Orthodox Christianity, Vol III, Chp 12: Russian Church Singing

Russian church singing began with the Baptism of the Rus’. Prince Vladimir the Great of Kiev was the ruler of the Rus’. He was baptized by the Greeks from Byzantium. There is a general pattern in the history of the Russian people. It tends to repeat; inspiration comes from the Greeks and a downfall in ethical and spiritual life from the West, particularly the Renaissance heritage that many Europeans have clung onto even today in its many morphing secular forms. This chapter divides itself into three parts: znamenny chant, partesny chant, and contemporary church singing. Today Russian liturgical singing is a mixture of znamenny and partesny chant. The first type grew organically when the Slavs of the Rus’ lands learned chant and the use of neume notation from the Greek Orthodox Christians in Constantinople. The second type came from Roman Catholic singing informed by the Renaissance; that time also coincided with a powerful combination of the Papal States and the new secular humanism of the rulers, nobles, and learned men. Partesny came to Russia through the Latinized influence of Poland and Ukraine. Partesny singing isn’t really chanting, but harmonization of parts from different voices, unlike the unison singing mentioned in previous chapters from Hellenism, Judaism, and early Christianity. Now Russian church singing is mixture of the eastern and western ways of practicing and conceptualizing church singing. Like genealogy, znamenny chant is the ancestral and authentic heritage of the Rus’ lands and peoples. The western influence, like architecture and iconography, brought an end to Orthodox practices and tradition. It seems to be reviving slower than iconography and theology in Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union; znamenny chant is still practiced in some monasteries there. Metropolitan Hilarion identifies a “genetic” link between Gregorian chant in Latin Christianity and Byzantine and znamenny chant; they both have the unique rhymical quality of “unmeasured beats.” But he doesn’t pursue that connection further in the chapter. Before the Schism, liturgical singing called Ambrosian, Gallican, and the “melismatic” Mozarbic in Western Europe existed and they do have direct links to Byzantine chant. The Gallican chant sometimes even uses Greek texts. The best contrast to today’s theatrical church singing in Orthodoxy is the choral singing of the Carpatho-Russians in Eastern Europe. Metropolitan Hilarion hasn’t commented on the survival of this tradition of participatory singing of the whole congregation in areas that once encompassed the old Slavic lands of the Rus’ like the Carpathians, eastern Slovakia, Ukraine, and Belarus.

Melody is our feeling guided and embodied by the unison of voices and divine words toward the Holy Trinity, the ultimate transcendent one. Znamenny chant can be understood as a collection of “melodic formulae,” each with their own characteristic name. Unlike the more emotional singing of the Greeks, maybe even the Syrians too, the Russians used some of their own folk melodies to make a calmer sounding chant. The neume notation wasn’t exact in nature like modern western letter notation on a staff; it had to be literally taught from person to person by practice. Like the alphabet, Byzantine neume notation was borrowed into Russian chant; they created the kriuk notation and znamenny signs to guide the voices. It’s a kind of chanting that depends on the divine services and oral tradition, not on precision of notes, pitch, or exact training. The liturgy, people, choir, and clergy were the main educators of znamenny chant. People who wrote these melodic formulae were like the rhapsodists of ancient Greece. It wasn’t purely an academic or scientific study or training that made this system of chant complex and beautiful; the Russians attained this chant by living within the mysteries of the Orthodox Church and maintaining tradition. The introduction of “cinnabar markings” made the liturgical chant more like the technology of texts rather than the simpler way of guiding and guarding the living traditions of znamenny. It was this kind of approach that began the slow decline of chanting toward the ultimate consequence of the contemporary “church concerts,” which are now a common, exhilarating, and diverse feature of Roman Catholic and Protestant Christian music. 

