A letter

Dear Father Petroniu,
I have decided to write you a long theoretical and confessional letter, which I think will seriously test your patience. Your letters excel in concision, equilibrium, and clarity - which means they are overly pragmatic, that is to say spiritual! That is why since you deprived me of the numinous quality of your calligraphy I have felt exceedingly melancholic. The calligraphy of each of the letters that you have so kindly sent to me demonstrates genuine preaching values and obvious hesychast features; he who looks at it gains spiritual peace and the instant patience to resume his work! It certainly did me a world of good. The mere contemplation of the shape of your letters, intertwined as if following a chastely undulating, discreet pattern of wisdom, strengthened my innermost self. Seen from a certain perspective, calligraphy is spirit on paper, and only a circumcised heart can lay it down unostentatiously. An ugly handwriting does not entail drawing on paper letters deprived of spirit ; one thing is to write unattractively and another thing to write non-calligraphically. No doubt about it, we can speak about calligraphy even in the instance of asthenic, passionate, nervously or ill-temperedly letters thrown down on a sheet of paper. At any rate, without daring to draw a conclusion, I will maintain that calligraphy is one of the testimonials to a civilization of faith, of the thorough urbanity of a practising Christian. It is a civilization stemming out of the respect of cohabitation, and as we know, the highest and most elevated form of cohabitation is the cohabitation with the Lord -certainly, for those whom the Lord has considered worthy of being His friends. That is why in your case, one can contemplate the politeness of truth, a politeness that is an integral part of the truth.
I keep your letters softly attached with pins to the wall. I already know the content of some of them by heart. Sometimes I re-read them at random. But I look at the calligraphy from the distance all the time, as if it were a painting, a Far Eastern engraving, or the page of a manuscript. If the worst comes to the worst, my eyes automatically glance off the beautiful succession of the long and round characters of your handwriting, which so effortlessly and non-emphatically make up the legible reality of the words. 1 digest your handwriting in an Eucharistic manner, as if it were a medicine.
1 thank you from the bottom of my heart for the promptness with which you have provided the information that 1 requested. It is of great use to me and I am extremely grateful to you. Yesterday, on the feast-day of the Transfiguration of our Lord, Fr Constantin Galeriu ended his sermon by reading aloud to the entire church assembly the passage from your letter prompted by the elevated feelings that I myself experienced, although I was unworthy of it, when I first travelled to Mount Athos. I was already familiar with the text, but when I first read it, it was in a totally different life context. On listening to Fr Galeriu yesterday, I was quite astounded: the similarity between the threefold doxology, i.e., the inside, outside, everywhere of the Divine Palace in Saint Niphon's Vision and the ubiquity of the divine sacred songs that have entered your heart , Most Reverend Father, on the occasion of that intimate feast-day on Mount Athos is utterly amazing; you experienced and recounted exactly what the ascetic Bishop of Constantiana experienced and recounted in his Vision sixteen centuries ago. Are you by any chance aware of this correspondence ? My estimation is that you had not yet had the time to become familiar with the hagiographic text (which was found at Dionisiou Monastery in 1970), as you had but recently arrived on the Holy Mount. Undoubtedly, God granted you a vision too - otherwise from where came the elevated emotion you described with such intense theological fervour and with such remarkable literary talent? 1 dare use your wonderful words to inform you that Rares's tabernacles, covered in frescoes both on the inside and on the outside, are precisely the same kind of materialized sacred songs , but this time iconographically materialized. At any rate, it seems to me that they should be regarded as architectonic and iconographic materializations of a divine and sublime doxology. ( Materiali:ed sacred songs is in fact the way you yourself put it, and these words were also recorded in Fr loanichie Balan's Spiritual Conversations, vol. 2, p. 724).
Although you have delicately warned me between the lines that the correspondences I have signalled to you, quote are but God'ordained patterns of order and manifestations of the concern of Divine Providence for the salvation of humankind, and in your particular case for your native country, Romania , end quote, I have to confess to you that perceiving their semantic substance does not cease to bewilder me! At the same time, Beloved Father, 1 wonder, why should I stifle my bewilderment and especially the strange and tender gratitude that overwhelms me each time I figure out the development and the meanings of these correspondences ? For instance, for years on end I have asked myself what were the real consequences of my trip to the Holy Mount - leaving aside the cultural connotations or the sensational ones, for that matter. Later on (after coming back home) I did not realize any kind of inner significant sense of achievement. Unlike many other enthusiastic pilgrims, I did not feel the irrestible call of Athos, that special call experienced by many of those who succeeded in visiting it at least once. Neither do I feel it at present. I must be spiritually calibrated for the more mellow and less tense monastic settings peculiar to our Romanian monasticism, which I am fond of calling metaphorically rustic monasticism or grasslike monasticism and with which you, Most Reverend Father, have been thoroughly familiar from the time that you took monastic vows in the old country. While the overly steep and sharply-rising slopes of Athonite asceticism have generated in me a kind of spiritual dizziness, the more gently-sloping hills of Vrancea and the incense-perfumed air of the hills of Neamt seem to suit my piety and my passionate nature much better, pointing the way to Heaven more firmly and more ardently. That is why 1 keep praising the redeeming vocation of these regions. While I was on the Holy Mount, my minimal devotion and insufficient compunction were constantly stretched tightly and overly alerted, like chased animals caught unawares. Still, the correspondences did not cease to haunt me. As it always happens, I understand their meanings only in retrospect. I confess that after so many years, the miracle of the "correspondences" and "coincidences' linked both to the initiatic trip to Athos and to the investigation of Rares's mysterious iconography has preserved its intensity and genuineness thoroughly unaltered.
