0132 Lord God Sabaoth

0132 Lord God Sabaoth
Russian.19th cent 25 cms in diam.
Double sided.

In the early Church, Christian theologians were happy to coalesce the concepts of God The Father and God The Son in one embracing title of “The Ancient of Days”. However between the 4th and 7th centuries there erupted an increasingly bitter dispute as to the nature and personality of Christ. Eventually, The Council of Moscow [1666-67] sought to end this dispute by making a final Judgement. Unequivocally, the Council  determined “To write an icon of The Lord God Sabaoth, which is the same as the Father with a grrey beard and his only begotten Son in His bosom with a dove between them is very bad and inappropriate for no one has seen the Father in His divinity”.
Despite this there were those, mainly the Old Believer sect and, more generally, in the 19th cent. when Russian iconography was easing itself away from its traditional values.
Icon 0132, dating from the mid-19th cent, was one. It was probably a Church that followed the Old Believer protocols. A church following mainstream Orthodox practices is unlikely to ignore The Council’s dictat. Secondly, the image is shown with both hands defiantly giving the traditional Christogram blessing. The icon is double-sided; an unlikely addition for a domestic environment. Finally, on the reverse is an empty chalice with its association with the miracle of The Eucharist. Again an unlikely image for an item destined for secular placement especially when the Eucharist was known in Orthodoxy as “The sacrament of sacraments”.