The American writer from the South, Richard M. Weaver, comments on this same cultural decline through technology and the dogma of precision; he calls these symptoms of fragmentation a loss of metaphysical center. An insidious insistence on precision, absolute pitch, cinnabar markings, staff notation were all signs of a disintegrated mind and chant had to flee from church services. Church singing lost its “submissiveness” to the core of the spiritual wording of the divine texts of the liturgy; they speak of Christ as the center of all creation. The spirit of humanistic analysis and a strict demand for exactitude scattered the focus of znamenny and Byzantine chant on Christ, the Son of God. Rebirth, called renaissance in French, now changed meaning from a spiritual renewal of the heart in Orthodoxy through chanting to a rebirth that denotes a turning over of tradition to discovery and the value of constant change in the service of progress toward the peripherality of experience to the point of losing all attention to spiritual sensitivity and growth. Gavriil Lomakin in the 19th c. spoke against this “Italianism” when he said, “a rebirth implies a death of something that went before … “For Russia, the death of cross-in-church architecture, wooden churches, iconography, znamenny chant and theology informed by asceticism had to die to make room for the new ideas coming from Rome, the capital of Renaissance humanism and the Papacy.  

Renaissance Europe developed and merged secular and church music into the “performative” arts. From this, enthusiastic Italian composers of church concerts came to Russia and changed Orthodox divine liturgy into an experience like opera or orchestral theatre. Instead of centering our feelings and desires toward the good and beautiful, we are now harnessed by “pain or pleasure” and our emotions are not used to struggle and to transcend this captivity to the world but to revel in it. Our feeling is to be oriented toward its natural end: to pray and praise the Holy Trinity in unison, many of our holy fathers teach this. But many well-known Russian composers were engulfed by the Renaissance music of Roman Catholic Europe. Some Russians tried to mix the world and the church; others genuinely sought to recover the past of znamenny chant through western methods of composition. The consequences of changing the purpose of music became evident in their way of thinking. For example, Pyotr Tchaikovsky lamented that the old Russian chants and melodies couldn’t be revived because they are lost to the past. But according to Holy Orthodoxy, we neither are bound by the past nor are slaves of the unknown future because the Church’s wisdom stands in the center, not limited to time as understood as the passing of moments. If Renaissance humanism were the correct path, then Tchaikovsky and other academicians would be correct. Now, the Choir of the Moscow Patriarchate seeks to revive the ancient melodies of znamenny. The next chapter discusses the church singing in the other patriarchates and local churches of Orthodoxy such as Georgia, Serbia, Romania, and Greece. Russia is an example to other Orthodox countries in its formation under its spiritual ancestry from Byzantium to its acceptance of the false philosophies of secularism. 

Guidelines for Online Participation

July 28, 2021
Samson of Dol

Brothers and Sisters,

Greetings in the Name of the Lord.

I’m writing to let you know about some up-coming changes in our online educational opportunities. Most of these changes will involve St Thomas School, but they will also have an impact on The Fall Theological Seminar and The Pascha Book Study.

Throughout the recent public health crisis, a few hard-working volunteers have made it possible for us to offer an online option for each of those groups. However, the reality is that those volunteers now need a break. Also, since we re-started Fellowship Hour in May, and we will do the same with Church School in September, it’s time for us to get back to meeting face to face for adult education. So, to facilitate those transitions, starting September 1, we will be adopting new guidelines for online participation in those three groups (The Thursday Night Bible Study will not be effected by these new arrangements):

• If you live in Austin, Pflugerville, Round Rock, Georgetown, Cedar Park, Leander, Jonestown, Liberty Hill, or Georgetown, we will be asking you to get in the car, drive to the parish, and attend the group meetings in person. This will make it possible for all of us to get to know each other better; it will facilitate actual discussion (which tends to be minimal during online meetings), and, on Saturday, it will allow folks to participate in Great Vespers following St Thomas School.

