The Church of the Holy Wisdom in Thessaloniki is a Living Icon of the Kingdom of God in the midst of a city. It has for me special significance because my first priest, my Geronda, decided to become a priest here. When he was a child during WWII he would come here to pray and receive what was often his only meal of the day. The last conversation we had before he passed away was about how much we loved this Church.
This Romanian Monastery is covered with external iconography, something which I believe should be seriously considered as we build Churches in the west. It could be a genuine witness to the beauty of Orthodoxy and a revelation to a world that sits in darkness.
This Church of Saint Photini is, I believe, one of the most significant architectural works in recent memory. The Church is made of local materials, has elements from the history of the region extending to ancient Hellas, through the East Roman Period and the Turkokratia, and it even has several contemporary influences.
Contrary to what we have said about Gothic art, the Byzantine architect seems free and untramelled by any a priori ideological aim. This does not mean that he is unclear in his purpose: he too is trying to build the “Church,” to manifest her truth, the space in which she lives, and not merely to house the gathering of the faithful. For the Byzantine, however, the point is precisely this: the truth of the Church is neither a set ideological system whereby we ascend by analogy to the transcendent— the excessive or the immense— nor a majestic organization with an authoritatively established administrative structure which mediates between man and God. The Church for the Byzantine is the event of the eucharist, the participation of what is created in the true life— the Trinitarian mode of communion and relationship. And this mode is the body of the Church, the flesh of the world which has been assumed by Christ: it is the whole of creation in the dimensions of the Kingdom.
Byzantine architecture studies and reveals this reality of the worldly flesh of the Word, the fact of God’s kenosis [i.e., his ‘self-emptying’ in the incarnation], and the ‘deification’ of created things, the way in which by taking on our material nature, God hypostasizes our existence in the divine life of incorruption and immortality. Like the ascetic in his direct encounter with his body, the architect encounters his material with the same freedom of humility and self-abnegation; and he studies the points of resistance and also the potentialities of nature. He looks for the inner principle, the “reason” [logos] in matter which was in abeyance before the incarnation but is now dynamic; that reason which connects the baseness and resistances of the natural material with the amazing potential in that same matter to contain the Uncontainable and give flesh to Him who is without flesh, to be exalted into the flesh of God the Word— into the Church.
Each Byzantine building is a eucharistic event; it is a dynamic act whereby each individual entity joins in the universal reality of ecclesial communion. This is a realization of personal distinctiveness, but a realization within the framework of communion, which means the rejection of [merely] individual emotions, [merely] individual intellectual certainty and [merely] individual aesthetics. Every Byzantine building embodies this ascetic rejection and self-abnegation on the part of the architect, and consequently manifests both his personal distinctiveness and at the same time the universal truth of the Church. As a technical construction, each work has a revelatory personal distinctiveness, and in this personal distinctiveness the universal truth of the Church is manifested. As Michelis writes in a technical description which unconsciously discerns the theological truth, Byzantine churches “are the dynamic compositions of a subjective sense, rather than the static arrangements of an objective theory... No work of Byzantine architecture is a pure type, a model which can be repeated... Each Byzantine church is an individuality, an act of emancipation from the model... It is not really important how precisely it fits together or how regularly it is laid out. The walls are not always at right angles, the roofs often have different inclines... the ground plans are not rectangular, the domes are not always absolutely circular at their base, the facades are irregular and the bricks fit together haphazardly. From the point of view of our very strict requirements, a Byzantine plan is always a mistake, but an acceptable mistake— one that works. The whole structure is a piece of music which the virtuoso craftsman has sung in a different way each time, and always so successfully that repetition is out of the question.”
The character of objective asymmetry and dissimilarity in each Byzantine building is the element which above all manifests the craftsman’s respect for the peculiar “reason” [logos] in the natural material. It reveals his ascesis and his endeavor to fit the “rational qualities” of matter into an organic unity and a harmony of reasons— to “church” matter, which means leading it to the “end” [telos] or goal of its existence, which is to constitute the flesh of God the Word. The objective asymmetry and dissimilarity of each Byzantine building is simply the visible manifestation of the architect’s love for his natural material; that love which respects and studies creation and reveals it as a means to salvation, an organic factor in the communion of created and uncreated, the recapitulation of all in the loving relationship between the Father and the incarnate Word.
–Christos Yannaras
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