Download PDF | Elena Ene D-Vasilescu - Heavenly Sustenance in Patristic Texts and Byzantine Iconography_ Nourished by the Word-Springer International Publishing,2018.
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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The ideas within this book are mainly supported by Byzantine, Patristic, and connected religious texts that refer to the spiritual needs of the human soul and to the saints. The first thought about writing it came when I discovered a particular fresco during my research that concerned the cult of St. Anne along the Via Egnatia. The image it depicts survived from 1361 in the Church of St. Mary Zahumska, on Ohrid Lake, Macedonia.
It represents St. Anne breastfeeding the infant Mary.' My study about this piece has established that a local lord, Grgur Brankovic, ordered the shrine to be built and this holy person to be frescoed within—Grgur and his wife were praying for a child, and through their generous act they were hoping for the saint’s intercession towards such an end (given the fact that Anne gave birth late in life, she is considered instrumental in mediating supplications with respect to maternity). Such a patronal gesture would have been in line with a long Byzantine tradition. For me personally it was important to determine the Biblical and Patristic sources that allowed such a rendering to be included among the traditional ecclesiastical images.
While doing research for the British Academy and History Faculty in Oxford, I came across seven more churches that have on their walls depictions of Anna breastfeeding. Despite the fact that none of them is dedicated to the saint, they contain the scene Anna Galaktotrophousa. All are located along the Via Egnatia or within easy access from it (this does not mean that those are the only ones in the world containing this depiction—even though I doubt that there are many—but just that those which I found are concentrated in this area).
This cannot be a coincidence. Obviously, barren women wishing children existed in other places of which culture was influenced by Byzantium. Especially the conspicuous absence of this iconographic motif in the vast territory of Russia is significant from this point of view; I have tried to find it depicted in the culture of that land with no positive results. Therefore, it does not seem that all these churches have been founded out of yearnings for an offspring. What is more intriguing is the fact that the representation of this iconographic scene began simultaneously (in the twelfth century) at both ends of the above-mentioned Southern European route. This also makes it impossible for the visual representations of Anna lactans to be the product of the same iconographic school, especially because the period between one illustration and the other is lengthier than 50 years.
Even when the interval between two renderings is shorter, the places in which they occur are too far from one another to allow us reasonably affirm that they were accomplished by the same hand or conceived by the same mind. That observation and the existence of similar instances in history made me think that depictions of Anne breastfeeding scenes are reactions opposed to a particular strand in the theology of the time. As is known and will be further developed in the book, the appearance and rapid proliferation of icons as, for example, “The Embrace of the Apostles Peter and Paul”, was one of the expressions of the hopes espoused by the organisers (some of them patrons of religious establishments) of Council of Ferrara-Florence concerning a reunion of Orthodox and Catholic churches.”
Also Nicole Thierry provides an example through the decorative programme in the Church of Sts. Joachim and Anne, Kizal Cukur, Cappadocia. She considers that it was created as “an attempt to comply with various understandings about the nature of Christ”* specific to the sixth-seventh centuries, particularly to those taking place during the reign of Emperor Heraclius (610-641), who supported monenergism* to the detriment of monothelism.®
In a similar vein, the peculiarity of St. Anne breastfeeding image to the Southern European areas and to the period twelfth-fourteenth centuries makes it plausible that this was a response to the Bogomil Docetism, which devalued the importance of the matter and especially of the human body. Similarly, as Saska Bogevska-Capuano indicates, a representation as that of Trinity in Omorphokklesia Church near Kastoria (thirteenth century) as a tricefalous man could be interpreted as a counterreaction to the Manicheism of the Bogomils, even though she personally considered it rather a mark of Western influence in Byzantine iconography (unfortunately she does not say where in the West one can find a counterpart to it).
