Our Vocation Today: A Conference by Abbot Paul Stonham, OSB

            I don’t know about you, but these past few months I’ve felt quite unsettled and disorientated, as though I were living in a dream. First of all, the resignation of Pope Benedict: could it really be? There was that feeling of confusion, of bereavement without a death. Then the election of Pope Francis and again: is this really happening? At times it was as though I were living through a film or a novel, believing that I would wake up at any moment and realize it was only a dream. If it was like for me, then what must it have been like, perhaps still is like, for the protagonists themselves. I often think of Benedict, of what he must be doing now, at this very moment, and of Francis, of how he must be coping, just when he was planning to retire and take things easy for the first time in his life. But in the Church, Christ has called us to serve and to be faithful to the end, so no retirement and certainly no taking things easy for any of us in the struggle against sin and in the fight to be good.

            How should we not be disorientated and confused, when this is the first time that we have ever lived through such an historic transition? What’s more, no one else has lived through this experience and written about it, telling us how it is. Even so, there is one thing that has struck me throughout and it’s this: there is something very powerful and particular that unites these two men, these two Popes and, as it were, fuses their ministries into one: a holy stillness, a divinely inspired calm, a spirit of contemplation, the effusion of peace, that reminds us of the words of Jesus, which we repeat every day at Mass. “Peace I leave you; my own peace I give you, a peace which the world cannot give, this is my gift to you.” (Jn 14:27) Perhaps the most moving moment that exemplified this was when Benedict and Francis met at Castel Gandolfo and prayed together, sharing the silence of God’s presence as they knelt side by side.

            What has struck me most, with all that’s been said and written these past few weeks, is that no one has mentioned the centrality of prayer, and of the prayer of silence, contemplative prayer, in the lives of these two extraordinary men. It seems strange particularly after what Pope Benedict said would be his main occupation in retirement: to pray for the Church and to accompany her in prayer. This above all has helped me to make sense of what is taking place in the Church today. It has also helped me calm my own anxieties about the Church, about the modern world, about life and what it’s all about, everything, in fact: living in the presence of God, being centered on Christ, opening one’s whole being to the grace of the Holy Spirit, in other words, the centrality and vital importance of contemplative prayer to the lives of all Christians, and especially of us monks.

            What Pope Benedict taught us by his example was that liturgical prayer, the celebration of the sacraments, was more than a concentration on and an understanding of the texts, more even than entering into the mystery being celebrated, it was to be immersed in the profound silence of the heart of God, being taken up into the Godhead, as it were. What you sensed and experienced when he presided over any celebration was that he was in total communion with God, that he had already crossed the threshold and was living that new dimension, that new life of the Risen Lord. He somehow rose above and beyond the splendor and grandeur of the occasion and was in a state of contemplation. That surely is the model to follow, the model of Christ himself, who, though incarnate, was nevertheless in perfect communion and harmony with the Father and the Holy Spirit. As we recall our Baptism this Eastertide and our immersion into the Mystery of Christ, we pray that our own humble offerings at Divine Office and Conventual or Parish Mass may follow the same path forged for us by Pope Benedict.

            Now I know that in many ways Pope Francis is very different, but the differences I feel are superficial and of little importance. Of course, they are what the media and his critics within the Church have already latched on to as though a bit of lace had the importance of the dogma of the Holy Trinity or that red Prada shoes were more important than the Incarnation. It’s the substance that matters, and what strikes me is that, in his simple Latin American way, Francis has that same spirit of contemplative prayer which he brings to each celebration and public occasion. Like Benedict, when he stands before the vast crowd of worshippers or the merely curious, he is completely focused on Christ and with him in communion with the Father through the indwelling of the Spirit. As we pray now for his pontificate and for the good of the Church and the salvation of all men, let us also pray that this spirit of silence and peace, of tenderness and respect, will also permeate our own Christian lives and our daily monastic prayer. I know it can be difficult as there are so many distractions, but even our distractions be contemplative and, above all, charitable and good humored. The important thing with distractions is to humbly accept and incorporate them into our prayer, turning them into prayer, and not rejecting them, thereby making them an issue with the devil himself and so asking for trouble.

