VST. SOPHIA
... new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven ... as a bride adorned for her husband.
Kingsley remarks that though Cyril thought he was establishing the kingdom of God upon earth, he was in reality establishing a sort of devil’s kingdom. The kingdom of God was independent of Cyril. And yet, of course, a great deal of the material success of Christianity was due to Cyril—if Christianity can really have such a thing as material success. Cyril was a sort of Cæsar to whom must be rendered the things that are Cæsar’s. And in his day imperial Cæsar himself had become Christian, and kings were to arise who would claim as a divine right, not only the things that are Cæsar’s but also the things that are God’s.
They were in their day accounted great, and there was noise about them and lights, and throngs of those who flock to noise and light. But though some were mighty instruments of the Divine Will, the spiritual power did not proceed from them but from the silences and the obscurities and privaciesof life. But for the holy men in the desert Cyril could no more have gloried and lasted than could a blossom without root. And on the other hand, Cyril and his like, and what they stood for, were in one sense the blossom and fruit of the seed sown by the hermits. It was the hermits who gave the spiritual impulse to Alexandria. Alexandria in turn gave new hermits to the desert—as new seeds fall from flowers in autumn. Such is the unity of the Church.
It seems at first as if the rude cave or cell of the hermit cannot be reconciled with the splendour of the churches of their time, with, for instance, the wondrous cathedral of St. Sophia, as if the wretched cave or hole in the earth were a contradiction of the great marble temple, painted and gilded and set with all manner of gold ornament and precious stone—and yet there is this obvious reconciliation, that the one is the seed, the other the blossom; the one the prayer in secret, the other the reward made openly; one the white light, the other the rainbow of Creation.
The first centuries of Christianity were a wild time. Many religions and philosophies were in the throes of glorious death, exchanging their mortality for Christian immortality. The music of change streams upward in wild, rapturous, sensuous, and agonising melody. Ten thousand passions and tragedies of conflicting import ravish the senses, and the heart leaps and the blood dances in the veins atthe spectacle of death becoming life, or the heart sinks and the face pales at the dread of life turning to death. Only the calm soul sees the myriad colours blend at last and become reconciled in the whiteness of Christ.
And that whiteness into which the other creeds must merge is the Holy Wisdom, the Sancta Sophia, with the name of which the early Eastern Church identified itself, representing the Bride of Christ as a new Athene, Sophia, the Christian Wisdom.
The Holy Wisdom distilled from Isis and Athene and thousands of other goddesses and conceptions that died to become Christian, the water of life distilled from all the magical fluids of antiquity. The wild waste of passion and colour, the almost barbarous pageantry of the early Church, is the pageantry of autumn; the reds and browns and yellows, the flame-colours and death-colours, that go before the whiteness of Christmas.
The cathedral of St. Sophia itself, the beautiful symbol of the Bride of Christ, is the representation of the death of thousands of creeds to become immortal in the new Christian conception. There is not an idea that is being transmuted that does not find its counterpart in the sacred edifice.
A mystic wrote: “St. Sophia was not born or created, but was built.” A relic, the dust or bones of those who had died for the faith, was built between every tenth stone in the walls of the cathedral. The walls were of granite and marble;the pillars of porphyry, malachite, and glimmering alabaster; the floor of polished marble; the doors of cedar inlaid with ivory and amber. Its height was as the height of heaven, its breadth as that of the earth. They brought the glory and honour of the nations into it. Trees of silver with lights for fruit sprang from the floor, like the tree of life in the midst of the City. Silver boats with oil and floating wicks hung from the domes. The stone canopy above the ambo bore a great cross inlaid with diamonds and pearls. Above the screen which shut off the choir were twelve columns overlaid with silver, and between them representations of the Jewish prophets, the Holy Family, and the four Evangelists—the past, the present, and the future of Christianity. The altar was raised upon a throne of gold, and was formed of thousands of precious stones and gems and pearls that had been crushed to dust and diffused in molten gold—as if of the pure lives and passions of all men a wine had been pressed into a precious chalice. On all the walls and on many of the pillars were painted the pageant of the Church, the prophets walking with God, the Saviour revealing God, the saints and martyrs and champions living and dying for the truth. There was not a religious history nor a Christian life that did not find its counterpart or emblem in the frescoes of St. Sophia. The cathedral and the idea of Sophia functionised every true conception and beautiful life lived in its day. It was “The Word” written instone, and standing instead of the ruined and almost illegible tablets of Moses. It was the white stone in which the new name was written.
The idea of St. Sophia is reduplicated throughout the Eastern Church. It is a-gleam in millions of ikons, endeavours to paint theallof Christianity and the living breathing Church itself, the Bride. It is the inspiration of such a cathedral as that of St. Basil, that marvellous mediæval passion in stone built by Ivan the Terrible in the Red Square of Moscow—hence its many colours, its extraordinary diversity of shapes, its harmonisation of incongruous angles and solecisms of form, its many chapels and standing places by which the Byzantine architect endeavoured to suggest that each and every one who entered the cathedral might find a particular place where it was most fitting he should stand and praise, a particular chapel where he might kneel in secret. Astonishing to find the architectural idea coming up again in such an unlikely place as New York, in the cathedral of St. John, which will be the largest church in the world, and pre-eminently the cathedral of the West. Into the walls and body of this new cathedral bits of every kind of stone existent in America are being built. St. John, built from the substance of the world, will be the counterpart of St. Sophia, built of the substance of the other world, and having the dust of martyrs between each tenth stone—thecathedral of the way of Martha and the West balancing the cathedral of the way of Mary and the East.
