Is a Patristic Aesthetics Possible?

PEETERSLEUVEN – PARIS – WALPOLE, MA

2013

STUDIA PATRISTICAVOL. LIX

Papers presented at the Sixteenth International Conferenceon Patristic Studies held

in Oxford 2011

Edited by

MARKUS VINZENT

Volume 7:

Early Christian Iconographies

Edited by

ALLEN BRENT and MARKUS VINZENT

Table of Contents

Allen BRENT, London, UK Transforming Pagan Cultures ............................................................. 3

James A. FRANCIS, Lexington, Kentucky, USA Seeing God(s): Images and the Divine in Pagan and Christian Thought in the Second to Fourth Centuries AD ............................................... 5

Emanuele CASTELLI, Università di Bari Aldo Moro, Italy The Symbols of Anchor and Fish in the Most Ancient Parts of the Catacomb of Priscilla: Evidence and Questions ................................ 11

Catherine C. TAYLOR, Washington, D.C., USA Painted Veneration: The Priscilla Catacomb Annunciation and the Protoevangelion of James as Precedents for Late Antique Annuncia- tion Iconography .................................................................................. 21

Peter WIDDICOMBE, Hamilton, Canada Noah and Foxes: Song of Songs 2:15 and the Patristic Legacy in Text and Art ................................................................................................. 39

Catherine Brown TKACZ, Spokane, Washington, USA En colligo duo ligna: The Widow of Zarephath and the Cross ......... 53

György HEIDL, University of Pécs, Hungary Early Christian Imagery of the ‘virga virtutis’ and Ambrose’s Theol- ogy of Sacraments ............................................................................... 69

Lee M. JEFFERSON, Danville, Kentucky, USA Perspectives on the Nude Youth in Fourth-Century Sarcophagi Representations of the Raising of Lazarus ......................................... 77

Katharina HEYDEN, Göttingen, Germany The Bethesda Sarcophagi: Testimonies to Holy Land Piety in the Western Theodosian Empire ............................................................... 89

Anne KARAHAN, Stockholm, Sweden, and Istanbul, Turkey The Image of God in Byzantine Cappadocia and the Issue of Supreme Transcendence ...................................................................... 97

George ZOGRAFIDIS, Thessaloniki, Greece Is a Patristic Aesthetics Possible? The Eastern Paradigm Re-examined 113

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Is a Patristic Aesthetics Possible?

The Eastern Paradigm Re-examined

George ZOGRAFIDIS, Thessaloniki, Greece

ABSTRACT

The possibility of an aesthetics that can be adequately called Patristic is examined as a question of its actual existence and as a normative question. Five tentative and not mutually exclusive answers are given: Greek Patristic aesthetics is possible (a) as far as we are dealing with it and we ascribe it to the Fathers, (b) if Fathers thought that they were doing aesthetics, (c) if they discussed aesthetic problems, (d) if its object exists (if art of that period was ‘art’), and (e) if it can fertilize contemporary theological and aesthetic-philosophical thought. The discussion of these statements seeks to clarify the presuppositions, the possible objects and the main themes of a Patristic aesthetics by evaluating modern approaches to the subject and by referring to patristic texts. All the factors of the aesthetic phenomenon could be included in their interrelation: the artist, the donator, the public of the artwork, the artcrafts themselves, views on the status and the function of the artwork and its social and theological dimensions. Special attention is given to the evidence from which an analysis of the aesthetic experience can be reconstructed and aesthetic notions can be extracted. Patristic aesthetics, unsys-tematic and functionalist as it is, cannot be an autonomous field, because for the Fathers aesthetics can only be considered contextualized in a wider theological, philosophical and artistic frame. Metaphysics, epistemology, anthropology and aesthetics constitute a hermeneutical frame indispensable for the understanding of the Patristic apprehension of art and of Christian art in particular.

Is a Patristic Aesthetics possible? This is, or should be considered as, a ques-tion with Kantian resonances; and rightly so. Because it was the Königsbergian philosopher that made such questions possible when he insisted on proving(or disproving) the legitimacy of main theoretical disciplines or branches of philosophy like metaphysics. However, one might say, we are not on a philo-sophical ground but a theological one. That is true, completely or partly, depending on the approach we adopt. And as it happens in many theoretical questions the crucial point is from what field the question is raised, for what purposes and what does it finally mean. Needless to say, it is not a rhetorical question, neither a (merely) methodological one – though it could be considered also as both. Even if it turns out to be premature, difficult or impossible to find a totally justifiable answer, it suffices to present it as a genuine and meaningful question.

Studia Patristica LIX, 113-135.© Peeters Publishers, 2013.

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What does the question mean? (1) That we are searching for an aesthetics (a discourse about art and art objects) and that can be called (or has been called) ‘Patristic’ in a distinctive way. For the purposes of this paper I simply (and descriptively) take it to mean Greek Fathers’ considerations on issues about art and art objects from second to early ninth century. Using it we still have to think how close and still how different this expression is from other more common expressions, like Christian or Byzantine or theological or reli-gious aesthetics. With regard to Byzantine aesthetics I have to mention that Patristic aesthetics antedates it and it does not include all of the Byzantine writers until Iconoclasm, only the Byzantine Fathers; obviously there is an overlap between them and we cannot detach them without narrowing our understanding. (2) The question also indicates that we are searching for the possible existence of a kind of aesthetics. And what does existence mean for aesthetics and how can it be ascertained? By locating scattered views of the Church Fathers on art in their teachings and writings, by finding systematic discussions and debates on aesthetic issues, or by assuming the implication of aesthetic values in the artcrafts made and used by the Christians of that age? As Kant would put it ‘where aesthetics is to be found, in the hands of whom, and how will we recognize it?’

What are we expecting as an answer, when we question the existence of a thing, aesthetics in our case? What would prove that a Patristic aesthetics does or does not exist? In other words, what makes a thought to be properly called ‘aesthetic’, and does this something exist in Eastern Patristic thought? And the very fact that we question its existence is this unique or can it be addressed to other periods of thought? For instance, could one ask whether there is an ancient Greek aesthetics?

I rephrase my initial question: ‘Whether and if so, how is a Patristic aes-thetics possible’. Here the descriptive question of its actual existence (and hence its possibility) is interwoven with the normative question of ‘what should be a Patristic aesthetics’, hence and more generally Aesthetics itself. Is Aesthetics conceivable in a pre-modern discourse and practice in the frame of which what we now call artworks were not being appreciated as such but mostly in virtue of their possible (non ‘aesthetic’) functions? But we have gone too far, only to let some of the parameters of the topic to show off. Now the one thing I can do is to attempt not one but few, in fact five, possible answers to the question; answers successive, partly complementary, which fol-low a course from the outside to the inside, from the present to the past and back to the present. One set of answers does not address directly the question of the possibility of a Patristic aesthetics in theoretical or a priori terms but is confined to infer the possibility from the reality, i.e. from the activity of modern or late antiquity writers and scholars and their understanding of this activity.

Is a Patristic Aesthetics Possible? The Eastern Paradigm Re-examined 115

I

The first answer: Patristic aesthetics exists as far as we are dealing with it and we ascribe it to the Fathers. This answer is based on a methodological view that gives special attention to the scholarly construction of the field. If we browse thousands of pages of Patrologies, Histories of Dogma, Histories of (Early) Christian Literature, Encyclopedias or Handbooks of Early Christian or Byzantine Studies, dictionaries, companions and guides (a not surprisingly flourishing genre) aesthetic issues are practically absent.1 Perhaps this absence is justifiable given the bulk of the covered material and in some way it is bal-anced by references to the art of the same period. If we enter into the strictu senso field of the aesthetics the situation does not alter. Few histories or general books on aesthetics cover or even allude to our topic; the History of Aesthetics (1962) of the Polish scholar Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz is a notable exception that already counts fifty years.2 We have not in Eastern Christian and Byzantine studies something like the Études d’esthétique médiévale of Edgar de Bruyne or other monographs on Latin medieval aesthetics.3

Study of early Byzantine art has flourished from late nineteenth century but it was mainly based on an appreciation of its stylistic properties4 and not on an understanding of its content. The hermeneutical horizon has been broadened later thanks to the formalist interpretations of Otto Demus or Ernst Kitzinger who insisted on the way style communicated meaning. After late 1980s art studies overcame the traditional frame of the history of art and styles, adopted models form cultural studies, and met the standards of a theory of art. All the factors of the aesthetic phenomenon are examined in their interrelation: the artist, the dona-tor, the public of the work of art, the artcrafts themselves, views on the status and the function of the work, and the social and theological dimensions of the art.5

1 Two notable exceptions: Alexandre Kazhdan, ‘Aesthetics’, in The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1991), I 29; Leslie Brubaker, ‘Critical Approaches to Art History’, in Elizabeth Jeffreys (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies (Oxford, 2008), 59-66.

