Diakrisis Yearbook of Theology and Philosophy

Vol. 4 (2021): 61–78

DOI: 10.24193/diakrisis.2021.5

Sacred Art
Between Tradition and Personal Expression:
The Orthodox Icon and Artistical
Transgressions of the Canon

Andreea Stoicescu
University of Bucharest &
National University of Music of Bucharest, Romania
E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract
The aim of this article is to present a personal reflection regarding the the-
oretical/philosophical relation between the generally accepted theological
grounding of icon painting and other contemporary artistic endeavours to
integrate the religious feeling – of Christian-Orthodox inspiration. This reflec-
tion is based on a mixture of ideas from different thought-frameworks which
have as common ground the need for speculating on issues such as ‘tradition
understanding’, ‘personal expression’, ‘art and religiousness’, exactly those
key-themes that are constituting the fundamental threads of my argumen-
tation. Hence, my appeal to authors like Lucian Blaga, Leonid Uspensky,
Martin Heidegger, Paul Evdochimov, and Christos Yannaras. The point of
departure for my study is the powerful and unavoidable conflict between
the need for personal artistic interpretations of religious themes – expressed
through contemporary artistic techniques and the application of contem-
porary metaphysical modelings – and the need for attaching oneself to an
‘authentic’ tradition of religious experience and to a community with deep
roots in history. My all-round thesis is that this conflict cannot be, at least,
clarified by choosing, from the artistic point of view, between two extremes:
contemporary secular art on the one hand, and sacred, canonical art on the
other hand, but by finding conceptual common pathways.
Keywords: tradition; face-image; person; contemporary art; transgression;
music; body; dance.

61
Introduction
his paper is a meditation about the ‘community’ between the old, litur-
T gical art, of the Orthodox icon and contemporary artistic manifestations
spiritually rooted in the Orthodox belief, ‘community’ in the sense that both
coexist in the contemporary cultural landscape and, at the same time, both
are shaping our sensibility underlying this understanding of Christianity.
For example, in Romania, I argue that, for a ‘modern’ believer, to pray in
front of a traditionally conceived icon and to listen to an orthodox inspired
composition such as Paul Constantinescu’s Easter Byzantine Oratorio are
both significant ways of experiencing the Orthodox Tradition, in its broad
meaning. This fact is worth analysing through philosophical and theological
frameworks because it reveals one of the most important inner tensions
of the modern person: the conflict between, on the one hand, the need for
sacredness, for cultural ‘authentic’ roots and for the immersion of oneself
within a community of like-hearted thinkers and believers, and, on the other
hand, the need for modernity, for creativeness, for openness towards new
forms of expression and metaphysical ideas. It is a hard inner tension that
is accurately represented by the, sometimes artificial, opposition between
the liturgical art of the Orthodox icon, which usually is created after a
well-theologically grounded canon, and ‘just’ religiously inspired art, such
as modern musical compositions, paintings, literature, and even choreog-
raphy. Usually, there are separately pursued, the place of the icon being
inside a church, while the place of a modern Orthodox inspired painting
being in a gallery, this spatial separation constituting, in fact, a symbol of
the theoretical-theological separation between the two. What I propose in
this paper is an endeavour to find a space of communication between these
two separate fields of creation and expression with the aim of producing
a dialogue (between these two types of logos). This space can be traced
through important concepts from the philosophy of culture, hermeneutics
and aesthetics: ‘tradition’, ‘expression’, ‘transgression’, ‘person’ and ‘expe-
rience’. Hence, my use of ideas from thinkers such as Lucian Blaga, Martin
Heidegger, and Christos Yannaras.

The Orthodox Icon

and its Theological Grounding
The Metaphysical Meaning of ‘Tradition’
The manner in which one operates with the concept of ‘tradition’, both in
the field of hermeneutics/philosophy of culture and in the field of Christian-
Orthodox theology, is the main ground for the phenomenon of transfer-
ability – of forms, ideas and styles – between the art of the icon and the

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 Sacred Art Between Tradition and Personal Expression

modern, religiously inspired, artistic manifestations. Tradition is seen as

a fountainhead of vitality, which means that ‘tradition’ can be viewed not
only as a rigid assemblage of old norms, practices and objects – needed to
be outreached in order to fulfil current different needs and ways of life –,
but as an energetic blowing which we breathe as a source of symbols and
profundity. Hence, tradition is, at the same time, the root for prejudices,
for stylistic predeterminations, for established cultural categories, and a
springboard for change, for the generation of new styles and categories.
This is the exact meaning which ‘tradition’ has in the Orthodox belief. It is
a core-concept that theologically justifies practices for centuries, including
the art of painting icons1. This is how the Romanian philosopher and poet –
who also studied theology and biology – Lucian Blaga beautifully described
the understanding of ‘tradition’ in the Orthodox belief:

Our tradition is of a more invisible nature; it permits only a met-

aphorical or metaphysical formulation. Our tradition is more
atemporal, it identifies with our creative stylistic potencies,
unexhausted, “magnificent as in the beginning”. Our tradi-
tion is our stylistic matrix, in a blessed state like our motherly
ancestry. Sometimes smouldering, yet uninterruptedly lively,
it manifests in time, although, measured from our ephemeral
horizon, it is above time. Being creative, this tradition of ours
has a ‘music’2 character, not a “museum-like” character. In
the Occident tradition is a sign of age, mostly a burden; the
departure from it means liberating revolution. Our tradition is
ageless like the green leaf; as a stylistic matrix it is part of our
unconscious logos. A separation from it would mean apostasy.3

