Images in Christian Worship before the Iconoclasm

In a seminal article published in the Dumbarton Oaks Papers (1954) Ernst Kitzinger defined and thus affirmed the phenomenon of “the cult of images before the Iconoclasm.” His definition of “cult of images” underscored devotional practices and belief in magical and apotropaic properties of religious representations, and in their miraculous origins. To this day, Kitzinger’s definition of what constitutes the cult of images continues to weigh heavily on the scholarship, and explicitly or implicitly charts the course of current debates about the meaning of images in the pre-Iconoclastic era.

This paper aims at steering the scholarly discussion on early Christian images in a new direction by critiquing Kitzinger’s premises and by offering a new method of analysis. I argue that there are two analytical problems with Kitzinger’s study. First, most of the Kitzinger’s examples concerned portable images. He therefore ignored the vast majority of religious images, those that decorated the interiors of early Christian churches. Second, Kitzinger’s definition of cult takes as its analytical lens phenomena that become more common after the seventh century, but seem largely absent from the earlier centuries of Christianity. It is therefore anachronistic and unsuited to the pre-Iconoclastic religious imagery.

This paper proposes a new model for understanding the link between Christian devotion and Christian images in the early Christian centuries. It is grounded in three sources: scripture, the writings of the Church fathers, and early Christian church decorative programs, such the fifth-century mosaics of the Church of the Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. This new model centers on the often-repeated contemporary statement that images in the early Christian churches functioned as the gospel for the illiterate. Yet what is neglected is that neither the scriptures were interpreted literally, nor were the early Christian images literal renditions of biblical text. Both contained deeper meanings that only the initiate could comprehend. Patristic literature provides ample evidence that scripture signified at three different levels: historical, moral, and spiritual. I suggest that early Christian church decoration likewise operated on the same three levels as scripture. The images functioned as evidence for the historicity of scripture; they taught moral lessons; and they allowed the initiates to perceive higher mysteries. Positioning of images in churches responded to these hierarchies of meaning, with the apse imagery referring to the highest mystery of all: the mystery of the Incarnation.

Like scripture, early Christian images in churches, such as those in Santa Maria Maggiore, therefore were essential to Christian worship, primed to enable the worshipers for their spiritual ascent to higher truths. This role of images can be discerned therefore more than a century earlier than the writings on spiritual ascent of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. More broadly, images did not enjoy a separate form of “cult.” They were integral to Christian worship as early as the late fourth century.

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Bone, Blood, Milk, and Oil: Examining the Relics of St. Panteleemon

This paper examines the relics of St. Panteleemon, and the ways in which they promoted and shaped his cult in Byzantium. Panteleemon was one of the anargyroi—doctors who healed without payment. After converting to Christianity and performing many miracles, he was tortured and beheaded by the Emperor Maximian in ca. 305. His body was housed in a church built outside the walls of Nikomedeia in Bithynia. He was one of the most popular saints in Byzantium, and his cult extended into the West. Churches were dedicated to him, and illustrations of his life are found in a variety of media and contexts. He has an extensive hagiographic dossier that includes such authors as Andrew of Crete, John Geometres, and Constantine Akropolites.

Panteleemon’s relics, however, have not been the focus of scholarship. Textual and material sources present a diverse picture of Panteleemon’s cult, and the relics that helped shape it. This paper parses out the various contexts and uses of these sacred substances, and determines what they can tell us about the veneration of this healing wonderworker in Byzantium.

His bodily relics, kept in Nikomedeia, were certainly venerated. Reliquaries that housed individual body parts—such as his arm, now in Venice—survive or are known through textual sources. Milk also became associated with his cult—it supposedly poured from his wound at his beheading. A pilgrim of the eleventh century describes a gold and crystal reliquary in Hagia Sophia, which contained the saint’s blood and milk. The pilgrim notes that on Panteleemon’s feast day (July 27), the two liquids miraculously separated—one ascended to the top of the vessel and the other liquid sank to the bottom. Other textual sources indicate that holy oil was also associated with Panteleemon’s cult. According to the Book of Ceremonies, the emperors visited a church in Constantinople that housed the saint’s head, and received holy oil from it. Epigrams for reliquaries also describe the curative power of holy oil that “gushed from” Panteleemon’s bodily relics; these texts refer to him as a myroblytes.

Panteleemon’s cult was thus unusual for the number and variety of relics that were associated with it: bone, blood, milk, and oil. This paper explores the reasons for this material proliferation, and expands our knowledge of their veneration in the Middle Byzantine period.

Evidence for an Imperial Cult: the Case of Nikephoros II Phokas

While only one emperor, Constantine I, was recognized as a saint by the Orthodox Church during the Middle Byzantine period, evidence suggests that many if not most emperors, and some empresses, were informally granted sacred status upon death by the Church and/or their successor.

There was a conventional process for conferring saintly status on the non-imperial dead, and I argue that it was the same process used for emperors. My case study is the suggested cult of Nikephoros II Phokas, who is depicted in the monumental decorative programs of Cappadocian rock-cut churches, celebrated in an akolouthia, and sanctified in popular apocalyptic texts and legends. In most cases, imperial and otherwise, non-canonical status quickly fell away. In the case of Nikephoros, a preliminary assessment of the evidence suggests that his cult, established immediately upon death in 969, subsided during the late tenth century only to reappear, strengthened, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.     

Nikephoros, I argue, was (re) granted sanctity in the early eleventh century in order to assert his descendant’s right to claim imperial status. The emphasis on his piety was calculated to stoke the fires of discontent amongst the great military families of Cappadocia, whose status and wealth had been decimated by Basil II.

While this socio-political agenda was, of course, intended to serve a very specific, short-term goal, I argue that the pious renovation of Nikephoros continued after the revolt of 1022 was suppressed. The symbolic relationship between Joshua and Nikephoros established during and immediately after his lifetime, in art and text, again became popular in Cappadocia. In each case he is presented and/or addressed as an acknowledged saint.

This study will further our knowledge of the many ways in which imperial sanctity was established in the Middle Byzantine period. Monastic authority was region-specific and limited in the ability to declare and maintain sainthood. Popular, regional devotion is thought to have had more impact in establishing and maintaining cults of ‘unrecognized’ saints—but such popular cults have left little evidence, and unrecognized saints tend to remain so. In the case of Nikephoros we have, I suggest, evidence of the ways in which an imperial cult was invented, disavowed, resurrected and continued over a period of 120 years.

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