Religious Symbolism and Well-Being in Christian Constantinople and The Crisis of The Modern City

Well-being, Personal
Wholeness and the

Social Fabric
Edited by
Doru Costache, Darren Cronshaw

and James R. Harrison
Well-being, Personal Wholeness and the Social Fabric
Edited by Doru Costache, Darren Cronshaw and James R. Harrison
This book first published 2017
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2017 by Doru Costache, Darren Cronshaw,

James R. Harrison and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-9858-9

ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9858-4
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Tables and Figures ........................................................................ viii
Part One: Diagnosing Well-being in the Body Politic
Chapter One ................................................................................................. 2

Introducing Well-being, Personal Wholeness and the Australian Social
Fabric: Ancient and Modern Perspectives
James R. Harrison
Part Two: Wholeness in a Fractured World: Theological Perspectives

on Well-being
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 32

A Markan Vision of Well-being
Michele Connolly
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 55

Being, Well-being, Being for Ever: Creation’s Existential Trajectory
in Patristic Tradition
Doru Costache
Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 88

Meaning and the Well-being of Our Souls
Peter Laughlin
Part Three: When the Social Fabric Unravels: Gathering up the

Loose Threads
Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 110

Australia’s Moral Compass and Societal Well-being
Wendy Mayer
vi Table of Contents
Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 132

Personal and Community Well-being: A Wesleyan Theological
Framework for Overcoming Prejudice
David B. McEwan
Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 154

Social and Personal Well-being under Late Capitalism: Laudato Si’
and the Character of Interconnectedness
Robert Tilley
Part Four: The Disintegration of Personal Wholeness: Pathways Back

to Well-Being
Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 184

Grace and Nurture: Connecting and Engaging through Music
in Dementia Care
Kirsty Beilharz
Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 209

“Laughter is the Best Medicine”: St. Paul, Well-being and Roman Humour
James R. Harrison
Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 241

Pilgrimage—A Personal Journey towards Spiritual Well-being
Neil Holm
Part Five: Personal Wholeness, the Leader and Their Community:

Meeting Mutual Needs
Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 266

Reimagining Faith-based Leadership for the Greater Good
Darren Cronshaw et al.
Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 297

The Dance of Wounded Souls: Improving Leadership Well-being
and Effectiveness
Stephen Smith and Murray Bingham
Wellbeing, Personal Wholeness and the Social Fabric vii
Part Six: The University, City and Well-being: Trajectories from

Medieval Times to the Present
Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 324

Religious Symbolism and Well-being in Christian Constantinople
and the Crisis of the Modern City
Mario Baghos
Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 355

The Medieval University and the Concept of Well-being
Yvette Debergue
Contributors ............................................................................................. 372

PART SIX:
THE UNIVERSITY, CITY AND WELL-BEING:

TRAJECTORIES FROM MEDIEVAL TIMES
TO THE PRESENT
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
RELIGIOUS SYMBOLISM AND WELL-BEING

IN CHRISTIAN CONSTANTINOPLE
AND THE CRISIS OF THE MODERN CITY
MARIO BAGHOS
Ancient and medieval cities were characterised by a symbolic culture that

attempted to create a microcosm of the universe within their precincts. This
was particularly the case in Christian Constantinople, which, in various
ways, including the geometric symbolism used in the construction of
churches and the art that adorned them, created a space within which one
could participate in the community of Christ with his saints. The repeated
exhortations to peace within this space—exemplified by the image of
Christ the Pantokrator giving the blessing of peace—was conducive to this
divine participation in the Lord. Modern cities, however, are constructed
according to secular paradigms that do not exhort their inhabitants to
peace, but to a frenzy of activity that, as neuroscientists have demonstrated,
has had a negative effect on their psychological well-being. This chapter
aims to show that the use of Christian symbolism in cities might have the
opposite effect, and will do so in relation to an analysis of the art and
architecture of late ancient and medieval Constantinople.
In the worldview of ancient and medieval societies, proximity to the

cosmos or nature was conducive to one’s “well-being”.1 This was because,
as Mircea Eliade has argued, nature veiled the sacred that was manifested
through it. Although Eliade did not use this term, it is implied in his
description of ancient and medieval persons as desiring to be ontologically
conditioned by sacredness, the opposite of which would be existentially
destructive.2 Moreover, Eliade highlighted that ancient persons needed to
1
Here nature and the cosmos are considered as interchangeable.
2
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans.
Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt Inc., 1987), 12-13.
Religious Symbolism and Well-being in Christian Constantinople 325
cosmicise the space that they occupied in such a way as to facilitate

participation in the sacred, avoiding thereby the psychic trauma of yielding
to profane, amorphous space.3 Nowhere can this better be seen than in the
religious art and architecture of ancient and medieval cities.
Contemporary environmental management and urban planning strategies

aside, modern cities are conditioned neither by religious conceptions of
nature nor the sacred, but by economic forces that, as Lewis Mumford has
pointed out, have made us prioritise material commodities.4 This chapter
takes as a critical challenge the adverse impact of the modern city on the
human being’s well-being. It begins with a methodology that defines
religious symbolism and its relationship to the city, where the symbol is
understood as facilitating a participation in the reality that it points to: in
this case, God or the sacred. First, the symbolic culture of the ancient city,
which is an outcome of humanity’s propensity to cosmicising the space it
occupies, is demonstrated. Next, the Christian approaches towards cities—
necessary for our understanding of ancient and medieval Constantinople
(modern day Istanbul)—are briefly analysed, before turning to the current
shape of the modern city and its negative impact on human psychology.5
Following this, I focus on the symbolic art and architecture of Christian
Constantinople as an alternative to the modern city.
Admittedly, I could have assessed many other cities in the medieval

world that were conditioned by ecclesial architecture at their centres. But,
given that many Western churches were modelled on Byzantine
designs6—not to mention that medieval travellers viewed Constantinople
with covetousness 7 —I will settle for Constantinople as my paragon.
3
Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 23-24.
4
Lewis Mumford, The City in History: its Origins, its Transformations, and its
Prospects (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961), 414-15.
5
By the modern city, I mean cities that have been conditioned to such a degree by
economic forces that their centres, whether geographical or symbolic, are
comprised of either the central business district or CBD, or the various skyscrapers
associated with corporations and other business, or both.
6
For instance, Charlemagne’s cathedral church in Aachen resembles Byzantine
buildings. Gunter Bandmann, Early Medieval Architecture as Bearer of Meaning,
trans. Kendall Wallis (New York-Chichester-West Sussex: Columbia University
Press, 2005), 200.
7
Krijnie N. Ciggarr, Western Travellers to Constantinople: The West and Byzantium
962–1204: Cultural and Political Relations (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 32.
326 Chapter Thirteen
Moreover, since the inhabitants of Constantinople prioritised participation

in God the Trinity revealed by Jesus Christ, this city represents, for me, a
paradigm for well-being understood as salvation and eternal life in Christ;
a paradigm I find especially manifested in the fact that Constantinople was
replete with images of Christ the Pantokrator—the Master of all—and of
his saints. Finally, the chapter will conclude with reflections on how we
can learn to overcome the challenges posed by the modern city by drawing
on the city-symbolism of ancient and medieval cultures, specifically from
Christian Constantinople.
Ancient Cities
It is important to make clear the manner in which humans create their
cities as sacred centres that epitomise the cosmos (or, their representation
of the world) and which reveal that the sacred was conducive to well-
being. According to Mircea Eliade, archaic, ancient and medieval persons
could not endure the formless expanse of undifferentiated space. 8 Thus
they needed to assume a certain place within that space, and organise it in
a way that reflected the order in the cosmos.9 Although there were some
exceptions, ancient cultures perceived the natural world, identified with
the cosmos, as revealing the sacred through natural objects that were
architecturally duplicated within their towns or cities. Ziggurats, for
example, reflected the cosmic mountains from where the demiurge created
the world and obelisks reflected rays of the sun, etc.10 Eliade referred to
the natural environment as this amorphous space that needed to be
organised. In contrast to this view, Karen Armstrong has pointed out that
the psychological propensity for “cosmicisation” was motivated not only
by an inability to endure the expanse of nature but also by the creation of
the first cities at the end of the Neolithic period, around 5000 BC. As
Armstrong argues, “in the cities […] the rate of change accelerated, and
8
Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 23-24.
9
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton
and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), xxvii, 20.
10
For ziggurats, see Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, 14-15. For obelisks,
see Fekri A. Hassan, “Imperialist Appropriations of Egyptian Obelisks”, in Views
of Ancient Egypt Since Napoleon Bonaparte, ed. David Jeffreys (Portland, OR:
UCL Press, 2003), 19-68, esp. 27.
people became more aware of the chain of cause and effect […] (and) they
were becoming increasingly more distinct from the natural world”.11
It was this dissociation between human beings and nature that resulted
from the rapid flux of early city life that had to be addressed in such a way
as to retrieve the natural order and the sacred manifested within it. Dean
A. Miller reiterates this sentiment, affirming that it was the city that caused
the dissociation between human beings and nature—between the subject
and its co-extensive object—and that this needed to be mended. 12
Paradoxically, this could only be done by constructing the city in such a
way as to make it “the simulacrum of total order, a cosmic system”.13
Of the three opinions, Eliade’s diverges from Miller’s and Armstrong’s:

