Christ Pantocrater
VIEW FROM THE PEW
It was one of those Biblical texts that brought out the writer and editor in me. The evangelist John quoted Jesus, making his farewell to the Apostles, as saying “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot hear it now.”
It was just the thing to distract; the worst thing to tell a journalist is that there is more to the story but you can’t have it. But I did keep tuned to the Gospel message on Trinity Sunday introducing the Apostles to the Holy Spirit who would “guide you to all truth” and Father’s homily reminding us of all the ways the third person of the Holy Trinity embraces and enlightens us.
Although I’m a word person, I confess it was the picture described by Father Clyde Guerreiro that stuck with me. It was of the large stained-glass window in St. Augustine Church which contains, among other images, a beachside encounter with a man watching a small child digging in the sand with a clamshell. I’m betting that most people see it as a charming connection to Waikiki beach across the street from the church.
Actually, it’s a depiction of a tale about St. Augustine who, four hundred years after Jesus, was pondering the Holy Trinity. One God in three persons; how can?
When the eminent Christian philosopher and theologian asked the child what he was doing, the answer was that he was scooping the sea into the hole he’d dug. Impossible, said the man. The child answered that “It is more possible for me to move the entire sea into this hole than it is for you to understand the Holy Trinity.”
The child was presumably an angel and the legend has been depicted in art since medieval times. It’s the most engaging possible picture of a saint of Augustine’s stature. He was one of the earliest heavyweight scholars whose efforts to explain, interpret and codify Christ’s teachings are the foundation of Christian beliefs today. Think of him when we recite the Nicene Creed. Much as we may honor a father of the church, it’s hard for a bearded intellectual in robes to inspire an artist.
Christian religious beliefs and saints and stories have been depicted in fine art, and some not so fine, as western culture developed and Christianity spread. Living in a time when we are flooded, battered with photos, videos and cartoons, urban murals and photo-shopped fakery, it’s hard to grasp how engaging a storytelling painting or a glorious stained-glass window would have been in the past.
From my pew every Sunday, I look across at the stained-glass array which includes another bearded, robed saint, Joseph of Arimathea. With only a few words about him in Scripture, he was a favorite for religious art. After Jesus was crucified, this was the wealthy, influential man who provided the tomb for his burial. He is usually shown in the heart-wrenching scene holding the body of Jesus at the foot of the cross.
That Sunday vision often takes me down memory lane, to when we saw a painting of Joseph in his much happier times. The art was on view at St. Anne’s Church in downtown Dublin. Our Irish friend has just pointed out that, despite our American Catholic assumption, this is an Anglican — Protestant — church, so notice what’s missing, such as a tabernacle.
Then a garrulous old guy took on the role of tour guide and pointed out that the fella in the painting was Joseph of Arimathea. He launched into a tale of a man who had traveled all the way to the British Isles after attending to the burial of Jesus in Jerusalem a few years earlier. As the story goes, St. Joseph was one of the disciples sent forth to preach the Gospel as far away as Britain. And, ahem, he was in possession of the chalice that Jesus used at the Last Supper. This was all news to us and we listened to our guide with doubt but without scoffing. But when he pointed out that Joseph was three centuries ahead of St. Patrick in bringing Christianity to Ireland, that was too much for us. We three exited the church and marched to a nearby pub to discuss the unlikely tale.
It turns out that we were woefully ignorant of a widely believed legend in England. I was fan of the stories of King Arthur and the knights of the roundtable, and knew the myths spun around their quest to find the Holy Grail. But I guess I never questioned how the grail, the sacred chalice, came to be in England. I never made it to England so I haven’t toured Glastonbury Abbey, where Joseph of Arimathea was allegedly buried.
That Joseph traveled far from his roots in Judea to do missionary work in the isles is a tale embraced by writers and artists in the Middle Ages. It was expanded with versions that Joseph brought along Mary, the mother of Jesus, and even that he had previously brought the child Jesus to England. There’s a line in a poem by William Blake, “Jerusalem,” that hints at the divine visitor. “And did those feet in ancient times …” is a line from an English hymn based on the poem.
I guess it is both awesome and awful that the Creator made humankind with such limitless imagination and curiosity and self-esteem that we want to do some creating ourselves.
As western civilization developed, the Catholic Church was open to artists interpreting the life of Jesus and saints and Christian teaching. But humans can go off course. So there are some hierarchical boundaries.