What really amazes me is not the fact that the fusion of my unworthy destiny and your virtuous and respectable life has been God's will. (Should I insist too much on this line of thinking, I would immediately run the risk of deluding myself into believing that I am a chosen and deserving individual - whom God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, has found worthy of such a privilege; it is obvious that if I persevered in this idea, I would but rave on and on and talk nonsense till doomsday! I am quite astonished by the way in which the Lord has always resorted to people, facts and circumstances in order to carry out His divine workings. Let me explain what I mean. My amazement at any sort of correspondence has primarily a modal distinguishing feature; correspondences are but diverse modalities chosen by the Lord so that He may accomplish the divine strategies of His priorities, His tactics to eternize daily occurrences or to historicize eternity - and above all, the simple, unsophisticated, divine originality of the release and fulfilment of providential procedures . Granted, as a close servant of Christ, and just like most of the resident monastics who live their lives on the Holy Mount in perfect accordance with His will, you have a lengthy and substantial spiritual experience that surpasses by far my own spiritual experience. I mean, you are definitely in the habit of speaking intimately with the Lord and with His angels much more frequently and in a much more edifying way than me. I am firmly convinced that to this very day you yourself are astounded at the fact that you came to Darvari in 1994, although nobody had the courtesy of inviting you, and that - out of an entire hagiography that had already been translated - you offered me, of all people, as a gift nothing else but the text of Saint Niphon's Visionl Undoubtedly, God Himself singled you out even at the time of your rapture, when He granted you the gift of feeling (hearing) the ubiquitous materialness of the divine doxology on the feast-day of the Transfiguration of Our Lord - so that you would eventually become the equally divine and modern dispatcher of the startling Paleo-Christian Vision of sixteen centuries ago. By nature, I am the type of Christian who does not ask for signs and miracles. I have been moulded and trained by my spiritual father to mind my own business in matters of faith, and to worry about fulfilling at least some of the requirements set by our Lord in order to obtain the salvation of my soul - as far as I possibly can. And since God Himself encourages us to acknowledge by virtue of certain correspondences the reality of His Second Coming unto power, how could I turn my back on the correspondences that vibrate at every step, as I probe into the depths of the structures and discourse meanings of the iconographic transposition of the fearful precursory Vision I am referring to? That is why these extraordinary temporal synapses, as well as their irreducible meanings so deftly and so originally placed by God at the bottom of a person's spiritual training or of a particular circumstance, have never ceased to have highly invigorating effects on my faith.
As far as I am concerned, merely recalling my short stay at Dionisiou Monastery (twelve years before I discovered the Niphon Source , when I was taken right into the monastic cell of Saint Niphon, Patriarch of Constantinople, the holy namesake of Saint Niphon of Constantiana, by the elderly monk recommended to me by you, and inside which I remained for a few long minutes without understanding anything at the time, being in a state of spiritual blindness and ignorance, gives me wings and always chases away the despondency and burdens of my everyday life. The only thing that still vividly persists in my mind is the slim semi-darkness in Saint Niphon's cell, sharply contrasting with the immense, cosmic vastness of the enormous horizon, which could be seen through the small cell-window, but which could not actually be contained by the small glass surface of the window looking like a portable television set, or rather like the porthole of a lilliputian spaceship. Why, I wonder, did that monk show me the monastic cell of Saint Niphon the Patriarch, and why did he lead me in such a great hurry to the votive fresco of the church of the monastery, in which Petru Rares Voivode and his wife, Elena, were portrayed as celebrated founders of the Holy Mount? Why did he show all that to me then, at a time when my cultural interests were axiologically revolving around altogether another area? Maybe all that did happen in order to keep me warm now, when I am all by myself with my own investigations and findings hanging like so many millstones around my neck!
