Aidan Hart

Icon painting has always been affected by the surrounding culture, incorporating and transforming elements from it. And more recently, icons in turn have been appropriated by and affected that culture. These are the very topical themes that I want to discuss in this article.

Icons are an extension of the Incarnation. This is true not only because of what they depict but also because of how they depict things. The way Christians have painted traditional icons throughout the ages has always been influenced by the culture of which they are, to a degree, a part, and to which they naturally wish to respond.  The icon is a union of the eternal and the local.

Put another way, healthy iconography is Pentecostal, for it declares eternal truths in the language of its viewers. One example is the early encaustic icons that used as their basis Romano-Egyptian funerary paintings (often called Fayum portraits). A second instance  is the Church illuminations of the Macedonian Renaissance that were based on works from Classical manuscripts. Both these examples we shall discuss below.

In subsequent centuries the style of icons in Byzantium continued to be influenced by the imperial court’s emphasis, or lack of emphasis, on classical learning. And in Medieval Rus distinct schools developed in different principalities, affected by such things as the extent of their trade contacts (a lot in the case of Novgorod) and the influence of monasticism (as in Moscow in the time of St. Andrew Rublev). Celtic Christian art likewise drew much of its inspiration from its pre-Christian traditions. Read More

Let me start with a parable of division:

Two kids have one big irregular piece of chocolate, and they need to share. But how? They have no way to measure, and somebody is going to get the big half. The smarter boy—or was it a girl?—figures a way: “I’ll make two portions, and you can choose first.” It’s immediately obvious that this will be fair. The divider knows that he may get the small half, so he makes as sure as he can be that they are even. And most people see the justice of the strategy.

This assumes consent to share. But what if one boy has the whole chocolate rabbit, and his sister wants some? If he’s an average child, the first thing he will do is decide that he ought to have the big half. After all, he is making a concession, diminishing his own position, and reducing his own reserve of chocolate. It was given to him by Authority. And what he gives to her is wasted, anyway: she doesn’t really taste it—as far as he can tell—and she might be messy, and it just doesn’t look right to see all that lovely chocolate disappearing down her lips. And it might not be good for her. Shouldn’t she be concerned about her weight? Therefore he asks himself, “How little can I give, to have some peace?” And many boys see the practicality of the strategy.

We, however, are adults. Read More

I first read Saint John Climacus’ book, The Heavenly Ladder, when I was a teenager. When you open this monument of Christian spirituality, you discover a new world, very different from the vision of the world that we are used to. The spiritual world is real. Spiritual warfare is real. This was the first lesson I learned when I started reading this book. The struggle is not me against the world. It is me against myself and my passions. This is the reason why at the bottom of the ladder one does not find repentance or vigilance but “on renunciation of the world:”

The man who renounces the world from fear is like burning incense, that begins with fragrance but ends in smoke. He who leaves the world through hope of reward is like a millstone, that always moves in the same way. But he who withdraws from the world out of love for God has obtained fire at the very outset; and, like fire set to fuel, it soon kindles a larger fire. (1, 13)

The second lesson I learned was that Christianity, especially in the East, is lived through experience. St. John’s Ladder is THE handbook in thirty steps for spiritual life in the absoluteness, the radicality of the Christian faith in the conversion of hearts. It goes beyond psychology, because it is not about knowing oneself, it is about contemplating God in the silence of prayer. Read More

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So Great a Cloud: A Celtic Litany
(Hebrews 11:4-12:1)

Ye sons and ye daughters! Come gather around!
Find drink for your thirst at the wells of thin places;
Turn homeward your hearts to God’s verdant oasis,
Where grace glints like dewdrops on this sacred ground.

And tho’ time should fail us, and evening draw nigh,
Our fathers and mothers in faith let us ponder;
Tho’ humble and meek, theirs to labour and wander,
In glory they shine now with angels on high.

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