Clothes designed for the kingdom of heaven

Ihad grown used to seeing in museums gryphons and suchlike fabulous beasts woven into textiles that had been produced more than 1,000 years ago in Syria and other lands of the Islamic world but then used to make liturgical vestments and the linings of reliquaries. But I had not realised that, after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, textiles incorporating the Cross continued to be produced in the Ottoman Empire for use by Orthodox Christians there and in Muscovy.

Some of them are on show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in a fascinating exhibition, Liturgical Textiles of the

Post-Byzantine World, on until the end of October. I have not seen it, but a New York professor, Warren T Woodfin, has written some interesting things about it.

He rightly stresses that figured vestments were not “merely a means of selfaggrandisement by the clergy; rather, they point beyond themselves to the mysteries of the liturgy as a dramatic reenactment of the life of Christ and microcosm of the divine kingdom”.

Looking at an icon such as that of St James painted in Greece by Stephanos Tzangarolas in 1688 (pictured), a Westerner recognises that the saint is dressed as for the divine liturgy, but the vestments do not quite match those of the Latin Church.

Like Latin vestments they had derived from the ordinary formal wear of the late Roman Empire. So the Roman paenula, a sort of cloak, developed into the chasuble, which the priest wears at Mass in the Latin Church. In the Greek Church it became the phelonion, which in the picture of St James is covered with a starry, floral motif resembling a field of crosses.

Beneath that, St James wears a garment patterned

with different coloured flowers (the sticharion, the equivalent of the Latin alb). This derived from the plain linen tunic that everyone wore. In the West, as a liturgical garment, it was consciously connected to the metaphorical whiteness worked by the cleansing waters of baptism. As the priest put it on before Mass each day, he would say a prayer beginning Dealba me, Domine, et munda cor meum: “Make me white, O Lord, and cleanse my heart.”

This invokes a passage in the book of Revelation about those who have mystically washed their clothes in the blood of the Lamb. Verbally it also recalls the familiar Psalm 51, recited at the Asperges, the sprinkling of holy water: Lavabis me, et super nivem

dealbabor: “Thou wilt wash me, and I shall be washed whiter than snow.”

If there were any idea that liturgical vestments are just a form of high fashion, it is dispelled by the importance given in the East and the West to the vestment distinctive of the clerical office. This is the stole, called in Greek the epitrachelion. Worn by priests even on a battlefield as they tend the dying, it was carried by mission priests at the risk of their lives in hostile territories, such as Elizabethan England, for use at the celebration of the Mass.

The epitrachelion or stole derives from an ordinary scarf. As he puts it on, the priest says a prayer: “Lord, restore to me the stole of immortality.” St James is depicted in an epitrachelion ornamented with panels embroidered with priests, kings, and prophets from the Bible, representing the triple role of Jesus Christ in the liturgy, which ordained priests carry out in his name.

All these garments and prayers may be unfamiliar but they demolish any insultingly reductive notion of priests as men in frocks.