the former affirming that human beings at some point could not endure
inchoate nature and thus had to build cities to give order and meaning to
their lives; the latter stating that it was the city that separated human
beings from nature which, since this affected them negatively, compelled a
response—the creation of the city as a reflection of the cosmos. Either
way, one thing is clear: in the ancient world, cities were mainly
characterised by the organisation of settlements around temple-structures
that repeated, in architectonic form and through the rituals that took place
within them, the cosmogony or creation of the natural world through
which the sacred was revealed. Indeed, there is even evidence to suggest
that a preoccupation with the sacred took precedence over the interest or
the ability to actually settle near their place of worship. What mattered was
that people congregated for worship, with other considerations being
secondary.14
11
Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth (Melbourne, VIC: The Text
Publishing Co., 2005), 58.
12
Dean A. Miller, Imperial Constantinople (New York: John Wiley & Sons Inc.,
1969), 2.
13
Miller, Imperial Constantinople, 3.
14
The evidence for this comes from Göbekli Tepe, a pre-pottery Neolithic tell that
was built around 11,600 years ago and that, according to the main archaeologist
working on the site, Klaus Schmidt, demonstrates “that organized religion could
have come before the rise of agriculture and other aspects of civilization” insofar
as no settlements have been found around the site. Charles C. Mann, “The Birth of
Religion”, National Geographic (June, 2011), 34-59, esp. 57. This is important
because it means that religious beliefs were an impetus for human beings to come
together as communities, meaning that settlement was organised around, and thus
Beyond these aspects, the cosmicisation process gave architectonic and

artistic form to the symbolic behaviour of ancient persons. Karen
Armstrong gives the etymology of the word symbol from “symballein
[which] means ‘to throw together’: two hitherto disparate objects become
inseparable”.15 In other words, the symbol not only points towards but also
participates in the reality it signifies.16 That this object usually relates to
God or the gods was also made clear by Armstrong when, after giving the
above definition of symbol, she affirmed that “[w]hen [they, i.e.
Paleolithic and ancient persons in general] contemplated any earthly
object, [they] were therefore in the presence of its heavenly counterpart”.17
According to Eliade, these symbols could be reflected in the geometric
shapes—the circle18 and the square19—incorporated into temples and other
city-structures,20 as well as the art they contained. Thus, insofar as these
conditioned by, sacred structures; and this was done well before they settled for
ostensibly utilitarian, or materialistic, reasons.
15
Armstrong, A Short History of Myth, 15-16. The primary definition of the first
person verb βάλλω is “I throw”. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-
English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 304. In composite verbs, σύν
means “with, along with, together, at the same time”. Liddell and Scott, A Greek-
English Lexicon, 1690. Hence, σύμβολον means “throw together”, as indicated
above.
16
This is implied in Paul Ricoer’s definition of the symbol, which consists of “any
structure of signification in which a direct, primary, literal meaning designates, in
addition, another meaning which is indirect, secondary, and figurative and which
can be apprehended only through the first”. Paul Ricoer, “Existence and
Hermeneutics”, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin, in The Conflict of Interpretations, ed.
Don Ihde (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 3-24, esp. 12-13. For
Eliade, it was these “figurative” meanings that reflected the “deepest aspects” of
“humanity”, and thus, whilst secondary in terms of the process of signification,
take on a primary or fundamental importance. Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols:
Studies in Religious Symbolism, trans. Philip Mairet (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1991), 12.
17
Armstrong, A Short History of Myth, 16.
18
Eliade, Images and Symbols, 52.
19
Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 45, 47.
20
To the circle and the square can be added the triangular or pyramidal shape
which symbolises fire, as made clear by the etymology of the word pyramid (from
the ancient Greek πύραμις) which includes in the first part of its compound the
word “fire” (πύρ). Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 1555. The triangle,
in its pyramidal form, can also symbolise heavenly ascent. Robert J. Wenke, The
Ancient Egyptian State: The Origins of Egyptian Culture (c. 8000–2000BC)
(Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 298.
symbols-within-cities facilitated an existential participation in the realities

they pointed to—in this case usually sacred ones—these cities, to follow
Eliade and Armstrong’s reasoning, acted as springboards for participation
in the sacred.
Moreover, these symbols were the outcome of a religious way of living

that was inherent to archaic, ancient, medieval, and modern persons (even
if, in some ways, the latter think they are irreligious). 21 According to
Eliade, the birth of human consciousness was marked by religiosity. 22
Armstrong reiterates this in saying that “men and women started
worshipping gods as soon as they became recognisably human”. 23
Furthermore, in her Short History of Myth, she began her discussion with
Neanderthal graves from the Paleolithic period that displayed an interest in
ideas “that went beyond everyday experience”.24 This preoccupation with
otherworldliness would become a standard feature in ancient civilisations
and up to early modernity, pointing to the fact that the kind of persons who
created, lived in, and were conditioned by ancient, medieval, and early
modern cities were fundamentally homines religiosi.25
So far we have seen that the natural world revealed the sacred, and so
the dissociation between human beings and nature, involved a retrieval of
the natural order and the sacred revealed through it. This retrieval,
executed by human beings who were inherently religious, involved the use
of geometric and other symbols within the cityscape. We have examples of
21
Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 209.
22
David Dorin’s translation of the following passage in the Romanian edition of
Eliade’s Patterns of Comparative Religion is relevant for this point: “The main
religious stances of human [beings] had been given once and for all, since the
moment the man became conscious of his existential situation inside the
Universe”. From Mircea Eliade, Tratat de Istorie a religiilor [Patterns in
Comparative Religion] (Bucureşti: Humanitas, 1992), 422-23, translated by Dorin
David in his article “Homo Religiosus in the Scientific Work and Fantastic Prose
of Mircea Eliade”, Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Braşov, Series IV:
Philology and Cultural Studies vol. 6, 55.1 (2013), 21-28, esp. 22.
23
Karen Armstrong, A History of God (London: Vintage, 1999), 3.
24
Armstrong, A Short History of Myth, 2.
25
I wrote “early modern” instead of “modern” here because even though there are
religious tendencies in many modern persons—even if they believe they are
secular—still generally speaking early modern (beginning c. sixteenth century)
persons were consciously more religious. Also, by homines religiosi I mean
“people as religious” in an inclusive sense.
how this retrieval took place from the Mesopotamian city of Eridu, one of
the oldest urban settlements in the world. Eridu was considered a locus
and recapitulation of a cosmogony that revealed the sacred through its
ziggurat which, it was believed, represented a cosmic mountain.26 Similar
perceptions could be found not only in other ancient Mesopotamian cities
but also in Egypt (where cities contained no characteristic structures apart
from temples),27 Palestine (especially Jerusalem),28 Greece29 and Rome.30
This process continued with Christian cities, but instead of temples at their
centres, there were now churches whose symbolic architecture indicated
the worship of the triune God, revealed through the God-man Jesus Christ
and his saints. Thus, for Christians, the life of Christ and his saints were
the main source of sacredness in the world, a sacredness that they desired
to participate in and that could be manifested in cities. But if we are to
consider Constantinople as the Christian city par excellence, then a
preliminary assessment of the Christian approach to cities should precede
our assessment both of Constantinople and of the modern city.
Christian Approaches to Cities

If Christians await the “heavenly” (Hebrews 12:22) and “holy city, the
new Jerusalem”, that, on the last day, will come “down out of heaven from
26
Samuel Noah Kramer, Sumerian Mythology: A Study of Spiritual and Literary
Achievements in the Third Millennium B.C. (Philadelphia: University of
Philadelphia Press, 1961), 62-63.
27
Jan Assmann, The Search for God in Ancient Egypt, trans. D. Lorton (London:
Cornell University Press, 2001), 1.
28
According to Eliade, “Palestine [Israel], Jerusalem, and the Temple severally
and concurrently represent the image of the universe and the Center of the World”.
Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 42.
29
According to Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges, “the Greeks, like the Italians,
believed that the site of a city should be chosen and revealed by the divinity. So,
when they wished to found one, they consulted the oracle at Delphi”. Numa Denis
Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion, Laws, and
Institutions of Greece and Rome, trans. Willard Small (Mineola, NY: Dover
Publications, 2006), 138.
30
The literature on Rome as caput mundi or as eternal (Roma aeterna) is long and
complex. See Eliade’s comments regarding the location of the mundus, the
gateway to the underworld, in the Roman Forum, the symbolic heart of the city:
“the mundus was clearly assimilated to the omphalos, to the navel of the earth; the
city (urbs) was situated in the middle of the orbis terrarum”. Eliade, The Sacred
and the Profane, 47.
God” (Revelation 21:1-2), then the Christian City is almost a misnomer.

