Russian Churches

Russian churches are unnervingly beautiful: if you don’t take care you can find yourself becoming rhapsodic, walking among the white stone pillars of the buildings, looking slowly at the icons, the carvings and the golden fretwork glowing dully in the dusky glittering light of the candles. There is clearly peace of a sort here, it can be found as easily here as anywhere. Even for someone who always looks for it in trees and lakes and such, it is undeniably in these places too, just as it is in those massive stone gothic cathedrals with their great spaces and stained glass light, or in the blue mosque in Istanbul. But here there is a sonorous beauty, muted, but redolent of some earlier age: fifteen hundred years away from the brash, grasping voraciousness of today’s Moscow with it beauty and ugliness all twisted in together, if they could only find a way to make barbed wire out of tinsel.

And you can help thinking of how much more potency all of this gorgeous churchiness must have wielded over those broken and unreasoning serfs, trudging weekly from their icebound hovels beside the cabbage mines to stand stupefied for a time in these worlds of hushed wonder? How much more compelling must it have been for them, for whom an ordinary Moscow Church must have seemed, itself, a miracle of creation? These were people who had never walked under the vaulted roof of Hagia Sophia, or gazed fearful and silenced by the beauty of Notre Dame, or Westminster Abbey, they hadn’t even got Iphones. This for them must have been the very pinnacle of architecture, the finest thing that men had built. One pictures them gazing in hushed wonder as the potatoes fall unnoticed from their raggedy pockets and roll silently over the granite floor.

Look here at the iconostasis, a veritable wall of gold; saints and martyrs gazing down through their sad tortured eyes, loving and pitying the tired, downcast heads of the worshippers, with creaking knees aching on the cool stone floor.  Or wander a while over there, where the golden rails hold the congregation back and away from the gilt and jewel-encrusted bible, best not let them get their grubby eyes on that, what if they know the High Church Slavonic for “camel” or “eye of a needle”? what then?

Or cast your uneasy gaze over there, at those intricately carved oak doors hanging portentously before the sanctuary of the priests, is that where they keep the X box?  And the believers of today: those uncomfortable and bareheaded men,  uncertain what to do, and those scurrying and humiliated looking middle aged women unable to meet the milky eyes of these corpulent and thriving priests. True, these priests sometimes take money to do what they should do without money: I have paid them “tips” for christening children, large tips whose size they named well after I had paid the official charge.  But I have also watched another, younger priest, christening my daughter, and his faith was palpable. Like a character from a Dostoyevsky story, the significance of what he was doing made him tremble, so that the questions I bring to churches seemed suddenly churlish and graceless, and it’s not as if everybody doesn’t know anyway; even the believers are skeptical of the church itself. The word you need to understand these moments is “numinous”: it addresses the problem without misrepresenting it.

And there are the Babushkas, armies of babushkas: the provisional wing of the Orthodox Faithful, cleaning and scrubbing, lighting candles for the departed or making soup for the little gang of homeless guys gathered by the gates, cold and hung-over and wanting to be drunk more than anything in the world.

And somewhere off at the other side, there are deep, calm voices singing melancholy, rolling melodies that echo from the walls and are softened by the wood and fabrics. You don’t stand a chance, so you try to escape. But outside the sun is bright and the golden domes shine and the glare throws shadows on the snow of the golden crosses that adorn each one. Centuries of money, great artists and builders, not to mention those musicians composing for the human voice,  even Rachmaninov wrote for these places too http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwRHT7Jbk1Q

This is what men can do when they have nearly two thousand years to seduce you into faith.

It is all genuinely, inescapably impressive and the evangelical atheists don’t stand a chance until they grasp the sheer astounding beauty of all this. Darwin being right is not enough to stop most of the world from feeling that this, and what places like this represent, cannot be wrong. Even orthodox patriarchs with thirty thousand dollar watches don’t outweigh this stuff: a leap of faith still counts if, even if you have to use a trampoline.

So the Russians roll back into faith as the state rolls back into autocracy and fear of elsewhere. This is Russia’s default mode, 1000 years of a church standing next to a Tsar, and it is familiar and comforting.