• If you live in Bastrop/Elgin, Kerrville/Marble Falls/Burnet, Killeen/Harker Heights/Temple/Jarrell then you will be eligible to participate in these groups online. However, each week, you will need to reserve an online slot at least 48 hours prior to the meeting: All you will need to do is send an email to remote.meetings@theforerunner.org, by Monday evening for the Wednesday night meetings, and by Thursday evening for the Saturday afternoon meetings. This will require you to plan ahead, but it will make it possible for us to know who will be attending the meeting online and whether or not we will need any of our tech volunteers to be available. 

• If you will be participating online, we will be asking that you be prepared to turn on your camera and allow the other members of the group to actually see you. Talking to a blank screen is just not very conducive to healthy interaction.

• If you live within easy driving distance of the parish, but participating online is easier for you due to age, health concerns, or any other issues, just get in touch with me, and we will be happy to work something out.

Change is never easy, but we’ve been through a whole lot of changes in the past year and a half, so we should be able to make all this work without too much trouble. After all, our goal is to enhance life in our community and to allow the members of our parish to get closer to one another and to the Most Holy Trinity.

Just let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks to each of you, and May the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit bless you all.

an unworthy priest
aidan

Orthodox Christianity, Vol III, Chp11: Early Christian and Byzantine Church Singing

Music is a part of human nature. The spirit is stirred by the sounds of music toward an action or end. All cultures have music, whether it’s whistling, humming, throat singing, singsong and tonal languages, or the long retelling of epic stories. A lament, a memorial, an account of heroic deeds, and tragedies are types of music that begin to approach the essence of prayer. 

Early Christian music and Byzantine church music are two main sections in this chapter. Icons and manuscripts often only survive in fragments and some melodies from Jewish worship have survived in Christianity and in some Yemenite Jewish communities. Holy tradition and scripture witness to singing hymns or hymnizing (Gk. humnesantes), psalms, and spiritual odes (Mt. 26:30, Col.3:16, Eph.5). These form the three broad groups of Christian music. In ancient Greece, hymns were songs in honor of ancestors, heroes, and gods; traditionally, the generational songs of older cultures are usually in connection with tribe, family, and the forming of peoples. For Christians, these three types of singing connect us to the saints who came before us, and it joins us with the Holy Trinity as sons and daughters of God. There are boundary stones to guide Christian worship from Apostolic origin, but how systematic that music became depended on where Orthodoxy took root. From Carthage, the Roman province of northern Africa, Tertullian (Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, 2nd – 3rd c. AD) who wrote in Latin teaches us that there was a tradition of reading the psalms and “improvised praises from the heart.” The Greeks preferred to intone the liturgical texts and Gospels in a style that was reminiscent of Hellenic antiquity. The Papyrus Oxyrhynchus found in 1786, for instance, uses the Dorian mode and letter notation for voices, and it may have been used in the liturgy. 

Many types of Eastern instruments are mentioned in the Psalms. Some interpret them allegorically and others literally, and that justifies the use of the organ, guitars, tambourins, and drums at some Christian assemblies. The human voice literally can encompass the major categories of man-made instruments: wind, percussion, and string. At the same time, words can be sung with the breath, the beat and the vibrating chords of voices that sing in unison during the Orthodox divine liturgy. In this way, instruments can be understood as both literal and allegorical. There are many other reasons. For many Greeks, instruments were viewed suspiciously as pagan, emotional, and meant to support voices that are already weak, according to St. Gregory of Nyssa. St. Clement of Alexandria viewed playing instruments generally as “delusion” and “irrational” that “corrupt man’s morals” and disturb our thinking. St. Basil the Great called the stringed lyre “obscene.” The harsh criticism about instruments stems partly from the immoral Greek culture of paganism and mostly from principles of form and function of these instruments and sounds that interrelate with human nature and prayer. Often the lyre was an instrument that the wealthy used to train female slaves to play seductively at parties. In the 4th c., Arnobius also criticizes secular instruments because they produce many passions. For this reason, even outside of the Church, many of our holy fathers cautioned against instruments as Plato warned of its effects on the morality of youth. The spoken word also conveys the real spiritual seeds of truth that enter our heart. What the liturgical texts say and seek to implant into us take precedence over instrumental sounds, which usually blunt the mind from capturing the speech of the liturgy. So, instruments were not rejected so much based on principle, but on the style and forms that affect the feelings of people during prayer every day. Like the Books of the Bible, the Church’s wisdom makes “conscious choices” and gives us rules about what to listen to as well as what to read, not based on fragments of philosophy or fashionable fads, but on the spiritual principles of life. Canon 75 of the Sixth Ecumenical Council set down that music is morally energized and that a code of ethics and behavior should be followed. Care and godly sorrow are awakened in our heart best by choral singing or voices in unison, the traditional music of Judaism and early Christians. 