The eschatological description of the permanent establishment of God’s
kingdom at the end of time as a “new Jerusalem”, a motif inherited by the
Church from Old Testament prophecies concerning the “last things”31 and
reinterpreted through the lens of the Christ experience, led the writer of
Hebrews to affirm that here we “have no lasting city, but we are looking
for the city that is to come” (13:14).32 This contradicts the belief that a
terrestrial city, like Rome for instance, could be eternal. Mathetes, or the
unnamed Disciple, fleshes out the Christian approach to terrestrial cities in
his Epistle to Diognetus, which affirms that Christians
live in their respective countries, but only as resident aliens; they

participate in all things as citizens, and they endure all things as foreigners.
Every foreign territory is a homeland for them, every homeland foreign
territory. […] They live on earth but participate in the life of heaven.33
This dual approach, where Christians could be said to participate in the life
of a terrestrial city without becoming affected or circumscribed by its
rhythms, is made possible because they anticipate the coming of God’s
City. But if, according to the author of the Epistle to Diognetus, Christians
already participated in heaven—where heaven, the city of God, and God’s
kingdom can be considered mutually inclusive—then why did they bother
to Christianise the ancient cities that they occupied by building churches
and monuments covered in Christian symbols? What purpose could this
serve? I will suggest two possible reasons, one theological and one
historical, for the early Church’s Christianisation of space.
The first reason is that the immediate participation in the life of

heaven—in God’s kingdom—whilst characteristic of the Eucharistic
community of believers, is nevertheless only perfected in the lives of the
31
As described, for instance, in Daniel chapters 9 and 10.
32
Hebrews 13:11 describes “[t]he high priest [who] carries the blood of animals
into the Most Holy Place as a sin offering, but the bodies are burned outside the
camp”. Christ is here likened to the animals—a “sin offering”—whose blood
sanctifies people in the same way that the blood of the animals does. However, it
remains significant that this sacrifice, through which the Lord Jesus is able to
“sanctify the people by his blood” (13:12), happens outside the city. The author
therefore exhorts the Hebrew Christians to go out to him there: that is, outside of
Jerusalem.
33
Epistle to Diognetus 5, in The Apostolic Fathers, trans. Bart D. Ehrman, vol. 2
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 139, 141.
saints. The saints have no need of a symbolic culture to facilitate their

participation in the reality signified by the symbol because they already
participate in that reality by grace. But sainthood is not inherited. It is the
reward of strenuous schooling in faith that is granted by God on his terms,
a schooling that is facilitated through the use of symbols.34 To give a few
examples in relation to the lives of the saints: it was not until the young
Antony entered the church that he was motivated to embark on his
ascetical journey and become, according to the Church’s reckoning, St.
Antony the Great.35 This is also the case for St. Mary the Egyptian, whose
call to the ascetic life was marked by her being prevented by providence
from entering the church of the Holy Sepulchre to venerate the cross of
Christ on the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. She was only able to do
so after beseeching the Mother of God, in the presence of the latter’s icon,
to help her change her way of life.36
At the beginning of their respective journeys, these saints needed to

encounter and engage with symbols in the same way as the rest of us who
await the perfection from above. Compelled, as we have seen, to cosmicise
the space around us,37 we need symbols—existential bridges linking us to
the realities that they signify—insofar as they call to mind the transformation
34
To give one example of such symbols: since the Church has as its ultimate
aspiration holiness wrought by God within her, then the icons, images of Christ
and his saints, contribute to the “schooling” that is meant to sanctify the people of
God. The definition of the second council of Nicaea—the seventh ecumenical
council—held in 787 in Constantinople is important in this regard; but I will not
address it here since I explore it in more detail below. Suffice it to supply the
reference: “Second Council of Nicaea—787”, in Decrees of the Ecumenical
Councils: Nicaea I–Lateran V, ed. Norman P. Tanner (Washington DC: Georgetown
University Press, 1989), 133-37.
35
St. Athanasius the Great, The Greek Life of Antony 2, in The Life of Antony: The
Coptic Life and the Greek Life, trans. Tim Vivian and Apostolos N. Athanassakis
(Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2003), 59, 61.
36
St. Sophronius of Jerusalem, Life of St. Mary of Egypt 22-24, trans. Maria Kouli
in Holy Women of Byzantium: Ten Saints’ Lives in English Translation, ed. Alice-
Mary Talbot (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and
Collection, 1996), 82-83.
37
Of course, saints also “cosmicise” the space around them, but they do this
differently. As immediate participants in the grace of God, they are able to shape
the natural world. See St. Serapion of Thmuis’ description of St. Antony in
Serapion of Thmuis, To the Disciples of Antony 5, 7, in The Life of Antony (cit. n.
35), 42.
that we need to undertake and the fact that we should continue on the
Christian journey. I will return to these aspects later. For now suffice it to
state that ordinary Christians needed to cosmicise their space with the use
of Christian symbols in order to fulfil the existential desire and need to
participate in Christ, a participation achieved perfectly in the saints. In
sum, this is the first reason for the Christianisation of space in cities. The
second reason, which in fact led to the creation of monumental church
architecture, is that the historical circumstances from the fourth century
onwards facilitated an unprecedented imperial beneficence towards the
Church by the Roman emperors beginning with Constantine the Great.
This beneficence expressed itself in the building projects that any emperor
or king since time immemorial would have typically carried out to express
their patronage of a religious cult (or to express their own power and
prestige).
Whether or not the extravagances that resulted from the Constantinian

building projects obscured the first theological reason, outlined above, in
the minds of many believers is not a question relevant to this chapter.
Because my purpose to compare the Christian city to the modern city, I
ascribe more value to the former than to the latter. I acknowledge that
Christians before Constantine used symbols such as the ΙΧΘΥΣ (icthys)
acronym, fish, anchors, and the Chi-Rho in order to recognise one another
and that they represented various scenes from the Gospels and the Old
Testament in the catacombs and in house churches. But the former
symbols were displayed in secret: the catacombs were underground and
the house churches were private residences. Instead I wish to focus on
public displays of Christianity in the city of New Rome, Constantinople,
because it constitutes the paradigmatic Christian city, filled as it was with
symbols that functioned for the well-being of its inhabitants. But before
we proceed to this investigation, we must briefly address the modern city
and its adverse impact on well-being, an adverse impact that, I will argue,
can be redressed with insights from Constantinople.
The Modern City

The modern city is a product of complex phenomena. The mentalities
behind it were in fact driven by an anthropocentrism that was augmented
by mercantile interests in the sixteenth century and which led, through
various intellectual trajectories and cultural trends, to the prioritisation of
the human being to both nature and the sacred. These two dimensions of
life, as we shall see, were by necessity recapitulated into the art and
architecture of ancient and medieval cities. As opposed to the former,

modern cities are marked by certain distinguishing features: the central
business district that dominates the centres of most cities; skyscrapers,
often boasting giant company or corporate logos; and billboards displaying
the brands under which the products or services are sold by corporations.
The current state of the city has been aptly summed up by Mumford,
who argues that “in our time the ultimate fate of the commercial city is to
become a backdrop for advertising”. 38 Although movements such as
“green building” have attempted to make us aware of the need to connect
with nature in the cityscape,39 still, the fact that we belong to a cosmos
seems to be something that only ancient and medieval persons were able to
integrate into their buildings.40 Moreover, both in CBDs and commercial
areas (such as Times Square in New York), corporations display their
symbols far above any temple or church. The brands they sell appear on
billboards, posters, and bus stops, advertising their material products as
essential for a human being’s identity and conducive to one’s well-being.
41
Recent studies by neuroscientists, however, have shown that mental
health issues are compounded in the current civic space. Overcrowding in
cities can lead to social stress that increases “the risk of depression and
anxiety, and the rate of schizophrenia is markedly higher in people born
and brought up in cities”.42 The physiological impact of cities on urban-
dwellers, affected by the above disorders, has been amply demonstrated:
38
Mumford, The City in History, 445.
39
Charles J. Kibert, “Introduction”, in Construction Ecology: Nature as the basis
for green buildings, ed. Charles J. Kibert, Jan Sendzimir, and G. Bradley Guy
(London and New York: Spon Press, 2002), 1.
40
I thank Protopresbyter Dr Doru Costache for this nuance.
41
The extent to which we are conditioned is made clear by Joel Bakan, who
affirmed that corporations “…determine what we eat, what we watch, what we
wear, where we work, and what we do. We are inescapably surrounded by their
culture, iconography, and ideology”. Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological
Pursuit of Profit and Power (New York: Free Press, 2004), 5.
42
Daniel P. Kennedy and Ralph Adolphs, “Stress and the City”, Nature 474 (23
June, 2011): 452-53, esp. 452. See also Alison Abbott, “Urban Decay: Scientists
are Testing the Idea that the Stress of Modern City Life is a Breeding Ground for
Psychosis”, Nature 490 (11 October, 2012): 162-64. For details on the higher
levels of schizophrenia in cities, see Lydia Krabbendam and Jim van Os,
“Schizophrenia and Urbanicity: A Major Environmental Influence—Conditional
on Genetic Risk”, Schizophrenia Bulletin 31.4 (2005): 795-99.
… the size of the amygdala [known to regulate the assessments of threat

