Introduction. Hesychasm and church art Genesis of Russian philosophical thought
Anastasia Babkova, III year IO SPbDA
There have been entire periods and eras in the history of the Church when reflections on the Divine light stood at the center of life, became the basis of culture, and shaped politics.
Such an era was the 14th century - the period of the triumph of hesychasm in Byzantium. Contemporary theologian and researcher of hesychasm, Rev. John Meyendorff distinguishes several stages in the development of hesychasm: from the cell practice of Eastern monasticism during the time of Macarius of Egypt (IV century) to the broad socio-political and spiritual movement, which swept the Eastern Christian world in the XIV - beginning. XV century
The mysticism of hesychasm, which combined deep prayer (“smart doing,” as they said in Rus') and contemplation of the Tabor light, had a huge influence on icon painting in Byzantium and the countries of its range, where an extraordinary flowering of art took place in the 14th century.
The word “hesychasm” comes from the Greek “ἡσυχία” - silence, silence. Hesychasts taught that the ineffable Logos, the Word of God, is comprehended in silence. Contemplative prayer, rejection of verbosity, comprehension of the Word in its depth - this is the path to knowledge of God, which is professed by the teachers of hesychasm.
Transfiguration. Theophanes the Greek. 1403. Tretyakov Gallery.
Of great importance for hesychast practice is the contemplation of the Tabor light - the light that the apostles saw during the Transfiguration of the Lord Jesus Christ on the mountain. Through this light, uncreated in its essence, as the hesychasts taught, the ascetic enters into communion with the Incomprehensible God. Filled with this light, he partakes of divine life and is transformed into a new creature. “Man cannot become a god by nature, but he can become a god by grace,” they argued. Deification (in Greek “θέωσις”) is final goal any spiritual activity.
If in the actual psycho-somatic technique of the hesychasts one can discern some lack of need for an image, then their attitude towards the veneration of the image and its significance in liturgical and prayer practice firmly follows the Orthodox dogma.
When St. Gregory Palamas speaks about icons; he not only expresses the classical Orthodox point of view, but also introduces some clarifications characteristic of hesychast teaching and the entire direction of Orthodox art:
Saint Gregory Palamas. XIV century
“He who became man for our sake, - he says , - create an icon out of love for Him and through it remember Him, through it worship Him, through it raise your mind to the worshiped body of the Savior, sitting in glory at the right hand of the Father in heaven. In the same way, create icons of saints […] and worship them, not as gods, which is forbidden, but as evidence of your communication with them in love for them and honoring them, raising your mind to them through their icons.”
Both in veneration of the image and in understanding its basis and content, Palamas expresses the entirely traditional Orthodox teaching; but this content, in the context of his theology, acquires a sound characteristic of the pneumatological period.
The Incarnation serves as a starting point for him to indicate his fruits - the glory of the Divine, revealed in the human body of God the Word. The deified flesh of Christ received and communicates the eternal glory of the Divine. It is this flesh that is depicted on icons and worshiped to the extent that it reveals the Divinity of Christ.
And since God and the saints have the same grace, their images are made in the same way.
In light of such an attitude to the image and such an understanding of its content, there is no doubt that for hesychasts in the field of art, the only means of communication with God could be an image that reflected the experience of this communication with God in accordance with the teachings of hesychasm.
Usually the term "hesychasm" is applied to the theological disputes that arose in Byzantium at this time. They concerned the very essence of Christian anthropology - the deification of man. How it was understood, on the one hand, in traditional Orthodoxy, represented by hesychasts with St. Gregory Palamas led, on the other hand - in religious philosophy, nourished by the Hellenistic heritage, represented by humanists led by the Calabrian monk Barlaam and Akindinus. The so-called Hesychast Councils in Constantinople in 1341, 1347 and 1351 were mainly devoted to these disputes.
However, these disputes only prompted the Church to reveal the Orthodox teaching on the deification of man and, by conciliar definitions, to give a theological justification for the enlightenment of man by the Holy Spirit, that is, that which from the very beginning of Christianity was the living impulse of its art, the basis that nourished it and determined its forms.
Divine Light is one of the main categories of the theology of the icon. The teaching of the hesychasts gave the experience of Light in the icon a special depth, poignancy and fullness. And in the 14th century, light became, so to speak, the “main character” of icon painting.
Theophanes the Greek. Fragment of the fresco “Pantocrator” in the dome. Church of the Transfiguration on Ilyin Street, Veliky Novgorod. 1378
Among the most important monuments of monumental painting that define the spirit of the era are the frescoes of Theophanes the Greek in the Church of the Transfiguration on Ilyin Street in Novgorod.
The decorative system and style programmatically embodies the ideas of acquiring divine light, the Tabor fire through unceasing “smart prayer” and participation in the liturgy.
As soon as you cross the threshold of a small but very elongated temple, you are literally stopped by the gaze of Christ Pantocrator, depicted in the dome.
Lightning seems to sparkle from his wide open eyes. This image makes us recall the words from Holy Scripture: “Our God is a consuming fire” (Heb. 12.29) or “I have come to bring down fire on the earth” (Luke 12.49).
“In the image of Pantocrator,” writes Vzdornov , - enormous Divine power comes from the figure, face and gaze of Christ. Light circles spread out from his eyes. The energy radiated by Christ seems to fill and permeate the entire space of the temple, creating an intense mystical atmosphere.”
For Theophan, as a “hesychast,” God is, first of all, Light, but this Light appears here in the form of fire. The world is tested by this fire, the world is judged by this fire, this fire burns out all untruths. He divides creation into light and darkness, heavenly and earthly, spiritual and spiritual, created and uncreated.
Theophanes the Greek. Prophet Elijah. Fresco in the drum of the dome. Church of the Transfiguration on Ilyin Street, Veliky Novgorod. 1378
Hence the pictorial language of Feofan - he reduces the entire palette to a kind of dichotomy; we see how lightning and white highlights flash on an ocher-clay background (the color of earth) (light, fire). Everything is written incredibly energetically, with some exaggerated effects, with increased semantic accents.
The selection of prophets in the drum is unusual, like everything else by Theophan, which allows you to “read” his intention. Here are depicted the so-called pre-Flood prophets, that is, the forefathers who lived before the Flood, before the first Testament that God concluded with humanity in the person of Noah. Thus, we see: Adam, Abel, Enoch, Noah. Of the later prophets, only Elijah and John the Baptist are included in this series. The idea is very transparent: the first world perished from water, the second will perish from fire, salvation in the first catastrophe of Noah in the ark is the proclamation of the Church. The fiery prophet Elijah announced this divine fire and himself ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot (2 Kings 1-2). The Last Prophet Old Testament John the Baptist preached that Christ would baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire (Matthew 3.11).
Theophanes the Greek. Fresco "Hospitality of Abraham". Church of the Transfiguration on Ilyin Street, Veliky Novgorod. 1378
The paintings in the small chapel dedicated to the Holy Trinity are relatively well preserved - this is a small room in the choir intended for individual prayer.
The program for this painting was the contemplation of the Holy Trinity by the ascetics. On the eastern wall is written the image “The Appearance of Three Angels” (“Hospitality of Abraham”).
And here Feofan is faithful to his principle of monochrome - even the images of Angels are painted in two colors. The general tone of the figures and background is brown. The main accents are marked and indicated with whitewash: movements on the faces and eyes, toroki-rumors in the hair, highlights on the wings, staves with trefoils at the end. Moreover, attention is drawn to the fact that the pupils in the eyes of the Angels are not written, they are replaced by bright white whitening strokes.
Theophanes the Greek. Fresco "Stylites". Church of the Transfiguration on Ilyin Street, Veliky Novgorod. 1378
Along the walls, on three sides, are depicted stylites and hermits - the same ascetics of prayer who fled from the world in order to practice silent contemplation in solitude. All of them stand before the Holy Trinity. In the images of ascetics, the dichotomy of Feofanovsky coloring acquires special tension. Activity before our eyes white grows from image to image.
Here the saint appears with his hands extended forward. There are energetic strokes of white on his fingertips - it’s as if he’s touching the light, feeling it almost physically. He enters this light. This is the holy stylite Simeon the Elder. The light glides freely over his clothes, pulsates on the curls of his hair, and is reflected in his eyes.
St. Simeon the Younger is represented in the pose of an oranta with his arms spread to the sides. The lights on his clothing resemble sharp, piercing lightning bolts piercing his decrepit flesh like arrows. There are no pupils in the open eyes, but whitening engines are depicted in the eye sockets (we saw the same technique in the images of the Angels of the “Holy Trinity” composition) - the saint sees this light, he is filled with this light, he lives by it.
Theophanes the Greek. Venerable Alypius. Church of the Transfiguration on Ilyin Street, Veliky Novgorod. 1378
The stylite Alypius is depicted with his hands folded on his chest, his eyes are closed, he listens to his heart, as the hesychasts advised: “Lower your mind into your heart and then pray.”
And finally, the apotheosis of transfiguration and immersion in light - the image of St. Macarius of Egypt. The elongated candle-shaped figure of the ascetic is completely enveloped in light, like a white flame; this is a pillar of light. The coverage of light reaches almost the indistinguishability of the outlines of the figure. On the white figure, the face and hands (!) painted in ocher stand out, put forward in front of the chest with palms open outward. This is a posture of acceptance of grace, openness. Whitening highlights are written in flashes on the face of Macarius, but the eyes are not written at all. This strange technique was again chosen deliberately: the saint does not need bodily eyes, he sees God with his inner (spiritual) gaze, he does not look at the external world, he is entirely within. St. Macarius lives in the light, he himself is this light (“It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” Gal. 2.20).
The face and hands against the background of light, in which the outlines of the figure of the saint are barely visible - an image of exceptional power, found by Theophan.
This is a classic illustration of the Orthodox mystical experience - the ascetic, in the process of communion with God, is immersed in the light, in the divine reality, but at the same time does not dissolve like salt in water (as they teach, for example, eastern religions), but always retains his personality. This personality requires purification and transformation, but always remains sovereign.
We can say that the images of the pillars and hermits of the Trinity chapel represent, as it were, different stages of deification. One of the pillars of hesychasm, St., wrote about the various steps of this ladder. John Climacus, abbot of the Sinai Monastery.
Theophan places St. at the highest level. Macaria
Theophanes the Greek. Venerable Macarius Egyptian. Church of the Transfiguration on Ilyin Street, V. Novgorod. 1378
Egyptian, ascetic of the 4th century, who stood at the origins of monasticism. Theophanes clearly demonstrates to us how the Tabor light affects the ascetic. This is a unique and very vivid preaching of the hesychast path, a call to follow it.
In a letter to Bishop Kirill of Tver, Epiphanius the Wise wrote that Theophan was a philosopher and very skilled in conversation.
And here, in his work on the painting of the Novgorod Church of the Transfiguration, the Greek master manifests himself not only as a virtuoso painter, but also as a profound theologian and brilliant preacher.
Church art positively accepted the features of spiritual experience that were emphasized by hesychast theology.
The reality that hesychasm defended, namely the holiness of man and the world, their unity with God and God with them - this reality is conveyed by the image in all its elements.
The visual techniques of icon painting are extremely closely related to the hesychast teaching about God, His actions and man.
Christ Pantocrator. XIV century State Hermitage Museum.
The realities of the mystical life of the sacred silencers determine the symbolic and semantic structure of the image. This structure forms gold (or related colors, for example, yellow-ochre, red), which is widely used in icon painting for the background, halos, and assist.
Gold symbolically conveys the uncreated Light of the Divine, enlightening and transforming the created world. All other elements of the icon correlate with the created world and belong to it. But their peculiarity is that they are shown in beneficial interaction with the Divine Light. Thus, gold signifies the grace by which every creature lives and joins God.
As one example when color acquires increased artistic expressiveness and symbolic significance, consider the icon of St. Marina from the Byzantine Museum in Athens, probably executed at the end of the 14th century.
St. Marina. XIV-XV centuries Byzantine and Christian Museum. Athens
According to the Byzantine tradition, St. Marina is always dressed in a red cloak. The color red has many symbolic meanings. It is “a flaming fire containing Divine energies” (Dionysius the Areopagite) that give life to creation. This is the color of martyrdom, an indication of the blood of Christ shed for the salvation of mankind. This is a symbol of Divine love, “a flame of burning love that warms hearts... so that fear is transformed into love” (Gregory the Great).
In the icon “St. Marina” the red color has a special tonality due to an unusual dark shade, close to crimson, very active, even piercing. The figure of the saint is immersed in a red cloak, as if in some special sphere, like a flame.
Red is not only the predominant color here, but almost the only one. It is he who determines main topic image: spiritual combustion, immersing the saint in a fiery mystical sphere, in which she resides in magnificent beauty and majestic tranquility. This icon embodies the idea of the inevitable triumph of those walking the spiritual path. It responds to the sentiments associated with the triumphant victory of the ideas of hesychasm.
Double-sided icon “The Virgin and Child Hodegetria / Three Saints: Gregory the Great, John Chrysostom, Basil the Great.” Byzantium, Thessalonica. first half of the 14th century Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens.
If we talk about the image of a person in an icon, then we see: not only the color of the body and vestments, but also the entire appearance of the saint is associated with the action of the unearthly light of grace.
Specific proportions of the figure, refined hands, slightly elongated face, large eyes, small mouth, thin nose - all this conveys the experience of deification as it is experienced by the spiritual and physical parts of a person. Moreover, this experience is depicted in strict accordance with how the saints describe it.
"If the body, says St. Gregory Palamas, - called upon, together with the soul, to participate in the ineffable blessings of the future century, it must undoubtedly participate in them to the extent possible even now... for the body also has the experience of comprehending divine things, when spiritual forces are not mortified, but transformed and sanctified».
« Spiritual joy coming from the spirit to the body is not at all distorted by the message to the body, but changes this body and makes it spiritual, because then it cuts off the evil lusts of the flesh, no longer pulls the soul down, but rises with it…».
« The teaching we have received... says that dispassion does not consist in killing the passionate part, but in its translation from evil to good... In dispassionate people, the passionate part of the soul constantly lives and acts for good and they do not kill it».
That. the transmission of emotional movements, for example, of a person, in an icon does not speak of the diversity of his mental life, i.e. “humanity” with all its inherent impulses of the soul, and that this diversity is translated into the correct perspective, addressed to God. The detailing of pre-personal writing was adopted by iconography not at all because of aesthetic interest in the surrounding world - it was justified by the view that sees in the surrounding that which is called upon, together with man and through man, to enter into the eternal joy of unity with God.
The victory of Palamism determined subsequent history Orthodox Church. If the Church had remained passive before the onslaught of humanism, there is no doubt that the hurricane of new ideas that the era brought with it would have led it to the same crisis that Western Christianity fell into.
Thanks to hesychasm, the last Byzantines, unlike the Italians, gave place to naturalness without developing naturalism. They used depth, but did not enclose it in the laws of perspective. They explored the human, but did not isolate it from the Divine. Art has not broken with revelation, retaining its character of the synergy of man with God.
It was in this era that the boundaries beyond which church art cannot go, while remaining church art, were determined.
Theophanes the Greek. Saint Simeon the Elder. Church of the Transfiguration on Ilyin Street, Veliky Novgorod. 1378
Full text of the dissertation abstract on the topic "Traditions of hesychasm in Russian medieval culture"
On the rights of the manuscript
Nadelyaeva Ekaterina Pavlovna
TRADITIONS OF HESYCHASM IN THE RUSSIAN MEDIEVAL
CULTURE
Specialty 24.00.01 - theory and history of culture (cultural studies)
dissertations for the scientific degree of candidate of cultural studies
Moscow -2004
The work was carried out at the Department of Cultural Studies of Moscow State Pedagogical University.
Scientific adviser:
doctor historical sciences Chekalova Alexandra Alekseevna. Official opponents:
Doctor of Philosophy, Professor Ponomareva Galina Mikhailovna Candidate of Cultural Studies Olga Vitalievna Rodionova
Lead organization:
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology
Defense of sosgshpskh 2004 I
hours at the meeting
dissertation council D.212.154.14 at the Moscow State
Pedagogical University at the address: 117571, Moscow, Vernadsky Avenue, 88, room. No. 826..
The dissertation can be found in the reading room of the library of the Moscow Pedagogical University state university at the address: 119992, Moscow, Malaya Pirogovskaya, 1.
Scientific Secretary of the Dissertation Council
Goryainova O.I.
Relevance. Since its inception, the hesychast tradition has firmly established itself as a classical page of Orthodox spiritual culture. A new understanding of hesychasm has become the property of our era. Nowadays, one can observe a revival of interest in the mystical tradition, as evidenced by the appearance of a large amount of scientific and spiritual literature relating to this topic. The inexhaustible depth of this problem and its relevance for modern man allows us to expect continued interest in hesychasm at increasingly deeper levels of perception and understanding of reality.
In Russian religious studies and cultural studies, along with thoroughly developed sections devoted to hesychast teaching and the activities of hesychasts, there are also insufficiently studied topics that are quite worthy of becoming the subject of special research. One of these topics is “Traditions of Hesychasm in Russian medieval culture". The relevance of a separate historical and philosophical consideration of this problem can be emphasized by the following circumstance: the question of the relationship between the Palaiologan Renaissance in Byzantium and the art of Theophanes the Greek and St. Andrei Rublev in Rus' to this day is the subject of scientific research and scientific debate. Therefore, a comprehensive study of the monuments is necessary art and literary works of this time in order to understand their true meaning. When answering the questions of the surrounding reality, we must make an attempt to speculatively, and perhaps even spiritually, join the tradition in order to draw on the positive that was developed by the hesychast ascetics.
During the Soviet era, the study, and, especially, the very existence of the tradition was complicated in Russia and was concentrated mainly abroad. After a long break, hesychasm is being reborn, and we set ourselves the goal of preparing the foundations, a solid base for future research. Our first priority was to provide a comprehensive, systematic summary of the tradition on modern language: to enter its world and its system, present its principles, concepts, attitudes, reveal its problems, indicate, as fully as possible, the body of primary sources and other materials.
The problem of the influence of hesychasm on Russian icon painting of the XSU-XV centuries gave rise to a large number of disagreements and disputes, both among philosophers and among art critics. This topic is very multifaceted. It touches on such areas of scientific thought as philosophy, art, history, and of course, is directly related to theology. This, in fact, determines the variety of approaches to this problem - religious and secular authors view it differently and place emphasis in different places.