2 Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, vol. 2: Medieval Aesthetics (The Hague, 1970); see also the German revised edition: Geschichte der Ästhetik, vol. 1 (Basel, 1979); Moshe Barasch, Theories of Art (New York, 1985), 47-60; Victor Bychkov, ‘Byzantine Aesthetics’, in Michael Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1998), I 321-3; George Zografidis, ‘Byzantine Aesthetics’, in Henrik Lagerlund (ed.), Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy (Dordrecht, 2011), 32-5.

3 I mention only the pioneering work of Edgar de Bruyne (Bruges, 1946; reprinted in two volumes, Paris, 1998); for an eloquent evaluation, see Umberto Eco, ‘L’esthétique médiévale d’Edgar de Bruyne’, Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales 71 (2004), 219-32. For a critical survey and a discussion of terminology problems, see Oleg V. Bychkov, A propos of Medieval Aesthetics (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Toronto, 1999).

4 Robert S. Nelson, ‘To say and to see: ekphrasis and vision in Byzantium’, in R.S. Nelson (ed.), Visuality before and after the Renaissance (Cambridge, 2000), 143-68, 160.

5 Kathleen Corrigan, ‘Iconography’, in E. Jeffreys (ed.), Handbook of Byzantine Studies (2008), 67-76, gives references to the earlier significant approaches of Grabar, Klauser and Kit zinger.L. Brubaker in ‘Critical Approaches’ (2008) draws the broader context. See also the earlier Robin

116 G. ZOGRAFIDIS

I only mention three classical books that had the ambition to treat the issue in toto, in times when such an ambition could be held. The Greek aesthetician Panagiotis Michelis in the Aesthetic Approach to Byzantine Art (1946)6 suggested an understanding based on the traditional aesthetic categories of beauty and sublime especially. With great sensitivity to works of art (architecture in par-ticular) and their properties, and perhaps by diminishing the role of the medieval beholder, he invites us to become modern viewers of a medieval art in a West-ern Musée imaginaire, offering a paradigm of a humanistic approach somewhat detached from the theological background of Byzantium. It is indicative that in the mid of 20th century Michelis felt obliged to draw our attention to the aes-thetic interpretation of Byzantine art, in addition to ‘historical, archeological and theological’, and to defend it as something much needed.7

On the other hand Gervase Mathew in his Byzantine Aesthetics (1963) analy-ses works of art but tends to reduce their interpretation mostly to historical and political factors. However he makes philosophical references while comment-ing on aesthetics issues.8 Victor Bychkov in Byzantine Aesthetics focuses on its theoretical problems, the ontological status of image and the metaphysical and epistemological dimensions of Byzantine art. While for Michelis or Mathew one might say that their use of texts is scanty and leaves us to wonder whether their aesthetic remarks could be shared – let alone written – by the Byzantines themselves, Bychkov tends to overtheorize his topics; for him ‘the aesthetic’ is one way to approach God through perceptible symbols.9

Whereas some scholars leave unquestioned the problem of the existence of a Christian aesthetics in Late Antiquity and Middle Ages and proceed to exam-ine aesthetics problems in texts or art objects, the unreserved application of modern aesthetic categories (and aesthetics itself) to this pre-modern period of European thought cannot be adequately sustained in terms of historical accu-racy. The very notion of ‘medieval’ aesthetics is considered as a historical

Cormack, ‘“New Art History” vs. “Old History”: writing art history’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 12 (1987), 223-31.

6 An Aesthetic Approach to Byzantine Art (London, 1995; 2nd ed. 1964). Michelis wrote numer-ous articles on the aesthetics of Byzantine Art, some of which are gathered in his Études d’esthé-tique (Paris, 1967) and Aesthetikos: Essays in Art, Architecture and Aesthetics (Dedroit, 1976); see esp. ‘Neo-Platonic Philosophy and Byzantine Art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 11 (1952), 21-45.

7 P. Michelis, ‘L’esthétique de l’art byzantine’, in VII Corso di cultura sull’arte ravennate e bizantina (Ravenna, 1960), 65-97.

8 G. Mathew, Byzantine Aesthetics (London, 1963); see the austere review of P. Michelis, ‘Comments on Gervase Mathew’s “Byzantine Aesthetics”’, British Journal of Aesthetics 4 (1964), 253-62.

9 Victor Bychkov, L’estetica bizantina: Problemi teorici (Bari, 1983); the Serbian edition is augmented: Vizantijska estetika (Beograd, 1991). Unfortunately other major works of Bychkov have not been translated; see e.g. A Concise History of Byzantine Aesthetics (Kiev, 1991) and Aesthetica Patrum (Moscow, 1995).


impossibility.10 The fact that many scholars from different disciplines are show-ing theoretical concerns and raise aesthetic questions while occupying them-selves with texts and works of art of the Early Church is significant but it does not entail per se the existence of Patristic aesthetics. So, let us see whether a second answer can be combined with the first in support of this, by turning to the way in which Church Fathers understood their occupation with art and what was the scope of their relevant views.

II

Here is the second answer: Patristic aesthetics exists if Fathers thought that they were doing aesthetics. It is obviously too difficult to argue for this state-ment. What I simply wanted to stress with such a formulation is that the initial question ‘Is Patristic aesthetics possible?’ is a question that only we moderns can ask. It is not a question that Fathers would or could, let alone should, ask. For sure, no Father, no Byzantine – at least until the ninth century – intended to form an aesthetic theory or thought of himself as doing aesthetics. One might assume that they continued and practised this discipline while, for instance, rejecting ancient Greek aesthetics. After all, there was the parallel case of phi-losophy: Fathers on the one hand rejected Greek philosophy as such (under the label of outdoors, heathen philosophy) and on the other hand (at least some of them) claimed for Christianity the status of philosophy – the ‘true’, ‘inner’, ‘ultimate philosophy’. In aesthetics the influence of Greek views on art is eas-ily attested throughout Patristic and Byzantine thought: the repudiation of art with its Platonic origin, the revelation of spiritual and sensible beauty, the Middle Platonic reevaluation of art, the Neoplatonic anagogical use of images, the literary genre of descriptions of works of art; in fact the arguments of Christians against the idols, as well as many others put forward in pre-icono-clastic Byzantium were anticipated by Pagan authors although in a different theoretical context. Even so, Greeks themselves did not think that they were doing aesthetics. It is not that the Fathers’ concern was theology, that arts and beauty had long been theologically suspect and theoretically controversial or that a late antique Christian Aesthetics was inconceivable only as a Christian one. Aesthetic evaluations were far from being the focal point even in Icono-clasm, when the very existence of representational art was questioned. If we gather all Fathers’ statements concerning art, artcrafts or beauty it is in prin-cipio doubtful whether they can legitimately count as ingredients of an intended aesthetics; but we have to remember that the same goes for Plato himself!

10 Jan A. Aertsen, ‘Beauty: Medieval Concepts’, in M. Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (1998), I 249-51.

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Probably we must leave the phantasm of an autonomous aesthetics that sets out its own rules, not only because such a field did not exist in medieval times, in pre-modernity more generally, but also because it is theoretically insufficient. So, after the first two answers we are still in an interim state. We, reluctantly or conventionally, use the term Byzantine aesthetics or aesthetics of the Fathers to designate an intellectual activity that the Fathers or the Byzantines had not and could not understand in the only possible way, i.e. as referring to the modern field of aesthetic.11

III

A third answer can bring us nearer to our subject matter: Patristic aesthetics is possible if Fathers discussed aesthetic problems, problems that even though the Fathers did not qualify them as aesthetic ones, today they are considered as such. A rough estimate would be that as long as no specific treatise was devoted to art and much less to aesthetic concepts (at least until Iconoclasm) a quick and plausible conclusion would be that there was no Patristic Aesthetics.