and fear] correlated with the size of the city within which the individual
currently resided, and activation of the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex
(pACC) [which regulates the amygdalas] correlated with how long a
participant had lived in a large city during their childhood.43
Apart from anxiety disorders and depression, the amygdala has also been
connected to “other behaviours that are increased in cities, such as
violence”.44 It is estimated that by 2050 seventy per-cent of the world’s
population will live in cities, and thus attempts to mitigate health risks are
of paramount importance to scientists working in the field of mental
health.45 Although the link between “urban upbringing and habitation” and
social stress processes has been empirically established, with the former
impacting the latter, still other possible reasons, posited by Florian
Lederbogen, for the negative impact of modern cities on humans, have
been limited to “pollution, toxins, crowding, noise, or demographic
factors”. 46 Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, director of the Central Institute for
Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, has suggested that “the common
urban experience of feeling different from your neighbours because of
socioeconomic status or ethnicity” could also be a stress-producing factor
in cities.47 Psychiatrist and epidemiologist Jim van Os has hypothesised
that “the risk of progressing from disturbance to full-blown psychosis” has
to do with a distortion in the subject’s learning, regarding which elements
of a new environment are rewarding and which are a threat.48
Without detracting from the groundbreaking work of these professionals,

I do believe there is more to the story. Certainly, if human beings are
symbol-making creatures, then the kind of symbolism that we see in
modern cities must have an effect on the people that live in them.
Conditioned by buildings that scrape the sky or cosmos instead of trying,
like in ancient and medieval cities, to replicate it on earth, and by the
43
Kennedy and Adolphs, “Stress and the City”, 452.
44
Florian Lederbogen et al., “Letter: City Living and Urban Upbringing Affect
Neural Social Stress Processing in Humans”, Nature 474 (23 June, 2011): 498-501,
esp. 499.
45
Lederbogen et al., “Letter: City Living and Urban Upbringing Affect Neural
Social Stress Processing in Humans”, 498.
46
Lederbogen et al., “Letter: City Living and Urban Upbringing Affect Neural
Social Stress Processing in Humans”, 500.
47
Abbott, “Urban Decay”, 164.
48
Abbott, “Urban Decay”, 164.
advertisements of various businesses—i.e. the new, materialistic symbols

of our time—urban dwellers wander through city-streets that, whilst
indicating a degree of spatial extension, do not have any cosmic or sacred
significance. As such, the inherent propensity of human beings towards
religiosity remains unfulfilled, and the human being in the city can become
ensnared by the objects of his or her experience, namely the products
being advertised, often marketed, as mentioned above, as being essential
for one’s identity and well-being. From this, various addictions—which,
from a Christian point of view, constitute the overwhelmingly passionate
attachment to objects of one’s desire or experience—can arise. The irony
is that these addictions (to products, people, places, modes of behaviour,
etc.) draw people precisely into aspects of the civic framework that are
inimical to their health. Since the remedies to these addictions—which, we
will see below, can be found in those Christian churches that exhort a
degree of dispassion—are diminished by virtue of being overshadowed by
skyscrapers, advertisements and the like, in some cases mental illness
ensues.
Next, we shall see that, in Constantinople, the symbolic art and

architecture of the city helped people to contemplate—and thus, through
prayer, participate in—the grace of God the Trinity manifested in the God-
man, Jesus Christ. This grace was in turn transmitted by Christ to his
saints (who were, like the Lord, depicted in the city): the former, that is
Christ—together with his Father and the Holy Spirit—being the only
source of well-being understood as salvation; the latter, that is, the saints,
having achieved this well-being by God’s grace. It will be demonstrated
that the symbolic art and architecture of Constantinople—particularly the
often repeated image of Christ as Pantokrator (Master of all)—act as
positive alternatives to the materialistic symbols in modern cities insofar
as they provided those who dwelt in the city with ample opportunities to
be reminded of, and to pray to, Christ as God, and his saints as
intercessors, for the well-being of all.
Religious Symbolism and Well-being in Christian

Constantinople
Despite the fall of the old Rome in AD 476, the Eastern Roman Empire
centred in New Rome, Constantinople, persisted, and due to the growing
prestige, wealth and power of its imperial court, was able to commission—
in tandem with the Church—the building of Christian churches that
recapitulated the entire Christian worldview. It is true that when the city
was founded, according to St. Jerome, “by denuding nearly every other
city (Constantinopolis dedicatur, pene omnium urbium nuditate)”,49 it was
filled with pagan art and architecture. The statue of Constantine as the sun-
god Apollo atop a column in the centre of his Forum—which was, at least
topographically, in the centre of the city—attests to this.50 So too do the
Hippodrome and the Baths of Zeuxippus which were filled with spolia that
demonstrated that the New Rome superseded its predecessor, Delphi, and
even Troy as the most prominent city of the empire.51
Like the ancient pagan emperor Augustus, Constantine built a miliareum

aureum—the Milion—that marked the distances to all the cities in the
empire at the juncture where his main road—the mese hodos—turned off
to the city’s eastern-most edge bestriding the Bosphorus.52 It was at this
eastern end of Constantinople where the emperor commissioned the
building of two of at least four churches attributed to him, although
scholars have debated this, since not all of them were completed during his
reign.53 First, we have the churches dedicated to the martyr-saint Acacius,
the first Hagia Eirene (Holy Peace), and the first Hagia Sophia, or Holy
Wisdom, that was not completed until the reign of Constantine’s son
Constantius II. Next, we have the mausoleum-church of the Holy
Apostles, which was controversial insofar as the emperor placed his tomb
in the centre of the building, surrounded by symbolic sarcophagi of the
Twelve.54 Hagia Sophia and Hagia Eirene would, like Holy Apostles, be
49
St. Jerome, Chronicle, the 277th Olympiad, the 334th year after the birth of Christ
(PL 27, 677-678); my translation.
50
Philostorgius affirmed that construction on the city began “at the place where the
great porphyry column bearing his statue now stands”. Philostorgius: Church
History 2.9a, trans. Philip R. Amidon (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature,
2007), 25.
51
Sarah Bassett, The Urban Image of Late Antique Constantinople (Cambridge,
NY: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 62, 69, 77.
52
Charles Matson Odahl, Constantine and the Christian Empire, Second Edition
(London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 240. See also map on ibid., 233.
53
Jonathan Bardill affirms that at least three or four churches were built by
Constantine within the city itself. Bardill, Constantine: Divine Emperor of the
Christian Golden Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 254. Mark
J. Johnson mentions five. Johnson, “Architecture of Empire”, in The Cambridge
Companion to the Age of Constantine, ed. Noel Lenski (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), 292. Above, I am following the latter.
54
Richard Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 69.
rebuilt twice over, and although the latter does not survive, the extant
edifices of the former two are the result of the extensive building campaign
of the emperor Justinian in the sixth century.
What Justinian’s architects managed to accomplish was the recapitulation