As for our problem, we cannot come to clear, indisputable conclusions due to various reasons, such as, for example, the difference in approaches - secular and religious, the difference in the perception of works of art, their controversial dating, the brush of one or another author, inconsistency the most patristic tradition and the works of the hesychasts. However, the purpose of this work is to take into account and analyze different opinions on this topic and come to conclusions that contain the rationale for a certain approach to the issue under consideration.
The object of the study is Russian medieval artistic culture.
The subject of the study is the hesychast tradition.
The main goal of this work is a cultural and philosophical study of the phenomenon of hesychasm in the broad cultural context of that time in relation to current problems modern cultural studies and philosophical anthropology.
Achieving the main goal of the study unfolds through setting and solving a series of the following tasks: 1. Consideration of the hesychast tradition, the subject of historical and cultural knowledge; 2. Study of the original creations of theorists and practitioners of the hesychast tradition, created throughout its existence; 3.
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Comparative analysis of the philosophical and theological debate between the hesychasts and their opponents; 4. Restoration of the existential and socio-cultural context of these views; 5. Determining the place of the hesychast tradition in the artistic culture of medieval Rus'; 6. Justification of the relevance of hesychast views for modern cultural studies and philosophical anthropology.
Methodologically, the dissertation study of hesychasm in the context of Russian culture is associated with an attempt at hermeneutical reconstruction and generalization of the spiritual and theoretical experience of hesychasm based on the analysis of the texts of its main representatives, primarily St. Gregory Palamas, as well as a comprehensive analysis of the cultural situation of the era under study and understanding of the problems of interpenetration the basic ideas of the doctrine of hesychasm and the surrounding cultural and historical environment.
The novelty of the work follows from the formulation and solution of problems associated with the explication of the views of hesychasm in the context of its cultural environment in relation to the current themes of “modern” philosophical thought, which opens up new prospects in the field of studying the deep existential experiences of the human personality in their absolute and cultural aspects.
The theoretical significance of the proposed work is associated with its relationship to the category of fundamental issues of religious and philosophical anthropology, theology and cultural studies. The disclosure of the anthropological model of late Byzantine hesychasm in all its cultural significance contributes to a deeper understanding of the problems posed in the system of modern philosophical and theological knowledge about the human personality. The dissertation materials can be used in research on medieval and modern philosophy of culture, as well as in lectures and practical classes in cultural studies, world artistic culture, and national history.
The following provisions are submitted for defense:
1. Review of the history of the study of hesychasm in literature, both pre-revolutionary and modern. The history of the study of hesychasm in classical and modern literature appears as a process of comprehending the intellectual and mystical experience of representatives of this original theological and philosophical movement.
2. Consideration of the socio-political and cultural situation in Byzantium in the XIV-XV centuries, in the context of which the tradition of hesychasm takes place; analysis of the teachings of the hesychasts and their opponents, consisting of a study of the history of Orthodox anthropology in Byzantium until the 14th century, the philosophical and theological teachings of the head of the hesychasts - St. Gregory Palamas and, finally, the anthropological, ontological and epistemological views of representatives of hesychasm. The main ideas of hesychasm are:
The view of man as the image and likeness of God, within the framework of which the question of creativity is raised and resolved;
The practice of asceticism to achieve theosis (deification) as the ultimate destination of the human person.
The doctrine of psychophysical unity, which presupposes the interconnection and complementarity of body and soul.
3. Modern reconstruction of hesychast views includes: analysis and rethinking of the spiritual experience of the past, comparing it with the achievements of modern philosophy.
The introduction substantiates the relevance of the topic, defines the subject of research and the methodological basis, and formulates its goals and objectives.
Chapter I. “Hesykham as a socio-cultural phenomenon” serves as a historical and philosophical introduction to the stated topic.
IN 1. “Hesychasm as a subject of historical and cultural knowledge” examines the historiography of the issue.
In Russia, researchers of religious thought started talking about hesychasm in the second half of the 19th century. In the middle of the 19th century. the future bishop Porfiry Uspensky, a gifted Russian scientist, sets off on a journey to Mount Athos. He discovers ancient sources. P. Uspensky collected and systematized the manuscripts he found related to Nsihast disputes, and then published them, which marked the beginning of research in this area in our country and abroad.
In 1860, the first study on hesychasm was published in Kyiv. It spoke about the book of Abbot Modest "Saint Gregory Palamas, Metropolitan of Thessalonica, champion of the Orthodox teaching about the Light of Tabor and the actions of God." Nowadays, only a narrow circle of specialists refers to this book. But she attracted the attention of Russian religious science to the hesychast disputes of X1UB. And to hesychasm in general. Researchers realized that the spread of hesychasm was a significant stage in the history of theological thought and one of the most important events in the life of the Orthodox Church, which retained its significance in subsequent times.
At the end of the 19th century. Serious research on hesychasm is appearing in Russia. They are already characterized by a historical approach to the problem of hesychast disputes. These disputes are now considered as a manifestation of internal social processes in the Byzantine Empire, a reflection of the struggle of worldviews, the origins of which can be traced back to the 6th-12th centuries.
We can observe a comprehensive approach to hesychasm in the studies of Bishop. Alexia (Dobronitsyna), A.I. Yatsimirsky, P.A Syrku and I.I. Sokolov, where the teachings of the hesychasts are analyzed with sufficient thoroughness. Their works showed that hesychasm as a mystical movement is not an isolated phenomenon, but an expression of a general pattern inherent in the late Middle Ages. Thus, the Byzantine mystics were placed on a par with the mystics of Western Europe (Eckart, Runsbroen, Tauler).
The famous historian of the early 20th century G.P. Fedotov wrote the book "Saints of Ancient Rus'". In it, he argues that in the era of the Horde yoke, a new stage of ancient Russian holiness begins - the mystical. He is embodied by St. Sergius of Radonezh. Fedotov considers him the first Russian mystic. The researcher does not find direct evidence of a connection between the founder of the Trinity Lavra and the Athonite school of “hesychasm,” but notes their deep spiritual closeness. In "hesychasm" the practice of spiritual self-deepening, prayer, and personal transformation through its intimate unity with God was developed.
In the 20th century, Russian theologians abroad made a significant contribution to the study of the phenomenon of hesychasm: Archbishop Vasily (Krivoshey), G.V. Florovsky, Archimandrite Cyprian (Kern), prof. VN. Salmon, Archpriest John Meyendorff.
In the study of the monk Vasily (Krivoshein) about the spiritual leader of the hesychasts Gregory Palamas, a very fruitful attempt is made to analyze the ideas of Palamas as a single, holistic and organic teaching. Moving on to the analysis of the philosophical and theological content of Palamas’s teaching, monk Basil explains such a high tension of the disputes that flared up around him, first of all, by the fact that both sides are based on different positions in their reasoning about God. Here the difference is revealed between cataphatic theology, more characteristic of the Catholic West - in particular, Thomas Aquinas and his school, and apophatic theology, predominant in the works of the fathers of the Orthodox East.
Thanks to G.V. Florovsky, in the 20th century there was a revival of interest in patristics. The researcher most fully identified neopatristic tendencies in theology. "Tradition
there is life, and traditions are truly preserved only in their living reproduction and empathy - the author formulated his manifesto of “neopatristic synthesis”1.
In 1950, a thorough monograph by Archimandrite Cyprian (Kern), a professor at the St. Sergius Theological Institute, was published in Paris, dedicated to the anthropology of St. Gregory Palamas. The author analyzes the anthropology of Palamas both against the background of his entire philosophical and theological worldview, and in the cultural and historical context of his contemporary era, which is a great advantage of his work.
V.N. Lossky compiled the first comprehensive presentation of Orthodox theology in the light of hesychast teaching. His writings provide evidence that apophatic theology is contained in the basic teachings of the Eastern Church Fathers. V.N. Lossky examines in detail the mysticism of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and the teachings of St. Gregory Palamas on "divine energy". Having studied the works of Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and Palamas, V. N. Lossky paid close attention to the connection between theology and mysticism in the Eastern Christian Church.
Father John Meyendorff provided a solid historical basis for the new interpretation of hesychasm. In his opinion, the main aspects of this ancient tradition are: “mental prayer” of Evagrius of Pontus, “mysticism of the heart” of Macarius of Egypt, the doctrine of “deification” of St. Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor, the doctrine of the vision of God by St. Simeon the New Theologian, Byzantine hesychasm of the 13th-14th centuries, medieval Russian monasticism.
Archpriest John Ekonamtsev considers hesychasm as one of the phenomena of the Renaissance. In his work “Hesychasm and the Eastern European Renaissance,” he analyzes in detail the problem of creativity.
In the works of S.S. Khoruzhy, the study of hesychast spiritual practice ("smart doing") took the form of an interdisciplinary program, including theological, psychological, linguistic topics, however, with philosophy at its core. S.S. Khoruzhy in his research devotes the main place to the energy aspect. The researcher pays attention to the very concept of “energy” and the meaning that was invested in it at different times in different philosophical systems.
St. Petersburg researcher G.M. Prokhorov, in a number of publications, examines the significance of hesychasm for Russian culture, the ways of penetration of hesychast ideas into Rus'.
As already noted, not all researchers recognized the positive influence of hesychasm on the political, social and cultural life of Byzantium. K. Radchenko considers the main reason for the victory of the hesychasts to be the general decline of Byzantium. Z.V. Udaltsova, G.G. Litavrin and Gustav E. von Grünebaum viewed Palamism as an ideological force that paved the way for Turkish expansion into Byzantium. M.Ya. Syuzyumov unequivocally assessed Palamism as an ideology hostile to everything new in the world, including the humanistic trends that were paving the way.
In 1993, a book by I.I. Semaeva "Traditions of hesychasm in Russian religious philosophy of the first half of the 20th century." This work, based on extensive material, concretizes the thesis about the Orthodox spiritual foundations of Russian religious and philosophical thought. A comparative analysis of patristic literature and the works of Russian religious philosophers allows the author to highlight the hesychast tradition as fundamental in Russian religious philosophy. Palamite origins can be traced in the central ideas of Russian philosophy: “all-unity”, “sophiology”, “energeticism”, “epistemological ontologism”, “philosophy of the heart”, etc.
One of the newest works is the monograph by D.I. Makarov "Anthropology and cosmology of Gregory Palamas", dedicated to a comprehensive analysis of the collection of sermons
1 G.V. Florovsky Eastern fathers of the 4th century. Paris. 1913. Sat.
(homily) of St. Gregory Palamas. Based on this source, the researcher examines the cosmological, anthropological and “sociological” views of Palamas as a systemic whole, which achieves a double goal - the homilies are analyzed simultaneously synchronically (as a source on the social history of Thessalonica - and more broadly - the Byzantine Empire in the 14th century) and diachronically ( as one of the most important evidence of the self-awareness of the Eastern Christian patristic tradition at the late Byzantine stage) aspects. The author also offers a concise outline of the history of Eastern Christian cosmology of the 1st-14th centuries.
In § 2. “Spiritual predecessors of Gregory Palamas. Socio-cultural prerequisites for the formation of hesychasm. Its heyday,” the evolution of the formation of hesychast teaching, its origins, the state of the spiritual culture of Byzantium and Russia during the heyday of hesychasm is traced.
The concept of “hesychia” (silence, silence) entered the lexicon of Christian mysticism and became a term denoting a state of peace and inner silence, which a monk achieved through victory over passions and which allowed him to move on to contemplation. A number of researchers connect hesychast teachings with the ideas of the Neoplatonists. Indeed, Neoplatonism can be considered as an ideological bridge from ancient philosophy to emerging Christianity. For example, Plotinus described mystical ecstasy, and subsequent Orthodox mystics, including Gregory Sinaite and Gregory Palamas, only echoed Plotinus, based not only on his ideas, but even using his expressions and terms.
The dissertation provides a brief overview of the religious views of the earliest apologists of Christianity.
The philosophy of Origen (2nd-3rd century) is a stoically colored Platonism in which Hellenistic and Christian elements coexist. Christian anthropology, the foundations of which are set out in his treatise “On the Beginnings,” for the first time takes the form of a system that contains sections: on the creation and fall of man; about soul and body; about the image and likeness of God; about redemption and salvation; about the resurrection. The great Cappadocians spread the “theology” of the Alexandrian teacher, giving it the Orthodox form canonized by the councils. Thanks to St. Gregory of Nyssa, subsequent generations accepted the basic principles of Origen's mysticism.
Evagrius of Pontus (IVB.), developed Origen's system. He first introduced the term “smart prayer.” Despite the condemnation of Evagrius by the Christian Church, we find excerpts from the work of Pontius in almost all spiritual Greek writers, including St. Gregory Palamu.
At Rev. Macarius the Great (IVB.) “mental prayer” of Evagrius becomes “heartfelt prayer.” Turning to the influence that the works of Macarius had on the spiritual literature of the East, we can easily find that, from the point of view of their readers of the 5th-15th centuries, they contrast biblical terminology and anthropology (perhaps with Stoic inclusions) with Platonic terminology and idealistic anthropology Evagria. These two anthropologies are veiledly present in the history of hesychasm, whose representatives can be divided into followers of Evagrius and Macarius.
The works of Dionysius (hereinafter referred to as Pseudo-Dionysius) Areopagite are of great importance. This is an unknown author who lived in the 6th century and signed with that name. Along with Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor, he made a significant contribution to the development of apophatic theology, which also formed the basis of hesychasm.
Isaac the Syrian (UP century). believes that for spiritual improvement a monk needs severe asceticism. The apogee of this process is love for God, which can only be achieved with the help of mental and spiritual deeds. The negative element of his teaching was hatred of the world.
Simeon the New Theologian (10th-11th centuries) argued that the highest goal of Christian asceticism is the vision of divine light. Simeon said that the Kingdom of God is, in a certain sense, achievable even in earthly life.
The doctrine of mental prayer was systematized and formulated by Gregory of Sinai (ХШ-Х1УБ.) on the basis of patristic teaching. His merit is also the spread of hesychasm in Slavic countries.
Speaking about the socio-cultural prerequisites for the formation of hesychasm, it is necessary to characterize the situation that developed in Byzantium in the 14th century. The era of the 13th - early 15th centuries. is the final cultural stage and an important milestone in the life of the Byzantine Empire. This was the heyday of hesychasm, which then swept the entire Orthodox East. Along with this, the Byzantine Empire is already showing signs of decline: economic instability, territorial losses, civil wars and the growing Turkish threat. An important event in the reign of John Cantacuzenus (1347-1354) was the revolt of the Zealots (1342-1349). The socio-political crisis in Byzantium was accompanied by a spiritual crisis: belief in demons and a passion for magic and the occult spread. Christianity ceased to satisfy all the needs of the Byzantine. The person had a feeling of loss of his spiritual integrity, and subconsciously he was already drawn to a different, non-Christian world. The “official church,” which was in direct contact with the authorities, was unable to overcome the spiritual crisis from within. Along with this, there was another tradition in the monasteries, which continued a different line of Orthodoxy. And this theology, which chose the path of asceticism and ascent to God, turned out to be even more significant for the church itself than the “official” theology.
In this situation, the activities of the most prominent representative of late hesychasm, Gregory Palamas, unfolded. At the Council of Constantinople in 1341, in the Church of Hagia Sophia, a dispute between St. Gregory Palamas and Barlaam took place, centered on the nature of the Tabor light. Varlaam was a representative of the humanistic movement. He, unlike Palamas, considered the Tabor light to be a created phenomenon. On May 27, 1341, the Council adopted the provisions of St. Gregory Palamas that God, inaccessible in His Essence, reveals Himself in energies that are addressed to the world and accessible to perception and, like the Light of Tabor, are not sensory and not created.
§3 is devoted to the main ideas of the hesychasts.
Most of the famous hesychasts of the early 19th centuries. left Sinai. They were St. John Climacus (VII century), Hesychius (UP-USH centuries) and Philotheus (6th-10th centuries) of Sinai, as well as St. Diadochos of Photiki (UB.), Abba Dorotheos, etc. This time is usually called the “Sinaitic hesychasm.” During this period, hesychasm acquired the features of an established method of spiritual practice. It was based on the school of prayer, which stood on a dual basis: the creation of prayer and “attention,” control of consciousness, ensuring the continuity of prayer. At this stage, the main stages of ascent were clearly identified: repentance - struggle with passions - hesychia - bringing the mind into the heart - dispassion - pure prayer - contemplation of the uncreated Light - transformation and deification.
Repentance is the highest gift for a person - “second grace” (after baptism), “second rebirth from God.” Repenting, the monk retires into solitude and silence, renouncing the world. Concepts such as silence and repentance for a monk are inseparably linked with each other. If we talk about the early period of Christianity, it can be noted that then solitude and hermitage were understood as synonyms. Here, of course, we mean laconicism. The only exception is for prayer. The saints were able to achieve true vision thanks to “purity of heart,” that is, freeing themselves from passions.
Fighting passions. The fight against passions is the dominant beginning on the path to God. The hesychasts paid great attention to her. They carefully classified the species
passions, while noting the psychological basis of their development. Along with this, ascetics have developed a whole system of methods to overcome them. Hesychasts have such a concept - “doing”. It means a spiritual process that strives to “transcend” nature, to unite with God. This process is closely related to the concept of achievement (asceticism).
The first text to systematically speak of hesychia (silence) is the famous Step 27 of the Ladder, the “sacred silence of body and soul.” Hesychia here is what follows invisible warfare. Silence is already a fundamentally new state of mind. Overcoming passions, a person ceases to care about worldly things. He reaches a new level, everything material loses its meaning for him. Hesychia entails a reduction in contacts and conversations that have a distracting effect.
The next step is to bring the mind into the heart. On it there is a merging of two types of human energies - mental (“smart”) and spiritual (“heart”). A strong connection of two energies occurs with the help of a special ascetic practice, the basis of which is attention. As a result of the movement of “smart energies”, a single energy source appears. In the process, mental energies undergo a significant change, as a result of which all fantasies are cut off and the imagination atrophies. The field of spiritual struggle for every person, first of all, is his own heart. Most hesychasts considered the heart to be the center of all spiritual and physical existence; it was in no way for them a metaphorical designation of the center of a person’s emotional life. In this, the hesychasts completely followed the biblical tradition. According to her, it is in the heart that all our spiritual potential, the core of personality, is concentrated.