One widely pictured and believed legend is of St. Christopher, a martyr to Roman persecution in the Fourth Century. It showed the hefty saint giving a child a piggyback ride across a river. As the legend goes, the man could hardly make it as his passenger got heavier and heavier. As he reached shore, the Christ Child revealed himself and that, with him aboard, the saint had borne the weight of the world. Who didn’t have a Christopher medal, an amulet of the patron saint of travelers to keep you safe?
Here’s where the hierarchical boundaries come in. In 1969, Pope Paul VI stripped Christopher and 92 other saints of their feast days in the liturgical calendar. Church scholars found there was no historical evidence of the St. Christopher legend. He and the others were not “de-sainted,” so their names and stories are still out there — and the medals for travelers are still on sale. You’ll be amazed at who else was deleted from the liturgical calendar for lack of evidence; look it up.
Religions that ban images
Freedom of expression by writers, painters and sculptors was too universal to be contained even by the church.
That’s not so true in other religious traditions. You won’t find a statue or painting in a Jewish synagogue or a Muslim mosque. The Torah, scrolls containing the first books of the Old Testament, the law delivered by Moses from God, is the icon in Judaism.
Muslims are forbidden to depict their prophet Mohammed, and zealots try to apply that belief to non-believers, as we’ve seen in attacks on media cartoonists.
In the Protestant revolution in the 1500s, statues in churches were part of the elements of Catholicism that were discarded.
Orthodox Christianity, the eastern branch of our faith, also remains rigid in its depiction of God, Jesus, his followers, the saints through the ages. Icons are the art in Orthodox churches. Iconography is an art form that uses traditional, conventional images instead of the free-ranging imagination of the artist. Jesus is shown with a lamb, St. Peter with keys to the kingdom, St. Helen with the true cross which she found, according to legend; you will find them the same in whatever country, perhaps with variations in the vibrance of the colors and gilding, which is a traditional icon feature.
A Hawaii Catholic Herald reader recently wrote of her visit to the Basilica of St. Paul’s Outside the Walls, a fourth-century church just outside the boundary wall of Rome. One of the oldest Christian churches, it contained the sepulcher of St. Paul. So, considering its age, the church mosaics are all in the iconic tradition. It also includes medallion-style depictions of all the popes from Peter to Francis. That is an artistic endeavor that has developed its own legend. The diminishing available wall space has led to a limited number of future pope portraits. And true to our love of legends, that has led to a prediction that when it gets to the end of space, expect the end of the world.
Although I missed Glastonbury Abbey in England, I had the opportunity to spend time at Glenstal Abbey in County Limerick, Ireland. The Benedictines who live and work there are totally into the modern world, running a boy’s school and a publishing company that produces musical, historical and devotional books and CDs. The church was amazing, bright with primary colors, and the blended voices of monks chanting the Divine Office at the seven devotional hours of each day still echo in my head. I have the help of a Glenstal CD that I occasionally share with the neighborhood. Staying in the guest house, observing monastic silence everywhere including the dining room, what a religious experience.
But no other time of it can eclipse a visit to the archives in the climate-controlled cellar where priceless icons are stored. Images of Christ, his mother and disciples were painted on wood and in the first centuries after Jesus lived, they were venerated as precious memories of the founding of Christianity. The monk who unveiled these small, dark images reaching back to the first centuries of Christianity said that this is as close as we will ever come to knowing what these people really looked like.
In a brochure about the icons, the writer said that a viewer looking at a painting in a museum feels he is standing outside and looking into it. He wrote that people spending time before an icon may experience the feeling that it is you who is being seen.
Christ Pantocrater, which means “Christ the Ruler,” is one of the oldest known Byzantine icons dating back to the sixth century, found at a monastery in Sinai, Egypt. We were looking at an 18th-century copy. The image of Jesus uses traditional symbols, one hand outstretched toward the viewer, the other holding a book with a passage from St. Mark’s Gospel: “Come to me, all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”
It is the picture of a slender dark-haired man with dark eyes, a Middle Eastern Semitic man. Each of us said afterward that “I felt he was looking at me.”
The enterprising monks have a recorded reflection for icon viewers. I found the words of Father Stephen Morris when I revisited the Glenstal website. “Join me in the gazing. In Christ, God now has a human face. It is an all-compassionate face.”
“Forbearing eyes of Christ, shine light into the world’s wounds … of militarization, child neglect, bio-destruction and economic wonder.
“May we be healed of our confident indocility, energy-stealing anxieties, compulsions, addictions, indifference, resentments.”
“In Christ there is no longer earth-here and heaven-there. His merciful eyes jump the gap.”
