Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever;

and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.

+ In the Name of God the holy and Undivided Trinity

There is a magnificent church in St. Petersburg. Built in the 19^th Century, St. Isaac’s cathedral has the third largest dome in the world. It holds more than 13,000 people. The ikonostasis is golf and the emerald-colored marble called malachite. Looking through the great royal doors, one sees the altar, which the orthodox call the throne, and it is easy to fantasize about the throne of God depicted in the Apocalypse, with its flashing rainbow and emerald throne. The whole thing is designed to lift the worshiper to another plane of being.

So far, so good. I like that. But if you look a little more closely, at the images in the screen, one notices the saints awarded places of honor with giant mosaics: Peter and Paul (the patrons of the city), Alexander Nevsky (local boy, a prince who defeated the Teutonic Knights and is revered as one of the patrons of all Russia), then St. Nicholas (another patron of Russia and popular favorite), St. Michael the Archangel, St. Alexius (early Roman ascetic), St. Catherine of Alexandria and St. Elizabeth, the cousin of the Bl. Virgin Mary. A fact jumps out at one familiar with later Russian history: Michael, Alexy, Peter, Elizabeth, Catherine, Paul, Alexander, Nicholas ~ these are all throne names of the Romanov dynasty. A simple, uneducated Russian might well confuse the saints with the rulers.

In Soviet times, the building was a museum. A Foucault pendulum was suspended from the great dome, to illustrate the rotation of the earth, and a large display over by the ikonostasis displayed the extravagant posters and from the coronation celebrations of the late Tsar and Tsarina. One depicted them literally hovering in the sky above Russia, surrounded by clouds and attended by angels, a celestial light shining down from on high. In the center of the exhibit was a quotation from Lenin: throughout history, rulers have always attempted to convince their subjects of their own divinity.”

Right on, Lenin! Too bad after he was dead they did the same to him! His mummy is STILL on display in Red Square ~ just like the bodies of incorrupt saints in the cathedrals of Moscow ~ and no one knows quite what to do with him. Down the river a bit from Lenin is the biggest church in Russia. His successor destroyed it and used many of its treasures in the new subway, but the robber-barons of the ‘90s rebuilt it, sparing no expense (well, no verifiable expense, anyway: it is said that the white sheathing on the distant domes is of ignoble material ~ plastic, not marble ~ but who can tell?) The Cathedral of Christ the Savior is the Russian San Pietro in Vaticano, and almost as big. It was built as a thank-offering for Russia’s deliverance from the Grand Army of Napoleon in 1812. Tchaikovsky was commissioned to write a piece for its dedication. The bells of the church and the canons of the Kremlin joined in the premier of the 1812 Overture in 1882. There are glimmers of beauty in this largest Orthodox church ever built, especially some of the early modern art nouveau iconography, but the overall effect is terrifically, monumentally ugly. It is a building intended not to uplift but to overwhelm. There are two golden thrones on a dais in the nave, under one of the pendentives, near the center. They are roped off, as if awaiting some future occupants. The enormous five-domed temple rises from a massif of black granite, fully four blocks square. The color scheme (black below, light above) is the same as the Lyubyanka the old KGB headquarters and fearsome prison. As an old friend once observed, “you can’t lie with architecture." And this is triumphalism at its worst.

All of this came to mind as I was considering the lessons for today. These Russian buildings represent what can go wrong when the church gets two cozy with the empire. In the end, empire as such is incompatible with the Eucharistic life, which we celebrate with special joy today. I still think that it is possible to be a Christian prince. Russia itself had plenty of them, genuine ones, like St, Vladimir of Kiev, St. Theodore of Moscow, the son of Ivan the terrible, who abolished the death penalty and torture in the 16^th Century, and the aforementioned Alexander Nevsky. Power and holiness are not mutually exclusive. Think of Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. I would not wish to argue that the Church ought to have nothing to do with princes. The problem is the almost irresistible pressure on the Church to become an instrument of princely power, from turning into a consort of the Great Whore of today’s reading.

We hear of two opposite kinds of human community today: the imperial and the Eucharistic. Those are the alternatives we have before us right now in America…maybe they are the only choices there ever are, for those, that is, who actually HAVE a choice. The Whore of Babylon is, of course, the Empire. She has intoxicated all the nations of the earth with her illicit, lascivious ~ and above all cruel ~ carnality. It is hard to imagine a more unflattering metaphor for an institutional system that is constantly trying to convince us of its own sanctity! But there it is. And while St. Jerome is probably right and a detailed parsing of apocalyptic symbolism will drive you crazy, it is generally agreed that the Whore of Babylon was code for the Roman Empire. Writing at a time when Christianity had just become the official religion of that Empire, Jerome would not have wanted to emphasize the metaphor. But it is hardly even code. She rode on a Beast, and the beast had seven heads, and the seven heads are seven hills. Let anyone with ears to ear understand!

