International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

TYPE AND ARCHETYPE IN BYZANTINE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE
Conveners:
 Jelena Bogdanović
, 
Marina Mihaljević
Filip Ivanović
, 
Type and Archetype in the Aesthetics of Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor
Galina Tirnanić
, 
Invisible Bonds: Image and Its Source of Power in Byzantine Popular Belief
Ljubomir Milanović
, 
The Body of Christ as Relic Archetype
Mabi Angar
, 
Types and Archetypes of Byzantine Head Reliquaries
Anna Adashinskaya
, 
A Guide for Last Journey – The Mother of God Hodegetria as Typical Receiver 
of Funerary Prayers in Late-Byzantium
Svetlana Smolčić Makuljević
, 
Type and Archetype of the Holy Mounts in the Byzantine Balkans
Čedomila Marinković
,
 
The Iconography of the Temple in Jewish art: Type or Archetype?
Maria Cristina Carile
, 
The Image of the Temple in Byzantium: Formation and Meaning of a Figural (Architectural) Type
Marina Mihaljević
, 
Type and Archetype: The Case of Nea Moni’s Double Colonnettes
Ida Sinkević
, 
Five-Domed Churches in Byzantine Architecture: Type or Archetype
Jelena Bogdanović
, 
The Canopy as “Primitive Hut” in Byzantine Architecture

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Filip Ivanović
Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem, Israel; 
[e-mail]
Type and Archetype in the Aesthetics 
of Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor
In the highly aestheticized language of (Pseudo-)Dionysius the Areopagite, God is presented 
as the archetype of beauty, according to which the members of famous Dionysian hierarchies should 
model themselves by imitating God and thus reaching perfection. As a matter of fact, the only way 
the soul can imitate the divine beauty is to constantly look up at the archetype, the transcendent 
beauty. The Areopagite’s successor, Maximus the Confessor talks about returning to the Archetype 
in order to restore the beauty of the image in which all human beings were created. This task was 
exemplarily performed by Moses, who, according to Maximus, “having made God Himself the type 
and paradigm of the virtues, he modelled himself on Him, like a picture preserving beautifully 
the copy of the archetype”. For both Dionysius and Maximus, the type-archetype pair does not 
have only aesthetic significance, but also points to deeper ontological, ethical and soteriological 
dimensions. This paper aims at analyzing these aspects in these two great thinkers, thus reaching 
a comparative appreciation of certain important features of their systems of thought, which had 
further implication for the Christian doctrines of icon, deification, virtue, etc.