An image like this suggests extra-corporality; I do not think however that the patron and/or the iconographer necessary conceived it having in mind for this figure to be an indicator from this perspective. Of course, the depictions of Maria Jactans that circulated in the same period were also a factor in the portrayal of Anne suckling—they can even be considered a subtype of that representation—but the fact that the episode of the saint breastfeeding ceased being painted after the last remains of the Bogomils were eradicated, while that referring to Mary was still represented in the nineteenth century, as I have pointed in some detail somewhere else,° supports my theory.
During my visit to Ohrid and Macedonia in general, and also to Serbia, I noticed how powerful the cult of this holy figure still is in that part of Europe. I already knew how much Sts. Nicholas, George, Dimitrios, and Catherine of Alexandria are revered in the south of the continent from my work on Byzantium and its heritage. During visits in northern countries, I discovered churches dedicated to the same saints. To shortly exemplify, Munich has two dedicated to St. Anne: one monastic and one parochial, both in an area called in its entirety the suburb of St. Anne’s/St. AnnaVorstadt. Also Eindhoven in the Netherlands has a church dedicated to St. George (Sint-Joris Kerk, Eindhoven-Stratum) and one to Saint Catherine of Alexandria (Catharina Kerk). Some of these places of worship hold wellattended evensongs in which they exclusively perform and listen to Byzantine music—their clergy publicise these religious services as being “Byzantine”.
My curiosity was incited to find out how the cult of the native southern saints has arrived in the North and survived so well in spite of its distance from the territories of the empire where it originates. Also the discovery of iconography representing breastfeeding compelled me to find out what determined the Byzantine artists to start rendering such scenes concomitantly at the extremities of the Egnatian Way. And I began researching both these topics; they are logically connected since the circulation of the cult of a saint entailed the proliferation of iconographic scenes and motifs related to him or her.
The results of this effort lead to the conclusion that at least in the case of saints’ veneration—and in many others, notably in trade—the divide East-West with which historiography operates should be replaced by a South-North one. There is no need for me to explicitly point out in the book each case which illustrates this necessity; it will be evident throughout. I had discussed the idea with colleagues and students when I came across an article rich in substance, as all his writings are, published by Peter Brown in 1976, “Eastern and Western Christendom in Late Antiquity: A Parting of the Ways”, in The Orthodox Churches and the West journal.’ I was glad to discover in that material the same idea and to find out that it derives from Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’—a fact acknowledged by the Princeton scholar.
Then I obtained a grant from the British Academy to follow my deductions through library and field work and thus the book came into being. Therefore, my thanks go to this institution for sponsoring the project whose results I include in the volume and to the colleagues at the Faculties of History and Theology, University of Oxford, especially those from the Byzantine, Patristics, Late Antiquity, as well as Classical and Mediaeval Studies, who shared their expertise and friendship with me and offered me opportunities to present extracts from the book to students and colleagues. Among them, I am especially grateful to Mark Edwards, Averil Cameron, Jonathan Shepard, Jane Humphries, Alexander Lingas, Mary Cunningham, Sebastian Brock (a good friend, who, with his wife Helen, has always been kind and encouraging towards me and my work), Cyril and Marlia Mango, Ralph Cleminson, Elizabeth Jeffreys, Alina Birzache, Mallica Kumbera Landrus, Paul Fiddes, Elizabeth Theokritoff, Bryan Ward-Perkins, the Right Rev. Dr Kallistos Ware, Yoanna Tsvetanova Planchette, John Watts, and Chris Wickham.
I thank also the colleagues at San Marco’s Procuratoria, especially those from the Technical Office for allowing me to take all the photos from Venice included here. David Smith, the librarian of Saint Anne’s College in Oxford; Gilia Slocock, the editor of Saint Anne in History and Art (1999) published by the same institution; and their colleagues who put at my disposal all the material they hold in connection to its patron saint. Also the librarians in the Old Bodleian, History, Theology, Sackler, Wolfson College, and Christ Church in Oxford were very solicitous to my efforts in bringing this work to fruition. Peter, my husband, patiently endured my busy schedule and I am grateful to him for this. Other friends and colleagues were involved professionally and morally, sustaining me through discussions, indications regarding bibliography, and in various other ways. I truly regret that I cannot mention all of them here. Of course, all shortcomings of the book are my own responsibility.