Perfect dispassion is intended to crown the first stage of man's ascent to God. This state characterizes the liberation and concentration of the mind. Suppression of carnal desires occurs mainly through spiritual efforts. It is then that the “bringing down of the mind into the heart” occurs. The degree of ascent to God correlates with the degree of prayer.
Prayer. Prayer, according to hesychasts, should be continuous. The ascetics of the Eastern Church developed the practice of internal, or spiritual, prayer. The short prayer of Jesus is repeated constantly and becomes second nature to the monk. The purpose of this prayer is to achieve constant "being before God." Gregory Palamas did not deviate in any way from the ascetic tradition in the spirit of St. John Climacus and Gregory the Sinaite. However, its real meaning is the teaching of St. Gregory Palamas’s understanding of prayer becomes clear when he enters into polemics with Varlaam.
The fact of transformation has a very wide meaning. Therefore, it is not surprising that it was he who found himself in the center of attention of the teachings of Gregory Palamas: personal interaction and the heavenly light are important energy elements, and, uniting them into one whole. Transfiguration becomes the absolute embodiment of the energetic connection between man and the Lord. But man cannot see the essence of God, which is inaccessible to our limited created nature. The manifestation of the divine essence, as a rule, is revealed to the silent in the form of light, which is given only to the saints to see. Humanists denied the possibility of bodily transformation. The obstacle to this, in their understanding, was the human body. Divine and human are completely different concepts for them. The highest stage of spiritual ascent is the Synergy of God and man, or “deification.” Completeness, the embodiment of human destiny, salvation, the achievement of energetic connection with God - this is holiness.
The dissertation notes that the theology of Gregory Palamas in certain aspects has a humanistic orientation. This applies in particular to the human problem. Following the theological tradition dating back to the anthropology of St. Gregory the Theologian and Gregory of Nyssa, Palamas emphasizes the important position of man in the universe. But this, of course, is not the anthropocentrism of humanists. At the center of Gregory's worldview is
definitely God. The theological system of Palamas is not at all an artificial superstructure over hesychasm as a religious, mystical and social phenomenon. It was developed as a traditionally inevitable form of defense against the arguments put forward by Varlaam.
In §4 we are talking about the peculiarities of Russian hesychasm - about the perception of the mystical tradition by Russian ascetics, about how it received refraction on Russian soil in the 14th-15th centuries.” during the heyday of hesychasm.
Russian culture and Russian mentality developed under the significant influence of the Byzantine so-called Macedonian Renaissance in Byzantium in the 11th century, which coincided with the spread of Christianity in Rus'.
Founder of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, Rev. Anthony of Pechersk - associated with the main center of hesychasm - Athos. Mount Athos, almost immediately after the first monastic communities appeared on it, became one of the main centers of the hesychast tradition. From here this tradition spread to Slavic countries, including the Russian lands. Initially, hesychast ideas began to penetrate under the all-Russian Metropolitan Theognostus (1328-1353), who was well acquainted with the teachings of the hesychasts. The extensive impact of hesychasm was expressed in the spread of philosophical and theological literature, such as, for example, the works of Dionysius the Areopagite, Symeon the New Theologian, and John Climacus. The spread in Rus' of works associated with the name of Dionysius the Areopagite has a significant influence on the formation of new judgments about the world and man.
St. Sergius of Radonezh revived contemplative monasticism. The Life of Sergius of Radonezh was written by his disciple Epiphanius the Wise. This work is dominated by the theme of the ascetic-contemplative motif and provides evidence that Sergius can be considered a representative of the Russian hesychast tradition. During this period, spiritual ties and communication between Rus' and the Orthodox East were the closest. The closeness of St. Alexis to the Patriarchs of Constantinople - Callistus, a disciple of St. Gregory of Sinaite, and St. Philotheus, a disciple of St. Gregory Palamas, undoubtedly contributed to the perception of the experience of silence that the spiritual ascetics of Byzantium acquired on Holy Mount Athos. The Monk Sergius was interested in the teaching of Saint Gregory Palamas about the common grace of the Most Holy Trinity, and to become aware of it, he sent one of his close disciples to Constantinople - Athanasius, abbot of the Vysotsko-Serpukhov Monastery. But the teaching of the hesychasts became only one of the starting points of the theology of St. Sergius. The sphere of his personal theological comprehension of the mystery of the Holy Trinity is Christian morality in its correlation with the foundations of faith.
The era of the most powerful development of ascetic ideals in the reading environment of Russian society was the time of the life of Nil Sorsky. Nil Sorsky studied the practice of mental prayer on Mount Athos, where, shortly before his pilgrimage, Gregory Palamas himself labored. The special significance of the activity of Nil Sorsky was that, based on many sources, he developed in detail a system of monastic residence and built a monastery, the way of life of which was fully consistent with the state of hesychast silence and contemplation.
Unlike Byzantine, Russian hesychasm is closer to man. It did not become as widespread and did not cause such heated dogmatic disputes as in Byzantium. Russian ascetics were far from politics; their religiosity was based mainly on unceasing prayer, oral and written instructions to the brethren, and personal spiritual achievement.
Chapter II is devoted to the question of the influence of the hesychast tradition on Russian artistic culture.
§1 is devoted to the aesthetics of hesychasm.
Representatives of early Christianity - the holy fathers of the Church - considered artistic creativity as similar to divine creativity, and God was often called the Artist. The existential nature of man is the need for creativity, the active ability to reorganize the universe, and the formation of a sphere of spiritual values.
St. Gregory Palamas paid a lot of attention to the problem of creativity. He developed the patristic teaching about God the Creator. Along with this, this question became the most important component of his anthropology, in which the doctrine of man and the doctrine of God merged. Palamas' point of view is based on the principles of the patristic concept of "synergy" - the interaction of divine grace and human free will. From the words of St. Gregory is clear that the descent of divine grace depends not so much on the efforts of the person himself, but on the will of God. Along with this, he argues that God does not set a limit to the grace awarded. Out of His unspeakable mercy, He gives each person much more than he is able to accept. St. Gregory Palamas believes that every person is divinely chosen. People differ from each other only in the variety of charismatic gifts, talents, as well as the ability and willingness to accept divine grace.
Creative talent, according to the saint, makes a person unique, similar to the Great Creator. Creativity, in essence, is likeness, our likeness to others, likeness to God. But the image of God is a distinct concept - something that is a priori given - to man by the Creator: reason, immortality of the soul, etc. Baptism serves to regenerate the image of God. Similarity is a criterion subject to positive change and improvement. Not everyone can achieve similarity. It is not for nothing that only a saint can be called “venerable.” This problem was first raised by Origen, and then developed by Gregory of Nyssa.
The doctrine of divine energies can be considered a doctrine of icons, since the dogma of icon veneration states that an artist can translate into the language of forms, lines, and colors the result of divine action in a person. The doctrine of the Light of Tabor speaks of the deification of man. This intersects with the concept of the deification of an image. Iconism or, somewhat differently, the iconicity of creation is the realization of God’s plan for the world and man. The teaching of Palamas gave Byzantine, and after them Russian, theologians a “theoretical” basis for resolving the question of what can and cannot be depicted on icons. And this question sometimes arose very acutely. In a mystical sense, an icon is a revelation and manifestation of the internal energy and love of the one depicted on it, and, in part, of the one who created it. An icon is a means of spiritual communication for those who strive for God; it is a sincere dialogue, a mystery that is comprehended through tireless prayer and inner contemplation. It is worth noting that during the iconoclastic disputes, it was the ascetic mystics who were the most persistent apologists of icons. Theological debates of the XIV-XV centuries. demonstrated that in the light of the Incarnation, art cannot stand aside, and is obliged to contribute to the affirmation of faith.
According to the holy fathers, asceticism is also creativity, but creativity of the highest, mountainous order. It brings positive transformative energy into the world. The peculiarity of mystical-ascetic creativity is that its subject and object coincide. Therefore, the most complete comparison occurs here. According to the teachings of St. Gregory Palamas, the lost likeness of God is achieved through the action of divine grace and our breakthrough to it, in synergy, that is, in creativity. In the hesychast tradition, a huge role is assigned to the historical incarnation, which made man's godlikeness real.
Considering the problem of hesychast influence on Byzantine icon painting of the 14th-15th centuries, it is necessary to pay attention to some subjects directly related to the ideas of the hesychasts. One of the main such plots is “Transfiguration”. In the art of the 14th century, the theme of the Transfiguration, in connection with the heated debates between the hesychasts and their
opponents about the nature of the Tabor Light, gained exceptional popularity. This plot goes back to the Byzantine examples of the Palaiologan era and is directly related to the theme of divine energies. In the course of discussions around the teachings of Gregory Palamas, it was determined that, despite the fact that God in His essence cannot be depicted, divine energies can be visible and then depicted on an icon. If we follow the teachings of Gregory Palamas, then the divine nature for created creatures is in itself incomprehensible, but as energy or emanation it becomes comprehensible, named, contemplated, depicted. Icon painters used techniques of highlighting faces and overlaying spaces. When you look at the face of the saint, you get the impression that he is emitting light. In icon painting, gold is not so much paint as inner radiance, an energetic luminous flux. The main effect of the icon is the radiance of the image, the radiance is very strong, so that the face, the gaze, and all matter literally seem to glow.
Certain examples of Byzantine art of that era clearly indicate that some Byzantine painters set themselves the goal of creating a fundamentally different one - an internally filled enlightened image that was removed and purified from earthly, material, material impressions, a mystical image. A bright, spiritually intense intonation permeates such images, “and their entire artistic matter. The general illumination of matter, the manifestation of its metaphysical essence in it, is observed in all works of this type. The figurative characteristics of the art of the 14th century are almost always individual. At the same time, there are common features that unite all types of images. Each of the images is characterized by spiritual fullness, extra-spatial depth. The language of the icon is laconic, like a short prayer, so beloved by hesychasts. There are no sticky details in it. Everything is symbolic. gesture, pose, and, finally, the face of the saint himself. With the establishment of Palamism, Byzantine art experienced a true flourishing.
The victory of the Byzantine hesychasts predetermined the course of further development of Russian artistic culture. Remaining within its strict canonical framework, ancient Russian art was not subject to ancient influence. In all likelihood, in
XIV century, it was faced with a different choice than Byzantine art of the same era. The teachings of the hesychasts served for Byzantine and then Russian theologians as a theoretical basis for the iconographic canon. Written in Rus' in the 80-90s.
XV in the "Message to the Icon Painter" hesychast views are taken as the basis of the theory of icon painting. Along with this, hesychast “smart doing” is proclaimed there as necessary not only for the creation of icons, but also for their perception, which is also a creative process. The ascetic ascetic type of image, which appeared at that time in Byzantine art, was also known in Rus', although in general - little. In Novgorod it was embodied by Theophanes the Greek.
The paragraph examines specific features of the hesychast movement in Russian art of the 50s. XIV centuries - late Palaeologian period - the triumph of hesychasm. Issues of faith, prayer, the possibility of seeing God (communication with God), and discussing the paths of a person’s inner life come to the fore. The Orthodox ideal approaches the monastic way of existence. The topic of wisdom was one of the most pressing in the dispute between the hesychasts and their opponents and, obviously in connection with this, the symbolic image of Sophia became particularly widespread in the Paleologian era. Therefore, the symbolic depiction of Wisdom can be considered as an attempt on the part of the hesychasts to contrast the Wisdom of God with the wisdom of the philosophers.
Over time, Russian icon painting moves more and more away from Byzantine. While the Byzantine iconographic type is preserved, it is filled with a different content,
loses its severity and asceticism. Along with this, Rus' developed its own iconographic types that had nothing to do with Byzantium. First of all, this is the cult of local saints. XIV - XV centuries - the heyday of Russian holiness, the revival of monasticism and hermitage, art and culture, which were concentrated in monasteries. A special national type of Russian holiness has emerged. It had less mysticism than the Byzantine one. Contemplation fades into the background, although considerable attention is paid to it. The moral criterion begins to play a special role. This fact is confirmed by the lives of saints, and icons testify to this.
AT 2. The task was set to analyze how hesychast ideas were realized in the works of Theophanes the Greek, Andrei Rublev and Dionysius.
The images of Theophanes the Greek are rooted in the Byzantine tradition. They are characterized by amazing internal concentration, detachment, isolation, and sophisticated psychologism. The ascetic appears face to face with God. His mystical experience is very individual. The master's palette is restrained - only two colors - ocher and white, the overall color scheme is ascetically monochrome - dark, brown. This really resembles the teaching of the hesychasts. Nothing superfluous. Many icons contain flashes of light - divine energies. The master presents light in the form of fire. Fire is the sword that pierces the flesh of the world (Heb. 4.12). In Theophanes the Greek we can find images of stylites with closed eyes or even without eyes. With this artistic technique, the master wants to show that the ascetic’s gaze is directed inward. The ascetics left the vain world in order to indulge in silent contemplation far from it. Theophanes, undoubtedly, had an idea of the theology of hesychasm and was probably familiar with its ideas not only from the works of spiritual writers and preachers of his time, but from surviving images, and, possibly, the works of ancient ascetic mystics. Theophanes depicted them in the frescoes of Spaso - Transfiguration Cathedral of Novgorod (1378). He created not only real portraits of ascetics, but revealed the inner essence of the ascetic image and the mystical spiritual path. To achieve this goal, the icon painter used special artistic means. They are extremely strict, as if refusing the colorful fullness that makes up worldly life itself. The master creates an image filled with divine joy, a feeling of endless happiness, which is comprehended through mystical revelations
The work of Andrei Rublev, a monk and icon painter, is inextricably linked with the Trinity-Sergius Monastery - the center of the Russian pre-Renaissance movement. All researchers of Andrei Rublev’s work note that it is distinguished by high humanism, interest in man, in his inner world. It’s difficult to talk about Andrei Rublev’s worldview. The culture of the Russian monastery of the 15th century was rich and diverse. The works of Basil the Great, Isaac the Syrian, John Climacus, and Dionysius the Areopagite were carefully studied and scrupulously commented on. From here elements of ancient philosophy - Platonism and Neoplatonism - penetrated into Russian church literature, and from here the impulses for a complex symbolic interpretation of religious images were drawn
Andrei Rublev, being a monk of the Trinity Lavra, obviously took part in those speculative conversations conducted by the followers of St. Sergius. And the master should have known that the image of the Trinity was interpreted by Byzantine theologians not only as an image of the triune Divinity and a prototype of the Eucharist, but also as a symbol of faith, hope and love. Rublevskaya Trinity" radiates light, calmness, concentration. The light coming into the world is love, transforming the world.
The dissertation draws attention to the icon painter’s attitude to the problem of soul and body. Palamas believed that treating the human body as “evil”
"beginning" - heretical, because it ran counter to the teaching of the mystical unity of man and God, and this, in turn, was based on the idea that the "corporeal" is the final reflection of the "supercorporeal." The clothes of the angels do not hide from the viewer the beauty of the young, perfect bodies. You involuntarily recall ancient art. At the same time, Andrei Rublev’s angels seem to us to be incorporeal, sublime creatures. True, the spiritual does not prevail over the physical in them either, here Rublev’s vision is precisely within the framework of anthropological views. Palamas.
Gregory Palamas was not indifferent to numerical symbolism. It is no coincidence that his polemic against Varlaam is presented in three treatises, each of which in turn is given the form of a triad. Following Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Palamas wrote about the trinitarian action of the individual mind, aimed at uniting “with the God-primary trinity unit”2. The saint dealt with the issue of the common grace (energy) of the Three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity and the deification of man through the participation of God's grace in the uncreated Light. But Palamas' interest in the Trinitarian problem was most of all aroused by the demands of the polemical struggle with the teachings of Varlaam, who argued that Palamas had retreated from tritheism to polytheism. The dogma of the consubstantiality of the Holy Trinity represents the antinomian core of all Christian morality.
Andrei Rublev visually confirms the central position of hesychasm about the unknowability of the essence of God, which is given to man in divine energies. He managed to embody the image of God directly as a material reality.
In 1408, together with his friend and “companion,” as the chronicles call him, Daniil Cherny, Rublev painted the Assumption Cathedral in Vladimir with frescoes. The fragments that have come down to us represent a scene of the Last Judgment, which adorns the western arches of the central and southern aisles, as well as the adjacent pillars. The scene of the Last Judgment is distinguished by enlightenment and inner calm. The upcoming judgment of God in the minds of medieval man was presented as something frightening and hopeless. This is reflected in the chronicles. Chroniclers often wrote about the wrath of God as punishment for sins and the end of the world. The Vladimir frescoes clearly demonstrate that even such a theme as the Last Judgment was not perceived unambiguously by the painters. Andrei Rublev and Daniil Cherny give their interpretation of the Last Judgment and the Second Coming of Christ: “This is the judgment, that light has come into the world” (John 3.19).
Another talented painter of that time was Dionysius, who lived in the 15th-16th centuries. During the time of Dionysius, hesychasm no longer had such a scope as under Sergius of Radonezh and Andrei Rublev. Dionysius himself was more likely to be a hesychast more according to tradition than according to the laws of his creativity. His art intertwines various ideological trends of his time in a very unique way. But he, like Andrei Rublev, sought to convey in his work the power of wisdom, kindness, and humility. All this to some extent brings him closer to Rublev, who worked directly under the influence of hesychasm, Dionysius worked on orders from monasteries that continued the Sergius tradition, and was also well acquainted with famous ascetics. True, along with this, he also worked for adherents of a slightly different spiritual orientation, and, for example, often communicated with Joseph Volotsky. The heyday of the artist’s activity dates from the 60s to the 90s of the 15th century and ends with a well-preserved painting of the Ferapontov Monastery. Deep enlightened wisdom, the power of the divine Logos, permeate the Ferapont paintings. I remember the idea of Sophia, which, in our opinion, was fully reflected in the work of Dionysius.
§3. dedicated to the reception of hesychast ideas in Russian artistic culture in the 18th and 20th centuries.
