by Jim Forest
In English the first verses of the Sermon on the Mount are called “the beatitudes.” The traditional Russian phrase is “the commandments of blessedness.” The first word of each beatitude isn’t an everyday word. We have to ask ourselves before going further what blessed and beatitude mean.
Beatitude comes from the Latin word beatus, meaning happy, fortunate, blissful. In the context of the gods in Elysium, it meant supremely happy, in a state of pure bliss. In the late fourth century, beatus was the word Saint Jerome opted for in his translation of the “blessed are” verses.
“I would expect that, like so many other Latin writers, Jerome was assuming that the meaning would enlarge within its textual context,” Latin scholar Harold Isbell tells me. “However don’t overlook the possibility that because Greek is a more nuanced language, it conveys degrees of meaning which the hard-headed Roman would not suspect. Then there is ‘beatific,’ as in ‘beatific vision,’ which in the Christian tradition of the west refers specifically to the vision of God, an entirely appropriate but quite unmerited fruit of God’s creative act.”
While most English Bibles use “blessed,” some modern translations prefer “happy”: “How happy are the poor of spirit . . .”
“‘Happy’ isn’t good enough,” Rabbi Steven Schwarzschild once told me. “The biblical translator who uses such a word should change jobs, maybe write TV comedies with nice, tidy, happy endings. The problem is that, if you decide you don’t like ‘blessed,’ there isn’t a single English word which can take its place. You might use a phrase like ‘on the right track’ or ‘going in the right direction.’ Sin means being off the track, missing the target. Being ‘blessed’ means you aren’t lost — you’re on the path the Creator intends you to be on. But what you recognize as a blessing may look like an affliction to an outsider. Exchanging ‘blessed’ for ‘happy’ trivializes the biblical word. You might as well sum up the Bible with a slogan like, ‘Have a nice day .’”
“Happy” in some respects makes for an unhappy translation. Its root is hap, the Middle English word for “luck.” The word happen is a daughter word. A happenstance approach to life is to let things happen as they will, to depend on the roll of the dice. To act in a haphazard manner is to do things by chance. To be hapless is to be unlucky, but to have good luck is to be a winner. The lucky person, the happy person, has things going his way. We say certain people were born under a lucky star — they seem to get all the breaks, everything from good looks to money in the bank.
The founding fathers of the United States, in declaring independence from Britain, recognized “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as inalienable rights. For them, the pursuit of happiness meant each person had the right to seek his own good fortune and not simply be the servant of another. In our era, in which happiness is somewhere between a human right and a social duty, many people feel guilty for failing to be continually happy.
But what about the word “blessed”? This was the word chosen by the translators of the Authorized Version in the seventeenth century. Blessed meant something consecrated to or belonging to God.
All the Gospels were first written in Greek. In those passages where “blessed” is a verb, the Greek is eulogeo (“to bless”) — an action associated with praise, thanksgiving and consecration, and therefore used in liturgical contexts. For example: “And as they ate, Jesus took bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘Take, eat, this is my body’.” (Mark 14:22)
Where “blessed” is used as an adjective, it is a translation of makarios. It is makarios which is used throughout the beatitudes. We also hear it also in such texts as, “Blessed are your eyes for they see, and your ears for they hear” and, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.” (Mt 13:16, 16:17)
In classical Greek makar was associated with the immortal gods. Kari means fate or death, but with the negative prefix “ma” the word means being deathless, no longer subject to fate, a condition both inaccessible and longed for by mortals. It was because of their immortality that the gods, the hoi Makarioi, were the blessed ones.
“The interesting thing about ashre [the Hebrew word for blessed] is that it is never, so far as I know, applied to God,” Archimandrite Ephrem Lash points out. “On the other hand the Greek makar starts life as precisely something which the gods are, though the related adjective makarios is more commonly applied to humans.”
In Christian use, makarios came increasingly to mean sharing in the life of God, the ultimate joy, a happiness without the fault lines of happenstance running through it. There is no higher gift. We are not simply capable of an abstract awareness that God exists or of studying God as an astronomer might study the night sky all the while knowing the stars are unbridgeable distances away, that their light may be centuries old by the time it reaches our eyes and that the objects which produced the light may no longer exist. The blessing extended to us is participation in the communion of the Holy Trinity, sharing in God’s immortality, and being blessed with qualities which seem humanly impossible.
