Aidan Hart was born in the U.K. but grew up in New Zealand, where he worked as a full-time sculptor after completing a degree in English Literature and a Diploma in Secondary Education teaching. He joined the Orthodox Church in 1983 and, on returning to England, began to work as a professional iconographer. Whilst he worked as an iconographer, he tested his vocation as a monk, spending two years on Mount Athos and six years as a hermit in Shropshire. Today, he is one of the world’s most celebrated liturgical artists.
Could you tell us about your road to Eastern Orthodoxy, and to life as a liturgical artist?
I was raised nominally Christian; my mother was an Anglican, though not regularly practising, because my father was an agnostic—not opposed to religion, but just neutral. My mother did insist, though, that I go to confirmation, so I had some exposure to the Christian faith through the instruction there; and at primary school, we had a teacher who came in once a week to teach Bible stories and do some drawing—so for me, quite early on, drawing and the scriptures went hand in hand. But when I was about fifteen, the fire of God entered my soul, and I began to search and look and believe that there was a God, mainly through looking at creation. I was raised in New Zealand, where I used to play outside, hiding and playing in trees, and I had an intuitive sense that there was a wisdom behind what I saw.
I started reading the Bible. One day a man came to our school to talk about his coming to Christ, and I had a vision of a shining face, which converted me. I saw the shining face—with people behind, which is important—and, as I say, the fire of God entered my soul. I didn’t know any Christians; the preacher came and went. In my high school library I found books about St. Francis of Assisi and other saints who fasted, and I began to fast regularly. One of my teachers asked me whether I was doing so for religious purposes, and I said ‘yes.’ He was a Baptist, and he invited me to his church.
I was with them for about three years, and got to know my Bible really well. But I had an intuitive sense that something was missing. I didn’t like the mechanical approach: the sense that one becomes a Christian to save other souls. Nor is the material world much affirmed in that tradition. So I went to an Anglican Church that was a mixture—both high-church and charismatic. But I was still seeking a deeper prayerfulness; I was very interested in the early Church; and though I went on to read English, my great love remained art. I trained as a teacher, but left to become a full-time artist, still as a devout Anglican. That was the key to my becoming Eastern Orthodox. I was looking for the early Church, for deeper prayer, and looking for art that would help me indicate the inner spiritual nature of the human person. I discovered two Orthodox monks in New Zealand, whom I met to learn about the icon, and I discovered what I had been looking for.
Today there is clearly a great longing for a form of Christian life and art that can give us the sense of rootedness that you describe. Notably, icons and other liturgical artworks of your tradition are becoming common in Anglican and Catholic churches throughout the West. Why is this happening? Why is the moment right for a revival of the icon?
These things are ineffable mysteries; one can only guess what goes on in the human soul. But I think there are several reasons, which appeal to different people to different extents. First: Christianity is not ultimately a ‘system,’ moral, philosophical, or of any kind: it’s a relationship, not only with Christ, but with the saints and the angels too. Icons—by which I do not only mean panel icons, but also mosaics, frescos, even the church building itself—are an encounter with persons. One enters into a church full of icons, of frescos, and one is immediately aware that one is entering a community. Second, the style of painting indicates that the reality behind icons is not just photographic reality: one is looking at a person as a person, but one realises that there is something more; ultimately one is looking at a divinized person, a person radiant with the Holy Spirit. And unlike most Catholic art until recently, the form of the icon reflects that deification—I think because, in the Orthodox tradition, the artist is a servant of the Church. Orthodox artists can be creative, of course; they are unique people who experience God in a unique way. But they operate within parameters, one of which is that the style of depiction is important, not only the subject depicted. In their work, people encounter a different way of seeing the world.