The theological grounding for Christian-Orthodox iconography springs

from the experience, reading and exemplarity of tradition and this fact is
the reason why tradition is, at the same time, the strength and weakness of
this understanding of Christianity. In the history of hermeneutics, Martin
Heidegger (re)discovered the tradition of Occidental philosophy as the
bearer of the original meaning and revelation of ‘being’. Yet, in Being and
Time, he makes the observation that tradition can also hide the true origins,
it can throw them into oblivion, namely into non-reflective and cliché-like
(pre)understanding4. Until recently, the Orthodox iconographical canon

1
Leonid Uspensky, The Theology of the Icon in The Orthodox Church [in Romanian], intro-
ductive study and translation by Teodor Baconsky (Bucharest: Anastasia Publishing House,
1994), 92.
2
From the Ancient ‘muses’.
3
Lucian Blaga, The Mioritical Space [in Romanian], in The Trilogy of Culture, (Bucharest:
Humanitas, 2011), 285; my English translation from Romanian.
4
Martin Heidegger, Being and time [in Romanian], translation and introductive study by
Gabriel Liiceanu and Cătălin Cioabă (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2003), §6, 29-30.

63
 Andreea Stoicescu

was considered unquestionable regarding the practice of icon painting. It

contains the ethical and technical prescriptions that constitute the basis for
differentiating between sacred art – thought of as an embodiment of spiri-
tuality – and religious art – the secular, un-liturgical expression of religious
themes5. Although this distinction is an essential theoretical difference
that helped to preserve the distinctness of the icon tradition and partially
safeguarded it from stylistic intrusions, it also kept it rigidly isolated from
the fruitful contact with new forms of painting. If we assume the need
for creative and vital participation, implication and modelling effect of
the Orthodox belief into the world, then we are obliged to also accept the
possibility of a ‘community’ and ‘communion’ between the world and
sacred expression. In other words, if one conceives of ‘tradition’ as a still
positive and deepening force in contemporary culture and society, then
one is forced to bring into light linking paths between what comes from the
past and the stance of the present. It is, necessarily, a biconditional relation
and the deviation towards one extreme or the other is meant to produce
misunderstanding, excessive reactions, extremism and, most important, a
spiritual pauperisation. The extreme secular practice of contemporary art
– that not only eliminates religious experience as a relevant inspiration for
art, but it takes it as a subject for mockery, as a simple grand taboo – is the
‘transgressive art’ as defined and criticised by Anthony Julius in his 2002
book Transgressions: The Offences of Art. Hence, the iconographical canon
for the Orthodox icon and the transgressive art are two extremes of artistic
practice. The first is limited by rigid norms and has as its heart the idea of
drawing from exemplary icons of the past and of devotion in front of the
represented subject, while the latter is so ‘free’ that it loses its identity, its
meaning, its expressive force, and has as its heart the attitude of unlimited
‘avant-gardism’ that, as now is certain, brings art at a dead end. This is the
theoretical reason why the need for a more distant and balanced perspective
is needed, why the comparative discussion of these two radically opposed
practices is relevant. In the center of this opposition is the concept of ‘tradi-
tion’ and the key, at least, to disentangle the issue is the strive to trace the
metaphysical assumptions about this concept.
Earthly life is determined by metamorphosis, by process, by continuous
transformations, temporality itself being a consubstantial condition for life.
Ivan Moody, an Orthodox priest and composer renowned for its research
about contemporary musical creations inspired by Orthodox Christianity,
argues that Tradition would be greatly enriched by the inclusion of paralitur-
gical realisations. He has a brief article suggestively entitled “Contemporary
Art as Theophany” in which he claims that “Christian art” should be much
5
Michel Quenot, The Icon: A Window Toward the Absolute [in Romanian], translation,
preface and notes by Pr. Dr. Vasile Răducă (Bucharest: The Encyclopedic Publishing House,
1993), 55.

64
 Sacred Art Between Tradition and Personal Expression

wider than “liturgical art”: “I have, to be brutally honest, no time for the
idea that we must wall ourselves off and live in a beautiful ghetto. That is
not what Christianity is, and if that is the case, then Christian art must as a
consequence be larger, wider, than the liturgical arts”6. Hence, this entwin-
ing of different domains of artistic practice is not unnatural or impermissible
for a Christian artist, on the contrary, is what constitutes the flexible and
lively part of Tradition. As Leonid Uspensky puts it: “Christianity absorbs
from the surrounding world anything it can use as means of expression”
and “People around the world who are hearing the call of the Church are
bringing with them their culture, their particular national characteristics
and their creative faculties. The Church is forming its sacred language by
choosing from this lot of contributions everything that is more clean, more
true and more expressive”7. This is the perspective about the past that suits
contemporary hermeneutical methodologies, such as Gadamer’s philosoph-
ical hermeneutics, in which he advocates for the importance of accepting
the dynamics between interpretation – which is always a strive from the
‘present’ of one particular person – and past ‘texts’ – literary texts, sacred
texts, philosophical texts, the musical score or, by extension, the entire field
of human products because they encapsulate meanings.

