ages, both in the East and the West. So you have something which is authority. And authority is direct. It’s related to who you are as a person. And so, you know, the senators had authority because they were prominent, because they had an important place in society. And then the other side, power, was the actual legal documents which gave the capacity for someone to enact that authority in the world. So you have a direct thing which is blessing or addressing. Then you have an indirect aspect which is the written code, the written law, which acts as a guarantee for that which is said or that which is brought directly. So you can see that in Christ and you can see it in our own experience. The bishop is there. The bishop blesses. That’s a direct thing. He is acting with spiritual authority to give unto us and for us to receive from the bishop, from the priest, to receive a spiritual relationship. And that ultimately leads all the way up to Christ. But our tradition also has the outer part which is all the exteriors that we have. We have our canons, we have the architecture, we have the liturgy. All of these things are outer, but both of them have to work together. You need to have an actual relationship of people that have authority, that go all the way to Christ. We have this apostolic succession. But then that will end up manifesting itself on the outside through these exterior forms. And you need both. You just have one. If you just have the exterior forms, you have an empty vessel. And if you just have the authority part, you have something which doesn’t have a body. Let’s say it that way. That lacks body. So in this image you have on one side of Christ, you have St. Paul, and on the other side of Christ you have St. Peter. And those, the first deacis, that’s usually what you would see in that image. On one side St. Paul, on the other side St. Peter. And those were called the pillars of the church. We still have that icon today that we even celebrate in the Orthodox tradition. St. Peter and St. Paul standing together, holding the church together. The two pillars of the church. So why is it that St. Peter and St. Paul are the two pillars of the church? We have twelve, thirteen apostles, twelve plus one. Why is it that it’s them? And what I think is that I think it has to do with who they are. And it has to do with this inner and outer, direct and indirect. All of these complementary relationships. So we have to see Peter and Paul as having a complementary relationship. Now in this image you can see that both St. Peter and St. Paul are being crowned. Can you see it? There’s a female figure standing behind them who are holding up crowns above their head. That is interpreted by church historians, by art historians, as being the two images of the church. This is something that we have lost a little bit, that tradition, because we don’t need it as much anymore. But in the ancient church we had these two figures of the church. Here is an image in Santa Sabina where you have the two images of the church. You probably cannot read the inscription, but it is the church of the circumcision and the church of the gentiles. And so St. Peter was the apostle to the circumcised and St. Paul is the apostle to the gentiles. So now think of it as I was trying to explain. Authority and power. The inner, direct and the outer. So now again you have this relationship between inner and outer. You have the Jews who had been the holders of the tradition and they were the circumcised. They were those that had removed the outside, removed the outer flesh and just had the core. That’s the ultimate symbol of circumcision. And then you have now also the apostle to the gentiles. And once you understand that, if you understand St. Peter as being kind of this inner apostle and St. Paul as being this outer apostle, it’s going to help you understand a whole bunch of things about St. Paul. St. Paul who represents himself as a fool, he represents himself as a shape-shifter. He says I’m everything to all men. He boasts about his infirmities. There’s this whole aspect of St. Paul which is related to him being, we could say, I’m going to start to talk in these terms now, the left side of Christ. And St. Peter being what we call the right side of Christ. Because one of the things you have to understand is that image of the deesis is already, right at the beginning, is already an image of the last judgment. The very first church decoration, the very first church programs were all eschatological. If you go to Rome and you see the very first churches, you can see like the 24 elders and all of this imagery from Revelations as this bringing us into the final moment, the totality of everything. And in that totality of everything, that’s when you get this ontological hierarchy that I’m telling you about. As everything has been revealed, you see everything in its place, in its finality. You see where everything goes in the giant puzzle of the cosmos. And so this is also one of the very first images. Now, this is on a sarcophagus. You can see again, can you recognize the figures? So on our right is, and the left of Christ in this image is the image of St. Peter. And then on our left and his right is St. Paul again. Can you see it? All right. So now you have Christ who is giving the law, he’s giving that book, that power. He’s handing it over to St. Peter. He’s handing it over to St. Peter. And so think about it the way that I’m telling you about. You have Christ in the center. He is the logos. He is that which is the origin of everything, that towards which everything culminates. And now he’s handing down. He’s distributing to that which is next to him. He’s distributing down the hierarchy, you would say. So he’s giving the new law to St. Peter. And he’s standing, this is important, he’s standing on the cosmos. So that figure down there with the thing, that’s the cosmos. It’s going to change, but that’s an early image of the cosmos. I just wanted to show you a few of these. Now one of the images, one of the traditions that ends up developing, and this one, the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, we don’t know if that’s what happens because one of his arms is broken. But one of the traditions that ends up developing is the transmission of the keys as well. So you end up having two traditions, a notion that the keys are transmitted and also that the law is transmitted. And then all of that’s going to come together in an image, which is this one, which is usually St. Paul actually receiving the text and St. Peter receiving the keys. You can see it at the beginning, it’s kind of bubbling, everything’s kind of coming together. At first it’s a little awkward, and here you can see that St. Peter, Christ is holding the key. He has this weird thing in his hand and it has a key on it. And then in his other hand he’s giving a roll, he’s giving this law to Paul, and he’s giving the keys to Peter. This is a later image, but here it has totally crystallized. So you see St. Paul is receiving the law and St. Peter is receiving the keys. But what I’m trying to get to is here again you have this image of that