Mani (33 page)

Byzantium fell, and the tears on ikons of the All-Holy One were not, to the awestruck Romaic world, the tears of the Mater Dolorosa for her Son, but the tears of a celestial Empress (and, beyond question, a Greek one) bewailing the death of the
last terrestrial Emperor of the Greeks and the desecration by infidels of Orthodoxy's central shrine. They were shed for the dispersal of her clergy and the falling silent of her bells and gongs; for the sprouting of minarets and the insult of the first muezzin's call. The Pantocrator retreated more inaccessibly into his golden zenith.

Perhaps it would have been better for Orthodoxy in the end, whatever the aesthetic loss, if the symbolism of religious painting and the arcane splendour of the liturgy had been less lofty and abstruse. For the clergy's task, in the ensuing Dark Ages (whose beginning exactly coincided with the Renaissance in the West and only ended in the Industrial Revolution), was the actual physical survival of their flock: its spiritual welfare was left to bare forms of sacrament and liturgy. Scholarship died. Spiritual development fossilized. Falling static at the time of the catastrophe, Orthodoxy became the most conservative of religions. All but rudimentary teaching vanished. But the forms became more august and venerable, more apt an emblem of lost glory and more hermetic a token of national continuity the further they floated from everyday understanding. In this new function the Church grew in power and became steadily more beloved and revered; the less religion functioned as a vehicle of the Christian ethic, the more holy it grew as the sole guarantee of survival. “Christian” and “Orthodox” became negative words and lost their meaning as moral or doctrinal terms; the former came to signify little more than non-Moslem, the latter—with “Romios” the paradoxical antonym of “Latin,” the epithet of the hated Catholics of the West who, with the Crusades, were the first to destroy the Orthodox Empire and make straight the way for Islam—meant, precisely, Greek.

Long gone were the days when the subtle Eastern theologians could with difficulty make the blunt Western prelates grasp the delicate shades of dogma; indeed the shoe was on the
other foot. But the outward observances, the liturgy, some of the sacraments, prostrations, rigorous fasts, frequent signs of the cross, the great feasts of the Church—the cross thrown into the sea at Epiphany, the green branches of Palm Sunday, the candles and coloured eggs celebrating the risen Christ at Easter, the monthly censing of houses, and the devotion to ikons before which an oil-dip twinkles in every house—all this became rigid and talismanic: and so it has remained. Its scope is different from what is usually conjured up in the West by the word “Christianity”; but there is a tendency in the most peaceful nations to identify religion with the tribe and the reasons in Greece are more cogent than most. All the outward and visible signs are there and it would be a bold critic who would unburden them completely of inward and spiritual grace. There is nothing laggard or perfunctory about these signs; they are performed with reverence and love. They have the familiarity and the treasured intimacy of family passwords and countersigns. The day is punctuated by these fleeting mementoes, and pious landmarks in the calendar, usually solemnized with dance and rejoicing, space out the year; with the result that few gestures are wholly secular. They weave a continuous thread of the spiritual and supernatural through the quotidian homespun and ennoble the whole of life with a hieratic dignity. There is a deep substratum of virtue and innocence in the Greek character which is very distinct, and much more positive a thing than the universal truism of peasant simplicity—compared to this general norm they are old in guile and sophistication. It is a trait which has weathered barbarian influx and foreign dominion. It may be a survival of ancient Greek
areté
and love of excellence, the survival of Christian teaching in the past or a by-product of the ecological influences of the Greek sea and mountains and light. The sky here exorcizes and abolishes the principle of intrinsic wickedness. Perhaps it is a triune conjunction of all three. The chief of the cardinal virtues, charity (when
it is not obscured by the hot fumes of individual, family, party or national feud-spirit), they possess in an overwhelming degree.

