Volume 22-23 – Iconography & more

The importance of the iconography of the Virgin and Christ for Byzantine art and culture can hardly be overemphasized. Curiously, however, there is one striking detail from the core of this iconography that still awaits a sufficient theoretical explanation. Namely, while the Heavenly Child is recognizably depicted in the medieval pictorial interpretation of chiton and himation of Late Antiquity, this iconographic formula was very often enriched by a specific addition – a third garment that virtually never appears when Christ was depicted as a grown man. Usually, this particular piece of cloth is wrapped around the Child’s chest and shoulders, occasionally just around the chest, over the chiton and under the himation (if the second was depicted). Contemporary theory has put forward some quite different interpretations of this iconographic phenomenon, but – as the following research will show – we are still far from a comprehensive and consistent interpretation of its meaning(s). Assuming that the cloth wrapped around the heart of the Christ Child in one of the most popular iconographic formulas of Byzantine art really deserves an in-depth investigation, the following study will attempt to unravel this iconographic mystery from the beginnings of its introduction into Byzantine art, and explain its semantic subtleties as a dynamic fusion of different layers of meaning that gradually overlapped in the course of its synchronic and diachronic embedding in the structures of Byzantine imagery.

Is there a connection between the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone and the political order of the modern West? Might the Western love of freedom and equality, as well as the emergence of Western totalitarianism, have a theoretical forerunner in the modern West’s fundamental theological doctrine of salvation, Martin Luther’s notion of justification by faith alone? Examining the religious experience that led Luther to formulate his doctrine of justification, we find freedom, equality, and totalitarian law held together such that the last is intrinsic to the realisation of the former two. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, I show how the divine law in Luther’s experience is totalitarian, while describing the arc of his experience with that law as one in which a more basic equality underlies his proclamation of freedom from the law’s demands. I then compare the pattern of Martin Luther’s experience of the divine law with the historical pattern of Marxist communism, noting that both began with great hope in the law, only to find it transform into a totalitarian monster.

If John Italos was ultimately censured for teaching Greek philosophical doctrines as the ultimate truth, why was he accused of iconoclasm? What role did icons play in the controversy around Italos’s philosophical teachings? At first glance, we might be surprised to hear that icons played any role at all since Italos was accused of teaching ancient, philosophical ideas instead of Christian doctrines: namely, that souls exist before human conception and that the cosmos was not created out of nothing. He was nonetheless accused of theoretical and practical iconoclasm, as well as its very opposite, worshiping images. We will now follow his story, accompanied by the pertinent documents surrounding the controversy, to see how images became involved in a dispute about philosophy.