2 Gregory Palamas. About prayer and purity of heart // Self-love. T. 5. M., 1900. P. 300.
The tradition of hesychasm can be considered the core of Orthodox culture. Today it is based on extensive experience, consisting of various approaches and practices, including the main aspects of human activity. Hesychast anthropology is subject to a single concept. In recent decades, new approaches to the ancient tradition have been formed, attempts have been made to include it in the modern spiritual, cultural and scientific context, which should help modern man in understanding the existing reality and searching for new resources in his intellectual and spiritual nature.
After the death of Nil Sorsky, the hesychast tradition did not develop and was forgotten until the end of the 18th century. It is not surprising that subsequent eras, in particular the reign of Ivan the Terrible and Peter I, did not contribute to the development of the hesychast movement. But gradually hesychasm began to revive. A significant role in this was played by Elder Paisiy Velichkovsky, who became the immediate spiritual successor of the Venerable. Nil Sorsky.
In 1782, Nikodim Svyatorets (1748-1809) published in Venice a collection of texts about hesychast “pure prayer” - “The Philokalia of the Holy Hermits.” The first edition of the Philokalia in Russia was carried out in 1793. This collection of ascetic literature contained individual sermons, conversations, and short treatises by hesychast authors: Simeon the New Theologian, Gregory the Sinaite, Nicephorus the Solitary, Gregory Palamas.
Such centers of hesychasm appeared as Optina Pustyn, Valaam, Sarov. The outstanding hesychast of the 18th century played a major role in the development of Russian thought. - Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk. At this time, new forms of hesychasm appeared - pilgrimage and eldership. The wave of hesychasm became widespread in Russia in the second half of the 19th century. The hesychast form of spiritual life was actively preached in word and deed by the elders of Optina Monastery, led by Ambrose - Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov and Bishop Theophan the Recluse.
One of the most revered Russian saints, Seraphim of Sarov, is considered a hesychast. Having taken monastic vows with the name Seraphim, Prokhor Moshnin spent 16 years as a hermit in a monastery. Of these, 3 years were in complete silence. In his biography we find evidence that Seraphim spent a long time in incessant prayer, having gone through the feat of stylite life. The saint lived in seclusion for 10 years. In his biography there is evidence that the ascetic saw the light of Tabor.
Ignatius (Brianchaninov), a Stavropol ascetic, was one of the translators of the Philokalia and a major church writer. His works attract attention with their deep knowledge of the Holy Scriptures and the works of the Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church, creatively revised and meaningful in relation to the spiritual needs of our time. The works of Ignatius are written with exceptional literary skill. In his essay “The Tale of Man,” Bishop Ignatius expounds the doctrine of man on the basis of the Tradition of the Orthodox Church - the Holy Scriptures and the works of the Holy Fathers. He simply does not consider all non-Orthodox and especially non-religious concepts of man - they are classified by him as “fabrications of the fallen human mind.” Along with this, being in line with the patristic tradition, his anthropology has its own characteristics. The saint is primarily interested in ways to heal the human soul from sin, issues of pastoral practice and asceticism. Therefore, of the Holy Fathers, Saint John Chrysostom, Saint Macarius the Great and Isaac the Syrian are closest to him.
Father Sophrony (Sakharov) is a modern representative of hesychasm, an Athonite ascetic. In his works, Sophrony pays attention to such issues as unceasing prayer, the epistemology of hesychasm, and a description of the actions of the divine Light.
At the beginning of the 20th century, as well as at the beginning of the 19th century, misperceptions and the desire to comprehend the mystical ideas of the time were revived in Russia. This contributed
reviving interest in the views of hesychasts. Along with the fact that the intelligentsia, in general, was eager to perceive the Athonite heritage, the official Church approached it with caution, and sometimes with wildfire, especially when hesychast ideas turned into “willow spiritual experience.”
Russian religious philosophers V. Solovyov, S. Frank, S. Bulgakov, P. Florensky, E. Trubetskoy, K. V. Losskiy, ZatrSGOSH such topics as unity, sophiology, energism, epistemological ontologism, “philosophy of the heart”, etc. They did attempts to connect the hesychast tradition with contemporary philosophy. In some cases
continuity between isshast ideas and the views of Russian philosophers of the late XIX - early XX convicts.
The conclusion summarizes the results of the study and outlines further prospects for scientific research.
Certain provisions of the work are reflected in the following publications:
1. Nadelyaeva E.P. Return to the origins // Society: problems, analysis, interpretations. Collection of scientific works of MPGU. Vol. L M, 2003. P. 277-285 (0.8 pp.)
2. Nadelyaeva E.P. Hesychasm of Sergius of Radonezh // Society: problems, analysis, interpretations. Collection of scientific works of MPGU. Vol. I/ M., 2003. P. 285-292 (0.7 pp.)
3. Nadelyaeva E.P. Hesychasm as a subject of historical and cultural knowledge // Proceedings of the XLVI scientific conference of MIPT. Part IX, Philosophy. Economy. M., 2003. P.50-52 (0.1 pp.)
Mean, to the dog. 09.15.2004- Volume KO p.l. Order No. 269 Shooting range. 100 MPGU Printing House
Chapter L Hesychasm as a socio-cultural phenomenon.
§1. Hesychasm as a subject of historical and cultural knowledge. P. 6
§2. Spiritual predecessors of Gregory Palamas. Socio-cultural prerequisites for the formation of hesychasm. His heyday. P. 33
§3. The main ideas of the hesychasts. P. 60
§4. Features of Russian hesychasm. P. 80
Chapter P. Hesychasm and Russian artistic culture.
§ 1. Aesthetics of hesychasm. P. 105
§2. Realization of hesychast ideas in the works of Theophanes the Greek, Andrey
Rublev and Dionisy. P. 131
§3. Reception of hesychast ideas in Russian culture of the 17th-20th centuries. P.157
Introduction of the dissertation 2004, abstract on cultural studies, Nadelyaeva, Ekaterina Pavlovna
Since its appearance, the teaching of the hesychasts has firmly established itself as a classical page of Orthodox spiritual culture. The discovery of hesychasm has become the property of our era. Nowadays, one can observe a revival of interest in the mystical tradition, as evidenced by the appearance of a large amount of scientific and spiritual literature relating to this topic. The inexhaustible depth of this problem and its importance for modern man allows us to expect continued interest in hesychasm at ever deeper levels of perception and understanding of reality. Its study also plays a significant role for philosophical anthropology, psychology, religion, cultural studies and for modern humanities in general. In accordance with this, we are making another attempt to study the various forms of internal experience that was acquired in the process of development of civilization. This helps to understand the significant role of spiritual practices. In Russian religious studies and cultural studies, along with thoroughly developed sections devoted to hesychast teaching and the activities of hesychasts, there are also insufficiently studied topics that deserve to be the subject of special research. One of these topics is “Traditions of hesychasm in Russian medieval culture.”
The relevance of the historical and philosophical consideration of this problem can be emphasized by the following circumstance: the question of the relationship between the Palaiologan Renaissance in Byzantium and the art of Theophanes the Greek and St. Andrei Rublev in Rus' to this day is the subject of scientific research and scientific debate. Therefore, a comprehensive study of both art monuments and literary works of this time is necessary to understand their true meaning. We must carry out the experience of “neopatristic synthesis”, in the words of G.V. Florovsky, in relation to a specific area of the hesychast tradition. In answering the questions of the surrounding reality, we must make an attempt to speculatively, and perhaps even spiritually, join the tradition in order to draw on the positive that was developed by the hesychast ascetics.
During the Soviet era, the study, and, especially, the very existence of the tradition was complicated in Russia and was concentrated mainly abroad. After a long break, hesychasm is being reborn. Our primary task was to provide a comprehensive, systematic collection of data about the tradition in modern language: to enter its world and its structure, present its principles, concepts, attitudes, reveal its problems, indicate, as fully as possible, the corpus of primary sources and other materials.
The problem of the influence of hesychasm on Russian icon painting of the 18th-15th centuries. gave rise to a large number of disagreements and disputes, both among philosophers and among art critics. This topic is very multifaceted. It touches on such areas of scientific thought as philosophy, art, history, and of course, is directly related to theology. This, in fact, determines the variety of approaches to this problem - church and secular authors consider it differently and place emphasis in different places.
As for our problem, we cannot come to clear, indisputable conclusions due to various reasons, such as, for example, the difference in approaches - secular and religious, the difference in the perception of works of art, their controversial dating, the brush of one or another author, inconsistency the most patristic tradition and the works of the hesychasts. The main goal of this work is a cultural and philosophical study of the phenomenon of hesychasm in the broad cultural context of that time in relation to current problems of modern cultural studies and philosophical anthropology.
Achieving the main goal of the study unfolds through setting and solving a series of the following tasks: 1. Consideration of the hesychast tradition as a subject of historical and cultural knowledge; 2. Study of the original creations of theorists and practitioners of the hesychast tradition, created throughout its thousand-year existence; 3. Comparative analysis of the philosophical and theological discussion between the hesychasts and their opponents; 4. Restoration of the existential and socio-cultural context of these views; 5. Determining the place of the hesychast tradition in the artistic culture of medieval Rus'. 6. Justification of the relevance of hesychast views for modern cultural studies and philosophical anthropology.
Methodologically, the dissertation study of hesychasm in the context of Russian culture is associated with an attempt at hermeneutical reconstruction and generalization of the spiritual and theoretical experience of Orthodox hesychasm based on an analysis of the texts of its main representatives, primarily St. Gregory Palamas, as well as a comprehensive analysis of the cultural situation of the era under study and understanding of the problems of interpenetration of the basic ideas of the doctrine of hesychasm and the surrounding cultural and historical environment.
The novelty of the work follows from the formulation and solution of problems associated with the explication of the views of hesychasm in the context of its cultural environment in relation to the current topics of modern philosophical thought, which opens up new prospects in the field of studying the deep existential experiences of the human personality in their absolute and cultural aspects.
The theoretical significance of the proposed work is associated with its relationship to the category of fundamental issues of religious and philosophical anthropology, theology and cultural studies. The disclosure of the anthropological model of late Byzantine hesychasm in all its cultural significance contributes to a deeper understanding of the problems posed in the system of modern philosophical and theological knowledge about the human personality. The dissertation materials can be used in research on medieval and modern philosophy of culture, as well as in lectures and practical classes in cultural studies, world artistic culture, and national history.
The following provisions are submitted for defense:
1. In modern science, the history of the study of hesychasm is considered as a multifaceted scientific phenomenon.
2. The socio-political and cultural situation in Byzantium in the XNUMXth-XVth centuries is considered, in the context of which the tradition of hesychasm takes place; An analysis of the teachings of the hesychasts and their opponents is carried out, including a study of the anthropological, ontological and epistemological views of representatives of hesychasm, the philosophical and theological views of the head of the hesychasts - St. Gregory Palamas and his ideological opponents.
The main ideas of hesychasm are: the view of man as the image and likeness of God, within the framework of which the question of creativity is raised and resolved; the practice of asceticism as a means of achieving theosis (deification) - the ultimate destination of the human personality; the doctrine of psychophysical unity, which presupposes the interconnection and complementarity of body and soul.
3. Modern reconstruction of hesychasgic views includes: analysis and rethinking of the spiritual experience of the past, comparing it with the achievements of modern philosophy.
The dissertation consists of an introduction, two chapters, a conclusion, notes and a list of references.
Conclusion of scientific work dissertation on the topic "Traditions of hesychasm in Russian medieval culture"
Conclusion.
The history of the study of hesychasm in classical and modern literature is considered as a process of learning the intellectual and spiritual experience of ascetics. Hesychasm appears to us as a multifaceted cultural phenomenon.
The mystical-ascetic tradition developed in the 1st-1st centuries. We can consider the Palestinian and Syrian anchorites to be the first hesychasts. Christian thinkers, beginning with Origen, have used Plato's philosophy to talk about Christ. There was a process of separation and
407 P.A. Florensky. And the Pillar and the statement of truth. From 310. simultaneously the rapprochement of Platonic philosophy and Christian theology, which culminated in the absorption of Platonism by Christianity.
Forerunners of St. Gregory Palamas, who systematized and finally formulated the basic ideas of the hesychasts, can undoubtedly be considered such ascetics as Origen and Evagrius (despite their condemnation by the official church), as well as Anthony the Great, Macarius of Egypt, the Cappadocian fathers, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, John Climacus , Isaac the Syrian, Gregory of Sinai, Simeon the New Theologian. Based on personal spiritual experience, in their works they touched upon such aspects of mystical practice as cleansing the heart - the center of a person’s spiritual life; “convergence” of the mind in the heart; unceasing prayer; vision of the uncreated Tabor light and “deification”. The victory of St. Gregory Palamas, who defended the position of the uncreated nature of the Tabor light, in a dispute with Barlaam of Calabria, placed Gregory among the most significant apologists of Orthodoxy and brought him fame as a teacher of hesychasm.
Epoch of the XIII - early XV centuries. is the final cultural stage and an important milestone in the life of the Byzantine Empire. This was the heyday of hesychasm, which then swept the entire Orthodox East. The mysticism of hesychasm, which included continuous prayer and contemplation of the uncreated light, had a great impact on the art of Byzantium in the 14th century and contributed to its flourishing. Already representatives of early Christianity - the holy fathers of the church - paid a lot of attention to the problem of creativity, considering artistic creativity as similar to divine creativity, and God was often called the Artist. The existential nature of man is the need for creativity, the active ability to reorganize the universe, and the formation of a sphere of spiritual values.
St. Gregory Palamas developed the patristic teaching about God the Creator. Along with this, this question became the most important component of his anthropology, in which the doctrine of man and the doctrine of God merged. Palamas' point of view is based on the principles of the patristic concept of "synergy" - the interaction of divine grace and human free will
The doctrine of divine energies can be considered a doctrine of icons, since the dogma of icon veneration states that an artist can translate into the language of forms, lines, and colors the result of divine action in a person. In the doctrine of the Light of Tabor we are talking about the deification of man. This intersects with the concept of the deification of the image. Iconism or, somewhat differently, the iconicity of creation is the realization of God’s plan for the world and man. According to the holy fathers, asceticism is also creativity, but creativity of the highest, highest order. It brings positive transformative energy into the world. The peculiarity of mystical-ascetic creativity is that its subject and object coincide. Therefore, the most profound similarity occurs here. According to the teachings of St. Gregory Palamas, the lost likeness of God is achieved through the action of divine grace and our breakthrough to it, in synergy, that is, in creativity. In the hesychast tradition, a huge role is assigned to the historical incarnation, which made man's godlikeness real.
The teaching of Palamas gave Byzantine, and after them Russian, theologians a “theoretical” basis for resolving the question of what can and cannot be depicted on icons. In a mystical sense, an icon is a revelation and manifestation of the internal energy and love of the one depicted on it, and, in part, of the one who created it. An icon is a means of spiritual communication for all who strive for God; it is a sincere dialogue, a mystery that is comprehended through tireless prayer and inner contemplation. It is worth noting that during the iconoclastic disputes, it was the ascetic mystics who were the most persistent apologists of icons. Theological debates of the 18th-15th centuries. demonstrated that art must contribute to the affirmation of faith.
Russian culture represents one of the most significant types of medieval culture, and an important factor is that it is based on the Byzantine tradition. Using the material of patristic literature, we made an attempt to identify the degree of influence of the hesychast worldview on the development of Russian artistic culture. St. Sergius of Radonezh and Nil Sorsky can rightly be called Russian hesychasts. Sergius of Radonezh revived contemplative monasticism in Rus'. He was interested in the teaching of Gregory Palamas about the common grace of the Most Holy Trinity. But the teaching of the hesychasts became only one of the starting points of the theology of St. Sergius. The sphere of his personal theological comprehension of the mystery of the Holy Trinity is Christian morality in its correlation with the foundations of faith.
Nil Sorsky, based on studying the works of the holy fathers, developed in detail a system of monastery residence and built a monastery, the way of life of which corresponded to the state of hesychast silence and contemplation.
In icon painting, hesychast ideas were embodied by such famous icon painters as Theophanes the Greek, Andrei Rublev, and, in a certain sense, Dionysius. The images of Theophanes the Greek are characterized by amazing internal concentration, detachment, isolation and refined psychologism. The ascetic appears face to face with God. The master's palette is restrained - only two colors - ocher and white, the overall color scheme is ascetically monochrome - dark, brown. This really resembles the teachings of the hesychasts. Many icons contain flashes of light - divine energies. The master creates an image filled with divine joy, which is comprehended through mystical revelations.
The work of Andrei Rublev is distinguished by high humanism, interest in man, in his inner world. As monk Andrei Rublev of the Trinity Lavra, he obviously took part in those speculative conversations conducted by the followers of St. Sergius. And the master should have known that the image of the Trinity was interpreted by Byzantine theologians not only as an image of the triune deity and a prototype of the Eucharist, but also as a symbol of faith, hope and love. Rublev’s “Trinity” radiates light, calm, and concentration. The light coming into the world is love, transforming the world.
Andrei Rublev's angels seem to us to be incorporeal, sublime beings. But the spiritual does not prevail over the physical, they form a single whole. Here Rublev’s vision is precisely within the framework of Palamas’ anthropological views. Rublev's work visually confirms the central position of hesychasm about the unknowability of the essence of God, which is given to man in divine energies. He managed to embody the image of God directly as a material reality.
Dionysius was more likely to be a hesychast more according to tradition than according to the laws of his creativity. His art intertwines various ideological trends of his time in a very unique way. But he, like Andrei Rublev, sought to convey in his work the power of wisdom, kindness, and humility. All this to some extent brings him closer to Rublev, who worked directly under the influence of hesychasm Dionysius, worked on orders from monasteries that continued the Sergius tradition, and was also well acquainted with famous ascetics. Deep enlightened wisdom, the power of the divine Logos, permeate the Ferapont paintings. I remember the idea of Sophia, which, in our opinion, was fully reflected in the work of Dionysius.
The tradition of hesychasm continues to live today, based on the extensive experience of Christian ascetics, consisting of various approaches and practices, including the main aspects of human activity. Hesychast anthropology is subject to a single concept. In recent decades, new approaches to the ancient tradition have been formed, attempts have been made to include it in the modern spiritual, cultural and scientific context, which should help modern man in understanding the existing reality and searching for new resources in his intellectual and spiritual nature. Undoubtedly, the hesychast tradition acquired the role of a feeding source of spiritual life, capable of creating its new forms. To remain alive and effective in the modern world, it must be understood and felt in detail, and this dissertation must serve to bring closer to this goal.
