Color & Being

Studies in Late Antiquity, 2022

Contemporary studies of mysticism pay careful attention to the way words signify-and for good reason. Early Christians debated theories of language and invented new ones to try to speak the impossible. But what if we shift the focus from linguistic signification to chromatic differentiation? What do we notice when we're looking not for moments when words fail but moments when colors pop? Polychromy and the jeweled style of late ancient aesthetics are now well-known features of late ancient art, and yet these studies are often vague about actual colors. This paper attempts to slow the swirl of late ancient colors to show how early Christians found God in the color blue.

Editura Bizantina, Bucharest, 2024

'The Blueness of Divine Humanism' deals with the specific coloristic aspects of Christ’s image in Byzantine art. The key historical change discovered, analyzed and interpreted in this book is the change of the color of Christ’s most conspicuous and most important garment from purple to blue, which happened in centuries following the iconoclastic crisis. Thus, the study reveals how one specific color, irrelevant in early Byzantine cultural context, gradually climbs up on the semantic value scale, up to the point of becoming the unquestionable designator of Christ’s visual presence in post-iconoclastic art and liturgy. Careful contextualization of this specific pictorial invention shows the enormous richness of its semantic potential and, consequently, demonstrates that the image of Byzantine Christ changed in the most subtle yet the most radical ways throughout the Middle Ages. Namely, the very color change radically subverts the earlier conventions of Byzantine artistic language, up to the point of becoming a specific designator of Christ’s kenotic un-exclusivity on the symbolic horizon of a medieval viewer. His image changes from the powerful sovereign dressed entirely-in-purple (or gold), in Early Byzantine art, to become the power-emptied High Priest, who is dressed in garment colored by innovative blue color, which is, at the same time, appropriate to be worn in heavens and by any human being on earth. Thus, this research shows how the relations between imperial and ecclesiastical ideologies gradually changed, not only in the high level theological or courtly realms, but also in the domain of the most popular visual culture at the time. Finally, as those meaningful changes directly affected the image of Christ, which was the cornerstone of the entire Byzantine representational system, the semantic capacities of the mysterious blueness of his robe were to increase beyond political symbolism, and enrich to the point of becoming – as this study will argue – one of the most profound pictorial inventions of European (medieval) culture.

Icon and Word: the Power of Images in …, 2003

Paper given at 'The State Between: Liminality, Transition and Transformation in Late Antiquity and Byzantium', 22nd International Graduate Conference of the Oxford University Byzantine Society, University of Oxford, 29 February 2020. Presented in extended form as: ‘Without Theophany in Monochrome? Investigating “Theology in Colour” in 8th-Century Palestine’, The Cambridge Graduate Early Medieval Seminar, University of Cambridge, 4 March 2021.

2015

kaleidoscope (Gk. k a l o s = beauti-ful + e i d o s = form) is an optical ‘toy’, a device in which beautiful colors and forms can be visually experi-enced. This brief paper will exhibit kalei-doscopic features in being something of a k a s h k ú l (“begging bowl”) to mix my metaphors. It will contain miscellaneous notes relating to religious cosmology, angelology, color and “throne ” symbol-ism in select Abrahamic, Bábí, Bahá’í, and religious and mystical texts. It will be seen that colours are related to the theology of the celestial Throne. It will be demonstrated here that angels, lights of different kinds and the Throne of God are all motifs closely related to each other. First, a few paragraphs by way of setting the scene. A n g e l o l o g y Though a complex theological subject, angelology can be given a quite simple (though necessarily inadequate) defini-tion. It may be regarded as the study of the doctrine regarding angels (Ar. m a l a k; Per. f i r i s h t i h). It is the ...

History of Religions 1985, 24: 345-368., 1985

Icoana Credintei. International Journal of Interdisciplinary Scientific Research, 2018

According to the Orthodox Theology, holy Icon is a reality of knowledge and vision of God. The icon is an embodiment of the love of God, thus the central theological ground of the veneration of icons is a Christological one. For the theology of the icon, the concept of the face as a reflection of the prototype is central. The specificity of the Orthodoxy shows us that Theology is the science of the complete knowledge with a direct existential implication of the only truth about life-Maker, iconically expressed by God – Holy Trinity. The theological background of knowledge is essentially of ecclesial nature, as a gracious ambience in which the Divine Revelation represents the power of Truth. That is why Church is the guarantee and the authenticity of the free and infallible knowledge of the divine truth which it internally possesses.

Altarul Reîntregirii, 2017

As visible manifestations of the eschatological realm in the liturgical practice of the Church, the symbol and the icon belong to the empirical world, and their characteristic note is given by their correlation with the transcendence. By the agency of the Holy Spirit, the two become environments through which Christ reveals His presence and saving actions in the Church. They both unveil and shroud, at the same time, the novel reality of the Aeon to come, for in this world "we know only in part", in such a manner, so as to make the man crave eschatological perfection. Both the icon and the symbol engage the human spirit in its wholeness, which in turn requires a certain degree of ascesis and spiritual delicacy in order to perceive their message. The liturgical symbol is both an "icon" of the economy of salvation and an "icon" of the world to come. During the Holy Liturgy, everything becomes a window to the eschatological realm, all the painted icons and the liturgical rituals point to the mystical Eucharistic Reality, the warrant of our future wholeness.