The Resurrection as Reintroduction: Rowan Williams on Icons of the Resurrection of Christ

Fresco of the Anastasis ("resurrection"), Chora Church (14th c., Constantinople)

Congregavit nos in unum Christi amor.

The classic icons of the Resurrection depict the Lord Jesus’ descent among the dead. In the icon, Christ stands astride the shattered gates of Sheol, surrounded by a mandorla that figures the depths of the divine life,   He grasps Adam and Eve by the hand, while other characters from the history of Israel—David and Solomon, Moses and Samuel—look on.  

In a rich meditation on the icons of the Resurrection, Rowan Williams suggests that they show “the effect of God’s action on human history up to that point, and, implicitly, the effect of God’s action on all history.” [1]  The icon dramatically depicts Christ’s liberation of human beings from the place of bondage and division into the peace of God.  “We are compulsive dividers, separators, and in these divisions we deny ourselves the life God is eager to give,” but Christ is “the one who bridged all these divisions.” [2]

The icons of the Resurrections, Williams suggests, fit with the theological vision of the great seventh-century Christian thinker, Maximus the Confessor, who “speaks of how every one of the great separations human beings have got used to is overcome in the person and the action and the suffering of Jesus”:

“The divide between man and woman, between paradise before the fall and the earth as we now know it, between heaven and earth, between the mind’s knowledge and the body’s experience, between creature and creator—all are overcome in the renewed humanity that Christ creates.” [3]  

So in the icons where we see Christ reaching out to both Adam and Eve, “it is as if he is reintroducing them to each other after the ages of alienation and bitterness that began with the recriminations of Genesis.  The resurrection is a moment in which human beings are reintroduced to each other across the gulf of mutual resentment and blame; a new human community becomes possible.” [4]  Christ stretches out his arms of love across all our divisions and gathers us into one new humanity, for “he is our peace” (Eph. 2:14). 

If the resurrection is “an introduction”, it is so “because the resurrection of Jesus brings us into friendship with the divine life itself”:

“It is because the uttermost of death and humiliation cannot break the bond between Jesus and the Father that what Jesus touches is touched by the Father too.  As he grasps Adam and Eve, so does the Father; as he draws together the immeasurable past with all its failures and injuries, it is the Father to whom he draws it.  Because of his relation with the Father , a new relation is made possible between ourselves and this final wellspring of divine life.  The Christ of this icon, standing on the bridge over darkness and emptiness, moving into the heart of human longing and incompletion, brings into that place the mystery out of which is life streams.” [5]

Thanks be to God, for “Christ’s love has gathered us into one,” congregavit nos in unum Christi amor. [6]

[1] Rowan Williams, The Dwelling of the Light: Praying with Icons of Christ (Eerdmans, 2003), p. 24.

[2] Ibid., p. 30.

[3] Ibid., pp. 30-31.

[4] Ibid., p. 31.

[5] Ibid., p. 40, 41.

[6] From the antiphon “Ubi caritas."

St. Christopher the Dog-headed

Icon, Мученик Христофор (Matryr Christopher) (20th c., Suzdal, Russia)

This summer in a monastery museum in Suzdal, Russia, I came across something strange: an icon depicting a military saint with the head of a ferocious-looking beast.  And, as if this wasn’t strange enough, the saint in question turned out to be none other than St. Christopher!  Of course, I had to find out what this was all about.

According to the earliest accounts, St. Christopher was a soldier martyred for his faith in Syrian Antioch round about the year 300. [1]  According to all the accounts, he was named Reprebus (or, Reprobus, literally, “wicked”), but after his baptism he was named Christopher (literally, “Christ-bearer”).  By 452 there was a church dedicated to him in Bithynia; the earliest Greek passions likely date from the sixth century and the earliest Latin passions from the ninth century in France.  These early accounts gave rise to the depiction of St. Christopher with a dog’s head, because they describe him as coming from a land of cannibals and dog-headed people.  For example, a late ninth-century Latin manuscript describes him thus:  

“There was a certain man who, since he was a foreigner from the land of man-eaters, had a terrible appearance, a dog's head as it were [qui habebat terribilem visionem et quasi canino capite].”

