Serhiy Krymsky’ s monologues about wisdom and life
PERCEIVING THE DIVINE SENSE GIVES ONE THE JOY OF LIFE
The Day offers the first part of a lecture by Serhiy Krymsky, Ph.D. in philosophy, dealing with St. Sophia’s Cathedral in Kyiv, a gem of world culture. We visited the Old Rus’ religious architectural site together with our regular author. The offered series of lectures are unusual in that the sage philosopher will hold improvised discussions, using his knowledge of Kyiv’s memorial sites and this Second Jerusalem’s toponyms. We had had to travel a long road to those lectures until we found the right context, unfolding a kind of anthology of the sophia (Greek for wisdom) of past centuries against the background of the Ukrainian capital’s cultural monuments.
PERCEIVING THE DIVINE SENSE GIVES ONE THE JOY OF LIFE
The sense of a book is inside it. The sense of an architectural structure depends on its locale. The structure emerges from a certain context, and one must also find the context of when to look: in the morning or evening, in winter or summer. I wrote an article about the Ukrainian baroque. You won’t find a single baroque structure in Ukraine, east or west, which I haven’t visited, going there on foot. And so the article is based on personal observations. First, one must become aware of the exterior.
St. Sophia’s Cathedral in Kyiv [also known as the Hagia Sophia of Kyiv] is a historic site of world importance, on a par with the Greek Parthenon or Roman Coliseum. In fact, Christian church buildings are usually dedicated either to a religious holiday (Christmas, Candlemas, Easter, etc.) or to a saint (Saints Paul, Nicholas, Peter, etc.). St. Sophia did not exist until the fifteenth century. It is just a personification of wisdom. Before the fifteenth century a Christian temple was named for St. Sophia only very rarely.
Indeed, some parallel could be drawn between the Athenian Parthenon and the Hagia Sophia of Kyiv. The Parthenon was built on the site of a historic battle with the Persians and Hagia Sophia on the site of a pitched battle with the Pecheneg nomads, whereupon the nomads vanished from the historical arena. The chronicle reads: “Many drowned, many were killed, and others scattered and are still running somewhere...”
The Parthenon was dedicated to Athena, goddess of wisdom, and the cathedral in Kyiv to Sophia, in other words to wisdom. Suppose we try to work out a short and precise formula of antiquity. What would that be? Something like sophia oecumenica or a concept of world wisdom.
The ancient Greeks believed that there were two types of wisdom: logos, meaning wisdom in one’s head, and sophia, meaning wisdom secreted in daily life, in the objects surrounding man. And so they inferred that the world is a book, it can be read the way one reads a book. In a book, every word, every punctuation mark has meaning. Likewise, objects in the world have a certain hidden, divine significance; perceiving it gives one the joy of life, the happiness of creativeness. In a way, it bestows on one the grace of life. And so the world is a book... This notion proved very important for Christians, for Christianity is a theistic religion, meaning that God is not a substance. Unlike in Brahmanism, the Christian God is not where energy is. Our Lord is a personality and has a biography (The Gospels). He has character. We know that Jesus wept but never laughed.
After all, how can a deity be connected with the world if that deity is a substance or energy? Of course, we might say that God is the beginning of all things. But how can we link a personality to the whole world? Remember the Ancient Greek concept of world wisdom. It says that the world is a text written by God, words spoken by God. Hence the Christian dogma: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And so Jesus is the Word and it was at the very beginning. Hence that special piety toward the signs of the surrounding world. A chronicler in Kyiv could describe an historic battle and mention a cow passing by. That cow passing by has a meaning matching that of the battle. It is a sign, pointing to something very important, it might have a divine meaning.
Now we will understand why Hagia Sophia appeared in Kyiv. Kyiv Rus’, the old Slavic state, was born on the bank of a vast ocean of steppes. Imagine the Great Steppe beginning by the Great Wall of China, including the Mongolian and Central Asian steppes, those by the Caspian Sea, Ural Mountains, and in Ukraine and Hungary, ending at the foot of the Alps. The Great Steppe embracing two continents! The Great Steppe was a giant ethnic cauldron spewing out waves of aggressive nomads.