of the Byzantine vision of the cosmos—an emphatically Christian
vision—in the architectonic and artistic space of many of the churches the
emperor commissioned, but before turning to Justinian’s reign, it is
important to note that in the intervening years between the reigns of
Constantine and Justinian, certain pagan ideals persisted in the empire and
were gradually transformed—such as the Roman ruler cult that continued
in Byzantium, albeit in a mitigated form.55 It is, however, a truism that
Constantinople took on a more emphatically Christian character as time
went on. Theodosius I, who sanctioned Nicene orthodoxy as the official
religion of the capital and empire, 56 banned pagan sacrifice 57 and
extinguished the flame of the Vestal Virgins in Rome that symbolised the
city’s eternal duration. 58 Although pagan statuary still existed in
Constantinople, it was perhaps viewed as secular art exemplifying the city’s
Greco-Roman heritage as opposed to idolatry. 59 In addition, Theodosius
55
Gilbert Dagron commented that the canonisation of Constantine the Great,
which must have come into effect by the sixth century, defused the “scandal of a
cult or an imperial priesthood grafting itself on to the Christian religion”. G.
Dagron, Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium, trans. Jean Birrell
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 144. Still, this did not prevent
emperors from depicting themselves as semi-divine and thereby coming into
conflict with the Church. See, for this early period, St. Athanasius the Great’s
criticism of Constantine’s son, Constantius II, in Mario Baghos, “The Traditional
Portrayal of St. Athanasius according to Rufinus, Socrates, Sozomen, and
Theodoret”, in Alexandrian Legacy: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Doru Costache,
Philip Kariatlis and Mario Baghos (Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Newcastle
upon Tyne, 2015), 139-71, esp. 155. However, by and large—and especially after
iconoclasm—the Byzantine emperors were not considered gods in the way that
ancient Roman emperors were.
56
Stephen Williams and Gerard Friell, Theodosius: The Empire at Bay (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 55-57.
57
Williams and Friell, Theodosius: The Empire at Bay, 57.
58
David Watkin, The Roman Forum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2009), 87, 92.
59
Sarah Bassett insightfully addresses this issue in her article “‘Excellent
Offerings’: The Lausos Collection in Constantinople”, The Art Bulletin 82.1
(2000): 6-25, esp. 18-19.
oversaw the rebuilding of St. Paul “Outside the Walls” in Rome,60 as well as
the dedication of three other churches in Constantinople:61 to St. John the
Baptist, the Holy Notaries, and St. Mark. 62 This Christianisation of the
cityscape went hand in hand with the Christological debates that the
Church was preoccupied with at the time—represented by the second
ecumenical council held by Theodosius I within the city—which were
repeated on the popular level in the city’s thoroughfares. To quote St.
Gregory of Nyssa, who commented on the events at this time:
For the whole of this city is full of it (Πάντα γὰρ τὰ κατὰ τὴν πόλιν τῶν
τοιούτων πεπλήρωται), the alleys, the forums, the squares, the streets: the
clothes-sellers, money-changers, and those who sell us food. If you ask
someone about the obol, he philosophises to you about the begotten and
the unbegotten; and if you ask about the price of bread, the answer is the
Father is greater and the Son inferior. If you ask, “Is my bath ready?” the
divisive answer you receive is that the Son was made out of nothing.63
St. Gregory is here summarising some of the Arian arguments against the
orthodox tenet that God the Son is homoousios or “of one essence” with
God the Father and hence entirely divine; but what one can surmise here is
the degree to which the debate regarding Christ’s divinity had impacted
the city streets. In any case, the Christianisation of space continued under
Theodosius II, grandson of Theodosius I. He and his sister, Pulcheria,
were famous for procuring relics, and Theodosius II undertook the second
rebuilding of Hagia Sophia in 415 AD.64 But it is the third Holy Wisdom,
rebuilt by Justinian—who also built or rebuilt thirty-three other churches
in the city—that I want to focus on.65
60
Deno John Geanakoplos, “Church Building and Caesaropapism, A.D. 312–565”,
Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 7 (1966): 167-86, esp. 178.
61
See fn. 66 in Ine Jacobs, “The Creation of the Late Antique City: Constantinople
and Asia Minor during the ‘Theodosian Renaissance,’” Byzantion 82 (2012): 113-
64, esp. 132.
62
Jacobs, “The Creation of the Late Antique City”, 132.
63
St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Deity of the Son and the Spirit (PG 46, 557B); my
translation.
64
Nadine Schibille, Hagia Sophia and the Byzantine Aesthetic Experience (Surrey,
ENG: Ashgate, 2014), 50.
65
Brian Croke, “Justinian’s Constantinople”, in The Cambridge Companion to the
Age of Justinian, ed. Michael Maas (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press,
2005), 79.
T
Figure 13-1 Holy Wisdom m (Hagia Sophiia), Istanbul (ii.e. Constantino

ople). The
minarets andd mausoleums (grey and in the foregrounnd and backgrround) are
additions madde after the chhurch was conv
verted into a moosque in 1453,, when the
city was capptured by the Ottoman
O Turkss. It is currenttly a museum. Photo by
author.
The originall designation Holy

H Wisdomm, seen by som me interpreterss as a way
of appeasingg the pagans inn the capital by
b referring too an attribute of
o God as
opposed to eexplicit refereences to Christ or the saintss,66 was clearly
y seen by
Justinian’s ccontemporariees, such as Proocopius, as reeferring to Chrrist,67 and
was in factt interpreted Christologicaally throughoout the empirre’s long
duration.68 IIn other words, the city of Constantinopple was condittioned by
66
Hans A. P Pohlsander affiirmed that the designations H Holy Wisdom and Holy
Eirene, givenn by Constantinne to the two churches
c that hhe commissioneed, “would
not be offennsive to paganns”. Pohlsander, The Emperror Constantinee, Second
Edition (Londdon and New York:
Y Routledgee, 2004), 71.
67
Schibille, H
Hagia Sophia annd the Byzantin
ne Aesthetic Expperience, 50.
68
Zofia Brzozowska, “The Church
C of Divin
ne Wisdom or of Christ—Thee Incarnate
Logos? Dediccation of Hagiaa Sophia in Co onstantinople inn the Light of Byzantine
Sources from m 5th to 14th Ceentury”, Studia
a Ceranea 2 (22012): 85-96, esp.
e 87-90.
Robert G. Ouusterhout disagrrees, affirming that
t the church was “famously y dedicated
the “Great Church” of Christ at its centre.69 Robert G. Ousterhout describes

this church aptly:
In plan, Hagia Sophia follows the model of an early Christian basilica, with
a nave flanked by side aisles, but it differs dramatically in elevation, with
vaulting introduced throughout the building, framing an enormous,
centrally positioned dome. Thus, in addition to the longitudinal axis of the
plan, a centralizing focus is introduced into the interior. The great dome,
100 feet in diameter, is the dominant theme of the building’s design, as it
soars 180 feet above the nave.70
This dome is supported by four arches that are buttressed by four

pendentives that link them together, and by two semi-domes (or conches),
each sitting below the east and west axes of the main dome. In fact, the
weight of the entire structure is supported by four main piers that give the
floor plan the shape of a cross in a square, geometric symbols that, along
with the semi-sphere or circle represented by the dome, summarise the
Christian conception of the world.71 The symbolism of the cross should be
obvious enough; it represents the sacrifice of Christ through whom
Christians participate in the life of resurrection.72 For Christians, the life of
resurrection is inaugurated by Christ on behalf of the whole cosmos, which
is symbolically articulated by St. Gregory of Nyssa in his Catechetical
Oration, wherein he described the arms of the cross as reaching out to all
the cardinal points of the universe (North, South, East and West) from a
to a concept and not to a person”. Ousterhout, “The Sanctity of Place and the
Sanctity of Buildings: Jerusalem versus Constantinople”, in Architecture of the
Sacred: Space, Ritual, and Experience from Classical Greece to Byzantium (New
York: Cambridge, 2012), 286.
69
In referring to the reconstruction of Hagia Eirene by Justinian, Procopius
mentioned that the building was located next to the “Great Church” (Ἐκκλησίᾳ δὲ
τῇ μεγάλῃ) that is, Hagia Sophia. Procopius, Buildings 1.2, in Procopius VII:
Buildings, trans. H. B. Dewing (London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 36-37.
70
Ousterhout, “The Sanctity of Place and the Sanctity of Buildings”, 288.
71
Falter stated emphatically that “the cross, the square and the circle” are used in
the church and that, whilst the building’s outline is a square, the “interior is a cross
with a longitudinal axis”. Holger Falter, “The Influence of Mathematics on the
Development of Structural Form”, in Architecture and Mathematics from Antiquity
to the Future, vol. 1: Antiquity to the 1500s, ed. Kim Williams and Michael J.
Ostwald (London: Birkhäuser, 2015), 83.
72
Colossians 1:18-20; 1 Corinthians 15:12-23.
central axis.73 To the cross’ cosmic significance can be added the circle
represented by Hagia Sophia’s dome, insofar as for ancient persons “the
observable cosmos represented itself as inescapably circular—not only the
planets themselves […] but also their cyclical movements and the
recurring cycles of seasons”.74
This was the case especially in ancient Greece and Rome. One need
only think of the ancient Athenian prytaneion, marked by the presence of
the fire of Hestia in its centre,75 upon which was modelled the temple of
Vesta in Rome, which was also circular and which Plutarch interpreted as
a symbol of the universe.76 The Pantheon was also circular, with an oculus
facilitating communication between heaven and earth,77 and so were the
mausoleums of various emperors including Augustus. 78 That the
Byzantines, with their Greco-Roman inheritance, would continue such
dispositions and designs should not surprise us, and the architects that
designed and built the structure, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of
Pelusiam, were by all accounts well versed in the crafts of ancient
geometry and architecture. 79 When Procopius described Hagia Sophia’s
“spherical dome” (σφαιροειδὴς θόλος), he emphatically stated that it
seems to be “suspended from Heaven” (ἀπὸ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ ἐξημμένη). 80
Holger Falter described the dome as “the circular space […] representing
everything spiritual”,81 and indeed, the circle, representing eternity, can in
73
The Great Catechism 32 [i.e. the Catechetical Oration], in Gregory of Nyssa:
Selected Works and Letters, trans. William Moore and Henry Austin Wilson,
NPNF (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1979), 500.
74
The Complete Dictionary of Symbols: In Myth, Art and Literature, ed. Jack
Tresidder (London: Duncan Baird Publishers, 2004), 108.
75
Jean-Joseph Goux, “Vesta, or the Place of Being”, Representations 1 (1983): 91-
107, esp. 92.
76
Plutarch, The Life of Numa 11, in Plutarch’s Lives I, trans. Bernadotte Perrin
(London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1967), 345.
77
William Lloyd MacDonald, Pantheon: Design, Meaning, and Progeny
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 89.
78
Mark J. Johnson, The Roman Imperial Mausoleum in Late Antiquity
(Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 19.
79
Procopius, Buildings 1.1 (Dewing, 11, 13).
80
Procopius, Buildings 1.1 (Dewing, 21).
81
Falter, “The Influence of Mathematics on the Development of Structural Form”,
83.
some religions be considered characteristic of the spiritual realm:82 but it is