The Canon and the Image of Transcendence

In the 20th century there were important attempts at systematising and
popularising the theology – and, implicitly, the metaphysics – behind the
painting of icons. Leonid Uspensky’s books are classics in this regard. For
a short exposition of the main threads of argumentation, I will have as
background works by Uspensky, Pavel Florensky, Vladimir Lossky, Paul
Evdochimov and Michel Quenot. Thereby, the main theoretical-theological
ideas that are forming the essence of the canon are:
1. The artist should have an ascetic way of living because only by this outer
and inner self-purification he could attempt to depict through painting the
spiritual reality. This ‘cleansing’ permits a true vision of the world that goes
beyond everyday factuality and material shapes.
2. The Christological grounding of the icon, of the visual representation
in the Christian-Orthodox thinking, is the holy fact of Incarnation, which,
unlike in the Old Testament, it demonstrates the effective and efficacious pres-
ence of God in the finite world through a Face-Image. This fact, historical
and mysterious at the same time, permitted the visualisation of transcendence
6
Ivan Moody, “Contemporary Art as Theophany,” Orthodox Arts Journal (10 february,
2015), accesed at the adress: https://www.orthodoxartsjournal.org/contemporary-art-the-
ophany-2/.
7
Uspensky, The Theology of the Icon in The Orthodox Church, 52–53; my English translation
from Romanian.

65
 Andreea Stoicescu

through the hypostatic Person of Christ as God-Human: God was truly seen
by man at a face-to-face encountering.
3. The Pneumatological grounding is complementary to the Christological
one because it refers to the opposite process of the human being who is
sanctified, the reverse and the aim of the Incarnation. Is the eschatological
dimension, the promise of Parousia, of the Kingdom, which the icon can hint
at, proclaim and confess through the reality of the Incarnation and of the
Hagiographies, both handed over from centuries through the holy Tradition.
4. Hence, the authentic icon must be a vision of the concrete, material,
sensible presence of the one represented, yet at the same time it must be a
vision of sacredness, which means, paradoxically, a vision of the invisible, of
the transcendence that is emanated through the transfigured corporality of those
depicted. This is the reason why the style of Byzantine-Orthodox iconog-
raphy is labelled symbolical realism, because it expresses both the physical
nature of those painted and their sanctified nature. Thus, the icon is neither
abstract, nor naturalistic, but a confessional revelation of faith and of the
promise for delivery:

The icon is an image of a human truly blessed with a spirit

wholly purified of sufferings. This is why his flesh is repre-
sented in an entirely different manner than the ordinary, meant
to perish, flesh. The icon is the sober conveyance, without pas-
sion, of a certain spiritual reality. If holiness fully illuminates
a man, in such a way that his spiritual and physical being is
infused by prayer and, thus, it remains within the divine light,
then the icon catches and keeps still in a visible manner this
man who became a living icon towards true semblance with God.
The icon does not represent sacredness, but indicates man’s
participation to the divine life.8

5. The face is the expressive center of an icon and, due to its theological
charge, its essential purpose. The icon (re)presents a Person, a word that
etymologically means ‘the-fact-of-having-a-face’, of facing the otherness.
Christ is a Person, consubstantial with the other two of the Trinity, God and
the Holy Spirit, and, thus, by his nature a divine Person, unlike human beings
who, because they are created, they are created persons. Christ is invariably
God by nature, while humans can become sanctified through the process
of holy transfiguration. Man cannot have access to God’s nature, but only
to His manifestations, His energy.
6. Christ is, at the same time, True-God and True-Human, which sym-
bolise the fact that he is the uncreated, invisible and fully spiritual Face-
Image of the Father, and has his own humanly, physiognomic Face after

Uspensky, The Theology of the Icon in The Orthodox Church, 115; my English translation
8

from Romanian.

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 Sacred Art Between Tradition and Personal Expression

his earthly mother. Due to this hypostatically united double-nature (the dogma
from Chalcedon) Christ can also be embodied through an icon. The significant
mention is that within a painted icon one does not represent entirely his godly
nature, because it is contradictory with the sense of ‘transcendence’, and, one
does not paint entirely his human nature, because it would be sheer naturalism
and, so, an un-truly rendering. However, what one tries to paint is the Person
or the Hypostasis which unifies both natures:

The icon does not represent either the nature, or the person.
[…] When we represent our Lord we do represent neither his
divineness, nor his humanity, but the Person who, in accord-
ance with the dogma from Chalcedon, unites in Itself, in an
unlimited manner – “unmixed and undivided” – both natures.”;
and “This is God’s overflow of praise or God’s kenosis: He who
cannot be accessible to the creature, He who cannot be either
described, or depicted by any means, is The One who becomes
accessible, describable and depictable, assuming a human body.
Jesus Christ’s icon, the icon of the God-Human, is the visual
expression of the dogma from Chalcedon: it truly represents
the Person of God’s Son who became human, of the one who
is co-being with the Father by his nature and co-being with us
by his human being: “altogether like us, but without sin” – as
the written words of the dogma are stating.9

