A History of the World in 100 Objects (58 page)

Can you picture God or can’t you? The huge dispute in the Byzantine Empire is one of those classic instances where that simple question is debated and becomes an issue which is actually very political. It split the empire down the middle. The Byzantine Empire met an extraordinary trauma, Islam, which came from nowhere and smashed the empire into smithereens. Naturally the Byzantines wondered ‘What’s this all about? Why is God favouring these Muslims who have come from nowhere?’ The one big thing that struck them about Islam was that there were no pictures of God and that this might be the answer. They thought that if you turned Christianity away from having pictures of God then the Byzantine Empire might get God’s favour back. That seems to be one of the motives in attacking images, icons, within the Byzantine Empire.

So a great wave of iconoclastic violence swept the Orthodox Church in the years following 700. The theological debates went on for well over a century and were very complex. But throughout, ordinary people remained on the whole firmly attached to their icons, and eventually, thanks in part to support from the women of the imperial family, the veneration of icons was restored by the empress Theodora in 843. This is the event known as the Triumph of Orthodoxy, which re-established such veneration as the touchstone of the true Orthodox faith, the central focus of Byzantine devotion, and a vital ingredient in the survival and the flourishing of the empire. And indeed for another 500 years the empire was able to keep the Islamic threat at bay. So when that threat returned even stronger than before, it was natural for the leaders of Constantinople to encourage people to look back to the great moment of 843 when the faith had been reordered and their empire restored and to draw comfort from the past as they faced a frightening future. In 1370 the feast of the Triumph of Orthodoxy was established, and some time after that our icon was painted.

It shows us the empress Theodora and that great restoration of 843. She stands beside the Hodegetria image of the Virgin and Child, and with her is her child, the boy emperor Michael, both of them wearing elaborate imperial crowns. Below them, in the bottom of the picture, stands a line of eleven saints and martyrs, crowded together as if they’re posing for a group photograph, some of them holding icons in their hands like prizes that they have just been awarded. Any viewer around 1400 would have known at once that all these saints had suffered in the great struggle to re-establish the use of icons. All of them are neatly labelled with their names written in red paint. My favourite is the one on the far left. She is St Theodosia, the only woman in the group, a feisty nun who was put to death essentially for killing a policeman. She saw an imperial guard climbing a ladder to remove an image of Christ from the entrance to the palace: she pushed away the ladder and he fell to his death. Naturally, she was promptly executed.

What the viewer around 1400 might not have realized is that some of these saints and martyrs were not even born in 843. The icon of the Triumph of Orthodoxy shows a whole society revisiting its past through a work of art, begging God to secure its future. It is a powerful and poignant image. The artist Bill Viola says this:

It is an extraordinary and innovative picture, which represents a really ingenious way of uniting the temporal world of the past, present and future with the eternal and the divine. I feel it’s almost a post-modern image, using the idea of the frame within the frame. There are icons within the icons, images within the image.

The Triumph of Orthodoxy – celebrated in feast and icon – did not secure the survival of the Byzantine Empire. In 1453 the city fell to the Turks, Constantinople became the capital of the Ottoman Empire, and the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia became a mosque. The world’s balance of power changed. But although the Byzantine state had foundered, the Orthodox Church survived. The faith we see proclaimed in our painting was strong enough to ensure that even under Muslim rule the traditions of Orthodox Christianity, with the veneration of icons as its defining feature, endured. In one sense we could argue that this icon achieved exactly what was intended. Although the Byzantine Empire fell, Orthodoxy survived, and every year on the first Sunday in Lent the Orthodox Church throughout the world celebrates the event shown in our icon: the Triumph of Orthodoxy, a ceremony in which the image and the music of the human voice come together in an overwhelming expression of spiritual yearning.

There are many surprises about working in the British Museum, and one of them is that we occasionally find offerings of flowers or fruit reverently placed in front of the Hindu sculptures. It is another touching demonstration that religious objects don’t need to lose their sacred dimension when they move into a secular museum – and a reminder that in the census of 2001 nearly 5 per cent of the population of England and Wales stated that their family origins were in the Indian subcontinent.

This is all part of a long-shared history that has been sometimes violent and always intense. For centuries the British have been fascinated by the cultures of India, and have struggled with greater or lesser success to understand them. For the eighteenth-century European, the most intriguing mystery of India was Hinduism, a faith that confusingly seemed to advocate both world-denying asceticism and riotous physical pleasure. Why were some Hindu temples, unlike English cathedrals, richly decorated with erotic sculpture? Where the Christian God endured unbearable suffering, Hindu gods seemed to rejoice in sex. Around 1800, one man, Charles Stuart, decided to explain to the British that Hinduism should be seriously studied and greatly admired. As part of this campaign, he collected and displayed pieces of ancient Indian temple sculpture; one of those pieces is the object of this chapter.

It comes from Orissa, a densely populated rice-producing state in north-east India, on the Bay of Bengal. In around 1300 it was a prosperous, sophisticated Hindu kingdom, which built thousands of magnificent temples. This was the great period of Orissan religious architecture, and the buildings that were most admired were the ones that had the most extravagant ornamentation. Most of these temples were dedicated to the god Shiva. For the people of Orissa, Shiva – one of the three central deities of Hinduism, the god of paradoxes, the god who forever creates and destroys – was the lord of their land. In Shiva, all opposites are reconciled.