more likely that in Holy Wisdom the created worlds, both spiritual and
material, are represented.83
I will return to this aspect in a moment; for now it is important to

highlight the significance of the square, which Falter described as the
earthly space.84 Mircea Eliade provided an interpretation that can be used
here, for according to him the square—along with the circle—when
considered from a central axis, projected the four horizons or the four
cardinal points (North, South, East and West) as aspects of the world,85
just like the cross in the Nyssan’s interpretation above. Thus, in Hagia
Sophia’s cruciform design within a square that was topped by a circular
dome, we have concurrent representations, via geometric symbolism, of
the universe from a Christian perspective. To these can be added the
octagon, symbolising the “eighth day” of God’s eschatological kingdom,86
and which can be found as early as Constantine’s church of the Nativity in
Bethlehem. It consisted of an octagonal structure to cover the cave of
Christ’s birth, to which was attached a basilica whose apse the octagon
replaced.87 Justinian’s church of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus, which acted as
the prototype for Hagia Sophia (and is pertinently still called küçuk
ayasofya or “little Hagia Sophia” in Turkish), also contained eighth day
symbolism in its dome, supported by eight columns that “form an octagon
placed inside an irregular square”. 88 This design was repeated in Holy
82
See fn. 48 in Schibille, Hagia Sophia and the Byzantine Aesthetic Experience,
55.
83
For the “earthly” dimension of Hagia Sophia, see the excerpts from Paul the
Silentiary’s Descriptio S. Sophiae translated by Bissera V. Pentcheva in her article
“Hagia Sophia and Multisensory Aesthetics”, Gesta: International Centre for
Medieval Art 50:2 (2011): 93-11, esp. 97, 99.
84
83.
85
83.
86
The eighth day was transcendent because, according to early Christian saints
such as Basil the Great, it went beyond the recurrent cycle of the seven-day week
outlined in Genesis. Mario Baghos, “The Recapitulation of History and the ‘Eighth
Day’: Aspects of St. Basil the Great’s Eschatological Vision”, in Cappadocian
Legacy: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Doru Costache and Philip Kariatlis (Sydney: St.
Andrew’s Orthodox Press, 2013), 151-68, esp. 159-60.
87
Bardill, Constantine, 258. See the church’s design on ibid., 260.
88
Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, 203.
Wisdom’s baptistery, which was also octagonal, and later, on a larger

scale, in the church of San Vitale in Ravenna. 89 Ravenna is important,
because in its apse above the altar a mosaic depicts Christ enthroned upon
the world: one of the earliest images of the Pantokrator—the Master of all
giving the blessing of peace 90 —that would appear in the centre of
Byzantine domes throughout the empire.91
Although this image was not painted in the dome of Hagia Sophia until
1355—and described by a contemporary, Nicephorus Gregoras, as “the
enhypostatic Wisdom of God”92—it can be traced as early as the Christian
catacombs. 93 It begins to appear on portable icons by the end of late
antiquity, such as the famous sixth-century image from St. Katherine’s
monastery in Sinai,94 a complex that was, incidentally, commissioned by
Justinian and Theodora. 95 By the Middle Ages, the Pantokrator would
appear in central domes, apses and wall panels in the palatine chapels of
Aachen 96 and Constantinople, 97 in the churches of the Theotokos
89
Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis, Ravenna in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, NY:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 227.
90
In Ravenna, the Pantokrator is “seated on a blue globe” and “holds a scroll
closed with the seven seals of the Apocalypse”. Deliyannis, Ravenna in Late
Antiquity, 237.
91
John Lowden affirmed in relation to Byzantine church domes that “the standard
post-iconoclast formula employed the medallion bust of Christ alone, in the form
we call ‘the Pantokrator.’” J. Lowden, Early Christian and Byzantine Art (London:
Phaidon, 1997), 194.
92
Nicephorus Gregoras, Historiae Byzantinae XXIX, 47 f., in The Art of the
Byzantine Empire 312–1453: Sources and Documents, trans. Cyril Mango
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 249.
93
The “idea of Christ as Ruler of the Universe finds clear expression in the
Catacomb of Commodilla [mid 4th century] where, within a frame coloured red and
brown, the Master’s head and shoulders are set in a manner expressing authority”.
One can detect in this image the origins of what would later become the image of
Christ the Pantokrator. Robert Milburn, Early Christian Art and Architecture
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 47; see image
on 46.
94
Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of
Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 93.
95
Judith Herrin, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (Princeton
and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), xxii.
96
Derek Wilson, Charlemagne: Barbarian and Emperor (London: Pimlico, 2006),
75.
Pammakaristos98 and Holy Saviour in Chora in the latter;99 in Greece, in

the churches of Hosios Loukas100 and the Dormition in Daphne;101 and in
Norman Sicily, in the cathedrals at Monreale 102 and Cefalù 103 and the
Cappella Palatina in Palermo.104 The Monastery of Gračanica in Kosovo
boasts a Pantokrator in its dome from the later Middle Ages,105 and so do
the Coptic Monastery of St. Antony the Great in Egypt,106 St. Mark’s in
Venice,107 St. Paul’s “Outside the Walls”,108 and Santa Maria Maggiore in
Rome, which also depicts the Mother of God enthroned next to her Son
and our God. 109 In the post-Byzantine period various other churches in
Romania, Russia, Greece, Bulgaria, Georgia, and Serbia all include this
97
Specifically, in the Chrysotriklinos, where “an image of the enthroned Christ
[was] depicted in the apse right above the emperor’s throne”. Alexei M. Sivertsev,
Judaism and Imperial Ideology in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), 182.
98
Guy Freeland, “The Lamp in the Temple: Copernicus and the Demise of a
Medieval Ecclesiastical Cosmology”, in 1543 and All That: Image and Word,
Change and Continuity in the Proto-Scientific Revolution, ed. Guy Freeland and
Anthony Corones (Dordrecht: Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V., 2000),
189-270, esp. 215.
99
Lowden, Early Christian and Byzantine Art, 415.
100
Lowden, Early Christian and Byzantine Art, 231, 235.
101
Lowden, Early Christian and Byzantine Art, 260, 264.
102
John Beckwith, Early Christian and Byzantine Art (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1979), 260.
103
Beckwith, Early Christian and Byzantine Art, 259.
104
Beckwith, Early Christian and Byzantine Art, 260.
105
Slobodan Ćurčić, “Gračanica and the Cult of the Saintly Prince Lazar”, Recueil
des travaux de l’Institut d’études byzantines XLIV (2007): 465-72, esp. 466.
106
Elizabeth S. Bolman, “Theodore’s Program in Context: Egypt and the
Mediterranean Region”, in Monastic Visions: Wall Paintings in the Monastery of
St. Antony at the Red Sea, ed. Bolman (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2002), 99.
107
“Refashioning Byzantium in Venice, ca. 1200-1400”, in San Marco, Byzantium,
and the Myths of Venice, ed. Henry Maguire and Robert S. Nelson (Washington
D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2010), 208.
108
Margherita Cecchelli, “Il Complesso Monumentale Della Basilica dal IV al VII
Secolo”, in San Paolo Fuori Le Mura a Roma, ed. Carlo Pietrangeli (Firenze:
Nardini Editore, 1988), 37-54, esp. 50-51.
109
Marina Righetti Tosti-Croce, “La Basilica Tra Due E Trecento”, in Santa Maria
Maggiore a Roma, ed. Carlo Pietrangeli (Firenze: Nardini Editore, 1988), 129-70,
esp. 132-33, 134-35, 136-37. The same is also the case in the apse of Santa Maria
in Trastevere, Rome.
T
image, whiich spread evene to the West in moodern times with the
proliferationn of Orthodoxy via its diasp
pora communiities and missiions.
Figure 13-2 A Byzantine mosaic

