by Krista West
On account of these detailed passages, some authors have argued that Christian vestments have their origin in Levitical dress, but even the most desultory comparison of the garments clearly illustrate that this could not be so (see Chapter Two for more on this topic). But just as the study of Orthodox Christian theology reveals much about the qualities of beauty within the Church, so it is through a reading of these chapters in Exodus that yet another quality of beauty within the Church is revealed: the fulfillment of types. This fulfillment is found in the progression from the Levitical understanding of worship, as outlined in the Old Testament, to the Christ-centered understanding of liturgy as found in the New Testament and the unwritten tradition handed down by the early Church—a rapidly coalescing tradition which led to the standardization of vestments and other adornments of the Church in the first few centuries following Christ’s earthly life.
St John of Damascus, writing in response to the iconoclasts who were arguing for a rejection of images based on Old Testament passages such as “You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath” (Ex 20.4), states:
It is not I who am speaking, but the Holy Spirit who declares plainly through the holy apostle Paul, “God spoke of old in many various ways to our fathers by the prophets.” Note that God spoke in many and various ways. A skillful doctor does not prescribe the same for all alike, but each according to his need. . . . In the same way the most excellent physician of souls prescribed correctly for those who were still children and susceptible to the sickness of idolatry, holding idols to be gods, and worshipping them as such, abandoning the worship of God, offering to the creature the glory due the Creator.16
He goes on to further explain this fulfillment of types by quoting from a sermon of St John Chrysostom on the Epistle to the Hebrews:
How can what comes first be the image of what is to follow, as Melchizedek is of Christ? Melchizedek is used as an image in the Scriptures in the same way as a silhouette is an outline for a portrait. Because of this, the law is called a shadow, and grace and truth are what is foreshadowed. Consequently, the law personified by Melchizedek is a silhouette of Him whose portrait, when it appears, is grace and truth inscribed in the body. So the Old Testament is a silhouette of things to come in a future age, while the New Testament is the portrait of those things.17
St John recognized that just as a tiny seed looks nothing like the blooming, flourishing plant, so it is necessary to be mindful that Orthodox Christian worship is not designed to look like Old Testament worship. The fulfillment of the beauty and liturgy of the Church, like the fulfillment of the salvation of mankind, comes in no less a person than Christ himself through his Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. The instructions in Exodus lay the groundwork, teaching that adornment of the holy things of God is integral to our worship of Him. But just as Christ took the place of rams sacrificed on stone altars, the adornment of our churches took a new and holy form through Christ’s Resurrection, molded by the time and place in history in which the Resurrection took place and by the subsequent establishment of a Christian nation in the Byzantine Empire.
We know that the Fathers of the Church had a deep and thorough knowledge of the Scriptures (after all, St John Chrysostom spent two years memorizing the Scriptures in their entirety) and such an education could not have left them puzzling over how to outfit the churches of their day. Add to this the unwritten tradition which they had inherited and it would be completely illogical to suppose that men so formed by these Scriptures and providentially shaped by a world in which honor and majesty were the cornerstone of political and social hierarchy would have been able to construct liturgies to the Creator of All without glory and beauty. “Bring to the Lord the glory due His name; worship the Lord in His holy court” (Ps 28.2). They knew that “holiness is proper to Your house, O Lord” (Ps 92.5) and that “they shall speak of the magnificence of the glory of Your holiness, and they shall describe Your wonders” (Ps 144.5).
While Exodus teaches that order and reverence are necessary components to the worship of God, the Church Fathers knew that any reading of the Old Testament Scriptures must be undertaken with an understanding that such Scriptures have their fulfillment in the coming of Christ and the traditions of the Church. Majestic and holy worship began with the Old Testament Levitical patterns but did not find its culmination until the Resurrection of Christ and the subsequent redemption of the world. With Christ’s coming everything is raised to a higher order, so the Church’s worship follows the same essential patterns, yet looks different. As adopted sons of God, we are the inheritors of this holy fulfillment. As the Psalmist prophesies:
They shall be intoxicated with the fatness of Your house, and You will give them drink from the abundant water of Your delight. For with You is the fountain of life; in Your light shall we see light. (Ps 35.9–10)
In the beauty of the Church’s worship we find the fulfillment of the prophetic words and foreshadowing of all the Old Testament Scriptures.
Manifesting the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth: A Call to Beauty
Once we understand that the beauty of the material church temple is integral to the theology of the Church, the adorning of the earthly temple is no longer seen as a “fussy” or “luxurious” pursuit, but becomes a holy and worthy endeavor. The physical church must manifest the reality that we enter into Heaven in the midst of its material environs and that the adornment of this space reflects a spiritual reality. We strive to embrace this “outside-in” paradox in which the physical world becomes the sacramental reality of the heavenly kingdom.