Such a solution would perhaps give a twofold satisfaction. First, to those who would persist in their explicit or latent downgrading of Patristics or Byz-antine studies on a thought that did not achieve a reflection on a central and omnipresent product of the Byzantine civilization, i.e. works of art, and did not develop into a systematic discourse. Second, to those who would evaluate pos-itively the non-existence of aesthetics because they esteem that the absence of a specialized, partial discourse corresponds to a society where the fields (social, political, artistic etc.) were not disunited. In this perspective, preference is given to a life conceived as an indivisible unity, a life in which – we should be reminded – theological discourse and religious practice and experience enjoyed an undisputed primacy. It is thus understandable that in a theocentric society no aesthetics can exist.

In either case, this absence makes us to weigh up its causes; does it denote simply a lack of interest or a substantial deficiency, a vacancy in Patristic and Byzantine thinking? If the second is true, then this vacancy should be explained and/or fulfilled with relevant evidence. We have to go back to the texts, all kinds of texts, and one may also say, back to the monuments, for a twofold reading: first to locate the questions that each text puts to its times, to other texts or to itself; we may also wonder about the reasons for not asking possible questions and we reconstruct the given answers. Second, to ask our questions and test possible answers within the context of each text. Thus we can construct a problématique strictu senso aesthetic, which treats the Fathers’ thinking in the least anachronistic way possible. Such an approach does not presuppose an

11 See the classic discussion of Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990).


essentialist assumption for a unified concept of ‘the aesthetic’, but carefully takes account of the historical, theological and artistic setting of each text and its author.

Amidst the numerous texts of Patristic literature, with titles that do not pre-dispose the reader at all for their aesthetic interest, there are (1) texts that deal with art, like (a) the early apologies against the idols, (b) polemical works on the theory of image, and (c) descriptions of works of art (ekphraseis).12 There are also (2) texts with occasional references to issues of art and art theory, with variant content (theological, historical, philosophical, hagiographical, rhetorical, literary) and written for various purposes and for different audiences during a period of many centuries. The exposition of the Fathers’ theoretical and practi-cal attitude to art, a topic widely discussed for many decades usually in terms of a dualist approach (iconolatry vs. iconoclasm), has to be done against the background of the artistic production of their age, a production that underwent dramatic changes in terms of media, uses, techniques or motives; furthermore it is obvious that it would be difficult to speak about the Fathers’ attitude as if it was (and, moreover, as if it should be) a unified position.

The concepts they coined or inherited, and the problems they faced about art can be better understood within their general appreciation of the sensible world. We have to think (not to say ‘feel’) what the Fathers saw, heard, smelled,13 tasted, touched; in other words, whatever they had aesthetic experiences of. I name but a few: Christian art and Liturgy (in each stage of their development), Pagan art and ritual (gradually less and less), everyday life and social and ecclesiastical practices.

Except the vast bibliography on Iconoclasm where the argumentation of both sides has been meticulously discussed, several studies have brought to our attention aesthetic elements and views that occur (or can be ascribed) to certain works of Greek Fathers and other Christian writers.14 A moderate stance is

12 Herbert Hunger, Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner (München, 1978), I 170-88; Liz James, ‘Art and Lies: Text, Image and Imagination in the Medieval World’, in Antony Eastmond and L. James (eds), Icon and Word: The Power of Images in Byzantium (Alder-shot, 2003), 59-71; L. James and Ruth Webb, ‘“To Understand Ultimate Things and Enter Secret Places”: Ekphrasis and Art in Byzantium’, Art History 14 (1991), 1-17; Ruth Macrides and Paul Magdalino, ‘The architecture of ekphrasis: construction and context of Paul the Silentiary’s poem on Hagia Sophia’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 12 (1988), 47-82; Henry Maguire, ‘Truth and Convention in Byzantine Descriptions of Works of Art’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 28 (1974), 113-40; id., Art and Eloquence in Byzantium (Princeton, 1981); R.S. Nelson, ‘To say and to see’ (2000); R. Webb, ‘The aesthetics of Sacred Space: narrative, metaphor and motion in ekphrasis of church buildings’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 53 (1999), 59-74.

13 One might recall statements from Clement’s Paedagogus or John Chrysostomus’ On Vain-glory; see L. James, ‘Senses and Sensibility in the Byzantium’, Art History 27 (2004), 522-37, 534 for further references.

14 André Grabar, ‘Plotin et les origines de l’esthétique médiévale’, Cahiers archéologiques 1 (1945), 15-34; F.D. McCloy, ‘The Sense of Artistic Form in the Mentality of the Greek Fathers’,

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aptly represented and strongly suggested by many studies of today’s scholars:15 a balanced use of texts with attention to their genre and strategies and of aes-thetic remarks on any kind of art with awareness of their philosophical sig-nificance. Though sometimes one might get the impression that text quotations serve to prove the scholar’s preconception, this problem is inevitable for such hermeneutical attempts. What we have gained is the acknowledgment of the complementarity of three fields: aesthetic theory, history of art and sociology of taste.

The general setting of Patristic aesthetics can be described as a pendulum that goes from artistic and cultic practice to theory,16 from rejection to justifica-tion of (religious) art. I sketch it out:

– Spontaneous and strong opposition of the Christians to the existing pagan art.– Theorizing the opposition in terms of idolatry and by appealing to the Bibli-

cal condemnation of visual representations (Apologists, Origen, Athanasius).17

– The emergence of Christian art and iconography.

SP 9 (1966), 69-74; George W. Butterworth, ‘Clement of Alexandria and Art’, JTS 17 (1916), 68-76; Basil Tatakis, ‘L’elemento estetico nel pensiero dei Padri cappadoci’, Rivista di estetica 6 (1961), 219-26; Dimitris Angelis, Buhantin® aîsqjtikß: ¨J ∂nnoia toÕ kállouv stòn M. Basí-leio (Athens, 2004); Gervase Mathew, ‘The Aesthetic theories of Gregory of Nyssa’, in Giles Robertson and George Henderson (eds), Studies in Memory of David Talbot Rice (Edinburgh, 1975), 217-22; Udo Reinhold Jeck, ‘Philosophie der Kunst und Theorie des Schönen bei Ps.-Dionysios Areopagites’, Documenti e Studi della tradizione filosofica medievale 7 (1996), 1-38; V. Bychkov, ‘Die philosophisch-ästhetischen Aspekte des byzantinischen Bilderstreites’, Filosofía [Athens] 8/9 (1978-79), 341-53; id., ‘Die ästhetischen Anschauungen des Patriarchen Nikephoros’, Byzantinoslavica 50 (1989), 181-92; John Travis, In Defense of Faith: The Theology of Patriarch Nikephorus of Constantinople (Brookline, Mass., 1984), 44-60; A. Grabar, ‘“L’esthé-tique” d’un théologien humaniste byzantin du IXe siècle’, in L’art de la fin de l’Antiquité et du Moyen Âge (Paris, 1968), 63-9; John Anton, ‘The Origins of Photius’ Religious Aesthetics’, in Konstantine Boudouris (ed.), Philosophy and Orthodoxy (Athens, 1994), 18-40.

15 See, among others, Charles Barber, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton, 2002); L. Brubaker, ‘Byzantine Art in the Ninth Century: Theory, Practice, and Culture’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 13 (1989), 23-93; ead., ‘Perception and Conception: Art, Theory and Culture in Ninth-Century Byzantium’, Word and Image 5 (1989), 19-31; L. James, Light and Colour in Byzantine Art (Oxford, 1996); ead., ‘“And shall these mute stones speak?” Text as image’, in L. James (ed.), Art and Text in Byzantium (Cambridge, 2007), 188-206; ead., ‘Art and Lies’ (2003); ead., ‘Senses and sensibility’ (2004); ead., ‘Color and meaning in Byzantium’, JECS 11 (2003), 223-33. Last major contribution is Anne Karahan’s, Byzantine Holy Images – Transcendence and Immanence: The Theological Back-ground of the Iconography and Aesthetics of the Chora Church, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 176 (Leuven, 2010).