And again:

“His head was terrifying, like that of a dog [Caput ejus terribile ita ut canis est].  His hair was very long, and gleamed like gold.  His eyes were like the morning star, and his teeth like the tusks of a boar.  Words are not sufficient to tell of his greatness.” [2]

The Latin tradition appears not to have taken the description literally.  (It did, however, add embellishments, so that the medieval western accounts—which reached their final form in the wildly popular thirteenth-century Golden Legend—depict the saint as a giant who carried the child Jesus across a river on his shoulders.)  In contrast, the Greek tradition did take the description of the martyr quite literally—hence the icons depicting St. Christopher as dog-headed (Gk: κυνοκεφαλος, kunokephalos).

But why do the ancient accounts describe Reprebus/Christopher as coming from a land of cannibals and dog-headed people in the first place?  The short answer is that they do so in order to emphasize his foreignness.  

In the earliest accounts, Reprebus is captured and forced to serve as a soldier in the numerus Marmaritarum (“Unit of the Marmitae”), which means that he was one of the Marmitae, a people who lived in the region in northern Africa known to the ancients as Marmarica. [3]  This fact is significant because, in ancient literature, mythic characteristics accrued to Africa (and India) owing to their location at the edge of the known world, the oikoumenē.  Both continents were defined by their supposed abundance of natural wonders, of bizarre and inexplicable phenomena.  The Greeks even had a proverb about this: “Libya always brings forth some new thing.” [4]

Icon, Christopher "Cynephelous" (17th c., Asia Minor),
Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens

Ancients and medievals delighted in cataloguing the reported wonders of Africa and Asia.  In these catalogues of wonders, Cynocephalics (Dog-heads) appeared alongside other “monstrous races”—One-eyes, Ear-sleepers, Shadow-feet, and No-noses; races of hermaphrodites, of pygmies, and of anthropophagi (cannibals).  For example, in the fifth century BC the Greek physician and historian, Ctesias of Cnidus, wrote of a people living in the mountains of India who have the heads of dogs and who communicate by barking.  Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD) drew on Ctesias’ account, including the Dog-heads in his Natural History in a section on “the wonderful forms of different nations.”  They even make an appearance in Augustine’s City of God under his discussion of whether “certain monstrous races of men [quaedam monstrosa hominum genera], spoken of in secular history,” are also descendants of Adam, that is, are truly human (civ. 16.8.1).  And the late fifteenth-century Nuremberg Chronicle contains a section on “strange peoples”, in which Dog-heads figure prominently.  (Here is Beloit College’s edition.)

Interestingly, although Augustine was skeptical about the truth of the reports of Pliny et al., he stands in a long tradition of philosophical and theological consideration of the “monstrous races” in order to ask what it means to be human.  This tradition extends at least through the Enlightenment, especially with respect to that most monstrous of races, the anthropophagi.

Reprebus, the cynocephalic cannibal from the edge of the world, is the Other par excellence.  The story of his conversion and martyrdom serves in part to illustrate the liberality of God’s love extending even to those whose very humanity is contested.  Indeed, the author of the eighth-century Passion from which I have been quoting states explicitly that he is relating the saint’s story in order to teach that the Lord rewards even converts from “nations who are only recently converted to the Lord,” and frequently refers to God as diligens humanum genus, “the lover of the human race.”  St. Christopher the Dog-headed, however fantastic, bears witness to the power of God’s love to transform even the unlikeliest, to do more than we can ask or imagine.

[1] David Woods, professor of classics at University College Cork, has an excellent page devoted to St. Christopher on his website, The Military Martyrs.  

[2] “Passio Sancti Christophori, martyris” [= BHL 1764], Anal. Boll. X (1891), pp. 394ff.  Translated by David Wood (here).  The passion is well worth reading.

[3] David Woods, “The Origin of the Cult of St. Christopher" (October 1999), The Military Martyrs.

[4] James S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction (Princeton, 1992), p. 88.

“Like some angel from heaven”: Concerning John the Baptist

Icon, John the Baptist, "Angel of the Desert" (Russia, 17th c.)

