The very Greekness of the liturgy bolsters up the warm tribal feeling. The fact that the Greek of the Epistles and Gospels is in Alexandrian koiné of the first century, and the main fabric of the Mass in the elaborate Byzantine language of St. John the Golden-Mouthed and none of it later than the seventh—all this flings the Greek mind back, once more, to past ages of incredible splendour and venerability. The language, largely incomprehensible to the unlettered faithful, sets it at a remove and doubles its wonder and numinosity and talismanic power. (Perhaps the word mysterion, the Greek for “sacrament,” as well as “mystery,” and the Last Supper being called “the Mystic Feast,” deepens this feeling.) This abstruseness is a source of pride and proprietorship different in its nature to the Latin of the Roman rite. The saintly idiom, though it has floated up beyond their grasp, is their own, the language, as it were, that their great-grandfathers spoke in happier days. It is a family affair and Our Lord and Our Lady and their enormous saintly retinue have long since become honorary fellow-countrymen. Although they never follow the liturgy in a parallel text, the congregation know some of the basic prayers and anthems since childhood and the identity of many scattered fragments in these two phases of Greek—the liturgical and the spoken—conveys an inkling of what is afoot. They lean back in their stalls and the long hours of chanting evolve round them in a magnificent and half-penetrable cloud of sound, an interweaving of canon and invocation and antiphon, of troparia and kondakia, of the canticle of the Cherubim, the Symbol of Nicaea, the litanies of the Faithful and of the Catachumens, perhaps the hymn of the Akathistos, of Cassia or the Myrrh-bringers, the constant renewal of the doxology and the multiple iteration of the Kyrie Eleison; all intoned or chanted, strangely syncopated in the minor mode of oriental plainsong, in a ritual tangle of hovering neums and quarter-tones.[4]
There is no feeling of tension in the Orthodox service, no climax of awed silence at the moment of miracle, followed by an unwinding. In spite of its name, and whatever its intent, it is unmystic in atmosphere. But it is dramatic. It is a gleaming and leisurely—almost a sauntering—pageant. Much of the drama unfolds behind the iconostasis, that roodscreen dividing the nave from the chancel; priests and deacons, their beards flowing and their long hair uncoiled over coruscating vestments, make processional entrances and exits, swinging thuribles bearing candles or a metal bound gospel, through the outside two of the three doors in this screen; doors which some scholars derive from the three thresholds in the proscenium of ancient Greek tragedy. The central door was reserved, they say, for the protagonist at the play’s climax; and, indeed, the celebrant only emerges from it to-day when he proffers the sacred vessels after the elevation. There is no excessive simulacrum of piety in the deportment of the officiating clergy. Their heads are flung back and the eyes above their singing mouths are cast up into the air in a mild unfocused gaze. Something tired, patrician and relaxed informs their gait and the deacons with their sweeping dalmatics and wide stoles, their youthful beards, their long dark hair and the lustrous wide eyes that illuminate their wax-pale faces, have the air of Byzantine princes who in martyrdom might turn into St. Stephen or St. Sebastian. The older clergy resemble minor prophets. The great dignitaries, who are always adorned with vast spreading beards and usually very tall (the thought has sometimes crossed my mind that Orthodox preferment may be a matter of height), glitter with golden copes and pectoral ornaments and snake-topped crosiers. With their white locks mitred with gem-studded globular crowns, they resemble pictures of God the Father. But, except at grave moments, an easy-going, paternal benevolence often leavened by the glint and the wrinkles of humour, stamps the faces of these deities. Their faces hint at an antique knowledge of their own and mankind’s fallibility; they betoken tolerance of back-sliding and quickness to forgive. Their anathema is reserved for temporal targets.
