The Byzantine Museum, Athens, August 2001

Christ of Sinai is directly in front of me, and I can't breathe. I didn't think He would be here. I rounded a corner, absorbed in my own thoughts, certainly not expecting to see Him on this quiet morning, in the hundred-degree heat and dust of a city that has not yet fully wakened; but here He is, and I am suddenly confronted with His image, the image, the oldest icon in existence, the epitome of what an icon is and should be. My hands shake, and I approach Him slowly, in disbelief. The rest of the room evaporates, and all I can see is Him.

He is part of the exhibition titled "A Mystery Great and Wondrous," a title I thought was fitting in many ways: it is drawn from the Megalynarion of Advent, a "magnifying" hymn to the Virgin Mary in the weeks before we celebrate her Son's birth. She is Virgin, yet she gave birth to a son: "In the confines of the manger is laid the infinite Christ our God." He is fully God by nature, fully man by choice. He died in the flesh and conquered Death; he went to Hell, only to take Hell captive. How can we ever hope to understand these truths? They are indeed pure mystery, great and wondrous and dizzying and terrible. And icons, the attempts of man to communicate these astounding and beautiful events, are themselves a mystery. How can the physical materials of wood and pigment and egg yolk and animal skin convey such ethereal truths, and how can the passage of many centuries only intensify the power of these images to captivate Christian eyes and hearts?

Christ of Sinai looks at me with a steady gaze. His eyes-the famed twins, Justice and Mercy-see straight through me, piercing the whitewashed tomb of my exterior, and it hurts. I turn to the guard and ask her, in broken Greek, whether this is the true Christ of Sinai, or one of the copies that the ancients were so fond of. No, she says. This is the only one, and it is the first time it has left its home in Egypt. I look again into His eyes, where there are no highlights, emphasizing Christ's spirituality over human individuality. One eye is dark, foreboding, the shadows between the brow and lid deepening and on the verge of righteous anger; the other eye embraces all, even my own unworthy soul. I stand and pray. My eyes swell with tears, and I cannot look anymore.

Christ's eyes are painted in the encaustic technique, using beeswax mixed with pigment, applied in pure form while hot or emulsified with oil while cool. This is the same technique used for many of the Fayum burial portraits of the same period, several centuries after the birth of Christ. These portraits can be found in the British Museum in great numbers, shown alongside the sarcophagi and weaponry of the Egyptians, and they are similar to this icon in one important aspect: amid the meticulously rendered details of the portraits, it is the eyes, dark and arresting and sometimes frightening, that call out to the viewer. The eyes are the door into something greater than the image's substance. It was the eyes of the icons that Turkish warriors scratched out when pillaging the monasteries of Greece: the presence of the saints did not stop them from looting churches, but even the robbers could not bear to look in the eyes of those saints while desecrating all that was holy to them.

Christ of Sinai is not large-maybe 20 inches by 30-and he is behind a layer of glass, with an extra guard keeping watch a few feet from His face. I am reminded, suddenly, amid my tears and prayers, that I am in a museum, not a church, and that I am looking at a piece of art that is very old and very valuable, like the Attic black-figure amphorae which are so plentiful here, excavated anew each time the Athenians try to build a subway station. But this is not just an ancient object: it is a holy one, an icon, a window into heaven: a screen through which we are allowed to see, as much as we can abide it, the true world that is invisibly present with us. We forget where we are, and even who we are, in the power of the presence of the Almighty God. The thought of worshipping the physical object of an icon itself is ridiculous for anyone who has truly regarded one: in prayer, the substance melts away completely. This is at the heart of what every iconographer is trying to do when he fasts and prays while painting, saturating every brushstroke with intercessions-hoping that, through God's mercy, he may be made worthy of creating an icon so true and beautiful that we forget it is there at all.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March 2004

The critics are calling this exhibition "The Byzantine Empire Strikes Back," as it is the second in the last ten years that has focused on the wealth and artistry of Constantinople's empire. "The Glory of Byzantium," in 1997, focused on the period 843-1261; this show surveys the period 1261-1557, covering the reclaiming of the empire by Crusaders and its eventual demise as it was absorbed into the growing Islamic nation. The exhibition is rich with icons from St. Catherine's monastery in Sinai, the monastery that houses the Christ of Sinai icon I saw in Athens. For those who are not fortunate enough to see the exhibition in person, there is a splendid volume from Yale University Press accompanying it.

In the first room, there are several large icons of the Virgin and Child in a pose commonly called "Sweet Kissing" or "Tenderness," Christ on his mother's lap with their cheeks together, and faces turned toward the viewer. One thing that strikes me right away is the parity between the icons of this exhibition, produced centuries ago under vastly different circumstances, and the icons being produced today in Greece, Jerusalem, and even the United States. Iconography, or the "writing" of icons-as any iconographer will be sure to tell you, they are not considered paintings but rather tools for religious instruction-is gaining popularity in the United States among converts to the Orthodox faith, and although there will always be those who alarm the establishment with ridiculously modern techniques and ideas (a female iconographer who paints Byzantine-style portraits of house pets with halos and calls them icons, for example), the trend is toward following the ancient rules. There are many such rules, and despite disagreements and differing schools of thought within the body of iconographers, the results of this stringent discipline are self-evident: a Sweet Kissing icon from 12th-century Byzantium, 18th-century Russia, or 21st-century North America will contain the same narrative elements, the same layout and positioning of figures, and probably even the same colors.

