Facial!

Some body likes seaweed eye mask! Thats not me!

Da Qin Christian Monastry?

"At first it seemed to be a wonderful Chinese scene of the Five Sacred Mountains or possibly a representation of the five peaks of Hua Shan, one of the Taoist sacred mountains. But as my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, I could see what had foxed the cultural experts from the province. For the centre of the mountain had a cave created within it. And in the cave was the lower portion of a statue. The mountain and the cave were classical Chinese in design. The figure was not. The robes were Hellenistic in style and the posture was one never seen in Chinese religious art. I have worked extensively with the Russian and Greek orthodox Churches and thus I have become familiar with Orthodox iconography. I suddenly realised what I was looking at. In Orthodox iconography, the Nativity is not depicted as in Western art. The orthodox follow the description contained in the Book of James and this says that Mary gave birth to Christ in a cave in a mountain, by herself. In front of me I could see the mountain and the cave. And the figure of Mary - for so I believe it to be - lay exactly as she is often depicted in Orthodox icons, her right leg drawn up slightly, her left lying along the ground, holding the Christ Child who looks towards her. Above the cave, the celestial light shines down. Here was Mary; here the place where the celestial light had once been but had been ripped down; here outlined by dirt, was the shape of a child. I was looking at the earliest known Christian statue in China and it fused, just as I had always thought it would, Christian and Chinese art in the way that Gandharian art fused Greek and Buddhist art."

hmmm??



and whats up with this?

"Many have tried to present the early Church as one ship, ploughing forward, driven by truth, with odd heresies breaking away from it. In fact the Early Church of the first 4 centuries of the Christian era were a motley collection of distinct tradition s which drew upon and fused with a variety of local, pre-Christian traditions. In Britain for example, the Celtic Church arose, distinctive through its fusion of Christianity with Celtic traditions and even deities. Antioch developed a Christianity that fused Christianity with a humanism which was the hallmark of the philosophical schools of the City. Meanwhile down in Egypt, the Church of Alexandria fused Christianity with the ancient traditions of the goddess Isis and her infant son Horus to produce the earliest known statues of the Virgin Mary and the Christ child. Egyptian Christianity was far more transcendental, more concerned with godhead than the humanitarian traditions of Antioch.All this came to a head in the fifth century. The Roman Empire had turned Christian during the 4th century and sought to create One Church just as it saw itself as the One State. As a result, local divergences and differences came to be seen as a profound threat to the concept and unity of the One Church model. Gradually local versions of Christianity were absorbed, dismantled or dismissed. These differences often expressed themselves in debates about the nature and person of Christ. For reasons too complex to go into now, the Archbishop of Constantinople, Nestorius, was in 431 dismissed as a heretic and his teachings about the humanity of Christ were declared heretical."