Anne Karahan, The Image of God in Byzantine Cappadocia and the Issue of God’s Supreme Transcendence

The paper aims at exploring how Cappadocian apophatic theology is conceptually intertwined with the occurrence of “meta-images” of God’s divinity in holy images. Iconographic focus will be on ornamented and patterned borders in five Byzantine churches in Cappadocia, Turkey. My hypothesis is that the Cappadocian fathers’ apophatic non-definitions of the divine constituted the gamut out of which grew the specificity of Byzantine aesthetics. God’s divinity was considered uncircumscribed/infinite (¢per…graptoj), non-categorizable, incomprehensible (¢per…grafoj), and non-representational. To materialize or categorize the transcendent divine was considered non-orthodox, ‘wrong’. God’s humanity identified in Jesus Christ, however, was declared to be circumscribed, visible and understandable. But God’s transcendence that identifies the heavenly divine as being above and independent of the universe and God’s immanence that identifies how God’s earthly pervadence and sustainment, divine actions in the world, identify the very same one God. God is transcendent divine, but God’s image is both human and divine, of the same substance as the Father and the Holy Spirit. Divine transcendence and divine immanence are thus essentially correlative conceptions. God’s threefold and twofold identification is one single reality, which emphasizes communion of transcendence and immanence as well as of theology and economy. I argue that this orthodox axiom could not be trespassed either in writing or in painting. Identification of the divine was a complex and tricky balancing act, irrespective of if written or painted. Measures and means had to be sufficiently paradoxical, abstract, incorporeal, or metaphorical, not to violate the divine beyond human definitions and comprehension To support my patristic theory and method for analyzing Byzantine aesthetics I refer to: (a) the imperative of analogy and conceptual intertwining between holy image/aesthetics and orthodox dogma/definitions, and (b) the notional correspondence between the Greek noun graf», which denotes an inscription as well as a drawing, and the verb gr£fw, which denotes the act of painting as well as describing.

Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, Stockholm