7. In the iconic representation functions a relation of participation, through

semblance, to the archetype. Even in the concept of an ‘image’ is presupposed
the difference between a subject of representation and the image. The icon
is not adored as idolatry (latreia), but only used as a foothold for worship
(proskunèsis). As Uspensky writes, there is a difference of nature and an iden-
tity of persons10. This is the reason why keeping the historical truth about
the physiognomic identity of those represented, as archetypes, through
tradition, is a necessity, this chain being labelled by Pr. Ioan Bizău “iconic
succession”11.
These (re)presentations are embodiments that retain a power of trans-
mitting a feeling of the transcendence, with the aim of inviting us to con-
template the beauty of this encountering and to surrender in front of the
nostalgic promise of finding our original, spiritual, sanctuary. Lugian Blaga
poetically describes this feeling near the presence of the transcendence in
Byzantine art as ‘sophianic’:
9
Uspensky, The Theology of the Icon in The Orthodox Church, 83–84 & 104; my English
translation from Romanian.
10
Uspensky, The Theology of the Icon in The Orthodox Church, 85.
11
Ioan Bizău, “Incursions into the Theology and the Art of the Icon” [in Romanian],
in What is the Icon?, edited by Leonid Uspensky, Boris Bobrinskoy, Stephan Bigam & Ioan
Bizău, translated by Vasile Manea (Alba Iulia: Reîntregirea Publishing House, 2005), 106.

67
 Andreea Stoicescu

Generally, Byzantine art, much vigorously in painting, and,

excepting the architecture, is sophianically oriented. How
should we understand this general affirmation? In Byzantine art
the figures are elementary stylised, rhythmically constructed,
soaked into an air of magnificent simplicity and monotony.
The figures are not sketched either by following their own
lines of individuality, or by following their Platonical ideas,
of embellished contours. Through their expressions, the fig-
ures are declaring themselves the bearers of transcendence;
a reflexion of eternity has descended on them. As earthly fig-
ures, they are imbued by the Heaven dropped in them. They
are crossed by a severe calm, from beyond this world. These
creatures seemed touched by an invisible blessing, not so much
due to the symbolical marks that surround them, as due to the
manner itself in which they are rendered. The figures are neither
naturalistically individualised, nor Platonically idealised, but
sophianically transfigured. The creatures seemed to be forms
of a transcendence that sprang inside them. The sophianically
stylised creatures are manifesting a quietness of a supreme
density, being free of any striving, remote from any volitional
act; they somehow gain the praise from above and are only
static, receptive forms, of reconciliation, of orderliness, and of
the higher wisdom.12

Hence, the iconographical orthodox canon, though severe, it is filled with

a kind of feeling from which the contemporary artist tends to be alienated.
From a cultural point of view, this alienation is a great occasion for grief,
yet it also is a great occasion for recontextualising the canon in relation with
new forms of expression and new concepts.

The complexity of religious experience

and the complexity of contemporaneity
Person and expressivity in the Orthodox inspired philosophy
The term ‘person’ comes from prosopon, which refers to the individual
face-image of somebody13, and it is the source both for an important theo-
logical concept and for an important psychological concept, namely that
of ‘personality’. It is the notion that implies the fact of relatedness, the fact
of ek-stasis, the openness towards an alterity and the unique dynamic of
a face-to-face relationship. It is the notion that forms the basis for a ‘per-
sonalist’ understanding of humankind, which means the understanding of
Blaga, The Mioritical Space, 219–220; my English translation from Romanian.
12

Cf. Christos Yannaras, Person and Eros, (Anastasia Publishing House, 2000), 21, for
13

more details.

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 Sacred Art Between Tradition and Personal Expression

‘this individual’ in its own being. A type of thinking which proposes this
concept in its core (The Hypostasis is a Person) and which grants every
soul with significance, has by its nature conceptual flexibility for accepting
‘personal’ expressions.
The philosopher and theologian Christos Yannaras, in his volume Person
and Eros, develops this notion within a network in which he weaves phe-
nomenological, neo-Aristotelian, and Heideggerian methods and concepts
with Christian-Orthodox ones, thus creating an ‘Orthodox derived meta-
physics’. To actually be a person presupposes to be in relation with others. The
‘others’ can be either those which are in the world, or persons. Beings are
manifesting, they appear as something, they show themselves – the etymol-
ogy of ‘phenomenon’ as that which sparkles, that which is showing –, yet
only in a personal relation, only in front/in the face of another one which turns
its gaze towards them. The most intimate personal relation that accomplishes
this ontological structure is the interpersonal relation14. The most important
impulse towards another person, towards another ontologically similar to
ourselves, yet very different in its ‘personal’ exhibitions and inner cosmos,
is eros, love15. This is the reason why in the Orthodox faith, the notion of
‘truth’ does not refer to objective, intersubjective verifiable information, but
is itself personified, it refers to a spiritual experience of a person, who ‘sees’
the immaterial reality, and the Person who eminently proved the validity of
this type of truth was the Person of Christ: “Truth does not respond to the
question what? but to the question who is he truth? He is a person that has
a face. This is why the Church does not only speak about truth, but it also
shows it through the image of Jesus Christ”16. It is an ‘ethical truth’ – from
‘ethos’ –, ostensive definable through a way of life. This is the type of truth
also emanated by the work of art because in art one is expressing the complexity
of interpersonal relationships. Art is the place where all uncertainties, needs,
emotional intensities, difficult situations and profound crisis are expressed.
Maybe sacred art is the purest type of art, yet it is also the most distant from
human concrete life because by its nature it does not concern itself with
concreteness. By representing ideals and models, the icon is a schema, is
“elementary”, as Blaga wrote. However, human life is not elemental, and
the person-to-person relation is a complicated mystery, as is the creation
of a personal style in art:

