A copy of the Icon of the Holy Virgin of Kazan, one of Russia's most venerated religious images, has finally found its way back home after nearly a century in the West. Pope John Paul II, who held the icon for the past eleven years, has sent it to the Moscow Patriarchy in a conciliatory gesture aimed at improving relations with the Russian Orthodox Church.
The original icon traces its history back to the 16th century when Russian Tzar Ivan the Terrible seized the capital of the Tartar Khanate, Kazan, and burned it to the ground. A local girl named Matryona found the image of the Holy Virgin in the ashes. Painted on a small wooden panel, it had remained unharmed in the devastating blaze. This staggering fact prompted the Russian Church to proclaim the icon miraculous.
Word about the icon's miracle-working power soon spread all across the Empire, and pilgrims flooded Kazan to see it with their own eyes. It was said that praying in the presence of the icon would heal the sick, make wishes of pious believers come true, and provide repentant sinners with the strength to overcome temptation.
In 1904, ahead of an age of revolutionary upheavals in Russia, a man named Chaikin stole the Mother of God icon from church. He was caught by the police shortly afterward, and admitted to stealing the image, but said that he had sold the bejeweled setting off to buy himself booze, and had burned down the painted panel.
The news came as a shock. Many in Russia considered the robber's sacrilegious barbarism to be a bad omen for the Empire, foreboding the imminent demise of the State and the Church.
The nation then pinned its hopes on two surviving 17th-century replicas, also proclaimed miraculous. One of those is said to have brought liberation from Polish invaders during the reign of the first False Dmitri in the early 17th century, while the other is believed to have helped rout Napoleon Bonaparte in the 1812 campaign. Both replicas vanished during the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, but one of them reemerged in the West shortly before World War II. It spent some time in a basilica at Fatima, a Catholic shrine in Portugal, and then moved on to the Roman Catholic pontiff's private chapel in the Vatican.
Executed in the Byzantine tradition, the Icon of the Holy Virgin of Kazan is quite distinctive from canonical Roman Catholic imagery, and that the Pope should revere such an image is a remarkable fact in itself.
There are some fundamental differences between Catholic and Orthodox Christian imagery. Catholic paintings focus on scenes from the Old Testament and the Gospels, portraying Jesus and the Saints as humans and showing the Paradise as idyllic rural scenery or the sumptuous interior of a royal palace. They are intended to have believers experience Biblical events emotionally and to teach them about right and wrong.
Russian religious images are symbolic rather than realistic. Jerusalem is a ladder for the Holy Spirit. Calvary is a hill of even brushstrokes. These are traces of the Lord, not stones. Jesus' blood isn't grumes, but drops of the light of redemption. It is impossible to imagine an Orthodox icon portraying Christ with His teeth broken and His skin bruised, like in the Isenheim Monastery's stunning altarpiece, painted by Grunewald. Here, the crucified Jesus has been reduced by His torturers to a piece of bleeding flesh.
Such images of Christ stand in striking contrast to Russian iconography, where Jesus appears uninjured by scourging and mauling. He is shown not nailed to a cross, but soaring up in the skies, His arms outstretched to embrace the universe. Here, there is no room for emotion; it is not the veracity of historical fact that reigns here, but the ultimate truth of events, with their divine meaning shining out.
Raphael's Sistine Madonna is carrying Jesus in her arms, and we can see that it takes her some physical effort to hold the baby. In an icon by the Russian medieval master Dionysus, by contrast, the infant Jesus is a spiritualized figure defying the law of gravity.
Russian iconography is a complex semiotic system hard to decipher. Prince Yevgeni Trubetskoi described it as "theology in color." And a contemporary religious painter, Rev. Zinon, has said that "the icon does not represent anything, it reveals." Thus, the Orthodox icon is not a pictorial representation of scenes or characters from the Scriptures, but, rather, a vehicle for communication with God.
Orthodox mystics believe an icon painter may not eclipse God with his art, but that he must vanish in his own creative act. Only then will his icon turn out genuine, only then will it become a vehicle by which God can reveal itself. The ability to transmit divine power is what makes the icon a wonder-working angel, emerging before worshipers in church to listen to their prayers and give them what they lack.
This belief in the possibility of becoming one with God is the underlying difference of the Orthodox Christians' imagery from the Catholics'.
The Roman Catholics tend to keep God at a distance; at their cathedrals, the emphasis is on the aesthetic and ethical aspects of religious experience rather than its spiritual dimension.
The Orthodox Christians are driven by their striving to become closer to God, to experience the divine mystery.
The Catholic cathedral is a place for talking to God; the Russian church is a place for silence, where no chatter with God will be possible.
Catholic religious paintings target the hearts and minds of people, lifting them to heaven. Orthodox icons' addressee is God, not man. They turn into a void, a set of symbols to let the divine light shine through them upon the beholder.
"It is not we that behold the icon, it is the icon that beholds us," noted Prince Trubetskoi.
It seems impossible for the two Christian traditions to reconcile their differences without mutual losses. And yet, the emotive odyssey of the Kazan icon, which passed through filthy and clean hands and survived revolutionary conflagrations to find itself in the Holy See and then back in the heart of Orthodoxy, does bring the Catholics and the Orthodox Christians a step closer to bridging their millennium-old rift.