So what does “blessed” mean? It means those who are already, in this life, risen from the dead, people whose choices are not driven by fear and death. “Risen from the dead are the poor in spirit… Risen from the dead are they who mourn…”
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[This is a slightly shortened extract from The Ladder of the Beatitudes by Jim Forest, published by Orbis Books, 1999; not to be published without the author’s permission]
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Here we would do well to look at the icon of the Last Judgment, the icon of Christ’s mercy to those who were merciful — but also of the hell we make for ourselves to the extent we reject mercy from our lives. We could spend a great deal of time studying the icon in detail. I cannot think of another icon with so much packed into it: Christ the main figure, the Theotokos on one side, John the Forerunner on the other, apostles in thrones on either side, archangels standing behind them. One tier below there are angels with scrolls, a way of showing that what each person did or failed to do is not forgotten. In that same tier on either side we see people awaiting judgment. There is also the snake-like dragon whose body serves as the pathway to hell. Much to think about! But time factors are such that I will focus on what is most basic in the image. It is a solemn warning the Church places before each of us, an uncomfortable reminder that we are held accountable for our lives. We will be judged. Indeed each day of our lives is a day of judgment. We are likely to be forever where we choose to be today. If you make hellish choices day after day, don’t be surprised if hell becomes your permanent address. Christ has already told us what we will hear at the Last Judgment. It’s rather surprising. We are not asked to recite the Lord Prayer’s or the Creed nor asked how often we attended church services or served on the parish council. We are asked if we loved Christ in the least person.
The recently canonized nun St. Maria of Paris — Mother Maria Skobtsova — gives us a dramatic example of what it is like to become a channel of Christ’s mercy.
In 1932 she made her monastic profession and became Mother Maria. Rejecting monastic enclosure, she leased a house in Paris with space enough for a chapel, a soup kitchen, and a shelter for destitute refugees. Her “cell” was a cot in the basement beside the boiler.
Though aware she was under Gestapo surveillance, she continued her work in behalf of Jews. To give up was out of the question, she told friends. A diary entry from that period of her life reveals the fidelity God had given her: “There is one moment when you start burning with love and you have the inner desire to throw yourself at the feet of some other human being. This one moment is enough. Immediately you know that instead of losing your life, it is being given back to you twofold.”
On the first weekend of May, Mother Maria, her son Yuri, Fr Dimitri and their friend and fellow martyr Ilya Fondaminsky were added to the Church calendar. People and clergy from many countries and jurisdictions came together to celebrate Christ’s victory over evil, fear and death through the witness given by these brave followers of the Gospel.
What is a pure heart? A heart free of possessiveness, a heart capable of mourning, a heart that thirsts for what is right, a merciful heart, a loving heart, an undivided heart, a heart free of distraction, a heart undamaged by lies.
The brain has come up in the world while the heart has been demoted to nothing more than the muscle in charge of pumping blood. But for thousands of years the heart was regarded as far more: the hub of human identity and our capacity to love, the core not only of our physical but of our spiritual life. The heart is where everything in us is held together. The heart was where we encountered God.
Seraphim grew up in a merchant family in Kursk and had his first vision of the mother of God when he was nine and in danger of death after a fall from scaffolding. He began monastic life in 1778, when he was nineteen. Years later, after ordination as a priest in 1793, he received permission to live in solitude in a log cabin several miles from his community. It was, he said, his “Holy Land.” Here he maintained a life of prayer, read the Bible, studied texts by and about the saints, tended his garden, chopped wood, and embraced austerities reminiscent of the Desert Fathers. Though he was once nearly beaten to death by three robbers who had heard there was a treasure hidden in his hermitage, he was never attacked by the wild animals he lived among. (When the assailants were later arrested, Seraphim tried to have them excused from their crime.) Visitors sometimes found him sharing his ration of bread with bears, wolves, lizards, and snakes. “How is it,” he was asked, “that you have enough bread in your bag for all of them?” “There is always enough,” Seraphim answered. On another occasion he explained that he, after all, understood fasting but the bear did not.
