Part Two begins in Chapter 6 with the veneration of icons in Early Christian Painting. Icons in Byzantium and Russia have an important historical and theological development for iconography today. Lastly, the Meaning of Icons in Chapter 9 summarizes the content of icons. Symbolism has always existed in religions across the world and in philosophical traditions. Symbolic representation is foundational for human thought. The meaning of icons in its theological, anthropological, cosmic, liturgical, mystical, and moral aspects can be linked directly to symbolism. Some symbols were given by God Himself in the Old Testament, when certain images of angelic cherubim were built onto the ark of the covenant, Moses’ bronze serpent was ordered to be made, and the cross shaped tabernacle emerged from its major items that run west to east. The former was forbidden to be touched; the latter God commanded to behold for healing just as certain liturgical objects are not casually touched by anyone and others are meant to be touched and tasted for healing in the Orthodox Church. There are differences in how we offer veneration or what we venerate, or put more simply, to give our utmost honor to holy symbols that help us worship the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Jews didn’t define all images as fundamentally “graven.” Extreme positions like that have been held most closely by some Protestant and Muslim groups. Solomon’s Temple, for example, included images of plants, angels, and the astronomical zodiac. How we look at other bodies, the earth’s plants and animals, the constellations matters because what we represent in our minds finds symbolic meaning in physical things; it is a matter of how we discern the means from the ends.
Although Metropolitan Hilarion takes one of his starting points with what he terms “Greco-Roman painting,” a better term that captures the diverse flavor of the times would be Hellenistic culture. The Hellenistic age began with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and arose with the death of Cleopatra, with Egypt having come into the Roman Empire around 30 BC. Hellenism was a mixed culture of Roman, Greek, and Semitic peoples like Levantines, Egyptians, and Jews. Some historians argue that this blended Mediterranean environment continued when Constantine the Great moved his capital to Constantinople. The hyphenated word Greco-Roman implies a monolithic civilization and it is useful for some styles inherited from those peoples, such as Roman frescoes in the Christian catacombs. But places like Fayum, Egypt represent this mixture well, where specific stylistic techniques, like melting beeswax and mixing different colored vegetable paints, were fused into the iconography of the Church along with Roman frescoes in the catacombs. In the Fayum mummy portraits, one sees the noticeable European and Semitic features of the people living there with Roman dress and Greek adornments. The portraits were made while the individuals were alive and were very realistic like a modern photograph or portrait. But they are unlike the more idealized depictions of ancient Egypt or Greece. The images were kept around the household until the death of that person and placed on the tomb. Iconography in painting and frescoes share with these Egyptian mummy portraits, which only lasted from the 2nd to the 3rd c. AD, the idea that ordinary people desire to memorialize the dead. What’s different between them is that icons represent transfigured humans in the next life whereas the mummies portray humans as they were in this life. To have a glimpse into paradise now is a unique perspective of Christians. In fact, studies on the Fayum portraits show, though they are well-known for their captivating beauty, that some of the bulging of the eyes, also known as exophthalmos, the cross-eyed expressions, and the noticeable facial asymmetry of some of them was probably not stylistic in purpose. After the discovery of skulls in graveyards that match the individuals in the paintings, researchers and artists have discerned diseases and deformities on the faces that were known to ancient medical practices of Egypt and the Greeks. Icons do show some important distinguishing features of the saints, but the overall meaning is to convey a universal transformation of the body and soul that can happen even in this life. The path of deification and transformation that many Christians have taken happened in the Roman catacombs, where the tombs and frescoes memorialized the saints and martyrs. Icons of saints are painted after their repose, unlike in Fayum, because Christians have trampled down death by death and Christ bestows life upon those in the tombs.