Synaxis means “council or gathering.” This icon celebrates the Church’s yearly commemoration of the twelve apostles as a group, and in this context, the viewer might rightly question the dominance of Christ in the strange distorted color bands surrounding him known as a mandorla. Mandorla is an Italian word that means “almond” and comes from the shape made when two circles overlap. Traditionally, in art, a mandorla is a visual way to represent liminal space, the point at which the material world is interrupted by the mystical world. In Christian iconography, this form is taken to mean something slightly different—it is the mystical place of God’s glory. Though the name of the icon suggests a focus on the twelve apostles, the prominence of Christ in the mandorla is a strong statement that Christ is the center of the Church and the “home” toward which every human being aims, whether they know it or not. Beyond and alongside the pre-eminence of Christ, this complex icon of the Prosopon School holds in tension and balance several opposing forces or paradoxes.
First, the icon plays with geometry by arranging two pairs of apostles diagonally across from one another, forming an implied Saint Andrew’s cross (X), in addition to the decorative red cross behind Christ. Saints Peter and Paul are regarded as the two principal apostles of the Church, which is considered the earthly manifestation of Christ after his ascension into heaven. Paul’s writings gave the theological scaffolding for the Church, while Peter’s forceful will gave the necessary dynamism to spread the good news of Christ’s resurrection. Saints Thomas and John seem at first an odd pairing. Doubting Thomas needed to touch the wounds of Christ before he would believe that Christ rose from the dead, while John’s gospel faithfully asserts the mystical theology of the Church. Through reflecting on this pairing, however, we come to understand that the discursive, scientific approach to God (Saint Thomas) is as essential as the mystical approach (Saint John), uniting both reason and nous, logic and heart.
The highly ornamented cross behind Christ has little round images of a bull, a man, a lion, and an eagle. These four images not only represent the four basic elements of ancient times—earth, air, fire, and water—but have also come to represent the four gospel writers—Saints Matthew, Luke, Mark, and John. The cross shape represents the Tree of Life, for through Christ’s voluntary ascent to the Cross, he opened the possibility of eternal life for all humanity. The vertical direction of the cross represents heaven’s light, the instantaneousness of angels, direct apprehension of the spiritual world, and apophatic, or “emptying/negative,” movement toward God. The horizontal direction represents life’s rich colors of joy and sorrow, the material cosmos, and cataphatic, or “filling/positive,” movement toward God. The vertical and horizontal unite all opposites at the center, in Christ, who is eternal love. Within the mandorla, weighted down by the heaviness of the apostles’ struggle to establish the Church, Christ blesses and calls the viewer to join the mystical space of the Church, where the old life of the world is transformed into New Life.