A few years ago in Moscow I had the opportunity to watch two restorers cleaning a large icon of Saint Nicholas. This too was a work of healing. They estimated the dark panel was three hundred years old. As decades passed and thousands of candles burned before it, the image had become increasingly hidden under smoke-absorbing varnish until the panel was almost black. Using alcohol and balls of cotton, their gentle, painstaking efforts gradually revealed sharp lines and bright colors that brought the icon back to life. I discovered I was witnessing a small resurrection.
I regard the icon of the Great Martyr St. George as an icon of peacemaking.
The dragon followed Elizabeth, says the Legenda Aurea of Blessed James de Voragine, “as if it had been a meek beast.” George was offered a great treasure as his reward but refused it, asking only that the local people, until then pagans, would prepare themselves to be baptized.
This wonderful tale emerged long after George had died a martyr’s death in the 4th Century. The real George battled no dragon and probably had no white horse. It isn’t even certain he was a soldier, though he may well have been and in older icons is shown wearing army clothing. Yet in another sense George and every Christian confessing his faith in a hostile world is battling dragons. George was living in the time of the persecutions of Diocletian and Maximian, when many Christians were being arrested and taken away to torturers and executioners. No one would have condemned him for keeping silent about his faith and hoping the storm would pass. Instead he had the courage to walk into a public square and shout, “All the gentile gods are devils. My God made the heavens and is the true God.” For this he was arrested and put to death. His witness is said to have led to the conversion of many and given courage to others who were already baptized. The dragon George fought against was his own fear and the panic some of those around them must have experienced in that period of many martyrs. But he battled not only fear. The dragon is a symbol of evil.
The icons of St. George slaying the dragon are simple but powerful images of the struggle against evil as well, as the fear that makes us complicit in evil. The white horse St. George rides is a graceful creature as light as air and as fearless as his rider — a symbol of the courage God gives to those willing to receive it. Notice how thin the spear is — nothing like an actual spear but at thin as a pencil. The point is that it is not a weapon in the usual sense. Another significant detail is the way George holds the spear — not tightly grasped but resting lightly in his hand. This means that it is the power of God, not the power of man, that overcomes evil. In many versions of the icon we see the actual nature of the martyr’s weapon in his battle with the dragon of evil — it is the power of the holy and life-giving Cross, the cross piece of which is shown at the top of the spear. There is also the dispassion in George’s face. It shows not a trace of anger, hatred or anxiety. Often the hand of the Savior is extended from heaven in a sign of blessing.
Peacemaking is not simply letting your hand hang by your side and doing no harm to others. It is taking part in the struggle against what St. Paul refers to as the principalities and powers. Indeed it is hard to think of a passage in the New Testament better matched to this icon than this section of St. Pauls’s letter to the Ephesians:
This brings us to the Pascal icons. Here are the first human witnesses of the Resurrection, who have come to the tomb to anoint the corpse of Jesus even though they were unsure how they would manage to gain access, as the tomb’s entrance was blocked by a large stone.
Perhaps even more striking is the icon of Christ harrowing Hell. This example is perhaps the best, not to be missed if every you can visit the Church at Chora in Istanbul. Icons often show what the unaided human eye cannot see, in this case Christ’s activity after his own death on the Cross. He is not simply a dead body in the sealed tomb but a warrior who has conquered the kingdom of death. Here see Christ standing on the demolished gates of the underworld, while Satan in chains is falling with his locks and keys into the abyss. Meanwhile Christ raises a man and a woman, Adam and Eve, from their tombs. It is one of the greatest of icons — if ever you visit Istanbul, please be sure to see it. Notice that behind Adam and Eve are those people referred to as “the righteous ancestors” — people who did not know the Gospel but who in various ways prepared the world for the Incarnation. Think of it! Adam and Eve! The two whose calamitous choices in Paradise unleashed the endless avalanche of sin that has troubled the human race down to the present moment. Yet they are first objects of Christ’s mercy in the kingdom of death. It’s a startling icon if you think about it. It’s an icon full of hope for each of us.