Even though we distinguish the energy or human action from

nature and nature from persons, we do not relate any synthesis
to nature itself, which means we do not divide and break nature
into persons and actions: persons and actions are neither “parts”
or “components”, nor “accidents” of nature, but nature’s mode
14
Yannaras, Person and Eros, 34.
15
Yannaras, Person and Eros, p. 36.
16
Uspensky, The Theology of the Icon in The Orthodox Church, 59.

69
 Andreea Stoicescu

of existence. The bringing into personal fulfilment of every act

“indivisibly” (ameros) and “unitarily” (henoeidos) synthesises
the entire action of nature, in the same way the person synthe-
sises the whole nature, is the existence of nature. The how of
the willing act (or of the efficient act, or of the act of loving, or
of any other act) naturally synthesises the what of the willing
act; nature’s possibility of willing exists and it manifests itself
only through the alterity of personal volition. Music, painting,
sculpture are actions or efficient energies (creative) of human
nature, yet they exist only as manifestations of personal alterity,
as Mozart’s music, Van Gogh’s painting, Rodin’s sculpture etc.
But anyway, it does not exist some other manner of manifesta-
tion or of determining the essence or the nature beside its active,
working, ek-stasis in the fact of personal alterity.17

Paraliturgical creations of artists in different fields are examples of per-

sonal interpretations of the Tradition, and these types of creations, though
not implied in the liturgical ritual, can be seen as an alterity to the conse-
crated creations, in which the icon is the most symbolically significant. These
artists had tried a personalisation of the Christian-orthodox system of ideas
and, thus, they had disseminated this spiritual framework within the limits
of their craft, feelings, intentions, and originality. The concept of the ‘icon’,
in this context, does not refer only to its narrow meaning – namely that of
a painted or sculpted object realised after a specific technique –, but can be
generalised in such a way as to correspond to its more speculative philo-
sophical and theological meaning, which is that of an archetypal ‘face-im-
age’, the face which cannot be seen with bodily eyes, the most comprehen-
sive sense of ‘image’ as ‘(re)presentation’, as bringing into presence through
material means even that which is only spiritual, nonmaterial. If we theoretically
rethink the fundamental concepts of the canon through this metaphysically
generalised perspective, then, by extension, we can indirectly view any type
of human creation as an incarnation of the personal energy of man, and
as a (re)presentation of God’s blessing that accompanies, fills and guides
man’s creative inspiration. As Paul Evdochimov writes:

By being expressive, art can transmit varied contents. Free, it

can still coincide with the icon – like a canvas by Rembrandt –,
as it can also distance itself from any religious content; in the
extreme case, it can move towards the pure fiction of a sign or it
can become only an aesthetic object, an object of art for art’s sake,
decoration; finally, it can change its nature and cease to be art.18

Yannaras, Person and Eros, 73–74; my English translation from Romanian.

17

Paul Evdochimov, The Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty, translated by Grigore Moga
18

and Petru Moga (Bucharest: Meridiane Publishing House, 1992), 81; my English translation
from Romanian.

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 Sacred Art Between Tradition and Personal Expression

Hence, art is a complex endeavour of expressing deep experiences and

needs of humans, among which the religious feeling has an ancestral, priv-
ileged place. Secular culture, as religiously disengaged as it may seem, can
still be interpreted, from a theological stance, as a mirror of God’s ‘image’
because, necessarily, it must contain elements of theophany. Again, in
Evdochimov’s formulation: “If every man, made after God’s image and
semblance, is His living icon, then earthly culture is the icon of the heavenly
Kingdom”19. This is a path on which sacred art and secular art can find
points of osmosis and, thus, permit reciprocal influences.

