Hierarchs and clergy wear symbolic vestments in Holy Orthodoxy, and it’s a distinguishing mark of our worship and identity as Orthodox Christians. Hierarchy is a principle that governs human relationships naturally, and it also mirrors metaphysical reality. The unity that derives from hierarchy requires that distinctions of rank and role be made between members that work toward a common end, to accomplish harmony together. Equality that protests for an obliteration of rank and a reversal of roles, sometimes the vestments and “outward rituals” specifically, is a refusal to admit distinctions. This reasoning tends toward disunity and disintegration at all levels of practical life. Resentment and egoistic orientations toward social relationships lurk behind this kind of fake “egalitarianism,” writes American thinker, Richard M. Weaver. Shakespeare wrote: O, when degree is shak’d, which is the ladder to all high designs … Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark what discord follows! Each thing meets in mere oppugnancy. The Holy Apostle Paul reminds us too: And if they were all one member, where were the body? Vestments and garments in general symbolize a spiritual reality that transcend time and space. Adam and Eve were clothed with light in the garden, though they were nude. The removal of our original garments of light was the immediate consequence, we realized our nakedness right away, of grabbing for equality with the Holy Trinity through matter without the Spirit. The Serpent’s seductive lie was aimed at perverting the holy hierarchy of creation by presenting this grasp for a higher, divine understanding as a right to some perceived inequality in the cosmos.
Symbolism is the opposite of nominalism – a rejection and skepticism of the existence of anything transcendent, like Plato’s forms, in particular words (our language) or material objects (the stuff) of the world. The principle of iconography presents an example of how symbols participate in a higher order while remaining distinct from the reality itself. The holy fathers described the type, the icon or object, as participating in the prototype, the reality. When we bow and kiss an icon of Christ or a saint, that gesture returns to Christ Himself or the saint. Whenever the laity touch the hem of the priest’s garment during the great entrance at the liturgy, it is as though we are doing it to Christ. Without the hierarchy of ideas and things, without the images relating to transcendentals and ultimately the divine source of life, humans are left only with bare objects, facts, and a material mindset that will be engulfed by an obsession with details and physicality. Nominalism rejects the foundation that a word or a thing represents what exists beyond the physical and phenomenal experiences of nature. It’s all arbitrary. It’s just a word. In Greek, symbolos meant a token or proof of identity, and it was variously used to refer to voting tokens, wax impressions, seals, contracts, and passports. It literally means something thrown or come together. The Greek verb symballo could mean: to meet, to join, to unite. Symbolic thinking works like a covenant or an icon. It is a real connection between heaven and earth. It’s like the unity between the Word and our flesh, or between a husband and wife; it’s a great mystery. The symbolic worldview, then, refers to a close joining between distinct things, not a mere masking between the representation and the supposed reality. The first “meal,” as Metropolitan Hilarion describes it, often called the Last Supper, was not a primitive, underdeveloped event, but a highly developed, fulfilling, symbolic feast that continues in Orthodox liturgies. Some vestments were inherited from Judaism, some taken from Greco-Roman styles of antiquity and the Mediterranean climate, and others adapted for later use such as headdresses and the mitre. Roman, but even more so, the Oriental Orthodox of the East have much in common with Byzantine, Antiochian, and Russian clerical vestments. The sticharion (a tunic) symbolizes purity of the clergy. Deacons wear the orarion (a long ribbon or cloth) and it symbolizes the angelic wings. The phelonion (cloak) carries with it strength and enlightenment; it’s also mentioned in scripture, 2 Timothy 4:13. The omophorion symbolizes the lost sheep, the good shepherd and it is worn by the ranks of bishops. The epimanikia, epigonation, zone, sakkos, panagia, kidarin, hieron epikalymma and mantia also have spiritual symbolisms.
Richard Weaver wrote that, “Equality is found most often in the mouth of those engaged in artful self-promotion.” He also describes barbarians with the specific desire to seize and inspect an object “as it is.” Satan wanted to convince humanity that there was something unjustly wrong with the established order and that the tree and the fruit itself wasn’t a symbol, but a hidden raw power to take, rather than something that only God can give us in a refined form. But we learn that the connection is real and deeply symbolic. The rapacious impulse to strip forms or ladders of transcendence, to rent veils, to throw off inhibitions and clothing, and to remove all mediation that hinder one’s access to analysis, freedom, nature, or knowledge is the revolt of the main antagonist, the Devil. A refusal to pass honor from the symbol to the form, from type to prototype, tree in the garden to God, is to ignore that only God can be Bodiless, He Alone is the Formless One; it is to sacrifice symbol – holy objects, ritual, the body, vestments, icons – to grab at materiality and divinity without mediation. This ancestral sin, unoriginal in pattern and seen in many kinds of iconoclasm and revolutions, refuses to see distinction and plots to separate what God has put together in creation. Adam learned that knowledge and virtue require a divine transcendence that is based on the Holy Trinity’s hierarchical, glowing garments that were given to all of creation graciously. Vestments of the clergy work in this way in the Orthodox Divine Liturgy. Symbols secure the structure of higher orders “in the heavens and on earth” and it follows the patristic teaching that what happens on earth happens in the heavenly realms outside time. Without hierarchical positions and these symbolic vestments arranged through the Holy Trinity, veneration and worship become nearly impossible, and life is reduced to animalistic and appetitive instincts. Icons, then, have a very honorable place and enlightening purpose in Orthodox temples. Next, Part 2 begins with the discussion of venerating icons in the Orthodox Church.