m of Christt the Pantokrattor giving the blessing
b of
peace in the ccircular dome of the Cappella Palatina,
P Palerm
mo. Photo by au uthor.
In Byzantinne churches anda churches influenced byy the Byzantine style,

therefore, thhe Christian conception
c off the whole unniverse is rep
presented,
with Christ as its Masterr. When Frank kish, Byzantinne, and Norm
man rulers
depicted thee Pantokrator in their cath hedrals and paalaces, they may
m have
been attemppting to bolsteer their claim to being the Lord’s repressentatives
on earth; neevertheless, evven in these cases the Lorrd took preceedence.110
110
This is eviidenced by the fact that many emperors depiicted themselvees as being
crowned by aand in obeisannce to Christ. See,
S for instancce, the mosaic above the
imperial doorrway in Holy Wisdom,
W wheree the emperor LLeo VI the Wisse (r. 886–
The fact that the main church of any Byzantine monastery was, and still is,
called the katholikon—the place where the “fullness of the church” was
summed up—is indicative of this mentality, and in monasteries, as in
cities, these churches literally or symbolically constituted the centre of
orientation for the inhabitants.111 The location of the place of worship as
the focal point of the community, one that can be traced back to the first
cities in Mesopotamia, and later in Egypt, Israel, Greece, Rome, and
elsewhere, was thus continued in the Christian era, and the city of
Constantinople had no small part to play in establishing a paradigm that
would be repeated in cities throughout the world.
It would be remiss of me not to mention the Byzantine influence on

Islamic architecture which characteristically replicates the Byzantine
dome, but the latter nevertheless represents a dissimilar mentality: for
whilst calligraphic and floral representations are permitted, the human
person is not112—and thus the “paradises” reflected in shrines such as the
Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem are bereft of inhabitants. Moreover, and in
light of what we have seen concerning churches as representations of the
cosmos, the effacement of mosaics—including the Pantokrator—in
Byzantine churches throughout Constantinople in its iteration as Istanbul,
and in lands occupied by the Ottomans, not to mention the displacement of
the Christian communities that worshipped within them, represent, in
metaphorical terms, veritable apocalypses.
In addition to the geometric symbolism of Byzantine architecture and

the oft-repeated motif of the Pantokrator, a standard pattern of the
representation of Christ and his saints within Byzantine churches—now
continued by many Orthodox churches throughout the world—would
indeed be to show Christ at the centre of the dome as Pantokrator, and the
Mother of God in the apse below the main dome as “Wider than the
912) is depicted in obeisance to the enthroned Christ, and Christ crowning the
twelfth century Norman king Roger II of Sicily in a panel mosaic in the Martorana
church in Palermo. Beckwith, Early Christian and Byzantine Art, 191 and 258
respectively.
111
The third and fourth definitions of katholikos (καθολικός) given in Lampe’s
Patristic Dictionary are relevant in this respect. They refer to “the fullness of
Christian doctrine” and “the whole Church”. G. W. H. Lampe, A Patristic Greek
Lexicon (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1961), 690.
112
Robert Hillenbrand, Islamic Art and Architecture (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1999), 21-23.
Heavens”, insofar as she contained the uncontainable One, who encompasses

the cosmos, within her womb.113 The rest of the church, the walls inside
the altar, the icon screen and walls of the nave would depict scenes from
the Old and New Testaments and the saints, who are considered immediate
participants in the grace of Christ, in states of dispassion. In some cases,
these representations would be placed on the façades and other external
walls of churches also, as made famous by the painted monasteries of
Moldavia,114 where Christ, the Mother of God, and the saints are made
visible to all who pass by. This is antithetical to Gothic architecture that
sprang up in the medieval West, which demarcated sharply between the
profane or demonic, exemplified by grotesques and gargoyles adorning the
external walls of cathedrals, 115 and the sacred which was represented
within them. In fact, Constantinople was replete with images of saints and
Christian images in the main streets of the city, and in the eighth century
this Christianisation of public space was given a formal mandate, with the
seventh ecumenical council in 787 declaring that
the revered and holy images, whether painted or made of mosaic or other
suitable material, are to be exposed in the holy churches of God, on sacred
instruments and vestments, on walls and panels, in houses and by public
ways (οἴκοις τε καὶ ὁδοῖς)…116
To mention just a few of these images, an icon of the Pantokrator adorned

the Chalke or Bronze gate, the entrance to the imperial palace,117 and the
walls and many gates to the city were marked by Christian images
113
John Anthony McGuckin, The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to its
History, Doctrine, and Spiritual Culture (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008),
222.
114
D. J. Deletant, “Some Aspects of the Byzantine Tradition in the Rumanian
Principalities”, The Slavonic and Eastern Europe Review 59:1 (1981): 1-14, esp. 5-
6.
115
Thomas E. A. Dale, “The Monstrous”, in A Companion to Medieval Art:
Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 253-73, esp. 255-57.
116
“Second council of Nicaea—787”, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 135-
37.
117
This was destroyed by the iconoclasts in either 726 or 730. Leslie Brubaker,
“Icons and Iconomachy”, in A Companion to Byzantium, ed. Liz James (Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 323-37, esp. 328-29.
functioning as apotropaia.118 For instance, when the Avars invaded in 626

AD, the Patriarch Sergius, to whom defence of the city was entrusted
whilst the emperor Heraclius was on campaign, each day made a circuit of
the land walls whilst holding the icon of the Mother of God Hodegitria—
and it was to her that the protection against the Avars was ascribed.119
Now that I mention the saints, it is important to outline the correlation

between them and the image of the Pantokrator in Byzantine churches: the
latter gives the blessing of peace, and the former, insofar as they have
interiorised the peace of Christ by grace and act as intercessors between
the Lord and us, also give the same blessing. In the various Orthodox
services, the celebrant often imitates this gesture, proclaiming the Lord’s
words “Peace be with you”, meaning that the ecclesial space, art, and
worship are all geared towards generating peace within the congregation—
a peace that is befitting to God’s presence amongst us, and thus to our
well-being. In Byzantium, as well as in Orthodox churches today, the
ecclesial space is an ordered cosmos with Christ as its Master and goal.
It has been argued that Constantinople, just like any other ancient or
medieval city, was an “archetectonic [sic] metaphor of eternal order and
harmony, peace, justice and life”.120 The emperor was also “the imitator of
the cosmos”, 121 and the imperial presence in no less than ten liturgies
celebrated within the Great Palace (albeit officiated by the patriarch), nine
ceremonies that began at the palace and culminated with the liturgy in
Hagia Sophia, and seventeen processions that culminated in various urban
churches, 122 underscores the fact that the emperor construed himself as
integral to the functioning of this city as an image of the cosmos. But, as
we mentioned above, the emperor was also subordinate to Christ the
Pantokrator, and in the absence of the emperor after the conquest of the
city, churches influenced by the legacy of Byzantium continued to
function in the same way: as recapitulations of the Christian vision of an
ordered cosmos mastered by Christ, with the saints as intercessors, and
118
Ernst Kitzinger, “The Cult of Images in the Age Before Iconoclasm”,
Dumbarton Oaks Papers 8 (1954): 83-150, esp. 118.
119
Bissera V. Pentcheva, Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium
(Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 57.
120
Miller, Imperial Constantinople, v.
121
Miller, Imperial Constantinople, 5.
122
Carolyn L. Connor, Saints and Spectacle: Byzantine Mosaics in their Cultural
Setting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 106.
with participation in the Lord—mediated through the existential condition

of peace—as the aspiration of the worshipping community inhabiting the
city.
In Byzantium, as in Western Christendom and amongst Oriental

