Deisis comes from the Greek word for prayer or supplication, and it is the name given to the standard group of icons adorning the first tier of the iconostasis above the royal doors. The looming iconostasis, or icon screen, confronts everyone who enters an Orthodox church because it divides the nave from the altar. An iconostasis has central “royal” doors, which are sometimes open during services, and a door on either side called the “deacon” doors. Above the doors are multiple levels of icons, depending on the size of the church, each level with a specific theme and purpose. The Church believes that this boundary between two worlds—the mundane and the holy, the material and the Divine—is a place of great spiritual danger, where all temptations and seductions are highly concentrated. The primary protection in this area of conflict or boundary of battle is the image of Christ, seated in Glory, directly above the royal doors. His Light shatters and pierces all the world, reaching into every dark cranny and level of existence, across time and space.

As the viewer’s gaze expands, it is drawn to the quiet, attentive, energetic images of Mary, the Theotokos, and Saint John the Baptist facing and leaning toward Christ, a posture not only of reverence and submission but also of oppositional unity. The Theotokos, God Bearer, represents female, love, nurture, birth, the fully realized New Testament person of body and soul. Saint John the Baptist represents male, ascetic, Old Testament law, and disciplined virtue with the call to repentance of the body. These seemingly opposite persons, whose combined energies are essential to the proclamation of Light, are immediate evidence of the universality of the Church throughout time, which has its roots in the old covenant, but gives the promise of newness of life.

For Wrestling with Angels, we present an abbreviated Deisis that includes the three central figures and two great teachers of the Church, Saint Gregory of Nyssa and Saint Gregory Palamas, whose teaching is essential for iconographers of the Prosopon School. They, too, like Saint John the Baptist and the Theotokos, unite seemingly opposite concepts. In their teaching, they proclaim that the nature of Christ’s energetic Light, or Glory, is simultaneously apophatic (unspeakable, undepictable) and cataphatic (speakable and depictable), its mystery apprehended only in union.

Each Deisis proclaims that Christ’s bright Light permeates and upholds all of the created order, from the humble Theotokos and Saint John the Baptist, to the powerful archangels of heaven, to the saints of the Church, and indeed out to us, the congregation, worshipping and praying in the nave. Because the Church is built upon human beings facing Christ, the physical act of facing a Deisis depicts the direction of the soul to its center: Christ. More than the building’s brick and mortar, it is this facing of men and women, old and young, toward the altar from which Christ gives of himself in the holy gifts that constitutes the Church. Under the gaze of great saints, the people eat the Body of Christ, activating the seed within them, calling them to become like the saints they behold, who actually live in Christ at every moment. In this spiral outpouring and return, the screen is no longer a barrier but a bridge into Paradise. 

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