The evolutions of all these figures against the effulgence of gilding and fresco and mosaic and brocade themselves form a kind of moving ikon, but familiarity and glory are so blended that the whole office suggests a leisurely morning in one of the remoter courtyards of Paradise. The chanting continues, candles glimmer before ikons encrusted with beaten silver, the iconostasis towers like a jungle of gold, topped with a cross guarded by two coiling dragons, incense drifts through the columns, and, if it is a great feast, the crushed basil scattered underfoot sends up its additional fragrance. Remote and benign divinities shine in the cupolas and the apse, and round the drum that upholds the Pantocrator’s dome a legion of angels open their wings in a ring. A bland, non-committal and avuncular troop of painted saints populate the walls and a quiet, reassuring and universal benevolence, dropping softly as dew, seems to descend on the congregation. The mind is lulled. It is a fitting and comforting and mildly supernatural occasion, a family reunion both in the literal and the Confucian sense. Very little—except perhaps something in the spiritual outlook of the faithful—has changed in the slow punctilio of word and gesture and music for thirteen hundred years. For the last five hundred, almost nothing. Both as a manifesto of Greek continuity and as an historical survival it is precious and unique.
* * *
I have taken ikon-painting as the epitome of the long stasis of the Orthodox Church; perhaps rather arbitrarily.[5] Even the moderately informed on such matters know that there were, indeed, different schools and even renaissances, in the history of Byzantine art, and very interesting they are. But in no case are these deviations from the essential canon as great as the gaps that yawn between great schools of the West, or as revolutionary as the Italian Renaissance. But I am only concerned here with one facet of this absorbing subject: the interaction of the Greek religion and Greek religious art.
The installation of the Turks in Constantinople and their occupation of all Greek lands was, to all but bare survival, a circular glare of the Medusa’s head. Luxuries like spiritual thought and painting were Gorgon-struck. The task of the clergy and of the ikon-painters was not progress or creation but sheer maintenance; things had to be kept intact until better days dawned. Religion and religious art, already contained by strict rules, became inflexible. The result was stagnation in religion, and in art, endless repetition and, at last, degeneration. Iconography remained intellectual, lofty and remote but learning dried up and with it the power to apprehend the abstruse messages implicit in Byzantine art. Unquestioning and uncomprehending formalism followed. The meaning of the equations behind cypher and symbol retreated and the almost algebraic notation itself become an object of cult. The overbred, long-fingered Byzantine hands were thickening on the plough.... Perhaps in this lean period a different and more accessible kind of ikon-painting, a lowering of the intellectual sights from head to heart, would have served their strictly religious purposes better.
Plenty of indications exist that during the late Middle Ages an opposite trend to Byzantine inflexibility was in being. It might have gained momentum if the Fall of the Empire had not condemned it to stillbirth. It might have changed the whole nature of Byzantine art. I refer to the “pathetic,” to a loosening of the stern rules of iconography, an accompaniment of the austere and cerebral idiom by an address to the emotions. The most important of these symptoms appear in the renaissance that followed the recapture of Constantinople by the Greeks after the sixty-odd years of the Latin Empire that followed the Fourth Crusade. The impulse had sprung up in the hardy exiled empire of the Lascarids at Nicaea. In Constantinople it flowered under the beginnings of the last dynasty, the Palaeologues, in the late thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, and appeared at its best on the mosaics of the Church of St. Saviour in Chora,[6] not far from the Theodosian walls. These mosaics were placed there, along with his own portrait, by Andronicus II Palaeologue’s Great Logothete, Theodore Metochites, who, on the strength of his extraordinary headdress, has already appeared in these pages.[7] In the scenes from the Life of the Virgin there is an appealing gentleness, a fluidity of motion and an unbending from the austere regulation postures that is full
of tenderness and human warmth and pity. The mosaic persons are still traditionally moonfaced, but a pulse begins tentatively to beat, the symbol and content merge.... Some have proposed, and others have fairly convincingly scouted, the hypothesis that this iconographic trend is an Eastern reflection of the Italian trecento brought about by a West to East cultural traffic incidental to the Crusades. It seems clear, however, that the tendency was autochthonously generated, a spontaneous upsurge of new vitality in Byzantium’s ancient frame. This Indian summer was soon to be extinguished.
In fact, the tide of influence flowed all the other way, in a steady movement which began long before the earliest glimmer of the Italian Renaissance. The Byzantine share in Italian primitive art needs no underlining. It was not, as former authorities were wont to assume, a mass swoop westwards, as from a Pandora’s box suddenly prised open, of all the treasures of the Greek world at the Fall, which a happy coincidence of dates seemed once to suggest. There is little in the Byzantine Middle Ages to indicate a reciprocal Frankish influence, certainly nothing comparable to that of Byzantium on, say, St. Mark’s in Venice. It is surprising, on the other hand, how little the Western plastic techniques of the Crusaders were influenced locally in their fiefs of the Greek world and Outremer. The Gothic churches of Cyprus and the omnipresent castellated ruins remain as alien to their setting as the Anglican Cathedral in Calcutta and British cantonments in Rawalpindi and Hong Kong, or, for that matter, in Nicosia. There was, however, a slight trickle of influence from West to East. In literature this took the shape of a few charming and artificial verse romances, an Eastern echo of chivalric prototypes that is very insipid compared to the vigour of the true Byzantine heroic vernacular in the great saga of Digenis Akritas. Perhaps a more interesting contribution may be observed in the Western exonarthex of Daphni, if, that is, the frescoes there are not contemporary with those of the rest of the church, but two centuries after and later than the Crusades, as Dr. Angelos Procopiou, to the consternation of many, has recently suggested. Here the same “pathetic” trends, comparable to those of the Chora, can be observed. Mr. Procopiou’s proposition has not yet been either ratified or destroyed by outside authoritative opinion, but his case is most seductively argued. The Western influences that he detects are those of the Siennese school and particularly of Duccio di Buoninsegua; and this hypothetical merging of the two trends he attributes to the tolerant attitude of the Frankish dukes of Athens, of the De La Roche family.[8] Intermarried with Greek princesses, both Catholic and Orthodox clergy frequented their Court in a brief ecclesiastical truce and this harmony may have loosened the iconographic barriers for Western infiltration. It is an inviting thought.
The remoteness, the formality and the austerity of Byzantine ikon-painting was originally a result of the mass destruction of religious portraiture started by the iconoclast emperor, Leo the Isaurian, in 727. It was a puritan, anti-monastic reaction that grew up in the minds of Asian Greeks largely because of the horror in which Islam and Jewry held all reproductions of the human as well as the divine countenance. Ikons were finally restored and the dissolved monasteries re-monked by the Empress Theodora in 842. This upheaval brought about a purifying and spiritualizing change in iconography. Hellenistic materialism, which had co-existed, in a meaty and ever-slackening dotage, with the fresh and vivid splendour of early Byzantine mosaics, was dead for ever. The realistic third dimension of sculpture flattened into the more intangible medium of painter and mosaicist. The holy dramatis personae, almost disembodied now, sailed into a spiritual and rarified empyrean of mystery and awe from which the centuries have not dislodged them.
From this moment it can be said that religious art in the East sought to bring man to God’s level, and in the West, bring God to man’s; each laying stress on a different half of Our Lord’s nature. It is a significant difference of plastic emphasis. Persian and Arabian graces in the detail of decoration—fountains, peacocks, flowers and intricate designs from oriental fabrics—tempered the splendid austerity of mosaic and fresco and illuminated parchment; but, more important, the continued study of the ancient Greeks propelled a harmonious and unbroken underground river of Platonic thought, sluggish at times, at others leaping forth in cascades and spreading in great serene lakes which irrigated and complemented the Christian dogma it had done so much to form; incidentally affecting at times, out of archaizing allegiance, the iconographic décor; but, more importantly, carrying the figures themselves yet further into transcendence and incorporeality. If Justinian had hoped to halt the speculative thought of the pre-Christian world by closing the philosophical schools in Athens, he closed them in vain. Psellus the Hellenist, during one of these recurring revivals, indicated the spiritual mood when he spoke of “stealing from intelligence the incorporeal quality of things and realizing the light within the body of the Sun.” The ambience is silent and still and stratospheric in its distance from everyday human passions.
