Reading Saving Paradise: Chapter 8, Part I

Hidden treasures of wisdom

Hagia Sofia - Holy Wisdom - Ayasofya

Brock and Parker write:

The interior of Hagia Sophia is an icon of paradise.  The rivers of Eden flow in green marble across the ivory floor, under the dome of sunlit heavens.  We strolled among the groves of trees created by the marble columns and filigreed carvings of leaves and vines.  Its space embraced us and surrounded us with signs on every side that earth is the dwelling place of God. 

Wisdom – God’s presence – permeates all things.  The early church believed the entire cosmos had been transformed by the presence of God in flesh.  As Ephrem had exulted, The Lofty One became like a little child, yet hidden in him was a treasure of Wisdom that suffices for all.  

 Inside Hagia Sophia: the Dome 

 

Brock and Parker write:

Christianity emerged and grew in societies of economic injustice, slavery, and war.  In the midst of struggle against the many forces of death, it offered a world of life, made known through the practices of wisdom. 

Apse mosaic of the Virgin and Child, 9th century

The oldest surviving mosaic in Hagia Sophia

Holy Wisdom, displayed in the apse icon of the revolutionary Mother of God, reminded the faithful of the incarnation of Wisdom in her many forms.  The faithful felt, perhaps, in the church’s spaces their hard-earned gift of life in paradise.  Their paradise was neither perfect nor complete.  It was complex and intermittent.  At its best, it was the goodness of ordinary life, joyous and luxuriant.  In an uncertain, troubled world full of pain and death and sorrow, the church offered spaces of respite where life might be loved and beauty appreciated.  Paradise was where the work of justice and love continued, and where the revolution of values proclaimed by Mary guided the work of hardworking saints. 

We climbed the long ramp up to the women’s balcony and surveyed its elegant halls, lit by large windows.  The balcony is level with the conch of the apse, and from one end of it, we could almost touch the mosaics of Mary and Gabriel we had seen from the floor below.  

 The angel Gabriel in the apse

As we continued around the balcony we found on one wall a 13th-century mosaic fragment of three life-size figures: Christ, Mary, and John the Baptist.  It was the most beautiful deisis we had ever seen.  The bearded, poignant face of Christ gazes out at the viewer with ineffable sweetness and light. 

 The Deisis 

A deisis, an image of prayer or intercession,

places Jesus between John and Mary, who look toward him,

as they intercede for humanity’s salvation.

The power of art

Brock and Parker write:

No crucifixion was depicted in Hagia Sophia.  Instead, it confirmed that early Christians made paradise tangible in the art and architecture of their churches. 

Our journey into early Christian visual culture was a rewarding adventure for two Western Protestant theologians trained in the analysis of written texts and philosophical ideas.  We began the adventure by looking at the images at length, as ordinary churchgoers might have done, and became convinced that the effort to understand the power of this art was crucial to a  better understanding of Christianity in its first millennium.

Ancient Christians understood that powerful images create a subjective change in committed views, what scholar Margaret Miles calls an initiation of knowledge and an awakening of eros, a transformation grounded in participation in the image.  Such viewing involves attraction to the work, not detached observation of it.  (See Margaret Miles, Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture.)

Ancient churches were rich and complete sensory worlds with physically demanding rituals.  Instead of sitting in a theater and watching moving images, the people moved themselves from image to image.  The physical demands, repeated chanting, and communal interactions could produce altered states of consciousness.  Dreams, trances, and visionary or ecstatic experiences were ordinary aspects of liturgical life and were among the ways images were experienced in the liturgy.

For early Christians, icons were sacramental:  They made divine power present, just as relics of martyrs carried spiritual power.  People prayed to visual images of Christ, the apostles, and the saints for intercession on their behalf.  These intercessors linked the world of the faithful on earth with God in the highest reaches of heaven, helping the faithful to reach divinity.

Please continue reading

on the next blog,

‘Art and Empire’