Roman Catholicism was founded on the rock of apostolic succession. St. Peter’s represents the House built upon a rock, the House that shall survive all storms and tempests. Eastern Christianity or Orthodoxy was founded on St. Sophia, the Holy Wisdom; and whereas Catholicism is a House built on the earth, Orthodoxy is a House vouchsafed from heaven, the new Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven ... as a bride adorned for her husband.
The word is one and the same. But the Roman Catholic is the least free of individuals, religiously. The rock of apostolic succession is the rock of infallibility. And whereas a foundation of wisdom implies freedom of individual thought, a foundation of infallibility implies intellectual and religious servitude. A Roman Catholic who thinks for himself in religious matters has already begun to be a heretic and has a sin to confess to his father confessor.
The service in one of our London churches frequently ends on the antiphone:
I am the Living Bread,Which came down from heaven.Whoso eateth Me shall live for ever.
I am the Living Bread,Which came down from heaven.Whoso eateth Me shall live for ever.
I am the Living Bread,Which came down from heaven.Whoso eateth Me shall live for ever.
I am the Living Bread,
Which came down from heaven.
Whoso eateth Me shall live for ever.
Even among the least religious people the sitting down together to a meal makes a certain intimacy. The loaf which is broken for you and me and another goes to make flesh and blood in each of us. Without any reflection or thought we know that we are nearer because we have broken bread together. At the symbolical meal, Communion, we are consciously nearer. By virtue of the bread that was broken for us we know ourselves nearer to one another.
Unity is the deepest knowledge. There are moments when one feels one would with deep emotion offer one’s ego and individuality upon the altar of unity, when one would cease to be John Brown or Ivan Ivanovitch, and become one with the human race, giving up one’s rich treasure of memories and experiences, character, developed intelligence, dear idiosyncrasies. In the depths of that humility is discovered a new graciousness and love, a new faith.
Only at death do we pass completely to the unity, though in life at rare moments we can apprehend it. That unity is not necessarily the unity of the family, of the human race as a family; it may be the human race is after all only one human being—Sophia, the Bride of Christ.
VIFROM EGYPT TO RUSSIA
On the quay at Alexandria flocks of Russian peasant pilgrims with great bundles on their backs, men and women who had been in Jerusalem when the Great War broke out, or at Mount Sinai in the desert seeking remote shrines and holy men. As Smerdyakof said, “No one in these days can move mountains into the sea by faith, unless perhaps one man in the world, or at most two, and they most likely saving their souls in secret somewhere in the Egyptian desert”; and the peasant pilgrim, through the traditions of his Church, always looks to these deserts for spiritual power.
Besides the Christian pilgrims are hundreds of refugee Jews driven out of Zion by the belligerent Turk, many of them patriarchal types of great piety, long-bearded men with multiplex wrinkles on their brows.
My ship goes riding over the sea to Greece, passing the seven churches, those candles lit in the dim dawn of Christianity, passing Cyprus and Patmos and a thousand nameless islands wherelived mystics, hermits, and writers of the early Church. We carried ikons brought from Jerusalem to be carried back to Russia. The pilgrims sang Christian hymns; the Jewish patriarchs, with phylacteries on their brows, read the Mosaic books and the prophets. Nearly every one on the boat was bound for Russia. We went thither the way these things have ever gone, from the desert northward over the sea. Not in vain does the reader of the Gospel stand facing the north; not in vain is the belfry of the cathedral built on the northern side. The direct message of Christianity has been the message that has gone northward.
The cathedral of Christianity, our St. Sophia in large, may perhaps be imagined in this guise.
St. Sophia.St. Sophia.
St. Sophia.
St. Sophia.
Egypt is the choir of the cathedral where stand the martyrs and the saints singing in white robes. Through the gates at the north and the west comethose who hear the sweet tidings and the heavenly music.
The journey from Egypt to Russia is like going across our great Sophia from the splendid choir to the multitudes who have come out of the forests to listen.
Christianity went over the waves to Athos and Tsargrad, to the Greek and Roman cities of the Black Sea shores, and up the mighty rivers to Kief and Novgorod and Yaroslaf, down the great Volga, driving the Tartar before it, across the forests and along the rivers where lived the primeval nature-worshippers of Russia, brought by knights in armour, by priests and bishops, engendered by hermits and martyrs, enforced eventually by princes and monarchs, interwoven with the splendour of mediæval chivalry. Russia became officially Christian in 988, when King Vladimir and his hosts were baptized in the Dnieper at Kief. A cathedral of St. Sophia, “mother of Russian churches,” springs up at Kief, St. Sophia appears at Novgorod, St. Sophia at Yaroslaf. At the time of our Edward the Confessor Russia was as fervently Christian as England. And the seed, no doubt, had sunk deeper or had been wafted into remoter solitudes. There was room in Russia for Christianity to mature in the popular mind.