As I put it, there are two ways of depicting a bush: one can just depict the bush, or one can depict it burning without being consumed, thus indicating the flame of the presence of the Spirit as well as the bush itself. Third, we live a ‘materialistic’ age. Or rather, as I explain in a talk that I will be giving soon to the Temenos Academy, our secular age purports to be materialistic; but in fact it doesn’t honour matter in the way a Christian does. The materialist uses matter, whereas we Christians have a profound veneration for it. We honour it; we even kiss it, not for its own sake but as an expression of the Creator’s love for us. People love the affirmation of matter that the icon, and all liturgical art, stands for. One can smell God through the incense, taste Him through communion. This is true materialism, and people sense that it makes us like a tree again, that is rooted in the ground but soaking in heavenly things.
In your art, how do you try to break through to people who are held back by vague adherence to the materialism that you describe—people who haven’t understood that earthly things can be symbolic of higher things?
It’s an important question. This was the brilliance of St Paul, who saw the idols on the Acropolis, but instead of denouncing them, looked for what was true in Athens, or half true, and found the altar to the unknown god, and talked to the Athenians about it. We are all made in God’s image, and so our very being searches for God. People are naturally good and only need the rubbish to be removed for their souls to rise naturally to God. So one has to take an optimistic view and look for what people do that is already good or half good. A friend of mine, Jonathan Pageau, has a podcast called Symbolic World, which is drawing many people to God. For a ‘symbol’, literally, is that which casts things together (συv-βαλλειν). In that sense, an icon is symbolic in that it is a mediator. To answer your question, then: we can start with what people have that is already symbolic. For example: after a talk, a lady came up to me and said, ‘Icons are evil, they are a distraction; I prefer white walls.’ I then asked her whether she had pictures at home:
“Yes, of course.”
“What are the pictures of?”
“My family, trees, things like that.”
“Well, you have icons then!”
Start with what people already idolise, and then show them not to stop at that thing that they idolise, but to understand that the beautiful thing, whatever it is, is a reflection of higher beauty. Start with what they love, show that what they are loving is the trail of God’s garment, and ask them, “Why not take God himself, instead of just kissing his hem?”
We live in a largely pagan world, and even those of us who are Christian, both East and West, are often very poorly catechised. One thing that we in the Catholic Church have learnt in recent decades is that, if one tries to speak to people in language that a completely uncatechised person would understand, one ends up with texts and art that are utterly banal. In your own richly allegorical and symbolic work, are you conscious of a tension between the demands of richness and the demands of intelligibility? How do you understand the proper relationship between liturgical art and catechesis?
Recently, I gave a ten-minute talk on icons, at my church, and I asked the people there how many came to the Orthodox church through icons. About a quarter or a fifth put their hands up. One of the Greek words for beauty, κάλλος, is, according to the consensus of etymologists, related to καλεῖν, to call. Beauty calls us: it’s as though we have a memory of paradise in us—we are in Adam and Eve, as it were—and when we see true beauty, not masquerading beauty, we feel at home. This may seem strange to us, because we are not used to paradise, but we have a memory of it, like that of the prodigal son who, seeing something that reminded him of home, felt nostalgia. Hence true beauty—divinized beauty, beauty that invites not to look at itself, but to look through itself to the beauty of God—attracts.
Now, such beauty can become caricatured, and images can become broken—just as the language of divine Fatherhood can be repelling for someone who has been abused by his father. So part of the problem is to overcome caricatures, and to find the right images. Often, not using words is helpful: to just say ‘Come and see. Come and smell.’ Recently, I went with the mythologist Martin Shaw, who has become an Orthodox Christian, to a hermitage where I used to live. The small chapel there has frescos all round, so one is, as it were, drowned in beauty visually; but also one can smell the incense and beeswax. One goes in and is enveloped by all the senses. When I was doing the chapel up originally, I had some gravel delivered by a very muscular, tattooed delivery man, who had probably never been to a church in his life, and I showed him in. He began to cry, saying that he had never experienced anything like it before. I said nothing, but one could tell that God was speaking to him through the fragrances, the visual art, the space, the lighting—there is no electrical lighting in there.