This sculpture comes from one of the many Orissan Shiva temples. It’s a stone slab about 2 metres (6 feet 6 inches) high by 1 metre wide, and although it may originally have been brightly coloured it is now a deep gleaming black. It would hardly be possible to carve more decoration on to it. Dozens of tiny figures swarm around the edges, and in the middle, on a much larger scale, is Shiva himself – we know it is Shiva because he is carrying his trademark trident and rests one foot on the back of the sacred bull that he often rides. The sculptor has carved the body of Shiva in very full relief, so as visitors approach it they have a growing sense of a god who is physically present. The sculpture is designed to bring the viewer close to the god, to allow them in a sense to converse with Shiva. The Hindu academic and cleric Shaunaka Rishi Das explains:

The physical manifestation of the image is considered to be a great aid in focusing the mind, and in gaining what they call
darshan
,
or the presence of god. So you practise the presence of god in your life by going to the temple, you see this image that is the presence, you bow down in front of the image, you offer food or incense and so on, you say your prayers, or you just enjoy the presence of god.

If you brought god into your home, for instance, then if god is right there in your living room you don’t have big blazing rows, you don’t do things that you wouldn’t do in the presence of god – which is quite a challenge to our false ego. Devotees of the deity would be developing their real ego – that of being an eternal servant of god.

So although our sculpture was certainly made for a temple, a very public place, it is very much about a continuing one-to-one contact with god. The experience of encountering this sculpture would be only part of a relationship with the divine, a form of conversation that you might begin in the temple and then carry on at home. Looking at the sculpture is simply the starting point for a daily dialogue that will ultimately shape every part of your existence.

But, in our sculpture, Shiva is not alone: nestling in his lap, and lovingly encircled by one of his four arms, is his wife Parvati. Both are similarly dressed in decorated loin cloths, with naked torsos and wearing heavy necklaces and ornamented headdresses. Husband and wife are turned towards each other and look lovingly into each other’s eyes, so engrossed in each other that they are oblivious to their swirling entourage. Their mutual devotion is mirrored by the animals at their feet, Shiva’s bull echoing his master’s doting gaze, and Parvati’s lion smiling bashfully in response. There is such a strong erotic charge in this carving that you might well imagine that Shiva and Parvati are about to move into a fuller, closer embrace. But no – or at least not yet – for the couple are expecting guests or, more precisely, worshippers. Our sculpture would probably have been at the door of a temple, welcoming families as they approached, and offerings would have been made not just to Shiva but also to Parvati, to the pair of them as a divine couple.

This smiling sensuous image doesn’t just show us a model couple that any husband and wife might emulate: the sculpture of Shiva and Parvati is a meditation on the very nature of God, for they are as the same person manifest in two different forms. Shaunaka Rishi Das explains:

God is male and female. The thinking behind that is that God cannot be something less than we are. God cannot be not-female, because there are females here, so God has to have a female aspect.

Parvati is a very good wife who doesn’t like people making fun of her husband. So worshippers have to be careful always to give respect to Parvati first and then approach Shiva. That’s considered to be the respectable thing to do and the safe thing to do. But both of them are very munificent. You don’t have to do much to please them, and they give to you very liberally.

It is the presence of Parvati, the female aspect of God, which is perhaps most disconcerting to a non-Hindu viewer, especially to one raised in monotheism. This is a very particular view of the divine. A monotheistic god is, by definition, alone – cannot engage with other gods, cannot be part of a dynamic sexual relationship – and in Judaism, Christianity and Islam that monotheistic god is not just single but has, by long tradition, been male. In the Hindu tradition, by contrast, Shiva needs Parvati. Karen Armstrong, historian of religion, explains:

In the monotheisms, particularly in Christianity, we’ve found questions of sex and gender difficult. Some of the faiths that start out with a positive view of women, like Christianity and also Islam, get hijacked a few generations after the foundation and dragged back to the old patriarchy. I think there’s a big difference, however, in the way people view sexuality. When you see sexuality as a divine attribute, as a way in which one can apprehend the divine, that must have an effect – you see it in the Hindu marriage service, where this is a divine act. Questions of gender and sexuality have always been the Achilles heel of Christianity, and that shows that there’s a sort of failure of integration here, a failure to integrate a basic fact of life.

It was Hinduism’s generous capacity to embrace all aspects of life, not least sexuality, that beguiled the man who collected our sculpture – Charles Stuart, an officer in the East India Company, who so vigorously embraced the values and virtues of Hinduism that he was nicknamed ‘Hindoo Stuart’ by his shocked compatriots. Stuart admired almost every aspect of Indian life. He studied Indian languages and religions and he even urged English women to wear ‘sensible and sensual’ Indian saris. The memsahibs declined.

As part of his study of Indian cultures, Stuart put together a huge collection of sculpture – our relief was part of it – designed to include examples of each deity as a visual encyclopedia of religions and customs. His collection was displayed to the public at his home in Calcutta. It was one of the first serious attempts to present Indian culture in a systematic way to a European audience. Far from finding Hinduism disconcerting, Stuart saw in it an admirable framework for living that was at least the moral equal of Christianity, and in 1808 he published his views in a pamphlet,
Vindication of the Hindoos
: