by Tom Bissell
“Theotokos,” Father Spiridon said, pointing at Mary. “English word same as Greek? Many word Greek, English—many word same.” He pointed at a nearby chair. “Thronos. Throne. Same word. Understand?”
As with Pantokrator, Theotokos was less a word than a theological festoon. Literally, it means “God bearer” and emerged from the fourth-century debates over Mary’s role in carrying Jesus to term. At issue was the nature of his divinity. A group of Christians popularly known as Nestorians—their name coming from Nestorius, the powerful patriarch of Constantinople—held that Mary was merely the Christotokos, or “Christ bearer.” This meant a Jesus whose divinity did not predate his conception. Of course, the position of what ultimately became Christian orthodoxy held that Jesus was preexistently divine—that his birth gave him form but did not create him. In 431, at the Council of Ephesus, Theotokos became Mary’s official title, which led to the so-called Nestorian schism and relocation of many of Nestorianism’s adherents to Persia, India, and beyond.
Spiridon pressed me: “Theotokos. Maria. Baby. Understand?”
“I understand,” I said. “Yes.”
Father Spiridon pointed at the pendentive arches that supported the church’s dome, which were decorated with scenes from the life of Jesus, as was almost always the case in Byzantine-style churches. These pendentives were used to illustrate key motifs of Eastern Orthodox iconography: Genesis (or Nativity), the Metamorphosis (or Transfiguration), the Stavrosis (or Crucifixion), and the Anastasis (or Resurrection). Father Spiridon showed me the mosaics on the olive-green-tinged columns beneath the pendentive arches. All held images of the gospel writers. “Lukas,” he said, pointing. “Mattheus. Ioannes. Markus.” He approached the nearest pillar—that of John—put his hands around the pillar’s edges, and attempted to shake it. The pillar, obviously, did not budge. “They,” he said, lightly touching the polished tesserae arranged to represent John. “This,” he said, grasping the pillar again. “Understand?”
“The evangelists support the church.”
He bowed with obvious tutorial pride. “Yes. Very good.”
Father Spiridon’s delight at my understanding him in turn delighted me. I then realized we were almost twenty minutes into our tour and had moved less than eight feet.
V.
In the largest and, consequently, least accurate sense, “Eastern Church,” “Eastern Christianity,” and “Eastern Orthodoxy” refer to several theologically distinct forms of Christianity that share cultural roots with the Byzantine Church as created by Constantine when he moved the Roman Empire’s capital from Rome to the city state of Byzantium—supposedly founded by Andrew—in 330, seventeen years after the Edict of Milan allowed Christianity equal standing with the empire’s other religions. Modern Eastern Orthodox churches include the Greek Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church, the Albanian Orthodox Church, and the Macedonian Orthodox Church.*5
“Eastern Orthodoxy” is mostly useful as a negative description: Christianity as it developed outside western Europe. The final, definitive split between Eastern and Western Christianity did not take place until the eleventh century—the traditional date of 1054 may be too precise for such a long, protracted, and immensely complicated process—but speaking in the neat terms of a “split” between East and West does not do justice to the variations and differing theological emphases within Eastern Orthodoxy itself.
Eastern Orthodoxy is more mystical than Western Christianity, but also more rigid. Its churches are arguably more beautiful, but its decorative art is far more torpid. Its conception of Jesus is more distant, but its theology is more attractively complicated. It is additionally more mindful of its traditions, for which there are historical reasons. Four of the five ancient patriarchates of Eastern Orthodoxy—Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, and Constantinople—were all, at various times, seedbeds of Christian heterodoxy.
