Aidan Hart

This article explores the relationship of light and matter in traditional icon painting and church architecture. In particular, it considers how this use of light reflects the Orthodox Church’s theology of deification, the material world’s transfiguration, the presence of divine logoi within the created world, and the capacity of aesthetics to help nurture the state of soul required for theosis. We might call this the ascetics of sacred aesthetics.

In this article we will discuss how the transfiguration of the created world in Christ finds expression in the formal or stylistic means of liturgical art, such as for example the way icons are highlighted, the translucency of the paint, the choice of colour, and the way Byzantine architects managed light and shade in their churches.

The invisible God cannot of himself be depicted. We depict God become flesh. However, the fact of divine grace working within the saints and the material world can be hinted at in the expressive forms of litur- gical art. Grace manifests itself through the people and things within which it acts. This objectively changes both the subjects it acts upon and the way we see them. The liturgical texts of the Transfiguration feast allude to both these transformations. Christ himself was transfigured: ‘You were transfigured on the mountain, O Christ God, revealing Your glory to Your disciples as far as they could bear it’.² But at the same time the eyes of the disciples were transfigured so that they could see Christ as he always was: ‘Enlightening the disciples that were with Thee, O Christ our Benefactor, Thou hast shown them upon the holy mountain the hidden and blinding light of Thy nature and of Thy divine beauty beneath the flesh’.³ To deny the capacity of art to indicate this transfiguration is to deny the capacity of the material world and the human body to participate in divine grace in any meaningful way.

1. All photos included in this article are by author, except fig. 10

2. From the Troparion of the feast. The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary and Archiman- drite Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber), 477.

3. From Matins, Sessional Hymn. The Festal Menaion, 479.