In
Byzantine art, poetry, painting, and music, life appears stylized. In other
words, the human body, clothes and ornaments, furniture, inside and outside
spaces, houses and streets, trees and animals, are presented not for the value
which they may have in the present but as intermediaries that help us perceive
another life. Through the centuries we came to identify the other life with the
world of the ideas, which gave way, after the French Revolution, to various
monistic conceptions and has become for us shadowy and ambiguous. . . . But the
other life is not a question of ideas; and if Europe has forgotten this in its
wasting of the moral resources of faith, we, who during four hundred years of
slavery, preserved ourselves only by the conventions of our worship, after the
fall of vain ornamentation in Byzantium, are in a position to know it, since we
have witnessed the resurgence of our life as freedom, without any ideological
rhetoric. By simply persevering, our life was able to refill the framework which
we received from our myth.
-N.G.
Pentzikis
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