Mani

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  “Lack of statesmen,” the former speaker interjected with melancholy triumph. Another said, still more dejectedly, that no country ever relinquished territory they held, whether rightly or wrongly, without dan-doon—he mimicked the sound of gunfire and the usual gesture of trigger-pulling.

  “You’re wrong,” said the Venizelist, “England has—the Ionian islands—because they are a logical and a just race, and because they knew who their real friends were better than they seem to—forgive me, Michali!—to-day. It did as much as Byron and the Philhellenes in the ’twenty-one war, as much as Navarino and Canning and alliance in the two great wars and Churchill, to strengthen Greece’s friendship for England. But, as I said, Churchill is old, Venizelos is dead, and I am afraid. Unless a great man appears, it will all slip into the hands of newspapers and priests and party politicians and of second-rate men in England, and finally, of soldiers, and then...” his shoulders went up, “you might even get Greeks and English shooting at each other.” A universal cry, surprised and indignant, of “Never!” went up.

  “Listen,” he went on, “I’m only an old man and a villager, and I can only read and write with difficulty, but I’ve lived a long time and I have heard a lot of talk and I’ve seen much...pollá...pollá.... Countries are only great if they can produce wise men, and if they have the sense to elect them. Otherwise the individuals, however good and brave and sensible they are, are like noughts, vast quantities of hollow, round valueless noughts. Place a statesman at their head, and it is like the digit in a written figure, it gives value to all the noughts, turns them into the sum of eight million in the case of Greece, and—forty-five?—thank you—in the case of England. Take away the digit, and the noughts are noughts again, and they can be blown away or dispersed by any chance wind. Venizelos was one of these digits, Churchill was another.” The air seemed to be afloat with purposeless bubbles.

  “If you go on like that,” one of the others said, “we shall all be in tears, and we’ve heard enough about old Venizelos, the horn-wearer, for one day. After all, I could go on about Papagos till to-morrow. With two races who are as old and trusted friends as the Greeks and the English, everything’s bound to work out for the best. Give Ioanna and Michali and Vasilio a drink, otherwise the wine will turn sour with standing so long!”

  When we set off at last they called after us. “Why go on to the Outer Mani? They’re a useless lot, not worth a five-drachma piece. You’ll see. Come back here afterwards, if you must go, and help us pass the time. What’s the hurry? You can have five chairs apiece, like Gladstone....”

  [1] This conversation took place in happier days, before the Turkish complication had appeared on the scene. The conviction that its emergence was fostered by Great Britain to bring in outside support to an otherwise untenable case has done more than anything else to embitter the problem in Greece.

  15. IKONS

  WE HALTED on the way out of the village to look into a small church. It was built of massive stone slabs, an empty oblong with a battered wooden iconostasis, pervaded by an atmosphere of dereliction and dust. The walls were covered with extraordinary frescoes.

  Very often, wandering in the wilder parts of Greece, the traveller is astonished in semi-abandoned chapels where the liturgy is perhaps only sung on the yearly feast of the eponymous saint, by the beauty of the colouring of the wall-paintings and the subtlety with which the painter has availed himself of the sparse elbow-room for private inspiration that the formulae of Byzantine iconography allow him: a convention so strict that it was finally codified by a sixteenth-century painter-monk called Dionysios of Phourna. He formalized the tradition of centuries into an iconographic dogma and deviation became, as it were, tantamount to schism. He it was who made the army of saints and martyrs and prophets identifiable at once by certain unvarying indices—the cut and growth of saints’ beards, their fall in waves or ringlets, their smooth flow or their shagginess, their bifurcation or their parting into two or three or five. He regulated—it was more the ratification of old custom than the launching of new fiats—the wings that anomalously spring from the shoulder blades of St. John Prodromos, and placed his head on a charger in his hands as well as on his neck.[1] He stipulated the angle at which a timely sapling, springing from the ground, should redeem the nakedness of St. Onouphrios from scandal and ordained that Jonah should be seated sadly beneath a gourd hanging from the trellis he built outside the walls of Nineveh, holding a scroll inscribed with the words: “Lelypemai epi ti kolokynthi sphodra eos thanatou”—“I have had pity on the gourd, even unto death.”