St. Clement of Alexandria taught the allegorical understanding of instruments in the holy scriptures. The zither symbolizes the mouth, the shofar symbolizes the call to resurrection, the strings the sinews and nerves of the body, the psaltery symbolizes the tongue. Essentially, our bodies are the instruments of God’s song. Just as the Jews worshipped with all twenty-nine different instruments and King David wrote the psalms with instruments to accompany the voice, Orthodox Christians worship with all the heart, mind, and soul to produce a sacrifice of praise to the Holy Trinity from the heart, not from the bass, guitar riffs, or drumming of the hands. There is the assumption that the mind, the heart, and the body all have specific purposes. Instruments, because of their form and ends, are tools that have ethical consequences. The chanting of voices works to enliven the 

“cold” and “stiff” parts of our human nature because of passions. King David was a shepherd, and he understood that songs can be calls to the sheep to return on the path as well as slings for the giants in life. The stringed psaltery or harp is unique because it’s the only musical instrument whose sound comes from the top part of it and descends from there. The spiritual principle reflects how the Holy Spirit comes with grace on Christian sons and daughters of the Holy Trinity. The form guides the function of the psalter toward higher awareness of God and humility; it’s the way to heaven for the soul that requires discipline and harmony. Because of this, our holy fathers don’t disapprove of the psaltery. When these ethical and musical principles aren’t followed by Christians, a spirit of secularism enters and fragmentation on all levels slowly breaks apart the universal voice. The opposite of fragmentation is connection. In the East, they perceived the whole in one voice singing or choral singing through neume notation and a kind of deduction, while the West in general followed letter notation from the bottom up so that the primacy of exactness and “disconnected points and moments” dominated church music. Orthodox music has an ethos, ‘’a salutary power,” and a moral effect because sound is a part of human nature. The next chapter discusses Russian Church music and its treasure of znamenny chant and its conflicts with this fragmented approach to music that still dominates much of the secular and Christian world.

Orthodox Christianity, Vol III, Chp 10: Music in Ancient Israel and Ancient Greece

Part Three has two major sections. The first section focuses on the many spiritual and historical aspects of liturgical singing and the second on the unique tradition of bell ringing. That covers a range of five chapters. 

In chapter 10, Metroplitan Hilarion highlights the parallels and differences between the musical traditions of ancient Israel and Greece from a religious and theoretical perspective. He mentions the belief among the Hebrews in “the salutary power of music.” The Hellenes also had an enduring cultural connection to this strong effect of music and poetry. For example, Homer’s epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were didactic and transformative for the audience, and Greek tragedies too were performed like the epics in communal and religious ways that spilled over into the poetical traditions of ancient Rome. Similarly, the Psalmist David composed hymns and poems that were accompanied by various kinds of instruments that were meant to enhance the singing voice, as Metropolitan Hilarion explains. Just as the Hellenes incorporated musicians into their honor of the deities, like Dionysius, Apollo and Artemis, so too the Hebrews recruited a certain number of priests from the Levites to worship God in the temple through music. The psalms often contain the phrase “call upon his name” and so there is a connection to the divine names of the Old Testament and its later development among the holy fathers of the Church and relationship between the name, the image and the first image in the principles of iconography. 