Music and plastic art

influenced by the Orthodox Tradition
Music has its place in the Church, yet is as (pre)determined by theolog-
ical norms as icon painting. Thus, the same line of argument concerning
‘tradition’ and ‘personal expression’ can be followed in this case and, fur-
thermore, another observation must be made: the historical assumption
made when a rigid system of stylistic constraints is held is the isolation
against influences from ideologies and movements of thought specific
to every epoch. It is true that sacred art created in the Byzantine shadow
was less altered in its forms by these socio-cultural interactions than in the
Roman-Catholic lineage, for instance, yet it is only a difference of degree,
itself determined by a special cultural, geopolitical and historical context.
For instance, in Romania, after the consolidation as a modern national
state in the middle of the nineteenth century, there were ample discussions
about the necessity of culturally sustaining this achievement through the
‘construction’ of a national school of composition and a national church
music. The ‘national church music’ had to be, quite paradoxically, at the
same time an expression of modernity – because it was meant to argue
for ‘nationalism’, a concept with specific modern connotations – and an
expression of ‘authenticity’ – which means of ‘pure’, ‘autochthonous’,
‘original’ roots. For this purpose, even in the case of church music, educa-
tion through Occidental techniques and principles became necessary: “The
combination between Oriental melodicity and Occidental harmony would
reflect, on the one hand, the Eastern roots and the aspirations of a modern
European nation, and, on the other hand, the Orthodox character and the
noble Latin descendance”20. Hence, although maybe not in an easy, overtly,
detectable manner, especially for an untrained ear, Orthodox church music
was also influenced by the Occident through music education, as many
19
Evdochimov, The Art of the Icon, 66; my English translation from Romanian.
20
Cf. Costin Moisil, “Constructing a National Church Music” [in Romanian], in New
Histories of Romanian Musics, edited by Valentina Sandu-Dediu and Nicolae Gheorghiţă
(Bucharest: The Musical Publishing House, 2020), 222; my English translation from
Romanian.

71
 Andreea Stoicescu

icon painters were, actually, trained and, thus, influenced, in occidental

techniques.
This brief yet important observation opens one up for accepting the idea
that if sacred art was, more or less, influenced by ‘external’ techniques,
principles and concepts, then, also, there must be works of art that contain
influences of Orthodox spirituality, in their case this mark of the transcen-
dence being integrated within a complex personal and artistical network.
In Romanian music, there are such obvious cases where compositions have
a direct relation with the Orthodox tradition, like Paul Constantinescu’s
1943 Easter Byzantine Oratorio and 1947 Christmas Byzantine Oratorio – ‘obvi-
ous’ only in the sense that even the unprofessional musician can trace the
Byzantine character, yet, on the other hand, the way Constantinescu con-
ceived these works, as a combination of the Occidental ‘oratorio’ form and
Byzantine contents, is not that obvious –, but there are uncanny situations
in which the composer has a more difficult to grasp spiritual and intellectual
vision, like Ştefan Niculescu:

If Ştefan Niculescu’s theoretical system steams from three

cardinal ideatical sources, namely the relation between One
and Multiple, the theory of musical syntax – with an accent
on heterophony –, and the coincidentia oppositorum principle,
his music has only one assumed spiritual root: the Christian-
Orthodox faith. The sphericity, luminosity and clarity of Nicu-
lescu’s music is due to an authentic religious tremor, which
confers it ontological heaviness, sacredness and serious-
ness, characteristics that are manifesting at the musical level
through personal compositional techniques: the clear formal
cut, chained in Ison I (1971-73) and Ison II (1975-76) and in the
Third Symphony – Cantos (1984), in which he partially flirts with
the spectral technique; then, synchrony as an heterophonic form
in Synchrony (1982), Duplum II (1986), Synchrony II – Hommage à
Enesco et Bartók (1981); the unison as a soteriological composi-
tional strategy in Hétérophonies pour Montreux (1986), Invocatio
(1989), Axion (1992), and Psalms (1993); complex harmonical
mixtures in the Fourth Symphony – Deisis (1993) and in the Fifth
Symphony – Litanies (1995); and also his paradoxical infra-me-
lodical chorales from Sequentia (1994) and Undecimum (1997-98).
In this way, Ştefan Niculescu’s music can be assimilated to a
music of the lithosphere, with sonorous volcanos and cliffs
that are configuring a tectonic of the soul, a petrified prayer
floating between earth and sky, with an underlying, striking
and redeeming psychic force, as is revelated in his last opus,
Commemoration – A Romanian Requiem (2007), a twin echo of
Krzysztof Penderecki’s Polish Requiem (1984).21

Dan Dediu, “Romanian Compositional Contributions After 1960” [in Romanian],

21

in New Histories of Romanian Musics, edited by Valentina Sandu-Dediu and Nicolae

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 Sacred Art Between Tradition and Personal Expression

As Ştefan Niculescu’s compositions are pointing, there are unexpected

ways in which musical techniques can combine themselves with religious
feelings in order to produce something that is uncanonical both from music
history’s perspective and from sacred art’s perspective. More than this,
Niculescu’s case is especially relevant because he is regarded – maybe
surprisingly in the context of this article – as one of the avant-gardists of
Romanian music. Usually, avant-gardism is understood as a type of atti-
tude opposed to religiousness, the only manner of reference to religious
themes being through critique, satire or even mockery. Yet, it is not always
the case. The radically negative approach of religious experience is crucial
to transgressive art – which, according to Anthony Julius, has as one of its
major elements of identification the radical dismission of the religious rep-
resentation, or at least the subversive critique of the veracity and sacrality
of these representations22 –, but is not a trait of every avant-gardist con-
ception, and Niculescu’s musical thinking is an eminent example for this
distinction. Hence, this is the reason why in the title of the present paper
I use the term ‘transgressions’, not because these contemporary creations,
like Niculescu’s, are ‘transgressive’ in Julius’s full terms, but, because, in a
smoother sense, they are an alterity and an alternative to extreme transgres-
sive art while at the same time retaining the characteristic of ‘transgression’
in its etymological sense, namely as a crossing over the canon’s borders;
they overrun the established limits and, at the same time, they develop,
reinterpret, deepen and integrate the canon within contemporary artistical
means. The question, from the theological perspective, is whether or not
these creations are inspired, are blessed with the filling of transcendence,
are relatable to the liturgy and are, truly, a sign of God’s presence in the
world? Another question is whether to be truly a sign of God’s presence in
the world presupposes a definite, rigid and strictly controlled artistic style?
It is, I argue, unrealistically in respect to human nature and to the beauty
of human’s capacity of creation to limit an artist’s means of expression

