Icons

Pigment suspended in hot wax — the technique of Roman funerary portraiture, still in use when this was painted and abandoned soon after. It survives because Sinai lay beyond the reach of the emperors who ordered icons destroyed in the eighth century, so the monastery kept a small group of panels that exist nowhere else.

The thing to look at is the face, and the way to look at it is to cover one half and then the other. They are not the same man. On one side the eye is wide and level, the brow calm, the mouth composed; on the other the eye is larger and darker, the brow heavier, the mouth pulled slightly down. Byzantine writers never mention the asymmetry, and the familiar modern reading — divinity on one side, humanity on the other — is a theology supplied by later viewers, not signed by the painter.

What is not in doubt is whose face this was taken to be. The Jesus Prayer names it: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner — repeated until, in the hesychast phrase, it descends from the mind into the heart.

The Menologion of Basil II is an imperial liturgical calendar made in Constantinople around 985, with more than four hundred miniatures. Unusually for Byzantine painting, the painters signed it — eight names appear in the margins, which is why we can say something about who made a Byzantine manuscript at all.

Gregory opens this sequence because the negative way is his before it is anyone else’s. In the Life of Moses he takes the verse where “Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was” (Exodus 20:21) and builds an entire doctrine of ascent on it: the soul climbs from light into cloud into darkness, and the darkness at the top is not the point at which the climb fails but the point at which it succeeds. To arrive is to find that God exceeds arrival — so the desire is never exhausted, and its inexhaustibility is the vision.

Dionysius, writing perhaps a century later, inherits the figure of Moses entering the dark and makes it the frame of the Mystical Theology. He does not invent it. Gregory’s homilies on Ecclesiastes are on this site’s mystics shelf, complete.

Emmanuel Tzanes (c. 1610–1690) was a Cretan priest and painter who left for Corfu and then Venice as the Ottomans closed on Candia; his panels are the late Cretan school at its most controlled, Byzantine in form with Venetian modelling in the flesh.

Dionysius is given the omophorion of a bishop of Athens. Every element of that is a claim the corpus makes for itself and modern scholarship denies: that its author was the Athenian judge converted by Paul on the Areopagus (Acts 17:34), that he was present at the Virgin’s dormition, that he saw the sun fail at the crucifixion. The texts in fact date from around 500 and depend, at times almost verbatim, on the pagan philosopher Proclus, who died in 485.

The doubt is old. Hypatius of Ephesus raised it at Constantinople in 532, and Valla and Erasmus pressed it hard in the Renaissance — well over a century before Tzanes picked up this panel. So this is a portrait of a man who never existed, painted with complete conviction, long after the conviction was available to be doubted. The tradition kept the books and kept the face.

Painted in 1780 by Leontios of the Monastery of Saint Herakleidios in Cyprus, and commissioned — the icon’s own record says — by a hierodeacon named Dionysius and a hieromonk named Hierotheos: two monks paying jointly for a panel of their own name-saints.

Hierotheos is the figure worth stopping on. In the Dionysian corpus he is the author’s teacher, the man who taught him the divine names, who spoke at the Virgin’s dormition, and whose Elements of Theology the author claims to be merely supplementing for beginners. No such book has ever been found and no such person is otherwise attested. He is an authority the writer invented to stand behind himself — a master conjured to give the pseudonym a lineage and a depth.

By 1780 the invention had a feast day, a fixed iconographic type, a monastery workshop that knew how to paint him, and two Cypriot monks carrying his name. This is what a successful fiction looks like twelve hundred years on.

From a Slavonic manuscript of the Ascetical Homilies copied in 1518 by Ioasaf Khokholek, a monk of the Kirillo-Belozersky monastery in the Russian north — a thousand years and two thousand miles from where the homilies were written.

Isaac was ordained bishop of Nineveh in the seventh century, lasted about five months, and withdrew to the mountains for the rest of his life. He belonged to the Church of the East, the communion Byzantium called Nestorian and held to be heretical. His homilies were translated from Syriac into Greek at the monastery of Mar Saba in Palestine, the awkward question of his church quietly not raised, and from there they travelled into Greek and then Slavic monasticism and became one of the most read books in it.

He is the source of a great deal of what the later tradition says about tears, about the prayer of the heart, and about a mercy so wide it takes in even the demons. Wensinck’s 1923 English translation is the next text queued for this site’s mystics shelf.

Painted at Sinai around the middle of the twelfth century, for the monastery whose abbot John Climacus had been some five hundred years earlier. Thirty rungs, for the thirty chapters of his book and the thirty hidden years of Christ’s life before the Jordan.