which is direct. If I give you keys, I’m giving you the capacity to open and close. Like Christ said, you have the capacity to bless and to curse, to open and close. It’s a direct authority. You as a person, you have that capacity, and our bishops have that capacity to bless and to curse. We have in the church that capacity to do so. But he’s also on the other side handing over the exteriors, the outside, the secondary or the added, which is this written text, this new law, this form that is going to be on the outside. So once again you have this inner authority and then this outer form that comes to the outside. Okay? Alright, so I hope that this is starting to make sense. I never know if silence means that people don’t know where I’m going or if it means that they’re following me. Alright, so everybody knows where I’m going. It’s going to get more complicated. Okay, so let me just… This is already going to start to account for the basic structure of the church itself. And so there are different ways of doing it. What I’m going to do is I’m going to show you the different ways of doing it, and it’ll help you understand why we have different traditions and why those different traditions just depends on what you’re doing. You can do it differently, but they all end up actually talking about the same thing. So the way that the West especially captured this idea was to have Christ in the apps in the East. So we’re all facing Christ, and there he is as this place where we’re all standing there. We’re all looking, we’re all together. We’re all joining together in order to focus and to participate in that which what we’re looking at, which is that the divine logos in his absolute manifestation as the judge of all, as the origin and finality of everything, and he is there blessing with his right hand, holding the book in his left hand. And so that’s the… So you can understand why it would make absolute sense to have Christ right there in the apps, because now we can imagine the deesis, right? We’re like a continuation of the deesis. You have Christ and you have all the saints, and so you can imagine all the stories and all the saints on the sides of the church, and then we actually are inside that deesis. We’re participating in it, okay? And that’s really important to understand the participation part. So in the… Now one of the things I want to just say one thing that’s difficult is that I’m going to talk about left hand and right hand, and it’s very difficult to talk about that because one of the problems with left hand and right hand is that we have a clear symbolism of it in scripture where Christ talks about bringing the sheep towards him and pushing the goats away from him, right? So you have this bringing in towards the middle and then this pushing away towards the edge. So we have that symbolism. Now the problem is how do you represent it? And that’s where it gets complicated because my right hand is the left hand of Christ and his left hand, if I’m standing in front of you, it flips, right? And so at the beginning of the church, you get… things keep flipping. So it’s like sometimes St. Peter is on one side, sometimes St. Paul is on that side, so it keeps going back and forth, one side and the other. It’s like as if they’re like, do we represent it as the right hand of Christ or do we represent it as the right hand as we perceive it? And so it’s not… at the beginning it starts to… it’s flipping around. So don’t worry if you see it flipping at the beginning, but as the tradition kind of settles, you’ll see that at some point St. Peter is always on his right hand. In our churches, like I don’t think I’ve ever seen a church where St. Peter is not on the right and St. Paul is not on his left. There can be exceptions, but it’s mostly… that’s mostly the way that it’s settled out today. So now we have the deesis after iconoclasm. The east… if there are images of this deesis before, I’ve never seen them. It’s hard to know what was there before iconoclasm. But what we see coming out of iconoclasm is that the east jumps, let’s say develops a deesis which is based on the Mother of God and St. John the Forerunner. But in that… so you see this is one of the first that we know of. This Harbourville triptych after iconoclasm. You see up in the top Christ, the Mother of God and St. John the Forerunner. But in this image we end up having a very, very similar structure as the one that we had in the deesis of St. Peter and St. Paul. The emphasis is slightly different. But if you look at the images, you always have to look and try to see if there are two figures that are complementary to each other, what is it that’s complementary about them? And so if you… the great thing about the deesis that we use is that you have two characters, two figures that were there before Christ and pointed us towards Christ. And so right away we get the sense that that’s the whole point of this… that’s the whole point of iconography. The whole point of iconography is to do what the Mother of God and St. John did, which is to point everything towards Christ. All the images of the saints, you know, although the saints have participated in God’s glory, they’re all pointing us in this great hierarchy towards the source of everything. So to have St. John the Forerunner and the Mother of God as these two pointers is… it’s a beautiful decision, let’s say. But… so on the one side, what do we have? We have the Mother of God and she is covered. Then we have St. John the Forerunner and he was wild. So wild hair, wearing animal skins, out in the desert, screaming, telling people to repent, gets his head cut off, all right? All right, so could you have an image of St. John, right? St. Paul also got his head cut off, by the way. And then you have the Mother of God who is covered, who is secret, who hid in the Holy of Holies, who, you know, every image about her, who gathers in her heart. There’s that beautiful text in the Gospel where it says that as she was seeing Christ develop, that she gathered all these things into her heart, right? And that’s who she is. She’s the one who gathers into her heart and then the logos manifest himself in her heart, in her center. So now you have, again, these two extremes. You have the outer, chaotic, crazy hair, wild animal, all of this left-hand, let’s say, left-hand symbolism. Then you also have the other side, which is this gathering and this bringing towards. Now, think of it, think of the Last Judgment. All right, think of the Last Judgment. Those are the two movements of the Last Judgment. There’s one movement which is come and there’s one movement which is move away. Now, one of the things that I’m contending from the beginning is that we have a manner in which that relationship of come and move away, which is come towards the center, being positive, move away from the center, being negative, but it’s not necessarily positive and negative. There’s also a way in which coming towards the center can be negative and there’s a way in which moving away from the center can be positive, right? Now, in the case of St. Paul, that he is a fool, that he is a shapeshifter, that he