The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary/Part 1/Chapter 7
I have been much struck with the many ruins of abbeys in England. There are many ruined abbeys that seem to need comparatively little restoration to make them great places of worship. Kirkstall Abbey outside Leeds, for instance, is a grand pile of stone, and has room for 1200 worshippers—but it remains little more than a curiosity and a questionable adornment of industrial Leeds. In Russia there are no such ruins. Throughout the wide stretch of Russia there is not a single Christian ruin. Christianity does not tolerate ruins. Kirkstall would never have been allowed to fall out of Christian service unless a heathen power like Turkey had gained possession of it. Russia, for instance, in 1875, coming into possession of the ruins of early Christian churches on the newly-acquired Caucasian shore of the Black Sea, at once set to work to restore them and to build new churches on the old holy sites. Kirkstall was built in 1152; it struck me, looking at it, that at their best the Russians of to-day are not unlike the English Christians of that date. They have the characteristics of early Christian fervour.
The most representative cathedral of Russia is quite a modern one—that of St. Vladimir at Kief. It is much worth entering. A wonderful interior painted by the marvellous Russian painters, Vasnetsof and Nesterof—mediæval artists alive in the present, the eyes of the dead Middle Ages opening again after a thousand years' sleep. All the walls and the pillars of St. Vladimir are painted by these wonderful artists. At the north by the font is a vast representation of the birth of Russian Christianity, the stepping of the army of King Vladimir down into the waters of the Dnieper to their first baptism. And away high over the altar in a background of dark blue is painted Vasnetsof's majestical Mother and Child, whence naturally the congregation raises its eyes in adoration and aspiration. In the choir at the west is painted the story of Adam and Eve and their sin, and at the east is the wonderful Crucifixion and Resurrection, human birth balanced by spiritual birth, Paradise lost by Paradise regained. On the columns of the church are immense figures of the warrior-saints of Russia, the champions of Russian Christendom. When on Easter Eve this wonderful modern cathedral is full of all manner of Russians, you have a complete and national picture—another vision of Holy Russia. It is not necessary to pray or to fall upon one's knees. It is only necessary to exist in the great choric throng and to look over a thousand heads to the awful and yet altogether lovely vision of the Virgin to feel one's heart almost stand still and one's soul become rapt in wonder, awestruck, thrilled. You wish to stretch arms above the head and give yourself completely to the spirit of beauty, the Godhead. You lose the sense of the Ego, the separated individual, you are aware of being part of a great unity praising God. You cease to be man and become the church, the bride of Christ.
The walls of all churches in Russia are painted all over with immense pictures. This is dimly thought by Western people to be in bad taste. But that is because the distance between the Western and Eastern churches of Christ is as yet unbridged. The Russian has the child-soul, the peasants get to heaven where we fail, because they are "as little children." And the children like the pictures. Older and more staid folk would not perhaps have thought of them. But they only need to go through the spiritual experience of praying in a Russian church surrounded by the painted cloud of witnesses to wish to be such children, and to feel that the child-idea of painting the walls with the pictures of the heavenly host is a perfect felicity.
The Eastern Church abhors dumb walls and the restriction of movement and attitude implied by pews. Every wall and every pillar is painted with pictures of the saints, and of incidents recorded in Holy Writ. Walls, blank walls, are always in the nature of prison walls. They separate us from other people. But the Russian, by painting the walls blue and crowding them with the saints, imparts to them a character of infinity. He gives to the worship a background of eternity. He paints in the spiritual landscape of the church.
A great interpretive Russian writer[1] thus writes of the fresco and wall-painting:—
In the West, where the Gothic arose, wall-painting naturally disappeared. There was no place for it on the arrowy columns and in the spaces between the windows. But in orthodoxy a continuous blank wall begged to be covered with painting. An ikon, a little picture in a square frame, was hung here and there, but still did not cover or give voice to the senseless walls at which the eyes of the worshippers gazed. In orthodoxy the wall must not be dumb, it must speak. But the wall cannot speak by texts—for which there are books. The people in the church ought to see themselves surrounded by holy scenes, pictures—of immense content and of immense dimensions. Such are frescoes. Only in orthodoxy are they possible, and indeed without them orthodoxy is dumb, powerless, not expressed. Thirst for such pictures among the Russian orthodox is great.
Frescoes make the walls live. The soul poured forth on the walls calls to prayer, and says as much to the worshippers as does the reading and the singing in church, not less. . . . The worshippers feel around them the great background of historical Christianity. They not only hear but see—Christian history, they not only hear but see—the story of salvation, they not only hear but see—the exploits of the martyrs, the suffering. . . . They see the pageant of orthodoxy, its splendid victories.