  Above their regulation beards and their ineluctable attributes, the saints gaze from the iconostasis and the walls of the narthex and the katholikon with a strange, blank, wide-eyed fixity, and behind their hoary and venerable heads, the golden haloes succeed each other in vistas of gleaming horseshoes or, when a saintly host is assembled in close array, in a shining interlock of glory like the overlapping scales of a vast goldfish. Barely sheltered from snow and rain by a loggia on the outer walls of remote fanes, the weatherworn lineaments of the pagan sages of the Greek world can be discerned: Solon, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Thucydides, Sophocles and Apollonius of Tyana,[2] arrayed in robes as honourable as those that adorn the Christian saints, but bereft of haloes. Their presence, due to passages in their writings interpreted as prophecy or ratification of the incarnation of Christ, seems to announce the age-old truth that the Greek Orthodox Church glorifies not only the Christian miracle as revealed to the Evangelists but the continuity and indestructibility of Hellenism and the part played in Christianity by the thought and discipline of the pagan Greek philosophers. Where but in the ancient schools (these figures imply), were developed the intellectual thews which enabled the great Doctors to hammer the raw material of the Gospels into the intricate and indestructible apparatus of Christian dogma? Without the dialectical and philosophic skill of these rain-swept sages, who would have heard of the Three Hierarchs indoors, so splendidly robed and haloed, polished by the kisses and dark with the incense of fifteen centuries: SS. John Chrysostom, Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa? Or of SS. Gregory Nazianzen or Athanasius? Or, for that matter, of the only great early doctor of the plodding and barbarous west, St. Augustine of Hippo?[3] Without our help (the honoured exiles seem to say) who would have unravelled the perplexing skein of the Trinity or confuted the subtle-tongued heresiarchs or championed the Homoousion and the Double Nature?

  The Greeks do well to honour these ancient mentors. They enabled their descendants to save the Divine message from the mumblings of the catacombs and to sort out the Semitic data; in cell and archbishopric and council, they attuned their skilful minds to detect, interpret and codify the promptings of the Holy Ghost. The evolution of Christianity into a logical system which could weather the shocks of millennia, was a Greek thing. The Christian Church was the last great creative achievement of classical Greek culture. For extent and influence in the world the dual message of Greek philosophy and the Greek interpretation of the Christian revelation stands alone.

  Scenes of carnage often cover the walls of churches from vaulting to flagstone. Beheadings, flayings, burnings, roastings, boilings, rendings, crushings, breakings, impalings, mutilations, hecatombs, dismemberments by bent trees and by galloping horses redden the mural cartouches with blood and flame. But something serene and formal in the treatment of these orgies of martyrdom, a mild and benevolent composure in the faces of both executioner and victim and even on the haloed faces of the decapitated martyrs, robs their impact of anguish and horror. These emblematic ordeals have the punctilio of a dance commemorating early heroism in the cause of the faith. They do not demand that we should participate vicariously in their torments. In fact, so identically non-committal are the persecutors and their prey that, if any such advocacy were at work, the wicked, as the artisans of beatitude, seem to solicit our approval with an equal claim. The swords and pincers they wield are the keys of paradise. Passion is far removed and th
e figures are, in fact, not figures at all in the ordinary sense, but symbols. The same absence of the argumentum ad hominem is discernible in the iconographic approach to Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin, especially in the treatment of the Nativity and the Passion. There is never a blush or a simper, the infant Jesus is never a dimpled bambino. The Byzantine interpretation of the sufferings of Our Lord does not seek our participation in His physical torments or ask us, as do religious artists in the West, to undergo the Passion by proxy. The tears of the Mater Dolorosa and the Ecce Homo are almost absent.

  Post-primitive religious painting in the West is based on horror, physical charm, infant-worship and easy weeping. This, with the modified exception of some Macedonian painting, is practically unknown in the East. The Virgin Mary, who is significantly known to Orthodoxy as the All-Holy One, has the austere aloofness of an oriental empress; she is calm, unreal, hieratic, wide- and dry-eyed. The Holy Child is abstract and unearthly and his glance is the wise one of an adult; and, with few exceptions, Christ Crucified, in spite of the emaciation which was the immutable token of holiness, has the same unworldliness. Eastern hagiography is no less bloodthirsty than the Western—indeed, until the Middle Ages, they were nearly the same—but the crucifix is a much rarer adjunct to Orthodox worship and the infliction of the stigmata on privileged saints is unknown.