changes his face depending on who he’s with, that he boasts, that he boasts for his weaknesses, all of this stuff, you would say it’s all negative stuff, but no, Christ turns that negative stuff into glory in St. Paul, right? And so, to give you an example, there’s a, one of my favorite quotes from St. Maximus is where he talks about what he calls the sins of the right hand and the sins of the left hand. And so he says that the sins of the right hand are the sins of pride, of self-sufficiency, that type of sin. And then the sins of the left are, you know, all the passions of the bodies, you know, sexual sins and all that stuff. That’s the sins of the left. And so he says that it starts actually with the sins of the right hand, that at first you get a sin of pride, and then that sin of pride opens the door for all the sins of the left hand to come in, okay? And so you can see, now, if you take a right hand character, you take someone like St. Peter, right? What’s St. Peter’s sin? That’s right. That’s St. Peter’s sin. St. Peter’s sin is I will never betray you. St. Peter’s sin. St. Peter, his… in his fervor is how he falls. In his fervor, right? That’s his fault. He says, I will be… I will get out of the boat. He’s the only one who does it. He’s like, I can do this. And sinks. Then he says, I’m going to follow you until the end. And denies, okay? So, like I said, the right hand is not necessarily always positive. The coming… And so you can understand when I talk about holding the center or coming towards the middle, right? That is, can be an image of pride if you only hold to your own, right? Because it’s our identities that give us pride. We think, like, I’m self-sufficient. I’ve got everything I need. I don’t need these other things. So it’s like I’m holding into myself, right? And then sometimes God will break that, smash us, splinter us, in order for us to understand that, no, the hierarchy keeps going after you, my friend. There are things above you and you need to submit to those as well. All right. So here’s one of the first images of the Last Judgment. So we have the sheep on the right hand and the goats on the left. And so if I asked you, St. John the Baptist, is he a sheep or a goat? Which one would you answer? It’s hard to answer because the goats are negative in the story. But yeah, in terms of his type, in terms of what he is, how he, what he manifests, he is the wild, he’s the wild aspect. All right. So now, of course, this comes into us, into our, into our tradition as becoming the very shape of the iconostasis. Right. So we have, we have Christ on his right. We have the Mother of God on his left. We have St. John the foreigner. And now look at this image. You notice how there is the red angel on one side and the blue angel on the other. This is a sixth century image, but we still have that today. Still have that even in your, even I’ve still looked at some of the iconostasis here in the chapel and in the church, and you still have that St. Gabriel on one side and St. Michael on the other. You can see I just had an image to show you the red angel at the end of the iconostasis and then the blue angel on the end of the, of the other end of the iconostasis. So this is complicated because I’m not going to talk about this, but there is also a way in which left hand and right hand symbolism, just like I’m standing in front of you, and it crosses like this. Well, you see that in icons as well, where it actually flips. You see it in the icon of the transfiguration and you see it in this icon, which is the fire angel is on the right hand of Christ, but the goats are on the left, and the blue angel is on the left hand of Christ, but the sheep are on the right. And so there’s this interesting crossing that happens. In the later traditions, you’ll see sometimes the red angel, St. Michael, has a sword right, and then the blue angel, St. Gabriel, holds a lily. All right, now, this structure, this basic structure, so now you’re going to start to see that it’s, it’s, it’s everywhere because the crucifixion is also that image. Crucifixion is, has the same structure as the deus is. This is one of the first crucifixions, fifth century. So like a hundred years, about a hundred years after the very first images started to appear in the, in the fourth century. So why do we show the three crosses in a full crucifixion? Because it’s in the story, of course. But also because what are the two sides? Right, one side looks towards Christ and the other side looks away from Christ. So here’s one of the, one of the first representation, another one of the first ones where you see on Christ’s right, on our right, I mean, you have the character who is looking up towards Christ, and then on the other side you have the character who is looking down or looking away or not looking at Christ. And you see that if you look at later images of the crucifixion, like the full crucifixion, you will see, you will see that. You’ll see sometimes one is actually turned backwards, different ways of showing that one is looking away and one is looking towards. And you have this image of the one, the thief that looks towards Christ as being the very image of this gathering in. He is the ultimate image of the gathering in because he says to Christ, today, he says to Christ, he says to the thief, he says, today you will be with me in paradise. And if you look at an image of the last judgment, there are a few figures that we show in paradise. And most usually we will show the good thief in paradise as one of the figures, not just because he’s in paradise, but as the first one to enter paradise through Christ, he becomes an image of the very entering into paradise, of that coming into the holy place. Okay. Now, and this structure again is also the reason why we have this. It’s the same thing. So you ever wonder why we have that tilted bar on the Russian cross? It’s because of that. Thy cross of Christ is a balance, right? Because on one side it lifts up and on the other side it casts down. And that’s the image of the crucifixion and that ends up being the image of the cross itself, ultimately. So when I’m talking to you about this aspect, these two sides, right, and you see it as in the very image of Christ’s blessing and the book and St. Peter and St. Paul and the red angel and the blue angel and the mother of God and St. John the foreigner, you know, you can see that it is really is this pattern of how unity and multiplicity exist. It’s an image of reality, right? It’s an image of how you can have something which is one, which brings us together, but also lets the many exist at the same time. You can think of it this way. You can think of it as breathing in and breathing out. So you have breathing in, breathing out. Christ brings towards himself and pushes away from himself. But the pushing away, like I said, is not, can be negative, but it’s not necessarily negative. It’s also a pushing away to go into multiplicity. It’s also this pushing away in the sense of sending the disciples out to the ends of the earth, right? That’s also this kind of casting away in a positive sense, okay? And so this is my