16 This list, I suggest, indicates the interdependence of artistic practice and theory. See also the scheme of the classic study of Ernst Kitzinger, ‘The Cult of Images in the Age Before Iconoclasm’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 8 (1954), 83-150.

17 Frederick Norwood, ‘Attitude of the Ante-Nicene Fathers toward Greek Artistic Achievement’, Journal of the History of Ideas 8 (1947), 431-48; Adriano Prandi, ‘L’arte nel pensiero dei primi scrittori cristiani’, in Atti del Convegno Internazionale sul Tema: Tardo antico e alto medioevo (Rome, 1968), 105-20.


– The reinforcement of a reserved or negative attitude to art in general, on religious and moral grounds; a dualistic approach (Clement of Alexandria) that exalts spiritual beauty (Origen).18

– The destruction or Christianization of pagan artworks and temples.– Popular piety, liturgical art, cult of relics, cult of images.– Christian criticism of image making and image cult.– Imperial iconoclasm, accusations for idolatry and erroneous Christology.– Defense of icons: elaboration of a theology of images.

From this scheme (as far as it can be confirmed by the extant material) few remarks can be made for Patristic aesthetics, or what we are entitled to call so. First: it has not a systematic nature, nor does it form or intend to form a coherent whole. Second: it is occasionalistic, in the sense that it emerged (and it is written) as a response to specific problems that aroused mostly by practice; often it dealt only with what was at stake, leaving other issues (however important) untouched. That is a reason why when reading the relevant views of the Fathers we must be cautious not to take the part for the whole. Third: it is often polemic, deconstructive rather than constructive. We have to wait until Iconoclasm for treatises of the later kind that never-theless retain an apologetic and antirrhetic character. Fourth: the hostile attitude to art was due to some extent to the fact that the early Fathers lived in a society where pagan imagery was dominant. Fifth: Patristic aesthetics referred not only to Christian art but also to ancient Greek art and to ‘secular’19 Byzan-tine art.

Let me comment briefly on the last points. The condemnation of pagan cult objects on religious and moral grounds, as well as the caricature of pagans who adore human creatures as gods, are something expected from those who pro-fessed a new religion – particularly the Apologists. What is of great interest in terms of aesthetics is the articulation of the following views: philosophical aniconism stemming from the Platonic critique of the seducing art, denial of anthropomorphism, no need for material cult. As years passed by and their Empire was established Christians came to terms with the idea that pagan works of art could be admired for their aesthetic qualities while their meaning

18 It is not easy to sustain an alleged aniconism of the early Greek Fathers, as it was when E. Kitzinger wrote ‘The Cult of Image’ (1954), not to mention the older classic books of Koch and Elliger. See the moderate interpretation of Paul Corby Finney, The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art (New York, 1994), and Charles Murray, ‘Art and the Early Church’, JTS n.s. 28 (1977), 303-44; ead., ‘Le problème de l’iconophobie et les permiers siècles chrétiens’, in François Boesplug and Nicolas Lossky (eds), Nicée II (Paris, 1987), 39-50. A useful survey: Steven Bigham, Early Christian Attitudes toward Images (Rollinsford, NH, 2004).

19 For this often neglected kind of art, see Eunice Dauterman Maguire and Henry Maguire, Other Icons: Art and Power in Byzantine Secular Culture (Princeton, 2007); H. Maguire, ‘The Profane Aesthetic in Byzantine Art and Literature’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 53 (1999), 189-205.

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and context should be rejected. In the Codex Theodosiani it is declared: ‘The statues that have been placed within the temple must be evaluated for their art and not for the divinity they represent’.20

Constantine’s I decision to remove ancient works of art to Constantinople and to display in public pagan statues (a practice that even Theodosius contin-ued) was possibly dictated by propaganda reasons (establishing a glorious past for the new capital) and their artistic value was probably not the first criterion for Constantine. Eusebius plausibly attributes to the Emperor the intention to de-sacralize these cultic objects21 so that Christians would fearlessly see all this pagan imagery ‘purified’ out of its original context, but it would be difficult to deny that the elites of the New Rome appreciated their aesthetic value.22 Some writers went to the point of claiming that the Christian monuments of their epoch are more beautiful than the Greek ones:

Marvel no longer at the glory of the ancients; by their art they did notleave a fame unspeakable great to the late-born as is the glory of wise Juliana, who by her works [temples] surpassed the most skilled design of the men of the past.23

Given the classical inheritance of Early Fathers and Byzantines, the use of ancient aesthetic categories was inevitable while formulating the theory of image and writing descriptions of works of art; the catalogue is long and I mention but a few: beauty, imitation, imagination, symbol, image, artist, creator. Similarly, as in ancient Greece, the appreciation of an artcraft was not exclusively aesthetic: an object could be admired both for its aesthetic qualities (e.g. beauty, symmetry, greatness) and for its craftsmanship and qualities (e.g. labor, execution, elabo-ration). Each concept needs a separate detailed analysis that can offer useful material for a reconstruction of Patristic aesthetics, but I can only briefly refer to the most common topos, that of artistic beauty, and beauty in general.

This once central concept in aesthetics has been depreciated during twentieth century and it is being restored in the context of contemporary theological aesthetics.24 A reflection of the later Platonic tradition is undeniable in the

20 Code Théodosien, Livre XVI, 10.8, ed. T. Mommsen, SC 497 (Paris, 2005); see also Claude Lepelley, ‘Le musée des statues divines. La volonté de sauvegarder le patrimoine artistique à l’époque théodosienne’, Cahiers archéologiques 42 (1994), 5-15.

21 Eusebius, Life of Constantine III 54.3; Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History I 16; similar views were common until the early eighth century in texts like Parastaseis syntomoi chronikai.

22 See L. James, ‘“Pray Not to Fall into Temptation and Be on Your Guard”: Pagan Statues in Christian Constantinople’, Gesta 35 (1996), 12-20, where further references.

23 Greek Anthology I 17. See also I 16: ‘Juliana had the Martyr herself, the Patroness of / the church, to inspire and help the artificers. For / never would she have accomplished otherwise so vast / and beautiful a work, full of heavenly splendour’.

24 Patrick Sherry, Spirit and Beauty: An Introduction to Theological Aesthetics (Oxford, 1992), 5-8 for beauty in early Greek Fathers; for the ‘neglect of beauty’, see Richard Harris, Art


Byzantine notion of a transcendent beauty, its relation to mathematical analo-gies and to the harmony of the planet’s movements.25 And sensible beauty had long been considered as an ascent to the divine, a way to approach God. The epis-temological-anagogical and revelatory function of sensible beauty, the whole creation, derives from the Bible (Ps. 19:1; Sap. 13:3-5, Rom. 1:19-20) and from the Fathers’ exegesis of a God-world relation: ‘We glorify the supreme Artificer of the wisely and skillfully created things and we grasp Him whois above all beauty (üpérkalov) from the beauty of the visible things’.26 God who is manifest through his creations is characterized as creator (djmi-ourgóv), as the best of artificers (âristotéxnjv) for the world’s decoration,27 and as an artist (kallitéxnjv).28 To bring creatures from non being to being is the work not of art but of the creative power. Art simply transforms (metaskeuáhei) beings to something else, while the creative power calls non beings to being.29

Using the notion of beauty in the context of Byzantine art and aesthetics has been challenged by Michelis, who throughout his Aesthetic Approach (1955) has tried to replace the notion of beauty and argues that in eastern Christian architecture and painting it is the expression of the sublime that prevails – something he considered to be characteristic for Christian art and mentality. Other scholars argued for other categories such as the holy or the (spiritual) beauty.30 Given that beauty can be predicated to nature, to art, even to God as many patristic texts testify, for example Ps.-Dionysius’ On Divine Names (IV 7) par excellence, one might say that beauty in late antiquity (and perhaps in the Middle Ages) was not a privileged notion of aesthetics related par excellence to art; it mostly served as an ontological and theological concept.31 At the end of our period Photius praises Christianity as ‘the most beautiful religion and faith’ and numbers beauty among its great qualities.32 Here again the notion of

and the Beauty of God (London, 2005), and the interesting attempt of Mary Mothersill, Beauty Restored (Oxford, 1986).