Gheorghiţă (Bucharest: The Musical Publishing House, 2020), 359; my English translation
from Romanian.
22
Cf. Anthony Julius, Transgressions: The Offences of Art [in Romanian], translated by
Tatiana Şiperco (Bucharest: Vellant Publishing House, 2009), 75–76, the under-chapter in
which Julius is describing the way transgressive artists had positioned themselves towards
religious themes and representations from the history of Western art; it is true that Julius
speaks mostly about plastic art and literature, music being an art form in which these direct,
and sometimes even cruel, transgressive gestures are much more improbable, but the com-
mon idea of linking any type of ‘true’ avant-gardism with the transgressive attitude has
been extended to all artistic domains because, in many cases, the fact of dismissing religious
themes is seen as a dismission of old and repressive taboos; hence, this link, though in some
cases is justified – everything depending upon the subject matter and the way the issue is
raised –, as for example in contemporary discussions about feminism and sexuality, in most
cases is misunderstanding, intolerance, and scarcity of spirituality; it is a very, conceptually
and culturally, delicate matter…

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 Andreea Stoicescu

only to old, well defined and canonical accepted techniques, an affirma-

tion which does not sustain that the ‘new’ is intrinsically good and what is
labelled as ‘obsolete’ is intrinsically bad, but which proposes, as this entire
study, a more nuanced, balanced, and, ultimately, correct understanding of
this issues. Another example, from Greece, is the music made by Michael
Adamis, who is determined in his compositional thinking by his faith, while
applying modern and contemporary compositional principles:

In many senses, then Adamis’s oeuvre is indeed “morphologi-

cally at the opposite pole from Western Art”. Not only are its
spiritual premises derived from the Eastern Christian tradition,
but that very fact determines the way the music exists in time
or, rather, out of time. There is no “development” of the kind
found in the canon of Western art music. If one begins with the
premise of the reordering of the cosmos made explicit by the
Resurrection of Christ, the vanquishing of death, how can time,
and therefore “development” of that time, have any meaning?
The endless possibilities and simultaneities of Adamis’s poly-
metric, polyrhythmic, polymelodic technique may then be the
only adequate response. Indeed, such a technique also reflects
the basis of Orthodox anthropology as being the individual,
man as an ontological hypostasis whose very distinctiveness
is the image of God, in communion with his fellow Christians,
his potential fulfilled in a way impossible in spiritual isolation.
One might, then, view this as an analogue of the individuality
of each human being, every one fully assumed and completed
by the mystery of the Second Coming.23

In music there are many other important examples, like Sofia Gubaidulina
and Igor Stravinsky from Russia, Alfred Schnittke from Russia and Germany
– considered one of the most important postmodern composers –, Sir John
Kenneth Tavener from England, and Arvo Pärt from Estonia – one of the pio-
neers of musical minimalism –, all greatly inspired by Christian-Orthodox
feeling and analysed by Ivan Moody in his book Modernism and Orthodox
Spirituality in Contemporary Music.
Regarding painting, a significant case is the personality of Olga Greceanu,
for two reasons: first of all, her art is of a personalised Neo-Byzantine style,
and, secondly, she can be remarked both as an important feminist figure and
an important supporter of the Orthodox faith. Olga Greceanu studied chemistry
and plastic arts and wrote important treatises and essays about art and,
specifically, about mural painting, proving a serious intellectual capacity
and a significant mastering of her art’s technique. Among her most impres-
sive realisations are the mural assemblage of the Holy Synod’s halls from
Ivan Moody, Modernism and Orthodox Spirituality in Contemporary Music (ISOCM,
23

Institute for Musicology of SASA, 2014), 43–44.

74
 Sacred Art Between Tradition and Personal Expression

Bucharest and the mosaics of Monastery Antim’s hallway from Bucharest,

yet her portfolio includes many other works, in varied techniques beginning
with mural painting and oil painting, until pastel or the painting of stained
glass, inspired by religious themes and spread in many locations24. The
fact is that all these works are not subject to the ‘canon’, yet having withal
a Byzantine stylistic genealogy. Her book, Meditations on the Gospels, is a
reminder of her deep, sincere and essentialised relation with the Christian-
Orthodox faith and, what is extraordinary in the literal and symbolical
sense, this book is actually the collection of her own preaching, held in
different places from Bucharest. A woman-preacher is something rare and
is still a personal and ‘feminist’ gesture. Her advocacy for the recognition of
women is explicit in the documented fact that she was one of the founders
of the interwar association “Women Painters and Sculptors” (1916)25 and
in the writing of a book entitled Unknown Women-Painters – an especially
contemporary study because only since twenty or thirty years ago this kind
of research has visibility and impact. Hence, I interpret that Greceanu’s case
is another one of ‘avant-gardism’, of transgression, not in the destructive
and easy sense, but in the deepening, complex sense, and in the literal sense
of ‘being ahead’ her time.