            Thinking of our vocation as Benedictine monks, no matter what work we end up doing or the fact that we are often called upon to change the type of work we do and the place we do it in, we are not and cannot be identified by our work, as these positions are temporary, and, in any case, life moves on and we are soon gone. It is not what we do, no matter how important that may seem, that matters, but who we are and who we are truly called to be. St Therese of the Child Jesus discovered her vocation to be “love in the heart of the Church.” What, then, is our vocation? Going back to what I said about the Holy Fathers Benedict and Francis, I believe our vocation is to be exactly what our motto says, “Pax”, i.e. peace at the heart of the Church, “a peace that world cannot give”, Christ’s peace, which is the fruit of prayer, of inner stillness and of focusing on Christ alone amid a myriad temptations, distractions, good works, duties and everything else that makes up our daily life. People who come into contact with us should sense and enjoy and breathe in the peace of Christ. Our brethren should find in us men of peace and a source of their peace. Each one of us should discover in himself that “peace of Christ which surpasses all understanding”, that peace which will “keep our hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God and of his Son, our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.” (Phil 4:7) Amen.

Conference given by Abbot Paul Stonham on 17th April 2013

A History of Art in Three Colours, by James Fox on BBC

       Today we reflect on how the colours gold, blue and white have changed the world. The Historian James Fox examines and explains it to us with a lively eye for telling details. He argues, for example, that  the concept of white changed from being a symbol of virtue and purity, to be a colour of revealing darkness of human instincts. This reflection is expressed in the 20th-century by the Italian dictator Mussolini and fascism.

The first colour is gold. We will see here how cultures like the ancient Egypt, Christian Rome, Bizantium, Renaissance Florence, 17th-century Saxony and 19th-century Birminham, conceived this colour as sacred. In iconography, gold is not just one colour, it contains all the colours, as the light does. It is considered a colour of eternity.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jx7BPLSt5aA&list=PLxFD-wxU4CoPSH0nJJkY4hBI_ertjzPul

The second colour is blue. James Fox argues that this colour hardly existed in the early history of art. Ancient Greeks did not have a word for this colour. XI-century Venice experienced the arrival of a vivid blue in this city. It was considered a precious stone called "lapis lazuli" (stone of heaven).

The third colour is white. As I said before, this fascinating and controversial colour has also change the world as we see it. 

This is an account on this subject that James Fox wrote on 25 July 2012  ( BBC)

Gold: the colour of divinity. Why do we cherish gold so much? Its value is essentially its colour, this glorious yellowness that never stops shining. It’s connected to the colour of the sun and in prehistoric cultures all around the world the sun was the most powerful divinity: the bringer of light and warmth to the world.

Ancient peoples didn’t just think gold looked like the sun; they believed it was materially the same thing. For the ancient Egyptians, gold, with its eternal shine, represented the afterlife, and the skin of the gods was supposed to be made of gold. That’s why it was used for Tutankhamun’s funerary mask (above). By covering yourself in this immortal substance, you would yourself become immortal.

In the Christian era, instead of immortality, gold represented divine light. Early Church artists used gold not because it was expensive, but simply because it looked miraculous. In the great Byzantine churches of the sixth century, before they could build really large windows, they could flood a building with light by using the reflective properties of gold mosaic. It’s also why all those Orthodox icons have gold backgrounds; in candlelight, they flicker as if filled with the light of God.

From around 1500, heaven lost its monopoly on gold. In the secular art of the Renaissance and the Baroque gold became a substance of display and a statement of earthly power.

In the 19th century, the old dream of alchemy, of turning base metal into gold, was realised by the technique of electroplating mass-produced objects. Gold had, in effect, been democratised. Gustav Klimt’s shimmering The Kiss (1907-8) was an attempt to infuse love and sex with a sense of the sacred - but ultimately Klimt’s stand against commercialism failed. The Kiss is reproduced on mousemats and gold is now something we keep in bank vaults. If gold reflects the thing that every society holds most sacred, it seems the most important thing, for us, is money.

Blue: the last colour to be named

Blue is my favourite colour. Yet it was the last major colour to get a name in any language – Homer didn’t have a word for it; he described the sea as wine-dark. Experts reckon the reason for this is that there are very few naturally occurring blue objects in the world. It is in itself a very evasive colour. And therefore in our minds it becomes the colour of escape.

In the Middle Ages, lapis lazuli, an intensely blue stone quarried from one mine in Afghanistan, was brought to the West by Arab traders. After many, many attempts, the Italians devised a recipe to turn this stone into the finest blue pigment Europe had ever seen and called it “ultramarine”, which was soon more expensive than gold. Colour laws were passed in the 13th century to stop people wearing blue because it was considered too special for worldly use.

Artists, of course, were alive to its transcendent qualities. Giotto’s Arena chapel in Padua (1305) has a ceiling covered in blue, with little gold stars, to represent heaven. And blue became this great, Christian colour: through much of European tradition, the Virgin Mary wore a blue robe.

