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Christ and the Abbot Mena
This portrait of Christ and Abbot Mena dates to the late 6th or early 7th century. It hangs at the Louvre, in an area devoted to Coptic Christian art.
According to the curator, this is the oldest known Coptic icon. There are two figures, Christ on the right and the Abbot Mena on the left. Christ is identified by the cross in his halo. He is richly dressed, and holds a book of the Gospels, decorated with pearls, and geometric signs. His right arm is on the shoulder of the Abbot. The curators say we know the Abbot’s name because it appears to the left of his halo. He is simply dressed, and holds a scroll in his left hand. His right hand is raised in a blessing.
Both figures stand on grass, and the background is a landscape, stretching to hills in the distance. There is a good bit of orange in the sky, suggesting a sunset.
Their eyes are not realistic, but their faces seem quite particular. Christ has a full head of brown/black hair, a plump face with full lips, a short trimmed beard, and a mildly pleasant expression. The Abbot has a short gray hair, a lean face, a longer untrimmed gray beard, and a tiny mouth. His expression is flat to my eye.
Christianity has a long tradition in Egypt. The early church was founded by St. Mark, according to Wikipedia. Egypt produced a number of the early Church Fathers, including St. Athananasius and St. Clement. It was also the birthplace of the monastic life. . . .
The Coptic Church split off from the Church of Rome in the Fifth Century, over a theological dispute about the nature of Christ as both human and divine. From Wikipedia:
In terms of Christology, the Oriental Orthodox (Non-Chalcedonians) understanding is that Christ is “One Nature–the Logos Incarnate,” of the full humanity and full divinity. The Chalcedonians’ understanding is that Christ is in two natures, full humanity and full divinity. Just as humans are of their mothers and fathers and not in their mothers and fathers, so too is the nature of Christ according to Oriental Orthodoxy. If Christ is in full humanity and in full divinity, then He is separate in two persons as the Nestorians teach. This is the doctrinal perception that makes the apparent difference which separated the Oriental Orthodox from the Eastern Orthodox.
I don’t understand the point of this distinction, but it is a matter of intense interest, as indicated by the history page in Wikipedia. This entry has been modified a number of times, as recently as January 21, as people try to get it right.
Coptic Christians make up about 10% of the population of Egypt. It’s members have been the subject of many attacks, most of which are blamed on al-Qaeda. Last Christmas Eve, there was an attack on a Coptic Church in Naga Hamady, about 40 miles from Luxor on the Nile River. That was followed by a suicide bomb attack on a Coptic Church in Alexandria on New Years Eve, which killed 23 and wounded 70. This led to the first street protests by Copts in decades, claiming that the government does not protect this huge minority. This report by Al-Masry says that young Copts took to the streets, mobilized by social media. It may have been a harbinger of today’s protests.
This site reprints a story from Al-Ahram, an Egyptian news service, which is not coming up today. Al-Ahram reported that thousands of Muslims accompanied Coptic Christians to Church following the massacres.
“This is not about us and them,” said Dalia Mustafa, a student who attended mass at Virgin Mary Church on Maraashly. “We are one. This was an attack on Egypt as a whole, and I am standing with the Copts because the only way things will change in this country is if we come together.”
I hope Abbot Mena would be pleased that all people in this ancient civilization are coming together in these trying times, even people whose religious beliefs are farther apart than the Roman Church and Abbot Mena’s Coptic Church.
10 Comments
Lovely. Is the painting on wood or what?
And wasn’t the split also to do with whether the Roman Pope was the leader of the church?
I posted on that same story a couple of weeks ago: We Either Live Together, Or We Die Together.” The title comes from the slogan of the event.
The lessons we can learn from one another, despite the things that divide us, are truly astounding.
The painting is on wood, and has undergone restoration.
As to the Pope, as I recall my Church History (and it’s been a long time), that was not a direct cause of the split. After the split, the head of the separated church may have been called a pope.
Wonderful, masaccio. And I’d seen that story, too. “…if we come together.”
Recommended.
“conversations about the concepts of the nature of mind and the body” continued for about 200 years.
Recommended. Very appropriate subject considering events in Egypt.
Egypt was a major center of early Christianity. It was also the epicenter of one of the worst schismatic conflicts of Christianity, the Monophysite “heresy,” as that sect was called by the early Catholic Church and the Eastern Roman Imperial authorities. Monophysites believed that since God could only have one nature, that Christ had to be purely divine, not human at all.
The exact opposite of the Arian “heresy,” which taught that Christ was fully human. Ironically, that belief doesn’t conflict with the basic teachings of Islam, but was widespread among the so-called barbarians who eventually conquered the Western Roman Empire.
There were quite a few civil wars fought in Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Egypt over conflicting versions of Christianity long before the Muslims existed. Gnostic Christians were also quite numerous in the Egypt of that time. It was probably in one of those religious civil wars that the Great Library of Alexandria was burned, a tragic loss to the world.
I’m not fully versed on what modern Coptic Christians believe, exactly, but they are the heirs of one of the oldest Christian traditions. Muslims know this, or they should, and the Koran teaches that the “People of the Book,” both Jews and Christians, must be respected.
The Muslims who target the Copts violate their own Holy Book by doing so. Fortunately, the majority of Egyptian Muslims are not among their number.
The Coptic Church attacked Christmas Eve is the oldest undisputed historical site in Christianity: Tourist attractions and traditional sites in Jerusalem (for instance) do refer to events in Jesus’s life, but none of those has historical certainty. However, St. Mark did indeed found the first Coptic Church on that site in Alexandria in 40 AD. It was rebuilt in 50 AD, and parts of that building survive today, and survived the attack. Long live Pope Shenouda.
Alexandria is also the site of the translation into Greek of the Hebrew Old Testament in the second century BC – a text which Jesus often used in his quotations from the Old Testament. It was said to have been translated by seventy Jewish scholars, hence the name, Septaguint.