Color, especially, is vital to an icon; it is also the subject of much debate among iconographers. The earliest icons were found in the catacombs, sketches of a faith in hiding and under persecution. Since the images were created to represent the holiest truths of Christianity, the faithful tried to use the purest pigments available; the less man interfered, the more God was allowed to shine through. They used dried earth, pulverized stone, and the juices of plants; they never mixed colors, either, and so for centuries there were as few as five pure essences to choose from. The colors signify various theological ideas, and again, what they signify varies according to the interpreter. Gold is closest to God; it is used for the heavens, often the background of an icon. Blue is the next highest color, representing divinity, made from crushed lapis; red is humanity. Thus the Theotokos wears a red inner garment and a blue mantle: she was human, but took on the divine by giving birth to Christ. Christ is clothed in the opposite manner: with his blue inner garment, he is shown to be purely divine, but his red outer garment tells of his adopted humanity. Both are also shown at times in caput mortum, the purplish-brown dye that signifies royalty.

Yet, though perhaps an iconographer would not want to admit it, there is an artistry beyond symbolism in choosing the color scheme as a whole. A huge icon of St. Cyril of Belozersk, the founder of a monastery in Russia who kept even Ivan the Terrible at bay, contains a central portrait surrounded by many scenes from his life. The scenes are vibrant in rich russet tones, velvety reds, and lush greens; against the darkness of the colors, points of white are luminous in contrast. The saint is clothed in a green-gold stole and brown cloak, and as he heals the sick and casts out demons and oversees the work of his brothers, he is accompanied by white-clad assistants. They are those whom the darkness of our own lives prevents us from seeing, except in rare moments; then we realize, if only for a moment, how far we are from grasping the true reality of things.

The Dormition of St. Ephraim the Syrian is another epic work. St. Ephraim is known to me only as the author of the famous prayer, said with prostrations, during Great Lent; I said it just last night. "O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, faint-heartedness, lust of power, and idle talk; but give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience and love to Thy servant. Yea, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own sins and not to judge my brother; for Thou art holy now and ever, and unto ages of ages." It is a wonderful, all-encompassing prayer, indicative of so much in Orthodox spirituality: the goal of humility is at the core of all that we do.

Here St. Ephraim is shown being mourned by a crowd of monks who kiss his feet and grasp his hands. In a larger circle around him are monks with candles and incense and a prayer book. Farther still, at the outskirts of the funeral gathering, scenes of monastic life are juxtaposed seamlessly. Monks till the soil, draw water, copy Scripture, and discourse with one another. Several carry an aged monk in a litter, and a young man carries an old man on his back. Another brings food to an ascetic who has positioned himself on a tower, one of the stylite monks who went days and weeks without nourishment, chaining themselves to the rocks and to God's love. Death is posited as just another event in monastic life; the monks mourn, they return earth to earth, and they continue in their daily work of eradicating the passions and uniting themselves to Christ. Yet the center of the icon is not the monastery, nor even St. Ephraim himself, but another icon: the Virgin Hodegetria, a common icon in the East for centuries. The Virgin holds Christ, who blesses us.

Stylistically, these icons vary a great deal, reflecting the influence of many cultures and periods. There are Serbian icons, with carefully inked line drawings in the style of illuminated Islamic manuscripts-small, active figures. Those geographically closer to Italy have a distinctively Italian flavor-carefully rendered drapery, with deep shadows and a sophisticated touch. Some are more painterly, very close to El Greco in style: long strokes and sunken, detailed faces. (El Greco himself actually rejected his native Eastern Orthodoxy because he believed he could not be an artist and remain within it.)

But the most traditional Byzantine icons, those which are still copied today, have a style all their own. Even the mosaics, some of them with glass tesserae less than a millimeter in diameter, mimic the defined outlines and angularity that is so central to icon-writing technique. It is truly otherworldly; the perspective is warped, frozen in pre-Renaissance times before the development of the camera obscura. The objects are tilted so that the viewer can tell for certain what they are: a table, where St. Luke sharpens his pen; a Russian church, shown in birds-eye view so as to display the row of onion domes. The faces are too angular, the hands too round to be true. It is easy to disregard such technique as obsolete, but it seems to me intentionally different, as if to bridge the gap between the seen and unseen. Icons are neither art nor prayer, but somewhere between the two.

A copy of the icon called King of Glory, a portrait of Christ's face as he suffers on the Cross, forces me to stop for a long moment. It is so dark the details are hard to make out up close; it is best viewed from a distance of a few feet, and then the blackness seems to coalesce into more understandable forms. Points on Jesus' face-his nose, an earlobe-define the sea of black into a face; the pale highlights mimic its muscular structure, almost like external tendons. His beard blends into his neck and the sides of his face, creating a vortex of shadow. He exudes sorrow and burden, the cares of the whole race of man. I look and look, and I think: how can something so obviously unreal look so real? Then I am looking through the icon again, through the window of humanity's imperfection into the truth of the Passion.

Emily Jorjorian Lowe, a music teacher who has studied architecture and classics, is a member of Holy Cross Orthodox Church in Linthicum, Maryland.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.