The great difference between our immense wall-paintings and mere painting on canvas, the things that are exhibited in galleries and academies, is that the one is national whereas the other is only personal. Instead of nervous shrieking pictures, these minute creations which hang on academy walls, we have something eternal, everlasting, to which may bow their heads generation after generation, to which will pray one human family, another human family, another. . . .
This is an orthodox Russian's view of one of the characteristic features of his own church. To the Russian it means so much. But to one who has worshipped in both churches, and is speaking for those who for the most part pray in churches that have dumb walls, there is a great deal more to note and to follow up in the consideration of this most interesting new emblem in religion. Rozanof sets us on the highroad for a fundamental understanding of Russian orthodoxy, and what I call the Eastern point of view in Christianity.
This praying in a church whose walls are "the great cloud of witnesses" is a portentous matter.
First of all, a word as to the service in a Russian church—the holy scene that shows itself if you go into vespers or matins, to a funeral or a wedding or a baptism, or a service for the remembrance of the dead, or any of the numerous occasions of religious gathering. There are no pews, no chairs. There is always a crowd, a promiscuity of rich and poor, of well-dressed and tattered, a kaleidoscopic mingling of people and colours, people standing and praying, people kneeling, people prostrated, people pushing their way to the altar, people handing candles over one another's heads, people pushing their way out, churchwardens wandering about collecting alms, no irritation at the pushing, no anger through discomfort. The lights are dim, being mostly those of the worshippers themselves, of the candles they have lit before votive shrines. There is no organ music, but an unearthly and spontaneous outburst of praise from the souls of the choir and the clergy and the laity worshipping together. It is a strange and wonderful crowd where noble human faces, broad shoulders, and beautiful forms predominate rather than clothes or uniforms. No ranks of pews and people, no "man's order," only God's order, the varying and wonderful multitude. And from the back and the sides, and from the pillars and columns look the pale faces of antiquity, the faces of the dead who are alive looking over the shoulders of the alive who have not yet died, all praising God, enfolding in a vast choric communion the few who in the church have met on the common impulse to acknowledge the wonder and splendour of the mystery of God.
All the walls and the people and the priests are praising God. Whom do they praise?
Whom are we all praising? It is Some One or Something that has been praised for all time, and that will be praised for ever. Any narrow conception is necessarily wrong. It does not matter that many a worshipper has a low or superstitious idea of the God he worships. We are all comparatively narrow—even the widest-eyed of us. It does not matter that many deny intellectually that they are praising at all. We at least know by what we have heard, by bursts of universal praising borne in upon our ears, that all there is, is praising. That is one of the reasons why frescoes touch the soul, they remind us of a truth we know in ourselves that the face of every human being, good or evil, is turned towards God, as the flowers turn their blossoms to the sun.
Russia has her modern frescoes, for she has rediscovered the art of painting on wet plaster. She has also her ancient Byzantine frescoes—the expression of the early Church. There is something in them all that expresses the idea of choric praise, "the same yesterday, to-day and for ever."
Rozanof very suggestively remarks that archaeologists are poets, in that they turn their backs on present-day reality and go to live with a time a thousand or two thousand years ago, holding that time to be as great a reality as the present day. They realise that the Past lives. We make a mistake when we talk of the dead past. It is a great religious truth that all that has ever lived lives for ever.
We are provincial dwellers in Time; we are, few of us, explorers, and many who do explore Time, explore it as moles do a field. We do not scan the vast stretch of Time from aloft. We are patient plodders, crawling on hands and knees and peering and poring over little plots of eternity. Few, very few of us, have the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling. But if we had the poet's eye and the poet's point of view we could see the time-that-was existent now, we could see it glowing and breathing and singing. We could see every event and circumstance in history—in living action, discharging itself and yet not getting discharged, rampant.
Keats, looking at the bas-relief on a Grecian urn, had the true poetic vision. He realised the ever-living quality of a moment of life poised in a picture. So he looked at the living groups on the ancient urn and sang:—
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
He looked at the Greek shepherds with their pipes and heard the liquid melody float away, and he cried:—
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.
What enchanted the poet was that though the sculpture was all action, it was only a single moment. He felt that all was living, all moving, all processional; but that all was fixed. He saw the eternity in the moment.
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss
. . . yet do not grieve;
She cannot fade . . .
For ever wilt thou love and she be fair!
He sees the trees whose leaves will never fall, and the spring which is an eternal spring.
A joy of art and of the eyes is the poising of a moment thus, and the showing in a sculptured relief or a picture or a poem all that was happening in the moment—the eternal life that the moment holds, the moment which we think passes, but which in truth never passes but ever is. We move past the landscape of Time and deceive ourselves that it is Time which passes us. It is we who pass by Time. The Time we have passed through remains. We can keep it in our view. We must go high into the heaven to see All-Time—nearer to God, nearer to the central sun of glory.
