Journal Entry for the Week of March 14 to March 18

During a particularly stressful time in our lives, or as a student approaching the final exam period, we have all experienced the intense desire to have someplace to escape to for a short period of time. Whether it is a cottage by the lake, a favourite book in a cozy corner of the library, or just the sanctuary of our dreams while we're sleeping, we've all felt the urge to leave the "real world" behind for a bit and abandon our senses. This experience was in many ways one of the founding principles of the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy. A beacon on the frontier borders of Byzantium, it was a classical attempt to implant a Greek heritage in the West; everything in the church was imported from foreign places: the marble, the colours, even the workers themselves. Certainly this alone created an atmosphere of mystique within the church, the almost overwhelming exposure to elements that were not a part of local life. But it was the artistic wonderland within the structure of the church itself that truly made this an escapist adventure. Everything in the church, from the stone and glass tesseraes to the vibrant frescoes adorning the walls, was meant to provide visitors with a surreal sense of mysticism. The images on the walls were a hazy middle ground between the earthly and divine worlds. Whether it was the images of Christ and his apostles, or similar images of an Emperor amongst his loyal servants, every element of the church was meant to convey an atmosphere physically and spiritually removed from the world outside the church doors.

What was particularly intriguing to me was the concept of the Emperor presenting himself as a divine being, one removed from but always watching over his people. Similar to the frescoes themselves, here again we had the ever blurring lines between humanity and divinity. They not only penetrated art, but also shaped a ruler's vision of what he saw himself representing; in this case, he was literally god's presence on earth. Modesty and humbleness aside, this slow progression away from humanity and towards divinity paralleled another important aspect of this time period: the experience of religion as an otherworldly phenomenon. Indeed, the frescoes in San Vitale were not of the human Christ performing miracles on earth or being tortured on the cross; they were images of him in the heavens, no longer a miraculous human being but a heavenly guardian far removed from simple human presence. It may have seemed like the natural course of things to present Christ in this new image, but it also spoke of an intentional effort on part of rulers to take the earthly, human elements out of religion. Whatever the positive or sinister implications of this phenomenon were, it was obvious that religion was shifting away from being a horizontal network to a more hierarchical structure. Indeed, by removing Christ from earth or presenting the emperor as god on earth, mere mortals in the Western world were no longer equal participants in religion; almost subliminally, they were slowly evolving to become subjects of religion, inheritors of a divine world that they could be taught but one they could no longer interpret for themselves. The mystical experience of being removed from the outside world within San Vitale was not limited just to the art or Italy itself. It penetrated the very core of western religious consciousness, a phenomenon that is hard to appreciate unless one looks at the church from the outside; steps back into the real world, so to speak.