This book was first published in hardback in 2018 and now appears in paperback. It was widely and favourably reviewed – even, some might say, admiringly so, which in my opinion is no more than a very accomplished piece of work deserved. It transforms the Byzantine donor portrait from a relatively straightforward question of prosopography into a gateway to the world beyond because it is the author's contention that the intention behind the donation, of which the portrait is a record, was to influence the donor's posthumous fate. In similar fashion to an icon the donor portrait is presented as a point of contact between the human and the divine, which explains why the author prefers the designation contact portrait rather than donor portrait. The task of understanding how this might be conveyed artistically requires that the author first investigate Byzantine beliefs about the afterlife. In doing so he turns a problem – apparently of art history – into one of religious belief. I can only suppose that the book was not reviewed in this Journal, when it first came out, because it was thought to be a work of art history with little relevance to ecclesiastical history. But this would be a mistake. It offers a very rich discussion of Byzantine views of the afterlife – taking up approximately a third of the book – which gives a new twist to the debate over purgatory between Latin and Greek theologians.
Purgatory became a routine topic in the negotiations over the union of Churches from the early thirteenth to the fifteenth century. By common assent the Greeks offered an unconvincing defence of their position when questioned by the Latins about the posthumous fate awaiting the bulk of believers, who were neither wholly evil nor wholly good – the mesoi, as they were called. Did they just ‘stand and wait’ for the last judgement? Greek theologians found it difficult to provide a direct answer. With little to guide them in the New Testament and the Fathers they had paid little attention to this period of waiting, in contrast to their counterparts in the West, who were evolving the doctrine of purgatory. This was embraced with great enthusiasm by the Latin Church, but why should the Greeks have found it so hard to counter, when its theological foundations were weak, as modern developments have shown? This may seem an obvious question, but Rico Franses is the first to frame it and to provide a detailed answer. He begins with the contrast between the Greeks and Latins. Whereas the latter had found a solution to the posthumous fate of the soul in the shape of purgatory, the former still maintained the official position that it was wrong to infringe God's autonomy by speculating on the afterlife, which was his preserve. But this contained a serious flaw, which the Latins soon identified. Like the Latins the Greeks had a penitential system, which by comparison was not so well developed. What happened, a Latin spokesman wanted to know, to penance that remained uncompleted on death? To insist that it was for God to decide did not square with an alternative narrative about the afterlife that had been emerging in Byzantium from the ninth century onwards in the shape of visions and of ‘beneficial tales’, which for want of a better word were popular in origin. Until the Latin intervention there was only the faintest awareness that official theory and popular narrative contradicted each other. The former was benign, trusting in the wisdom and mercy of God; the latter presented the afterlife as a time of punishment in a way that sometimes made the pains of purgatory seem relatively mild. Left to their own devices the Greeks would undoubtedly have worked out their own solutions to the anomalies created by two different concepts of the afterlife, as is evident from the responses given in the late twelfth century by the disgraced-civil-servant-cum-littérateur-turned-monk Michael Glykas to anxious queries about the afterlife from members of his circle. His answers pointed the way to buttressing the fantasy of the tollgates of the air and the efficacy of prayers for the dead with patristic authority and thus offering the possibility of reconciling an alternative narrative of the afterlife with official teaching. But after 1204, Franses contends, Latin criticism left the Greeks in a dilemma: unwilling to submit to criticism and to admit to inconsistencies in their views on the afterlife, they simply wished them away and remained in a state of denial. It was not until the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438–9) that there was a serious debate on purgatory between Greek and Latin theologians. Some compromise may have been worked out, but it was almost immediately rendered irrelevant by the fall of Constantinople.
Franses's treatment of Byzantine views of the afterlife may be the core of his book, but it is only incidental to his main purpose, which is to elucidate the Byzantine donor portrait. But his presentation of the portrait as a means of influencing the donor's posthumous destiny requires a view of the afterlife that was full of terrors and perils rather than one overseen by a merciful God, as official teaching suggested. Franses therefore emphasises the importance of the alternative narrative, which provided what he was looking for. He becomes impatient not only with the Byzantine theologians for turning a blind eye to the inconsistencies that existed in their concept of the afterlife, but also with modern commentators for taking at face value ‘first-hand reports and explanations of beliefs’, which were designed – not necessarily consciously – to mislead as a way of masking blatant inconsistencies. The author is working within a framework provided by the concept of ‘misrecognition’, whereby misrepresentation or suppression of inconvenient facts and ideas springs from the need not so much to deceive others, as oneself, and serves as a way of preserving the integrity of belief when its different strands come into conflict. This is an idea developed by the influential social scientist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), whose work provides much of the intellectual underpinning of Franses's book. At first sight, it applies rather well to the differing versions that the Byzantines apparently entertained of the afterlife. The difficulty is that the Byzantines themselves approached the matter rather differently. Take the Orthodox Patriarch Germanos ii (1223–40), who was a contemporary of the first debate between the Latin and Orthodox Churches over purgatory. He was not directly involved, but he will certainly have received a report on it. His hair-raising account of the perils of the afterlife – replete with tollgates and demons of the upper air – alerts us to the fact that the highest ranks of the hierarchy subscribed to the alternative narrative of the afterlife and did not see it as in direct opposition to official teaching. Stress on the perils of the afterlife only emphasised the necessity of the wisdom and mercy of God. Rather than two different concepts of the afterlife being in contradiction they reinforced each other. It is an illustration of how differently the Latins and the Greeks framed the problem of the afterlife. The former solved it, as the author notes, by creating a mechanistic system of absolution, which ‘cut out aspects of true forgiveness and charity of God’. To the Byzantines this was nothing less than ‘an infringement or usurpation of divine mercy and divine power’ (p. 124), which their views on the afterlife preserved. Not only is this – despite earlier criticism – a sympathetic treatment of the Orthodox position, but by approaching the problem from a new direction the author forces us to look afresh at an old and increasingly stale debate, which has depths that until he drew our attention to them were ignored.