The Psalms were the distinguishing structure of ancient worship in Israel as it does in the Orthodox Church today. There were different forms of song and instruments used by King David. Instruments included the categories of wind, string, and percussion; there were twenty-nine names of different instruments mentioned in Hebrew so that these words are only a rough translation into the English, Russian, or Greek. The purpose of instrumental music was to accompany choral singing in Jewish tradition to strengthen the human voice. Israelite worship is founded on how different human voices sing as one voice. The Orthodox Church still uses this kind of “intoned reading” or “psalmodic cantillation” during the divine liturgy and choral singing. Improvisation and ornamentation were a few of the characteristics of Jewish psalmodic worship. According to Metropolitan Hilarion, secular music didn’t exist. The melody for the Hebrews in a “single voice” structure of singing in unison did not have large stock of sounds to use. 

The ensemble of chanting into “one voice” is also shared by the ancient Hellenes. They also used a similar stringed kitharaand lyre like the ancient Israelites, which originally were plucked with four strings that would become the basis of the tetrachord (four-string). The alternation between voices, antiphonal singing, was also accompanied by dancing. Rhapsode means a song is stitched together or woven by a reciter. It is seen in the Odes of Pindar, which contain lyrical poems to be recited. The rhapsodist made sonic icons for the ears. The Panhellenic games gathered all the different Hellenic peoples into one place, at Olympia, Corinth, Delphi, or Nemea. There they recited rhapsodes, celebrated deities and victories, and both men and women competed in many games and musical processions. It encapsulated Hellenic communal identity that stretches as far back as the Neolithic times of Old Europe to the philosophy of Plato’s classical idea of the common good, and it is argued to be at the root of the communal Greek spirit. The Greeks developed musical theory that influenced St. Augustine and Boethius much later in history. From the verb teino, to pluck, stretch, pull, we get the word tone. The tonos or tone became the basic unit of Greek music, which referred to the tension of string on an instrument. Plato taught that “all harmonies [symphonia] are formed from four sounds.” His philosophy was interested in music in so far as it produced a good soul and a morally strong person. Plato was not bogged down by the details but he was interested in how music affected the emotions and actions of people. From this the principle of the tetrachord emerged as a symphony or harmony of sounds in consonance. The tetrachord is made up of four different sounds around each other in a similar way that different voices form one voice in a choir. Tetrachords can be grouped together to form other systems such as the octave. Two tetrachords equal an octave. The grouping based on octaves instead of tetrachords forms the basis of western European musical tradition. Evgeny Gertsman argues that modern European cannot sense the difference between the tetrachord symphony and the octave system, and this split in music had contributed to their separation from the cultures of antiquity and Russian civilization. Europeans and Russians do not share the same basis in musical theory. Gertsman also explains that there is a functional relationship between sounds and how “the content of the work” moves forward. The closest western counterpart to that relationship of sound and the work itself is the Latin epic of the Aeneid by Virgil that divides lines of poetry into dactylic hexameter like the Homeric epics.

The modern system of music in the West relies on the range of two tetrachords. The widest range for the Greeks was five tetrachords from the highest to lowest sound because of the aesthetic descent. Metropolitan Hilarion also explains that unlike the European system today, there is no “absolute pitch” in Greek musical tradition because each instrument and human voice is different; the lowest sound is unique to the individual. But to create a “smoothness” a group of instruments or voices shared the lowest sound in harmony. Not all tetrachords joined together are created equal, according to Plato and other Greek philosophers. Plato ascribed certain ethical characteristics or an ethos around each grouping of tetrachords. The Dorian mode, or kind, was considered noble-spirited, but others were called effeminate, ecstatic, festive, brave, peaceful or licentious. The pagan Greeks understood the moral results of using certain instruments and arrangement of voices and tones. The principle of music in ancient Israel and Greece is the same: the human voice is strengthened by other human voices by singing in unison. The holy fathers of the Church and the canons were aware of these ethical implications of music and the powerful way it could draw us into worshipping the Holy Trinity in spirit and in truth. The next chapter discusses early Christian and Byzantine singing in the Church. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol III, Chp 9: The Meaning of Icons