Beloved Reverend Father, I would like to ask you to kindly help me clarify a misunderstanding: I think that some of my requests might have given you the impression that I was irresponsibly poking my nose into spiritual mysteries that should not have been approached in such a worldly manner of investigation - since they exceed by far my miserable spiritual condition. You have drawn my attention to the fact that the topoi about which I was asking further clarifications are essentially spiritual matters that should not be regarded as physical or material spaces; above all, it is their hundred per cent spiritual identity that should not be investigated in such a physical or corporeal manner. No doubt about it, 1 entirely share your standpoint, which is precisely the standpoint of Orthodox dogmatic theology. The only caveat is that my investigations are not at all related to the unfathomable mystery of these spiritual topographies, but are connected with the way in which they were equated symbolically by the iconographers of Northern Moldavian holy edifices - as 1 said previously, when I was referring to correspondences between things. We should visualize with emotion the fact that 500 years ago, they had before their very eyes the same text that we have today, the text of Saint Niphon's Vision, and the selfsame description of the transcendental Divine Palace . Again, as 1 mentioned earlier, their extraordinary intention, which fully demonstrates its worldwide uniqueness to this very day, was to materialize the wholeness and doxological ubiquity of the Eucharistic edifice of the Heavenly Kingdom in the Vision by the agency of a tabernacle. That is why each compartment, each section of the tabernacle, along with its adjacent iconography, was deliberately meant to incarnate symbolically the spaces or topoi of the Divine Palace that Saint Niphon had perceived in his Vision.
Since a careful study of the evolution of the iconography of the tabernacles clearly demonstrates the founders' effort to determine iconographically the true axiological position of Heaven as compared to the Kingdom, 1, who am following their traces, cannot be indifferent to certain obscurities or ambiguities in the referential text -which is why I dared ask your opinion about this more or less apparent lack of outline of some passages in the Vision. After you receive the final version of my study (yesterday 1 finally managed to finish it, after working on it for ages), you will be amazed at realizing that the paradisiacal topos has been gradually taken out of the symbolic area of the Heavenly Kingdom on the basis of certain iconographic proofs (!). May I remind you that in the Vision, Heaven is mentioned only twice, and each time its ambience is bestowed as a reward on a category of people who sinned or who were involved in certain shady circumstances, but who were absolved or redeemed on account of the compensatory presence of some major virtue in them. Firstly, there were those who succumbed to anger in the world , and secondly, idol-worshippers who did not have the chance to know Christ's laws and commandments, but who kept or observed them by nature, listening to their own conscience . At Probota, which is where the iconographic programme was initiated, Heaven was featured by the Last Judgement, in the corridor before the pronaos. Later on, at Humor, at Baia, and at Moldovita, Heaven was removed (together with the Judgement) to the exonarthex, i.e., neither inside, nor outside - and finally at Voronet, which was by far the definitive solution of the matter, Heaven was portrayed on the outside wall, more precisely on the west facade of the church. It would seem that the metropolitan-iconographer Grigorie Rosca (who in my opinion was the potential author of the iconographic programme, whereas Petru Rares was the founder of the edifice) was not at peace with himself until he situated Heaven in its right place! The seriousness and doctrinal fidelity of these two great, unparalleled practising Christians can be discerned all over the architectonic and iconographic structure. The consequence of this final iconographic permutation was extremely important: when Heaven was placed outside the spiritual topos of the Kingdom, as a spiritual edifice "towed by the Divine Palace in the Vision, the location of the tabernacle was automatically removed to an Edenic site - i.e., symbolically speaking, the pilgrim who stands by the tabernacle should consider himself in Heaven from thence on. In turn, each of Rares's tabernacles must be contemplated as an image of the Kingdom on the threshold of Heaven and the site of the edifices as a paradisiacal dislocation. Indeed, the iconography should have explicitly ascertained that Heaven is not situated in the Kingdom (i.e., in the tabernacle), but that one enters the Kingdom only through Heaven, just as heading for the Kingdom, the righteous led by the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, who are featured in the Last Judgement, get ready to ensure their entrance into the Kingdom through Heaven. The impact and energy of the theological emotion induced by Heaven (hypostatized as a site, as the ambience of the tabernacle), make the surroundings look like accommodating spaces of a genuine theophany of the Kingdom; in other words, one should actually feel that the Kingdom is drawing near . From this may derive the holy amazement that suddenly seizes all those who come face to face with any of the voivode's admirable tabernacles!
