Basic Questions in Symbolic of the Lord’s Cross

Abstract

This short article by Vladimir Ilyin, published in the first issue of Orthodox Thought (1928), is devoted to a conceptual analysis of the symbolic and liturgical aspects of the veneration of the cross in the Eastern Christian tradition. The cross is presented as a quintessence of the Gospel, the central image of the Word of God. The author divides the semantic levels of the functioning of the cross in the space of religious experience: the saving cross, on which the Lord Jesus Christ was crucified, and a cross as an iconic image, and the sign of the cross as a symbolic action, and the cross as the most accurate semantic formula of life subject to final salvation through the acceptance of suffering and victory over death. Thus, this brief discussion contains a lot of fundamental ideas directly related to the visual theology of Eastern Christianity. Vladimir Nikolaevich Ilyin was born in 1891 in the town of Vladovka, Radomyslsky district, Kiev province, died in 1974 in Paris. He was a famous Russian philosopher, theologian, literary and music critic, composer. Ilyin graduated from the Kiev Imperial University (1917) and the University of Berlin (1925). He taught at the Orthodox Theological Institute named after St. Sergius of Radonezh in Paris, at the higher educational institutions of Belgrade, as well as at the Paris Conservatory. For some time he joined the Eurasian movement among the Russian emigration. He developed the ideas of Father Sergey Bulgakov in the field of sophiology. He dealt with the problems of the philosophy of religion, defining religion as a trinity of dogma, myth and cult. In his opinion, myth is antinomically fixed in dogma and is expressed in cult practice. In this regard, V. Ilyin gave a great value to the issues of liturgics and theological symbolism in the structure of religious experience. He devoted several major works to the study of the liturgical tradition of the Orthodox Church, as well as Eastern Christian iconography. In general cultural studies, Ilyin developed the doctrine about morphology as the foundation of a human way of being, about “universal iconology” as the universal logic of culture and (following Father Pavel Florensky) defended the principle of iconicity of all knowledge. V. N. Ilyin’s text is published in modern orthography, but keeping author’s punctuation and manner of writing. The form of references is also reproduced, with one exception: references to the Greek section of J. P. Migne’s Patrology are indicated with the abbreviation “PG” which is more familiar to modern reader, instead of the abbreviation “Migr.” used by the author. Also, the identified typos in Greek words and quotes have been corrected. For technical reasons, the end-to-end numbering of references is used, in contrast to the text of the original source.