The
Buddha and the
Pantocrator
Carol Zaleski January
12, 2017 The Christian Century
Buddhist statues and Orthodox icons aren't
always symmetrical. Neither are we.
I’m sitting in front of my computer drinking
from a knobbly, lopsided Japanese tea bowl, with two new books on
either side of my keyboard. At my left hand is William Empson’s The
Face of the Buddha, edited by Buddhist scholar-monk Rupert
Arrowsmith from a long-lost manuscript. At my right hand is The Art
of Seeing: Paradox and Perception in Orthodox Iconography, by the
Orthodox monk-scholar Fr. Maximos Constas. The books are mirror
opposites; I wish the authors could meet.
Many consider William Empson the best critic
of his generation. His first book, Seven Types of Ambiguity, which
he began at the tender age of 22, plumbed the English poetic canon
for tantalizing examples of verbal ambiguity—cases in which a word
or expression yields alternative meanings, to the puzzlement of the
attentive critic and the delight of the deep reader. Empson was a
figure of ambiguity himself, a profound exegete of Christian
literature and a passionate anti-Christian. He loved to unearth
evidence that his favorite English authors were conflicted about
their faith, that the ambiguities in Paradise Lost were symptomatic
of Milton’s struggle to make a tyrannical God seem worthy of
worship, that the double meaning of a word as innocuous as buckle
revealed Gerard Manley Hopkins’s mixed feelings about his Jesuit
calling, that George Herbert’s poem “The Sacrifice” exposed a
two-faced God: vindictive judge and loving redeemer.
What had promised to be a spectacular academic
career ran aground early on when a servant found contraceptives in
Empson’s college rooms and the young prodigy was expelled in
disgrace. But the exile proved fruitful; after a stint among the
Bloomsbury literati, Empson found teaching jobs in Japan and China.
Here, amid the gracious statues of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, he
discovered a type of ambiguity that was free from neuralgic
Christian associations. Studying the Kudara Kannon in Nara’s
Hōryū-ji Temple, he marveled at the “puzzlement and good humour” on
the left side of the face and the “birdlike innocence and
wakefulness” on the right. He became fascinated to the point of
obsession, crisscrossing the Asian continent in search of statues
that shared the same secret: “the faces all seem to be asymmetrical
in the same way, as if the artists were working on a theory.” To
test the theory, Empson would photograph a Buddha’s face, split the
photograph down the middle, reverse one side, and create two
mirrored composites. The asymmetries were unmistakable. One face
appeared sardonic on the right side, mystical on the left; another
cunning on the right side, placid on the left; yet another
“masculine and foxy” on the right side, plaintive on the left.
Overall, the asymmetries created an impression of ironic wisdom
coupled with compassion, and marked by a certain “coolness” toward
the supernatural. “I think Buddhism much better than
Christianity,” Empson wrote, “because it managed to get away from
the Neolithic craving to gloat over human sacrifice.”
Fr. Maximos Constas has an eye for ambiguity
as well. For Constas, the art of the icon requires a certain
strangeness, a disruption of the symmetries that naturally please
the eye, in order to transport the viewer from the image to its
divine original. Nowhere is this strangeness more apparent than in
the majestic sixth-century Christ Pantocrator of Sinai, an icon
whose asymmetry has been the subject of endless commentary. Using
the same split photograph technique, Constas discovered “a timid,
slightly sad-looking young man . . . yearning for contact and love”
on one side and “a ponderous Titan, aloof to all relations” on the
other. Some interpreters think that this duality is a lesson in
Chalcedonian Christology, but Constas suggests that the real
subject is “the paradoxical co-existence of mercy and judgment.”
The effect is intentionally disturbing: “Beholding the face of
Christ, the viewer . . . judges his own likeness poor and
disfigured.” Yet the ultimate message is a hopeful one, for the
tender side of Christ’s face, commanding the viewer’s left visual
field (which is favored, Constas notes, by our asymmetrical brain),
is what unites the composition. It seems that the iconographer
instinctively understood how to portray the polarity of divine
mercy and judgment in such a way that mercy would be
undimmed.
Empson never wholly converted to Buddhism; he
returned to England at intervals, taught at various universities in
the United States and the U.K., and wrapped up a brilliant, unruly,
bohemian life with a knighthood and an honorary fellowship from the
college that expelled him. Constas (now the Very Rev.
Archimandrite Maximos Constas) is at once an American academic and
an Athonite monk. The two authors, one a promiscuous literary
adventurer, the other a scholarly ascetic, have made a wonderful
discovery. But where Constas sees a saving paradox, Empson sees a
damnable contradiction. Where Empson sees a vindictive God, Constas
sees a loving God in whom “Mercy and Truth have met together . . .
Righteousness and Bliss have kissed.” It’s a mystery—here are two
intelligent bipeds, symmetrical on the outside and asymmetrical, as
we all are, on the inside, who have so much to teach us about the
aesthetics of ambiguity; and yet they fall on opposite sides of the
great divide.