The surviving forms of Eastern Orthodoxy are all that remains of a roundly defeated faith. In 1453, when sixty thousand troops answering to a twenty-one-year-old sultan named Mehmet II surrounded Constantinople, the city’s Christians prayed against hope that their eight thousand soldiers would be able to hold off the invaders, among whom were several thousand Christian mercenaries. Their prayers were not answered. The emperor Constantine XI Palaeologus, the guardian of Byzantine Christianity, died (supposedly) on the ramparts of Constantinople, slashing away at its Ottoman invaders. The eleven-hundred-year-old church founded by Constantine formally terminates with this last Byzantine emperor’s straw-stuffed head (again, supposedly) going on a victory tour of the cities of the Muslim world. All Eastern Christian missionary activity ended. A great faith became a captive faith. Many of Eastern Orthodoxy’s founding sees are today located in non-Christian lands. An exception to this is the Russian Orthodox Church, which is particularly assiduous in tracing its roots back to Byzantium and which rose to great heights indeed,*6 especially when, after 1453, Moscow became the principal seat of Eastern Orthodoxy not controlled by Muslims.
Working out God’s calculus with regard to his Eastern subjects was a particularly difficult task for the Greek Orthodox Church, which conducts its services in the very language in which its scriptures are written. An interesting emotional dissimilarity between Western and Eastern Christianity can be seen in how both view the book of Revelation. In the Western tradition, it is avidly scoured; in the apocalypse-clobbered Eastern tradition, Revelation was old news.
Devotional Byzantine art began to cohere into a self-conscious style around the fifth century. Compared with the devotional art of Western Christianity, Byzantine art is less “realistic” (allowing for the fact that “realism,” strictly speaking, did not exist until hundreds of years after the Byzantine style codified), and its repertoire of motifs is more limited, owing to a generally more oppressive orthodoxy. As we walked on, I realized that for all of Eastern Orthodoxy’s deco-doctrinal rigidity and the practiced emptiness at the core of Byzantine art, none of that really mattered. I had not lied to Father Spiridon: This was one of the most beautiful churches I had ever seen. The entwined and purposefully abstract patterns, floral imagery, and peacock pennae used as edging all over the church were inventive, subtle, and arresting—one of the more benign examples of Islam’s influence on Byzantine Christianity. The atmosphere of the church, embodied by a man willing to drop everything to take a curious stranger on an impromptu tour, was also more welcoming than any I had visited. And from time to time, a breeze from the sea blew in through the open front doors, causing me to turn, and there, gloriously, was the Mediterranean, blaringly blue and roiling with distant whitecaps. To look out from the middle of a church and see the ocean was pleasurable in a way I had no name for.
Father Spiridon squired me around with no discernible method. After patiently describing some aspect of an object in one corner of the church, he walked me to the directly opposite church corner. Eventually, we wound up in the apse area, from which Father Spiridon shooed an injured pigeon—an awkwardly hopping rotundity—from our path.
Behind the apse area was what is called the sanctuary. It was blocked off from the rest of the church by a white marble wall known as an iconostasis (which means “stand for images”). The iconostasis began as columns that divided the sanctuary area from the rest of the church; this can still be seen in Western churches, but in the Eastern tradition it evolved into a large opaque screen or outright wall whose door-shaped enclosures usually contained a number of tiered icons, the displayed order and subject matter of which was predictably subject to tight doctrinal control. One attained access to the sanctuary via one of the iconostasis’s three doors. Only one door, the Beautiful Gate, was frontal, and from it the church patriarch emerged during the liturgy.
The crenellated iconostasis of Saint Andrew’s Church was quite grand. I followed Father Spiridon around to one of its two remaining gold-painted side doors, which were used when the liturgy was not under way. He opened the door and walked into the sanctuary. Inside the sma
ll room was an altar and, on it, several burning candles that filled the space with a low, wavy auburn light. Father Spiridon was in the process of kissing the altar when I walked in. I did not get a chance to see much else. When Father Spiridon noticed me entering, he crossed himself and rushed toward me and pushed me out the door. “Only Orthodox! Only Orthodox man here! Only Orthodox man!” While I apologized, the cleaning lady of Saint Andrew’s Church approached. She spoke for a moment in a language best described as Greeklish, pointed at a nearby icon of the baby Jesus and at Father Spiridon. “Jesus good,” she said, “Father Spiridon good. Both good.” Father Spiridon laughed, thanked her, clapped his hands together, and announced, “Now icons.”
Most icons are small paintings, often in panel form, of Jesus, Mary, John the Baptist, an apostle, saint, or, sometimes, in particularly large icons, a combination of some or all of the above. Icons are extremely ancient. Eusebius, in the fourth century, mentioned seeing icons of Peter and Paul and, in Edessa, an icon of Jesus that Eusebius believed had been painted from a living likeness. The Greek love of icons gave rise to a period known as Iconoclasm (the word literally means “image breaking”), which lasted from 726 to 843. Iconoclasm was an imperial response to repeated collisions between the conquistadors of Islam and Byzantine Christianity, whose forces saw their first defeat by a Muslim Arab army as early as 636. In 721, Islam formally forbade representative art—technically, anything “with breath”—in religious settings. Iconoclasm might thus have been intended to shore up citizens of the Byzantine Empire against what its leaders feared as the Muslims’ fiercer, more refined faith. Other scholars have argued that Iconoclasm had nothing to do with Islamic iconophobia. They point out that various strains of iconoclastic belief existed within Christianity since the fourth century. The fanatical fourth-century Christian bishop Epiphanius, for instance, once tore to pieces a portrait of Jesus in a church in Bethel. Jews have often been iconophobic themselves,*7 which suggests a revulsion to representative art that may be a by-product of Middle Eastern culture generally. But Iconoclasm, in any event, was a miserable failure, due to both the irregularity with which it was enforced and the emotional currents against which it ran. All Iconoclasm really did was drive representative devotional art underground, especially within monastic communities, which became clandestine icon factories. After Iconoclasm, Eastern Orthodoxy reasserted its artistic controls with flourish-crushing severity.
While iconic subject matter was open to choice, the icon’s formal presentation was not. The rules binding the aspiring iconist were (and remain) bewilderingly myriad: The subject must be displayed frontally. The subject’s name must be displayed via inscription. Subjects must wear certain types of clothing, and these must be colored in certain ways. Any subject of divine stature must be larger than a subject of non-divine stature. The subject’s hands must be displayed in certain ways (one hand position often found in Eastern Orthodox art comes from a pagan tradition that has to do with the physical expression of the philosopher’s right to teach).
Saint Andrew’s Church, like most Eastern Orthodox churches, contained numerous icons. They were displayed everywhere, from the walls to the bays to the sanctuary to the portable examples near the entrance to the iconostasis itself. Interestingly, Eastern Orthodox churches are given some decorative latitude when it comes to icons. Individual churches are allowed to choose which saints to display in icon form, though this typically boils down to preferences that have more to do with region, history, and culture than with strict matters of faith.
One of the most interesting beliefs attendant to icons—one eventually codified by Eastern Orthodoxy itself—holds that iconic images themselves were divine transmitters. The potential for pandemic religious derangement here is clear and obvious and allows one to understand why Iconoclasm occurred. The Greek devotion to icons remained nonpareil—though beleaguered Russian Christians have certainly done their best to challenge it—and the Greek Orthodox Church still annually celebrates the ninth-century day on which the empress Theodora restored the veneration of icons as the Triumph of Orthodoxy, during which what purports to be a copy of the document that reversed Iconoclastic policy is read out loud.
Father Spiridon began our icon tour along the church’s eastern wall—one saintly figure on a molten gold background after another. “Here Spiridon,” Father Spiridon said, pausing at one icon.
“Your namesake?” I asked.
“My name,” he said. “Spiridon. Corfu. Four hundred years old.”
“Spiridon was martyred four hundred years ago on Corfu?”
He shook his head. In a few moments, we had worked it out (I think): the icon was four hundred years old and had been painted on Corfu, where Spiridon’s relics were still kept.
“Here Zecharias,” he said, a moment later, and waved a finger over the palm leaf Zecharias held. “Martyr. Understand?”
“The martyr holds the palm leaf. Yes. I understand.”
“Eight martyrs of Patras,” he said. “He one of eight.”
“Got it.”
“Here Gregorius. Episcopo. Understand?”
“Episcopo? Bishop?”
“Yes! Bishop. Martyr. Nyssa.”
“He was martyred in Nicaea?”
He took hold of my wrist, gently but firmly. “No. Nyssa. He theologios.”
“Oh. Gregory of Nyssa!”
“Yes!”
The Gregory icon was one of four handsome icons devoted to the Doctors (in the theological sense) of the Greek Church: Gregory, Basil, John Chrysostom, and Athanasius. All wore the omophorion, a wide, cross-embroidered stole. Now Father Spiridon pointed at an icon of a very young man in a nightgown-like garment, holding a book and an oil lamp. Father Spiridon said, “Protomartyr,” and looked at me, as though daring me to guess his identity.
“Stephen?” I said. “The first martyr?”
“Yes! Stefanus. First died. First martyr.”
Father Spiridon’s cell phone sounded, the ring tone set to the tune of The Nutcracker. As he turned away to answer, I thought of how odd it was that a man who clearly knew the history of his church exceedingly well, and spoke Greek and Latin, was forced by my ignorance of Greek (and Latin) to have a conversation that resembled the colloquy of two toddlers precociously fascinated by religious history. How might some of the earliest Christian missionaries have explained Jesus to, say, the Scythians? “Big man. Jesus. He come from sky. He die for all good. He dead, but no. He alive again. Save you. Save me.”
More icons followed, several of which I correctly identified, after which Father Spiridon grabbed my wrist and smiled. “You,” he said, “theologian!” Wanting to keep pleasing him, I began responding to icons by throwing out a saintly name and waiting for Father Spiridon’s affirmative wrist touch. When I was wrong, and I was often wrong, I compounded the error by quickly reciting every name from Christian history I could recall in the hopes of eventually getting it right. This method proved most spectacularly ineffective when we came to a section of icons devoted to saints local to the traditions of Greek Orthodoxy, an inordinate number of whom seemed to have been banished to islands. My icon batting average crept back above .350 when we came to one of Jerome that showed him wearing a hood and holding a small scroll. Next to Jerome were two icons of armored sword-wielding angels with Mona Lisa–ishly ungendered faces. “Who?” Father Spiridon asked me of these.
“Jerome, Gabriel, and Michael,” I said, ashamed these were so easy.
“Yes!” Father Spiridon took my wrist again, but with some softer, more intimate urgency. Apparently, he wanted to share something with me. “My mother,” he said. “America. Fairfax, Virginia. Six months old. Lived in Fairfax, Virginia. Hospital. My mother. Small problem.”
Six months old? His mother was six months old and living in Fairfax, Virginia?
“No.”
Father Spiridon was born in Fairfax, Virginia, but there was a problem, and his mother returned to Greece with him when he was six months old?
/> “No.” After a few more volleys, it was established that Father Spiridon’s mother had needed heart surgery in Fairfax, Virginia, and was hospitalized there for six months. Much of that time Father Spiridon was with her, which is how he learned English.
VI.
The Acts of Andrew is one of five “major” apocryphal acts. The others are The Acts of Paul, The Acts of Peter, The Acts of John, and The Acts of Thomas, none of which was available in a single collated edition until, amazingly, 1898. According to a now-abandoned tradition, their supposed author, Leucius, a fierce advocate of chastity and asceticism and an opponent of marriage, had been a traveling companion of the apostle John. Their genuineness was contested harshly by the church fathers. Eusebius: “To none of these has any churchman of any generation ever seen fit to refer in his writings. Again, nothing could be farther from apostolic usage than the type of phraseology employed, while the ideas and implications of their contents are so irreconcilable with true orthodoxy….[T]hey must be thrown out as impious and beyond the pale.”