Introduction
The book is mainly concerned with Patristic ideas about the spiritual needs of the human soul and indicates how Byzantine, apocryphal, and other religious literature and iconography referring to saints have expressed their preoccupations with the issue. It introduces a case study that suggests that following the emergence of the Bogomils in the Balkans and later of the Cathars in Europe,’ both being movements that emphasised the spiritual to the detriment of the material and denied a fully human nature to the historical Jesus, mainstream Christianity countered their views and cultivated a dramatic focus on the body as the epitome of human-divine interaction.
As a response to and a reflection of these happenings, another phenomenon took place: the iconography along the Via Egnatia during the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries witnessed the occurrence of a new subtype within the established typology of Eleousa/ Eleusa—the depiction of holy women breastfeeding their offspring. The novelty of the current study consists in the fact that it connects developments in visual representations and the praxis of the Byzantine Church with the occurrence of the Bogomils.
The work is also a commentary on the Scriptural, Patristic, medieval, apocryphal, and iconographic sources that concern nourishment, which is understood to be at the same time biological and spiritual. It also refers to historical persons and to documented events which took place within and on the fringes of the “more or less fixed entity”’ that was the Byzantine Empire. It attempts to situate saints, facts, images, legends, and metaphors in their socio-cultural context.
The volume also suggests a methodological approach that could aid researchers to analyse historical, theological, cultural, and other developments in Europe in a more nuanced manner: in addition to the currently prevalent East-West distinction taken into consideration in such enterprises, researchers should also bear in mind a North-South division that, as we shall demonstrate, is apposite in many situations. This is not, in itself, an entirely new thought either for historiography or, as shown in the Preface, for me personally. As remarked, the idea is present in both Gibbon and Brown’s above-mentioned works. Here are Gibbon’s arguments to support it: “The distinction of North and South is real and intelligible ... But the difference between East and West is arbitrary and shifts round the globe.”*
As we shall see, in the matter of European hagiography, following the North-South division is the most appropriate strategy. Since this volume is concerned with St. Anne in three chapters, the distinction is relevant to the topics undertaken. For Brown himself it suggests that “the history of the Christian church in late antiquity and in the early middle ages is far more a part of the history of the Mediterranean and its neighbours than it is a part of the history of the division of the Mediterranean itself between east and west”. He acknowledged his indebtedness for this notion to other scholars, thus: “I would like therefore to hark back to the perspective of Henri Pirenne, in his Mahomet et Charlemagne. Whatever the weakness of Pirenne’s thesis [...], his [Gibbon’s] intuition on the basic homogeneity of Mediterranean civilisation deep into the early middle ages still holds good.”*
An article from 1976 may look obsolete, but I do not think that this one is; all of Brown’s intuitions have proved correct in both the short and long term. Averil Cameron also supports the idea of homogeneity around the Mediterranean when speaking about the occurrence of saints and holy men; for her, their cult appeared simultaneously in places around this sea.> Moreover, one can even today clearly notice uniformity among the countries in that geographical area from the perspective of how they display their religion and, more generally, their culture. The shared Byzantine heritage and the communication network, together with the trade and cultural exchanges these facilitate, are among the factors that have contributed to this state of affairs.
A methodological aspect worth alluding to, even though it will not be developed further in this book, is the periodisation of history. I suggest that perhaps we should not be overly meticulous about it because the time ascribed to each historical “stage” varies almost from country to country—this is certainly the case with respect to what goes by the name of “the European Middle Ages”. My research and teaching in three countries, two in Europe and one on the North-American continent, have taught me that the best way to deal with this issue is simply to state in our publications which specific century (or even year?) we are referring to. Thus, the readers will be able to classify events according to the convention regarding historical and temporal divisions that have already been accepted in their own countries and institutions, while still interacting easily with the international scholarly community.