  Our Lord is usually represented enthroned in splendour, gravely and triumphantly presiding over mankind, His left hand raised, thumb and fourth finger touching in benediction, enjoining—what? Nothing so simple as good conduct for fear of Hell fire. The need perhaps of learning to penetrate symbols. The emphasis of the Christian year falls on the Easter victory: Christ risen from the dead, Christ as God and the All Powerful Christ Pantocrator, undemonstrative, impersonal and divine. He soars overhead in the centre of the dome in a golden sky as transcendent as the regions of abstract thought. Aloof and august, He floats in an atmosphere which is still and spellbound and if a presiding mood can be identified, it is one of faint, indefinable and glorious melancholy, like the thought of space. Ikons are wholly, like the paintings of Piero della Francesca in the pages of Mr. Berenson, unemphatic. All trace of apostrophe is lacking; there is no attempt to buttonhole the observer. Western Christs expose their wounds; Eastern Christs sit enthroned in ungesticulating splendour.

  The Western medieval Madonna is a gentle and beautiful mediatrix, a celestial Philippa of Hainault, and we are the bur-ghers of Calais with ropes round our necks for whom she will intercede. When the Italian version of disinterred paganism had set new pulses beating, her statues, like Venus addressing a reluctant Adonis, seem almost to woo her devotees. At its worst there is the hint of an ogle, a veiled appeal for fans. In the West, iconographically, Our Lord and Our Lady and the Army of Saints, whether they are exquisite idealizations or smirking and blubbering simulacra, are, each of them, one of us. Their Eastern effigies—which, during all these mutations, scarcely changed in thirteen centuries—are emphatically different. The expression of the Panayia, even at the foot of the Cross, says “No Comment.” If an expression can be detected in the raised arcs of eyebrow and the wide eyes enigmatically gazing through the kisses and the incense and the candle flames, it is, most strangely, a faintly quizzical and ironical one. “Do not worship me,” perhaps, “but what I represent.”

  The unexclamatory message of these paint and mosaic figures is neither sensual nor emotional. It is a spiritual and an intellectual one. They are not, in the ordinary sense, figures at all; they are symbols of the abstract idea of God which offer different facets of the Divine principle. If the right formulae existed, the message might have been conveyed by elaborate geometrical figures or intricately decorative algebraic equations. They are, in fact, ideograms. So slender is their link with flesh and blood, that it is almost an accident that the notation happens to be, in its very rarified way, anthropomorphic. They are, one might say, gilded and illuminated cube roots of the Logos.

  There were plenty of ascetic solitaries in the early days of the Eastern Church: the Thebaid and all the Levant were scattered with them, stylites dreamed their lives away on the summit of columns, dendrites chained themselves to the topmost branches of high trees. Speluncar Christianity throve and hermits meditated in many a cave. The mysticism of East and West may be said to have sprung from Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (and thus from Proclus), but the interpretation was very different. The macerations, austerities, meditations and penances of these lonely figures are closer to the general mystic temper of the Orient than they are to the mystics of the West. They were part of a Christianized tributary of the general Asiatic stream of mysticism that branched out at different times into the Kabeiri and the initiate religions of Pagan Greece, the Gnostics, the Neoplatonists, the Essenes, Yogis, Sufis and the various Dervish sects. They immersed themselves in the abstraction of divine omnipresence and I feel that a Byzantine mystic would have been closer in spirit to the meditations of Jellaladin on the astrolabe of God’s mysteries—he, indeed, inherited much from Greek thought—than to the ecstasies of, say, Marie de l’Incarnation or Saint Teresa of Avila or St. John of the Cross. In the latter case, again, the approach was personal and immediate, involving not only metaphysics but the passions: a private or reciprocal relationship between the Divinity and one human being; and, parallel in this to the iconography of the West, the terminology is startlingly anthropomorphic and literal. The solitary quest for union with God is expressed, for lack of a fitting vocabulary, in the specific language of love. Hesychasm, the Strange Quietism of late Byzantium which flourished in the monasteries of Athos, was the last mystical movement of Greek Orthodoxy. That discipline of slow breathing, attuned to the endless lamaic repetition of a single prayer, the silent posture and the searching gaze irremovably focused on the navel until, in a trance, the inner light of Mount Tabor should begin to glow there—this is more in harmony with the East than with the West. Fiercer enemies than the hostile Greek monks of Calabria lay in wait for such strange twilight flowerings of Byzantine mysticism.... The crescent hoisted on the dome of Justinian in Constantinople changed and circumscribed the rôle of the Greek Church for ever. The stem that put forth such extravagant blooms soon withered away. The cloud of Orthodox mystical feeling drifted to Russia; in that snowy world, its fusion with the Slav temperament threw off many curious spiritual phenomena, not least of them Dostoievsky. The Philokalia, the beautiful and simple meditations of the hesychasts, was, until the Revolution, far more widely read in Russia than it is in Greece to-day.