By the time of Titian, blue was released from religious control. His Bacchus and Ariadne (1524) is a scene of secular paradise, with an incredible blue sky, plastered with the purest ultramarine ever found.

From about 1800, blue became the great symbol of Romantic longing, the colour of our internal world. For Picasso, in his Blue Period (above), it was the colour of despair. For Yves Klein, who patented the vibrant International Klein Blue, it was the colour of obsession (his widow claims his fatal heart attack, in 1962, was triggered by poisons in the pigment).

There’s a lovely turning point to all this when, in 1968, photos from the Apollo 8 mission revealed Earth, viewed from space, as blue. All through the centuries we have thought of blue as the colour of escape from earthly things. But when we finally breach those horizons we find that blue is the colour of our own planet.

White: the darkest colour of all

When we think of white, we think of the pure forms of antique sculpture. In fact, antique white is a fallacy; Greek marble was veiny and buttery; the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum (left) were “cleaned” to make them whiter in 1938.

In the 18th century, however, a German antiquarian and historian called JJ Winckelmann decreed that whiteness was the secret to the beauty of classical statuary. He probably knew that antique sculpture and architecture was originally covered in colour, but for him, white was the colour of reason and good taste and his ideas became very powerful.

As neoclassicism took hold, white became the colour of the modern Utopia. Soon, white classical buildings were cropping up everywhere. The White House in Washington and the Konigsplatz in Munich were grand civic buildings that bought into the notion of white as a symbol of unity and spiritual value.

American painter James McNeill Whistler’s Symphony in White, No 1 (1863) was an attempt to subvert the fashionable sentiment associated with the colour. Exhibiting his work 20 years later, he painted gallery walls white and put white frames round the pictures, creating, in effect, the first minimalist “white cube” gallery.

Marcel Duchamp also chose white to distance himself from the people. His famous urinal Fountain (1917) ridiculed traditional statuary and emphasised white’s sterile coldness. “I chose white,” he said, “because it’s too hard to like.”

Le Corbusier, on the other hand, believed in the cleansing power of light. The great modernist architect believed that by painting walls white, he could wash the working classes better.

By the inauguration in 1940 of Mussolini’s Palazzo della Civilt Italiana – a monolith with marble statues of perfect Aryan Italians – racism was laced into the notion of purity. White may have offered a dream of a better world, but it ended the darkest colour of all.

The History of the Mandylion of Edessa

    According to Iconographic Tradition, King Abgar of Edessa wrote a letter to Jesus, asking him to come and cure him of an illness. This story is found in the History of the Church (1.13.5-22) written by Eusebius of Caesarea who claimed that he had transcribed and translated the actual letter in the Syriac chancery documents of the king of Edessa. In this earliest account, Christ replies by letter, saying that when he had completed his earthly mission and ascended, he would send a disciple to heal Abgar. The image “not made by hands”, that Jesus sent  to cure the king, was known later to the Byzantines as the Mandylion (“holy towel”). 

I present two interesting texts: the first one is an excellent account of the "History of the image of Edessa", written by Professor Sebastian Brock, Oxford University. You will find here a connection he makes between the mandylion and Adai and his disciple Mari, later related to the "Anafora Adai and Mari" http://www.jaas.org/edocs/v18n1/Sebastian%20Brock-mandili-Final.pdf 
The second text, here below, is a quick account on the image of Edessa, its journey and a brief analysis of the icon. Enjoy!  

The Image of Edessa Revealed, by Joe Nickell

The Legend

The story of the Edessan Image is related in a mid-fourth-century Syriac manuscript, The Doctrine of Addai. It tells how King Abgar of Edessa (now Urfa in south-central Turkey), afflicted with leprosy, sent a messenger named Ananias to deliver a letter to Jesus requesting a cure. In the letter (according to a tenth-century report [qtd. in Wilson 1979, 272–290]), Abgar sends “greetings to Jesus the Savior who has come to light as a good physician in the city of Jerusalem” and who, he has heard, “can make the blind see, the lame walk . . . heal those who are tortured by chronic illnesses, and . . . raise the dead.” Abgar decided that Jesus either is God himself or the Son of God, and so he entreats Jesus to “come to me and cure me of my disease.” He notes that he has heard of the Jews’ plan to harm Jesus and adds, “I have a very small city, but it is stately and will be sufficient for us both to live in peace.”

