Political Ideology and the Neoplatonic Hierarchy in Image: The Case of 14th Century Serbia
Political Ideology and the Neoplatonic Hierarchy in Image: The Case of 14th Century Serbia

Author(s): Nikola Piperski
Subject(s): Political history, 13th to 14th Centuries, Eastern Orthodoxy, History of Art
Published by: Institut za filozofiju i društvenu teoriju
Summary/Abstract: The system of wall painting in the Byzantine churches of the middle and late periods was organized according to a strictly defined hierarchy. The intention was to portray the earthly church as a reflection of the heavenly church as faithfully as possible. “The idea that earthly reality is a reflection of heavenly reality was part of the Neoplatonic ideas that Byzantium inherited from late antiquity.” The analogy of heavenly and ecclesiastical service was established early on: Ignatius of Antioch, around 100 AD, already referred to the bishop presiding over the assembly of his priests as the equivalent of Christ in the company of the apostles, but the strongest ideological basis which illustrate the ideological possibilities of pairing an earthly order with a heavenly counterpart can be found in the 6th century in the work of Dionysius, The Heavenly Hierarchy and The Church Hierarchy. The Corpus Dionysicum Areopagiticum stems from philosophical Neoplatonic writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite—an Athenian convert under Paul, the “first intellectual” Apostle who himself was concerned mostly with debatable questions about what it means to be Christian (Acts 17:16-34).

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