pet peeve here, which is you will, everybody, and I’m sure everybody has their opinion about this icon and everybody who’s in seminary has heard about it and had their opinion, and you will hear the deconstructors who will tell you that this image is just an accident. And if you look at it closely, you get a sense that maybe that eye that’s a bit off, you know, on his left side is maybe a bad paint job. Like they tried to fix it and they didn’t get it right. And the thing is that people are missing the point. It doesn’t matter what the mechanical cause of this image is. Who cares? Like when we say icons not made with hands, they still manifest themselves. Like it doesn’t matter how they manifest themselves. That’s not the point, right? The point is that when we look at this image of Christ and we see the two sides and we perceive it, we’re not just perceiving it in that image, it’s because we’re perceiving the entire tradition of iconography. Like it’s there everywhere. So if we see it there and people tell you, no, it’s not there, it’s like, well, it’s everywhere else. So why does it bother you that it’s there? Like why does it bother you? And it is, there’s a kind of insidious approach towards our tradition and towards our history, which is to try to point out, and it’s like, I would say it’s like the Bart Ehrman School of whatever, you know, it’s like trying to point out the historical accidents and the historical causes as if that matters, as if that explains the meaning of something. Like it can participate in the meaning, but it doesn’t explain it, right? Like if you find it, like using again the images we have that are not made with hands, they’re still made of material. They still materially manifested themselves. So if you can show some kind of mechanical cause of, you know, it’s like, well, it can’t be an image not made with hands because it’s made of wood. Like, okay, I don’t know, dude, that doesn’t matter. That’s not the point. You’re missing the whole point. Okay, all right, sorry, I’m going to get off my rant and I’m going to go back into this presentation. Okay, so you have the basic deesis, you have Christ, and you remember the image of Christ with his feet on the cosmos, right? There’s this text in the prophet, which is that heaven is his throne and the earth is his footstool. And so now what you can do, and it’s what’s going to happen too, is instead of representing this hierarchy like this, where you have Christ in the middle and you have all these things that come out, that gather to him but also come out of him, you can do it like this. You can do it like a pyramid. You can have something above and then things below, which then come from that source above, head and body. So now we have heart and let’s say periphery, like center and periphery, like that, in terms of the deesis, but you can also have head and body. And that’s when things start to look like this. So this is a, call it a proto ascension. And now we’re taking the same idea and we’re propping it up in a way that we put Christ above. Christ is going up into heaven. He’s becoming the head of the church and the church is there below and manifesting him in the world. So we have Christ up in glory. He’s the alpha and omega. And then down here, who do you think is there? You can probably guess who’s there. Who are the two figures on the sides? Peter and Paul. And in the middle it is debated who exactly it is. You could say that it’s Ecclesia, that it’s the church, but it doesn’t matter to us because ultimately that image of Ecclesia will become the mother of God. So whether or not it was explicitly identified as the mother of God at that time, it doesn’t matter because it’s using that iconographic structure that we’re going to come to the full manifestation of the mother of God as this image of Ecclesia who is below. So in the text it doesn’t say that the mother of God was there at ascension, but we have to have her there at ascension. Because this image is not just an image of ascension. It’s an image of reality. It’s an image of the way that the church exists. It’s an image of the ontological relationship of the saints that gather together and become the body of the head, which is Christ. And there’s no other way to see it. Because Paul wasn’t there at the ascension either, and it’s funny, but he’s there in that image. Like why is St. Paul in that image? St. Paul is in that image because the ascension becomes the vehicle to show us something which is revealing to us the very manner in which the church exists. And you have to have St. Paul there because St. Paul is that pillar. He’s that outer pillar. In the temple there were two pillars. There was one, I forget the names, the Yakin and Boaz. I think the name of the pillars were. Does somebody remember the name? Yeah, so Yakin and Boaz. And one has to do with, let’s say, establishing, and one has to do with Boaz, which is who married a foreigner. So we don’t even know. They don’t exalt. It’s funny that he’s named Boaz. He’s the one who married this foreign lady. So he is this apostle to the Gentiles. You have the Gentiles on one side and you have the inner Jews in the middle. Like it was there. I mean, I’m telling you about this, but this is there. This is there from creation. I particularly like the images of the ascension that have the Mother of God on a footstool. That’s the best because then you really get that whole image of Christ sitting on his throne and then you have the body, the earth, which is down below as his footstool. And then he is sitting on a rainbow, which is this dome, right? Is this image of heaven above. Can you see that he’s sitting on a rainbow? Yeah, right. So. So now what you can do with this, now you have this image, which is a great image. Then you can actually, you can spread it out into space. So you can take this image and you can turn it into this. Right? It’s the same image. It’s the same thing. The first representations of Christ in the dome were actually representations of the ascension. You had the disciples and the Mother of God and then you had Christ in the top. And it was not just the ascension, but it was both the ascension and the eschatological moment. Because as the angel said, he will return in the same manner that he left. So to show, showing the ascension, that’s why I’m telling you that that image of the ascension, it’s one of the best images because it’s an image of everything. It really is an image of reality. It’s showing us the relationship of Christ to his church as he’s ascending to become the head, but also as he’s returning to join fully with his body. So it’s also the bride and the bridegroom, it’s all of that is going on in this image. Alright, so how do you turn it into this? So you have at the lower, on the lower sphere, you have in the square, which is the footstool, which is the nave, you know, we have this square cross. And then you have the dome, which is heaven, which is the rainbow and all of that. So you have the Mother of God in the apse, who is, who represents for us now how all of this, let’s say, how the footstool comes together into her and then above you have