25 Pavlos Kaimakis, ‘La musique des sphères chez les Byzantins’, Filosofía [Athens] 31 (2001), 166-74.

26 Basil of Caesarea, In Hexaemeron I 11; SC 26bis (Paris, 1968), 134. 27 Cyril of Alexandreia, Homilies for Pascha 1, SC 372 (Paris, 1991), 168. 28 Gregory Nazianzen, On Virtue 110; ed. C. Crimi (Pisa, 1995), 122, and 218 for other patris-

tic references. 29 Cyril of Alexandreia, Thesaurus 15 (PG 75, 256A-B). 30 Constantine Kalokyris, The Essence of Orthodox Iconography (Brookline, Mass., 1971) and

Paul Evdokimov, L’Art de l’icône, théologie de la beauté (Paris, 1970), respectively. 31 I had tried to show the inadequacy of a discussion focused on the category of beauty in

Buhantin® filosofía t±v eîkónav: Mià ânágnwsj toÕ ˆIwánnj DamaskjnoÕ (Athens, 1997), chap. 1.

32 Photius, Letter to Boris 531-2, 547-9; Photii Epistula et Amphilochia I, ed. B. Laourdas and L.G. Westerink (Leipzig, 1983), 18-9. Theophylact in Life of St. Clement (PG 126, 1198B) records Clement’s intention to attract the Slavs by the beauty of the churches. See also the well known narrative on the admiration of Hagia Sophia as a cause of the Russians’ conversion to Orthodoxy.

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beauty maintains its multiple connotations. The same Patriarch describing a new church exclaims: ‘The new church’s superiority is due not only to the superiority of Grace and the Holy Spirit but also to its beauty and execution and ingenuity’.33

The notion that I think is crucial to discuss is one that did not occur in the writings of the Fathers but is essential for the possibility of aesthetics. It is a basic notion of aesthetics: aesthetic experience (often identified with a unique form of experience; a pre-conceptual form of apprehension) which, together with aesthetic attitude, are considered crucial for the aesthetic appreciation of a work of art. Despite contemporary criticisms to the established jargon (and despite the obvious circularity of all these aesthetic notions), one can still accuse the Byzantine beholder (Fathers included) that he or she blurs reality and representation – abolishes the necessary aesthetic distance from the work of art, making thus aesthetic judgment and aesthetics impossible.

It is true that in Byzantine texts the qualities of realism and lifelike were attributed to religious and secular paintings alike. One might think that the resemblance the authors are referring to is only a rhetorical topos or that their standards were quite different from ours and they have misconceived art of their times as realistic.34 But the Byzantines do not confuse mimetic images with what they depict as far as they insist on their formal likeness. Gregory of Nyssa speaks about the exact imitation of the prototype: ‘One who sees the depiction in the painting to be shaped exactly according to the prototype states that the form of both is one’.35 Photius finds this quality as a general feature of the very ‘art of painting, which is a reflection of inspiration from above, and has thus exactly established the natural (life-like) imitation’.36

Since the Byzantine did not have a modern photographical conception of the portrait, they were rather interested in the fidelity of the form to its prototype.37 To their eyes this property permits to identify the depicted person of a scene

33 Photius, Homily X 6; ed. Basil Laourdas (Thessaloniki, 1959), 103.16-18; trans. Cyril Mango, The Homilies of Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), 188 (altered).

34 C. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 312-1453: Sources and Documents (Toronto, 1986), xiv-xv; id., ‘Antique Statuary and Byzantine Beholder’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 17 (1963), 55-75, 64-5. But see H. Maguire, ‘Originality in Byzantine Art Criticism’, in Antony R. Litttle-wood (ed.), Originality in Byzantine Literature, Art and Music (Oxford, 1995), 101-14, 101-2; L. James and R. Webb, ‘Understand ultimate things’ (1991), 2, 10.

35 Commentary on the Songs XV 6.3; Gregorii Nysseni Opera, ed. H. Langerbeck (Leiden, 1960), 439,11-4.

36 Photius, Homily XVII 2, 167.12-14. I quote slightly altered Leslie Brubaker’s translation, Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzantium (Cambridge, 1999), 20.

37 Henry Maguire, The Icons of their Bodies: Saints and their Images in Byzantium (Princeton, 1996), chap. 1. Robert Grigg, ‘Relativism and Pictorial Realism’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42 (1983), 397-408; Gilbert Dagron, ‘Holy Images and Likeness’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 45 (1991), 23-33; C. Kalokyris, Essence of Iconography (1971), 75-81.


(sometimes with the aid of inscriptions) and to distinguish one saint from another. Being lifelike is a psychological fact: it is by virtue of its likeness that an image was considered capable to work miracles, deliver oracles, affect etc.

Asterius of Amasea remarks in the description of the Martyrdom of St. Euphe-mia38 that the blood that was dropping from her body was depicted so lively that you would think that it was really dropping and you would walk away mourning. This verisimilitude, that cannot be interpreted as a mere convention of the literary genre of ekphrasis, was not just an aesthetic property that the viewer admires, but mainly the capacity of the work of art to provoke a reaction – not only to the beholder but even to the narrator: ‘Hence I cry and the passion cuts short my discourse’ (XI 4.1). In such rhetorical texts the listeners are turn-ing into spectators who see with ‘the eyes of the soul’.39

Many texts insist on the beholder’s conduct before and because of the paint-ing. ‘I have often seen’, says Gregory of Nyssa, ‘a painting that represents this passion [of Isaac] and I could not pass by without crying’.40 Speaking of Christ’s crucifixion a later author exclaims: ‘Even if you have a heart of stone, when you see the Passion’s image, your heart will be shaken (qámbov) at once’. In an iconophile letter we read: ‘When we enter the Church and see the histories and the paintings of our Lord, we do not come out without having been touched; who would not be moved and cry?’41 It is clear that although east Christian and especially Byzantine art is considered as formalistic, being a liturgical art it does address the human feeling both to stimulate it and to transform it.

Is this a sentimentalism, repulsive for many moderns, that surpasses or restrains other spiritual and ‘higher’ functions of the image? The response of the beholder42 in a passionate manner often presupposes a naive identification

38 Homily XI 4.1, Asterius of Amasea, Homilies I-XIV, ed. C. Datema (Leiden, 1970), 155,3-4. 39 See R. Webb, ‘Imagination and the arousal of emotions in Greco-Roman rhetoric’, in

S.M. Braund and C. Gill (eds), The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature (Cambridge, 1997), 112-27. Patricia Cox Miller discusses ekphraseis and has rightly insisted on what she calls the ‘material turn’ from the fourth century. See Patricia Cox Miller, The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia, 2009); I thank the anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to Miller’s work.

40 Gregory of Nyssa, On Divinity of Son and Holy Spirit (PG 46, 572C); this passage is included in an iconophile florilegium; see Alexander Alexakis, ‘A Florilegium in the Life of Nicetas of Medicion’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 48 (1994), 179-97, 185.

41 Jean Gouillard, ‘Aux origines de l’iconoclasme’, Travaux et mémoires 3 (1968), 243-307, 289. See, also, a passage attributed to Cyril of Alexandreia: ‘I saw the mural painting: the young girl suffers bravely the persecution. I watch the scene not without tears. That’s what the painting caused to me’; the Greek text in A. Alexakis, ‘Florilegium’ (1994), 187. Joy, wonder and inner turmoil are other emotions equally attested; see G. Mathew, Byzantine Aesthetics (1963), 132.

42 L. Brubaker, ‘Perception and Conception’ (1989), 20-1, 23-5; L. James and R. Webb, ‘Under-stand ultimate things’ (1991), 7-9; Anna Kartsonis, ‘The Responding Icon’, in L. Safran (ed.), Heaven on Earth: Art and the Church in Byzantium (University Park, Penn., 1998), 58-80; Nico-letta Isar, ‘The Vision and Its “Exceedingly Blessed Beholder”: Of Desire and Participation in the Icon’, Res 38 (2000), 56-72.

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of the image and its prototype and an attitude common among pagans and Christians in late antiquity to the artcraft as something animated and inhabited by demons.43 The iconoclasts’ view that image making and worship can easily lead (or has led) to the confusion of image and prototype may have been con-clusively refuted by the Iconophiles’ careful distinction between worship and veneration; but in practice the interaction of the viewer and the cultic object – though it can be understood within its liturgical context44 – nevertheless permits a legitimate question with theological origin and aesthetic conse-quences: Is there a danger to slip from a liturgical presence of the prototype to its identification with the image? Is the believer before the icon like the uned-ucated spectator of a play, who searches for a fire-extinguisher when an actor screams ‘fire’?

