funkystuf31 wrote:
Armyman wrote:
Now that i think about it for a while, the Catholic Church had Anti-Popes, should the Orthodox Church have Anti-Saints? Should there be an image of Stalin in the icon style, except without the halo?
Dave
I don't know, there are plenty icon-like images (statues and otherwise) of almost divine-looking figures from the Communist era. The communists seem to have taken care of it already.
It\'s not for us to judge. I just got back from Greece and one of the places I visited was the church of St Dionysios on the island of Zakynthos. On the back wall of the church there is a huge, ceiling-to-floor icon of the last judgment. In this particular Icon, the iconographer included people in business suits, and people in \\"foustonellas\\" (I think that\'s what they\'re called - the stuff that soldiers wore during the Greek revolution), representative of the average guy. He even put himself in the Icon, with his easel and everything, in a white painting-coat (In my opinion...symbolic of all iconographers...). Then there was one thing that I initially thought was really cool, but after talking to a friend...I didn\'t agree with...the iconographer had depicted Hitler (the only was you could tell was his moustache...he was naked) with the damned being herded by the demons into hell. My friend brought up the good point...It\'s not for us to judge. Obviously we can\'t canonize/glorify Hitler or Stalin. But it\'s not for us to make the judgment on them (Judge not lest ye be judged)...who knows...maybe they DID repent inwardly and ended up going to heaven. We can\'t canonize them, but we can\'t \\"anti-canonize\\" them either, and making icons without halos or whatever, that would be like that. It would be saying \\"These people are in hell\\" when we don\'t know that. As one contemporary elder said, we should not be able to stand the fact that some souls are cut off from God, and we should pray with all our hearts for their salvation. Just my two cents.
-Manoli
P.S. They wouldn\'t let us take pix in the church on Zakynthos and nobody sold copies of that Icon, but if somebody wants to try and find it online, go right ahead.
