Beauty is often expressed by symmetry or balanced proportions. Musical compositions and graphic art usually strive for some measure of symmetry, in order to appeal to our esthetic tastes. They provide us with a sense of harmony, stability and peace—even a sense of sanity, within an often chaotic and crazy world. Major theological themes do the same.
The New Testament depicts Christ’s saving work by stressing its symmetrical movement. “No one has ascended into heaven,” Jesus declares,” but He who descended from heaven, the Son of Man” (John 3:13). The apostle Paul elaborates on this imagery in the sublime “christological hymn” of Philippians 2:5-11. He who from all eternity is “equal” with God the Father, who bears the divine “form” or essence of God, descends through His incarnation to take upon Himself the “form” of a man, the essence or nature of created humanity. Because of His humble obedience, sealed by His death on the Cross, the Father “highly exalts” Him, and reveals Him, in the presence of all of creation, to be “Kyrios,” both Lord and God.
A similar symmetry characterizes the whole of salvation history. Creation and the people of Israel are balanced and fulfilled by a new creation of the “Israel of God,” the Church (Gal 6:16). And the pivot or fulcrum that achieves and maintains that balance is the coming in the flesh of the Son of God.
We find this kind of symmetry as well in iconography, perhaps nowhere more strikingly than in certain images of Christ and His holy Mother. The iconostasis or icon screen of any Orthodox church invariably includes, on the left side of the Royal Doors as viewed by the worshiper, an image of Mary, the Mother of God, holding her divine Son. In the most typical images, He is enthroned upon her, as she offers Him to the faithful and to the world. She embraces her Son with tender affection. Yet at the same time her regard is directed outward, toward the congregation and toward eternity. This child she has borne will suffer and die, in order to open the way that leads both her and us to life in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Here there is a symmetry, an exquisite balance, between Mother and Child, between joy and sadness, between holding and relinquishing, as there is between new life that has emerged from the womb and the impending death that will make possible a new order of Life beyond.
Yet this image fits into a greater symmetry, insofar as it is fulfilled by the movement represented in the icon of the Dormition or “Falling Asleep of the Mother of God.” This icon depicts the apostles, who “from all the ends of the earth have gathered in Gethsemane.” They surround the Theotokos, the Mother of God, as she lies “asleep” in a position reminiscent of Jesus’ repose in the Pieta, His lifeless body outstretched in the new tomb. In some images, St John—the Beloved Disciple, into whose hands Christ committed His Mother—bends over her as she bent over her deceased Son. In others, St John is shown at the foot of the bier, his hands pointing toward the Virgin in a gesture of profound veneration. In the center, behind the bier, stands the glorified Christ. A 14th century Novgorod icon shows Him vested in gold, with a flaming seraph above and behind His head. In His arms He holds a small figure that represents His mother’s soul, dressed in radiant white. That garment, however, is a burial shroud, recalling the winding sheet that enfolded her Son at His own burial.
That winding sheet was first seen at Christ’s Nativity, when the newborn child was wrapped, not in the garb of an infant, but in the shroud of a dead man. Now, at her Dormition, Mary’s soul appears vested in a similar shroud, yet one transfigured by light. The Risen Lord embraces His holy Mother as she embraced Him at His birth. As she offered Him to the worshipers and to the world, so He now, in similar fashion, offers her. And as she surrendered Him to life-giving death, so He receives her from death, to raise her with Himself to eternal life.
There is symmetry—balanced proportion—throughout it all, from image to image and within each individual depiction. It is a divine symmetry that produces beauty, peace and harmony, both in the icon itself and in those who pray before it.
This symmetry tells the story of our own experience, from birth through death, and on to life beyond. For what began with Christ and His holy Mother comes to completion with us, as He raises us from our own death and unites us with her in the glory of the communion of saints.