There are few things that can be said in regard to such reservations. (1) First: why feelings like those that Byzantine authors eloquently and persistently describe are not equally legitimate reactions like sentiments of speechless admi-ration, visual pleasure of the contours or the colors’ combination, or even fear in front of the infinitude of sea? Are the later more ‘pure’, than is aesthetic? It was Aristotle in his Poetics who emphasized the role of the purification process. He was certainly referring to performative arts, but the inclusion of representational arts is still an option. The narrative scenes in Byzantine art are displayed on wood, panels, walls or textiles as series of acts. Even the portraits aim to remind and in a way re-enact the ultimate praxis: incarnation for God, transformation – the good alteration (âlloíwsiv) – for the Saints.

It is somewhat naive to qualify as naive, hence non-aesthetic, a reaction, even a sentimental one, of the beholder, since it is difficult to ignore that emo-tions and their expression (even the crying in our sources) are more complex responses that were once supposed to be.45 Of course Fathers could discern between aesthetic delight and other possible functions of paintings. Neilus of Ankyra writes to sub-prefect Olympiodoros: ‘You aim to decorate the church with scenes of hunting and fishing for the pleasure of the eyes; a childish idea that will seduce the faithful. […] Cover, instead, the walls with Testaments’ scenes for the uneducated to learn’.46

43 Glenn Peers, Sacred Shock: Framing Visual Experience in Byzantium (University Park, Penn., 2004), 2.

44 Nikolaus Thon, Ikone und Liturgie (Cologne, 1979); Hans Belting, ‘An Image and Its Func-tion in the Liturgy’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 34/35 (1980-81), 1-16.

45 Needless to say, a study of emotions in Byzantium is lacking and have to be done in the way it is conducted last years for Greek and Latin Medieval Philosophy; see Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Oxford, 2004). For the psychological effect, see Thomas F. Mathews, ‘Psychological Dimensions in the Art of Eastern Christendom’, in Art and Architecture in Byzantium and Armenia (Aldershot, 1995), 1-21; Paul Lemerle, ‘Psychologie de l’art byzantin’, Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Budé (1952), 49-58.

46 Hans Georg Thümmel, Die Frühgeschichte der ostkirchlichen Bilderlehre, TU 139 (Berlin, 1992), 310.


(2) A second comment can be made to the reservations stated above: the alleged loss of aesthetic distance, an accusation that can be addressed to every religious art (as well as to a politically committed art), was encountered in a way by iconophile Fathers, John of Damascus especially, who draw a sharp distinction between image and its depicted object.47 These two must be kept separate in mind, heart and behavior of the faithful beholder. Otherwise, images will not be images but their prototypes; and the beholder will confuse worship and veneration, the direct and the mediated honor to God.

This functional approach of art did not obscure the Fathers’ criteria for the demarcation of a natural attitude to art, as we may call it, from a learned one. Gregory of Nyssa remarks48 that views on beauty differ reasonably, because when a person imperfect in mind sees something attractive consider this some-thing beautiful by its nature and does not go deeper. Most people, Gregory continues, find it difficult to distinguish between beautiful matter and beauty itself. That is a relief for a master painter, says John Chrysostom, who should not worry if his paintings are being mocked by those who ignore art.49 Viewers ignorant of geometric analogies, Procopius thinks, can not grasp the beauty of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople but instead they feel fear.50 Two people, states Didymus of Alexandreia,51 may look at the same painting, and yet see another thing. So, even the aesthetic response cannot be irrelevant to a presupposed non-aesthetic response. The latter is determined by various factors.

Aesthetic appreciation certainly concerns the discernable qualities of the art-work; to become capable for such a judgment one must be well trained in a specific form of life and study, where the acquired cultural accomplishments are considered as warrant for adopting an aesthetic disposition. They are not neutral: a myth of a pure gaze cannot be sustained. The artistic evaluation and the sentimental reaction of the beholder they do not simply contribute to a moral conduct, but they are examples of this moral conduct, that is examples of the kind of evaluations and reaction that involves this conduct.

Aesthetic experience in early Christian communities and in early Byzantium is conceivable as a way – but not the only way – to experience art. If the sub-jectivity of this experience is rightly stressed in modernity, a Byzantine would be very suspicious to such a notion. He or she was interested in an experience (aesthetic or not is not the question now) that is socially and more specifically ecclesiastically communicable and, so to speak, verified. This quasi objectivist

47 John of Damascus, Discourse I 9.3-6, III 16.2-8; Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskus III, ed. B. Kotter, PTS 17 (Berlin, 1975); for a discussion, see G. Zografidis, Buhantin® filosofía t±v eîkónav (1997), 107-10, 146-54.

48 On Virginity 11.1; Gregorii Nysseni Opera, ed. J. Cavarnos (Leiden, 1952), VIII/1 292.5-15.

49 On Priesthood V 6 (PG 48, 676). 50 On Edifices I 1.33-5. 51 Commentary on Genesis, ed. P. Nautin and L. Doutreleau, cd. 8A 2-9.

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attitude to ‘works of art’ would not deny that aesthetic properties are socially and culturally conditioned but would assume a weaker conception of objectiv-ity: e.g. the statement (or even the feeling) that x representation is life-like means that this aesthetic appreciation is valid within the Byzantine society and culture – although what we conventionally call ‘Byzantine viewer’ does not consist as a homogenous group but includes quite different groups like emper-ors, high clergy, patrons, monks, ordinary people etc.

In this context emerges the role of the artist, anonymous as he is for various reasons: his skills can be recognized but the analogy of God and the artist is partially downgraded because the latter is conceived as someone whose task has been completed by the execution of the work. After all, the artist is ‘the fifth cause’ of a work of art in Nikephorus’ account.52 The work becomes independent from its creator; not to the point of its annihilation (as the Fathers warned that happens for the entire world when alienated from its Creator) but its accomplishment. The life of the work of art, i.e. its meaning, can be con-veyed in virtue of its artistic form53 but it can be integrated in the presence of the viewer. It is now (especially in religious art) the viewer who undertakes to continue the artist’s work; and it is the beholder’s eye, i.e. the use of the image that can turn an icon to an idol. East Christian apologists and early Byzantine Fathers suggest that this inner correspondence between the beholder and the image can reveal the primary message intended to be conveyed to the beholder as well as the message that the beholder him/herself seeks to recognize in the image. It is when these processes coincide that communication is accomplished. And at the same time the image is surpassed!

Contrary to the modern era, in Byzantium there was not an art-world, where a ‘work of art’ should have a place. If as a sociologist argues the aesthetic disposition is defined in terms of distance from the social world,54 in Early Byzantium the denial of this world led to asceticism and to desert, not to aes-theticism and to salons. If art cannot be separated from life, function prevails over form; things of art seem to be reduced ‘to the things of life’, of ecclesiastic life in particular. In this context, aesthetic experience is part of an experience that is completed and overcome when it implies spiritual experience. After describing St. Euphemia’s martyrdom Asterius of Amasea exhorts the hearer of his Homily, the reader of his text and the viewer of the scene described: ‘Now it’s time for you, it is your turn to accomplish the painting, to enact the story’.55

52 Refutatio et eversio, ed. J.M. Featherstone, CChr.SG 33 (Turnhout, 1997), 68.1-14. 53 This does not imply that the aesthetic quality of the image, especially of a religious one, is

a prerequisite for the image to convey its meaning nor for the viewer to respond to it. 54 Pierre Bourdieu, The Distinction (London, 1984), 5 and the part I for a social critique of

the judgment of taste. 55 Homily XI 4.4, in Homilies, 155, 15-7; R. Webb, ‘Accomplishing the Picture: Ekphrasis,

Mimesis and Martyrdom in Asterios of Amaseia’, in L. James (ed.), Art and Text (2007), 13-32.


So, the story continues in the mind of the audience and urges for action. We must underline the hermeneutically significant emphasis that many writers put on the role of the beholder, as if the work of art is an open one, waiting and wanting of the beholder’s eye, thought and action to be completed. But, at the same time its accomplishment is its overcoming.

