by Krista West
The Garments of Salvation
Orthodox Christian Liturgical Vesture
Krista M. West
ST VLADIMIR’S SEMINARY PRESS
YONKERS, NEW YORK
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER 2013940518
Cover image: Portion of mosaic icon from the church of Sant’ Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna, Italy, circa 6th century. Photo property of the author.
All photographs and sketches are the property of the author, unless otherwise indicated.
Copyright © 2013 by Krista M. West
ST VLADIMIR’S SEMINARY PRESS
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To my own hundredfold: Alban, Josephine, Honoria, and Georgia
Acknowledgments
Writing a book is a long exercise in discovering how little you know and how dependent you are on the kindness of others. If one thinks he is an island, he has only to write a book to find otherwise. I would never have written this book if I had not been helped along the way by many kind and generous people. My thanks belong first to Fr Chad Hatfield, Dean of St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, who originally approached me about writing a book on vestments following my lectures at the seminary, and to his staff.
Once having begun this rather daunting task, Gretchen Brown’s expertise as a librarian and cheerful willingness to discuss the book was invaluable. The staff of the Multnomah County Library system consistently went above and beyond the call of duty, allowing extra lending time on certain books and even shipping reference books to my home so I could study them at length.
To my gracious and insightful proofreaders, Fr Zosimas of Xenophontos Monastery, Nektaria Blalock, Presvytera Dr Eugenia Constantinou, Rev. Dr Chrysostomos Nassis, Prof. Christos Karydis, and Gretchen Brown, I owe many thanks as the book was much stronger for their contributions. Translation work was an especially thorny problem for me as I do not have command of any scholarly languages, so I am grateful to Fr Kilian Sprecher, Rev. Dr Chrysostomos Nassis, Fr Patrick O’Grady, and Fr Alban West for their translations and comments on certain texts.
Dmitry Shkolnik generously advised me on iconography for the cover of the book. I thank Leslie Schaill for setting my feet on the path of ecclesiastical tailoring and for being such a demanding teacher. To my wonderful clients, I thank you for constantly challenging me to become better at my craft and to keep searching for the answers to your questions.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to His Grace, Bishop Anthony (Michaels), with whom I have shared many inspiring conversations over the years about the importance of vestments within the liturgical life of the Church. Dr Warren Woodfin kindly answered my most trivial emails and graciously shared his wide knowledge of the study of Byzantine vestments, Prof. Christos Karydis provided information on the conservation of Orthodox textiles, and Eleni Vlachopoulou provided helpful information about the history of liturgical embroidery as well as reviewed Chapter Four.
My dear friends Nektaria Blalock and Athanasius Blalock cheerfully and enthusiastically reviewed the text and prepared the manuscript. I am also grateful to those who showed me hospitality during my trip to Greece and Italy in September 2012 for research: Dimitris Bales, Gerontissa Theophano and her Sisterhood of the Panagia Odigitria Monastery in Portaria, Greece, the sisters of Holy Trinity (Agios Nektarios) Monastery in Aegina, Greece, the Giagmouris family, and the Nassis family.
For their ongoing encouragement, support, and prayers, I would like to thank Athanasius and Nektaria Blalock, Alexandra Obeid, Gerontissa Efpraxia and her Sisterhood of St John the Forerunner Greek Orthodox Monastery in Goldendale, Washington, Gerontissa Theophano and her Sisterhood of the Pana-gia Odigitria Monastery in Portaria, Greece, Mother Sergia and her Sisterhood of Presentation of the Virgin Mary Monastery in Marshfield, Missouri, the parishioners of St George Orthodox Church in Portland, Oregon, and my in-laws, Don and Karen West and Gregory and Melanie Nickel. I am especially indebted to the generosity of Karen West and Melanie Nickel who were always willing to help tend my home fires while I was writing. Their constant and unfailing support was an outpouring of their love for me and my children and I am deeply grateful for it. To my three beautiful daughters, Josephine, Honoria, and Georgia, my heart overflows with thankfulness for your ever-cheerful encouragements and your willingness to share your mother with others, even when it meant you had to give of yourselves.
But my deepest and most heartfelt thanks go to my dearest friend and beloved husband of twenty-five years, Fr Alban West, without whose steadfast encouragement, rigorous editing, and ever-willingness to discuss all-things-vestments this book would never have come to fruition.
Khouria Krista M. West
Foreword
Kh. Krista West’s book on the origins, history, and theological meaning of Liturgical vestments is both an intellectual and spiritual achievement covering many academic disciplines at once: it is engaging history that traces the civil lineaments of what finally became sacred vestments; it is systematic theology true to holy tradition, teaching you can touch; it is evangelical in that it proclaims the faith in fabrics; it is pastoral, showing how we as members of the clergy are chosen to “put on glorious apparel” as a reflection of Christ Who sits at the right hand of His Father.