Incidentally, the Ukrainian public has suddenly taken an interest in the nation’s culture. As usual, every new discovery (like when they discovered America) attracts adventurers in the first place. Now too adventurers have rushed into Ukrainian culture, coming up with perfectly stupid writings. I do not mention the Ukrainian diaspora and its obviously harmful influence. Their researchers had nothing in terms of serious sources, yet they wrote and spoke and now everything they have invented is regarded as gospel truth. For example, they claim that Ukrainian culture is rural. No culture can be rural! Culture is developed in the city. Ukraine is a special region of the globe. It had no rural areas until the midseventeenth century. Only fortified cities could withstand nomad raids from the steppes. What was described as villages were actually Cossack khutir farmsteads. Of course, villages also appeared, but later. Now a Cossack khutir was anything but a village. At the time Cossacks spoke Latin. The title hero says in Nikolai Gogol’s Taras Bulba that he also read Horace in Latin. In other words, the Cossacks formed an entirely different community, albeit very interesting, made up of peasant and plowman warriors.
THE CHURCH AS HARBOR IN THE STEPPE OCEAN
The Great Steppe was oppressive to Kyiv Rus’ and to a Kyivan, anyone living in Rus’, it was a great void, chaos. It had to be counterpoised by an intelligent oikoumene, in this sense an intelligent way of life. A city could be that oikoumene. Kyiv with St. Sophia’s in the center was an alternative to the chaos of the steppe. In fact, the notion of the city was understood differently then. We understand it as a territory having its center (downtown) and outskirts. At that period the city was surrounded by a fortified wall. Whatever was located beyond that wall was not the city. And the wall was associated with the notion of chastity. It was only after Joan of Arc that chastity became associated with women. Before that it was referred only to the walls protecting the city’s wisdom. And the city was perceived as a solid image, as an earthly icon of the heavenly city, Jerusalem. In the chronicles it is used in a creative context: “And so Rus’ was clad in the white robe of cities.”
Hence we see the special significance of the very idea of Sophia and the Hagia Sophia. Of course, it is a Christian temple, the main one of Kyiv Rus’. At the same time, it was a cultural center. The second floor accommodated banquets, diplomatic receptions, and the first library. On the whole, it was a temple of wisdom, Sophia. Moreover, just as the Parthenon was the relay station (if you will pardon my metaphor) transmitting the ancient tradition to Western Europe, so Hagia Sophia relayed the ancient tradition to Eastern Europe. Hence its symmetry.
A religious author of the fifteenth century described Orthodox church buildings as “quiet harbors in the boundless steppe expanses with their unsolved problems.” A church is like a harbor in the steppe ocean.
Looking at St. Sophia’s from outside, the whole structure reads like a text, with every detail having its meaning. For example, the 13 domes (6 were added in the seventeenth century). Why 13? Because there were 13 Apostles, including Jesus or including Judas (he was also an Apostle chosen by Jesus). And there were 13 Rus’ tribes (Poliany, Drevliany, Kryvychi, Uhlychi, Viatichi...)
Historian Nadiya Nykytenko maintains that St. Sophia’s Cathedral began being built by Prince Volodymyr [the Great, subsequently canonized], because keeping the architects and workers of the Church of the Tithe idle was something he could ill-afford. I feel that my esteemed colleague is right, although her thesis is opposed by official historians with their long-established version).
In the fifth century, a monk in Rome calculated that the end of the world would come in the tenth century, in other words, at the beginning of the second millennium. Remarkably, the European economy would be in decline for the next five centuries and no one would care. Instead, people would invest in churches and monasteries to save themselves. In the tenth century, they discovered that doomsday would take place later. At least they thought so, but I believe that doomsday was already there, albeit protracted, considering that 400 million perished in the second millennium — in other words, all those inhabiting the Earth in the tenth century. Not a single really important social problem was solved, including poverty, unemployment, crime, and youth. Neither socialism, nor capitalism have been able to solve them.