They are like rungs on a ladder which Christ has arranged in an exact order. There is a pattern to his arrangement. Each step builds on the foundation of the previous step, each leads to the next, and each is indispensable. We can’t divide them up, retaining those we find appealing and leaving those we don’t care for to others, as if one could specialize: “I’ll take peacemaking, you can have purity of heart.”
Saint John Climacus, one of the Desert Fathers, used the ladder metaphor for a more complex arrangement in his Ladder of Divine Ascent, a strategy of salvation which begins with the renunciation of worldly life and ascends through obedience, penitence, detachment, and humility in the daily struggle to enter more and more deeply into the love of God and freedom from everything that impedes that love. So far as I am aware, his is the only book that has given rise to its own icon: the image of a ladder with many rungs stretching from the desert toward the welcoming arms of Christ in the upper right-hand corner. The ladder is crowded with those who wish to enter the kingdom of God, but they are under attack by small demons armed with arrows, spears, and ropes. Succumbing to various temptations, some are shown falling off the ladder.
Let’s look at an icon of a saint whose life shows what poverty of spirit can look like. Here is one of the most famous of the Desert Fathers, St. Moses the Black, born about the year 330 or 332. As a young man he escaped from slavery only to become a notorious and dangerous criminal, head of a gang of 75 robbers. He was a large and powerful man regarded with dread in Egypt. His transformation began when he sought to hide among a community of monks. He was amazed that none of the monks were afraid of him. Their love and welcome astonished him. Finally he asked if he might stay. Here began his life of repentance, but his conversion was far from instantaneous. He had a difficult time adjusting to monastic discipline and the ascetic life. One of the many stories that survives is this: While living in a small cell, he was attacked by four robbers. Much to their surprise, Moses fought and overpowered them, tied them together and dragged them to the chapel where the other monks were praying, announcing that he didn’t think it was “Christian” to hurt them but then what should he do? Again the robbers were amazed, first to be conquered by a monk and now to hear the monk opposing their punishment. The robbers repented, were converted, and themselves became monks under the influence of Moses. Eventually a community of 75 monks — not all of them former robbers — were drawn to live around him while many others, both monks and lay people, came from far away to confess and seek his counsel.
However various the forms it takes, at the core of poverty of spirit is an attitude that we see in its most perfect form in Christ’s mother. Her unconditional assent to the will of God is a model for every Christian: “Be it done to me according to your word.” At the marriage feast at Cana, after drawing her son’s attention to the fact that there was no more wine, she instructs the servants of the feast, “Do whatever he tells you.” And this is what she is forever saying to each of us.
We next hear a report of Jesus weeping when he approached the tomb of his friend Lazarus, now dead four days. Before calling Lazarus back to life, he shared fully in the grief of Lazarus’s sisters and friends. In John’s Gospel the shortest verse is simply, “Jesus wept.” It is one of those events when we see Jesus first as true man, responding to death with grief, and then as true God, reviving a corpse.
One saint who symbolizes a life of mourning for past sins is Mary of Egypt, a woman of the fifth century. Explore any Orthodox church and probably you will find her icon — an emaciated, white-haired woman wearing little and standing among barren forms suggesting the desert. Each year during Lent, in every Orthodox parish, there is a public reading of the story of how Father Zosima, a monk who lived in the desert southeast of Jerusalem, one day caught sight of a human figure disappearing into the bushes. Pursuing the stranger, he heard her voice calling on him to turn his eyes away because she had no clothing. Father Zosima gave her his cloak, after which she spoke to him from a distance, telling him how, in Alexandria, she had abandoned herself to promiscuous pleasures and diversions. On a whim she joined a group of pilgrims going to Jerusalem, seducing some of them along the way. Then in Jerusalem she experienced a miracle. Looking at an icon of Christ’s mother in a church courtyard, a simple image of self-giving love and purity, she was overwhelmed with remorse. Afterward she entered the church. Venerating a relic of the cross, she heard a voice telling her, “If you cross the Jordan, you will find peace.” Taking these few words literally, for forty-seven years she lived a solitary life, praying day and night, fighting an invisible war with demons, surviving on plants and spring water. Father Zosima visited her a second time to bring her Communion. On his third visit, he discovered her dead body. She left a message in the sand to let him know she had died on the night of Christ’s passion.
