If we want to understand what a theological statement is — and
that applies not only to written statements but also to icons, I should think
the nearest approximation would be to say that theological statement either in
words or in lines, or colours, or indeed in music, or in the pageant which the
liturgical service is, is very much like the sky at night. What is
characteristic of the sky at night is that we see against the darkness of the
sky, the translucent darkness of the sky, we see stars, which are combined in
constellations. These stars are points of light and these constellations are
recognisable, so that by looking at the sky at night we can find our way on
earth; but what is important in the sky at night is all these stars are separate
from one another by vast spaces. If you collected all the stars in one place,
you would indeed have in front of you a glowing mass of fire but you would have
no pointer to any direction, you would be unable to find your way not only in
heaven but also on earth. What is important is the vastness between the stars
and so are also the statements which are being made theologically, again in word
or in line, in colour. They give us a glimpse and they leave a vast space into
which we must penetrate in silence, in veneration. And the silence and
veneration which is paid to them, I think, can be well expressed by the word
“mystery”.
I know that in colloquial language “mystery” is something
mysterious, something which is secrete, hidden and should be unveiled and seen
through. The Greek word “mystery” comes from a verb “muen”, which means “to be
spell-bound”, to be held absolutely mute in silence because of the deep
impression something makes on us. It has given the French word “muet” which
means “dumb”. Confronted with the overwhelming sense of the divine presence all
we can do is to bow down in adoration. We are silenced in mind, in emotion, we
become totally receptive and not passive but actively receptive. If I was to
give an image, I would say our attitude at those moments is that of the
bird-watcher. You know what happens to the bird-watcher. He gets up early in the
morning before the birds are awake, goes into the wood, goes into the field,
settles down and then he remains intensely alert at the same time as he is
totally immobile because if he budges, he moves, if he doesn’t become part of
the background, the birds will have disappeared long before he has noticed them.
And so the attitude of the bird-watcher is this intense alertness that combines
a total liveliness with a total stillness. This is what one could call the
attitude of a believer has with regard to the mystery of God and also with
regard to any statement, any expression that conveys God or things divine to us.
We look at things in silence in order to receive a message and the deeper the
silence, the more perfect the silence, the more completely and perfectly the
message can reach us.
Obviously, when we look at an icon, we may discover that it has
got features, which we apprehend or analyse intellectually. When it is a face,
the impact may be more direct but when it is a scene, like an icon of Christmas,
an icon of the entry of Christ into Jerusalem, an icon of the Crucifixion, there
are features, which we can examine with our eyes and take in with our mind, but
once it is done, we are confronted with something which is an object of
contemplation. And I’ll give you an example or two.
The first example I wish to give you is an icon of the Mother of
God which probably no-one of you has seen. It is in the South of Russia, there
are very few reproductions because it is not considered as being one of the
great and beautiful and classical icons of Orthodox Christendom. What it
represents is – against a darkish background, the face of what I would call a
peasant young Woman, square face with a parting in the middle, her hair falling
on her shoulders, without a veil and looking straight not at you, as most icons
do, but simply straight ahead into the vastness, into eternity, into infinity, —
you must find out into what. And then the second thing you notice is that in
front of Her chest there are two hands in agony clasped in pain and anguish. And
when you ask yourself, why is this young Woman dishevelled, why has She lost her
veil, why is Her hair falling like this? Why is this fixed gaze and this
agonised hands? And you look at the icon, you see in a corner of this icon
painted in very pale yellow colour the Cross, a Cross without a body. It is the
Mother of God who is confronted with the death of Christ, not the dying, not the
mystery of Her own offering of Her Son to God and to men but of His being dead,
of the seeming defeat, of the end of all Her hopes, of the serene pain of Her
heart.
This is one example, but once you have analysed these elements,
looked at the face, asked yourself, what do these eyes see and seen it in the
corner of the icon what do these hands speak about and understood, then you are
confronted with the same thing, which confronts the Mother, – with the
Crucifixion, with the love of God revealed as life and death, with the love of
God, which says to us, “What you, — each of us singly, not the collectivity of
mankind, each of us singly — means to Me can be measured by all the life and all
the death of the Only-Begotten Son of God become man through the Incarnation
born of the Virgin, crucified on Calvary after the tragic week of the passion.”
So at that moment the icon is no longer a story, it is a direct challenge, a
confrontation with an event to which we can respond by adoration, by conversion,
by a change in us, by prayer in the vastest possible sense of this word. Not by
repeating words of prayer, not by doing what a boy of our congregation, when he
was seven, said to his mother, “Now that we have finished prayering, could we
pray a little?” — which mean:, now that we have said all these words which are
written in the book, which I can’t read yet but which you rehearse to me very
evening, can’t I stay before God and tell Him that I am sorry for one thing or
another, that I love Him, that I am happy and then say “Good night” and send a
kiss to the icon which is too high for me to kiss...