The different meanings of icons encompasses the whole person, all mankind and what has been revealed to us in the Holy Orthodox Church. The first image, the archetype of created images, is God. Metropolitan Hilarion reminds us that the icon of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, is “an icon of God,” a theosikon. The holy fathers like St. John Chrysostom and John of Damascus have outlined how an icon can bear the image of the first image through the name. From the beginning, the incarnation of Christ works to save the whole of mankind. Anthropology is a scientific field that studies human behavior and society by assuming that methodical observation and formal analysis reveals the deepest truth about our nature. The Church, however, teaches us that humanity’s nature is reversed and improved because God became man – the ultimate revelation of God. Icons reveal our transfigured nature and our relationship to the saints and the Holy Trinity. 

To better understand iconography’s primary purpose and working principles, the previous chapters have built on the foundations of the creation account in Genesis, the theological distinctions laid out in the writings and councils of the church fathers and the history of Russian iconography. The veneration we give to the type passes to the archetype in a real and symbolic way. What is seen in various forms on earth relates to the divine realm and to the Holy Trinity by participation. The word icon comes from the Greek verb meaning “to be like, to befit,” eiko. What was made good on earth is like what exists in the heavens. Images also call to mind thoughts so that icons can help Christians remember our relationship with God in our heart and mind and body. The Orthodox iconographer, Baker Galloway, reminded us in his presentations that images are never neutral. We continually contact them through daily encounters with our eyes or with our memories and thoughts, our inward eyes. St. John of Damascus taught that “an image is a reminder.” 

The Seventh Ecumenical Council sums up the theological meaning of icons that many have tried to grasp and articulate later in the Orthodox Church: The uncircumscribed Word of the Father became circumscribed, taking flesh from thee, O Theotokos, and he has restored the sullied image to its ancient glory, filling it with the divine beauty. 

The restoration of all things, the great reversal of deification and repentance, the gifts of asceticism are all focused on making the image beautiful again through Jesus Christ, and the Most Holy Mother of God helps to save us through Her Son. The resurrection reveals our anthropology because Christ’s defeat of Hades now deifies us and resurrects us after we die in our body. Icons teach us what to believe and think. Even though the resurrection of Christ is a dogma of the Church, there is no traditional icon called “The Resurrection Icon” or “The Harrowing of Hades.” Even “The Descent” only tells half of the story. There is an anthropological way to paint this event and name this dogmatic icon. Based on Church tradition and the liturgical services of the Octoechos and Lenten Triodion, the proper title should be “Christ’s Departure from Hades.” These words describe how we worship mystically and what we believe about paradise and hell. With inscriptions, words, chant, and paint, the liturgy teaches us that Christ left Hades as the Conqueror, that the victory was given to all people, that all might be saved. 