I cannot help admitting that the discovery of the Vision, an indubitable source of the iconography of the Last Judgement, was also confirmed by a series of comparisons and literal interpretations of the relationships between the text and the image. I realized that in spite of their intransitive status, the iconographers did not hesitate to transcribe the extramundane information textually . I repeat, iconographically speaking, it was only thus that I succeeded in identifying the Vision as the biblical source of the Last Judgement and of Rares's entire iconography. By regarding the text of the Vision as a sacred text, the founders avoided commenting on it, interpreting it in any way, or adding their own ideas to the ideas in it. Beloved Reverend Father, will you kindly follow the evidence of just one of my personal reactions to the Vis/on? For years on end, 1 have been almost hypnotized by the iconographic shape of the River of Fire. For me as an artist, it is both expressive and semantically ambiguous, and as such I have always contemplated its viscous-reddish winding from a professional perspective. I have never theologized upon its disconcerting shape. My masters have trained me not to make an idol out of an image, but on the contrary, no matter how prestigious and sublime the image might be, to approach it in an amicable manner, to rub elbows with it - so to speak) as if it were a bosom friend of mine. Personally, I would have never drawn such a shape with my own hand, particularly in a bidimensional homogeneous context, lest I should distort the solemn alignment of the horizontal registers in a biased way. As a modern painter, I have not been able to understand my colleague (if I may make so bold as to call him that) of 500 years ago. Artistically speaking, what could have determined him to contrive such a deviated morphology? I formally perceived the image of the River of Fire as a river shaped like the trunk of an elephant, risen upwards; thus, as it is shown in the mandorla of the Second Coining, the springing of the river from under the feet of the Lord seems to be equally an absorption of the fire in the spot from where it sprang. I had to read the Vision in order to understand the matter once and for all.
Although other scriptural sources also mention the purifying River of Fire more or less minutely, only Saint Niphon's Vision provides a precise indication - which should be neither 'spiritualized' , nor commented on, nor ignored - according to which the river gushes out/will gush out of the East and is impetuously heading towards the West, that is to say towards the west facade of the Last Judgement, which is the direction from which we are looking at it. Therefore, the iconographers placed the river in perspective, which explains why it is so thin and very far away, in the East, right in the spot where it springs from under Christ's feet, and why it becomes larger and wider as it comes near us, the onlookers, who are situated in the twilight zone of the old world. That being the case, the blood-red shape of the river, which almost secantly intersects all the horizontal registers of the fresco from top to bottom, was not an aesthetic original element of the kind that we, today's painters, take the liberty to use, but the literal transposition of certain spatial coordinates. At this point I became firmly convinced that what the medieval painter showed in the iconography of the edifice was exactly what Saint Niphon had seen in his Vision, and that the Vision constituted the key to decoding the iconography of Rares's tabernacles. Subsequently, as if by sheer magic, I found additional proofs that significantly increased in number. May I reiterate the fact that only an artist can visually perceive the atypical character of the shape of a river, as well as the degree of aesthetic discomfort which its bizarre winding displays all over the wall of the edifice. To put it more bluntly, one does not paint like that, aesthetically speaking! - for indeed, it is not an 'aesthetic emotion of a painting that lies at the origin of this drawing, but a theological emotion, always generated by literal transcriptions from one artistic code into another - in our case, from the language of rapture" into the "language of the icon".
Beloved Father, in my opinion, one of the great mistakes that modern mentality makes each time it is confronted with medieval religious expression is attributing the stereotypes of hermeneutic hyperintellectualness to it, a characteristic of modern investigation. In its turn, the ecclesiastical perspective backs up cautiously, dreading the fact that it might violate the spiritual delicacy of extramundane events by the incisiveness of rational objective reasoning. Modern man actually refuses to think like medieval man and adopt the latter's genuine capacity to refer to a sacred vision; yet that does not mean that medieval man's sight, hearing or reasoning were uncultivated or agnostic. Just like any authentic Christian believer, medieval man's sight, hearing and reasoning - regardless of the historical period he lived in - were doctrinal by nature (but not indoctrinated!); he was totally ignorant of the classification of men of ideas into free and dogmatic . For medieval man, just like for any authentic believer, thoroughly identifying himself with the Christian doctrine and leading an altogether veritable Orthodox life meant being definitively and entirely free. Both for medieval man and for any genuine Christian believer, there is no true freedom outside the Christian doctrine because doctrinal congruity functions as an a priori judgement and is obviously as beneficial as the education that one receives during one's first years of life!
Getting back to the matter at hand, on account of the fact that medieval man did not perceive the world discontinuously, the medieval iconographer was never afraid of prejudicing the spiritual status of a scriptural text in any way by representing or materializing it. On the contrary, by virtue of the fact that he functioned ironically, in a theanthropic way - in God's image and according to His likeness - the medieval iconographer cherished the hope that he could amplify the significance of the spiritual event that he represented by substantially increasing its mystery and spiritual effects. When he painted die River of Fire in an evidently concrete and consistent manner, he did not diminish the essentially spiritual nature of the purifying spiritual fire at all. The same applies to me: wishing to find out the correct relationships between the chambers of the "Divine Palace' as they are described in the Vision, I paint them solely with a view to clarifying their spiritual meaning, that is to say with a view to reproducing their mystery and spiritual nature more forcefully and more intensely.