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Issues of cultural studies and philosophy
HESYCHASM IN EAST SLAVIC CULTURE
M. N. Gromov
The work was supported by the Russian Humanitarian Fund, grant No. 08-03-00238a
Hesychasm began to penetrate into Rus' under the Russified Greek Metropolitan Theo-Gnost (1328-1353). The beneficial spiritual impulse received from Byzantium and being one of its last gifts, fertilized the domestic culture of the 14th-15th centuries. and contributed to its unsurpassed flourishing1. It was then that the Corpus areopagiticum, “Dioptra” by Philip Monotrope, “The Source of Knowledge” by John of Damascus and a number of other fundamental works of theological and philosophical thought were disseminated. It was then that Theophanes the Greek, Andrei Rublev, Epiphanius the Wise, Metropolitan Cyprian, Pachomius Logothetes created, personifying, on the one hand, the high rise of ancient Russian culture and, on the other, its inextricable connection with the Greek-Slavic Orthodox area, which constituted, in the words of D. . Obolensky, a kind of commonwealth2 or, in the words of R. Picchio, with a special region of Slavia orthodoxa, which was under the strong intellectual emanation of Byzantium3.
Hesychasm is characterized not by a departure from reality, as its critics sometimes believe, but by the solution of current life-meaning problems of the era “from the point of view of eternity”4, when it is not the changeable empirics of this world, but unshakable values that play the main guiding role. The main intention of hesychasm, which determines its essence, is the organic coupling of phenomenally experienced reality with a new understanding, a new reading, a new interpretation of the patristic heritage that preserves the imperishable noumenal essence.
Speaking more broadly, regarding the typology of the emergence of new cultural phenomena, then, as a rule, an energetic breakthrough forward involves, for balance, a search for reliable support in past experience, and the forms of interaction with it can be very different (from apologetics to polemics), but this is always an opening potential possibilities of a “dialogical situation” within the framework of a single cultural ecumene, the all-encompassing space of the “seven-sphere” (Yu. Lotman)5.
The main pathos of hesychasm lies in the new axiological attitude of the late Middle Ages, when, in confrontation with the Renaissance and at the same time under the influence of proto-Renaissance and Renaissance ideas proper, a kind of rehabilitation of the created, material, carnal principle took place through enlightenment, spiritualization, and elevation of it by the Tabor light of Divine energy. If for early Christian authors, as well as for neophyte educators among successively baptized peoples, harsh anti-paganist preaching with a sharp rejection of any
cult of the flesh, then after several centuries of affirmation of the Christian primacy of the spirit, the need arose to correct the previous position.
The human body begins to be perceived not as a prison of the soul and an obstacle to its salvation, but as a bright upper room, a beautiful abode, a true temple of the soul, which needs to be cleansed from the impurities of passions and bad thoughts, filled with the Holy Spirit, under the influence of which the bodily and spiritual principles will be harmonized. The long-standing dream of a harmonious personality, expressed, in particular, by Plato in the dialogue “Phaedrus”, where the soul is presented in the form of a rushing chariot driven by a charioteer - the mind, which restrains the horse of passion and the horse of will6, is realized in the practice of hesychasm. This, in fact, is what the refined meditation of the Palamists is aimed at, and the famous “Charter” of the Venerable Nilus of Sora also serves this purpose, the goal of whose monastic aspirations is “not mortification of the flesh, but internal, moral self-improvement”7, but, of course, not in utilitarian-secular , but a sublime-spiritual understanding of the ascent from the earthly to the heavenly. The largest Russian hesychast creatively applied the teachings of St. to Russian monastic practice. John Climacus book, where 6 stages of the formation of affects are considered (la^l - struggle is omitted)8.
In relation to monastic practice, Nil Sorsky points out, referring to Hesychius of Jerusalem, four confrontations with passions:
1. “Beware of pretexts” (cutting off early impressions, “newly introduced into the heart and announced to the mind,” at the very initial stage).
2. “Have a deeper heart, keep silent from every thought and pray” (internal concentration of the spirit, not allowing external influence and remaining in prayerful concentration).
3. “Call the Lord Jesus Christ for help” (repetition of protective prayers, especially Jesus prayer).
4. “Have Mortal Memory” (reflection on the transience of earthly existence and the eternity that lies beyond its threshold)9. Let us note that it was precisely on such traditions of patristic and ancient Russian thought that the later cardiognosy of Pamphil Yurkevich and the anthropological teaching of Bishop Luke Voino-Yasenetsky, echoing him in our time, was formed, as well as, to a certain extent, the work of Grigory Skovoroda and, undoubtedly, the “Philokalia” of Paisius Velichkovsky.
In accordance with hesychast practice, Neil gives, as they would say now, psychotherapeutic advice: “hold your breath,” “be silent,” “sigh,” and move from an absent-minded presence in the world to the utmost concentration of consciousness and internal self-absorption. This is also facilitated by the ascetic recommendations traditional for Orthodoxy: “if anyone has a healthy body, it is appropriate to tire him out by fasting and vigil and doing difficult work, and if bowing or handicrafts are difficult to do,” for idleness and satiety are the source of many vices10. In the fifth chapter, the monk examines the teaching of St. Nile of Sinai about eight vices generated by bad passions: gluttony, fornication, love of money, anger, sadness, despondency, vanity, pride. The eight vicious passions should be contrasted with eight virtues: fasting, chastity, non-acquisitiveness, mercy, faith, patience, modesty, humility. Essay “O
eight thoughts" of Sinaita was very popular in Rus'; it is found in many moral and ascetic collections. The very fifth chapter of the Russian palamist is close to the work of “De coenobiorum institutis” by John Cassian the Roman, the founder of monasticism in Gaul in the 4th-5th centuries, who was also concerned with issues of ascetic life.
The idea of a synergistic transformation of the created world appears not only in verbal sources, but also in icon painting, small sculptures, architecture - in the entire context of culture. In the icon “Transfiguration” by Andrei Rublev from the iconostasis of the Annunciation Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin, the traditional plot is filled with new content. The figures of the apostles located at the bottom of the composition appear self-absorbed, concentrated, “contemplating the light within themselves”; The Favorian radiance coming from Christ permeates the entire picture; instead of a sharp contrast of spirit and matter, an enlightened image of light, spiritualized, airy flesh, the harmony of the heavenly and the earthly appears11.
Rublev’s life-affirming mood was continued in the works of his followers; it reached a particularly major sound in Dionysius, who created magnificent frescoes in the Cathedral of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary at the Ferapontov Monastery in the Vologda region12. In the north of Rus', where in the deserted silence of midnight nature the soul is more open to the outstretched heavens, many monasteries are founded in the name of the Transfiguration of the Lord: on Valaam, on Solovki, on Lake Kubenskoye.
Let us note that such an optimistic vision of the world must be correlated with the contrasting background of harsh historical realities and the difficult ideological situation of past centuries. In the second half of the 15th century. throughout Europe, eschatological sentiments of expectation of the end of the world grew, for, according to biblical chronology, the last seventh thousand years expired in 1492. In the 16th century. After the polemics between the non-acquisitors, supporters of the Venerable Nile of Sora, and the Josephites, followers of the Venerable Joseph of Volotsk, the state-centralization direction prevailed, and the doctrine of “Moscow - the Third Rome” was formed, which carried the idea of establishing a strong earthly kingdom in the spirit of the pan-European concept of Roma aeterna13. This doctrine did not coincide in a number of parameters with the established ideal of Holy Rus', which led to dramatic collisions in Russian history from the Middle Ages to the present day14.
However, one should not contrast the non-acquisitive and Josephite traditions, which was the sin of liberal pre-revolutionary and especially Soviet historiography, which sought everywhere the irreconcilability of the class struggle. Both monastic movements developed different aspects of the legacy of St. Sergius of Radonezh, which worthily combined the intelligent work of hesychasts and the active social functioning of monasteries. The country needed both small monasteries and prosperous vast monasteries, just as it needed hermits who retired to the point of seclusion, and shepherds of the Church who were energetically active in the world.
Hesychasm and the line of the Venerable Nile of Sarov found their continuation in the Russian eldership, the activities of Tikhon of Zadonsk, Theophan the Recluse and many other holy ascetics, of whom special mention should be made of the Venerable Seraphim of Sarov, who performed the hermit’s feat in the name of salvation
Russia from the troubles and upheavals that were approaching it. Now, in the conditions of the spiritual revival of the Fatherland, interest and need for deep sources are awakening again; quests of a neo-patristic, neo-hesychast, neo-starche sense are revived. It is significant that almost lost, but now widely developing neo-Russian icon painting takes as models the best creations of the high Russian Middle Ages of the 18th-15th centuries, thus following the hesychast tradition immanently embedded in them.
The interest shown in Old Russian Palamism is not accidental, for it became not just one of the most influential spiritual movements, but essentially coincided with the national mentality in its innermost foundations and effectively contributed to its creative upsurge. However, the study of hesychasm is associated with a number of serious methodological issues, including the problem of the diversity of surviving evidence and the need for their holistic, interconnected, synchronized interpretation.
Available sources can be divided into verbal (lives, letters, messages, chronicles), non-verbal (works of art and architecture), combined (illuminated manuscripts, icons and frescoes with texts, singing art); they need not only an isolated consideration from the positions of historical, philological, art history, theology, philosophy and other sciences, but also a qualitatively new interpretation using the latest methods of comprehensive source study, integration synthesis of analytically obtained components, an all-encompassing semiotic approach, when, as meaningful signs and symbols explore all elements of culture without exception.
Similar attempts are being made in a number of areas of modern semiotics, for example, iconology15, one of the prominent representatives of which E. Panofsky put forward the thesis of “condensation in a separate work”, taken as a microcosm of the entire macrocosm of the culture that gave birth to it, and proposed an original idea about architectural Gothic as “stone scholasticism,” which was not an outwardly spectacular beautiful phrase, but a thoughtful statement about the unity of embodiments in the diversity of cultural monuments of the essence of the medieval worldview16.
In line with semiotic research, many books have been published in the West on the semantics of architecture17. There are several publications on this and related topics in the domestic literature18. The idea expressed by Saussure about the closeness of architectural and natural languages and the concept of a unified semantic analysis of cultural phenomena formulated by Lévi-Strauss continue to remain fruitful premises for modern research. According to E. Rogers, “architecture is the consolidation of time - an era in space,” it “transforms the transitory into the eternal”19. F. L. Wright calls the works of architecture “the highest product of the human spirit”: “In them live his innermost thoughts, here is his philosophy, true or false”20.
By organizing space by means of architecture, a person not only creates a utilitarian living environment (which, unfortunately, prevails in modern construction, especially mass construction), but also embodies his vision of the world, his ideas about beauty, his dream of a harmonious existence. This is especially deeply realized in developed civilizations. The human dwelling in traditional Indian architecture was understood as a “model of space”21. Chinese architecture is equally philosophical. A house built under the “yang” sign was perceived as a world-organizing symbol, in a broad sense understood as a street, village, city, country, the entire celestial empire; it is opposed by the existing
under the sign of “yin” there is unorganized space. And the ancient Slavs had their own deep-rooted symbolic semantics of home, walls, hearth, bed, doors and windows open to the world, which is still deeply seated in our consciousness23.
Arising one after another within the framework of different styles, far separated in time and space, the creations of architecture from different eras represent unique evidence of the worldview and world-creation of successive human generations. “The static, harmonious-plastic space of Ancient Greece, the mysterious, vertical-hierarchical space of the Middle Ages, the geometric-optical space of the Renaissance, the theatrical-dramatic space of the Baroque, the rationalized, dynamic space of modern architecture”24 clearly reflect those “aesthetic formations” (A. Flaker), which act as stages in the overall development of humanity.
Acting as a “stone chronicle,” architecture has a valuable feature, namely, the objectivity of the information contained in its creations. It reveals “pure, unfalsified trends of time”25, but taking into account the fact that the process of reflecting the era itself is complex and ambiguous. If written monuments can be removed to archives, books - to libraries, works of art - to museums, and all this can be suppressed or biasedly interpreted if desired, then the creations of architecture cannot be removed from the streets and squares, just as it is impossible to ultimately give them a misinterpretation, although Of course, significant damage can be caused to them through demolition, distortion, and biased assessments.
It is worth emphasizing the phenomenon of synthesis of art that arises on the basis of architectural creativity. In this respect, architecture is close to philosophy, which holds together all forms of knowledge of the world, in its fundamental, interpretive function. At the same time, architecture has such a quality as inertia, because for its implementation architectural ideas sometimes require quite a significant investment of time, money, and materials. In this regard, literature, especially journalism or poetry, can respond much more quickly to a changing situation.
In the 11th-19th centuries. in Byzantium, instead of the original Basilican churches, a cross-domed type of church building was formed, which more suited the needs of the cult. The cross-domed church, in addition to a purely structural solution, has a deep ideological meaning. It expressed the idea
a concept about the universe that combined, under the sign of the cross, the image of the quadrangular firmament of the earth, likened to Noah’s Ark, and the domed vault of heaven, as described by Kozma Indikoplov in “Christian Topography” following Clement of Alexandria26. During that period, the Orthodox church was increasingly perceived as a model of the universe expressed through plastic means, open to people, including them through the temple action27. The temple as a world, the temple as a cosmos, the temple as a society has become an intermediate link between man - the “microcosm” and the universe - the “macrocosm”. It was the binding part of the ontological triad (“mesocosm”).
Not only the world, natural and social, but also human history was demonstrated to people entering the temple in the images of forefathers, biblical prophets, ancient thinkers, in the stories of humanity from the past to the future. From under the main dome, which together with the under-dome space was the center of the entire composition, the stern face of Pantocrator looked out; on the eastern altar wall, a mosaic or pictorial depiction of the sacrament of the Eucharist attracted attention; before leaving the temple, the eye stopped at the impressive fresco of the coming Last Judgment. The very cycle of daily, weekly and annual worship constantly reproduced the basic paradigms of the Christian worldview. All his life, from young, receptive years to experienced old age, man was imbued with a vision of the world through the image of the temple and the action taking place in it.
And invariably, before the gaze of a person standing in the temple, an iconostasis appeared, which developed in ancient Russian art from a small altar barrier of Byzantine churches to a majestic structure reaching seven, nine, and even more tiers. The five-tiered one was considered classic. In it, from top to bottom, ranks of ancestral, prophetic, festive, deesis and local ranks were lined up, consistently reproducing a philosophically meaningful world history in its Christian understanding. From the visually and spatially distant upper rows, as if through the haze of time, the faces of forefathers and prophets appear. In the most clearly visible row of dei-sus, raised above the crowd, the central idea is expressed: prayer to the Savior, seated in the image of the formidable judge of all human affairs and thoughts, on behalf of the Mother of God, John the Baptist, the archangels Michael, Gabriel and the most revered chosen saints. At the very bottom there is a local row, made up of icons that are closely connected with the temple itself, with the history of the city or village, with what is part of the life of the inhabitants of a given area. “The entire human race” was represented here “in concretely recognizable images”28.
The antitheses of the world and the local, the universal and the personal, the high and the low, the holy and the sinful, the inexorable and the merciful made the soul tremble, break out of the crampedness of everyday consciousness, be imbued with eternity, think about the sublime and strive to the best of our ability towards it. Being not only an icon painter, but also a thinker who expressed deep philosophical ideas in a spiritual and symbolic form, Andrei Rublev, who was considered “superior to everyone in wisdom,” well understood the dominant position of the iconostasis in art.
terrier of the temple and its strong impact on the consciousness of people. He creatively developed the concept of this architectural structure: “The iconostasis of the Assumption Cathedral in Vladimir, created by Rublev, concentrated the achievements of the philosophical and political thought of his time and opened a new chapter in the history of the iconostasis”29.
K. Onash considers the iconostasis “a hand-drawn Summa theologiae of the Eastern Church-
in and" . Its concept, history, internal content, expressed in plastic form, attracts the attention of many specialists, including Western ones31. If the Latin genius in the person of St. Thomas Aquinas created a verbal-rational “sum”, then the Orthodox in the person of St. Andrei Rublev and many other icon painters created a figurative and symbolic system, where the basic values and paradigms of Christian doctrine are visually embodied. The mystical theology of Eastern Christianity found one of its most profound reflections in Russian icon painting32.
Among the reasons that influenced the formation of the high ancient Russian iconostasis is undoubtedly the influence of hesychasm. The flourishing of icon painting, the long-standing love for wood as a plastic material that allows you to create pictorial compositions that rise vertically more easily than heavy marble, the desire to organize the abundance of icons concentrated in the temple not mechanically, but in the form of a well-thought-out system, the general desire of the spirit for the heavenly led to the creation of a genuine symphonies of theological and philosophical doctrine, embodied by means of religious art. Hesychasm gave a creative impulse, and the old local traditions of working with wood made it possible to create something new, unique, which did not exist in Byzantium.
Note that the tendency to streamline the abundance and diversity of icons led later in the Old Believers to the construction, in addition to the central iconostasis, of additional ones on the side walls, although not in such a complete form. Also, in parallel, there was a process of systematization of fresco painting on the walls of the temple, and sometimes fresco, and in modern times, oil painting reproduced the rows of the iconostasis, as can be observed, for example, in the painting of the 17th century. Church of Elijah the Prophet in Yaroslavl33.
Not only in icon painting, called “speculation in colors” (E. N. Trubetskoy), but also in sewing, works of applied art, and small sculptures, high spirituality, deep content, and a tendency toward a symbolic interpretation of existence appear. Many veils, shrouds, shrouds, airs, banners created by Russian nuns and novices represent unique creations of sacred and aesthetic content. These are the “blue shroud” of the 15th century. from the collection of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, “The Savior Not Made by Hands with Those Who Come”, XIV century. from the Shchukin collection in the State Historical Museum, “The Eucharist with the Lives of Joachim, Anna and the Mother of God” of the 15th century. from the Cathedral of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary in Suzdal34.
One of the best collections of facial embroidery is the collection of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra. Among several covers dedicated to the foundation of the monastery, the earliest one (around 1424), created shortly after the canonization of Sergius with the participation of his brother Fyodor, Archimandrite Simonov Monastery, attracts attention35. This is the best image of the monk, often reproduced in modern times.
cultural fine literature, which was influenced by the activities of Andrei Rublev. It is believed that the flag bearer, from whose design the embroidery was carried out by the monastery craftswomen, was from the circle of the famous icon painter.