Yesterday was the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist, or John the Forerunner, as he is known in the East.  Since this is the only feast dedicated to John in the Episcopal Church (the Orthodox have six), I’ve seized the opportunity, however belatedly, to write something concerning John, “the friend of the bridegroom” (Jn. 3:29), Prophet and Forerunner of the coming of Christ.  And I’ve done so in the form of commentary on the iconography of John as “the Angel of the Desert.”

John is often depicted in icons, as in the one shown here, with unkempt hair and shaggy coat, following the biblical description of him as “clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist” (Mk. 1:6 and par.), like the prophet Elijah.  A tree with an ax symbolize his call to repentance:  “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (Mt. 3:10 and par.).  In this icon, John holds a diskos (liturgical vessel) with a figure on it, representing Christ as the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (Jn. 1:29).  The symbolism here comes from Orthodox liturgical practice, specifically from the prothesis (preparation) of the Divine Liturgy, when the priest cuts a cube out of the loaf of bread, and this cube is known as “the Lamb.” (Here is a clear explanation.)  Nearly as often, John is shown holding a platter with his own head on it—and there are icons of his “honorable head.”  And sometimes he has wings.

Why the wings?  Why is John depicted as “the Angel of the Desert”?  As far as I can tell, John is an “angel” in at least two senses: as messenger of God and as exemplar of the ascetic life.  

The first sense derives from the Greek word ἂγγελος (angelos), which means both “messenger” and “angel.”  Mark’s Gospel applies to John the baptizer the words from Malachi and Isaiah: “See, I am sending my messenger (ἂγγελον) ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight’” (Mk. 1:2–3).  John is the angelos sent “with the spirit and power of Elijah” before the Lord at his coming, preaching repentance to “turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God” (Lk. 1:16–17).  He is the angelos sent to baptize with water in order that Jesus might be revealed by the descent of the Holy Spirit as the Son of God, the Word become flesh (cf. Jn. 1:29–34).  As John Chrysostom put it, the Forerunner came down from the wilderness into the cities, “like some angel from heaven.”*

(It may be that the iconographic tradition also understands John as an angel in a more literal sense.  Origen at least entertained the speculative idea that John was “an angel who assumed a body for the sake of being a witness to the light,” without denying John’s humanity.†)

John is also “the Angel of the Desert” insofar as he is exemplar of the ascetic life.  In the ascetic tradition of the Christian East it is a commonplace to understand asceticism as an imitation of the life of the angels.  Often the goal of ascetic practice is to recover the angelic state in which Adam was thought to live in Paradise.  In such milieux, it is not surprising to find John the Baptist—living in the wilderness, eating locusts and wild honey—held up as model for the angelic, ascetic life.  

John Chrysostom does just that in a homily on the Gospel of Matthew.  Commenting on John the Baptist’s clothing of camel’s hair, John the Golden-mouthed writes:

“[I]t became the forerunner of him who was to put away all the ancient ills, the labor, for example, the curse, the sorrow, the sweat; himself also to have certain tokens of such a gift, and to come at once to be above that condemnation. Thus he neither ploughed land, nor opened furrow, he ate not his bread by the sweat of his face, but his table was hastily supplied, and his clothing more easily furnished than his table, and his lodging yet less troublesome than his clothing. For he needed neither roof, nor bed, nor table, nor any other of these things, but a kind of angel’s life in this our flesh did he exhibit. For this cause his very garment was of hair, that by his dress he might instruct men to separate themselves from all things human, and to have nothing in common with the earth, but to hasten back to their earlier nobleness, wherein Adam was before he wanted garments or robe. Thus that garb bore tokens of nothing less than a kingdom, and of repentance.”‡

Coptic Icon of John the Baptist (Egypt, date?)