And what about scientific and technological progress? Werner Heisenberg, one of the giants of modern science, said that this progress is a way to make hell more comfortable to live in. Technology solves the problems it causes. So I can have a car and ride to work or get there using public transport. But why do we have to live so we have to ride to work?
I believe that Prince Volodymyr baptized Kyiv Rus’ in the late tenth century to spare his people the Last Judgment, and it was no coincidence that the baptism took place when everybody was expecting the end of the world. This expectation, this context of the coming end of everything had its impact here. What you see are not real windows or embrasures later blocked in. They were built that way from the outset. Why? There were demons at play outside the temple, so let them try to get inside through the blocked windows. You can also see slim posts on the apses, reaching up and forming an ornament, a trefoil (designed much later but illustrating the meaning of the posts). The trefoil symbolizes the Holy Trinity, the threefold personality of the one Divine Being. The evil forces are in the earth. They have to be channeled out, on the surface, so they get lost in the unbearable symbolism of the union of three persons — the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost — in one Godhead. We see here that expectation and struggle with those formidable external forces. In fact, the Mother of God (Oranta, meaning the Impregnable Wall) is precisely that which protects man from the evil forces rampant outside the temple.
CULTURES ARE NOT STUCK INSIDE EACH OTHER LIKE MATRYOSHKA DOLLS
There is another distinct feature. Kyiv was born as a Christian center amidst evil forces, precisely their most dangerous species, witches. Kyiv was known for its witches’ Sabbaths atop the Lysa Hora (Bald Mountain). This black magic had to be counteracted by Christian strength, Christian defenses had to be built and spirituality cultivated.
Atop St. Sophia’s you can see the rypidy, or suns... A year ago in Paris I saw the difference between Catholic and Orthodox cathedrals. In Paris, they were built as the City of God, with battlements that are often architecturally alien, a lot of sunlight and stained glass. At the Hagia Sophia the walls are solid, with the rypidygiving off spiritual light derived by the righteous men from the pitch dark of their caves and then transferred to the surface. Indeed, it was spiritual light obtained from the dark.
In St. Sophia’s we see a sample of culture dating from 1037, although the date most likely indicates its consecration. There are frescoes dating from 1018, the very beginning of the eleventh century. Despite what we read in our textbooks, cultures are not stuck one inside the next like Matryoshka dolls. Cultures are monadic, closed. Penetrating them is very difficult; it takes most sophisticated modeling. Every culture has its own values, mentality, and it is impossible to comprehend its essence proceeding from what we know at present. I say this so you can understand what we are about to see. For example, in our culture life is the greatest value. Yet life and death were two values before the European culture of the seventeenth century. I mean not only the Stoics that staged feasts, recited poems, and cut open their veins. Oleksandr Dovzhenko brilliantly illustrated this in his film Earth: old bearded men. I remember the type so well from my childhood in the Ukrainian countryside. To them, death was something like an apple dropping from a tree. They awaited it. Each had a coffin stashed away in the attic. Death had its value and it was an altogether different culture with both life and death having their respective value. We find this hard to understand. For example, Ivan the Terrible wanted to make executions an awe-inspiring sight. The thing is that for people in Old Rus’ an execution was nothing terrible, it was just another street show where the condemned would bid farewell to the crowd of onlookers and say his prayer, convinced that in a moment he would be in Heaven as a martyr. So how could one make an execution terrifying? Ivan the Terrible had St. Basil’s Cathedral built by the place of execution, so the condemned would mourn parting with that beauty of the earthly world. It didn’t work. No one was afraid of the executioner; everyone feared burning in hell, which is a separate topic. Finally, the tsar came up with what he thought would be the most terrifying form of execution: death inflicted suddenly, form behind a corner, so the condemned would have no time to sense his end, offer up a prayer, and go straight to hell. Do you see how different that culture was? What it is all about we know from recent events in Iran. The Shah’s Guard, using modern weapons, could not get the crowd under control, because by Muslim tradition a man killed fighting for his faith is sent right to paradise where he is immediately attended by 40,000 houris.
CULTURES OF DIFFERENT EPOCHS
By the way, I know from my friends in Star City [currently Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Russia, about thirty kilometers from Moscow] that Yuri Gagarin must have been the last man with the value of death. Actually, that’s why he died; he had constantly lived on the verge of death. When being launched into orbit, he had a normal heartbeat. That’s a miracle, for your pulse quickens even as the phone rings or when you ring a friend’s doorbell. Gagarin was on a mission leading no one knew where. Before him a satellite (sputnik) had burned, killing two dogs. None of the subsequent Soviet or US astronauts had that kind of experience. This is what cultures of different epochs are all about.
On the other hand, it is a sense of time. Before the seventeenth century the clocks had no minute hand and no one cared about minutes. Goethe wrote, “Stay, fleeting moment! You’re divine.” It was a great discovery, because no one had ever thought of moments as having a beauty of their own. People had been living under the sign of eternity. There was a special corner in every Orthodox home with icons on the wall and the whole structure was oriented to the east. People were buried with the feet pointing eastward. Interestingly, the tradition originated from Rome, with Jerusalem located to the east. But east of us is Siberia! Another historical paradox.
Twenty years ago we used to have all those Khvylynka [Minute] snack bars serving vodka and sandwiches. They proved short-lived as the Kyivans could not accept the style, not even in the nineteenth century, for meeting a friend for a drink, for just a minute, was unthinkable. Eternity, not a minute, remains the watchword. There you have it. A culture with eternity as its value. It teems with symbols that we often cannot decipher. For example, the most brilliant Old Rus’ architectural site, Church of St. Mary’s Protective Veil on Nerl, was dedicated to a very important joyous Orthodox holiday of St. Mary the Protectress. Yet we find a griffin torturing a hare in both the exterior and interior, a rather awe-inspiring image. Why? It was only thanks to Dante Alighieri that the riddle was solved. The celebrated author lived at the turn of the fourteenth century and still had a key to the symbolism. The image related to a worshipper. But there is a whole chain of associations to follow in order to grasp the meaning! For this reason, we are dealing with a culture having symbols, the imperative of eternity, and belief in the values of life and death.
Sophia was the second stone structure built in Kyiv Rus’. Here the fundamentals of Orthodox architecture were developed. Take the Gothic style. They say it is the art of writing architectural lines into the sky, and that its main task is to express infinity in a given structure. In our case the task was precisely the opposite; the structure is monumental yet the architect did his utmost to produce a homely, chamber effect. It is important to build a structure to emphasize the infinity of heavens, rather than make the structure express this infinity. And so Orthodox cathedrals have that very high sky effect. Look at an ordinary building. The sky does not seem to rise as high as it does here where we are witness to an architecturally calculated high sky effect.
Or look at St. Sophia’s masonry: stone, plinth, flat brick, and special mortar. Many say that eggs were added. Untrue. No eggs. The reason was simple: those people building the cathedral were in no hurry. In modern construction, quicklime slakes in 2-3 hours. There were pits by the Golden Gate where the lime slaked in two or three years! The same kind of masonry is found in Rome. The technique reached Kyiv Rus’ through the Byzantine Empire.
KYIV’S SOPHIA PRODUCES A POWERFUL DRAMATIC EFFECT
At first, St. Sophia’s was surrounded by an open gallery, so people entering it found themselves first in half-shade and then in darkness, entering the narthex and walking through dark corridors. And then they were blinded by the sudden inner light given off by the mosaics. Christian churches were built differently compared to earlier temples. In Egypt, for example, one entered through two narrow pylons (symbols of birth), reaching a double row of columns that did not allow to deviate from course to the right or left even by an inch, and the course was set on the ultimate destination point, the mummy. An ancient temple was not to be entered by a layman. It served as a sheath of God, only priests were admitted, and people gathered in a crowd around the temple on the square.
An Orthodox church was built differently, so that the faithful could gather under the same cupola. It was built like a model of the world. In other words, it has its own space architecturally programmed by the cross-cupola composition, with the cross being its foundation. This space is tangible due to incense emanating from thuribles; here time is measured by the order in which the frescoes are read — as a rule, counterclockwise, from bottom to top.