She has structured the text of her book so that the theological outline for vestments in the first chapter permeates and legitimizes the other chapters, grounding her discussion of how clothing developed into garments exclusive to worship in a startlingly spiritual framework. So the reader gains a pious experience from reading these words. We can reverence the beauty of the aesthetics of liturgical clothing and ornamentation and realize, through that reverence, an ascetical dimension to the practice of our own faith. I thought that the external and sanctified clothing we put on our bodies must somehow co-ordinate with the inner man of the soul that St Paul talks about in his letters to the churches. The tempered passions of the soul match the luster of textiles. The luminous things I put on to serve the services are rays of the light that shine out from my heart. Kh. Krista writes: “some of the most ornate and elaborate vestments in use today can be seen in the churches of what is, paradoxically, one of the most austere settings in the world: the monasteries of the Holy Mountain. Such devotion to material beauty by those who have found their calling in a life of liturgy and prayer is surely a further witness to the understanding within Orthodox Christianity that physical matter is not only redeemed, but also has a vital role to play in the salvation of mankind.” Asceticism diminishes carnal needs to embellish heavenly goals. The material makes palpable the ethereal.
The craftsman who makes vestments is like the artist who writes or paints icons, as she lyrically describes here. The iconic nature of both tailor and painter displays the picture of His presence everywhere in the Church. After reading this book my perception of priestly ministry expanded. Kh. Krista helped me see offerings everywhere. Now I know that “prosphora,” the bringing out or bringing forth, is giving my gifts to Christ to use as He wants, and that “anaphora,” the lifting up of myself as an offering of my life to Life Himself, is an essentially priestly vocation that everyone has, since everyone is made in the Image and Likeness of God. All material things, once transformed into both functional use and sacramental meaning by us, have a transcendent destiny, liberating them through art and skill and training, from their earthly settings and giving them wings for an ascent to heavenly places.
Kh. Krista has been my teacher. It is an honor for me to introduce this essential book.
Rt Rev. Bishop ANTHONY (Michaels)
&
nbsp; Prologue
I began my career as an ecclesiastical tailor in the winter of 1995, two years after my conversion to the Orthodox Christian Church. I found it a vocation filled with much hard work, but much joy, as I began to understand and recreate the garments that had been part of the Church for almost two millennia. As time went on and I had a wider circle of clients, I found myself fielding all sorts of questions: Which color is the best for Lenten vestments? Where did the exorason come from? Sometimes I knew the answer, but more often than not I had no idea how to answer these inquiries. I began searching for books on Eastern Orthodox Christian vestments, but with the exception of one or two brief surveys, there did not seem to be much available in English on the subject. I cast my net a little wider and began reading anything I could find on vestment history, which led me to works focused almost exclusively on vestments of the Western tradition. Several of these volumes were written in the late nineteenth century by Victorian, self-styled scholars who, while offering panegyrics on the wonders of Western vestments, would also occasionally present a small, poorly researched chapter on Eastern vestments. I found in these works a prevailing presumption that Eastern Orthodox Christian vestments had their origin in Western vestments, when a basic survey of early Church history suggests that it had to be the other way round.
Being a bookworm from childhood, I found that this lack of information rather shook my sure and steady faith in the power of books. So, in desperation, I began at what I thought of as the beginning, searching out books on the garment history of the ancient world. It was here that I found many gems of knowledge, and these books began to inform my study of Orthodox liturgical garments. Before I knew it, I was traipsing through textbooks on natural dyes, travelogues from nineteenth-century Russia, and doctoral dissertations on the Byzantine silk industry. I traveled to Crete to participate in conservation work being done in a local monastery so that I could see very old vestments firsthand, something virtually impossible in America. One fascinating topic seemed to lead to another and I realized that I had the makings of a book on Eastern Orthodox vestments. But, despite my groaning bookshelf and sheaves of notes, I was hesitant to begin. After all, I am just a tailor, someone who spends her days measuring and cutting, buying buttons, and drafting patterns. I do not have any letters after my name and I certainly am not a scholar.
However, simultaneously with my historical research, I was becoming more and more aware of the spiritual significance of vesture. I began to recognize vestments as integral to Orthodox Christian praxis in the same way that an altar faces east or the Pantocrator icon is depicted in the main dome of a church, and integral to Orthodox Christian theological expression in the same way that the veneration of icons manifests our belief in the Incarnation. Vestments are not simply “pretty clothes,” they are absolutely essential to our celebration of the Divine Liturgy, one of the ultimate expressions of material theology in the Orthodox Church. On a personal level, my tailoring work was slowly changing my life, bringing me peace of mind and a delight in work that I had never imagined possible. There was something in this work that was beyond my own hands and it compelled and intrigued me.
These two parallel tracks merged into a single road when I met the twentieth-century iconographer, chanter, and Byzantine artistic theorist par excellence, Mr Photios Kontoglou. Somewhere between the Victorian vestment writers and the Russian travelogue, I discovered a wonderful little volume of Kontoglou’s writings, Byzantine Sacred Art, edited by Dr Constantine Cavarnos. With the first paragraph I knew I had found truth:
Byzantine art is for me the art of arts. I believe in it as I believe in religion. Only this art nourishes my soul, through its deep and mysterious powers; it alone quenches the thirst that I feel in the midst of the arid desert that surrounds us. In comparison with Byzantine art, all the others appear to me trivial, “troubling themselves about many things, when but one thing is needed.”1
Reading through Kontoglou’s writings was sheer joy. Here I found deep resonance with my own experience of this work—that somehow, these physical things, crafted to ornament and beautify the Church, are vitally important and are, in fact, necessary for our full experience of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. I found Kontoglou’s bold statements particularly refreshing since they are diametrically opposed to the assumption I had encountered all too often that vestments are a sort of liturgical afterthought or an unimportant detail that might be casually modified or updated. My heart cried “amen” as I read:
Let those who want innovations and who seek secular delight from the Liturgy note what I have just said. They are wrong in thinking that the form of a church and its vessels, the character of its psalmody, its iconography, and the vestments of the priests have only a “nonessential” significance. These things cannot be changed to accord with the conceptions of churchgoers who take as a standard for them the secular spirit of each epoch. They have this idea because—I repeat it—they regard these things as conventional human creations, not as permanent, eternal, and true expressions of the one and only spirit of the Orthodox faith. For them the form of the holy icons, the character of church psalmody, the architectural form of the church, and so on are simply “aesthetic” inventions of the men who created them out of their sensibility and imagination. They do not know that these are truly works of the Divine Spirit, made with the hands and the sanctified minds of the faithful, truly spotless archetypes by means of which the divine essence of the Christian religion becomes apparent and palpable to the senses. . . . They are sentimentalists who want “aesthetic”, secular, superficial experiences, and who do not distinguish the holy from the secular, contrition from aesthetic experience. For them singing and psalmodizing, painting and iconography, literature and hymnography, the theater and the church are one and the same thing.2
I began to fear that if we did not endeavor to comprehend the spiritual significance of our vestments, the Orthodox Christian Church could be subjected to a simplification or, worse yet, a rejection of tradition similar to that experienced in the Western communions. Prior to the mid-twentieth century, beautiful vestments were still in use in many Western communities. Fine Italian and English brocades, exquisite embroidery, velvet work: all were considered appropriate and even necessary to the celebration of the Eucharist. However, in the late 1960s Western vestments began to be simplified, which turned out to be quite a slippery slope given that today—not two generations since—the plain, novel or costume-like vestments used in many Western communities could scarcely be recognized as cousins of the wondrous vestments of previous ages.
Having been privileged and blessed to participate in the beautiful, glorious, and heavenly vestment tradition of the Orthodox Christian Church, I felt I had to defend this tradition to the best of my ability. Kontoglou’s writings were my clarion call, my reminder that the brocades and silks under my scissors were going on to a life of mystic significance and that anything I could do to further an understanding of their importance was a worthwhile endeavor, despite my own personal shortcomings. After all, it was Kontoglou’s own completion of over 5,000 square meters of iconography that had informed his insights into Byzantine art. Inspired by his example, I began to understand that the greatest disadvantage I had in writing a book on vestments, that I am no scholar but a mere tailor, might be the very thing to give at least a small measure of veracity and insight into the world of Orthodox Christian vesture. So I humbly present this volume in the hopes of making better known the sublime beauty of our hieratic vestment tradition.
Thank you, Mr Kontoglou.
Khouria Krista West
Portland, Oregon
2013
Notes
1 Constantine Cavarnos, Byzantine Sacred Art (Boston, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1985), 17.
2 Cavarnos, Byzantine Sacred Art, 126.
CHAPTER ONE
Longing for Paradise
Liturgy consists of the various means whereby the church makes it possible for th
e faithful to experience through their senses the mysteries of religion, that is, the sweetness of the kingdom of God. These means are material: the church building, the vessels, hymnody, psalmody, iconography, the vestments of the priests, and so on. All these things have gradually taken a holy form, on which has been stamped the mystical seal of the Spirit. In other words, they are not works of chance human preference but of mystical activity.
Photios Kontoglou, Byzantine Sacred Art1
Heavenly Beauty and the Soul
When we enter an Orthodox Christian church, we are entering into the Kingdom of Heaven. To the modern mind this statement might seem a somewhat quaint and naive construct fashioned to provide a sort of spiritual, theatrical backdrop to worship, but the theology of the Orthodox Christian Church makes quite clear that the physical church is really and truly a manifestation of the Kingdom of Heaven and, as such, serves as the intersection between this present, earthly life and the heavenly life to come. Orthodox Christian tradition maintains that the very angels of God surround the altar and fill the church continually and that when we come to celebrate the Divine Liturgy we are not creating something of our own but are entering into a celebration that is already well under way. This conviction that the church building is a true outpost of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth forms the basis for our understanding that vestments, as well as other adornments, serve a divine and holy purpose. They do not exist simply to look pretty or to dress up an otherwise bare church interior, but are in actuality a manifestation of the beauty and glory present in the eternal Kingdom. They are not there simply to remind us of Heaven or, in a more modern construct, to represent Heaven; they are there to participate in the reality of Heaven on earth. As one writer has explained, “The cosmic matter of the sacraments [is] not accidental. The simplest things conform to a very precise destiny. Everything is an image, a likeness, a participation in the economy of salvation; everything is a hymn, a doxology.”2