The other example which I wanted to give is that of an icon of
the Incarnation, a Christmas icon — a mountain, a cave, in one corner the Angels
singing to the shepherds, on the other hand, the three kings travelling, in
another corner Joseph sitting and being tempted by Satan who whispers to him
that there is there something quite wrong in the whole situation, and then the
Mother of God and the Child. But this icon, of which I am thinking in
particular, does not show us the Child in the manger. It’s not the classical
half emotional picture, which we see so often. Instead of the manger there is in
pink stone an altar of sacrifice and the Child lying on it. And this icon is a
theological statement not only about the Incarnation as the divine act that made
God immanent in the world that the world may be saved, it speaks to us of the
fact that the Son of God became Son of man in order to die, that His birth was
the beginning of entering a world of suffering, of pain, of rejection and of
death. And once we have discovered that the mountain matters nothing, that the
shepherds and the kings, that Joseph and his tempter are features of the past
that has simply brought the message to us, we are confronted with the central
event – God has become man and by becoming man He has accepted to become
helpless, vulnerable and enter into the realm of suffering and death. And then
we are confronted with a God Whom we can worship in a new way, not a God Whom we
worship in the great cathedrals because of the unsurpassed beauty He represents,
not the All-Mighty one but the God Who has chosen to become one of us, frail,
unprotected, helpless, given to us, and we see what mankind has done to this
God, who had taken full responsibility for His creative act by dying of it and
of its consequences.
So this leads me to the last point, which is obviously very
short. Confronted with an icon, we receive a message and this message is always
exactly as a passage of the Gospel is or a prayer written by a saint is, is a
challenge for us – how do you respond to what you see, what do you do? Who are
you in relation to this event, to this person, to this face, to this particular
experience of the Church of God, of the Mother of God, of the saints of God, of
the martyrs, of the Apostles and so forth. And this is the beginning of an act
of prayer. Now, we treat icons with veneration not because they are beautiful
and not even because they convey an essential message but because somehow we are
aware of the fact that they are connected with the person represented on them
and the event. I will give you one more of those flat analogies which are
natural to me.
We don’t treat an icon as an idol but we treat it exactly in the
way in which you would treat the photograph of someone whom you love dearly. It
may be your departed parents, it may be your parents alive, it may be the girl
or the boy whom you love with all your heart. You look at these photographs and
you do not imagine that they are the person, you do not worship them but there
are things which you would do and things which you would not do to them. If you
have the photograph of someone whom you love with your whole heart alive or
departed, you will not simply take your teacup and plant it on top of it because
it is the best way of protecting the table. And you will be probably foolish
enough at a moment when there is no-one who looks at you to take the photograph
and give it a kiss. Well, it’s exactly what we do about icons. We give them a
kiss, we are less shy and we do it publicly, but we do it because they are the
only way in which we can kiss the person who is absent in a way, who is present
in spirit, yes, whose image is there being like a window, like a link, like a
connection with this person.
And our praying to icons is not praying to the wood or to the
paint or even to the scene or the face represented. All these things become
transparent in the way in which the photograph is transparent to us because it
is the person whom we perceive, whom we see, whom we love, whom we treat with
tenderness and reverence when we hold a photograph of a beloved person. And our
praying to the icon is a praying that reaches through the icon. It may be a help
to us because it is not everyone of us who is capable of shutting his eyes,
abstracting himself or herself from all surrounding and feeling that he is or
she is in the presence of God, and there is nothing between God and him, there
is nothing that he needs to connect him with God. But ultimately we must come to
the point when having looked at an icon, receive its message, received indeed
its challenge, its call, we must be able to shut our eyes and be in the presence
of God Himself and the saint who is represented in it. And this is what St. John
Chrysostom says in one of his sermons. He says to us, “If you want to pray, take
your stand in front of your icons, then shut your eyes and pray.”
Apparently, what’s the point of having icons if you shut your
eyes and don’t look at them? The point is that you have taken one look and this
look must have awoken you, you must have had one look and be alive to all the
message and all the challenge that it has and now you must be free from the
particular elements of this icon and be able to pray, to sing to God.
And I will end by an example, by an image, which is not properly
of an icon but which convey to you probably better than I can this idea of our
whole self beginning to sing and to respond. I was nineteen then. and I was
reading together with an old deacon in one of the small churches in Paris. He
was very old, he had lost all his teeth with age and the result was that when he
read and sang, it was not as clear as one might have hoped for, and to add
insult to injury, he read and sang with a velocity that defeated me, my eyes
could not follow the lines. And when we finished the service, being as arrogant
as one may be, some may be at nineteen, I said to him, “Fr. Evfimiy, you have
robbed me of all the service with your reading and singing so fast. And what is
worse, you have robbed yourself of it, I am sure, because I am sure, you
couldn’t understand a word of what you were saying.” And so the old man looked
at me (I don’t know why but he liked me) and he said to me, “O, I am so sorry,
but you know, I was born in a very-very poor family in a very poor village of
Russia, my parents were not in a position to keep me because they were too poor
to feed me, so they gave away at the age of seven to a neighbouring monastery
where they fed me, they gave me education, they taught me to read and to sing,
and I never left the monastery until the revolution. And I have been reading
these words and singing these words day in, day out, day in, day out for all my
life. And now, you know what happens? When I see words, it is as though a hand
was touching a string in my soul, and my soul begins to sing as though I was a
harp, which is being touched by a hand. I don’t cling to the word. You still
need it, but for me seeing it or seeing the notes is enough. I begin to sing
with all my being.”
Well, this is what we should become when we can look at an icon
and immediately receive the impact of it, so that our whole being begins to sing
and sing and sing to God in whatever tune. It may be repentance, it may be joy,
it may be gratitude, it may be intercession, it does not mean anything, what
means something, which is essential is that we should sing to God as a harp
sings under the hand that has touched it.
