In celebration of the Feast of Three Hierarchs, St Vladimir’s Seminary will celebrate the Divine Liturgy on Thursday, January 30, at 9 a.m. at Three Hierarchs’ Chapel.

On Thursday at 7 p.m., in the Metropolitan Philip Auditorium, St Vladimir’s Seminary will hold its Commencement ceremony for all mid-year graduates. Following the ceremony, the 42nd Annual Father Alexander Schmemann Memorial Lecture will begin. This year, Dr Henry Maguire, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University, will deliver the keynote presentation, “Heaven to Earth, Earth to Heaven: Neoplatonic Theology and the Art of Byzantine Churches.”

Dr Maguire describes his presentation with the following summary:

Recently some scholars have interpreted early Byzantine churches, such as the great sixth-century church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, with reference to Neoplatonic ideas, especially those disseminated by the anonymous Christian writer known as Pseudo-Dionysios the Areopagite. But much less attention has been paid to the impact of Neoplatonism on the art of later Byzantine churches, those which dated to the period after the iconoclastic crisis of the eighth and ninth centuries. This lecture will look at some of these splendid medieval buildings in the light of Neoplatonic theology, using as our guide the voices of contemporary Byzantines who saw and used these buildings. Pseudo-Dionysios described a mystical hierarchy in which the material world, characterized by variety, reflects the light emanating from the One, the divine unity. Following these ideas, medieval writers gave to their churches a cosmic interpretation, seeing in their interiors a hierarchy of lights reaching up from the gleaming multicolored marbles of their pavements, which represented the diversity of the earth, to the overwhelming splendor of the gold mosaics in the vaults above, which represented the unity of the heavenly realm. In the words of one poem, the church was a ladder, leading up from the muted gleam of the earthly stones below to the more brilliant light of the heavenly orbit. This vertical exchange of light was associated by Byzantine writers on art with prayer, which reflected, as in a candle, the desire of the faithful ascending from earth, and was responded to by the greater light descending from heaven.

You are invited to attend the Liturgy, Mid-Year Commencement, and the lecture in person or watch live online. You will receive one link to watch both after you register. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Light reception to follow the lecture. 

Register Here

About Dr Henry Maguire:
Henry Maguire, Ph.D. is Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. He has also taught at Harvard and at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. From 1991 to 1996 he served as Director of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC. He has authored six books on Byzantine art, and co-authored three more with his partner, Eunice Dauterman Maguire. Together with Ann Terry he carried out a survey and publication of the wall mosaics in the Cathedral of Eufrasius at Poreč, which was published in 2007. Throughout his career he has been interested in the relationships between art and literature in Byzantium, although he has also written on other topics, including ivories, Byzantine secular art, and attitudes toward nature in Byzantium.