Christ in the dome. So you can see that if, like if you don’t have a dome, for example, I mean it’s totally fine to have the deesis as we experience it, to have Christ in the east as the one who returns and then have the unfolding of creation and the Bible stories and the saints on the sides. We have that, we also have that too. It’s the great deesis. When you’re standing in church and you’re looking and you have the great deesis, say if you have a very elaborate iconostasis, you’re staring at the same thing that a Western medieval Christian would have stared at in the 12th century. You have Christ in the center in glory and then you have this unfolding on the sides. So they would have seen that in the apse. So I think some of, most of the chapels here actually have Christ in glory in the apse, right. So these two ways are manifesting the same thing. They’re just, you can pull it up into a dome and then you have that fullness, but you can also bring it down in terms of its, you know, of that type of representation. And so here if you look at this image, it’s great. This is Josias Lucas and you can see the apse with the Mother of God and they put a dome above the apse. There’s a little dome above the apse and then there’s the, there are many domes in that church. Then there’s the giant dome which has Christ in glory and above the apse they have this little dome and what’s represented there? Can you see? Somebody guess what that is? Can you see well? Sorry? Yeah, but what’s going on? What’s coming down on their heads? How about if I say it that way? It’s Pentecost. All right, so it’s Pentecost. So, yeah, and so you have this, you really have this image of, so again, so why, why is St. Paul at Pentecost? St. Paul’s not at Pentecost in the story. He’s there because this is to show you how it works. It’s to bring you into the very manner in which the church exists and the very manner in which we participate in that. So we, that’s why in our icon of Pentecost we don’t have, we have St. Paul and St. Peter that are there to show us. So in this, this is a little different. Like in this version you have this idea of the fire of Pentecost coming down onto the church. So if you were there you would experience it. You have the dome of Pentecost and the coming down and then under the dome of Pentecost you have the Mother of God, which is there, stand in for all of us, stand in for, for, for Ecclesia and she is there under this whole thing of Pentecost. Now in our icon of Pentecost we have the other figure. Remember we have the Mother of God as the right hand figure in the sense of bringing everything together. But in our icon of Pentecost we have the left hand figure. We have the old figure of Cosmos in the dark. So now what we’re, the other image is showing us how Pentecost is this descending of the Holy Spirit into the communion of the saints. And this image is showing us how ultimately this goes out into the ends of the world. The early images of Pentecost actually had a crowd in the image. They had a crowd of foreigners. They had a bunch of people dressed in different garbs representing all the different peoples of the world. And so that’s, that’s St. Paul, right? St. Paul going all the way to the edge. So you can have, but it’s important to be able to distinguish between the two. It’s really important because some really creative iconographers sometimes, I’ve seen recently a very creative iconographer who put the Mother of God down there. It’s like are you putting the Mother of God in the dark outside on the edge of the world? I’m not sure about that. It’s very odd. She’s in the Holy of Holies. She’s not in the, she’s not outside. She is the very image of inside. We always say the Mother of God is the mystery of the church. Like we keep her to ourselves, you know. Alright. So a few more. Is anybody keeping time on me? Am I good? Alright, okay. Alright, so this is my last, this is my last image. Just to show you how all of this, all this can come together in different ways. It doesn’t always have to be exactly the same. It can, so here is, you could say how reality is manifested in the crucifixion. And to have the crucifixion as the image of everything, because it is also, the last judgment is already there in the crucifixion. That’s one of the reasons why we have the good thief and the bad thief. It’s to help you understand that in the crucifixion moment, everything was accomplished. Even the last judgment was already accomplished in that moment. Right? And so you have Christ above, you have this image of the crucifixion at the very top of this hierarchy of images. And now it’s almost, you have to kind of imagine as if in the crucifixion, all of this is happening. Like the image of the Anastasis, which we see underneath of Christ going down into death, that’s in the crucifixion image. You know when you see the blood of Christ going down and dripping on the skull of Adam? That’s just that, it’s like if you took that little part of the icon of the crucifixion, you unfolded it, what you get, you get the Anastasis. So it’s already packed in there. And we just open it up. And then again, the same, you have the icon of the last judgment, which is under the Anastasis and is contained also in the Anastasis. So you have Christ going down into death, getting Adam and Eve, and then in the image of the last judgment. They probably don’t have it in this one. Yeah, do they? Yeah, they do, they do. So he comes into death, he takes Adam and Eve, he brings them to the last judgment, and there they are in the last judgment. And they’re the stand-ins for us as well. So all of this is gathered, brought into the image of the cross. And so what I’m trying to help you to see is that when you have just the icon of Christ, if you have just the icon of Christ, or if you have just a crucifixion scene in front of you, all of it is unfolded into that image. Everything is folded in to those moments. We can unfold them, and then when we unfold them, we get this glorious, beautiful panoply of images that we fill our churches with. But if you’re at home and you are standing in front of the image of Christ in glory, all of it is folded into that image as well, just as all of reality is brought into the incarnation, brought into Christ. And so what I mostly wanted to help you do is just also to get a sense of excitement about iconography and understanding that the images we have, they’re not arbitrary. They’re not just a bunch of separate images, but rather the entire of iconography is really like a symphonic thing. All the images take their meaning from each other and reflect each other, and they come together in a kind of communion is the only way to say it. They all come together into a kind of communion to help us enter into the life of Christ, just as we do, hopefully, the same when we’re together, when we’re singing, when we’re worshiping, when we’re loving each other. All of this is this image of how all of creation is brought together and held in Christ. So hopefully that was helpful for you guys to get excited about iconography. And as you become priests in your parish, I encourage you to take