For Chrysostom, John’s life exhibits an angelic detachment from the worry for food and clothing that marks fallen human society.  Living as Adam lived in Eden before sin entered the world, the Forerunner embodies the life of the kingdom inaugurated by Christ Jesus.  As such, Chrysostom urges us, his auditors, to emulate John’s “life of restraint,” if not by going into the wilderness (many people did precisely that in Chrysostom’s day), then by showing forth repentance in the cities.  Taking up John the Baptist’s demand, “Bear fruit in keeping with repentance” (Mt. 3:8), Chrysostom exhorts us to turn from the works of sin and to pursue the good deeds that make for peace.  Like the Baptist, Chrysostom unflinchingly preaches that repentance must be manifest in a changed way of life; he cries out, “It is not, it is not possible at once both to do penance and to live in luxury.”§

May we heed the voice of “the Angel of the Desert.”  May the One who sent him, in the words of the collect, “make us so to follow his teaching and holy life, that we may truly repent according to his preaching; and, following his example, constantly speak the truth, boldly rebuke vice, and patiently suffer for the truth's sake.”

* John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, 10.4.

† Origen, Commentary on the Gospel of John, 2.25.  Origen has some lovely and perceptive passages in which he contrasts John as the “voice” to Jesus as the Word.  “John’s voice points to the Word and demonstrates it,” he writes.  Origen’s distinction appears to have influenced Ephraim the Syrian whose Hymns for the Feast of the Epiphany contain the lines:

     “John cried, ‘Who comes after me, he is before me:

      I am the voice but not the Word;

      I am the torch but not the Light;

      the star that rises before the Sun of Righteousness’.”

‡ Chrysostom, op. cit., 10.4, emphasis added.

§ Ibid., 10.6.

On the Ustyug Annunciation

Today is the Feast of the Annunciation, transferred from Holy Week.  To mark the day, here is a reflection on one of my favorite icons: the Ustyug Annunciation.

"Annunciation Ustyuzhskoe," Novgorod icon (12th c.), Tretyakov Gallery

“The angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary.  And he came to her and said, ‘Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you’.” — Luke 1:26–28
Gabriel comes as the messenger of the one who says, “Sing and rejoice, O daughter Zion! For lo, I will come and dwell in your midst” (Zech. 2:10).  Gabriel greets her within whose womb his Creator (and hers) comes to take on flesh.  In the icon, Gabriel’s hand is raised in blessing because he comes in “the fullness of time” to “a woman” (Gal. 4:4) who has “found favor with God” (Lk. 1:30), to the one who will become Mater mundi Salvatoris, Mother of the world’s Savior.*  Gabriel rejoices with all creation† in the one chosen in God’s “good pleasure” (Eph. 1:5, 9) to be the mother of the Son of God.

“Then Mary said, ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word’.” — Luke 1:38
Like Abraham (Gen. 22:1), like David (Ps. 40:7), like her Son (Heb. 10:5–7), Mary’s response to the Lord is: “Here I am.”  She gives herself totally to the Lord.  In delighting to do the good pleasure of God’s will (Ps. 40:8; Eph. 1:5), she is made the mother of Christ, bearing him in her heart whom she will conceive in the flesh.‡  Thus, in the icon, she touches her heart, wherein dwells Christ, the King of Glory, who also makes her womb a throne.

In the icon, the Virgin Mary also holds scarlet thread in her hands.  The imagery comes from an apocryphal story in which Mary is chosen to spin scarlet and purple thread for the veil for the Temple.§  Apocryphal or not, it seems an appropriate symbol in the hands of her from whom “the Word became flesh and lived, tabernacled, among us” (Jn. 1:14).  Her flesh becomes “the temple of his body” (Jn. 2:21), and, in his face, shines forth with the glory of God (2 Cor 4:6).

Rejoice and be glad, O Virgin Mary, Alleluia. For the Lord has truly risen, Alleluia.    — Regina Coeli antiphon

* From Henryk Gorecki, Totus tuus Op. 60.
† From the Divine Liturgy of St. Basil the Great:  “In you, O full of grace, all creation rejoices, the ranks of Angels and the human race: hallowed temple and spiritual Paradise, pride of virgins, from whom God was made flesh; and he, who is our God before the ages, became a little Child; for he made your womb a throne; and made it wider than the heavens. In you, O full of grace, all creation rejoices. Glory to you!”
‡ Augustine, De sancta virginitate 3.3
§ Protoevangelium of James 10.