Dance and the transfiguration of the body

Christian experience is integrally filling the human being, body and
soul. Since his beginnings, the human is earth and spirit. Sufferings, joys,
beliefs, nostalgies, are all belonging in the same degree to the body and
to the soul. The Incarnation is the fact that promised the transfiguration
of matter through the transfiguration of the human body, considered the
jewel (kosmos) of matter. The icon is not abstract, exactly because it pres-
ents a physiognomy. The Person is the Face-Image. Dance is the art that
elevates, educates and expresses the reality of our soul through the reality
of our body. Corporality is valorised in Christianity, and, as such, dance’s
expressive force should be, simply put, used. As the postmodern choreog-
rapher Merce Cunningham said in an interview, a choreography cannot be
abstract because the body cannot be abstract. The body has a definite shape
and, hence, it is limited by this shape, exactly the philosophical status of
the icon: neither fully symbolical, nor fully naturalised. The body simply
is, and, moreover, it is always the body ‘of someone’. The body, when is
animated, lively, and, especially, in movement, has uniqueness and infini-
tesimally identifies itself with the person. This is why, through the expressive
24
Cf. Adina Nanu’s Preface for Olga Greceanu’s book Meditations on the Gospels [in
Romanian] (Bucharest: Sophia Publishing House, 2010), 7–8.
25
Cf. Ioana Cristea and Aura Popescu, Ladies of Romanian Fine Arts: who distinguished
themselves between the two World Wars, trilingual album (Bucharest: Independent Company
“Official Monitor”, 2004), 80.

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 Andreea Stoicescu

gesture, the dancer conveys an aura of meaning. In dance, the human body is
metaphysical, beyond mere physicality, similar with the way in which the
body is transposed towards transcendence in the icon. In dance it exists the
possibility of embodying a theology through a relational act, or, in other words,
our own organism can become the place of epiphany:

God wants of His Epiphany to be perceived by the whole man.

Palamas underlines the idea of human being’s integrity in which
“even the body has the experience of those that are godly”.
Beside the kosmos noetos (the intelligible world) Tradition puts
kosmos aisthetós (the sensible world) – the whole domain of the
mysteries, of the liturgy, of the icon, and of the experience of
God. […] According to Saint Maximus, the powers of the soul
are opened through the senses. The soul hears, sees, feels, tastes.
This is why are created organs for perception – the senses. The
human is a totality, spiritual and sensible at the same time, in
the service of the Incarnation. The accomplished senses are sen-
sibly perceiving the Unsensible or, better said, Trans-sensible.
Beauty appears as a sparkling of the mysterious depth of being,
of this interiority that confesses the intimate bound between
body and spirit.26

For example, the Romanian choreographer Ioan Tugearu made a short

dance piece inspired by a Greek prayer (interpreted by Simona Şomăcescu)
and the body of the dancer was all expression, waving different feelings
and intensities according to an inner narrative. This symbolic density of
the movement is as powerfull as a painted image, or even more. Another
example, though not linked with the Orthodox tradition – this type of
choreographyc representation being, unfortunately, extremely rare –, yet
compelling for the stunning effect a religiously driven choreography can
produce, is the faimous dance-spectacle Revelations by Alvin Ailey, in which
the technique of classic and modern dance is infused with specific afro-ame-
rican religious feeling27.

Conclusions
This essay-article was the development of a personal reflection about a
critical contemporary topic: the relation between sacred art and modern
artistical expressions. Although the central sacred artistic practice from
which I begun is icon painting, during the text I exemplified and argued
26
Evdochimov, The Art of the Icon, 30; my English translation from Romanian.
For example the second scene from this spectacle danced upon a song entitled Fix me
27

Jesus, is essentially like a moving icon; the scene is accesible for watching to the following
youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CXk1mQVCgI.

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 Sacred Art Between Tradition and Personal Expression

for modern and contemporary multi-artistical practices, such as music

composition and choreography. The icon is, symbolically, a visualisation
of the core-values and ideas of the Christian-Orthodox tradition, and any
study who commits itself to deal with sacred Orthodox art should, thereby,
start from the theology of the ‘icon’. The Face-image, the transfiguration
of the body, the elemental Byzantine style, the type of spirituality, and
the entire aura of the icon is a pictural systematisation of the Orthodox
grounding regarding religious experience. My text is specifically concen-
trated on this cultural tradition due to a personal interest I have in it, yet
the general idea of finding a metaphysical, hence conceptual, common
ground between sacred art and secular expressions of religious feelings
is a crucial investigation with bearing on contemporary arduous cultural
problems. In the Christian-Orthodox thinking, concepts such as ‘tradition,
‘face-image’, ‘person’, ‘relation’, have great potential for opening a creative
dialogue with contemporary philosophies and, from the opposite direc-
tion, contemporary artistical techniques and ideas can reveal new depths
of religious experience.

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