Among the works of church applied art that have deep spiritual content, one can point out the Zions and Jerusalems, which are images of a temple, a tabernacle, a city, merging into three-dimensional, visually perceptible, generalized, sacralized models of the universe36. One can also give examples of beautiful creations and modest products of sphragistics (seals with personalized images), small plastic arts (body icons, crosses, panagia), stone and wood carvings, casting, jewelry, etc. - and everywhere, upon careful study, traces are found worldviews, imprints of high spirituality, key images of ancient Russian consciousness symbolically encrypted according to the canons of medieval semantics, artistically embodied philosophemes and theologemes37.
When interpreting monuments of the past, the problem of adequacy of assessment also arises. Understanding their unconditional value as genuine sources and treating them with the utmost care, one should not fetishize them and give them absolute significance. Any verbal and non-verbal source is a material, material, limited means of expression and transmission of the essential content inherent in it during the creation, which is immaterial, immaterial, limitless. The main thing is ideal images and thoughts, behind which stands the highest spiritual creative principle, and not their material shell. That is why it is so important for the researcher to break through the frozen flesh of the monument, often fragmentary and distorted, to its true spiritual content, which is possible, in the words of ancient Russian scribes, only with “spiritual eyes” and not “physical”38.
If the author of the monument tried to express the essence of the thoughts that possessed him with the help of words, then the result was a verbal means of embodiment, if using other means, then a non-verbal one. For example, the universal human idea of the Trinitarian nature of the universe, considered in Christianity as the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, can be expressed in verbal form, in an icon, a fresco, in the tripartite organization of the temple and temple action, in various plastic means, in color, in music, in language gestures and symbols. Moreover, all the various forms, means and methods are equal in their applied function, for they are not the essence of the Trinity, but are its reflections.
Let's take a closer look, for example, at the famous image of the Old Testament Trinity by Rublev, in which three thoughtful angels have a silent conversation about the meaning of existence. The composition of lines creates an outline of the universe itself, the sphericity of which was justified by the ancient Greeks. The absence of ordinary details gives each detail the meaning of a deep symbol. The tree is not just the Mamvri oak tree, under which the forefather Abraham treated the three wanderers who appeared to him, but the tree of life, the tree of knowledge, the tree of the cross. The building above the left angel is not only an architectural backdrop, the house of Abraham, but an understanding of the world as a well-ordered city, standing firmly among the chaos of unorganized existence. Mountain above
the right angel is not just a landscape background, but a symbol of the ascent of the spirit to the heights of knowledge of the highest secrets of the universe. This image is no less philosophical than Hegel's triad or Kant's trichotomy. Without any words or categories, he expresses through visual means the trinitarian concept of being39. The desire for plastic, aesthetic, metaphorical self-expression is a distinctive feature of national consciousness40.
Particularly important is the problem of the relationship between the verbal and nonverbal aspects in this situation. The word "Verbum" has a unique function as a universal means of connecting, consolidating, codifying and transmitting an entire culture. This is his strength. But words cannot express the infinity of the universe, the deep essence of phenomena, the aroma of flowers, the melody of sounds and much, much more that we existentially experience in the flow of life and the infinite variety of created being, not to mention the relationship to the manifestations of the Divine, the highest form of communion with which is its silent contemplation.
That is why in hesychasm verbal embodiment is not the main thing, and that is why written sources are so limited and modest. As great as the activity of St. Sergius of Radonezh is, it is poorly verbalized. And is it possible to convey in words the inexpressible state of the soul, which, through refined meditation, begins to gain insight into the contemplation of the heavenly? This is also impossible, just as it is impossible to convey the full depth of the “metaphysics of light” of Palamism, which creatively developed an irrational and difficult to verbalize tradition coming from antiquity41.
This ratio of verbal and nonverbal is characteristic not only of Orthodox culture. With all the intellectual development of the West, with the mass of written works of Catholic and Protestant theologians, with the sophistication of conceptual tools, we still find a similar idea about the limits of the human mind and the boundaries of speech. Thus, Saint Bonaventure wrote in “The Soul’s Guide to God” (Itinerarium mentis in Deum), empathizing with Saint Francis of Assisi, who climbed to the top of Mount Alverne and joined the perfect contemplation of God: “In this matter, nature is powerless, not very many can help zeal, research gives little, but anointing can give a lot: the tongue gives little, but inner joy gives a lot, the word and the book give little, but everything is a gift of God, that is, the Holy Spirit, creation gives little or nothing, but everything is creative ) essence, Father and Son and Holy Spirit"42.
The above discussions about the limitations of the verbal and the need to correlate it with the nonverbal are not aimed at belittling it, but at its sober assessment. Just as Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” does not at all testify to the obscurantism of the greatest thinker, but actually serves to enlighten the mind, so an objective approach to the word without blind worship should serve its good use, otherwise we risk falling into the next creation of an idol that occurs among intellectuals who fetishize the object of their passion. And the last amendment - we were talking about the human word as a universal means of culture, but not about the Divine Word, Logos, Christ as the ever-present hypostasis of the Holy Trinity43.
I would like to end the article with the words of the elders of Mount Athos: “Let the Highest Truth be honored in silence.”
1 Meyendorff I. Byzantium and the Rice of Russia: a Study of Byzantino-Russian Relations in the Fourteen Century. - Cambridge (Mass.), 1981; Khoruzhy S. S. Hesychasm and history // Civilizations. - M., 1993. - Issue. 2. - pp. 172-196.
2 Obolensky D. Bysantium and the Slavs: Collected Studies. - London, 1971.
3 Studia slavica mediaevalia et humanistica Riccardo Picckhio dicata / M.Colucci e.a. curant. -Roma, 1986.
4 Prokhorov G. M. Monuments of translated and Russian literature of the XIV-XV centuries. - L., 1987.
5 Lotman Yu. M. The problem of Byzantine influence on Russian culture in typological light // Rus' and Byzantium. - M., 1989. - P. 227-236.
6 Plato. Phaedrus / Trans. A. N. Egunova. - M., 1989.
7 Arkhangelsky A. S. Nil Sorsky and Vassian Patrikeev. Their literary works and ideas in ancient Rus'. Part I. - St. Petersburg, 1882. - P. 129.
8 Maloney G. Russian Hesyhasm. The Spirituality of Nil Sorsky. - Paris, 1973; Venerable Nil of Sorsky and Innocent of Komelsky. Works / Ed. preparation G. M. Prokhorov. - St. Petersburg, 2008.
9 Borovkova-Maikova M.S. Nila Sorsky Tradition and Charter. - St. Petersburg, 1912. - P. 33.
10 Ibid. - P. 37.
11 Plugin V. A. Worldview of Andrei Rublev. (Some problems). Old Russian painting as a historical source. - M., 1974. - P. 58-59.
12 Danilova E.I. Frescoes of the Ferapontov Monastery. - M., 1970.
13 Roma aeterna. - Leiden, 1972; Kudryavtsev M.P. Moscow is the third Rome. - M., 1994.
14 Gromov M.N. Eternal values of Russian culture: towards the interpretation of domestic philosophy // Questions of philosophy. - 1994. - No. 1. - P. 54-61.
15 Mitchell W./.Th. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. - Chicago, 1986.
16 Panofsky E. Die Perspective als symbolische Form // Aufsatre zunmdfragen der Kunstwissenschaft. - Berlin, 1961. - S. 111-115.
17 See: Koenig G. K. Analisi del linguaggio architettonico. - Firenze, 1964; Norberg-Schulz C. Existence, Space and Architecture. - Oslo, 1971; Weber O., Zimmerman G. Probleme der archi-tectonischen Gestaltung unter semiotisch-psychlogischen Aspekt. - Berlin, 1980; Bouyer L. Ar-chitettura e liturgia. - Magnano, 1994; etc.
18 Uspensky B. A. Poetics of composition. - M., 1970; Marcuzon V. Semantics and development of the language of architecture // Architectural composition: Modern problems. - M., 1970.
pp. 44-49; Strautmanis I. A. Informative and emotional potential of architecture.
M., 1985; Artemyeva E. Yu. Semantic aspects of studying cultural monuments // Monument studies: Theory, methodology, practice. - M., 1986. - P. 62-75; Wagner G.K. The art of thinking in stone. - M., 1990, etc.
19 Masters of architecture about architecture: Foreign architecture, late XIX-XX centuries. - M., 1972. - P. 456.
20 Wright F. L. The Future of Architecture / Transl. from English - M., 1960. - P. 52.
21 Wistara. Architecture of India: Exhibition Catalog, ed. K. Kagala. - Bombay, 1987. - P. 8.
22 Zavadskaya E. V. Artistic image of utopian thought // Chinese social utopias. - M., 1987. - P. 163.
23 Bayburin A.K. Dwelling in the rituals and ideas of the Eastern Slavs. - M., 1983.
24 Murina E. B. Problems of synthesis of spatial arts. - M., 1982. - P. 89-90; Flaker A. Stilske farmacije. - Zagreb, 1976.
25 Giedion 3. Space, time, architecture / Transl. with him. - M., 1973.
26 Wolska W. La Topographie chretienne de Cosmas Indicopleustes: Theologie et science en VI siecle. - Paris, 1962. - P. 116-117.
27 Florensky P. A. Temple action as a synthesis of arts // Makovets. - 1922. - No. 2.
28 Tolstaya T.V. Local row of the iconostasis of the Assumption Cathedral at the end of the 15th - beginning of the 16th centuries // Assumption Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin: Materials and research. - M., 1985. - P. 122.
29 Plugin V. A. Worldview of Andrei Rublev (Some problems): Old Russian painting as a historical source. - M., 1974. - P. 127.
30 Medieval Russian Culture / Ed. by H. Birnbaum and M. S. Flier. - Berkley, 1984. - P. 186.
31 Chatzidakis M. Ikonostas // Reallexikon zur byzantinischen Kunst. - Stuttgart, 1966. - Bd. 3. -
32 Uspensky L. A. Theology of the icon of the Russian Orthodox Church. - Paris, 1989.
33 Bryusova V.D. Frescoes of Yaroslavl in the 17th - early 18th centuries. - M., 1983. - P. 70-89.
35 Trinity-Sergius Lavra. Artistic monuments. - M., 1968. - P. 119.
36 Sterligova I. A. Jerusalems as liturgical vessels in Ancient Rus' // Jerusalem in Russian culture. - M., 1994. - P. 46-62.
37 Wagner G.K. From symbol to reality. Development of the plastic image in Russian art of the 14th - 15th centuries. - M., 1980.
38 Gromov M. N. Medieval Natural Philosophy in Russia: Some Aspects // Miscellanea Mediae-valia. - Bd. 21/1. - Berlin; New York, 1991. - P. 365.
39 Lazarev V. N. Russian medieval painting. - M., 1970.
40 Bychkov V.V. Russian medieval aesthetics of the 11th - 16th centuries. - M., 1992; Spidlik T. L"idee Russe: une autre vision de l"homme. - Troyes, 1994.
41 Losev A.F. Essays on ancient symbolism and mythology. - M., 1993. - P. 894-901.
42 Bonaventure. The soul's guide to God. - M., 1993. - P. 155.
43 Mann U. Divine simplicity // Philosophy of religion: almanac. - M., 2007. - P. 150-180.
Chapter 3 Hesychasm in Rus' in the XIV-XV centuries.
Byzantine origins
Period XIII - first half of the XV century. represents the final and culturally particularly significant stage in the life of the Byzantine state. After the defeat of Constantinople by the crusaders in 1204, the leadership of the state was concentrated in the city of Nicaea. The spiritual forces of the nation, philosophers, theologians, and icon painters are concentrated here, and an Academy is being created, where theological problems are discussed with unprecedented intensity, including those related to the concepts of the incarnation of deity and the procession of grace, and the nature of “divine energies.” This spiritual upsurge, usually referred to as the Palaiologan revival, lasted after the return of the Byzantine government to Constantinople in 1261, and later, until the fall of Byzantium under the attacks of the Turks in 1453. The process took place against the backdrop of the growing crisis of the Byzantine state and the general consciousness of its inevitability death, which raised especially acute questions about the future fate of the country and the orientation of its cultural life - towards the Roman Catholic West or the Orthodox East. The conflict between these two orientations, on the one hand, constituted the main content of theological reflection, on the other, determined approaches to the formulation and solution of problems rethought in Christianity, but rooted in the heritage of ancient philosophical classics and Neoplatonism and briefly described above.
In Byzantium, from time immemorial it was believed that it was the successor and continuer of the ancient world, relying in the state-political sphere on the experience of Ancient Rome, and in the sphere of science and abstract knowledge - on the experience of Greek philosophy; However, only the Christian faith has always been recognized as the basis of the religious life of the state. “We do not prevent anyone from becoming acquainted with secular education, if he wishes, unless he has just accepted monastic life,” wrote one of the most authoritative theologians of that era, Gregory Palamas. -But we do not advise anyone to indulge in it to the end and completely forbid us to expect from it any accuracy in the knowledge of the Divine; for it is impossible to obtain from her any true teaching about God.” (Gregory Palamas. Defense of the holy hesychasts. Triad one). In real life, the successor
It was impossible to carry out this division again. In the atmosphere of the Paleologian revival and the associated intellectual upsurge, church leaders sometimes appeared fully armed with philosophical knowledge, and philosophers supplied arguments for theological debates. The conflict between supporters of the Western Catholic orientation and supporters of the Eastern Orthodox Orthodoxy could take - and did take - no matter how insignificant forms, but the range of issues that were discussed and required resolution was common.
By the XIII-XV centuries. in Byzantium, these two questions prevailed over the rest - the question of the relationship between the essence of God and His presence in the world, as well as the question of the religious and aesthetic meaning of icons. In their initial theoretical formulation and in specific solutions, both one and the other revealed an obvious connection with the Neoplatonic tradition.
In the course of its spiritual history, Byzantium developed a different understanding of the essence of Christian doctrine than the Western Church. Behind numerous particular discrepancies, liturgical and canonical, a fundamental and fundamental discrepancy emerged. For all Christians, God is transcendent, but manifests itself externally, that is, in the life of the world. For Catholics, such manifestations of God are given in actions, in the natural perfection of the world, in the feeling of tenderness that this perfection evokes in the soul of the believer, that is, they are something that is caused by the essence of God, but by nature is different from this essence . That is why Catholic theologians are so fond of likening God’s influence on the world and on believers to the imposition of a seal: the imprint retains all the features of the seal, if the imprint is especially good, then down to the smallest, but even the most perfect imprint does not and can never become a seal. It is made of a different material, it is of a different nature and belongs to a different being. The philosophical problem of the relationship between the transcendental essence of God and His appearance in the world, the stages of the descent of grace here is not so much removed as ignored, and with it the entire Neoplatonic component of the ancient heritage in Christianity. In a reinterpreted form, as part of a different system, it forms the main source of the main trend of Byzantine Orthodoxy in the 13th-15th centuries. - the so-called hesychasm.
After many centuries of existence, discussion and understanding of the doctrine of hesychasm, its main content emerges as follows: the essence of God is manifested in the simultaneous
His existence - both in the unknowable otherworldly and in the outward turn, which is Divine energy. Energy, being different from the otherworldly unknowable essence, is at the same time inseparable from it, and in each of its manifestations the whole God, one and indivisible, is present; the external self-realization of God is expressed both in His direct entry into the real history of mankind through His consubstantial Son, and in the fact that this hypostasis of God, entering history, has the character of the Logos, i.e., it is finite, self-complete, historically specific, and represents a meaningful form in the Platonic and Aristotelian sense of the word. The constant realization of God outside, in His energies, makes especially significant (more significant than in Catholicism) the third hypostasis of the deity - the Holy Spirit, the pouring, energetic, dynamic principle of God. “If we turn to the dogmatic question that divided East and West, to the question of the procession of the Holy Spirit, then we cannot speak of it as an accidental phenomenon in the history of the Church as such. From a religious point of view, it is the only real reason for the confluence of those factors that led to separation." (Lososiy V.N. An Essay on the Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. M., 1991. P. 13); the emergence of God in Spirit and Energy from His transcendence, His entry into the world makes it fundamentally possible for a person to meet God, to know the unknowable God in the mystical and vital act of merging with His essence; the same constant presence of the essence of God in the world in the form of His Spirit and Energy makes the self-realization of God in the world, as well as the meeting with Him and knowledge of Him, a creative act, the result of spiritual tension taking shape, which form cannot but be involved in God as the highest beauty , . e. not to be aesthetic; This entire teaching is most adequately expressed in the icon - this, in the words of Dionysius the Areopagus, “the visible of the invisible.” The breakthrough to God is realized in the icon, as it were, from two sides - in the act of perception and in the act of creation, which have a common basis.
To perception:“For this sake of us who became man, create an icon out of love for Him and through it remember Him, through it worship Him, through it raise your mind to the worshiped body of the Savior, sitting in glory at the right hand of the Father in heaven. In the same way, create icons of saints<… >and worship them not as gods, which is forbidden, but as evidence of your communication with them in love for them and honoring them, raising your mind to them through their icons.” (Gregory Palamas. Decalogue on Christian
legal provisions. Quote By: Uspensky L.A. Theology icons of the Orthodox Church. Paris, 1989). “In veneration of the image and in understanding its basis and content, Palamas expresses entirely traditional Orthodox teaching; but this content, in the context of his theology, acquires a sound characteristic of the pneumatological period. The Incarnation serves as a starting point for him to indicate his fruits: the glory of the Divinity revealed in the human body of God the Word. The offended flesh of Christ received and communicates (that is, expresses, transmits) the eternal glory of the Divine. It is this flesh that is depicted on icons and worshiped to the extent that it reveals the Divinity of Christ.” (Uspensky L.A. Decree. Op. P. 198).