Focusing now on the main topic of the book, nourishment and milkfeeding, we shall say that the case of Anna lactans ( Galaktotrophousa/ MI chopitatelnitsa’) can be illustrated through a direct and empirical method of evaluating the textual, pictorial, and other sources that, while discussing milk, also touch on the wider theme of the relation between spiritual and biological. As noticed above, intriguingly, the churches that contain depictions of St. Anne feeding her child are located solely along the Egnatian Way and had their decorative programme made within a documented period of 200 years (or at most 300 years if some suppositions are to be taken into consideration’); various and intense interchanges took place along this historical route in the temporal interval the publication covers.
As said, I connect the apparition of this phenomenon with the occurrence of the Bogomils, or more precisely with the period of maximum expansion of the Bogomils in the Balkans at the end of the eleventh century and throughout the twelfth; it took a while for the ideas to spread and for a counter-reaction to develop, but certainly when the last remains of the Bogomils waned, the visual rendering of Anne suckling her infant daughter ceased (the last—at least surviving—image is that from Ohrid, 1361).° Because of their anti-materialistic stance, as will be shown in Chap. 8, the Bogomils did not believe in the sacraments of the Church and disregarded pictorial accounts of the holy. It is very probable that the first iconographers to carry out a representation of breastfeeding (or their patrons) felt the need to counter such a theology by allowing for an emphasis on the human body as well as for more illustrations of the temporal world in their works. For them, a holy woman nursing was the quintessence of the idea of the earth and heaven coming together since the biologically produced milk points to the Divine nourishment and Christ himself has been seen “as Mother”.?
In the book, a connection is also made between the circulation of sentimental images of St. Anne, such as that of the Se/britt'° in the rest of Europe (German lands, Austria, France, Belgium, Italy—only a few isolated cases have been recorded in the latter), and the spread of the Cathars in those territories. According to some scholars, as will be detailed in Chap. 8, they were in contact with the Bogomils and continued their legacy. The fact that the painting of nursing scenes and the representation of Anna Selbritt ceased after these two sects dwindled almost into extinction show that my hypothesis is correct. This will not, however, be a volume on iconography or visual art in general; only one of its sections assembles images that, taken together, substantiate the rapport between, on the one hand, theological movements that had repercussions for discussions on spiritual nourishment and, on the other, the development of a specific painterly motif.
The publication contains eight chapters. Chapter 2 introduces the association between heavenly nurture and biological sustenance as it was conceived by the Ancient Greeks and Romans, by the Bible and the Church fathers, and by apocryphal literature. Chapter 3 delves into manifestations of the topic of milk in the experience of the martyrs and medieval mystics and also considers women experiencing and offering nourishment. Chapter 4 treats the emergence and the dissemination of the saints’ cult. Chapter 5 focuses on the proliferation of St. Anne’s veneration, its connection to her relics, and her role as an intercessor for people at the divine Court, initially in regard to barrenness and then to healing in general.
Chapter 6 explores various literary sources concerned with St. Anne, including apocryphal texts, particularly as they relate to the saint milkfeeding her daughter. Chapter 7 deals with the visual consequences of the development of the cult of St. Anne, especially along the Via Egnatia between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries. Chapter 8 introduces the Bogomil sect and shows how the depiction of Anna Galaktotrophousa was a reaction to ideas propagated by its members. It points out that theological ideas have always informed iconography but that so far nothing has been written on the connection between Bogomilism and visual scenes referring to milk-nursing. Chapter 9 draws conclusions on the relation between biological and spiritual nourishment in Byzantine and medieval Christian culture. It also considers the popularity of St. Anne and her relevance to people’s devotion.
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