IV

We have seen some aspects of the aesthetic vocabulary that the Fathers and the Byzantines used or implied. Now we can make one step back to question the nature and the status of the object of aesthetics, i.e. art. I give the fourth answer: Patristic Aesthetics is possible if its object exists. This answer, paradoxical as it is, brings forward the main theoretical obstacle that one has to confront before (I mean logically before) he or she enters the field of aesthetics – unless, of course, he or she is content with the first and the third answers, and over-looks the second.

If aesthetics is the discussion and the elaboration of the concepts involved while talking about works of art (that is a second-order activity), then – as we know from the third answer – such concepts occur in Patristic literature mostly as an inheritance from ancient Greek theory. And even though the Fathers’ discussion was inadequate or partial or unsystematic, one can speak of ‘aesthet-ics’. A second supposition is more complex: If art is the object of aesthetics, there must be art. Is this necessary condition in our case fulfilled? Was it art? Or: In what sense was it art what the Church Fathers did see and write about? I assume that no one doubts the existence of, let’s say, ancient Greek art, or has any problem with juxtaposing Aphrodite of Melos, Michelangelo’s David and Dali’s Aphrodite. And in so far as the early Fathers lived among and wrote on Greek Art, one cannot exclude the case that Patristic aesthetics would have existed even if there had only been Pagan art; but then it would probably had – according to what we have seen – an almost exclusively negative character.

Thus, the problem is the existence of a Christian art that would be the main subject of Patristic aesthetics. I do not mean to question its existence or the date of its appearance; enough with that debate that preoccupied research for dec-ades. I just want to keep in mind that art theorists have rightly made us cautious to incorporate without qualifications all kinds and periods of ‘artistic’ produc-tion within the great narrative of art or European art in particular. For Early Christian and Byzantine art to be an art, there must be art in the pre-modern era.

An aesthetic-centred discussion of Byzantine art (a) could reveal the schol-ar’s embarrassment to treat this period of ‘art’ differently, namely in its own terms – perhaps because he/she does not have other analytical tools for his/her approach, or (b) could depend on a given aesthetic appreciation of this ‘art’ – romantic in the case of Michelis. The modernist’s question ‘But is this art?’

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should be equally addressed to post-modern artcrafts and to the Christian art of late antiquity; not with the intention of reviving an outdated debate on the quality of the art in question but for a deeper understanding of what makes something ‘art’. The conception of a single art, an ars una, that comprises all works, from African masks and devotional icons to holograms and video art, is questionable even if one is not a fervent cultural relativist.56 In few words, reminding Hans Belting’s formulation, the Byzantine image existed before the era of art. But could there be an aesthetic for something that is not art? Here the notion of visual culture would help, in so far as we can now interpret aes-thetically objects that would not have to be constructed and construed as ‘art objects’ in early Christian societies – and the notion of aesthetics could respec-tively be broadened.

Inevitably we have to touch upon another vast and debatable issue, namely the relation between art and religion. If the problem was our attitude to past forms of religious art, it would suffice to say that ‘much that was not art – cul-tic works, for instance – has over the course of history metamorphosed into art; and much that was once art is that no longer’.57 The works of art become what they are by refusing their origin. But that thought, justified maybe in many cases, does not comfort in the case of Early Christian and Byzantine art. Icons were and still are cultic works; they did not deny, at least not yet and not for all, their origin.

Even this theoretical impasse which we face takes for granted the legitimacy of image making. What if we undermine it? I do not mean to repeat Greek philosophers’ or Byzantine Iconoclasts’ arguments; they are all well known, as are their counter-arguments.58 I prefer to draw our attention to a lively and revealing passage from the ascetic literature, attributed to Abbott Pamvo: ‘If we stand before God, we must stand in much devoutness (ên poll±Ç katanúzei) and not in abeyance (ên metewrism¬ç). Because as monks we did not come into this desert to stand before Him singing songs, playing tunes, shaking hands and moving feet to dance’. Here mystical experience is sharply opposed to aesthetic experience. Does the mystic need art, or poetry? And when he writes

56 See, among others, H. Belting, L’histoire de l’art est-elle finie? (Nimes, 1989); id., Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago, 1994).

57 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London, 2002), 3. 58 From the vast bibliography: M. Barasch, Icon: Studies in the History of an Idea (New York,

1992), 183-289; A. Grabar, L’iconoclasme byzantin: Le dossier archeologique, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1984); Gerhardt Ladner, ‘The Concept of the Image in the Greek Fathers and the Byzantine Iconoclastic Controversy’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 7 (1953), 1-34; Andrew Louth, St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology (Oxford, 2002), 193-222; Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary (Stanford, 2005); Léonide Ouspensky, Théologie de l’icône dans l’Église orthodoxe (Paris, 1980); Kenneth Parry, Depicting the Word: Byzantine Iconophile Thought of the Eighth and Ninth Centuries (Leiden, 1996); Jaroslav Pelikan, Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons (Yale, 1989).


poems, using words in a metaphorical manner, describing his indescribable experience of divine light, is he not a poet of a reality that is not yet or is not more? Does the union with God make art dispensable? One might say in response that art itself is the request to come to being the conditions that make her dispensable. It longs or recalls Paradise but exists only in Fall, in History.

Is this another theoretical impasse? Probably, if we remain at the content which is ineffable, at the essence which is inaccessible – what Iconoclasts did. But art is also (or mainly) Form. The iconoclastic illusion of a pure meaning, the demand for an understanding (often subjective) of the ‘pure’ truth disdains the sensible reality that cannot be perceived without forms. And art, in a way familiar to the history of ideas, becomes a threat to religion, to society, to mor-als, to any kind of power.

The Iconophiles, on the other hand, placed within the anti-iconic trend with Jewish and Greek origins, they inherited the inner antinomy of Christianity without its solution: invisible versus visible, divine versus human, eternal ver-sus death. All these polarities beget the iconophobic and the iconophile side of Eastern Christianity. For the later, art and language are not only sufficient, more or less, ways to convey any meaning. They are necessary stages for any ascend to the transcendence, given the anthropological condition of human creation after God’s image and of the Fall. One has to remember John of Damascus’ irony against the ‘exalted’ and ‘immaterial’ Iconoclasts, who ‘spit with contempt on everything visible’.59 What they exclude is the human desire to see; as John continues: ‘I am a human being and wear a body, I long to have communion in a bodily way with what is holy and to see it’. In all respects art and language are inescapable for anthropological and epistemological reasons.

Bringing together image and word, one remark matches here. I do not intend even to comment on this ancient topic, one of the most interesting and impor-tant chapters of Eastern Aesthetics entered in Christian literature at least in Basil of Caesarea. Perhaps following the Fathers, we use the word-image anal-ogy in the sense of upgrading the underestimated image by attaching it to the always praiseworthy word. I suppose that the analogy should also be used toward the opposite direction, in order to pair image and word in their ultimate inability to gráfein, to paint and to describe the uncircumscribable God. And if language has the alternative of metaphor, of allegory, of symbol, of the apophatic way – what has Byzantine art?

This dialectics of visible and invisible, immanence and transcendence, that works so that the two poles never meet, the two ontological levels never be confused is what art has in terms of color, shapes, light. The image of art, at its highest claims, is the image of truth; and its own truth is not its beauty but

59 Discourse I 36, trans. A. Louth, St. John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images (Crestwood, N.Y., 2003), 43.

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its reference and its proper use. However perfect it may be, image is there to be overcome.

One final remark can be made about the nature of the artistic domain in Byzantium. Even if it was a pre-modern society, we could say that there existed something like an aesthetic practice that the Fathers did not ignore. The aes-thetic practice is bound up with a whole universe of material objects – furniture, clothes, and paintings. For the elite, aristocratic and religious, art and patronage always play a central role. Producers and consumers need each other and their relationship constitutes mainly the aesthetic field. But religious art performed a social function not restricted to these elites. ‘Aesthetics, art appreciation and taste’ may emerge from ‘an interaction between individuals, their socio-cultural origins and the fields in which they find themselves’;60 the same can be said of the anonymous producers of art, as well as the beholders. An early Christian and Byzantine work of art can be better understood not as the work of an indi-vidual but as the creation of the field of artistic production as a whole, which in turn must be understood only according to its position in the totality of the society. In Byzantium, as in any other traditional society, the artist and the audience, Church Fathers included, shared a set of references that conferred value to the work of art, a sensible object that embodied community values and could serve as a sign the meaning of which is open and common to all faithful beholders.