In 1978, Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave a speech at Harvard warning that Western cultures have forgotten God like the Soviets did in Russia. He warned that disasters would follow if forgetfulness continued on its own path. Icons help Christians not to forget who God is and who we are and where we are all going in the end. When we venerate icons, we also pray to God and request help from the saints and the Theotokos. Metropolitan Hilarion points out that “icons are incarnate prayer” (Zenon, Conversations, 22). To inherit transfiguration, the Church gives us ascetical disciplines that are circumscribed on the icons of the saints. They point the way to life like St. John the Forerunner points to Christ. The iconographic human body of Orthodox saints employs a range of light and illumination unlike those of ordinary paintings or Renaissance arts that show a much more realistic, naturalistic, and oily kind of flesh that still finds its main resources and inspirations from this earthly orientation. There is a degree of skill, virtuosity, and natural elegance involved in Renaissance paintings, but its morality and mystical elements have been occluded from our view with the result that transcendence cannot be nourished through self-denial and prayer. Eventually people lose sight of spiritual symbolism while all the focus is funneled into the materiality of existence and a rationalism that ever approaches the peripheral. Humanism has a different anthropology than iconography; humanists tended to emphasize the image over the archetype. Orthodoxy teaches that a Christian will receive his or her body back, the image given by God, but we will be in “the semblance of light.” The humanistic philosophies do not strive for this divine light to transform the body or soul together in the same way. The Enlightenment was not the Light of the Holy Trinity that is given graciously through asceticism, repentance, and prayer. The Age of Reason has had its own justifications, methods, and consequences. If our thoughts, our memory, our degree of indulgence or asceticism, our view of humanity and the cosmos are interrelated fundamentally to the enlightened lessons of iconography and miraculous veneration of holy icons, then to exchange that truth visually and conceptually for some other image and idea will influence morality and the ability to discern mystery and wonder in life. It will influence the assumptions we make about the universe and its purpose. It will establish whether we see sacredness in our own bodies and in our neighbors. Orthodox music during liturgical worship relies on our bodily sacredness, primarily the human voice, not mechanical instruments. The next section investigates the common tradition of singing and chanting in the Orthodox Church. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol III, Chp 8: Russian Icons

Iconography in Russia developed from Byzantine artists who came and painted churches and icons between the 11th and 13thc. Many of them lived in Novgorod and they were influential on the churches there. Theophanes the Greek settled in Novgorod, northern Russia, in the 14th c. Local artistic traditions in major cities such as Novgorod, Pskov, Rostov-Yaroslavl, Tver and Moscow arose together with these spiritual and cultural centers of lands of the Rus’. Byzantium passed down the spiritual and technical traditions of iconography to the Russians. But Russian iconographers did not copy blindly what their Greek masters taught them in a lifeless form of rigid exactitude. They began painting in a style that is unique to their culture and spiritual gifts, but still within the canon of the Orthodox Church. The Church of the Holy Transfiguration on Il’yn Street and the Moscow Kremlin Cathedral of the Archangel were painted by Theophanes the Greek. It also depicts the Hospitality of Abraham of the Old Testament, a real event. The three angels symbolize the Holy Trinity, and Theophanes wrote an inscription over the angel seated at the middle of the table, who represents Christ, with omicron-omega-nu. These Greek letters represent the phrase “He Who Is” or The Being (Ho On). Over the whole scene is written the inscription “The Holy Trinity.” An important distinction to be made is that iconographers are not depicting the being or essence of the Holy Trinity, what they really are or looked like, but a symbolic icon of the Holy Trinity. Abraham and Sarah are also depicted while the Three Angels symbolize “the pre-eternal council” of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Byzantine iconographers tended to paint fierce ascetical figures and scenes. For example, Saint Macarius of Egypt is depicted naked with no eyes, lips, ears; his body is covered with white hair and his hands are outstretched in symbolic gesture of prayer and supplication. He represents a rejection of the illusions and the vanity of this world in boldness and sanctity. This kind of icon reminds us that our bodies are earthen vessels and that by practicing asceticism we are lifted by God’s grace toward the Light of the World. It also shows us that Christians should incorporate these symbolic and bodily gestures in worship, which have been much lost in modern Christianity. The icons of Theophanes the Greek connect us also to the hesychasts who taught about receiving the divine gift of experiencing the energy and light of the Holy Trinity through ascetical disciplines and the Jesus Prayer. Metropolitan Hilarion explains how Theophanes uses light in his iconography. It can be painted with many kinds of brush strokes and used to illuminate the face, body, and background of the image. Most importantly, Theophanes does not make light “a means” but “a power” that comes from the inner transfiguration of a person into a saint. Silver, gold and white paint is often used to depict what ascetics and mystics have seen and felt in the grace of prayer. The Transfiguration of the Lord (1403) in the Tretyakov Gallery symbolizes divine illumination as the purpose of the cosmos and creation. 

