Lectures/Jan 23, 2025

Heaven to Earth, Earth to Heaven: Neoplatonic Theology and the Art of Byzantine Churches

Heaven to Earth, Earth to Heaven: Neoplatonic Theology and the Art of Byzantine Churches lead image

Heaven to Earth, Earth to Heaven: Neoplatonic Theology and the Art of Byzantine Churches, 42nd Annual Father Alexander Schmemann Memorial Lecture by Henry Maguire (Johns Hopkins University), St Vladimir’s Seminary and online, January 30, 2025, 7:00 pm

Recently some scholars have interpreted early Byzantine churches, such as the great sixth-century church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, with reference to Neoplatonic ideas, especially those disseminated by the anonymous Christian writer known as Pseudo-Dionysios the Areopagite. But much less attention has been paid to the impact of Neoplatonism on the art of later Byzantine churches, those which dated to the period after the iconoclastic crisis of the eighth and ninth centuries. This lecture will look at some of these splendid medieval buildings in the light of Neoplatonic theology, using as our guide the voices of contemporary Byzantines who saw and used these buildings. Pseudo-Dionysios described a mystical hierarchy in which the material world, characterized by variety, reflects the light emanating from the One, the divine unity. Following these ideas, medieval writers gave to their churches a cosmic interpretation, seeing in their interiors a hierarchy of lights reaching up from the gleaming multicolored marbles of their pavements, which represented the diversity of the earth, to the overwhelming splendor of the gold mosaics in the vaults above, which represented the unity of the heavenly realm. In the words of one poem, the church was a ladder, leading up from the muted gleam of the earthly stones below to the more brilliant light of the heavenly orbit. This vertical exchange of light was associated by Byzantine writers on art with prayer, which reflected, as in a candle, the desire of the faithful ascending from earth, and was responded to by the greater light descending from heaven.

Advance registration required.