Creating a border cultural code in the iconography of sts Ggeorge and Christopher as a special type of meta-lingual christian sermon

In the paper, the history of the development of a special “border” type of icon painting is studied, that reflects the compromise in the religious world outlook between the Christian and pagan one. The place and role of icons written within this tradition in the visual (iconic) preaching of Christianity, are investigated. A special attention is paid to the analysis of border cultural codes in such iconography and their transformation into a new pagan-Christian code. The author of the article analyses the ways in which this new cultural code influenced the history of re-thinking the iconographic Christian sermon in Byzantine Orthodoxy (the 9^th-15th centuries), Russian Orthodoxy (12th-19th centuries), Ossetian religion and Orthodoxy in Georgia (the 9^th-15th centuries) and even medieval Roman Catholicism. The related processes in the history of corresponding Christian churches are taken into account. The transformation of the border states of Christian and pagan cultural codes is studied in the article by the example of the metalinguistic visual homiletics of Christian icons. It is shewn that the border state of the “friend - foe” cultural code in this case is unstable and eventually turns into a new autopoetic (self-generated) cultural code, which leads to a fundamentally different reading of the symbolism of the icon and, accordingly, another meta-linguistic Christian sermon. In the article, the author analyses three examples of the new autopoietic pagan-Christian cultural code generation and three related examples of the historical transformation of the meta-lingual sermon: “The Miracle of St George and the dragon”, and the Martyr St Christopher. The methodology used in the article is constituted by the semiotic analytical method developed by Roland Barthes. The author of the paper comes to the following conclusions. 1. The history of icon painting proves that the state of cultural codes “on the border” can generate completely new and often unexpected cultural codes, which will become generators of a new homiletic metalanguage over time. 2. The visual religious sermon broadcast by means of iconography can undergo radical changes over time, not expected by iconographers. From a canonical Christian sermon, in several centuries it can gradually transform to in a completely non-canonical, pagan-Christian sermon that absorbs a layer of ancient Eastern and antique pagan religious meanings. 3. The iconic (metalinguistic) level of Christian preaching can generate a textual (linguistic) one. An example of this is the historical change of versions of life of St Christopher. His icons did not change, but the meta-language of their interpretation radically changed, and the homiletic narrative was heavily transformed. 4. In the visual iconic homiletics, the connotative (polysemantic) components of the cultural code that provide access to reading the icon outweigh the denotative (unambiguous) components.

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