V

The fifth answer: Patristic aesthetics is possible if it can fertilize contemporary theological and aesthetic-philosophical thought. Here the possibility does not depend heavily on the assumption that Fathers have or were interested to have aesthetics but to our concern to reconstruct – with the less hermeneutical vio-lence possible – such an aesthetics based on texts and objects, on concepts and properties that they used while discussing artcrafts.

The empty look of the postmodern viewer, the manipulation of the seen without being exposed to other’s gaze, the turning of the image itself to a pro-totype (when the access to its prototype has been lost or neglected), the prob-lematic status of representation,61 the visual and visuality, the contemporary libido videndi are all themes that can be more fruitfully understood within the broader context of the complex human experience, an experience that is not merely aesthetic – as Fathers clearly showed – or it can be called aesthetic if

60 Michael Grenfell and Cheryl Hardy, Art Rules: Pierre Bourdieu and the Visual Arts (Oxford, 2007), 56.

61 That ‘might seem a very modern, if not postmodern preoccupation’: Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1989), xxvii.


we expand significantly this notion. Though centuries later the Byzantine poly-histor Michael Psellos summarizes and combines all aspects of a patristic ‘aesthetic’ experience: ‘I am a most careful viewer of icons: but one icon astonished me by its indescribable beauty, paralysing my senses like a thunder-bolt, and vanquishing me of my power of judgement in the matter. Its subject was the Mother of God.’62 Now that the formalist separation of aesthetic values from others values has been questioned and debates on the moral function of narrative or the social impact of the arts are taken into consideration the study of Patristic aesthetics can benefit from the above questioning and debate. And in turn, it can inform these especially by virtue of Patristic aesthetics’ inherent in apophaticism.

The concern here is not about the past, the historical accuracy of the term ‘Patristic aesthetics’, but about the hermeneutical present of the scholar and the beholder. Reading texts, seeing images, hearing and so on bring us before what Church Fathers did and to the question of what we can do with the Fathers.63

Greek Patristic texts and modern studies give us abundant material to reex-amine the case of Patristic aesthetics, its historical existence and its theoretical possibility. Such an aesthetics could be a discourse about the nature, the limits and the functions of all factors involved in a two ways process: (a) the concep-tion of the prototype by the artist (and his community) and the creation of the artwork and (b) the perception of the image and the interaction with the viewer (the multiple functions of artwork) in given conditions. One thing we have to avoid is to relate aesthetic issues (perspective, background, light, colours) to dogma in a rigorous way, to assign with theological content matters of style – something that can lead to an essentialist approach of religious art and to a historically arbitrary identification of a certain style with dogmatic accuracy.64

The five tentative answers I outlined were in fact conditions that we have to examine thoroughly in order to reconstruct a field that can be adequately called ‘Patristic aesthetics’ – not an autonomous field, because for the Fathers, and also for us, aesthetics can only be considered contextualized in a wider theological, philosophical and artistic frame. As Gregory of Nyssa declared: ‘We need and episteme in order to make judgments about beauty’.65 Metaphysics,

62 Quoted by Anthony Cutler and Robert Browning, ‘In the Margins of Byzantium? Some Icons in Michael Psellos’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 16 (1992), 21-32; Robin Cor-mack, Painting the Soul (London, 1997), 35.

63 See M.-J. Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy (2005); ead., L’image peut-elle tuer? (Paris, 2002); and synthetic works that assimilate the patristic paradigm: Régis Debray, Vie et mort de l’image (Paris, 1992); Alain Besançon, L’image interdite (Paris, 1994); Hans Belting, Pour une anthro-pologie des images (Paris, 2004).

64 See P. Evdokimov’s L’art de l’icône (1970) where metaphysical certitude reduces byzantine icon to a normative model for art.

65 Commentary in Eccles. 6; Gregorii Nysseni Opera, ed. P. Alexander (Leiden, 1962), V 374, 10-1.

134 G. ZOGRAFIDIS

epistemology, anthropology and aesthetics constitute a hermeneutical frame indispensable for the understanding of the Patristic apprehension of art and of Christian art in particular.

This means that representational art,66 especially religious art, and hence aesthetics are possible because all their objects are already given (and perceived or conceived) as images – and these apply primarily for their most revered object, Christ, who as Theodore Studite says ‘was born êzeikonisménov’.67 Image is image if and only if (or: because) its prototype is an image, i.e. some-thing that can be perceived and conceived and imagined as such; and the proto-type would not be prototype without its image. Parallel to this ontological and epistemological dimension (truth and its grasp) is the anthropological one: the viewer is him/herself an image of the First Image (Christ).

Somewhere ‘between the vagaries of subjective feeling and the bloodless rigour of the understanding’68 Patristic aesthetics would rely on the original notion of aesthetics as the perception of the sensible69 and could profit from the last thirty years' elaborations of ‘theological aesthetics’.70 Its objects would be: (1) the created, both as the creation of God (nature) and as a product of human intelligence and craft (works of art, enactments and practices, religious or not), and (2) the uncreated, in so far as it is revealed in nature and in history, that is God as a possible object of human experience – reaffirming in a way the incar-national event.

The culmination of Patristic aesthetics, the theory of the image, complex and demanding as we understand it to be, makes possible the establishment of an ontology based not on the essence of beings but on the possibility of their rela-tion. In Christian late antiquity what was at stake, i.e. theology and economy, could and sometimes was treated in terms of aesthetics. And on the other hand, a key problem of art itself (i.e. how to make visible the invisible) was a central problem of Christian theology and of a Christian society: how to talk about the

66 For a synthetic approach, see Averil Cameron, ‘The Language of Images: The Rise of Icons and Christian Representation’, in D. Wood (ed.), The Church and the Arts (Oxford, 1992), 1-42.

67 Letter 221, 50-54; Theodori Studitae Epistulae, ed. G. Fatouros (Berlin, 1992), II 344. 68 T. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), 17 referring to Kant. 69 See on this point, John P. Manoussakis, God After Metaphysics: A Theological Aesthetics

(Bloomington, 2007). Titles on theological aesthetics are innumerable in the last three decades; see P. Sherry, Spirit and Beauty (1992); Richard Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics: God in Imagination, Beauty, and Art (New York, 1999); Gesa E. Thiessen, Theological Aesthetics: A Reader (London, 2004); John Milbank, Graham Ward and Edith Wyschogrod, Theological Perspectives on God and Beauty (Harrisbourg, Penn., 2003).

70 There is no consensus about the definition of theological aesthetics; see Oleg Bychkov and J. Fodor (eds.), Theological Aesthetics after von Balthasar (Aldershot, 2008), xiii. Among the relevant increasing bibliography: O. Bychkov, Aesthetic Revelation: Reading Ancient and Medieval Texts after Hans Urs von Balthasar (Washington, D.C., 2010); Stephan van Erp, The Art of Theology: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theological Aesthetics and the Foundations of Faith (Tilburg, 2004), where full references to Balthasar’s works.


unspeakable, how to depict it. Patristic aesthetics, or perhaps more aptly ‘theory of art’, would endorse the words of a philosopher: ‘The power of the work of art suddenly tears the person experiencing it out of the context of his life and yet relates him back to the whole of his existence’.71 This is a bold statement not at all phobic to human freedom and to the indeterminacy of meaning.

Not a few times philosophers state that what matters are the question and not the answer(s); and poets declare that the journey is what counts – Odyssey, not Ithaca. If one is working in the field of philosophy, he or she will gladly admit that this is a quite relieving thought. The provisional answers I’ve given were just reflections on what could make the initial question possible and meaning-ful. I hope that this much has been proven. As for the rest: texts and art objects, philosophical or theological discourse and aesthetic or religious practices are there to deal with, or here to live with.72

71 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed. (New York, 2004), 60-1. 72 I thank Markus Vinzent and the anonymous reviewer for their helpful remarks and suggestions.