In this undertaking, we join with a community of saints who have had a particular calling to beautify the house of God. One of the most compelling of these holy ones is St Erasmus, whose story is related in the Prologue of Ochrid:
Erasmus was a monk in the Monastery of the Caves in Kiev. He inherited great wealth from his parents and spent all on adorning churches, especially on silver-plating and gilding icons. When he had become impoverished and remained without anything, he was despised by all. The devil whispered to him that he squandered his estate in vain; instead of distributing his wealth among the poor, he gave it for the adornment of churches. Erasmus succumbed to this temptation and believed it for which he despised himself and fell into a state of despair and began to live aimlessly and lawlessly. When the hour of his death approached the brethren assembled around him and discussed his sins which he himself was not conscious of. All at once, he straightened up in bed and said: “Fathers and brothers, it is as you say; I am sinful and unrepentant, but behold St Anthony and St Theodosius appeared to me and after that, the All-Holy Mother of God told me that the Lord gave me more time for repentance.” The Mother of God also spoke these encouraging words to him: “The poor you have with you in every place and my churches you do not.” Erasmus lived for three more days, repented and fell asleep in the Lord. This teaches us that zeal for the Church and adornment of the churches is a task pleasing to God.18
It is interesting to note that the devil used St Erasmus’ devotion to adorning churches as a weapon to achieve the saint’s fall. The last thing the Evil One wants is for the church to be beautiful and so he whispers to St Erasmus that he should have distributed his wealth to the poor, but therein lies another sly deception: the devil does not want the poor to be provided for any more than he wants the church to be beautiful. Yet he targets St Erasmus’ great devotion to this “task pleasing to God” because the enemy knows that the beauty of the church reveals the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, and this is something he cannot tolerate. So, he cunningly creates a false dichotomy—either you adorn the church or you give to the poor.
This dichotomy continues to our present day, and if possible, is even more robust due to the anti-materialist religious climate that surrounds us. It can be tempting to view the architecture, icons, woodwork, and vestments as so much “dross,” the money spent on which would have
been put to better use by giving to those in need. But as Orthodox Christians, we are called to provide for those in need and to manifest the glory of Christ within the church. A tall order? Certainly, but as Christ himself says, “For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required; and to whom much has been committed, of him they will ask the more” (Lk 12.48).
Through the witness of such saints as St Erasmus and St John of Damascus, we comprehend that the labors they expended in adorning and defending the physical church were one of the means of their achieving salvation. This work was part of their journey toward theosis, creating not only beautiful churches for the honor and glory of God, but also beautiful souls as well. The churches they built, the chalices they donated, the books they wrote, the icons they gilded, were just as much a part of their salvation as their prayers, fasting, and almsgiving. The holy examples of these saints present another quality of beauty within the church, and this is its ability to be a powerful means of repentance. Beautification of the churches of God is not just a rote task to be checked off a liturgical “to do” list, but rather, a holy work that draws us closer to the source of all beauty, our Heavenly Father.
We live in an age that is replete with assaults upon the senses in the form of frenetic and immoral images, and this, combined with the influence of heresies that repudiate the material world, creates an atmosphere of negative anti-materialism that sours our physical senses and dulls them to the beauty of God. By giving attention to the adornment of our churches, we effectively turn our senses back towards God. In the early Christian mind the physical and the spiritual were intrinsically linked: if the physical sense was defiled, then the spiritual sense was likewise.19 By beautifying our churches, we open the doors of repentance to our senses and have yet another means to create beautiful souls within ourselves through the grace of the Holy Spirit.
Repentance comes with much work and struggle, and it is an interesting facet of the beauty particular to the Orthodox Christian Church that there is a profound, mystical link between aesthetics, or the sense of beauty, and ascesis, the spiritual struggle of the nous. Orthodox Christian aesthetics is not a preoccupation with pretty things to engage and delight our senses, but a consciously cultivated awareness that we have left Paradise through our sinful rejection of God and that this situation must be rectified. If we were truly holy, the entire world would still be Paradise. The beauty that delights our eyes in the church does so through a veil of tears, the tears of repentance. Like the prodigal son, we return home, but in the bittersweet knowledge that we have rejected this very abode. We see heaven before us in the Divine Liturgy and we perceive with despair that we are outside the gates. This recognition of our great need for repentance gives a quality of humility to the beauty of the church.
