Imagination and Spiritual Vision in Byzantium
Below, with the author’s permission, is an excerpt from Fr Dr Maximos Constas’ essay, “Beyond the Veil: Imagination and Spiritual Vision in Byzantium.” For the entire essay, including its detailed footnotes, visit the author’s academia page here . In the ritual setting of the Byzantine liturgy, walls, barriers, dividers, doors, curtains, and screens—in short, the vast array of screening paraphernalia—have the capacity to operate at structural and symbolic levels, generating a broad range of binary categories, such as here/there, earth/heaven, sensible/intelligible, etc. At the same time, the ability of screens and partitions to establish such binaries is matched by their facility to unite what stands on either side. If the veil “separates” it is also the very thing that enables contact, disclosing or revealing precisely to the same degree that it conceals. At other times this structure yields to more complex configurations, since these liminal sites also construe and choreogr