A hundred years ago, Eliot wrote that we were living with a heap of broken images; today, one might say that we have a torrent of images of images swept away. We are utterly saturated with images: so much so that I suspect we tend to think today that images are there purely for the nice feeling that they give us—that we can take them for a moment, and then move on to the next; that they don’t point to anything else beyond. As you say in an essay, sometimes a little of the grotesque is helpful in art, to ensure that we don’t merely wallow in the beautiful for its own sake, but instead see to what it points. Could you say more about this?
There is always an ascetic element to the icon: something not hard, but cutting. Beauty alone is ambiguous and has its limits. It can only take us so far, and then God calls us to go through and beyond it. To go back to the burning bush: Moses sees the strange sight of a bush burning without being consumed. Here is an unusual beauty, which is both material and immaterial: an icon, one could say. But Moses does not just say ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ and go on his way. Rather, he draws closer; God sees this, and calls him by name: ‘Moses, Moses.’ Then, ‘Here I am,’ says Moses. They converse and God tells him to do something—quite a big thing, in fact: to lead his people from slavery.
I was a novice monk for twelve years, for some of the time at Mount Athos, and it is hard work: a vigil can last for twelve hours. One is surrounded by beauty, but it is hard graft. One’s legs are aching; once I fell asleep on my feet! God has done everything, yet to become beautiful involves real struggle. If one follows Christ, one could die: for example, I have friends in Russia who suffered in prison for twelve years for the faith. I tell my students of iconography that they should beware: studying iconography is dangerous and will change their lives. God might ask them to do something, or they might decide that they must do something, perhaps something radical. So beauty must have an element of risk in it; it is awesome.
Most people find it difficult to accept meaning or symbolism in created things—to see more in an icon than a moment’s aesthetic stimulation. We Moderns tend to reduce everything to that which we can capture, define, and exploit using our rational faculty. But in your work, you draw attention to the forgotten faculty of νοῦς(in Latin, intellectus), a faculty that goes beyond merely picking things apart and putting them in a new order. Could you introduce us to that faculty, and explain how you are trying to make use of it and bring it out in your art?
If there is any dominant heresy today, I think it is not a Christological or Trinitarian heresy as the past ones have been, but an anthropological one. We’ve reduced the mystery of the human person, made in God’s image, to mere body, or at most to body and mind. Yet the most important and central human faculty is the νοῦς or intellectus—we just don’t know what it is any more! The wonderful collection of Eastern ascetical writings called the Philokalia (the love of the beautiful), a collection of works by monks from the third to around the fifteenth century, has recently been translated into English. In the glossary, νοῦς is explained in various ways, but perhaps best as the ‘eye of the heart,’ or that part of us which knows things in an unmediated way. Perhaps the closest a secular person can get to the concept is through falling in love: one meets a certain woman, and feels that one knows them, even though one hasn’t spoken with them much. With time one begins to add facts about them to that intuitive knowledge. So νοῦς has two aspects. First, it’s experiential knowing: I see you when you’re in front of me. This knowledge is unmediated, in the sense that it isn’t an accumulation of facts. It reveals the soul’s ἔρως, its earnest longing for God. I then use my body and my reason, considering, for example, how to get closer to God, and reasoning that I need to go to church, which I then use my body to do. So body and reason are of course important, but perhaps best thought of as servants of the νοῦς, which is what allows that personal relationship with God.
This is why icons are in one sense symbolic, but in another they are not: they bring us face to face with the holy person, in a direct encounter. I’m not really interested in symbols of God, or in symbols of St. Peter: I want God himself; I want St Peter himself. The icon is a door; once I’m through it I forget it. All this is only possible through the νοῦς. St. Peter, for example, has died and gone to heaven; I can know about him through my reason: but I don’t want just to know about St Peter, or the Mother of God, or St. Aidan; I want to know them. That is only possible through the eye of the heart.