The principle of beauty perfected through humility is intriguingly demonstrated in the iconography and other artwork produced after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. With such social and political upheaval it might be expected that the artwork of the Church would suffer and degrade. However, as the highly skilled craftsmen of Byzantium—the iconographers, woodcarvers, metalworkers, silk weavers, and musicians—were dispersed throughout the medieval world, they took their craft with them and their work was shaped with a new tool, that of personal suffering through the loss of their homeland. Rather than perpetuating rote, ossified forms, this suffering, because it mirrored that quality of aesthetics interwoven with ascesis that is foundational to the beauty of the Church, created a great dynamism. True beauty has a harmony with ascesis, the struggle to achieve union with God. As Kontoglou tells us:
The works after the fall of Constantinople are often full of astonishing freedom, originality and religious passion, often more so than the works that were done at times of political and social flourishing of Byzantium. . . . The Hellenes who lived in that period underwent much hardship and suffering, and they withdrew into their own inner depths and there contemplated themselves directly. Their souls passed through the fire of martyrdom and were purified. For this reason, whatever they produced then, whether icons, or books describing the lives of saints, or dirges, or other songs, had the fragrance of Christian faith, which cannot be possessed by souls that have not become humble and wept.20
Bishop Anthony (Michaels) further elucidates this essential connection between true beauty and spiritual struggle in a letter written to the author:
Aesthetics (the beauty of the Church) and ascetics (the spiritual disciplines of the Church) emerge from the one faith. The display of beauty on the one hand conveys the arduous spiritual work of reforming and artistically reshaping the soul on the invisible, inside of us, on the other. St Paul prayed that the Ephesian community might be “strengthened with might through the Holy Spirit in the inner man.” By making beautiful vestments the visual Tradition of the Church frames the whole written Tradition, like an appropriate frame hugs a masterpiece and brings it out, reveals it as beautiful. The great ascetic Fathers who served parishes, although faithful to the monastic calling of being personally poor, spent money continually on stunning vestments and church adornment. Why? Because they knew the sacramental dimension of the Church. Their own ascetic piety brightened the lives of the faithful. That brightness has to be seen, also, materially. It must be “on display.” The Eucharist has a material vestment, bread and wine, and a glorious, eternal, beautiful Body and Blood of Christ. So, icons, vestments, etc. must be a visible medium of invisible grace—uncreated energy. In this way the Church as the Kingdom of God permeates the Church as the true Eden of Paradise. Fr. Pavel Florensky has written: “Asceticism produces not a good but a beautiful personality; the characteristic peculiarity of great saints is not the goodness of heart which is common among carnal and even very sinful men, but spiritual beauty, the dazzling beauty of radiant, light-giving personality, unattainable by carnal men weighed down by the flesh.”21
As Orthodox Christians, we are called to this mystical, holy beauty, both in our churches, where heaven is manifested through the sacraments and glorious adornment, as well as in our souls, which we must be striving to make truly beautiful rather than merely good.
When we take up the holy endeavor of adorning our churches we embrace a great and sacred source of repentance and salvation not just for ourselves, but also for the world around us. There is great power in the beauty of the Church and this “beauty will save the world.”22 The beauty of the Church is a compelling means not only of repentance, but also of evangelism, particularly to those who find the dogmas and theology of the Church dry or difficult. In this modern world, with its ubiquitous ugliness and plainness, the startling and refreshing beauty of an Orthodox Christian church temple is an amazing witness to the Faith, a beautiful gate through which searching souls may enter. As St John of Damascus exhorts, “If someone asks you about your faith, do not start talking about dogmas, but show him the icons which you venerate.”23 True beauty is the essence of our holy Faith, a fulfillment of our longing for Paradise.
Notes
1 Constantine Cavarnos, Byzantine Sacred Art (Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1985), 126.
2 Paul Evdokimov, The Art of the Icon (Redondo Beach, CA: Oakwood Publications, 1990), 59.
3 St Germanos, On the Divine Liturgy (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 63.
4 Constantine Cavarnos, Byzantine Thought and Art (Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 2000), 63.
5 The Lenten Triodion , Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware, trans. (South Canaan, PA: St Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 1994), 169.
6 Artistic self-expression is not valued in Orthodox Christian tradition because such human self-expression is considered simply too limited to express the beauty of God. As the eminent Byzantinist Henry Maguire states, “One of the guiding principles of Orthodox church art was that artists did not invent” (Paul Stephenson, ed. The Byzantine World [Oxford: Routledge, 2010], p. 322), meaning that Byzantine artists wor
ked within a tradition of highly circumscribed forms, rather than pursuing creative invention for its own sake.
7 Cavarnos, Byzantine Sacred Art, 38.
8 Bishop Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), 50.
9 St Germanos, On the Divine Liturgy, Paul Meyendorff, trans. (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 95.
10 St John of Damascus, On the Divine Images, David Anderson, trans. (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980), 23.
11 St Athanasius, On the Incarnation (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989), 26.
12 St Athanasius, 39.
13 St Athanasius, 43.
14 St John of Damascus, 31.
15 Evdokimov, 117.
16 St John of Damascus, 54.
17 St John of Damascus, 41.
18 St Nikolai Velimirovic, The Prologue of Ohrid, Fr T. Timothy Tepsic, trans., Fr Janko Trbovic, the St. Herman of Alaska Serbian Orthodox Monastery, and the St Paisius Serbian Orthodox Monastery, eds. (Serbian Orthodox Diocese of Western America, 2002), 196–7.
19 In our time there is a pervasive notion that beauty is “uplifting” but ugliness is somehow “neutral” or without effect. In my opinion, nothing could be further from the truth. Ugliness is the opposite of beauty and it has an opposite effect. I do not think it is putting it too strongly to say that ugliness is evil. Case in point: have you ever been inspired to glorify the Creator of All by the tile floor of your local fast food restaurant or the vast asphalt parking lot of a supermarket?