In Dostoevsky’s crowning work, The Brothers Karamazov, there is the Christ-like monk, Father Zosima. He is based in part on a monastic elder personally known to Dostoevsky, Staretz Amvrosi of Optina. Many people travel long distances in order to see Fr Zosima even for a few minutes, to seek a word of advice, an answer to a question that tortures them, an assurance of forgiveness. On the last day of his life, Father Zosima tells his life story to his beloved young cell attendant, Alyosha Karamazov. He recalls that as a child, in a time of illness, God had entrusted him with a great truth, which he first expressed to his mother: “Each of us,” her told her, “is guilty in everything before everyone, and I most of all.” Of course she objects, telling her feverish son that, after all, he is no murderer or robber. The boy cannot explain or justify his truth, but assures her with even more conviction that “each of us is guilty before everyone, for everyone and everything.”
Christ’s first miracle — changing water into wine at the wedding in Cana — was done in meek submission to his mother’s appeal, after telling her that it wasn’t yet time. Her petition made it the time.
He was born in Russia in 1867, he went to seminary and afterward became a reader and choir director at a St. Petersburg parish. He felt unworthy of the priesthood but finally, encouraged by St. John of Kronstadt, accepted ordination. He was sent to serve a village 60 miles from the capital. As was the case for many priests, his meager salary was not enough. Side by side with his neighbors, he worked the land. Yet he also lived a life of mind and spirit, saving money to buy the writings of the Church Fathers. He was a parent as well — he and his wife had two daughters. His pastoral zeal was recognized — in 1916, age 49, he was made an archpriest. Then the next year, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, he was arrested, tortured and sentenced to death. Remarkably, his eldest daughter succeeded in freeing her father by offering herself as a hostage in his place. The effects of torture, however, remained with him for the rest of his life. Because of nerve damage, his right eye was always open wider than his left.
Saint Leo the Great, bishop of Rome in the fifth century, has a similar stress in his homily on the Beatitudes: “It is nothing bodily, nothing earthly, that this hunger, this thirst seeks for, but it desires to be satiated with the good food of righteousness and wants to be admitted to all the deepest mysteries, and be filled with the Lord Himself.” It is notable that Saint Leo, one of only three popes to be recognized as a doctor of the church, laid great stress on almsgiving and other social aspects of Christian life, for Christian life is less our ideas about God than how we live with those around us. To follow Christ and turn a blind eye toward the poor is a contradiction in terms.
The righteous person is someone in whom others, especially those in need, experience the mercy of God.
Perhaps a good place to start is to point out that, no less than the written word, an icon is an instrument for the transmission of Christian tradition. Tradition is such an important word. It comes from a Latin word, traditio, which means the handing over of something from one person to the next, not only the handing on of an object but also of information, instruction or doctrine. It could be a gold coin or it could be words of wisdom. Why do we do certain things, Tevia asks in “Fiddler on the Roof.” He answers with the single word, “Tradition!”
It’s like that with iconography. Just as the hands of many thousands of bakers, and centuries of bakers, stand behind each loaf of bread, the icon is more than the personal meditation of an individual artist or the work of only one person’s hands. Each icon is the fruit of many generations of believers, a chain of continuity uniting us to the actual witnesses of the resurrection. Through traditional sacred imagery, the Holy Spirit speaks to us, revealing truths that may not be evident to those using only the tools of word and reason.
As you can see even from a photo, it’s not an icon that has always lived a sheltered life. It has seen many wars, much suffering. Before this icon rivers of people have prayed from the depths of their hearts. It is an icon associated with many miracles.
There are many sightly different versions of this icon, all icons that can be called the Mother of God of Tenderness. The Vladimir icon is only the most famous example. In all of them we see Mary’s perfect devotion, a devotion so absolute that God finds in her the person who can both give birth to himself and who will ever after serve as the primary model of Christ-centered wholeness — the woman whom all generations will regard as blessed. In her assent to the angelic invitation, Mary said not only on behalf of herself and all her righteous ancestors but for all generations, “Yes, Lord, come!” Through her all humanity gives birth to Jesus Christ, and through Christ she becomes our mother.