It is to take cognisance of the infinite breadth of Time, a richer knowledge than that on which we pride ourselves, knowledge of the length of Time. There is nothing more touching that one man can say to another than the recounting of all that is happening at one and the same time in the Universe. But speech and writing have one great lack. It is that we must spend time to write and we must spend time to read. We must write one word after another, must read one word after another. But, joy of the artist! in a picture he can give an immediate impression of many things happening at the same time. The gazer at beauty has not to follow laboriously word by word and line by line and page by page to find out what all was happening at one and the same time; he sees it at once and takes it to himself at once in the painting. Especially in the fresco. He sees the breadth of Time shown in the breadth of the picture, and the multiplicity and variety in it.
So the sculptures and frescoes of the church touch the human soul. They are fragments of the breadth of Time, fragments of the pictures which Man writes on the breadth and surface of Time, fragments of the mystical "Garment" of which Goethe speaks. They are fragments of universal pictures, fragments of the picture of the Universe grouped about the feet of God. They have a choric and processional aspect. No matter what the figures in the fresco seem to be doing, they have the aspect of praising God, of being part of a choric universe.
Have we not noticed this in Nature, of which Art is the mirror? A dead man lying in an open coffin is like a piece of a fresco framed. The face of a dead man is a picture of a man going through a great gate. It has a grand processional look.
The roll of history itself is a long strip of fresco. It is only too narrow a strip. It is in the breadth of history that the beauty lies. If we could only see in poised moments all people and all nature praising God in all their various ways at one and the same time! That is the full roll of history—to see the broad eternity in each moment. To see that is to see the great phantasmagoria, the infinite blending of all shapes and colours, of all the runic and mystic manifestations which, seen in small, thrill us and puzzle us and perplex us in our mortal lives. It is also a vision of the Last Judgment. I often think in these days of accusing God and quarrelling with Providence it will not be God that judges us, but we who give our judgment about Him. When the true and full vision bursts upon us, we shall all cry Hosanna unto the Highest. The whole universe, seeing itself and understanding itself, will burst into one great cry of glory.
How that could come about, or what such a cry would mean, is beyond thoughts and words. We cannot be literal about it, and yet we have sense of it, and are able to strike chords of the great harmony or catch glimpses of the symphonies of colour and form. The strange picture is miraged for us backward through Eternity and we catch glimpses of it. So it is in the Orthodox Church, in a crowd of pilgrims in a dim temple lit by the lights which the pilgrims themselves have lighted at the altars, enfolded in the great cloud of witnesses we sing praises to the One, the Central One, the God of All.
There is nothing more wonderful than a real crowd, a crowd attracted by a personality or an idea. At interludes throughout history we catch glimpses of gazing crowds, the
Armies of angels that soar, legions of demons that lurk,
Man, brute, reptile, fly—alien of end and of aim—
that rush into sight at once as you name the ineffable Name.
The New Testament pictures of Jesus standing in the midst of the crowd is the symbol for all time of the Church, "Jesus teaching among the people, living in His heart the life of every one He saw, living from His heart in living veins over the whole earth, the thousand people about Him listening, calling, reviling, praying, the angelic spirits gazing at Him rapt, even the devils acknowledging Him from the bodies of the possessed, the disciples bringing sick people to and fro at the Master's feet."[2] This is just the same picture as the Russian Church presents to-day. It is the idea of that wonderful modern Russian painting, "Holy Russia," where Jesus walks out of the ikon frame and stands enhaloed above the crowd of all sorts and conditions of Russian men and women. It is the picture presented in the work of the great novelist Dostoieffsky. Dostoieffsky's novels are pictures of great crowds of Russian men and women in the presence of the mystery of Love. Dostoieffsky's novel is a church, and in the church there is room for Raskolnikof, the murderer, and the little white-slave Sonia, room for the sick and the suffering and the lustful and the pure. And even the devils cry out from the bodies of The Possessed acknowledging the Christ. Jerusalem of to-day, with its thousands of poor Russian pilgrims and its crowds, is such a church. Thither come not only the good and the respectable, but the outcast, the criminal, and the drunkard; there is room for them in the presence of the Sacred Face.
The little village church of any forest-side of Russia is also such a church. All Russia is such a church, and the world itself also, for every face is turned to one idea of God as the flowers are turned to the sun. Hence we sing most felicitously the Hymn of the Three Children, so popular in the early church, the Benedicite Omnia Opera:
O all ye Works of the Lord . . .
O ye Angels, O ye Heavens, ye Waters . . .
O all ye Powers of the Lord . . .
O ye winter and summer . . .
O ye mountains and little hills . . .
O ye children of men . . . ye priests of the Lord, ye servants
of the Lord, ye spirits and souls of the righteous, ye holy
and humble men of heart, bless ye the Lord, praise Him and
magnify Him for ever.