Faith, Iconography and Power or Decay and Glory

 

Maybe I should have just taught some art that relates to Halloween today. I don’t know, I don’t think I taught  very well today, and that bothers me, but it is always a, shall we say, delicate balance to figure out how to teach well, pedagogically, content-wise, at the beginning of the week, all filtered through our own personal neuroses and miasmas. Good, Heavens!  Indeed, maybe that ghoulish painting on the bottom, a 1973 work by contemporary Austro-Canadian Otto Rapp, entitled, The Deterioration of Mind Over Matter would have been more successful.

The work on the top, a 6^th century very precious and rare icon of the enthroned Virgin Mary, was at the centerpiece of today’s art history lecture. Okay, sure, which one of these art works would probably have generated more heat and action in the classroom??!!! But, in a survey as expansive and rushed as the AP Art History curriculum, we really don’t have time to stop and just “have fun” like with the diabolical, surreal Rapp piece. And that icon is from the coolest monastery in the world—St. Catherine’s at the base of Mount Sinai, in Egypt…yes, I have been there!

So, why didn’t it go well today? A parade of Byzantine icons is always a difficult “sell” to any audience, yeah sure, but there is an exciting urgency to this week. This week I call “Our Encounters with the Divine” week and in this four-day week (one day is given over to a school-wide PSAT test, yeah, great)  we careen through the visual imagery of Byzantine Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. I try and frame the art as a way to reveal the beliefs and practices of each faith, also hoping the quick-connect-the-dots students will see universalities among and between these major world faiths. But today I saw more yawns and anxious looks at the clock (hey, it was right before lunch!) than in a month of Sundays (slight religious pun intended!). So I thought it might be fun to write a blog entry about a tough day in class and a day that did not engage as well as I had hoped.

Gee, writing about a bum day in class…sounds like interesting reading, huh??!!

But actually, this period of art is fascinating, and I wanted to reclaim it for myself tonight, so read on dear reader! Byzantine art has been described by one of my textbooks as “about paradise—meaning it is everywhere and nowhere.” That alone is a fascinating assessment. If you check out one of the study guides for AP Art History they reduce almost two millennia of these images as simply, The Four F’s: flat, frontal, formal and floating. Okaaaaaaayy…well, that works as a mnemonic device in discerning a Byzantine work with a cool  little F trick, but oh, there is more beneath the surface!  Like really all religious art, these images are meant to serve as a refuge from the real world. Increasingly in this historical time (which would be from about 550 and for the next thousand years, but even continuing in many contemporary Orthodox churches) there would be no art images in their real world, and one would visit a church as a refuge and solace from that everyday world. You step inside one of these churches, and the gold backgrounds and the jeweled colors and the images of an all-mighty Divine One would envelop and embrace and stun you.  But beside the image as refuge, one can’t escape how the works are not made in a vacuum—they are against the landscape of the tumult of real history. That dichotomy ought to set your pulse racing!

From Crete to Moscow to Constantinople to Cairo, these icons faithfully represented the same reality. This reality was not depicted by the image but contained by it: icons held the “presence” of Christ or the Virgin or the saints, as if in a kind of limbo, waiting to be activated by the fervor of the faithful. That is why they are difficult for us…if they seem “boring” it is because we have not stepped into its world of infinite reflections and crossed that threshold into what you fervently long to get, that glory beyond the glory that you see. You can see how easy it is for our 21^st century eyes to resist such a vision.

Let’s add on top of this the “tumult of real history” I tempted you with earlier! In 726 Byzantine Emperor Leo III felt the tremors not too far south of his capital in Constantinople the incursions of a new faith, Islam. As I mentioned in class that this is one of the first instances of a Christian reacting to the rising surge of Islam, I fumbled to find the right verb, and Rami, a student far more engaged today than maybe I deserved, Rami said, “This is when Christianity and Islam first collided.” Great verb Rami!

I noted that Leo worried that Islam, with its rather daring ban on representations of human form, decided that the faithful in his empire should therefore destroy the icons like that one from Sinai above! Some obeyed and some did not. Ohhh, it gets rather interesting and kind of class warfare like: the rich defend the precious, expensive icons, and the poor have at it and destroy away! For 150 years there is this debate over icons, their use, their veracity, their idol-like control, and that is why the icon above from St. Catherine’s is so precious since very few survive from this time. We have a Christian icon, a source of refuge, that is very much caught between the storm of Christianity and Islam. Wow! And still I managed to be on the dull side today!

Yes, I suppose the ghastly Rapp painting would have been more fun today, and it also stands for some of the same feelings of iconography and power, but I like the little lesson on icons as well. Faith—and its ability to inspire the most soaring of visions, the most rarified of craftsmanship, as well as the most zealous attacks on non-believers, is the underpinning of this week’s exploration. The icons tax our 21^st century attention spans, but they also allow for a peek at the tumult of history and the way it can lead to an astonishing cross-pollination.

On Friday night, the night our school celebrated Halloween, I was on my way to the school’s Haunted House. A student, a captivating, compelling, quixotic young man came to my door, and wanted to talk about good and evil in the world. Great. One trip would have been easy (um, to the Haunted House) and one taxed my mind as he explored whether or not history has been inevitable about evil…oh, my, nothing really weighty is ever easy, and so I think about today’s class, look at how it is a difficult lesson, and kind of chuckle as I ponder Ralph Waldo Emerson’s semi-Halloween saying, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”  Let’s just leave it at faith and glory.