The renaissance that followed the Fourth Crusade, of which I spoke a few pages back, was a reaction from this supernal exaltation. Hard times had come, most of the Empire was divided among infidels and the alien and reciprocally schismatic Franks. The walls now girded a pillaged and half-ruined city full of weeds and rubble and waste land and cornfields...the Roman Empire, founded thirteen centuries earlier, had just one and a half more to go. The changed temper—a compound of vigour and melancholy—which had prompted the mosaics of St. Saviour in Chora took general form in the iconography of the Macedonian school. It was a feeling that spread in widening rings all over Greek lands and into the southern marches of the Slav world from the peak of Mount Athos. The move towards purely mortal distress was epitomized by a fixation on the human sorrows of Our Lord and the Panayia. This modification of religious paintings, so glaringly at variance with all that had gone before, had, however, long been latent in the Greek world in Asia. The sorrowful aspect of Christianity, the Passion and the Sufferings of the Virgin, all that which was to run riot in the Western Church, had been simmering in the East since divines like George of Nicodemia in the ninth century had enlarged on the Passion of the Virgin, which, five centuries later, St. Bernard was to spread across the whole of Western Christendom.
Far from the religious radiance of the Metropolis a gloomier, wilder, tougher, more uncouth form of picture had covered the tufa walls of the Cappadocian rock monasteries—anyone who has seen that harsh light and those desolate and fierce volcanic cones in which they are warrened can understand this well.[9] There must have been something in the air propitious to their emergence now. These new trends, meeting the old on Athonite monastery walls, produced the beautiful Macedonian school. Painting gained in fluidity and human feeling—in the pathetic, indeed—but lost much of the inner luminosity which is the great glory of Byzantine art.[10] It must be made quite clear, however, that it never sinks (though perhaps it meant to) to the dolorous realism that later swamped the West. The divine Protagonist and the Blessed Virgin, even when she is fainting at the Cross’s foot, have the hieratic dignity of figures from Greek tragedy; and the ritual character of an ancient chorus pervades the bowed heads of mourning women. There is no element here that presaged the stagey rictus and pictorial syncope, the dark wayside fetishism of Italy and Spain or the amazing northern excruciations of Grünewald; no hint of the religious trend which rears the black silhouette of Golgotha and the panoply of the lance, reed, sponge, whip, hammer, nails, pincers and thorns between the eye of mankind and the splendour of God.
* * *
Suddenly, on the steep and rocky flank of a detached cone of the Taygetus, seventy miles north of the point on the Mani coast where these last rambling pages began and five miles from the first page of the book, on the very eve of the Empire’s collapse, all the luminosity, all the splendour and radiance of Eastern art suddenly emerged with a changed and newborn vigour that seems, to-day, a challenging salute of the condemned. Houdini-like, the painting of Mistra had elbowed itself loose alike from the hindering bonds of t
he ancient iconological formulae and from Macedonian hypochondria. Retaining all that was most precious in both, it put forth new and bold juxtapositions and interlocks of colour and, as though by magic, humanized gods, angels, saints and mortals without draining them of a flicker of their spirituality. They not only exalt the beholder, which is an almost unfailing attribute of Byzantine painting; they touch and move him as well. It is a miracle of delicate balance, and it is almost a solution to the question these pages have been asking. How long could it have continued? It is exactly contemporary with the trecento and early quattrocento in Tuscany and Umbria which, all too soon, without the disaster of alien conquest, were to be water-logged by Latin materialism. Perhaps it was too frail and rare a thing to endure. Certainly its setting and its incubation were unique; for all these Mistra frescoes were painted within a few decades of the Empire’s fall. The town was to survive the Capital by three strange years. With the exception of the minute far-away Empire of Trebizond, which went out sadly and ingloriously after yet another couple of years, it was the last lonely star of the great constellation of Greece. Only the south-east corner of the Peloponnese—the triangle contained by the fortresses of Mistra and Monemvasia and the Mani—comprised this isolated Byzantine despotate. A few miles away, at the wreck of old Sparta, Frankish feudalism began; and further north, as the time grew short, the armies of Amurath and Bajazet the Thunderbolt, pigtailed and shaven-pated under their pumpkin turbans, were ravaging and subjugating Greece. Brass-crescented horsetail banners, the baleful green flags and the kettledrums and all the martial and barbarous clangour of the Mongolian steppes were just out of sight and earshot. From the great crenellated palaces of the Palaeologues and the Cantacuzenes, dominating the belfries and the cypresses and the bubbling domes and cupolas of the steep honeycomb town, fluttered as though they would flutter for ever, the silken banners charged with the linked B’s of Byzantium and the two-headed Imperial eagle.
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