The very Greekness of the liturgy bolsters up the warm tribal feeling. The fact that the Greek of the Epistles and Gospels is in Alexandrian
koiné
of the first century, and the main fabric of the Mass in the elaborate Byzantine language of St. John the Golden-Mouthed and none of it later than the seventh—all this flings the Greek mind back, once more, to past ages of incredible splendour and venerability. The language, largely incomprehensible to the unlettered faithful, sets it at a remove and doubles its wonder and numinosity and talismanic power. (Perhaps the word
mysterion
, the Greek for “sacrament,” as well as “mystery,” and the Last Supper being called “the Mystic Feast,” deepens this feeling.) This abstruseness is a source of pride and proprietorship different in its nature to the Latin of the Roman rite. The saintly idiom, though it has floated up beyond their grasp, is their own, the language, as it were, that their great-grandfathers spoke in happier days. It is a family affair and Our Lord and Our Lady and their enormous saintly retinue have long since become honorary fellow-countrymen. Although they never follow the liturgy in a parallel text, the congregation know some of the basic prayers and anthems since childhood and the identity of many scattered fragments in these two phases of Greek—the liturgical and the spoken—conveys an inkling of what is afoot. They lean back in their stalls and the long hours of chanting evolve round them in a magnificent and half-penetrable cloud of sound, an interweaving of canon and invocation and antiphon, of troparia and kondakia, of the canticle of the Cherubim, the Symbol of Nicaea, the litanies of the Faithful and of the Catachumens, perhaps the hymn of the Akathistos, of Cassia or the Myrrh-bringers, the constant renewal of the doxology and the multiple iteration of the Kyrie Eleison; all intoned or chanted, strangely
syncopated in the minor mode of oriental plainsong, in a ritual tangle of hovering neums and quarter-tones.
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There is no feeling of tension in the Orthodox service, no climax of awed silence at the moment of miracle, followed by an unwinding. In spite of its name, and whatever its intent, it is unmystic in atmosphere. But it is dramatic. It is a gleaming and leisurely—almost a sauntering—pageant. Much of the drama unfolds behind the iconostasis, that roodscreen dividing the nave from the chancel; priests and deacons, their beards flowing and their long hair uncoiled over coruscating vestments, make processional entrances and exits, swinging thuribles bearing candles or a metal bound gospel, through the outside two of the three doors in this screen; doors which some scholars derive from the three thresholds in the proscenium of ancient Greek tragedy. The central door was reserved, they say, for the protagonist at the play's climax; and, indeed, the celebrant only emerges from it to-day when he proffers the sacred vessels after the elevation. There is no excessive simulacrum of piety in the deportment of the officiating clergy. Their heads are flung back and the eyes above their singing mouths are cast up into the air in a mild unfocused gaze. Something tired, patrician and relaxed informs their gait and the deacons with their sweeping dalmatics and wide stoles, their youthful beards, their long dark hair and the lustrous wide eyes that illuminate their wax-pale faces, have the air of Byzantine princes who in martyrdom might turn into St. Stephen or St. Sebastian. The older clergy resemble minor prophets. The great dignitaries, who are always adorned with vast spreading beards and usually very tall (the
thought has sometimes crossed my mind that Orthodox preferment may be a matter of height), glitter with golden copes and pectoral ornaments and snake-topped crosiers. With their white locks mitred with gem-studded globular crowns, they resemble pictures of God the Father. But, except at grave moments, an easy-going, paternal benevolence often leavened by the glint and the wrinkles of humour, stamps the faces of these deities. Their faces hint at an antique knowledge of their own and mankind's fallibility; they betoken tolerance of back-sliding and quickness to forgive. Their anathema is reserved for temporal targets.

The evolutions of all these figures against the effulgence of gilding and fresco and mosaic and brocade themselves form a kind of moving ikon, but familiarity and glory are so blended that the whole office suggests a leisurely morning in one of the remoter courtyards of Paradise. The chanting continues, candles glimmer before ikons encrusted with beaten silver, the iconostasis towers like a jungle of gold, topped with a cross guarded by two coiling dragons, incense drifts through the columns, and, if it is a great feast, the crushed basil scattered underfoot sends up its additional fragrance. Remote and benign divinities shine in the cupolas and the apse, and round the drum that upholds the Pantocrator's dome a legion of angels open their wings in a ring. A bland, non-committal and avuncular troop of painted saints populate the walls and a quiet, reassuring and universal benevolence, dropping softly as dew, seems to descend on the congregation. The mind is lulled. It is a fitting and comforting and mildly supernatural occasion, a family reunion both in the literal and the Confucian sense. Very little—except perhaps something in the spiritual outlook of the faithful—has changed in the slow punctilio of word and gesture and music for thirteen hundred years. For the last five hundred, almost nothing. Both as a manifesto of Greek continuity and as an historical survival it is precious and unique.

* * *

I have taken ikon-painting as the epitome of the long stasis of the Orthodox Church; perhaps rather arbitrarily.
[5]
Even the moderately informed on such matters know that there were, indeed, different schools and even renaissances, in the history of Byzantine art, and very interesting they are. But in no case are these deviations from the essential canon as great as the gaps that yawn between great schools of the West, or as revolutionary as the Italian Renaissance. But I am only concerned here with one facet of this absorbing subject: the interaction of the Greek religion and Greek religious art.

