In Byzantine art, poetry, painting, and music, life appears stylized. In other words, the human body, clothes and ornaments, furniture, inside and outside spaces, houses and streets, trees and animals, are presented not for the value which they may have in the present but as intermediaries that help us perceive another life. Through the centuries we came to identify the other life with the world of the ideas, which gave way, after the French Revolution, to various monistic conceptions and has become for us shadowy and ambiguous. . . . But the other life is not a question of ideas; and if Europe has forgotten this in its wasting of the moral resources of faith, we, who during four hundred years of slavery, preserved ourselves only by the conventions of our worship, after the fall of vain ornamentation in Byzantium, are in a position to know it, since we have witnessed the resurgence of our life as freedom, without any ideological rhetoric. By simply persevering, our life was able to refill the framework which we received from our myth.
N.G. Pentzikis
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