The Day of the Theotokos

The Hodegetria ("She who shows the way") by Berlinghiero, Lucca, Tuscany, c. 1230,
Held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

By Bp. Joseph Boyd (Ancient Church of the West)

Five hundred years ago, artists and scholars doubted the validity of the Classical World’s abandonment of the Classical Greek Culture. They sought to return to the arts and cultural learning of 1500 years prior to their own day, and in so doing, they birthed the Renaissance. Now, 500 years after the birth of a return to Classicism, we live in the ruins of a hedonistic, self-centered, unnatural, and legalistic culture. All the faults of the Greeks and Romans are again evident in our midst. Now, many of us understand why the philosophers of the Late Classical Era whole-heartedly ran into the embrace of Christianity. Like those who sought to curb the imbalances in the Roman Catholic Church through a return to the basis of Western Culture, so now, we the inheritors of the modern world seek to return to the basis of the Christian Culture.

We look back 1500 years and see the Church in a different state than the one the Renaissance Humanists knew. We see the Church as the great culmination of ancient wisdom and classical culture; one in which the Church was an accomplice to Culture, in which men learned Plato and Aristotle in the Gymnasium, and Paul and Chrysostom on the Streets. We see that the early Fathers of the Church were of equal, if not greater, intellectual standing than the philosophers of old, and with their feet planted in the mixed soil of Athens, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Babylon, and Rome, they were even more adept at understanding culture and psychology in relation to philosophy than the early Attics had been. The Pre-Schism, pre-Papal Catholic Church, before scholasticism and dogma were one and the same, before the Church and the Monarchy collapsed into one monolithic entity, that stagnated through the confusion of roles and the manipulation of religious faith for temporal power.

Madonna and Child by Jacopo Bellini, Venice, Italy, c. AD 1440, Held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

The days of Roman-Byzantine unity were the “Days of the Theotokos,” where the real issues of theology were formed and canonized through councils of international church leadership. When men still remembered and practiced the practical arts of building domes, canals, and expansive bridges, and exulted trade as the main method of building missionary contact in foreign nations. These were the days when emperors were elected for life, based on their merit, regardless of their social standing, and the world saw immigration from third-world countries to both Eastern and Western sides of Rome, based on a common Christian dream; Non-Roman Armenians, Opera Singers, Slaves, and the sons of Bishops all held power. These were the days before Mohammad plotted his attack on Medina, before he rallied his troupes with a cry of a holy war on the “evil empire” that was invading Arab lands, all the while relying upon the bible that these invaders brought with them as the foundation for his new faith. These were the days that resonate most with our day, and we find in our own culture and our own failings, echoes of the situation that confronted the earliest Christians. In a world without a solid, nuclear family, over-burdened with sexual slavery and vice, twisted through the abuse of children, and held captive by vestal feminists and eunuch priests, we find our last hope in the Exaltation of the Cross, and in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist… just as the early Christians did. 

With the horrible split of the East and West, and the exultation of a single Roman bishop as Vicar of Christ and Prince of the Church, the Church’s vision in the West changed from lives lived in communion around the Lord’s Table within an overarching secular society to an corporate organization that controlled and maintained society, and with this change a great philosophical rift between the Church of the Classical World and the Church of the Dark Ages formed. The Orthodox Church has never been a part of Catholicism as a Monolithic and Platonic entity; we have always been about Catholicism as the early vision of the Church, in the true sense of the word “Kata Holos,” which is making life and society “complete” – joyful, hopeful, and positive in the face of the doom and gloom of a world mislead by the narrowness of the human mind, and with an exclusive focus on the human body, which will ultimately pass away! We find, with the Ancient Fathers, that the Church gives life to the Culture as the Soul gives life to the Body, and that death ultimately follows if you split the two from each other.

Adoration of the Shepherds by Agnolo di Cosimo Bronzino, c. AD 1600, Held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, Hungary