it seriously and to take iconography seriously. So I’ll say thank you. And if anybody has any questions, I think we do have time for questions. Yes. All right. If anybody has any questions, go ahead. I was wondering maybe if you could elaborate on the ambiguity in these different aspects of symbolism, right? Because like the two pillars, they have a righteous type and an anti-type, right? The left and the right hand, the same thing. And so sometimes people who are not so schooled in semiotics, they make a very simplistic assessment of one symbolic element here. I mean, I was, you know, a good example of this is the eye. You all see. Yeah. You go into work. Like I was in the Holy Land. I’m at the Mount of Temptation. And there, you all see. I’m trying to explain to somebody who I’m with, well, no, it’s not Freemasons. So the first thing that we have to the first thing that we have to look at is that symbolism is not moral. That’s the only thing I can say is that the way in which reality exists is not a not moral in the way that we we tend to see moral in the sense of this is good. This is bad. This is good. This is bad. Like everything, everything in creation is is good if it’s in its proper place. You know, there’s nothing that is created which is evil in itself. And that is true of so much. And so the best thing that the devil can do is distort and twist things. But usually if you’re attentive, you can you can also flip it back and you can bring things back to how they should be. So the good best example is upside down cross with that. Is that satanic? Of course not. It’s the image of St. Peter. Right. But can it be satanic? Sure. It’s used in that context. It can be satanic. An actual cross can be satanic to people actually, you know, they’ll use or, you know, like, let’s say a pentagram is a pentagram satanic pentagrams not satanic. A pentagram is a five pointed geometric shape. Right. And so it can it can have it can be very, very powerful representation of how four things go into one. You know, you can imagine even Christ with the four glories as a kind of pentagram. He has four glories and then you have his head as the as the head of the four glories. Right. So it’s not there’s nothing wrong with with these signs. But but like I said, it doesn’t mean that they can’t be misused and that they can’t be distorted and that they can’t be used for evil purposes. Like, you know, just like language itself is the way that God created the world. But we can use language to hurt others and can learn, you know, we can use language to curse people. So so it’s the same. That’s to me, that’s always the way that I look at it. I always try to see like if I look at something, I always try to see it in four. I always try to see because usually. There are two two things that mirror that like mirror each other. I tried to see the positive aspect of one side, the negative aspect, the positive aspect of the other side and the negative aspect. And I really try to see it that way. And I think it’s it’s helpful because, you know, it’s like the left hand, for example, is usually sinister. It usually is is represented in terms of casting into hell. I mean, you see it in the last judgment. It’s casting into hell. But but then, I mean, OK, so why is St. Paul always on Christ’s left? You know, at some point, John the foreigner, like at some point you also have to be able to see that that if you if you ignore the positive aspect of it, then you’re actually going to miss an aspect of reality and you’re just it’s just going to be blindly in front of you. You won’t even be able to understand it. All right. And somebody else. Yeah. It was like you for a few years. I just want to say you’re even more fun in person. Thank you. Question from the beginning that there was the image of the church of the circumcised of the Gentiles. It seems to me that contemporary Orthodox who actually continue that pattern and you look at like the ethnic, what are the ways in which you know, if you’re Russian or Serbian or Greek, you can sort of your title of Orthodox. Yes. It seems to be a Gentile here because like myself brought in as a convert. I’m always wondering if there’s a way that that symbolizes you and see how that symbolizes your being a convert. Well, it’s that symbolism, like I said, because this is a symbol of reality. It’s not it’s not it’s an image of reality and all identities work that way. That is not just the church. Every identity has an inside and outside. That’s just when an identity is. And so in all identities have a inside and a margin, something which is not quite inside and not quite inside. And so we need to we just I mean, it can be used for good and can use for bad. It can be used to cohere. Right. So you have this sense that we have to we have to be able to cohere. But then we also have to be able to look towards the outside. So in our church, we have that we have our if you look at the liturgy and you look at the the architecture of the church, it’s a moving in which also respects or makes participate the outside too. So we have a narthex and in the narthex, you know, that’s where the catacombs go when they get chased. I mean, nobody does it anymore. But it’s like when the catacombs get chased, they go to the narthex and in the narthex, we can represent, you know, you see that in Greek churches until today. They’ll put Plato and Aristotle and all these characters, which are kind of like, well, are they inside or are they outside? They can’t be totally inside because I mean, you know, they’re pagans and all that. But they can’t be totally outside because then why do we use their language to talk about the mysteries of Christ? So we have to find a place for them. They’re they’re on the edge, you know. What is it Dante put them in limbo. So we put them in the narthex or in this like intermediary space. Right. And and so so I think that that can happen. Like you said, it can happen in terms of ethnic in terms of ethnic communities where, like you said, you have that opportunity, which is to have a group that you identify with, that you can celebrate the same story, the same history, the same, you know, hardships together. But then it can also be a problem when it becomes a shut door that prevents you from interacting with love towards your neighbor. Right. So it’s neither good nor bad. We just have to be it just depends on how it’s used. So, in a, in all, running. Merit appear hear how do the imagesization is a price here and drive for them to replace the young Shaffer? That was a very, very early 올 gearbox what about Trump derivative of broke away. record long energy of Zeus. It’s basically a figure with power and authority. Okay, so she asked about the fact that in the Deesis, or in our tradition now today, we represent Christ with the beard. And if you look at the older images, in Rome especially, you saw Christ as a young man, as a kind of young, kind of ideal Apollo figure. And so she asked, how does that change happen, or why did it happen? And does it have to do with Zeus? And what? And the powers? The certain power and authority that Zeus has, but not the power of the power