Blog
Game of Thrones is a phenomenon; there's no doubt on that score. I mean,it has even achieved the much-coveted Acronym Status: all you have to say is GOT, and everyone knows what you're talking about. I didn't look up any of the actual metrics, but the show is now being regularly referred to as the most-watched series in the history of broadcasting. However, if that is true, I can't help but wonder what that says about our culture.
For this roundtable, Scott the Editor wants us to explain why Easter is more significant than other Christian holidays. In Holy Orthodoxy, Easter is the most basic Christian holiday. That’s because, on Easter, we celebrate the central event in the salvation of this world: the Resurrection of Christ Jesus. And since the Resurrection is so fundamental to the Faith, we actually celebrate it each and every Sunday of the year.
From Michael Ruse:
It doesn’t come as a surprise that Christians in the 4th-7th c. would — from a mostly Roman and Levantine background of the Byzantine Empire — make mosaics, frescoes, and images to represent important Scriptural messages and beliefs and teachings from Apostolic tradition.
As Metropolitan Hilarion explains in this chapter, Orthodoxy has passed through a period of iconoclasm (destruction of icons). Likewise, we might be going through a similar kind of iconoclasm of traditions, beliefs and ideas that we thought couldn’t ever be challenged seriously or changed.
There are more than a few sections in the book that cover different topics that survive in Byzantium’s entrancing iconographical tradition:
1. The Icons of the 4th-6th c. and Sinai’s Encaustic Icons
2. The Canonical Image of Christ, Image Not-Made-By-Hands that is mentioned in the Teaching of Addai, and its connection to the Shroud of Turin
3. Iconoclasm and the Veneration of Icons that has received probably most of its inspiration from Islamic mindset. But there are deep theological currents behind the bloody conflict
4. Decorative Painting and Basic Iconographical Types
5. Byzantine Mosaics and Frescoes, 4th-9th c., 9th-14th c.
6. Book Miniatures
Join us all this Saturday at 4:00 and immerse yourself in Orthodoxy’s iconographical tradition; this class, and the next several classes) will be taught by an expert in the field of iconographical tradition.
From Michael Ruse:
Come and join us this Saturday at 4:00 to learn more about icons. We cannot discuss the veneration of icons in the Orthodox Church without first talking about how some early Christians were not Jewish. If the older Jewish religion forbade making images of human beings, what made images appear more often in human form among early Christians?
We find out that some scriptural accounts were turned into mosaics, portraits, catacomb paintings, frescoes and ultimately traditional icons in our temples. Icons burst forth as symbols and images of our salvation and humanity “in a tense dialogue with the pagan world and active missionary work among pagans.” This brief chapter will help us understand the larger chapter on the iconographical tradition in Byzantium. It also introduces some important concepts and categories when discussing icons such as: posture, reverse perspective, symbolic, antique, and other typological images.
From Michael Ruse:
If you are interested in fashion and liturgy, know something about either or know nothing about it at all, then come and join us this Saturday evening at 4:00pm.
Metropolitan Hilarion explains, “The apostolic Church did not have special vestments for sacred serving … everyday clothing came to be treated as sacred.” How do objects come to be treated as sacred?
In this chapter, he continues with this kind of question and he discusses the origins of liturgical vestments that became sacred in the Greek and Russian traditions. That may be easy enough to understand. But why would it be inappropriate for the Orthodox today to change their liturgical vestments to everyday clothing in the spirit of the early Church or as other Christian communities do? It is important to know that sacred significance and symbolism of liturgical vestments took root in the early centuries of the Church.
In the East, we see the phelonion and omophorion become more widespread in liturgy and in icons and mosaics of the saints more than in the West. Although Russian liturgical vestments have a lot of influence from the Byzantine tradition, there were developments – like the sable mitre-caps for patriarchs – that were specifically Russian in adaptation to culture and climate.
Metropolitan Hilarion discusses these main vestments in more detail: sticharion, orarion, epitrachelion, omophorion, sakkos, turban/mitre, and staff as well as a section about the color scheme of vestments.