Christians, the recapitulation of the cosmos within the ecclesial space
spilled out into the thoroughfares of almost each and every city,123 village,
and town, with liturgical processions and litanies undertaken around and in
between churches and other important shrines constituting a main
expression of the public devotion of a city’s inhabitants. We know from
the tenth century Book of Ceremonies that in Constantinople everyone had
a part to play in the processions—even the circus factions! 124 —so that
prayers to God the Trinity revealed by the Son and his saints resonated in
the streets. For all the dastardly things that we know took place in the
Middle Ages—symptoms of our fallen humanity—nevertheless, thus was
the character of Christian cities, replete with symbols, acts and gestures
that not only reminded their inhabitants that Christ is Master and the
source of their well-being as salvation, but, if we are to take the meaning
of the word symbol as an existential bridge into consideration, facilitated
participation in Christ and his salvific kingdom. On a micro scale, such are
the traditional churches today.
Concluding Remarks
At the beginning of this chapter I asserted that ancient, medieval, and early
modern persons wanted to be closer to nature and the cosmos because they
perceived the sacred as manifested through them. This is reflected in
ancient and later Christian cities. In the Byzantine churches in Constantinople
(and beyond) that I addressed above, the whole cosmos is considered as
symbolically recapitulated into the cross-in-square or octagonal design,
capped with domes that signify the firmament. The Pantokrator, the image
of Christ giving the blessing of peace, is one amongst many images that
123
For the Orthodox this is typified at the end of the liturgy, just before the
dismissal, when the priest exhorts the faithful with the following words—ἐν εἰρήνη
προέλθωμεν—meaning “let us go forth in peace”, which can be interpreted as the
faithful being encouraged to take the existential state of peace, received in the
Church, with them into the world. The Divine Liturgy of our Father among the
Saints, John Chrysostom (Sydney: St. Andrew’s Orthodox Press, 2005), 104. I
thank Protopresbyter Dr Doru Costache for this nuance.
124
Dagron, Emperor and Priest, 91.
filled the churches within the city of Constantinople, but the fact that he
marked the underside of the dome indicated, for the Byzantines, that
Christ is the Master of all. The saints that adorned the inside of these
churches and the streets of the city, who are acclimatised to Christ’s divine
life by his grace, are depicted as serene, dispassionate, and also giving the
blessing of peace. As homines religiosi in Christ, attending church was a
regular activity for the Byzantines, both in Constantinople and in the many
cities throughout the empire. As such the constant exposure of the
Byzantines to sacred images, bolstered by hymns that praised these figures
in a spirit of prayer, would undoubtedly have had a lasting effect.
It was remarked to me once that the long duration of the Byzantine

empire represented a growing incarnational mentality, and that this is
reflected in Byzantine architecture. The grand designs of buildings like
Hagia Sophia, make way, in the middle and late Byzantine periods, for
smaller, more intimate structures. This occurred not for lack of funds, nor
for lack of architectural ingenuity, for these churches are also stylistically
intricate. The Byzantines simply wanted to be in closer proximity to Christ
and the saints depicted on the walls of their churches; they wanted to be
part of the community of saints. 125 I have also been taught that the
Byzantine fascination with holiness reached such heights in the last
decades of the empire, as indicated by the phenomenon of hesychasm—
the silence or stillness practised by monastics, dignitaries, and laypersons
alike—that part of the reason the empire fell to the Ottomans in 1453 was
because many of its inhabitants spurned worldly concerns. 126 It is not
insignificant that this later period saw the greatest flowering of artistic
representations of saints who, by abiding in Christ, transcend the world.
That the silence, stillness, and peace revered in the Byzantine world—
and, paradoxically, by many in a capital city like Constantinople—leads to
well-being should be taken as a matter of fact. From a Christian point of
view, this well-being is augmented by the grace of the Trinitarian God,
whom the Byzantines worshipped and who was manifested in the saints,
many of whom were “produced” precisely by the ecclesial framework,
with its manifold symbols, promoted by the Byzantines. I believe the fact
that modern persons in the public or civic sphere are not exposed to these
existentially significant symbols—which have been relegated more or less
125
I thank Professor Vrasidas Karalis for this nuance.
126
I thank Protopresbyter Dr Doru Costache for this nuance.
to the private sphere of some individual Christian groups127—is problematic

for the modern human being’s well-being. We have already seen that a
complex network of factors has led to the current situation, where in
modern cities the public space is occupied by a-cosmic buildings that
signify commerce and material products. There have also been spikes in
anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, and violence in modern cities, and
although a causal link between the new symbolism of modern cities—such
as advertisements of material products—and these illnesses has not been
demonstrated, nevertheless I believe it is no coincidence that such
disorders are at their highest in an epoch where religiosity, which according to
Mircea Eliade and Karen Armstrong is inherent to humankind’s behaviour, is
marginalised in the public sphere, and economic/materialistic forces reign
supreme.
More problematic is the dismantling of Christianity in the public space,

especially from a Christian point of view that promotes Christ as
disclosing the true God and the path towards well-being—“I came that
they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). I stated above
that it has been asserted that by 2050 seventy per-cent of the world’s
population will live in cities. As such, it is imperative to address the
problems faced by modern people in cities, but how can this be done
concretely from a Christian perspective? Is it reasonable to believe that
modern society can revert to Christendom: that modern governments will
reinstitute the public worship of Christ and the veneration of his saints in
the cityscape? Certainly not in the West: although the nations of the
Balkans and Russia might be an exception, since Orthodox Christianity
has seen a resurgence in the public arena in many cities in these countries,
leading to the construction of churches in cities and towns that will
inevitably remind people of Christ and his saints.128 In the West, the only
remedy might be for Christians to do a better job in publicly promoting
their views based on certain common denominators that, unfortunately, not
all Christians share: namely, the active promotion of Christianity through
traditional symbols and images that can be found in most Orthodox,
Catholic, and even High Protestant churches. This might constitute a
127
Churches nevertheless do impact the public space by virtue of their external
symbols (crosses, etc.), but these are often overshadowed by the kinds of symbols
that we saw above that were intrinsic to modern cities.
128
Of course, the presence of churches and Christian symbolism in a city does not
assure well-being: one needs to be consciously aware of the functions of these
symbols in order for them to do any good.
challenge for some Protestant denominations—namely Evangelical and

charismatic groups—who tenaciously adhere to the an-iconic (and in many
cases, iconoclastic) injunctions of the Reformation which, to an extent,
contributed to the removal of Christian symbols from the public space.129
But, in light of what I demonstrate above—that those of us who are not
saints can be helped by symbols and images in order to contemplate God
and participate in him—then these denominations could learn much from
the Orthodox, Catholics and High Protestants who still use images and
symbols.
I believe that this is especially the case in relation to the Orthodox

Church, which, in its iconography, depicts the saints in a state of
dispassion and peace—the outcome of their strenuous asceticism and the
gift of grace—not to mention the Lord himself as Master of all, something
that we all need to be reminded of. Certainly I would not expect images of
the Pantokrator to adorn each and every Christian façade and interior. But
in a public arena—in cities—bombarded by images that exacerbate the
passions and contradict the Christian way of life, it would benefit us to be
constantly reminded, through images of Christ and his saints, that Christ’s
peace, given to the saints, is always available; that eternal life in Christ is
possible, and that it is only in him that we can experience permanent well-
being.
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Religious Symbolism and Well-Being in Christian Constantinople and The Crisis of The Modern City

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Well-being, Personal

Wholeness and the

Doru Costache, Darren Cronshaw

Edited by Doru Costache, Darren Cronshaw and James R. Harrison

This book first published 2017

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Copyright © 2017 by Doru Costache, Darren Cronshaw,

ISBN (10): 1-4438-9858-9

List of Tables and Figures ........................................................................ viii

Part One: Diagnosing Well-being in the Body Politic

Chapter One ................................................................................................. 2

Part Two: Wholeness in a Fractured World: Theological Perspectives

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 32

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 55

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 88

Part Three: When the Social Fabric Unravels: Gathering up the

Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 110

Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 132

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 154

Part Four: The Disintegration of Personal Wholeness: Pathways Back

Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 184

Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 209

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 241

Part Five: Personal Wholeness, the Leader and Their Community:

Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 266

Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 297

Part Six: The University, City and Well-being: Trajectories from

Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 324

Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 355

Contributors ............................................................................................. 372

THE UNIVERSITY, CITY AND WELL-BEING:

RELIGIOUS SYMBOLISM AND WELL-BEING

Ancient and medieval cities were characterised by a symbolic culture that

In the worldview of ancient and medieval societies, proximity to the

cosmicise the space that they occupied in such a way as to facilitate

Contemporary environmental management and urban planning strategies

Admittedly, I could have assessed many other cities in the medieval

Moreover, since the inhabitants of Constantinople prioritised participation

Of the three opinions, Eliade’s diverges from Miller’s and Armstrong’s:

Beyond these aspects, the cosmicisation process gave architectonic and

symbols-within-cities facilitated an existential participation in the realities

Moreover, these symbols were the outcome of a religious way of living

Christian Approaches to Cities

God” (Revelation 21:1-2), then the Christian City is almost a misnomer.

live in their respective countries, but only as resident aliens; they

The first reason is that the immediate participation in the life of

saints. The saints have no need of a symbolic culture to facilitate their

At the beginning of their respective journeys, these saints needed to

Whether or not the extravagances that resulted from the Constantinian

The Modern City

architecture of ancient and medieval cities. As opposed to the former,

… the size of the amygdala [known to regulate the assessments of threat

Without detracting from the groundbreaking work of these professionals,

advertisements of various businesses—i.e. the new, materialistic symbols

Next, we shall see that, in Constantinople, the symbolic art and

Religious Symbolism and Well-being in Christian

Like the ancient pagan emperor Augustus, Constantine built a miliareum

What Justinian’s architects managed to accomplish was the recapitulation

Figure 13-1 Holy Wisdom m (Hagia Sophiia), Istanbul (ii.e. Constantino

The originall designation Holy

the “Great Church” of Christ at its centre.69 Robert G. Ousterhout describes