This post continues the Obsculta Preaching Series, sponsored by the Obsculta Preaching Initiative at Saint John’s School of Theology and Seminary. In these posts, our authors engage a variety of ways in which scripture, preaching, and liturgical worship interact with the life of the faithful.
(Illumination of an ambo, used for preaching – Index of Medieval Art, Princeton Univ.)
The previous post problematized preaching as a liturgical art, claimed that sacred arts are media of encounter, and summarized pre-modern iconological theory to help explain how the sacred arts achieve this end.
Preachers in the East Roman world (so-called “Byzantines,” a term they never used of themselves) inherited a rhetorical practice rooted in the classical tradition. Among the engaging techniques developed in this tradition was ekphrasis. For those familiar with this term who are not students of historical rhetoric, the word likely evokes the empirical description of an art object’s appearance. For the pre-modern rhetor, however, ekphrasis was less a way of describing than a way of communicating his or her experience of what was described. This included description of the sensory experience of an artwork or building, certainly. But it also incorporated sensory detail evoked by, but not physically present in, the object. It also expressed the affective dimension of the rhetor’s experience—awe, joy, sorrow. The more vivid, clear detail, the better. The goal was to create in the hearer a secondary experience of the speaker’s own.
The earliest ekphrasis of art in this lineage was the description of Achilles’s shield in the Illiad of Homer. In the midst of an epic poem about war’s all-pervasive harm, Homer gives us a lengthy ekphrasis of an artwork that could never have existed as described. The ekphrasis is full of sight, of course, but also sound, emotion, and all the complexity of life in this world of stars, celebrations, fields, and oceans depicted on the shield. There is war, just as is foregrounded throughout his poem, but it is a small part of the whole of human life and the cosmos. This catastrophe, all-encompassing for the poem’s characters, is contextualized by divine artwork. It is not the whole story of the human experience; justice and harmony reign elsewhere.
Another example comes from Philostratus’s third century CE Images, which describes a series of paintings in a private gallery. He provides vivid detail, filling in the compositions, including sound and smell alongside the visual. The point of ekphrasis is not to provide “objective” information about an appearance. In fact, in another example, a city might bring an orator to portray that city to its own citizens. Amidst the very buildings being described, the speaker would help the denizens to view their own environment anew, with fresh import accomplished by that sense of defamiliarization an outsider’s interpretation gives to the ordinary.
But, it would be a mistake to think that ekphrasis was limited to physical objects. Historical events were a common subject of ekphrasis, and the rhetor was expected to transport his or her hearers to the actions described, to witness them unfolding before their very eyes. All these antique techniques were present in the homilies of East Roman preachers educated in classical rhetorical performance, enlivening images, sacred spaces, and biblical narratives.
Remarkable for our purposes is the theory of memory described in rhetorical instruction. A rhetor’s memory was described as a wax tablet, and the experience as a seal impressed in that wax. Capable rhetors would use ekphrasis to impress the same seal into the wax tablet of the hearers’ minds. The effectiveness was dependent on the vivid clarity of the description. While neither iconologists nor rhetoricians expressed an awareness of the identical language in the East Roman world, we can see the same mechanics present in the media of both image and speech. If the likeness of a prototype could inhere in the medium of paint, for rhetoricians it could inhere in the spoken description. This means that preaching itself could mediate the same encounter with the prototype as the image did, by conveying the likeness of the prototype to the hearer. In pre-modern homilies that use ekphrasis, such an encounter was indeed the goal.
In the final post I will present a homily that exemplifies this iconographic preaching. This is but one demonstration of the homily’s capacity to bring the hearer into a real encounter with the time, place, and people of the commemorated events. It works naturally with the other liturgical arts because it is acting as liturgical art. It is not an interruption of the liturgy but is woven into the sensory and affective tapestry of worship: one that reveals an icon of Jesus Christ, and facilitates a real encounter with him.
Photo courtesy of the Index of Medieval Art- Princeton University
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