Towards creation:“An icon is painted in the light, and this, as I will try to find out, expresses the entire ontology of icon painting. Light, if it most closely matches the iconic tradition, turns golden, that is, it is precisely light, pure light, not color. In other words, all images arise in a sea of golden grace, washed by streams of divine light; it is he who is the space of true reality<…>And on an icon, when its scheme is abstractly outlined or, more precisely, intended, the process of embodiment begins with the gilding of light. The icon begins with the gold of creative grace, and it ends with the gold of grace. The writing of the icon - this visual ontology - repeats the main stages of divine creativity, from nothing, absolute nothing, to the New Jerusalem, the holy creation<…>When the first concreteness appeared on the future icon - the first gold color in dignity and chronologically, then the white silhouettes of the icon image receive the first degree of concreteness; Until now they were only abstract possibilities of being, not potencies in the Aristotelian sense, but only logical schemes, non-existence in the exact sense of the word (that is, eivay).
Western rationalism imagines deducing from this nothing - something and everything; but this is not how the ontology of the East thinks about it: ex nihilo nihil, and something is created only by Being. The golden light of super-quality existence, surrounding future silhouettes, manifests them and makes it possible for abstract nothingness to move into something concrete, to become potency<…>Technically speaking, it’s a matter of filling the internal contour spaces with paint so that instead of abstract white, you get a concrete silhouette, or, more precisely, a colorful silhouette beginning to be concrete.” (Florensky P.A. Iconostasis // Philosophy of Russian religious art of the 16th-20th centuries: Anthology. M., 1993. S. 272-273).
The difference between Eastern Christianity and Western Catholicism lies, in particular, in the fact that the latter is striking in its “this-worldliness,” a complete lack of taste for philosophical analysis and, accordingly, a lack of connections with the Neoplatonic tradition of ancient Greek philosophy. It is important, however, that within the Eastern Church this tradition not only exists and plays a primary role, but is also radically rethought. Hesychasm itself, which is successive in relation to it, is in turn internally divided, and its Russian version is significantly different from the Byzantine one. This difference concerns, first of all, two points: the center of religious culture and rethinking of the ancient heritage is shifting from the sphere of literature and philosophical theology to the sphere of fine art and, first of all, icon painting; Hesychia becomes from a philosophical system a form of personal behavior and a life feat. “If Byzantium theologized primarily in word, then Russia theologized primarily in image. Within the limits of artistic language, it was given to Russia to reveal the depth of the content of the icon, the highest degree of its spirituality.” (Uspensky L.L. Decree. Op. pp. 222-223).
Iconography of the 15th century. and "Trinity" by Rublev
A specifically Russian understanding of the hesychast doctrine of the icon image is evident, in addition to the icon painting works themselves by such masters as Theophanes the Greek, Andrei Rublev, Dionysius and others, also from the theoretical presentation of the Russian theology of the icon in the “Message to the Icon Painter” and in the adjacent three “Words” about veneration of holy icons (late 15th - early 16th centuries). Their authorship is traditionally attributed to Joseph Volotsky, although significant passages of the text coincide literally with one of the works of Nil Sorsky; in addition, according to L.A. Uspensky, the second and third “Lay” belong to different authors. The essay “On Holy Icons” by Maxim the Greek, written a little later, is devoted to much the same topic. What we have before us, therefore, is not so much an expression of the views of an individual author, but, despite many discrepancies, a relatively holistic teaching on icon painting, characteristic of Rus' not only during the period of hesychasm, but also in the next era.
The first thing that attracts attention both in these texts and in the iconographic practice generalized in them is the central position of the main hesychast image - the Trinity and especially the
There is another episode of the New Testament in this context - the Transfiguration. The second “Word” begins with the theme of the Trinity, the third “Word” is entirely devoted to it, it is spoken of in the “Message” itself and in the very first chapter of Maxim the Greek, and the famous icon of Andrei Rublev is dedicated to it; One of the most significant works of Theophanes the Greek is the Transfiguration. The central and absolutely dominant position of these themes is a feature of Russian hesychasm of the 14th-15th centuries, which is not represented to the same extent in Byzantine hesychasm.
The second feature of Russian hesychasm XIV-XVbb., which distinguishes it from Byzantine hesychasm, is the understanding of icon painting as life-construction. If the essence and meaning of an icon is the insight of the prototype in all its spirituality and holiness, then the contemplation of an icon, its worship and, especially, its creation are not artistic acts, but existential, moral and life-building acts. “They are wonderful and notorious icon painters, Daniel and his disciple Andrei, and many others are the same, and have so much virtue and so much care for fasting and monastic life, as if they were vouchsafed divine grace, but always raise their minds and thoughts to to the immaterial and divine light, but always raise the sensory eye to the written image of the Lord Christ and His Most Pure Mother of God and all the saints from the material world” (Reverend Joseph of Volotsky “Answer to the curious and a brief legend about the holy fathers who were in the monasteries on the Rusti of the existing earth” / / Great Menaions of Metropolitan Macarius. September, days 1 - 15. St. Petersburg, 1868. Quoted from: Uspensky L.A. Decree. Op. pp. 212-213). Perhaps more clearly and expressively, the same idea was expressed by Maxim the Greek in his essay “On Holy Icons” (chapter 2): “If someone is very cunning about imagining holy icons, but a living one is not splendid, do not order them to write. But again, if someone has a spiritual life, but cannot beautifully imagine holy icons, do not command such people to paint holy icons. But let him eat other handicrafts, whatever he wants.”
The pinnacle and most complete embodiment of Russian hesychasm and Russian icon painting of the 14th-15th centuries. is “Trinity” by Andrei Rublev. The fundamental position of hesychasm - God in his essence is not only transcendental, but is also alive and present, for he is given to us entirely in his energies - could be proven and developed philosophically and theologically, in the sphere of thought and word, which was done in Byzantium, but to imagine God as given in the exterior, plastically, to see His image and experience Him directly, as a material reality, would seem to be absolutely and completely impossible. Even the apostles could not do this,
who at the moment of the Transfiguration were burdened with sleep, and then saw only a cloud and only heard a voice emanating from it. This impossible task is solved in Rublev’s “Trinity”.
The dismembered unity of the three hypostases of the deity is, in principle, indescribable, for it, as the founders of the hesychast teaching said, “exceeds any type of knowledge.” Accordingly, Rublev took as the plot not this indescribable unity as such, but one of the episodes of the Old Testament - the visit of Abraham by the Lord, who was accompanied by two angels (in the Bible they are called men), at the oak grove of Mamre (Gen. 18: 1-19). The Christian viewer, however, understands not so much thanks to historical details (thrones, walking staffs that became sacred staffs), but rather to religious knowledge, that before him are not Old Testament figures, but images of the Trinity. These images are undeniably recognizable, although they are not identical to the plot persons of the biblical story, and, rationally speaking, they should not be “read” here, but for everyone who carries the image of the Trinity, it is they, not fitting into the “historical” form of the Old Testament characters, they shine through them and visibly replace them. The miracle lies in the fact that the indescribable is not depicted here - and at the same time depicted, for it is given with all clarity to inner knowledge, and therefore to inner vision and experience.
The described approach to the theme of the “Trinity” is continued and deepened in the interpretation of the motif of the sacred meal. In the Old Testament it is presented vividly and in detail: “And Abraham hurried to Sarah’s tent and said: quickly knead three sacks of fine flour, and make unleavened bread. And Abraham ran to the herd, and took a tender and good calf, and gave it to the lad, and he hastened to prepare it. And he took the butter and the milk and the cooked calf, and set it before them (that is, before the Lord and both angels. - G.K); and he himself stood next to them under the tree. And they ate" (Genesis 18:6-8). In Byzantine icon painting, it was this side of the biblical story that most often received special attention - the table was depicted with all the details, abundant dishes placed on it, Abraham with his family and household, reverently looking at the sacred meal. In Rublev, three people sit around a table, given in reverse perspective and, in particular, for this reason, more reminiscent not of a table, but of an altar. The altar table is empty, and only in the middle of it is a sacrificial bowl with a slain lamb. Before the viewer is again an Old Testament plot, well known to him and unfolding in his memory on the basis of associations arising in connection with
depicted: God's prediction to Sarah about the miraculous appearance of her son, the birth of Isaac and - one of the most stunning scenes in the Bible - the sacrifice of Isaac to the Lord. And again, through what is depicted one can read the indescribable: the lamb - the sacrifice - the salvation of the world through suffering, death and resurrection, given not as a visible, concrete plot, but as an experience, communion with the divine essence - deification.
Art historians have revealed in detail and substantiated which face of the Trinity each figure on Rublev’s icon corresponds to: God the Father in the center, God the Son to his right (and to the viewer’s left), God the Holy Spirit on the right side of the icon; facial expressions and the meaning of corresponding gestures were analyzed in detail (see, in particular: Andrei Rublev's Trinity: An Anthology / Compiled by G. Vzdornov. M., 1989. pp. 126-128). It is no less important, however, to think about and feel the unity of the whole that reigns in the icon. And in this sense, the image of the Trinity as three separate hypostases, which at the same time are an indivisible unity, so deeply and thoroughly developed in Byzantine theology, is picturesquely indescribable. It is possible to depict, as with Rublev, only three separate faces of the Trinity, but then the transfer of their unity, outside of which they do not exist, becomes an independent task of ontological importance, the solution of which is given by visual means, but in such a way that it goes far beyond their limits. It begins with the figure of perfect unity and supreme harmony - the circle; the composition of the icon is subordinated to it and all the characters are inscribed in it. The circular line covering the entire image is repeated in the poses of the figures - they not only bowed their heads as a sign of mournful and bright humility before divine predestination, but also bowed to each other, uniting in love, harmony and understanding of what is happening and what is to come. Their communication is quite real and obvious, although their lips are closed. Purely hesychast devotion to silence as a condition for a perfect religious state gives rise to the dominant image of silent conversation in the icon, and through it the highest Trinitarian Council - Concord.
Rublev’s work in general and his “Trinity” in particular were, as it were, rediscovered at the turn of the 20th century. and since then they have aroused and are arousing more and more interest and admiration, an increasing number of reviews, observations and scientific analyzes. Among them, the general feeling of a real and obvious connection between these works and the art of classical Greece attracts attention. This feeling is truly universal. Write about him
All researchers are a joke - from L. and V. Uspensky, who began work in the first years of the century, to M.V. Alpatov (1967), from P. Muratov (1913) to religious thinkers, whose reviews were collected as recently as 1989 (See the above-mentioned anthology by G. Vzdornov, and for an earlier period a review: Danilova I.E. Andrei Rublev in Russian and foreign art literature // Andrei Rublev and his era. M., 1971. P. 17-61). A distinctive feature of these reviews, in addition to their universality, is in most cases their non-technical, not specifically art historical, but rather impressionistic and general cultural character. Where attempts are made to trace this connection at the level of technique and specific analogies, the result may be more or less convincing, but usually it does not clearly explain the historical, cultural and philosophical essence of the phenomenon. Before us is one of the great and so often hidden highways of spiritual interaction, running in the centuries-old depths of the cultural and historical existence of peoples and rarely able to be reduced to a purely rational explanation.
The “Trinity” evoked and still evokes the most direct associations with reliefs on the tombstones of Greek steles of the classical era. The same deep calm, the same dissolved and enlightened sorrow, the same extreme simplicity and restraint of expressive means, a special harmonious beauty. The worldview behind these reliefs and the one that gave birth to them is quite obvious. The social contradictions that tore apart the Greek polis could be as sharp as desired, but the ancient man also carried within himself the mythologized unity of his world, where everyday life, an idealized image of civil society, mythological tradition and the entire world order merged and penetrated into each other. life. This ideal unity, and at the same time directly known to every Hellen, was reflected in the highest manifestations of the Hellenic spirit - in the tragedies of Aeschylus, in the philosophy of Aristotle, in tombstones. The best commentary on this evidence of the unity of their world among the Hellenes is the speech of Pericles preserved by Thucydides (I, 38 f.) over the Athenian soldiers who fell for their hometown.
Material contacts between the Byzantine world with its Ancient Greek heritage and Russia in the 14th-15th centuries. unconditional. It is enough to recall the joint work of Rublev with a native of Greece, Feofan, whose student a century later Joseph Volotsky called the author of the Trinity. To explain only by them, however, the description
The above-mentioned impression of “Trinity” does not apply. In the spiritual experience of Byzantium, everything actually ancient Greek was dissolved in later layers. Rublev most likely never saw the works of ancient Greek art themselves, much less the tombstone reliefs. But the main thing was that the basis of the icon painter’s worldview remained the most devout Orthodoxy, and the material of his knowledge and thought was the Holy Scripture. He saw the meaning of his activity in serving God and glorifying the Holy Trinity. They were a worldview, knowledge and thought, animated by completely different principles than Greek antiquity, and directly opposite to it. If, nevertheless, “echoes in the depths of culture” are obvious here, then they must not be denied, but explained, following, in particular, the path laid out by the most insightful and authoritative experts and researchers. Following them, firstly, we have to admit the following: “In his reasonable balance and proportionality to everything human, Rublev is closer to the Hellenes of the classical era than to the intensely agitated people of the Hellenistic world and Byzantium.” (Demina N.A. Trinity by Andrei Rublev. M., 1963. P. 46). Secondly, it is necessary to abandon simple and self-evident explanations: “The greatest difficulty lies in the fact that these ancient, Hellenic features, obviously guessed by Rublev in Byzantine icons, where they sounded only weak, barely discernible echoes, appeared in his own work with unprecedented intensity" (Danilova I.E. Decree. Op. P. 38). And finally, apparently, we should turn to explanations that are not so familiarly rational: “His classics were not the fruit of close study or diligent imitation. It is generated by the artist’s ability to guess; this ability gave him access to everything.” (Alpatov M.V. Andrei Rublev and his era. M., 1971. P. 13). Such “guessing,” obviously, must be understood as a special pre-rationally integral intuitive knowledge that penetrates into the final depths of culture; its specific mechanisms are unclear. In fact, P.A. also wrote about him. Florensky, saying that Russia XIV-XV centuries. “the only legitimate heir of Byzantium, and through it, but also directly, of ancient Hellas,” and “we are not talking about external, and therefore superficially random, imitation of antiquity, not even about historical influences, however, indisputable and numerous, but about the very spirit of culture, about the trend of its music” and that it was precisely this legitimate heritage and the trend of music that was reflected in Andrei Rublev’s “Trinity”, making it “the greatest of works.”
not only Russian, but also, of course, world-wide brush" (Florensky P.A. Decree. Op. pp. 275, 282).
During classes on the study of ancient heritage in the culture of Russia, both the student and the lecturer are repeatedly faced with the situation just described. It arises as a specific embodiment of that property of culture, which was called above its entelechy, could also be called its hermeneutics, or, following A.N. Veselovsky, its “countercurrent”, and which largely constitutes the cultural essence and philosophical meaning of the very phenomenon of “Russian antiquity”. Foreign cultural ideas and images do not always penetrate from the outside into a given cultural system and have a more or less lasting impact on it as a result of material contacts between the assimilating and assimilated cultural systems. More often, the process is of a different nature: in solving its internal tasks conditioned by its immanent development, a given cultural system, as it were, seeks and finds experience accumulated outside its borders, and, implanting it into its own fabric, becomes a uniquely individual version of a single culture - an era, region or , at the limit, of the world. At the same time, two points are especially important for “Russian antiquity”. Firstly, as noted above, when a foreign cultural phenomenon enters a given system, it is modified, oriented along the power lines of its “magnetic field” and appears in a form that is sometimes radically different from its historical original, but which corresponds to the needs of the new environment, and therefore assimilated by this environment, despite their sometimes different nature. Secondly, as just noted, such assimilation does not always imply material contact and conscious borrowing. As it turns out, we know incomparably more about world culture and our own past than we assume, incomparably more than we were “taught”, and, turning to world cultural experience for our (not always conscious) needs, sometimes we discover and extract from it things that , it would seem, they could easily not have identified him. The ancient Hellenic principles in the works of Andrei Rublev, and primarily in his “Trinity,” find an explanation in the described properties of culture. Its same properties make it possible to understand the place of antiquity in the heritage of the leading figure of Russian hesychasm of the 14th-15th centuries. - Sergius of Radonezh.
Sergius of Radonezh
This saint is one of the key figures in the entire spiritual development of Russia. Despite the outward inactivity and concentration of his life, spent almost entirely in the monastery on Makovets, his activities were woven into the most diverse aspects of Russian reality, affecting the formation of national self-awareness, and the nature of relations between the church and the state, and the ideal of monasticism, and disputes about monastic property, etc. This entire wide range of issues is not considered in this work: characterizing the life and work of Sergius of Radonezh is the task of a special monograph. Let us focus on only a few problems directly related to the entelechy of the ancient heritage: the concept and practice of hesychy; on the intuition of light; on the attitude towards icon painting in the Sergius Monastery; on the image of the Trinity.
Ancient Greek hsucia, or, in Byzantine pronunciation "hesychia", played in Byzantium in the 14th-15th centuries, as indeed before, the role of one of the main theological concepts. Its essence has been briefly explained above. In addition to its main theological meaning, it was also associated with a certain philosophical teaching and direction of church policy, with a certain technique of self-hypnosis and ecstasy. In Russian sources concerning the life and work of Sergius, and in the main one, the “Life” of Sergius of Radonezh, written by the saint’s younger contemporary, Epiphanius the Wise, the word “hesychia” is not used, but the concept itself is constantly present.
The totality of Sergius’s features, which largely determined his appearance and are constantly noted by his biographer, are hesychast: quietness, gentleness, calmness, bright openness to people, avoidance of honors, signs of attention, recognition of merit, silence, constant solitary work and concentration on a special kind of prayer ( so-called smart), which presupposes extreme intensity of religious feeling, up to tears and visions, and creates a special self-awareness of inner lightness, contact with the highest spiritual principle of life. The center of this ethical complex is the concept and practice of silence - this, as Gregory Palamas defines, “the ascent to true contemplation and vision of God.” According to the original routine of life in the monastery of Sergius, everyone had to constantly engage in prayer and handicraft in their cell alone, that is, to remain silent. When the hermits reproached
Sergius was criticized for having founded a monastery so far from a source of water, he replied that he relied only on his habits, “for he wanted to be silent here alone.” Having left the monastery in difficult times, he turned to his friend Stefan with a request to recommend him “a secluded place where he could remain silent.” Six months before his death, sensing its approach, he transferred control of the monastery to a disciple, and he himself plunged into silence.
