EMPIRE OF SADNESS
This essay has FOUR parts AND A POSTSCRIPT. Click here for the FIRST part, “UNDER THE INFLUENCE”. Click here for the SECOND part, “HISTORY AND PROPHECY”. CLICK HERE FOR THE THIRD PART, “SUSPICION”. CLICK HERE FOR THE POSTSCRIPT.
ThIS ESSAY IS THE SECOND IN the ENCOUNTERS WITH CHRISTIANITY series. CLICK HERE FOR THE FIRST ESSAY, “ASCETICISM AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL”.
26. Talbot Rice, Art of the Byzantine Era, p. 122.
27. Runciman, The Byzantine Theocracy, p. 136.
28. I presume that the way the podium is rendered has a special iconographic significance, but I lack the relevant technical knowledge.
29. See Christine Philliou, “Communities on the Verge: Unraveling the Phanariot Ascendancy in Ottoman Governance”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 51 no. 1, January 2009, 151–81.
30. On class degradation and religion, see Lucien Goldmann’s invaluable study of Jansenism, The Hidden God: A Study of the Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, tr. Philip Thody (1956; London: Verso, 2016).
31. “In Church” (1912), in The Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy, tr. Aliki Barnstone (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), p. 57.
IV
A POET REMEMBERS
A POET REMEMBERS
There is something more to be noticed in the miniature, which historians have explained to be characteristic of Byzantine art in the eleventh century. David Talbot Rice wrote about “a new interest in tenderness and intimacy”,26 and Steven Runciman considered the same stylistic feature to be one symptom of this venerable society in decline: “Pathos comes in. There is an emotional exaggeration in proportions, and human anxieties and sorrows are revealed.”27
It is my own view that Christianity overstates the importance of hope as the remedy for despair (see topic: HOPE AND ITS DISCONTENTS). Sometimes the best defence against despair is to willingly accept the sadness of unchangeable things, whatever they may be, which might even be a more persistent burden than the grandiose nihilism of despair. If this is true, then it is the artist who is in the habit of exploring and revealing the sadness and not the theologian or the historian—for example the illustrator who had the admirable skill to create the image in the manuscript of Chrysostom’s sermons. He gave the saint at the left an earnest and even pestering appearance, in counterpoint to the despondency that sweeps across the rest of the image. The ageless emperor has been bolted like a captive into his lavish podium.28 His weary and dejected face is mirrored by the archangel in his beautiful turquoise cassock, who is barely more than a boy, and whose blessing resembles a valediction. The higher significance of the miniature as a representation of the other-worldly spirituality of the Byzantine Church–state accord cannot cancel out its depiction of two men of sorrows seeming to sense danger in a waiting world of shadows. The image has to be understood both politically and in terms of Christian timelessness, but still it is full of the sadness of time passing and its having passed, which is a humble and respectful kind of sadness.
Fifteen hundred years after Saint John Chrysostom ministered to the congregation in Antioch, the city was part of the Ottoman Empire which in its own last years of decline was home to a Christian remnant. The families known as Phanariot had in previous centuries occupied elite positions serving the sultanate.29 After Greek independence, their status diminished. Those who stayed on in Constantinople and in Antioch became déclassé.30 Among this degraded group was the regally named but not imperially minded poet Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis (C. P. Cavafy), who wrote:
As I enter the Church of the Greeks,
with the fragrance of its incense,
its liturgical voices and harmonies,
the priests’ magnificent presence,
their each movement in solemn rhythm,
dazzling in their adorned vestments—
my mind goes to the great honors of our people,
to our glorious Byzantium.31
Here Church history appears quite differently than in studies by professors. There is no place in the poem for chronicle or the scholarly distillation of primary sources, no room for politics or economics, no institutionalisation and competition of theories. Instead tradition is invoked as directly feeding the senses in the form of incense, vestments and liturgy. Within the holy surroundings there emerges a consciousness of loss and absence—an awareness, expressed by the poet with a certain beautiful and minimal blankness, of what lies forever in the past unless it is remembered. It is not only the solemnity of the Orthodox setting, so reverently described, which “In Church” has in common with the eleventh-century illustration; the poem likewise insists on adding sadness to Christian splendour. The crucial difference between the two artworks is the use of the first person. Konstantinos offers us an image of himself, and there is no blur of the wolf to be glimpsed in the miniature of his poem. I think the poignant drift of his mental return to the glory of the Christian empire, which has passed away, signifies this great poet’s still resolute faith.
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