In the Gospel, an anonymous voice praises Mary for having given birth to Jesus and having nursed him. Christ responds by remarking on what is still more important about his mother and all who follow him wholeheartedly: “Rather blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it.” She who gave birth to the Word of God also keeps it eternally. She was his first and best disciple.
But religious life is not all in the head. God made us physical beings and well as spiritual. The two are bound together — a unity of body and soul that God intends to be seamless. What we call the spiritual life is equally the physical life. A typical example is embracing the Cross spiritually while at the same time marking our body with the sign of the cross: a hidden action combined with a visible action. Without the inner action, the outer action is incomplete. The physical action, however, can be a powerful aid to achieving the inner action.
One day he was in an Orthodox Church in Moscow, quite possibly the same Epiphany Cathedral, standing in front of an icon when an old Russian woman approached him. She could see at a glance that Hannes was a foreigner. Few Russians could afford such clothing. And she could see he wasn’t Orthodox — he hadn’t crossed himself, he hadn’t kissed the icon. He was looking at it as one might look at a painting in a museum. “Where do you come from?” she asked. “Holland,” Hannes replied. “Oh yes, Holland. And are there believers in Holland?” “Yes, most people in Holland belong to a church.” But he could see the doubt in her face.
Consider this icon by St. Andre Rublev. It is a Pantocrator icon. Much of the image has been lost — damage suffered in the early years of the Communist revolution — but in the center the face survives. It is a kind of miracle. The icon, having been taken from the iconostasis of a monastery, was later found being used as a step in a barn. Now it is among the treasures in the care of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Look at the face of Christ. We see how the iconographer has sought to convey the awesomeness of the invisible and divine reality and to lead the viewer to an awareness of the divine presence. 
This is certainly a man but more than any man we have yet met. He looks at each of us with absolute knowing, and also with absolute care. It is the face of the God who made us in his image, the God who is the source of all love. It is not a soft love but a love that demands great things of us, a love that awaits our conversion, a love that invites us to live our lives in the kingdom of God, and to do so not later on but today, this very hour. We cannot look at this icon and be unaware of God. The icon makes us think of ourselves in relationship to God.
A third point: Icons guard against over-familiarity with the divine. For example, a Savior icon is not merely a sentimental painting but portrays both his divinity as well as his manhood, his absolute demands on us as well as his infinite mercy.
Here is a recently painted Pantocrator icon by a Bulgarian. This is definitely not “our dear friend Jesus” but someone who challenges all who meet him to live in a way that reveals the kingdom of God.
In icons the basic idea is to show a person transfigured by Christ. This is a blessedness beyond happiness. It’s something like standing before God. It doesn’t mean that sanctity is at odds with joy but that the joy involved is beyond smiles.
A fifth point: The icon is silent. No mouths are open nor are there any other physical details which suggest sound. But the silence is not empty. St. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, the disciple of St. John the Evangelist who was devoured by lions in Rome in the year 107, made the comment: “He who possesses in truth the word of Jesus can hear even its silence.” The stillness and silence of the icon, in the home no less than church, creates an area that constantly invites prayer. The deep and living silence which marks a good icon is nothing less than the silence of Christ. It is the very opposite of the icy stillness of the tomb. It is the silence of Mary’s contemplative heart, the silence of the transfiguration, the silence of the resurrection, the silence of the Incarnate Word.
A sixth point concerns the flatness of icons and inverse perspective. Icons avoid artistic techniques intended to create an illusion of three-dimensional space. The icon suggests space without attempting to escape the two-dimensional plane of the panel. Even slight violations of this two-dimensionality damage the icon’s meaning, just as a spoken word violates pantomime. The lighting of an icon is never explained by a single light source; light is within the image as well as exterior to it and illumines whoever stands before the icon. The image is reduced to a minimum of detail.
