clothes designed for the kingdom of heaven
A big apple exhibition presentations how liturgical vestments embodied a language of perception
I had grown used to seeing in museums gryphons and suchlike terrific beasts woven into textiles that had been produced greater than 1,000 years ago in Syria and other lands of the Islamic world however then used to make liturgical vestments and the linings of reliquaries. however I had no longer realised that, after the autumn of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, textiles incorporating the move endured to be produced within the Ottoman Empire for use with the aid of Orthodox Christians there and in Muscovy.
a few of are on convey at the Metropolitan Museum of artwork in new york in an interesting exhibition, Liturgical Textiles of the submit-Byzantine World, on until the end of October. i have now not seen it, but a new york professor, Warren T Woodfin, has written some interesting issues about it.
He rightly stresses that figured vestments were not “purely a way of self-aggrandisement with the aid of the clergy; reasonably, they point beyond themselves to the mysteries of the liturgy as a dramatic reenactment of the lifetime of Christ and microcosm of the divine kingdom”.
St James, dressed as for the divine liturgy, painted in Greece via Stephanos Tzangarolas in 1688
having a look at an icon similar to that of St James painted in Greece by using Stephanos Tzangarolas in 1688 (pictured), a Westerner recognises that the saint is dressed as for the divine liturgy, however the vestments do not relatively match these of the Latin Church.
Like Latin vestments they had derived from the bizarre formal wear of the late Roman Empire. So the Roman paenula, a sort of cloak, developed into the chasuble, which the priest wears at Mass in the Latin Church. in the Greek Church it become the phelonion, which in the image of St James is covered with a starry, floral motif resembling a container of crosses.
beneath that, St James wears a garment patterned with completely different coloured vegetation (the sticharion, the similar of the Latin alb). This derived from the simple linen tunic that everybody wore. within the West, as a liturgical garment, it used to be consciously related to the metaphorical whiteness labored by using the cleaning waters of baptism. because the priest put it on prior to Mass every day, he would say a prayer starting Dealba me, Domine, et munda cor meum: “Make me white, O Lord, and cleanse my coronary heart.”
This invokes a passage within the ebook of Revelation about those who have mystically washed their garments in the blood of the Lamb. Verbally it also recalls the acquainted Psalm fifty one, recited on the Asperges, the sprinkling of holy water: Lavabis me, et tremendous nivem dealbabor: “ Thou wilt wash me, and that i might be washed whiter than snow.”
If there were any idea that liturgical vestments are only a form of excessive type, it’s dispelled by means of the significance given in the East and the West to the vestment varied of the clerical workplace. this is the stole, called in Greek the epitrachelion. Worn by way of monks even on a battlefield as they have an inclination the loss of life, it was carried by mission priests at the chance of their lives in opposed territories, equivalent to Elizabethan England, to be used at the social gathering of the Mass.
The epitrachelion or stole derives from an atypical scarf. As he places it on, the priest says a prayer: “Lord, repair to me the stole of immortality.” St James is depicted in an epitrachelion ornamented with panels embroidered with priests, kings, and prophets from the Bible, representing the triple role of Jesus Christ within the liturgy, which ordained priests carry out in his name.
All these garments and prayers may be unfamiliar however they demolish any insultingly reductive belief of priests as men in frocks.
A big apple exhibition shows how liturgical vestments embodied a language of perception
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