  Byzantium fell, and the tears on ikons of the All-Holy One were not, to the awestruck Romaic world, the tears of the Mater Dolorosa for her Son, but the tears of a celestial Empress (and, beyond question, a Greek one) bewailing the death of the last terrestrial Emperor of the Greeks and the desecration by infidels of Orthodoxy’s central shrine. They were shed for the dispersal of her clergy and the falling silent of her bells and gongs; for the sprouting of minarets and the insult of the first muezzin’s call. The Pantocrator retreated more inaccessibly into his golden zenith.

  Perhaps it would have been better for Orthodoxy in the end, whatever the aesthetic loss, if the symbolism of religious painting and the arcane splendour of the liturgy had been less lofty and abstruse. For the clergy’s task, in the ensuing Dark Ages (whose beginning exactly coincided with the Renaissance in the West and only ended in the Industrial Revolution), was the actual physical survival of their flock: its spiritual welfare was left to bare forms of sacrament and liturgy. Scholarship died. Spiritual development fossilized. Falling static at the time of the catastrophe, Orthodoxy became the most conservative of religions. All but rudimentary teaching vanished. But the forms became more august and venerable, more apt an emblem of lost glory and more hermetic a token of national continuity the further they floated from everyday understanding. In this new function the Church grew in power and became steadily more beloved and revered; the less religion functioned as a vehicle of the Christian ethic, the mor
e holy it grew as the sole guarantee of survival. “Christian” and “Orthodox” became negative words and lost their meaning as moral or doctrinal terms; the former came to signify little more than non-Moslem, the latter—with “Romios” the paradoxical antonym of “Latin,” the epithet of the hated Catholics of the West who, with the Crusades, were the first to destroy the Orthodox Empire and make straight the way for Islam—meant, precisely, Greek.

  Long gone were the days when the subtle Eastern theologians could with difficulty make the blunt Western prelates grasp the delicate shades of dogma; indeed the shoe was on the other foot. But the outward observances, the liturgy, some of the sacraments, prostrations, rigorous fasts, frequent signs of the cross, the great feasts of the Church—the cross thrown into the sea at Epiphany, the green branches of Palm Sunday, the candles and coloured eggs celebrating the risen Christ at Easter, the monthly censing of houses, and the devotion to ikons before which an oil-dip twinkles in every house—all this became rigid and talismanic: and so it has remained. Its scope is different from what is usually conjured up in the West by the word “Christianity”; but there is a tendency in the most peaceful nations to identify religion with the tribe and the reasons in Greece are more cogent than most. All the outward and visible signs are there and it would be a bold critic who would unburden them completely of inward and spiritual grace. There is nothing laggard or perfunctory about these signs; they are performed with reverence and love. They have the familiarity and the treasured intimacy of family passwords and countersigns. The day is punctuated by these fleeting mementoes, and pious landmarks in the calendar, usually solemnized with dance and rejoicing, space out the year; with the result that few gestures are wholly secular. They weave a continuous thread of the spiritual and supernatural through the quotidian homespun and ennoble the whole of life with a hieratic dignity. There is a deep substratum of virtue and innocence in the Greek character which is very distinct, and much more positive a thing than the universal truism of peasant simplicity—compared to this general norm they are old in guile and sophistication. It is a trait which has weathered barbarian influx and foreign dominion. It may be a survival of ancient Greek areté and love of excellence, the survival of Christian teaching in the past or a by-product of the ecological influences of the Greek sea and mountains and light. The sky here exorcizes and abolishes the principle of intrinsic wickedness. Perhaps it is a triune conjunction of all three. The chief of the cardinal virtues, charity (when it is not obscured by the hot fumes of individual, family, party or national feud-spirit), they possess in an overwhelming degree.