Such being the case, we realize that from here derives the divine capacity of icons to materialize the. most unfathomable mysteries. In an absolutely miraculous manner, the iconographer represents diem without exhausting their mystery in the very least; what is also extraordinary is the fact that the ineffableness of the divine mystery also lends itself to visual symbolization. Do those who paint Christ, I wonder, paint Him after diey have fully and essentially known Him?! The Lord and His saints concede to be painted in an icon even if the painter does not match their spiritual height. Undoubtedly, a believer's heart knows the Lord a little bit and by opening up to Him, receives Him in it in order to portray His image, but that does not mean that he shares His nature and spiritual height. The portrait of an ordinary human being is based on the ontological congruity between the painter and the model, on their identical status before God. The more likely the painter and the model are by nature, the more accurately and plausibly will the former represent the latter! But when it comes to icons, the identification between the divine model and the painter is achieved only through grace. In other words, it is through grace that I manage to symbolize the divine model, rendering His physical features by means of the system of causalities and determinism of our spatial and temporal coordinates. The most serious error would be to avoid painting Him on account of the fact that He has a divine spiritual essence. Of course, there is a great difference between the iconographic act, i.e., between the symbolic rendition of the spiritual phenomenon, and my representation of it within the reference system of this world. The transcendental details that Saint Niphon provided are not at all the effects of his imagination, but a divine iconographic kenosis; they are forms of this world, divine portraits that the Heavenly Father Himself allows to be painted after having rendered them capable of featuring Him iconically. In portraying the image of the Lord, the painter reproduces graphically the way in which the Lord would paint Himself. That is why it is nonsensical to picture Heaven or the Kingdom of Heaven outside the forms that Heaven or the Kingdom itself consider appropriate for the purpose. Lastly, that is also the reason why the iconographers of the tabernacles follow the text of the Vis/on so closely: because the images in the Vision were not Saint Niphon's, but God's own images. God was the One who transcribed them into our human terms. The narrative elements that Saint Niphon could no longer put into words - as his disciple, the hagiographer, informs us - were not missing from the Vision on account of a sudden, unexpected narrative blockage on the part of the saint (who from the time that his rapture began until it came to an end declared that he was incapable of expressing it properly), but by virtue of God's refusal to continue to grant the respective divine events permission to circulate freely from the divine realm to the human realm, i.e., to man's lexical and syntactic devices. The things that Saint Niphon saw but could not express had to remain unutterable. Their linguistic representation in notions or concepts was no longer useful - neither for the salvation of humankind, nor for the other providential reasons that had prompted the Vision.
All these things are not at all my invention, but the fruit of vivid, concrete and absolutely truthful experiences that I myself had - as a painter of icons. The biggest mistake (and the greatest sin!) is to imagine Christ on your own. Unless you have another icon as a model, painting an icon of Christ should be an activity carried out as if by itself; an icon of Christ should be allowed to paint itself! Yet, this cannot be done without your implicit consent, outside yourself, in the absence of that 'little votive-light inside your heart. It is this flame that you should kindle inside your heart in order to make it manifest: this is the only way in which you can make use of traditional icons, which persist in your memory like the breadcrumbs dropped by Hansel and Gretel. I do not think that the heart can have unmediated access to the divine physiognomy of Christ; for starters, the Holy Tradition should act as a mediator. What is certain is the fact that the more deeply Christ will abide in your heart prior to the iconographic act proper, the less you shall grope about. You do know that He is inside your innermost being, you do know that you have been found worthy of making room for Him so that He Himself shall paint the icon, you do know that when you think of Him alone or when it is only Him that you see in your loved one, in your profession, in your friends, in your humblest daily deeds, in your talent, in your most secret hopes, in your little ones; only then will He portray Himself of His own will. Above all, He loves you more than you love yourself and constantly thinks of you more than you think of yourself. Indeed, that which we achieve together with the Lord is of an exclusively personal nature. The iconographic act is not susceptible to the impure relationship between subject and object, which governs the metaphysical syntax of a painting. It is a hundred per cent subject/subject relationship, and His Image on the wooden icon folds them up in a transparent manner: the icon reproduces the way in which the Lord has painted His Image inside the painter's heart and mind and the degree to which He has allowed the painter to portray His Image. Consequently, the Lord paints His Image in the icon if He wants to and if the painter acquiesces to do it. Nothing can be done reluctantly or by force; no iconic undertaking can be accomplished under constraint. Absolute freedom governs icon-painting from beginning to end. If we juxtapose twenty portraits of Christ, we will immediately notice innumerable dissimilarities regarding the proportions of His face and the shapes of His skull: His cranium is sometimes wide, sometimes elongated, round or pointed; His nose is now long, now bottle-shaped, straight or hooked; His eyes are either almond-shaped or prominent, and so on. Yet in spite of everything, these icons miraculously portray Christ Himself, not somebody else. To round it all off, whereas differences are brought about by the unique manner in which each icon-painter gives way to the Lord so that He will paint His own Image, the physiognomical likeness of the icons is granted by the Lord Himself. That is why the Image of Lord Jesus Christ painted in icons will never be a generic image. It will always be personalized by the deified physiognomy of the icon-painter. As Venerable Macarius of Egypt said, God is the Divine Iconographer and man is the model .