Abgar, so the story goes, instructed Ananias that if he were unable to persuade Jesus to return with him to Edessa, he was to bring back a portrait instead. But while Ananias sat on a rock drawing the portrait, Jesus summoned him, divining his mission and the fact of the letter Ananias carried. After reading it, Jesus responded with a letter of his own, writing, “Blessed are you, Abgar, in that you believed in me without having actually seen me.” Jesus said that while he must fulfill his mission on earth, he would later send one of his disciples to cure Abgar’s suffering and to “also provide your city with a sufficient defense to keep all your enemies from taking it.” After entrusting the letter to Ananias, “The Savior then washed his face in water, wiped off the moisture that was left on the towel that was given to him, and in some divine and inexpressible manner had his own likeness impressed on it.” Jesus gave Ananias the towel to present to Abgar as “consolation” for his disease.

Quite a different version of the story (see Wilson 1979, 277–278) holds that the image was impressed with Jesus’ bloody sweat during his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane (Luke 22: 44). (This anticipates the still later tradition of Veronica’s Veil, wherein Veronica, a woman from Jerusalem, was so moved by Jesus’ struggling with his cross on the way to execution that she wiped his face on her veil or kerchief, thus imprinting it with his bloody sweat. Actually, the term veronica is simply a corruption of the Latin words vera iconica, “true images” [Nickell 2007, 71–76].) In this second version of the story, Jesus’ disciple Thomas held the cloth for safekeeping until Jesus ascended to heaven, whereupon it was then sent to King Abgar.

Significantly, the earliest mention of the Abgar/Jesus correspondence—an account of circa ad 325 by Bishop Eusebius—lacks any mention of the holy image (Nickell 1998, 45). Also, in one revealing fourth-century text of The Doctrine of Addai, the image is described not as of miraculous origin but merely as the work of Hannan (Ananias), who “took and painted a portrait of Jesus in choice paints, and brought it with him to his lord King Abgar” (qtd. in Wilson 1979, 130).

Historian Sir Steven Runciman has denounced all versions of the legend as apocryphal: “It is easy to show that the story of Abgar and Jesus as we now have it are untrue, that the letters contain phrases copied from the gospels and are framed according to the dictates of later theology” (qtd. in Sox 1978, 52).

The Mandylion’s Journey

Nevertheless, Runciman adds, “that does not necessarily invalidate the tradition on which the story was based ...” (qtd. in Sox 1978, 52). The best evidence in the case would be the image itself, but which image? There have been several, each claimed to be the miraculous original. Obviously, only one could be authentic, but does it even still exist?

The Mandylion has a gap in its provenance (or historical record) of several centuries. It was reportedly transferred in 944 to Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire, along with the purported letter from Jesus to King Abgar. The image may once have been incorporated into a triptych of the tenth century. Its side panels, now reposing in the monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai, illustrate the pious legend of Abgar receiving the image. Interestingly, the panels portray Abgar as having the features of Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos.

After the Venetians conquered Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, the Mandylion was reportedly transferred to the West, where its history becomes confused. Three traditions develop, each associated with a different “original” of the image:

1. Parisian Mandylion. Allegedly obtained by Emperor Baldwin II and sold or donated by him in 1247, this image was eventually acquired by King Louis IX (1214–1270), who had it installed in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. It was lost in 1792, apparently destroyed during the French Revolution (“Mandylion” 2008; Wilson 1991, 129).

1. Genoese Mandylion. Although this image reportedly can be traced back to the tenth century, its verifiable history dates from 1362 when then Byzantine Emperor John V donated it to Genoa’s Doge Leonardo Montaldo. After Montaldo died in 1384, the Mandylion was bequeathed to the Genoese Church of St. Bartholomew of the Armenians, arriving in 1388. It remains there, displayed in a gilt-silver, enameled frame of the fourteenth-century Palaeologan style. The image itself is on a cloth that has been glued to a wooden board (“Mandylion” 2008; “Image” 2008; Wilson 1991, 113–114, 137–138).

1. Vatican Mandylion. This image has no certain history before the sixteenth century, when it was known to be kept at the convent of San Silvestro in Capito. In 1517, the nuns were reportedly forbidden to exhibit it, so it would not compete with the church’s Veronica. And in 1587 it was mentioned by one Cesare Baromio. In 1623 it received its silver frame, donated by Sister Dionora Chiarucci. It remained at San Silvestro until 1870 when, during the war that completed the unification of Italy, Pope Pius IX had it removed to the Vatican for safekeeping. Except when traveling, it still reposes in the Vatican’s Matilda chapel (“Mandylion” 2008; “Image” 2008; Wilson 1991, 139–140).

These are the three Edessan Mandylions that have been claimed as original. Others—such as a seventeenth-century Mandylion icon in Buckingham Palace in London, surrounded by painted panels (Wilson 1979, 111)—need not concern us here.