Whoever wrote the Apocalypse ~ whether it were the Beloved Disciple or the Fourth Evangelist, or someone else altogether ~ there is no reason to doubt the author’s self-description as a prisoner on the island of Patmos, off the Anatolian peninsula near Ephesus. He was in exile, or a refugee in hiding from the first Empire-wide persecution of the Church under Domitian. Everything in the Apocalypse is to be taken in this context of ruthless persecution. The Empire was no longer seen through Paul’s eyes, as the more-or-less necessary guarantor of civil peace. The Empire now was evil itself, worthy of the last degree of scorn and contempt. The Great Whore of Empire, and her lewd wallowing with the princes of the earth, is one kind of human community ~ if it can be called that. It is really an anti-community, whose currency is power, whose character is immoral ruthlessness, and whose hallmark is torture, which John of Patmos’s correspondents were experiencing as he wrote. That kind of human system is destined for the bonfire ~ and her smoke goes up for ever.

The other kind of community is revealed in the vision of the Wedding Banquet of the Lamb, of which the Holy Eucharist is a foretaste and a type. The Lamb is a figure of sacrifice, the precise opposite of Domitian ~ or any domination. The Lamb Himself is a Survivor of torture at the hands of the same Empire, the Whore now burning before Him. The Crucified has vanquished the Empire. That is the message of the Apocalypse. It is frankly political and revolutionary: unqualified in its condemnation of the dehumanizing cruelty of the Empire. Babylon, that great whore, has fallen ~ defeated by the crucified Messiah, Who shall reign forever and ever.

The human relationships preferred by the Empire ~ besotted predation ~ are replaced by the mutual love and self-giving of the Wedding Feast. The Eternal Communion with each other and with God around the Sea of Crystal opens to us now in the Mystery of the Holy Eucharist. Every time we celebrate it, every time we receive Communion, we renounce our subjugation to the Empire and declare ourselves to be subversives, whose allegiance is elsewhere. And the Empire may well kill us, but in the end it can’t win. In the end, the Great Whore is supremely stupid.

For she will overextend herself, bankrupt herself with her orgies of military power, weaken herself at home by permitting her population to grow poorer and sicker. She will set up dreadful prisons in secret places and maintain in power local tyrants to run them, until the wretched of the earth turn on her ~ as on Satan ~ and find themselves willing to die rather than salute her. In her insane stupidity, she will inevitably involve herself in self-destructive adventures. The Great Whore cannot survive forever. the inner logic of her own power will destroy her.

Christians, fortified by the foretaste of the Heavenly Banquet, must resist her to the death. We may hide from her raging, hoping to escape her notice, like John of Patmos. Or we may be called upon to witness (martyr ourselves) by denouncing her in public. What Christians may NOT do is join with the princes of the earth in her drunken orgies. At all costs, Christians must NOT come to regard the Empire as divine, or even as on any way favored by God. That would be apostasy ~ defection from Christ, of the kind I am afraid the those flirted with, who built those two big churches in Russia, buildings that glorify imperial power as much as they glorify the Lamb That Was Slain. I am all for splendor, and for attempting to replicate in our worship the beauty of the Celestial Wedding Banquet. But sometimes splendor is not beautiful.

When I came out of The Largest Orthodox Church Ever, I felt suitably overwhelmed ~ and a little filthy. As though I had just participated in St. John’s metaphor in some way. Fortunately, there was spiritual cleansing close at hand. The other side of Russian Orthodoxy, which I cherish, is represented in a corner of the large park that surrounds the black granite esplanade: another new church, just a chapel, really, hardly bigger than this room. It is made of unpainted (but intricately carved) woodwork, in the old Russian style. A kindly old woman welcomes the visitor, who may buy candles from her to honor the simple, traditional ikons. The place is serene and beautiful, dedicated to the Transfiguration. In so many ways it represents the opposite of the pompous monstrosity that overshadows it. You can’t lie with architecture. The Chapel of the Transfiguration is clearly a Eucharistic building. It represents the possibility of human community that God has offered us in His Son. That is, the Divine Life of love and perfect peace that is the inner Life of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. By inviting us to say Our Father, Jesus has invited us into that Life. By giving us His Flesh for to eat and His Blood to drink, He raises our carnal, mortal bodies to new life in His Mystical Body, so that whoever eats this bread might live forever.

O SACRED banquet,

in which Christ is received,

the memory of His Passion is renewed,

the mind is filled with grace,

and a pledge of future glory given to us.

YOU GAVE THEM BREAD FROM HEAVEN

CONTAINING WITHIN ITSELF ALL SWEETNESS.

ALLELUIA, ALLELUIA, ALLELUIA