This Annunciation is a good example. It comes from the iconostasis of one of the cathedrals within the Moscow kremlin. We see the most essential elements and nothing more. Mary to the right, the Archangel Gabriel to the left. To suggest that Michael is a bodiless being, he is shown standing on his toes or perhaps floating. Angel comes from the Greek word angelos, messenger. As God’s messenger, he goes instantly wherever he is sent by God. His quickness to go at once wherever he is sent is symbolized by wings. In the icon, Mary has already said, “Be it done to me according to your word.” Already the Word has become flesh — revealed within her body is the unborn Christ. There is also the small detail of Mary holding a blood-red skein of yarn: by assenting to bear Christ, she is weaving our Salvation. It is an astonishingly simple icon. There is either nothing at all in the background, as in this case, or, if a setting is required, as in this icon of the wedding at Cana, it is rendered in the simplest, most austere manner. “Inverse perspective” is used. There is no single vanishing point. Objects expand where, according to the rules of perspective, they should contract. Lines move toward rather than away from the person at prayer before the icon. The vanishing point is not in illusory space behind the image but rather the viewer’s own heart.
Because nothing in our world can do better than hint at the beauty of the kingdom of God, natural objects are rendered in a vivid but symbolic, even abstract, manner. It is only in modern times that artists like Chagall have begun to rediscover the value of icons in ignoring rules of perspective and figures that defy gravity. Thus Chagall is able to show in this painting something about the nature of marital love that could not be revealed with such immediacy in a realistic painting of a husband and wife together in their kitchen. But then Chagall, though Jewish, grew up in a world of icons — a Ukranian town.
“Spiritual reality cannot be represented in any other way except through symbols,” commented the iconographer Leonid Ouspensky. Thus persons may be shown smaller or larger due only to reasons of their condition. In a Dormition icon, for example, the roles are reversed: it is no longer large Mary holding small Jesus but the other way around. Mary appears twice in the icon — her falling asleep in death in the foreground, then in the background herself but baby-sized in the hands of Christ.
On the subject Ouspensky writes: “There are no words nor colors nor lines which could represent the Kingdom of God as we represent and describe our world. Both theology and iconography are faced with a problem which is absolutely insoluble — to express by means belonging to the created world that which is infinitely above the creature. On this plane there are no successes, for the subject itself is beyond comprehension and no matter how lofty in content and beautiful an icon may be, it cannot be perfect, just as no word or image can be perfect. In this sense both theology and iconography are always failures. Precisely in this failure lies the value of both alike; for this value results from the fact that both theology and iconography reach the limit of human possibilities and prove insufficient. Therefore the methods used by iconography for pointing to the Kingdom of God can only be figurative, symbolical, like the language of the parables in the Holy Scriptures.” [The Meaning of Icons]
A seventh point: The icon should be unsigned. Sadly there are iconographers who violate the rule, but traditionally an icon is not a work of self-advertisement. This is an example of the icon called “Unmade by Human Hands.” It represents an image that resulted when Christ pressed his face against a linen cloth when King Abgar in Edessa appealed for Christ’s help. The cloth eventually went to Constantinople but was stolen and lost when Latin Crusaders took the city but countless icons inspired by the original cloth have come down to us. There is no signature nor even the iconographer’s initials. And here is one of the countless versions of the Icon of the Sign, which takes its name from a prophecy of Isaiah: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. A virgin will conceive and bear a son and shall call him Immanuel.” It is a masterpiece yet unsigned. The iconographer was interested in nothing more than drawing our attention to the mystery of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity becoming human. An unborn child, invisible to the world but made visible in the icon, riles the universe from his mother’s womb.
A seventh point: The icon is an act of witness. As Thomas Merton explained to a correspondent belonging to a Quaker friend, whose church avoids religious imagery of any kind, “What one ‘sees’ in prayer before an icon is not an external representation of a historical person, but an interior presence in light, which is the glory of the transfigured Christ, the experience of which is transmitted in faith from generation to generation by those who have ‘seen,’ from the Apostles on down…. So when I say that my Christ is the Christ of the icons, I mean that he is reached not through any scientific study but through direct faith and the mediation of the liturgy, art, worship, prayer, theology of light, etc., that is all bound up with the Russian and Greek tradition.”
The iconographer cannot show us the uncreated light that was revealed to Peter, John and James that day in Galilee but has to suggest it. We could easily find dozens of icons that show the light that exploded from Christ in strikingly different ways. There would also be many variations of composition and color. But in all Transfiguration icons we are invited to participate with these three Apostles in knowing Christ’s divinity. We do at times find his face too bright to look at.