Image Analysis

The Vatican now concedes (in the words of the official Vatican Splendors exhibit catalog [“Mandylion” 2008]) that “... the Mandylion is no longer enveloped today by any legend of its origin as an image made without the intervention of human hands....”

In the summer of 1996, the Vatican Museum’s chemistry and painting restoration laboratory analyzed their Mandylion. It was taken out of its baroque reliquary and removed from its silver-sheet frame (made in 1623). Glued to a cedar support panel was the linen cloth on which the face of Christ was clearly “painted,” although the non-destructive tests were insufficient to specifically confirm that the painting medium was tempera.

While “the thin layer of pigment showed no traces of overpainting,” there were nonetheless “alterations in the execution of the nose, mouth, and eyes” that were “observed in the x-rays and thermographic and reflectographic photographs.” Specifically, the nose had once been shorter, “so that the image originally must have had a different physiognomy” (“Mandylion” 2008, 57–58).

The museums’ scholars learned (according to “Mandylion” 2008, 56):

The version in the Vatican and the one in Genoa are almost wholly identical in their representation, form, technique, and measurements. Indeed, they must at some point in their history have crossed paths, for the rivet holes that surround the Genoese image coincide with those that attach the Vatican Mandylion to the cut-out sheet of silver that frames the image. ... So this silver frame, or one like to it, must also have originally covered the panel in Genoa.

Iconography

The Mandylion clearly has been copied and recopied, as if the different versions were just so many “icons” (as they are now called). It is not surprising that many of them appeared. According to Thomas Humber (1978, 92), “Soon the popular demand for more copies representing the ‘true likeness’ of Christ was such that selected artists were allowed or encouraged to make duplications.” Indeed, “there was, conveniently, another tradition supporting the copies: the Image could miraculously duplicate itself.”

Because icons were traditionally painted on wood, the fact that both the Vatican and Genoese Mandylions are on linen suggests that each was intended to be regarded as the original Edessan Image. That image was described in the tenth-century account as “a moist secretion without coloring or painter’s art,” an “impression” of Jesus’ face on “linen cloth” that—as is the way of legend—“eventually became indestructible” (qtd. in Wilson 1979, 273).

While the original image appears lost to history, Ian Wilson (1979, 119–121) goes so far as to argue that the Edessan Image has survived—indeed, that it is nothing less than the Shroud of Turin, the alleged burial cloth of Jesus! To the obvious rejoinder that the early Mandylions bore only a facial image whereas the Turin “shroud” bears full length frontal and dorsal images, Wilson argues that the latter may have been folded in such a way as to exhibit only the face. Also there is an eighth-century account of King Abgar receiving a cloth with the image of Jesus’ whole body (“Image” 2008). Unfortunately, the Turin cloth has no provenance prior to the mid-fourteenth century when—according to a later bishop’s report to the pope—an artist confessed it was his handiwork. Indeed, the image is rendered in red ocher and vermilion tempera paint—not as a positive image but as a negative one, as if it were a bodily imprint. Moreover, the cloth has been radiocarbon dated to the time of the forger’s confession (Nickell 1998). (Another image-bearing shroud—of Besançon, France—did not come from Constantinople in 1204 as alleged but was clearly a sixteenth-century copy of the Turin fake [Nickell 1998, 64].)

The evidence is lacking, therefore, that any of these figured cloths ever bore a “not-made-by-hands” image. Instead, they have evolved from unlikely legend to Edessan portrait to self-duplicating Mandylions to proliferating “Veronicas” to full-length body image—all supposedly of the living Jesus—and thence to imaged “shrouds” with simulated frontal and dorsal bodily imprints. Finally, modern science and scholarship have revealed the truth about these pious deceptions.

References

• Humber, Thomas. 1978. The Sacred Shroud. New York: Pocket Books.
• Image of Edessa. 2008. From Wikipedia, available online, accessed September 5, 2008.
• Mandylion of Edessa. 2008. Vatican Splendors: From Saint Peter’s Basilica, The Vatican Museums and the Swiss Guard. Vatican City State: Governatorato, 55–58.
• Nickell, Joe. 1998. Inquest on the Shroud of Turin: Latest Scientific Findings. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.
• Sox, H. David. 1978. File on the Shroud. London: Coronet Books.
• Wilson, Ian. 1979. The Shroud of Turin: The Burial Cloth of Jesus Christ? Revised ed. Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books.
• —. 1991. Holy Faces, Secret Places: An Amazing Quest for the Face of Jesus. New York: Doubleday.

Investigative Files

Joe Nickell

Volume 19.2, June 2009