Beauty in the Church

Khouria Krista West's Lecture Notes on "Envisioning the Kingdom: the Why and How of Beauty in the Orthodox Church

Session 1: the "why" of beauty in the Church

• We are living in a time that has a fragmented, disintegrated approach to beauty. It is not part of our theological tradition as Orthodox Christians.

• As Orthodox Christians, we have a beautiful God and we are created in His image.

• We are human, and as such, have a physical and spiritual reality.

• We are sons of God and in the words of Philip Sherrard, to a son of God means, "for god to be, in an active and not merely a passive manner, the source, the inmost center of our reality."

• In Christ, the was of separation between God and man is destroyed and the entire universe is fully, divinely integrated -- there is no longer a divide between heaven and earth, the physical and spiritual.

• In the Gospel of John, Jesus says: "For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God." John 3:20-21.

• In this way, man shares with Christ, in the words of Sherrard: "in that sacrament of love and beauty in which all things, released from their bondage, live, move and have their being. Outside this relationship... man has no real place in the world, or the world in him."

• To be fully human, necesstates that we fully participate with our Beautiful God, that we see Him as the ultimate reality, the fountain of our being, the reason of our existence, and the purpose of our lives. We do this by recognizing two truths:

1. The incarnation of Christ is an eternal truth and has fundamental consequences for the cosmos -- "the was of separation os destroyed.

2. We are called to co-operate and participate in the Divine in the Universe in our physical world.

• Our vocation in Christ is: to cooperate and participate in the Divine and this virtually always involves cooperating and participating in beauty, in all its myriad forms, because we have a beautiful God.

• Plato and Aristotle go to lunch: Aristotle and his "no food touching" is mono-symbolism or "a thing only means one thing and only that thing"; Plato and his messy salad is poly-symbolism and "things mean things and things mean other things."

• Beauty isn't "good" or "bad", it just is, in all its varied, amazing, sometimes complimentary, sometimes contrasting forms.

• Sacrament is the means by which we cooperate with God in the sanctification of the created world. Sacramental living, living in such a way as to make all things holy, is healing for the world, for others, and for ourselves.

• All acts of beauty are seen as actions towards and with God.

• Sacrament is a "confrontation of man and his Maker in the fire of love and the Holy Spirit."

Session 2: the Features of Orthodox Christian Aesthetics

• Orthodox Christian art must be perceived noetically: not jut intellectually, but through the noetic experience.

• How does the nouse perceive? Through the senses that feed our mind and then into our nous -- it is an entirely integrated process.

• It utilizes the construct of time: Orthodox Christian art is expected to unfold in time, not to be instantly apprehended. It unfoldsM rather than appears.

• Historically the study of aessthetics was akin to the study of God -- the Beautiful God. The study of theology would have been a "subheading" under the great umbrella of asthetics, instead of the current reverse model of asthetics under theology.

• So, how does this all work in the "fallen world"? The world has been redeemed and is truly, inherently beautiful and resurrected, yet we only see as much as we are able to participate in its resurrection.

• Beauty is restorative and restful -- is brings peace, not chaos. It invigorates and motivates through the calming presence.

• It is a full sensory experience that utilizes all the senses, not simply the sense of sight.

• The Facets (or building blocks) of Orthodox Christian Aesthetics

Rhythm: a sense of movement and rhythm, feast and fasting, joyful and penitent, a cyclical nature, a lack of monotony, the importance of repetition, theologically always moving towards theosis.

Contrast & Light: bright versus dark, the importance of the play of light -- light is used as an artistic medium in its own right just like color.

Color: what does a historic Eastern Christian palette look like (no neon orange or blue-purple); icons as living color palettes, patina of metal and wood, polychromy and the warmth softening the magnificence.

Layers: the various elements of church art work together both in time and space sanctifying time and space -- the idea of layering over the generations, the holistic nature of ECA, the harmony of layers and textures -- we incorporate stone, marble, mosaic, wood, textiles, and metal all within the same space working to the same end.

Emphasis (Hierarchy): which pieces of art are emphasized over others? The idea of the church beginning at the Holy Table and radiating outward; the positioning of the iconostasis, the chanters' stand, the baptismal font, the epitaphios over the wast door, etc.

Substance instead of appearance: we use real things, quality materials, the "best of the earth", we are working within an achieved reality, not a produced fantasy.

Proportion, or The Itsy-Bitsy and the Ginormous: what is smaller or larger in a given scheme and why? Why teeny-tiny mosaics actually emphasize space. This is how we approach the artistic principles proportion and scale within Eastern Orthodox art.

Originality: referencing an original, not a sense of the new or novel.