Monks climb; Christ leans from the top right to receive them; ranks of angels attend above. And black winged demons, drawn small and busy, drag climbers off with ropes and hooks — not only near the bottom but at every height, including one man within reach of Christ’s hand. That placement is the icon’s argument, and it is not a comfortable one: no rung is safe, and the higher you are the further there is to fall. At the foot a small group of monks stands looking up, praying, not yet on the ladder at all.

Step 27 of the book is On Stillness — hesychia, the word the whole movement is named for. It is there that Climacus gives the instruction the hesychasts built a practice on: let the remembrance of Jesus be joined to your breathing, and then you will know what stillness is worth.

Attributed to a Northern Greek master, most likely working in Thessalonica in the first years of the fifteenth century. Palamas had been archbishop of that city and died there in 1359, so this was made where he had worked, perhaps fifty years on, by painters whose own teachers could have seen him.

The argument he made is the reason this page holds together. Barlaam of Calabria, a learned Greek from Italy, had attacked the Athonite monks for claiming to see the divine light in prayer: God, he held, is unknowable in principle, so what the monks saw was either a created effect or a delusion — and he mocked their bodily technique of breathing and posture in the process.

Palamas answered with a distinction. God’s essence is and remains forever unknowable, exactly as the apophatic tradition insists. God’s energies are God himself, really given and really encountered — not a created substitute passed down at a distance. On that hinge the negative way avoids ending in agnosticism: God cannot be known, and God is genuinely met, and both are said of the same God without contradiction.

From the cathedral of the Saviour’s Transfiguration at Pereslavl-Zalessky, attributed to Theophanes the Greek: a Byzantine painter who came north around 1370, worked in Novgorod and then Moscow, taught Andrei Rublev, and carried the visual habits of the hesychast century with him into Russia.

Christ stands on Tabor between Moses and Elijah. The three disciples below are not kneeling in reverence — they are thrown down the rock, sprawling, one of them pitched head-downward. Whatever is happening above is registered underneath as impact.

The thing to look at is how the light is built. Christ stands in a disc of pale silver-blue, ring within ring, raked with fine gold lines; out of it a white star breaks in long points that pass beyond the disc and reach the men on the ground. The light is not rendered as brightness — the gold ground around it is warmer and in places brighter than the mandorla itself. It is rendered as structure and force: geometry above, bodies knocked over below. Theophanes’ signature is in those white strokes, laid hard on top of the modelling rather than blended into it, so that the light sits on the surface of things instead of seeming to come from within them.

Elsewhere in the tradition the same problem is solved the other way about, by darkening the mandorla toward its centre until the core is almost black — the visual equivalent of what Dionysius does in words when he writes of what outshines all brilliance by the intensity of its darkness. This panel does not do that. Both are attempts at the same impossible commission: to paint a light its own tradition calls uncreated, and therefore not a thing the eye or the pigment can hold.

A miniature from the collected theological works of John VI Kantakouzenos, copied at Constantinople in the 1370s. The emperor presides; the bishops are ranged on either side; the synod is that of 1351, held in the Blachernae palace.

Kantakouzenos convened the councils — 1341, 1347, and this one — that vindicated Palamas and condemned his opponents in turn. Then in 1354 he abdicated and became a monk, and the same manuscript contains the portrait he is best known by, in which he appears twice in one frame: emperor in purple, and monk in black.

What the 1351 synod did was make the essence-and-energies distinction the official teaching of the Byzantine church, binding rather than merely defended. Orthodox writers sometimes therefore count these among the ecumenical councils and call this the Ninth — a claim no one outside the East accepts, and one that sits awkwardly next to the seven this site lists. It is the sharpest single instance of the East and the West having stopped counting the same things.

The only plate here taken from a living face, and it shows: what looks out of the dark is a particular old man — heavy-browed, tired, unidealised — rather than a type. Seraphim (1754–1833) spent some fifteen years as a forest hermit near Sarov and several more in strict reclusion before he opened his door and began receiving anyone who came.

He closes this lineage on the strength of one conversation. In the winter of 1831 a layman, Nikolai Motovilov, asked him what “the acquisition of the Holy Spirit” actually meant. By Motovilov’s account Seraphim took him by the shoulders in a snowy clearing and told him to look at him — and what he describes then is a face too bright to hold in view, snow falling on them both and not melting, warmth and a scent of summer, and his own eyes failing.

The record is Motovilov’s alone, written up long afterwards and not published until 1903, the year Seraphim was canonised. It is testimony, not evidence. But what it claims is precise: the uncreated light of plate VIII, met in an ordinary Russian winter five hundred years after Palamas argued that such a thing was possible — and by a layman, not a monk.