Beloved Father, before closing this long letter, I would like to let you in on a significant event, this time an incongruous one, whose meaning I have not been able to decipher to this very day. But the fact is worth looking into.
As soon as I noticed the striking resemblance between the text of the Vision and the great fresco of the Last Judgement at Voronet, I started analysing the statements of the prestigious scholar Paul Henry (the only researcher who wrote down the name of each saint portrayed in the metopes of all religious edifices) in order to find out whether or not Saint Niphon was among them. To my great satisfaction, the French scholar actually discovered Saint Niphon's name on the buttress situated on the right side of the Judgemental Voronet, but he did not thoroughly investigate the significance of this iconic presence, which is quite visible since it is placed in such a noticeable spot. The mural frescoes depicting Saint Gregory the Dialogist, Saint Sylvester, and Righteous Noah - all three of them represented along the same buttress as Saint Niphon, Bishop of Constantiana - are equal in size. To my knowledge, no medievalist has ever mentioned the huge icons of these four saints, which explains why 1 could not find additional information on the matter up until now.
So, I made up my mind to visit the monasteries to look for the mural icon featuring Saint Niphon. No sooner said than done: my wife and I rushed to Humor and started to stare at each square centimetre of each and every fresco in the hope that we would find Saint Niphon's initials. Total failure! Seeing how disappointed we were, one of the female resident monastics suggested that we should go to Voronet and ask Father Paramon (the father confessor of the monastery) about it, because he had a good knowledge of all the facades of the monasteries. She also told us that Father Paramon was so taken up with a correct, rigorous, and responsible inventory of the iconography of Rares's tabernacles that he used to investigate them through a pair of binoculars all day long; that is why he was nicknamed the father who would not part from his binoculars ! We managed to make his acquaintance at 12:00 p.m., when the midnight service came to an end, while he was anointing the nuns. He was short, rather dark-skinned, a little bit bent, and quite a stutterer - just like myself! I whispered my wish into his ear: Could I ask him a few questions about the exterior frescoes of the monastery? His face instantly lit up and a childish-like smile appeared on his face. I briefly explained the matter to him and we quickly made for the buttress, literally running to it! Out of breath, we stopped right in front of the fresco depicting Saint Niphon. To our great surprise, although the saint's face had been completely erased by winds, the inscription bearing his name was preserved intact. The inscription read clearly: "Saint Niphon" - and that's that! Of course, at that time I knew that the other Saint Niphon (Patriarch of Constantinople) had been canonized ten years before the ascension to the throne of Petru Rares, namely in 1517. I asked Father Paramon: Which one of the two saints is featured on the buttress? Without the slightest hesitation, he answered that it was the icon of Saint Niphon, Bishop of Constantiana. Then I asked him what was the exact justification of his statement -since the other Saint Niphon (the Patriarch) had already been canonized when the edifice was being painted and since the inscription under discussion read just that: Saint Niphon . He told me I should not worry, as he was absolutely certain it was the former, and promised me that he would provide all the necessary arguments the following day. Although I insisted on getting the information right away, he declined. We decided to meet at 10:00 a.m. the following day. As soon as I stepped out from the courtyard of the house opposite Voronet (where we had spent the night), I ran into an acquaintance of mine from Bucharest, and we became involved in a rather idiotic conversation whose lofty subject was neither more nor less than deciding who was the most remarkable father confessor in all of Romania! Having wasted almost two whole hours with this non-sense, I realized that I could no longer see Father Paramon because I definitely had to be in Targu Neamt around noon.