The Venerable Andrei Rublev (c.1360-1427) lived at a time when large, multi-tiered iconostases were built in Russian Orthodox temples and wooden architecture was also common. Rublev painted the first “Russian Christ” icon. He does not use the ascetic intensity and boldness of the Greek style. Instead, Christ looks calm and harmonious in his facial expression. Rublev is also recognized for his famous icon of the Holy Trinity at the Trinity Lavra at St. Sergius Monastery. It is an ancient Orthodox scene that can also be found in the Roman catacombs of the 2nd – 4th c., at Santa Maria Maggiore in the 5th c., and San Viale in Ravenna in the 6th c. This icon draws out more symbolism from the Hospitality of Abraham than merely representing a story from the Bible. It contains the inscription, a canonical feature of iconography, “The Holy Trinity” and their “equal” natures are highlighted. The cross-in-halo of one of the central angels represents Christ. Together with Rublev’s Trinity and the cenobitic monastery of St. Sergius of Radonezh, Metropolitan Hilarion explains that the Holy Trinity became “the absolute spiritual-moral reference point of his community.” It is also a “eucharistic” icon that is related to every person in an Orthodox temple and the central place we find communion, community, and co-salvation. 

After this high point of Russian iconography around the 15th c., the canons became lax and depictions of God the Father became prevalent and other unprecedented compositions were painted. Naturally, these relaxations led to the Church making pronouncements about iconographical standards. The Stoglav Council of 1557 reestablished the norms, boundaries, and expectations for iconographers. It seems to be a common thread running through Russian history that inspiration comes from the East and shortsightedness arrives from the West. Some of these influences on the departure of canonical iconography in Russia came from the western styles that also attempted to paint God the Father during the Italian Renaissance and later with the European Enlightenment. That classical rebirth of learning in Europe inspired emperor Peter of Russia to make changes in society that determined a course for the westernization of Russian culture and religion toward Roman Catholic forms and ideas as well as an emphasis on “academic” iconography.  The “academicians” were groups of artists. Some painted icons like a copyist in a dead form by trying to reach for exactness as a goal like the Old Believers. Others painted icons academically by treating icons in a sentimental and purely conceptual way like the Renaissance artists of western Europe. Oils became more common than the traditional tempera technique for icon panels. This scholastic approach characterizes much of the post-Petrine period of icon painting in Orthodox churches in Russia. Icons are infused by the ascetic work of the iconographer. Metropolitan Hilarion explains that the academic style of the west tends to oppose the ascetic foundation of iconographers of the past. He also says that “a copy is a dead product.” But there have been iconographers who have always been inspired and attempted to follow the Old Russian traditions of iconography, sometimes in a fresh and unique style. Leonid Ouspensky criticized this western movement in art. He saw in westernized icons a “sublimated eroticism” and “vulgar triteness.” There was an overall sentimentality and romanticism that had lost hope on symbolism and transfiguration of the human soul and body. People’s feeling toward the universal and transcendent truths could no longer guide their reason and intellect on the path of transformation by divine illumination. Feeling without transcendent forms is empty and vane. Russian iconographers continued during the “Red Terror” of 1917 and after the Revolutionary period. “Two Russias” emerged. Some Russians stayed in the homeland and became prisoners of the Soviet Union. Other Russians fled abroad, mainly to Paris and founded schools and intellectual movements. When USSR was dismantled in the 1990s, these two Russian communities reunited through iconography. Sister Juliana, Gregory Kroug, Archmandrite Zinon and many more artists and intellectuals and clergy came together. They tried new forms and sought to keep the traditions. But they understood that “in the sphere of faith there are truths which are not subject to change.” Many creative works and writings arose out of the sufferings of the immigrant Russian communities in the west and their relatives under the Soviets. The experiences that they have left us in icons and books bore much fruit in rediscovering the meaning of icons not just in Russia but for the Universal Orthodox Church.