At last the Turks streamed across the Levant, and severed the Christian world in two. Foolish and naïve Mahomet came stamping into the greatcathedral of Sophia on horseback, shouting out at the foot of the sublime altar, “There is no god but God, and Mahomet is His prophet.” Legend says that on that day a priest was celebrating Mass at the altar, and he prayed that the body of Christ might be saved from profanation. As an answer to his prayer the stones gaped, and priest and Host were enclosed, as the relics had been that in earlier days were placed between the tenth stones. The priest was probably murdered as he broke the bread, and, it is true, he has been taken into the wall and has become part of the Bride.
Leopards have their dens where Christian hermits once prayed to God, and they do not know that the ground is holy ground. And the ferocious yet simple Turk has it not in his power to profane Sancta Sophia. When the time comes he can be driven back to the wilds whence he came.
Constantinople falls. But Christianity does not fall, rather it grows. Russian Christianity is saved from much ecclesiastical exploitation, Levantine corruption, and materialism by the severance of the earthly tie, the break-up of the patriarchate of Tsargrad. After the Turks took Constantinople Russian Christianity was fed by the angels. Hence its fair face to-day.
Over the sea to Russia, to the Kremlins round the many-domed churches, to the gleaming ikons, to the great choruses, resplendent and triumphant Orthodoxy; to the land where ever day and nightthere is witness, where the young men see visions and the old men dream dreams; to Kief, to Novgorod, to Moscow, to the Kremlin, to the great pink-walled hill that stands above the mother-city crowned with churches. Bowing at the Ilinskaya, baring the head to enter at the Spassky Gate ... my eyes rest on the wan wall of St. John the Great. I climb to the belfry and let my fingers pass lovingly over the bulging bells. I light a candle in the cathedral of the Assumption. I walk across the broad open spaces where Napoleon’s cannon are ranged and listen to the sad slow chime of the Kremlin clock giving the hours and the quarters. Here again is a holy city standing above a merely worldly city, this walled hill over commercial Moscow, this Sophia exalted above Prudentia.
In the first autumn of the War, when I was at Moscow, I used to go to the Kremlin last thing each night. They were beautifully starry and peaceful nights. The churches and the low pavements that wander among the cobbles were flooded with silver, the toothed battlements and antediluvian old towers of the Kremlin walls seemed gigantically exaggerated in silhouette, and yet, though exaggerated, in a way truer, as if the ordinary vision of them we had by day was not correct, as if they were really in themselves of enormous importance and correspondingly enormous proportions. The moat of the Moscow river lay murky below,and afar among the vast congregation of the houses of the city a lamp burned here and there as if before votive shrines. Motionless sentries stood in front of the cathedrals. One’s own steps echoed startlingly. The single liquid melody of the Kremlin chime broke out and poured away—ding,ding,ding,ding,dong,dell,dell. Holy Russia was watching.
I went into a cathedral: still many candles were burning. I walked along the walls: lamps were alight before holy pictures set in the old bricks. There was a perfect stillness and serenity. I paused, and the mind went across Moscow and beyond it fifteen hundred miles to Poland and Germany and Austria where was another scene, a more exterior scene and manifestation of the life of Russia,—Russia in arms against a false ideal. Russia was serene though Russia was in deadly struggle. The heart was beating faithfully, strong hands were smiting the foe.
In the night the hundreds of Napoleon’s black cannon had a sinister aspect, each one seemed pointed at me. The mind went back to their real hour of history when from them death blazed forth; when instead of this stillness and serenity the thunder and tumult of battle was around them. They are death’s heads of what once were live guns; they are greedy as death, menacing as death—harmless also as death. Away above them among the glittering stars stand the gold crosses of the churches, the splendour of God. The mind’s eyetakes in hundreds and thousands of gold crosses, waving, dipping, lifting, triumphant, the grand processional aspect of the Church. Even at this moment how many are dying, how many souls are passing. In the Kremlin in the still night Holy Russia is watching. Away on the battlefields the brave are dying. Look, in the Kremlin you see their crosses among the stars; listen, you hear the heavenly chorus swelling as they join the great procession of the Church.
From Egypt to Russia, and then from Russia West once more to England. The tempestuous War still rages, and in the seasons of history it is deep winter. Ravenous winds lash the bare trees, howl through the churchyards. Or the wind dies down awhile and bitter frost sets in, and the merciless hungry stars stare at the dead earth. Or heavy clouds come over and the snow sifts down, becomes deeper, communes with the breeze, wreathes itself in fantastic drifts. On the still branches of the forest the snow is balanced, or only disturbed by ravens flitting awkwardly from one tree to another. It is the winter of history, but the season will change. Under the crusted streams the water is flowing, flowers are rising under the snow, flowers from the living seed. The seed lives through the four seasons, and the seed is the Word of God.