Five months later, in early spring, I felt that I could no longer bear the incertitude, that I was getting nowhere and that it was imperative to see 'the father who would not part from his binoculars and talk to him about the inscription. I felt such a strong urge to get to Voronet that although it was snowing rather heavily in Bucarest, I took my wife and my daughter, Anastasia, and we drove to Voronet in the twinkling of an eye, so to speak. We arrived arounnd 3:00 p.m. Snow everywhere. The sky was lighted up, spring was in the air, and a transparent, ineffable beauty seemed to envelop us from all sides. Inside the monastery grounds, there was a penetrating smell of meatballs and other appetizing delicacies... We went up the stairs to the terrace and Reverend Mother Irina welcomed us there. I asked her about the irrestible aromas coming from the refectory; she answered that it had been forty days since Fr Paramon died and that they were getting ready for the special ceremony celebrated for the repose of his soul!!! He had died at 50, struck down by a devastating cancer of the pancreas in just a few months. I was flabbergasted when I heard it. I literally froze in my shoes and felt I had to sit down for a while. The news had left me speechless. I think that my hair, already prematurely grey, turned white in an instant. My hopes of discovering the truth about the inscription were completely shattered.
Fr Paramon's unexpected death forced me to go about gathering the evidence I needed. I could not help wondering why he apparently wished I would attend the special service celebrated forty days after his demise. I still do not why. In the long run, it was confirmed to me that the fresco I was interested in represented the holy hierarch of Constantiana, not the prestigious Patriarch of Constantinople: Petru Rares and Grigorie Rosca had deliberately designed their admirable iconographic programme so that it should include only the saints who had lived before the Schism. That explains why Saint Gregory Palamas, for instance, is missing from the Pantheon of saints portrayed inside or outside the tabernacles. I insist on the fact that the iconographers deliberately confined themselves to portraying exclusively the saints of the Undivided Church and refused to include the saints who were canonized after 1054. It is a peremptory proof of the ecumenical message delivered by Petru Rares and Grigorie Rosca, of their manifest wish to avoid disturbing the delicate ecclesiastical unity which the two sister-Churches had temporarily achieved on account of the Counter Reformation and of the impending Islamic threat. In light of the above, I dare state that the iconography of the tabernacles is also a crucial document of ecclesiastical and ecumenical diplomacy. For ourselves, who are Eastern Christians - the one and only heirs of die Tradition of the Undivided Church - this fact acquires an immense importance.
Later on, starting at Probota, I began to pay my informers . Young restorers from all over the country, who were usually poorly paid, were told that I had offered one million lei for each Niphon spotted in any of Rares's edifices. In a short time, I found out that they had discovered his portrait everywhere, and my informers received the promised million only after handing me over the photographs of the respective frescoes. For instance, while at Probota and Humor Saint Niphon's portrait is located in the diakonikon, at Moldovita it is on one of the tympanums in the sanctuary. It is noteworthy that Saint Niphon's name was not mentioned in the frescoes of the edifices founded by Stephen the Great, nor in the iconographies conceived subsequent to the reign of Petru Rares - which demonstrates that Saint Niphon's fame spread only due to Rares and Rosca, whom God had entrusted with the task of updating the hagiography of the saint. Saint Niphon's portrait appears at Voronet once again, on the outside wall, on the left apse of the Eternal Banquet - if I remember correctly. You see, if I paid handsomely I obtained what I was after! Although I usually grumble about the fact that in today's era only money talks, this time I got my money's worth!
At the incipient stages of my research and for some time after that, I did not realize that, regarded as an architectonic and iconographic whole, Rares's tabernacles had Saint Niphon's Vision as a model. At the beginning, I identified them in a limited manner, only as indisputable scriptural sources of the Last Judgement. Subsequently, I spotted the iconography of the apses and finally I managed to single out the Eternal Banquet/the Great Celestial Feast as the general theme of the iconography of the apses - starting from the straps of angels and from the wall of angelic powers surrounding both the edifice in the Vision and the tabernacle itself. Before reading the Vision carefully, I had believed that the friezes with seraphs and cherubs, as well as all the angelic processions, be they vertical or horizontal, which surround the edifice on the outside, were exclusively ornamental elements meant to adorn the processions on the apses with symbolic pomp, making them look as attractive as possible. It was only after I had read the Vision that I realized they "illustrated the wall of angels, which protects and glorifies the Great Celestial Feast. I also realized that the obsession of the divine punishment and the overrating of the penal context of the Last Judgement had hypnotized Christianity to such a degree that terrified by it, almost all iconographers focused exclusively on it, ignoring the Great Celestial Feast, and particularly the fact that the Vision of the Dread Judgement was a holy description made up of two indivisible, yet distinct, parts.
Finally, thanks to several remarkable correspondences', I managed to perceive all of a sudden, as if I had been struck by lightning, the astounding formal and functional congruity between the Divine Palace and Rares's tabernacles, as well as the wordly character of their doxological composition! It was as clear as crystal that in the beginning was the Vision, that the Vision became flesh', that it became an incarnation of the architecture and iconography of the tabernacle, and that just like the other original redemptory motivations, the incarnation had an ecumenical motivation.