In your work, you often talk about man’s role as priest—as steward and perfecter or eliciter of creation; his role as a secondary rationaliser of reality, if you like. It’s a task in which he must use his νοῦς to appreciate the potential of that which he stewards. Could you tell us more about that very pregnant idea of man as priest, and the role that it plays in your art and your thought?
This goes back to my earlier intuition as a youngster that both God and matter were very important. I often return to the tree as an image: at the hermitage where I used to live, I planted 5,000 native trees as a ‘thank you’ to trees for leading me to God, and for being so great a source of teaching to me. I have just written a talk about the anointing screen that I was invited to make for the King’s coronation, depicting the Tree of Life; and doing so reminded me how much teaching there is in the tree. The tree is rooted in the ground, in the soil; it takes up inanimate stuff from the soil (the minerals). Above is the sun, which is like divinity. Through the sun, a symbol of grace, the tree takes the minerals from the soil and makes them into a living thing—the tree. So the tree is a mediator between, as it were, heaven and earth. Many of the Church Fathers emphasise that, where in Genesis God says ‘Let us make man in our image and likeness,’ the image is given—even the most sinful person is still made in God’s image—but the likeness, as St. Irenaeus of Lyons says, is something that is acquired. God put us upon this earth with a task which, ultimately, is to be deified.
I was often perplexed about the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil; I asked myself why God put such a great test there. I found the answer in St. Ephraim. He said that the Tree represents the whole created world, which ought to be received with thanksgiving and ‘used’ as God intended—in other words, treated as an artist would treat pigments: with honour, with respect for the unique logos of each. My job as an artist is to transform the pigments into something higher: an icon, which reflects divine beauty. So I’m acting like a tree: I’m taking raw materials and, through divine inspiration, raising them up. Our capacity to get close to God is dependent very much on how successfully we are prophets, priests, and kings—or, as I like to put it, royal artists.
The prophet listens to the word of God in his materials, as I do with my pigments or wood or stone. The priest mediates, and above all he gives thanks—indeed all creation gives thanks through him. Thus he sees what is given is not just an object in itself, as Adam and Eve thought when they took the apple merely for its taste. Through the priestly role, then, we avoid Adam and Eve’s mistake of not giving thanks. Last, the kingly role is to transform creation, as an artist does. God has told us to know Him by looking up, but also by looking down, and by raising up what is below us.
Could you tell us a little bit about your role as a teacher of liturgical artists? Do you see signs of hope for the future?
I’ve seen more and more clearly that there are two elements to improving liturgical art, if one can take that as the aim. One is training liturgical artists in the skills and in the spiritual life. I had two long-term apprentices, Jim Blackstone and Martin Earle; and about two years ago I was approached by Chichester Cathedral, who asked me to help them set up a liturgical art centre. Consequently, Martin and Jim went down to live there.We now have a twofold educational system. First, Martin and Jim are concentrating on training apprentice liturgical artists. Second, I realised that it was no good training artists if the clergy don’t know how to brief artists, or if they are not commissioning any art in the first place, or if they are commissioning the wrong artists. So I’m working with Jim in particular and at the centre at Chichester to try to persuade seminaries—Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox—to have a mandatory module in their training on liturgical art. —Not one, that is, which teaches them to make liturgical art, but one that teaches them of its importance—that it is not just an optional extra. If we are incarnate beings as St. Irenaeus says, then to know God we need our bodily senses as well as our spirit, which means that liturgical art is essential. So we are trying to teach clergy how to commission good liturgical art. I feel really strongly that many of the mistakes made have resulted not only through a scarcity of trained liturgical artists, but also because the priests or decision-makers in churches have chosen the wrong people. One cannot just choose anyone: liturgical art is a specialist field, and commissioners need to know where to find liturgical artists.
So we’re in it for the long term. To some extent, one has to jump to the next generation, in other words to work with the current seminarians. If any of you reading this are directors of seminaries—we have to get on to this as soon as possible!