of the certain figure. Okay, so the idea that Zeus as this authoritative figure and then those that are under him. So the tradition of representing Christ as with a beard, and also representing Christ without a beard, seems that very early, at first, I’m not sure if it had a specific meaning. I think that at first it seems to have been just, you know, like, okay, so we represent a figure, we don’t know what Christ looked like, let’s say, in Rome, and we want to represent him in a way that people understand what we’re talking about. So this is how we represent it in a kind of typological manner. But quickly it actually came, I think, to have meaning. If you go to Ravenna, there’s a church where on one side of the church it’s all images of Christ without a beard, and then on the other side of the church it’s all images of Christ with a beard. It’s like, that’s obviously not, like Justinian isn’t an idiot, like they didn’t do this just arbitrarily. This obviously has some kind of meaning. Okay, and so the way to understand it, I think, and what it’s come to mean in the Orthodox tradition, is that the beardless Christ, which we still have, it’s not true that we don’t have images of beardless Christ. We have the images of Christ Emmanuel. We have the infant Christ. And so, and then we have images of Christ with a beard as the adult represented as this kind of inglorious figure, even in, when you see in the images of his life, he’s dressed as a senator. Obviously, Christ was not dressed as a senator when he walked through Galilee, but we represent him that way in order to show us something about who he is. So I think that the way that it’s come to mean, this is really an interpretation, is that we show Christ implicit in terms of a child. So we show Christ the idea of the logos hidden in the world, or the logy that are hidden in creation. That’s why we show Christ born in a cave, all of this imagery of this hidden aspect of Christ. What is it? Logos permaticos, like St. Justin talks about, the idea of the logos hidden in creation. And then we have the logos which is fully revealed and fully manifested. So when we show Christ the way we do it with a beard, we’re showing the returning Christ. Even when we’re showing him in his life. So if we’re showing him at the wedding of Cana, we’re still showing him as the returning Christ in full glory. I don’t know if that makes sense. So as Christ is being, it’s the idea of the logos revealed and the logos hidden. Does that make sense? This way I can explain it. Yeah. The way that you’re speaking about this is that you’re all thinking that this is a stress, an inspection to the human being. And they’re very compelling as ideas. But I wonder, why is it important that, this is an interesting question, but why is it important that we represent these things in disciplines? We’re not just our picture. We’re just explaining things as abstractly. Why is it important that we’re seeing them as images? Yeah, so Benedict asked why, because we can express these things conceptually. We can explain them and talk about them with ideas. So why is it important that we represent them artistically? Why is it important that we have them as images? And I think that there are few answers. The best answer would be participation. That’s the best answer. The church is participative. The church is not just sitting and thinking about things. And so the image is something you have to, it has a place in the world. It’s taking up space and it’s reflecting light from the world. It’s participating in creation in a very bodily sense. So it engages us to participate. It engages us to actually engage with the face of this person. And it’s also because Christianity isn’t a story of ideas. Christianity is a story of incarnation. And so it’s not, so when I say let’s say that the left hand or right hand and all this stuff, St. Paul is manifesting that to us. He’s making it real in the world. And that’s what we have to do. We can’t just think about it. We have to incarnate the principles that ultimately originate in Christ. We have to manifest them in the world. So to me that’s what it is. It has to come down to us and we have to participate in it. Maybe I’ll ask a question. So going back to the right hand image, you said that St. Peter found his fervor right in his contrived excitement. Can you touch the viewpoint and mention it? St. Paul has a thorn. Yes, so my question is how is St. Paul’s what is his symptom interest? I later talked about that my suffering is completely what is lacking in the process. Well St. Paul has a thorn. So what is the so you have this, you go in the garden, let’s go back into the garden. So what’s the first sin? What kind of sin is it? It’s a sin of pride. It’s I am going to be God. And then what happens is they fall and then what do they encounter? Thorns. They encounter thorns. They encounter the hardships of the world. They encounter the passions. They encounter the multiplicity gone wild. Right? The demons, all the millions of demons that are pulling us in all these different directions. So St. Paul has a thorn. He’s using, if you read that text he’s actually using the image of creation. He’s actually bringing us back into the garden and he’s telling that story again and he’s telling us where his place is. He doesn’t tell us what the thorn is because it doesn’t matter what the thorn is. We all have the thorns like we can all know what it could be and we get a sense of what it could be and does it really matter. But I think that it’s showing us this. It’s showing us and so, okay, so let’s do it this way. Let’s do it this way in terms of the completing the sufferings of Christ. Okay, so the left hand is let’s say going away, moving out. So it’s, you can imagine it going out, down into fire, let’s say. You can also imagine it going up around into fire. So there’s a relationship between death and glory. There’s a relationship between that which moves out and what glory is. Like a crown is something which is added. Which is useless. Which is, it’s all these the crown actually has more left hand symbolism than anything because it’s this ornamental thing that you add on top that’s not part of the thing. Like let’s say you have a chair and you have the identity of the chair, right? It’s a chairness of the chair and then you have, you put a, paint a flower on it. What does that flower have to do with the chair? It has nothing to do with the chair. It has nothing to do with the chairness of the chair. You’re putting a flower on it to make it different from other chairs. So you can be different from other chairs in a bad sense. Like you can be different from others in a bad sense in the sense that you’re falling away. But you can also be different in a way that is higher and shows the glory of that chair. So if I want to make that chair special, then I make, put something on top of its identity in order to mark it as special. And that’s glory. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, it’s like a door to the province of scholarship. I hope I’m not losing anybody with that one. It’s like, it’s getting into me to hard, difficult things. Yeah. Two more. Okay, so yeah, you two. Okay, so go ahead. So, you have a kind of in church arts and then the art world outside. And the boundaries, like the dark ex or the border. In order to really kind of hone our vision to see, to practice looking, it seems as though we have to kind of cultivate the ability to notice these patterns in creation and then in the kind of the just outside the truth. So what would you recommend? Because we’re not all going to leave this room and be like, I see us in looking everywhere at this painting. So what would you recommend as Change of things if you know what to have in it. You can do what’s possible. Never mind. We all have. So what would you recommend as kind of further reading? To find, to read this in book. I don’t imagine that the unpacking, the meaning behind what it is is going to be helpful. But in art, outside of the search for art, in order to kind of strike a new muscle. I still think that the best way is to look in first and then look out. Like that’s the way I see it. If you understand Christianity, and if you dive into our own stories, if you dive into scripture and the relationship between scripture and icons and the relationship between that and the liturgy and the architecture, then that will give you the right eye to then look out. I think that’s the best way to do it. So I tell people, you know, I always point people to the same books of the fathers. These are the key, I’m telling you guys. So Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, that book has everything in it. If you’re attentive, you read just the second part. If you know the story of Moses, you don’t even have to read the first part. Read the second part. That book has everything in it. It’s one of the shining jewels of our tradition. San Ephraim the Syrian, Hymns of Paradise, that book has so much in it. You have to be careful because you can read through a paragraph and you’re like, no, no, no. Read every line in that paragraph. And every line I could unpack for hours. There’s this crazy place in San Ephraim’s poem where he says, he goes, talks about Paradise. Then he says, like Noah in the ark. Then he says, like the tabernacle, like Moses ascending the mountain. And he just goes, dun, dun, dun. He just names them one after the other. And if you’re attentive, it’s like your mind’s going to explode because he’s basically taking all scripture and he’s saying, you want to know what Paradise is? You want to understand it? Here, I’m going to tell you and I’m going to give you all the images in scripture that have the same pattern as the pattern of Paradise. And he just knocks them out in like one paragraph and you go crazy. So I think that St. Gregory of Nyssa, San Ephraim the Syrian, and I think St. Maximus in terms of the theory, in terms of understanding the manner in which the Logi come together and the manner in which that is also us coming together in love, how that all fits, becomes like a world view that you can live in. I think St. Maximus gives us the key to that. And so, and then after that, I mean, you know, I don’t know, there’s nothing better in the modern world. There are some symbolists that in the modern world, my brother wrote a book. He’s not orthodox, but he has a very, very sharp eye in terms of understanding the patterns in scripture. And there are a few people that have written. You can read Kabazila’s comment on the liturgy. You get, and it’s hard because the fathers also, they’ll do this in a way that isn’t, like they’ll talk about, they’ll give you like this amazing tidbit, but it’s not in a book about that. So it’s like you’re reading their thing and then it’s like, oh, it’s like this, and then they say something crazy like Samson, was it St. Irine of Lyon? He says something like, Samson is one of the figures in the Old Testament that is closest to Christ. You’re like, what? Did you just say that? And then it’s like, okay, okay, I have to unpack that because I trust you, so I’m going to have to unpack. How is it that Samson is one of the closest, like the closest to the incarnation is Samson, because you’d think, you wouldn’t think that, right? Anyway, but that’s harder because then it’s like as you’re reading the fathers, and as you’re reading sometimes in the services, you’re going through the service and all of a sudden some phrase, you know, some hymn just pops out and it’s as if it’s giving you the keys to reality, you know, especially in the especially during the whole pascal season during that time, like there’s some of those hymns that are just, they blow your mind. So, sorry, I can’t give you too much like that, but it’s all there. Alright, one last one. Yeah, so thank you for your presentation. One thing that I find interesting from the presentation is there’s so much cool stuff, and then like some of us are going back to parishes that are like dentist offices. There’s always this tension between you know what I mean though. I’m in one of those churches, so I sympathize with you. So there’s always this tension between like you know, when we were going and playing future churches, we’d be right out of space, or we’d go to the ground where we buy old glasses out first. Is there any way in which or you see that you can take Western structures or you know, just square boxes with you know, playing balls and sort of immerse them in these images, in these forms, without you know, just you know, destroying the entire journey. No, I think there is. I think we do what we can with what we have. I think that we have to, this is my advice to all of you as you become priests, the trick is to not pretend. That’s the trick. Seriously, don’t pretend. Don’t pretend that you have something you don’t. And I think that’s one of the problems with the culture of reproductions, is that it’s like we want to go into our church and have an entire iconographic program, and it’s like, so then we’re just going to buy all these prints and plaster them on the wall. It’s like okay, you know, it’s not, and I’m not saying it’s heretical, there’s nothing there’s nothing, there’s nothing ultimately wrong about it, but I think that there’s, there’s the approach is lacking. I think I would rather you have one beautiful icon of Christ and start there. Because it’s all in there anyways. It’s all in that icon. And so, you know, you if you have a building that doesn’t have a dome, I would suggest to explore the possibility of having Christ in the East. Rather than, you know, you go into a church that has a low ceiling, it’s like this little rental place, a ten foot ceiling, and they try to put like an image of the Pentecost or a like that doesn’t, you’re pretending, you’re not in Constantinople. It’s like, it’s not happening. And that’s okay. And that’s okay to not be in Constantinople. So I would say that. And so like, no, so that’s what I say, move slowly, get a few beautiful things, and you don’t have to fill the whole space. So I’d rather you have a, you know, I’d rather you have a few things and have spray painted gold, everything. Very much so. So that’s my suggestion. So everybody, thank you so much for your time and your attention.