Stanford Humanities Center
While my current project at the Humanities Center is on music and art in a medieval monastery in Southern France, my specialization is on the Greek East, on Byzantine art. As the fellowship year comes to its conclusion, I nourish my own scholarly hope, which is to return to my beloved Hosios Loukas, an eleventh-century monastery in Greece, close to Delphi in the mountains. This site is the perfect place to start when contemplating the role of hope in medieval culture.
Hope in Byzantium is about the narrowing of the distance between God and the faithful so that one regains their ability to see the divine face to face. With the fall of Adam, it is believed, a distance has appeared, which despite the sacrifice of Christ, continues to expand because of the new sins humanity commits. A Byzantine church stages these ideas spatially with the image of Christ at crucial points of encounter: in the tympanum of the narthex and in the dome of the nave (Fig. 1). At Hosios Loukas, Christ as the Light greets the newcomers at a height of approximately four meters. Once this threshold is crossed, the next image of the Redeemer soars high, over twelve meters. This telescoping spatial arrangement is purposeful: it shows the visitor the dramatic and expanding distance. The only way this interval can be closed is through compunction (katanyxis) and repentance (metanoia) weighing on the shoulders of the faithful. One is personally responsible for their salvation.
Image by Hans A. Rosbach.
Byzantium develops the practice of public repentance practiced at Lent through chants that model ideal repentant sinners such as the fallen woman, David, or Peter, or Thomas, to name a few. By enacting their examples, the faithful hope to soften the divine Judge and receive mercy/pardon. Hope for Byzantium is the ability to fall to one’s knees and shed tears. As a result of this process, Christ would perform his own bending down from the heavenly heights, in Greek synkatabasis (syn-"with," katabasis "descent"). Christ is attuned to the human suffering and repentance, he synchronizes with it, descends to earth with it. Human action causes divine reaction. Hope is in the actions of the individual: invested in bending down, examination of one’s conscience, and repentance, tears shed for one’s transgressions.
The narthex of Hosios Loukas communicates these ideas visually. As one steps into the narthex, one’s vision is momentarily blinded from the bright sun outside and the warm and peaceful semi-glow inside. Gradually one regains their sight and begins to read the Passion narrative. Two scenes face each other on the north and south sides respectively: the Washing of the Feet and the Doubting Thomas. The former shows Christ’s capacity for synkatabasis and tapeinōsis (humility): to lower one’s self (Fig. 2). As the Byzantine ninth-century poetess Kassia wrote: “bend down to me (kámfthētí moi), towards the groanings of my heart, you who bowed the heavens by your ineffable kenōsis.” Christ partakes in the human and terrestrial; he touches with his hand the feet of Peter. This methexis, partaking, guarantees the future salvation of humanity. On the opposite wall, the resurrected Christ stands erect, he bares his side and allows Thomas to thrust his finger in his wound (Fig. 3). Here humanity partakes in the divinity of Christ. Hope for the resurrection is invested in this human touch of the divine, partaking in the resplendent garment of Salvation. The inscription “of the closed doors” (tōn thyrōn kekleismenōn) is a metaphor of the inviolate, resurrected body that the faithful will recuperate at the end of time. This phrase carries the memory of song as it features in several chants sung at Easter. In one of them, an idiomelon (a song that has its own special melody chanted on the Fast of the Doubting Thomas), Christ speaks to the apostles asking them to wait, staying in Jerusalem, in order to be infused with the resplendent energy of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Thomas partakes in the doxa—glory of the divine; the touch of his finger ensures the salvation of all who are ready to put the effort in their practice of faith.
In Byzantium hope grows from the personal commitment to narrow the distance separating sinful humanity from God. This process requires humility, conscience, katanyxis (compunction) and metanoia (capacity to repent). Hope is in the lowering of oneself and the production of tears. As the poetess Kassia expresses through the mouth of the fallen woman who kisses the feet of Christ, washes them with her tears, wipes them with her hair, and anoints them crying out: “Who can trace the multitude of my sins or the abyss of your judgments, my soul-saving Saviour? Do not cast me, your handmaid, aside, you who unmeasurably bear great mercy.” The narthex of Hosios Loukas, with its images barely four meters above the floor produces an intimate chamber that propels katanyxis (compunction). So, after being washed in one’s repentant tears, one can face the soaring image of the divine in the nave (Fig. 1).
Image by Boris Missirkov, courtesy of the author
Image by Boris Missirkov, courtesy of the author
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Hope: The Future of an Idea
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This year at the Stanford Humanities Center, we asked our fellows to reflect on questions of this kind. Their work ranges from the esoteric to the immediate, from the deep past to the present moment, and across the disciplines from music and art history to philosophy and education. Our aim here is to create a repository of informal thinking about the presence of hope in what we do, not only as scholars, artists, and practitioners but as people living in the twenty-first century.
It is natural to say we live in a hopeless time, as climate change, war, authoritarianism, and other dangers loom over us. Without dismissing the force of despair, this Colloquy proposes to recover the grain of hope, not as a two-dimensional response to three-dimensional problems but as a complex problem on its own. The title of the Colloquy, in which we call hope an idea, is meant to signal this approach.
The contributions collected here, while conceived from many distinctive intellectual and personal positions, are best discovered in twos and threes. Read or watch one, then another and another, at random. Imagine these items as belonging to a virtual conversation, which stands in for the exchange of ideas that takes place every day at the Center. Some of the contributors are professionally connected to the problem of hope—for instance, the historian of philosophy Pavlos Kontos is now writing authoritatively about hope in Aristotle’s thought—while others accept our invitation to fold the topic into their projects or their lives as scholars. Some simply register the place of hope in their lives.
Finally, we bear in mind that, even when it is concerned with historically remote cultures or recondite questions, research in the humanities is always about the present and the future. It is through the lens of the present that we address every question, which means that, except for the most circumscribed topics, we seldom produce definitive answers; instead we tend to offer arguments and interpretations that work for our moment, to be improved by the knowledge and perspectives of our successors. Anticipating that conversation with the scholars of the future, we send off the fruits of our research hopefully to posterity. This Colloquy aims to render hope where the present meets the future.