The installation of the Turks in Constantinople and their occupation of all Greek lands was, to all but bare survival, a circular glare of the Medusa's head. Luxuries like spiritual thought and painting were Gorgon-struck. The task of the clergy and of the ikon-painters was not progress or creation but sheer maintenance; things had to be kept intact until better days dawned. Religion and religious art, already contained by strict rules, became inflexible. The result was stagnation in religion, and in art, endless repetition and, at last, degeneration. Iconography remained intellectual, lofty and remote but learning dried up and with it the power to apprehend the abstruse messages implicit in Byzantine art. Unquestioning and uncomprehending formalism followed. The meaning of the equations behind cypher and symbol retreated and the almost algebraic notation itself
become an object of cult. The overbred, long-fingered Byzantine hands were thickening on the plough.... Perhaps in this lean period a different and more accessible kind of ikon-painting, a lowering of the intellectual sights from head to heart, would have served their strictly religious purposes better.

Plenty of indications exist that during the late Middle Ages an opposite trend to Byzantine inflexibility was in being. It might have gained momentum if the Fall of the Empire had not condemned it to stillbirth. It might have changed the whole nature of Byzantine art. I refer to the “pathetic,” to a loosening of the stern rules of iconography, an accompaniment of the austere and cerebral idiom by an address to the emotions. The most important of these symptoms appear in the renaissance that followed the recapture of Constantinople by the Greeks after the sixty-odd years of the Latin Empire that followed the Fourth Crusade. The impulse had sprung up in the hardy exiled empire of the Lascarids at Nicaea. In Constantinople it flowered under the beginnings of the last dynasty, the Palaeologues, in the late thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, and appeared at its best on the mosaics of the Church of St. Saviour in Chora,
[6]
not far from the Theodosian walls. These mosaics were placed there, along with his own portrait, by Andronicus II Palaeologue's Great Logothete, Theodore Metochites, who, on the strength of his extraordinary headdress, has already appeared in these pages.
[7]
In the scenes from the Life of the Virgin there is an appealing gentleness, a fluidity of motion and an unbending from the austere regulation postures that is full of tenderness and human warmth and pity. The mosaic persons are still traditionally moonfaced, but a pulse begins tentatively to beat, the symbol and content merge.... Some have proposed, and others have fairly convincingly scouted, the hypothesis that
this iconographic trend is an Eastern reflection of the Italian
trecento
brought about by a West to East cultural traffic incidental to the Crusades. It seems clear, however, that the tendency was autochthonously generated, a spontaneous upsurge of new vitality in Byzantium's ancient frame. This Indian summer was soon to be extinguished.

In fact, the tide of influence flowed all the other way, in a steady movement which began long before the earliest glimmer of the Italian Renaissance. The Byzantine share in Italian primitive art needs no underlining. It was not, as former authorities were wont to assume, a mass swoop westwards, as from a Pandora's box suddenly prised open, of all the treasures of the Greek world at the Fall, which a happy coincidence of dates seemed once to suggest. There is little in the Byzantine Middle Ages to indicate a reciprocal Frankish influence, certainly nothing comparable to that of Byzantium on, say, St. Mark's in Venice. It is surprising, on the other hand, how little the Western plastic techniques of the Crusaders were influenced locally in their fiefs of the Greek world and Outremer. The Gothic churches of Cyprus and the omnipresent castellated ruins remain as alien to their setting as the Anglican Cathedral in Calcutta and British cantonments in Rawalpindi and Hong Kong, or, for that matter, in Nicosia. There was, however, a slight trickle of influence from West to East. In literature this took the shape of a few charming and artificial verse romances, an Eastern echo of chivalric prototypes that is very insipid compared to the vigour of the true Byzantine heroic vernacular in the great saga of Digenis Akritas. Perhaps a more interesting contribution may be observed in the Western exonarthex of Daphni, if, that is, the frescoes there are not contemporary with those of the rest of the church, but two centuries after and later than the Crusades, as Dr. Angelos Procopiou, to the consternation of many, has recently suggested. Here the same “pathetic” trends, comparable to those of the Chora, can be
observed. Mr. Procopiou's proposition has not yet been either ratified or destroyed by outside authoritative opinion, but his case is most seductively argued. The Western influences that he detects are those of the Siennese school and particularly of Duccio di Buoninsegua; and this hypothetical merging of the two trends he attributes to the tolerant attitude of the Frankish dukes of Athens, of the De La Roche family.
[8]
Intermarried with Greek princesses, both Catholic and Orthodox clergy frequented their Court in a brief ecclesiastical truce and this harmony may have loosened the iconographic barriers for Western infiltration. It is an inviting thought.