The closeness of this type of behavior and personality to the Byzantine hesychia and the implementation of the hesychast religious worldview in them were expressed, in particular, in the fact that they established a special relationship between the “uncreated” and the “created” in man, opening his flesh to emanation, “pneuma” , God, and thereby making available to the believer the main and highest state of religious existence - the perception of the essence of God not only through knowledge of his transcendence, but also through the experience of this essence in its material, bodily manifestations - in its “energies”. The objective connection of this system of thoughts and feelings - ultimately - with the Neoplatonic image of God and the world was indicated above.
This also explains those episodes in the “life” of Sergius, which describe his “breakthroughs” into the sphere of another, divine, reality, whether in the form of his seeing the Mother of God, or in the form of a supernatural vision of persons and events inaccessible to physical vision - the Kulikovskaya move battle or his friend Stefan passing at a great distance from the monastery. The same hesy-hast-Neoplatonic perception of the relationship between the bodily and divine principles in man determined the view of the Byzantine hesychasts on the meaning of asceticism, which, as far as one can judge, was fully adopted in Makovets. In accordance with Plotinus’s idea that the body carries within itself reflections of the One and therefore is, as it were, an abode, albeit meager, of its divine nature and beauty, the hesychasts very disapproved of the Catholic teaching about the body as the fundamental source of sin and evil, as such subject to constant cruel humiliation. On the contrary, Gregory Palamas taught: “Our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit living in us.” The meaning of asceticism for Sergius was liberation from lusts and passions, purification of thoughts from everything that could distract from God and prayer (and in no case self-torture), poverty, and not hunger and suffering. Sergius himself was distinguished by good health and remarkable physical strength; Among the miracles that happened on Makovets was an unexpected miraculous appearance in
moment of extreme need for food carts; the cultivation of vegetable gardens, which provided the monks with vegetables, was, as it were, a statutory duty of each of them. The permeation of the created by the uncreated remained a universal concept, which was reflected not only in icon painting, but also in the life of hesychast monasteries.
Light, as noted above, was the substance in which for the hesychasts the unity of the essence of God and its material manifestations appeared especially clearly and immutably. The grace bestowed on Sergius was expressed, in particular, in light and diverse luminous phenomena, in the image of Epiphanius tightly surrounding the image of the Radonezh saint. The connection of this topic with the hesi-hast teaching about the Light of Tabor is quite obvious in many places in the Life, appearing with extreme clarity in the description of the appearance of the Mother of God to Sergius. The same theme forms a broader context for the theme of light and a golden background in icon painting, briefly described above in the words of P.A. Florensky there, where it was said about the Byzantine origins of the theology of the icon. The theme of light as a special, existential, sacred and at the same time aesthetic category occupies a significant place in the writings of the church fathers, who were still in many ways connected with the late antique philosophical atmosphere, such as, for example, in St. Augustine. It can be added that the theme of gold as a materialized, luminous-sacral blissful state itself has ancient origins - in particular from Seneca.
Considering all that has been said, there seems to be no doubt that the role of icon painting in the life of the Sergius Monastery was significant and that this role is subject to interpretation in the context of the general isi-hast understanding of the icon with its Palamist-Byzantine origin and distant philosophical Neoplatonic origins. Among the crafts for which the Sergius Monastery soon became famous, icon painting occupied a place of honor. It was here that one of the most significant icon painters of those years, Bishop Theodore of Rostov, the nephew of Sergius, was brought up. The most significant icon-painting school of the era is usually associated with the Sergius Monastery in its origin - the school of the Androniev Monastery in Moscow, where Andrei Rublev worked. According to legend, the master wrote his “Trinity” at the direct prompting of Sergius.
Thus, for hesychast Orthodoxy the center of Christian doctrine is theology of the Trinity. This situation is fully preserved in the life of Sergius and also, as far as possible,
but to judge is in his teaching, in the tradition he created. The image of the Trinity is the leitmotif of the Life. In the womb of his mother, who came to the church to pray, the unborn Sergius, according to his later biographer, filled the temple with a loud exclamation, and “not once or twice, but precisely three times, showing that he will be a true disciple of the Holy Trinity.” The mysterious old man, depicted in Nesterov’s painting “Vision to the Youth Bartholomew,” according to the Life, then went to Sergius’s parents and, leaving, uttered mysterious words: “The Youth will once be the abode of the Most Holy Trinity.” In the name of the Trinity, Sergius and his brother consecrated the church they built upon their arrival on Makovets. There is a lot of other evidence relating to the later periods of Sergius’s life.
Such an intense experience, such a wide distribution and the key role of this particular image, the image of the Holy Trinity, are unknown not only to the Catholic West, but also to Orthodox Byzantium. This should indicate that it was given special features in Rus' during the era of Sergius. We can only guess about them, but in at least two cases with significant certainty. The first of these features was reflected in the well-known words of Epiphanius the Wise, reproducing, like so much in the Life, the views, if not always of Sergius himself, then almost always of his closest associates during his lifetime: the temple on Makovets received its consecration, “so that by looking at the Holy The Trinity conquered the fear of the hateful strife of this world.” Against the background of the bloody confrontation between enslaved Rus' and the Tatar enslavers that permeated all reality, endless feuds between princes, quarrels and intrigues of church hierarchs and robbery of all kinds merged into a general picture of enmity between all and all. According to Karamzin, “might seemed right; whoever could, robbed: not only strangers, but also his own; there was no safety either on the road or at home; theft has become a common plague of property.” Both the moral and state existence of the people, as well as the Christian ideal itself, were destroyed. Under these conditions, the idea of unity and centralization went far beyond the state and military-political framework, becoming an imperative and hope, the desired focus of spiritual and practical thoughts, the actual value of culture and faith. The Trinity appeared as a divine image of the unity of all Christian and, in this sense, light, personal and close principles of life.
Another feature of the image of the Trinity is clear from the use in sources of the adjective “life-giving” as a more or less constant definition. This word is literally
meaning indicates a deeply hesychast understanding of the Trinity in the circle of Sergius, “life-giving” means laying the beginning of life, carried out in the further movement of life, which maintains a constant and living connection with this beginning. Behind the idea of the Trinity, what is revealed here - of course, not at the level of theological or generally scientific reflection, but in the holistic experience of the world - is an endless historical, cultural and spiritual depth, which is “in itself” present in the image of the Trinity in Rublev, Sergius and those who continue his work in the ideas of life, economy, Logos and divine energy, human participation in the beauty of creation that they experience in this image.
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(= utterance, “creation”) Jesus Prayer(“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner”). The goal of hesychia is union (= communication) with God, in other words, deification. It is achieved by a special way of prayer and is expressed in the vision of the Uncreated Divine Light, just as the apostles saw it on Mount Tabor during the Transfiguration of Christ.
After the Byzantine disputes of the 14th century, between supporters and opponents of hesychia, hesychasm also began to be understood as the teaching of the Eastern Church about the uncreated nature of Divine grace and the deification of man, which dogmatically took shape during these disputes.
The specificity of the Byzantine situation of the 14th century in the field of the Church was the active opposition of secular rationalistic philosophy against the spiritual experience and theology of Orthodoxy.
Representatives of the intellectual trend were mainly rhetoric teachers from the capital - Constantinople humanists, passionate ancient philosophy Plato, Aristotle and other Greek thinkers (the term “humanist” at that time meant a person engaged in “humanistic studies” - research in the field of humanitarian knowledge). The Gospel, like the patristic works, was understood by them in the context of ancient wisdom. At the end of the 30s. In the 14th century, the Calabrian monk Varlaam tried to join them, although he was not accepted. Calabria - region of Italy). However, it was Barlaam, his denial of Orthodox asceticism leading to deification, that provoked the so-called hesychast disputes. Three times, at the councils of Constantinople in 1341, 1347 and 1351, Barlaam failed before the defenders of Hesychia and left Byzantium, returning to Italy. In his person and in the person of Nicephorus Gregoras, the Church condemned the rationalistic philosophy that distorted Her teaching.
On behalf of the Church, St. spoke in defense of hesychia. Gregory Palamas.
The stumbling block that ultimately divided both sides was the question of the nature of the Tabor light. Varlaam and the humanists considered the light in which Christ appeared on Tabor to be an atmospheric (physical), created phenomenon that only symbolized the Divinity of Christ. Hesychasts, on the contrary, argued that the Tabor light is uncreated Divine energies, grace, and in this sense God Himself. And the one who contemplates this Divine light enters into communication with God, is transformed spiritually and physically, becoming light himself - God by grace. And because man is the center of all creation ( “the focus of all that exists and the leadership of God’s creations” - St. Gregory Palamas), then its transformation (deification) entails the transformation of living and “inanimate” nature, its communion with God.
For critics of hesychasm, such a connection between God and earthly man did not exist (for there is nothing uncreated, which would come from God and would be accessible to man). The Creator and his creation are separated in earthly existence; deification, the communion of man with God, is impossible under present conditions. In the next century, a person will join Him with his mind, the body will not participate in this joy - this is how they reasoned.
Having the opportunity to influence not only mentalities, but also art, and, moreover, church art too, Byzantine humanists brought their passions for pre-Christian Greek culture (Hellenism) into the sphere of icon painting. It was their influence that contributed to the fact that from the end of the XIII - beginning of the XIV centuries. The number of new ancient borrowings increased significantly, leaving their mark on both the style and subject of the icon. This was manifested in the artist’s desire for optical unity of the image, its parts: figures, architectural scenes, rocks, etc., which were now linked into a functionally determined whole. Scale relationships have become more natural. The spatial constructions reflect the usual visual experience, i.e. laws of empirical reality. This, in turn, predetermined a change in the relationship between what was depicted and what was to come: the image of an individual figure or a complex composition was no longer always oriented outward - frontally - towards the person praying; often it unfolded as a picture living its own life, regardless of the viewer, as if closed in on itself, detached, another reality. The facial features became smaller, the expression lost its stern character. The movements and poses of the figures acquired dynamics, turns, and gestures. That. a temporal element was discovered, the transmission of what changes over time: narration, emotional psychological reactions, etc. Traditional flatness has been replaced by a tendency towards spatiality and depth. Elements of the pre-personal – nature, architecture – received greater elaboration and place. Etc.
The same desires to imitate the visible world - mimetic realism - penetrated into the plot sphere. For example, the image of the Mother of God breastfeeding the Infant of God in the scene of the Nativity of Christ, or the Mother of God with the Infant of God, as if trying to playfully stand in her arms, being in a mobile pose (“Leaping”), the Crucifixion, with a strongly curved figure of the Savior and the Mother of God falling at fainting cross, etc.
Thus, the way of thinking of the opponents of hesychasm contained a departure from the traditions of church art and led to the de-churchification of icon painting and its repaganization ( those. return to pagan art forms) and transformation into secularized religious painting. This is the path that church art took in the West during the Renaissance, and which it could not refuse Catholic Church still. Moreover, Byzantine humanism, which denied the experience of deification in earthly conditions, the participation of the body, more broadly, matter, in unity with God, clearly contradicted the eschatological revelation of the canonical icon, which showed man and the created cosmos (our earthly world in its animal, plant, and generally natural diversity) transformed and united with the Creator by uncreated grace. The symbolic language of the church image was empty, meaningless for intellectuals and therefore unnecessary, less preferable compared to ancient forms. If the human body and nature are not connected with God and will not participate in the bliss of the future age (holiness), then, apparently, it does not matter at all how they are depicted in the icon. On the other hand, because The material world (starting with the human body and ending with natural forms), the laws of its existence, as humanists believed, is like a mirror in which the Creator Himself is reflected, and therefore, by cognizing the world, we cognize God, then the image of the material world in church art should was to strive to replicate earthly realities.
The influence of hesychasm, the preaching of which became widespread thanks to disputes with humanist philosophers, had a completely different effect on icon painting. Church art positively accepted the features of spiritual experience emphasized by hesychast theology. For the holiness of man and the world, their unity with God and God with them, which the image conveys in all its elements, is precisely the very reality that hesychasm defended. The theology of the latter is not difficult to discern in all aspects of the iconographic canon - spiritual, performing and visual.
An icon is created through the constant prayer of the icon painter. Prayer shapes his spiritual life, at certain stages of which, having acquired the grace of the Holy Spirit, a person enters into collaboration with God. In this cooperation lies the main and only principle of Christian creativity - the principle of synergy, which necessarily implies the deification of man ( Greek synergy translates as assistance). Ishizam defends this principle while at the same time establishing himself on it. He also experimentally establishes prayer-ascetic rules that allow the individual to free himself from the power of the sinful nature and most conveniently lead to synergy. (Compare: in the (Russian) Pilot's Book ( those. Book of Rules) of the middle of the 16th century, in the chapter “The Legend of Icon Painters, What It Befits to Be,” there are the following words: “It is proper... to be a pure icon painter, to live a spiritual life and good morals, to adorn yourself with humility and meekness and to do good in everything... and of old the Lord spoke to Moses, who filled them with joy with the Spirit of God, and this same man made the tabernacle of the meeting of the old law with joy, how much more befits the present grace of those who wrote the image of Christ our God, and of His Most Pure Mother of God and His saints to strive to receive the Spirit of God.")
This is the spiritual component of the canon.
In the performing aspect, the doctrine of Divine energies provides an understanding of the nature and manner of manifestation of that mysterious force that operates in material materials used in icon painting. Through man, the grace of the Holy Spirit transforms and purifies them, and, what is important to emphasize, thereby justifies the human appointment of the shepherd of the universe, bringing “all kinds” ( those. creation) to the “Creator and originator of all things.” Indicative in this regard is the example of St. Alypius of Pechersk, Russian icon painter and monk of the late 11th century. His life tells of cases when St. Alypius treated ailments by anointing the sick with paint prepared for icons.
Finally, the visual techniques of icon painting are extremely closely related to the hesychast teaching about God, His actions and man. The realities of the mystical life of the sacred silencers determine the symbolic and semantic structure of the image. This structure forms gold (or colors similar to it, for example, yellow-ocher, red), which is widely used in icon painting for the background, halos, assists, and, less often, spaces. Gold symbolically conveys the uncreated Light of the Divine ( other words, energy, grace), enlightening and transforming the created world. All other elements of the icon correlate with the created world and belong to it. But their peculiarity is that they are shown in beneficial interaction with the Divine light. So, gold symbolizes the grace by which every creature lives and joins God. Etc. There is a real spiritual justification for the fact that the background of the image in the language of icon painters is called light.
In contrast to gold, the color(s) in the icon are usually associated with created being. The colors indicate that the world they decorate and its “inhabitants” are shown in their highest state, no longer knowing sin and abiding in God ( Heavenly Kingdom, – i.e. not in the present - earthly, but in the new - sinless, deified). In the ordinary (physical) world, color is derived from the light of the sun (or other source), which, in contact with objects, “colors” them in different colors depending on the properties of the object’s matter. IN spiritual world, which the icon represents, the uncreated Spiritual light (=grace of the Holy Spirit) acts. Its source is God, its pictorial symbol is gold. Contacting and penetrating creation, Divine light also “colors” it, but now depending on its spiritual properties. Decorating with color here means transformation. The Light of the Creator (His grace) first transforms (changes) the spiritual and physical composition of a person, and then spreads through the body of the saint throughout creation, involving it in a universal transformation (deification).
In a spiritual sense, the world, stricken by sin, stands immersed in darkness on the brink of non-existence. It is dark-like - black, there is no color in it, because... there is no light (compare: at night the colors are indistinguishable and disappear).
With the action of the unearthly light of grace, if we talk about the image of a person in an icon, not only the color of the body and vestments, but also the entire appearance of the saint is associated. Specific proportions of the figure, refined hands, slightly elongated face, large eyes, small mouth, thin nose - all this conveys the experience of deification as it is experienced by the spiritual and physical parts of a person. Moreover, this experience is depicted in strict accordance with how the saints describe it. “If the body,” says St. Gregory Palamas, “is called upon, together with the soul, to participate in the ineffable blessings of the future century; it must undoubtedly participate in them to the extent possible even now... for the body also has the experience of comprehending divine things, when spiritual powers are not mortified, but transformed and sanctified.” “The spiritual joy that comes from the spirit to the body is not at all distorted by the message to the body, but changes this body and makes it spiritual, because then it cuts off the evil lusts of the flesh, no longer pulls the soul down, but rises with it...” (He same). “Whoever cleanses his mind with tears,” writes St. Gregory of Sinai, - having resurrected his soul here on earth by the Spirit, and made his flesh through the mind a luminous and fiery reflection of Divine beauty - he almost becomes a cohabitant of the angels... for an incorruptible body will be an earthly body, without moisture and plumpness, transformed in an indescribable way from a spiritual body into a spiritual body, so that while remaining material, it will at the same time be heavenly, but of god-like subtlety.”
In line with the hesychast practice of communion with God, icons do not seem to be something alien to churchliness, i.e. the encroachment of the world on its canon, the desire to identify the emotional and spiritual sphere of man, a more detailed depiction of landscape and architectural elements characteristic of icon painting of the 14th – 16th centuries.
The first is justified by the words of St. Gregory Palamas, who in a dispute with Varlaam, who proved the need for the dying away of the passionate part of the soul in spiritual experience, explained: “The teaching we received... says that dispassion does not consist in killing the passionate part, but in its translation from evil to good... In dispassionate people the passionate part of the soul constantly lives and acts for the good and they do not kill it.” That. the transmission of emotional movements, for example, of a person, in an icon does not speak of the diversity of his mental life, i.e. “humanity” with all its inherent impulses of the soul, and that this diversity is translated into the correct perspective, addressed to God.
As for the detailing of pre-personal writing (within reasonable limits), it was adopted by icon painting not at all because of aesthetic interest in the surrounding world as a valuable area in itself, or even as a stage of knowledge of God (Varlaam, for example, believed that, without knowing the structure of the universe, God cannot be known). She was justified by a look that saw in the surroundings that which is called, together with man and through man, to enter into the eternal joy of unity with God.
Drawing a general conclusion, we must say:
1. It was the hesychast experience of deification that determined the iconographic canon, following which the icon acquired the maximum fullness of churchliness, dogmatic depth and confessional character.
2. With the victory of hesychasm in the art of the Church, the development of those tendencies that in one way or another damaged the teaching of the Church ceased. Only thanks to hesychasm “the last Byzantines, unlike the Italians, gave place to naturalness without developing naturalism; they used depth, but did not include it in the laws of perspective; explored the human, but did not isolate it from the divine.” The life-giving connection of art with revelation was not broken.
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