We are now looking at the key image of the Hagia Sophia, Oranta the Mother of God. Every picture has a source of light — window, lamp, and so on. Here there is none: the light is everywhere. It is divine. Its structure is as follows: mosaics, smalt, cubes positioned at different angles and dispersing the light. The lighting is inner and absolutely unique. No analogues of this image of the Virgin Mary have survived the ravages of time. The Mother of God is, of course, portrayed differently. She is refined, slim like a candle. In this case She is noble, emerging the way She is in the Acathistus in Praise of the Mother of God, portraying Her as a female warrior of God.
One historical version has it that the acathistus was composed in the fifth century, the time when Prince Kyi attacked Constantinople, and that it was in praise of the city’s deliverance from the barbarians. Eventually, the acathistus came to Kyiv in the form of the Oranta. The image was borrowed from Exodus precisely from the scene when Moses is leading the Jews out of Egypt and there is a battle with the Amalekites on the way. Seeing that the Amalekites are prevailing over his people, Moses raises his hands and begs Jehovah for help. It is interesting to note that for so long as Moses could keep his hands raised the Jews prevailed, but the instant he dropped his hands, exhausted, the Amalekites did. In other words, the feat of Oranta is eternally holding up her hands before God to protect the sinful human race. This is why she is portrayed as a warrior woman, as a paragon of will and strength smiting all enemies. What is especially important here? Once again, it is that we see a different culture in which a prayer was not a purely mental state. The psychological aspect of worship was introduced only by seventeenth century Pietism. A prayer was like magic, an action meant to work a miracle, and sometimes it took physical effort, as you can see here.
MISSION AND FUNCTIONS OF THE MAIN CATHEDRAL IN KYIV RUS’
Much can be said about the Oranta, and other associations emerge here. In Old Rus’ cities, the main cathedral had a semantic function, as an expression of the princely mission. In the Pereyaslav Principality, the cathedral was named for St. Michael, commander of the heavenly troops, and the border principality played a major role in protecting Rus’ from nomads. In Chernihiv, the cathedral was named for Our Savior. The principality claimed the leading status among the Rus’ lands. It had the largest territory, stretching from Kursk to Tmutarakan. Finally, there is Hagia Sophia of Kyiv. Orthodox theology interprets Sophia as the second person of the Holy Trinity, i.e., Jesus Christ. Yet the cathedral is dominated by the image of the Mother of God. In fact, Kyiv semantics is inherently akin to the Virgin Mary. Its major temples (Dormition at the Golden Gate, Church of the Tithe, all the temples of the Pechersk Lavra Monastery of the Caves — from the Conception of St. Anne to the Dormition Cathedral) are in some or other way related to the Mother of God.
Why? What has Sophia to do with the Virgin Mary? I have studied the problem and found a very simple solution. Theological literature regards the Mother of God as the first temple of Sophia. She bore Jesus in herself, she was pregnant with Him, so she was the first temple of Sophia. What we are looking at is the middle-ground temple of Sophia. So there is no controversy with the thesis of Sophia being related to Christ and the fact that the Mother of God is the key figure. She embodies the temple of Sophia.
You can see three figures at the top, a scene known as the Obsecration. A large part of the Orthodox rite originated from the Byzantine court’s rituals. The icons are analogs of the portraits of military leaders. The iconostasis emerged from the backdrop of the ancient theater. It has three entrances, just as the ancient theater had a cast of three actors. The Obsecration was originally a scene with the emperor and two closest associates on both sides: his wife and the first vizier, both begging him for mercy for the inmates of the dungeon in Constantinople. And so the Obsecration was gradually transformed into an Orthodox rite. Starting in the fifteenth century, apostles would be portrayed on both sides, resulting in an iconostasis order. At St. Sophia’s, we see Jesus and people closest to Him on both side: John the Baptist and the Mother of God, both begging him to spare the sinful human race. The legend over the Oranta is an excerpt from Psalm 46: “God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall help her, and that right early.” This inscription and image place Kyiv under the protection of the Mother of God. The Oranta is characteristic of Orthodoxy. The Protestants deny the notion, considering the very symbol unnecessary sentimentalism.
(To be completed in the next issue)