I daresay that the present resuscitation of the Vision and, through it, the revival of the complex eschatological meanings prophesied by the voivode's tabernacles have an apocalyptic and revelatory purpose: to give us the impulse to perceive ecumenism through the magnifying glass offered to us by the eschatological perspective. In today's era, we are too easily satisfied with the Balamand ecumenical formula: the union of the two Churches shall be done in the Spirit and in Truth" - an astutely formulated general statement lacking in any formal landmark indicative of the ensuing ecclesiastical revival of ecumenism. The great importance of the ecumenical tabernacles raised by Petru Rares (they may very well lead to the voivode's canonization in the near future!) lies in providing the entire Christian world of our day (obviously divided) with a formal model of the long-lost ecumenism of the Undivided Church. It was with this goal in mind that the two medieval iconographers devised their iconographic programme. That being the case, I wrote a newspaper article suggesting that the meeting between His Holiness Pope John Paul II and His Beatitude Patriarch Teoctist should take place at Voronet, right in front of the icon of the Last Judgement. I wonder, Beloved Reverend Father, what would have been the Pope's reaction if he had seen his two predecessors-Gregory the Dialogist and Sylvester - portrayed as witnesses to the Dread Judgement in one of the frescoes of an Eastern Orthodox religious edifice? What do you think about it? I bet that neither His Holiness the Pope, nor our Patriarch have been informed as yet about the outstanding ecumenical meanings hidden in the shade of the fir-trees of Voronet... I foresee a glorious future for these tabernacles, which - by the will of God - shall eventually represent the ecumenical landmarks of a worldwide ecclesiastical unity. Should our compatriots be aware of the value of this unparalleled patrimony, no one would leave the country anymore. Our Church should immediately update and refine the discourse of the guides of these divine edifices; preserving them intact is a matter of the greatest urgency. At the present time, with very few exceptions, most of the holy edifices have been thoroughly neglected, both literally and figuratively, and the general public has been insufficiently informed about their real conceptual and religious value. What a pity that the guides limit their discourse to a bureaucratical and rather tedious enumeration of the religious themes displayed in the frescoes, to which they add severe reprimands regarding the moral standards of the visitors! Let us remember the fact that Petru Rares himself destined these edifices as protocol meeting places and that they were never left at the discretion of the people . In order to understand the erroneous way in which they are perceived nowadays, we should completely change our outlook on the aspect and class of a royal ambience. Both Stephen the Great and Petru Rares, like all the other members of Petru Musat's family, had a strong European conscience; we may safely say that they were European to their fingertips! They did behave like Gothic rulers, and whatever they accomplished was done solely on behalf of the Undivided Church; that also explains the elevated ecclesiastical conscience which motivated their heroic deeds. They were both patriotic and cosmopolitan. As historians claim, we should note that German was one of the diplomatic languages Petru Rares mastered and that his political aspiration was to affiliate Moldavia to the German Empire, so that by integrating it into the NATO of the time, he should protect it from the Islamic threat. The voivodes who belonged to the golden generation of Petru Musat's dynasty (as Nicolae lorga called them) were not at all as they were portrayed in the chauvinistic movies implemented by Ceausescu's regime: voivodes looking like shepherds, dressed in fleecy mantles, wandering about the cold chambers of lugubrious autochtonous castles situated in the woodsy end of the continent. I ask you, how could anyone possibly believe that Petru Rares Voivode, who in the medieval epoch was regarded as a mere fish merchant, and who was a bastard on top of everything, actually founded a universal patrimony of such great value and originality in such a cultivated manner and with such spiritual finesse? As matters stand, the inertia of our intelligentsia involuntarily supports the apathy of the ecclesiastical world. Romania is striving to get rid of the anonymous destiny forced on us by the atheism of Ceausescu's golden age , seeking prosperity precisely where it shouldn't. Romania is keen on making a pretty penny from tourism, by flaunting the vampirism of poor Vlad Tepes Voivode (the Impaler), a.k.a. Dracula! I bet my bottom dollar that no single beneficiary of this foul commercial recipe knows that Stephen the Great, the greatest athlete of the Christian world of the 15th century , as His Holiness Pope John Paul II has called him - was placed on the throne by none other than Vlad Jepes himself! Has anyone ever seen a vampire place a saint on the throne?

With all my gratitude and deep filial affection,
Yours respectfully,

Sorin Dumitrescu

(Published in „The Ecumenical Tabernacles of Petru Rares

Voivode And Their Celestial Model”, Anastasia Publishing House,

Bucharest 2004)