The exhibition "Byzantium: Faith and Power 1261-1557" now on view at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art has won unanimous praise for its scope and beauty. The themes of the art are emphatically Christian; yet it is perhaps a sign of spiritual hunger in our times that nonbelievers are flocking to the show and being deeply moved by it.

The exhibit deals with the final phase of the eastern Roman Empire, centered in Constantinople, from the time it regained sovereignty from western European conquerors in 1261, through its fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, and for a century afterward. Christian art did not vanish under Muslim rule that was violently repressive. The end-date of 1557 was the year when a German scholar first gave the name Byzantium to the eastern Roman Empire. Meanwhile, some Orthodox Russians proclaimed Moscow the "Third and Final Rome" and continued to produce icons in a local variant of the style of Constantinople, all the way down to the present era.

You can go online, if you have access to a computer, and enjoy a "virtual tour" of the 11 galleries housing icons, reliquaries, vestments and other fabulous treasures, on the Metropolitan Museum’s website, with highlights of some five dozen artworks. But it should only whet your appetite to get up to New York and see the real thing before it closes on July 4.

Just imagine: There is an entire roomful of icons from the ancient Monastery of St. Catherine on Mt. Sinai in Egypt, which had never lent any of its art to any museum in the world before the first of the Met’s series of Byzantine art exhibits a few years ago (this is the third and last of the series).

In the second gallery, which houses liturgical objects, there hangs a magnificent "choros" or circular lighting device 15 feet high and almost 11 feet in diameter, which held candles and oil lamps and "danced" in the breeze on high church festivals (the word means dance in Greek, as in choreography). It was in the presence of this awesome furnishing that All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, Spiritual Head of the Worldwide Orthodox Christian Church, delivered a lecture and special blessing on the occasion of the exhibition’s opening on March 23. The patriarch has worked with Pope John Paul II toward reconciliation of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches.

Indeed, the gathering and presentation of the objects in this show, together with a masterful audio guide that includes accounts of the liturgical and theological significance of many works by Archbishop Demetrios, Greek Orthodox Primate in America, make it more than an esthetic journey. It is also a spiritual one, much in the way that a visit to a historic church joins the quest for beauty and faith.

For Catholics, this show gives much to ponder. Constantinople’s sack by Catholic crusaders in 1204, who took time off from their trip to the Holy Land to pillage their Orthodox brethren, is a bitter chapter in the history of Catholic-Orthodox relations. After a half century of being ruled by a Flemish knight, the triumphant Byzantine general Michael VIII Paleologos entered Constantinople in 1261 carrying aloft the famed icon of the Virgin Hodegetria, the city’s eternal protector. The era of Paleologue rule that followed was marked by great artistic and intellectual flowering, even as Muslim Turks tightened ever closer around Constantinople.

The 350 masterworks in the show come from 30 nations, including many that were part of Constantinople’s cultural empire during those centuries — today Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, FYR-Macedonia — as well as Italy, France, and the Vatican. From Russia come precious textiles, icons and sculpture that survived the Communist disaster, which destroyed far more religious works than the Latin crusaders or the Turks.

The Paleologue era was one of ceaseless interchange and negotiation between Greek and Latin Christianity. Not long after 1261 came the Council of Lyons, where Saints Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas both worked for unity with the Greek Church.

In 1439 at Florence, another ecumenical council achieved, briefly, a full agreement on doctrine. The union, sadly, did not last, because it was not popular in Constantinople, and because western military aid to the Greeks was not forthcoming; but it is widely credited with having sparked the Renaissance, and this historic watershed is recorded in the show abundantly. Among remarkable documents of the events leading up to and following the Council of Florence, are a series of fine drawings by an eyewitness, the Italian artist Pisanello, and a staurotheque (icon-reliquary) that once belonged to Cardinal Bessarion, the key negotiator for the Orthodox side, who took refuge in Italy and became a cardinal of the Roman church.

There can be no doubt that our western appreciation for the Blessed Virgin Mary, which came to the forefront in the 13th and 14th centuries, was nourished by her veneration in the East and by the various icons of the Virgin and Child that were copied, and then varied, by Western artists.

It must be hoped that the sheer beauty of the textiles, mosaics, carvings, decorated books, and icons in this show, may inspire a new flowering of religious art in our own, spiritually beleaguered age. If you plan to visit the show, and I hope that you will, promise yourself at least two hours with the audio guide.