By JAMES MONTI
In the Book of Genesis we read that when the patriarch Jacob paused to rest for the night at the place that would come to be called Bethel, he experienced a remarkable dream: “And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! And behold, the Lord stood above it” (Gen. 28:12-13). Jacob’s reaction to this vision is quite telling: “Surely the Lord is in this place. . . . How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven” (Gen. 28:16-17).
Jacob’s dream would find its ultimate fulfillment with the coming of Christ. Our Lord Himself was to invoke this vision of Heaven touching Earth when He said to St. Bartholomew (Nathanael), “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man” (John 1:51).
For nearly two thousand years, Catholics having seen Heaven opening, and Jacob’s ladder set in place, in the celebration of the Mass. Our churches have become that awesome place, that gate of Heaven, of which Jacob spoke.
This sacred “commerce” with Heaven reaches its apex in the consecration, with the Eucharistic Prayer within which it unfolds constituting the final ascent to this summit of the holy sacrifice. This sublime event is most beautifully experienced when set within the silent recitation of the Roman Canon as found in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass. The great Benedictine liturgist Dom Prosper Gueranger (1805-1875) explains:
“When she [the Church] has given birth in him [the believer] to the desire for the infinite good . . . she ascends like Moses upon the mountain, and her voice ceases to be heard in the ears, to resound only in the hearts. The accents of a mysterious language alone echo in the holy assembly, and transport thought beyond the limits of the present; even those who understand this language are warned that something extraordinary is happening; soon the words of this sacred language come to be lost in a silence where God alone hears; but the symbolic ceremonies always continue, and by their visible forms do not cease to elevate the holy people to the love of invisible things” (Dom Prosper Gueranger, Institutions Liturgiques, Paris, Julien, Lanier and Co., 1851, volume 3, p. 84).
Yet this intimate encounter with Heaven does not cease after the consecration. Soon afterward, the threshold of Heaven comes to meet the threshold of our souls at the altar rail, at the threshold of the sanctuary, where Heaven and Earth meet as we receive Holy Communion.
This gate of Heaven remains open for the rest of the day in our churches, through the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament. This reality has made Catholic churches a living and continual Temple of God. Our Lord is not an occasional visitor to our Catholic places of divine worship, for in the Holy Eucharist He has kept His word to be Emmanuel, “God with us” always.
Across the centuries, architects and artists have responded to this reality in the fabrication of churches and cathedrals. Thus Francois René le Vicomte de Chateaubriand (1768-1848) speaks of the unique celestial aura created by the Gothic cathedral:
“You could not enter a Gothic church without feeling a kind of awe and a vague sentiment of the Divinity. You were at once carried back to those times when a fraternity of cenobites, after having meditated in the woods of their monasteries, met to prostrate themselves before the altar and to chant the praise of the Lord, amid the tranquility and the silence of the night. . . .
“Those ceilings sculpted into foliage of different kinds, those buttresses which prop the walls and terminate abruptly like the broken trunks of trees, the coolness of the vaults, the darkness of the sanctuary, the dim twilight of the aisles, the secret passages, the low doorways — in a word, everything in a Gothic church reminds you of the labyrinths of a wood; everything excites a feeling of religious awe, of mystery, and of the Divinity” (Francois René Vicomte de Chateaubriand, The Genius of Christianity; or the Spirit and Beauty of the Christian Religion, Baltimore, John Murphy and Co., 1871, pp. 385-386).
Adding to this sacred aura is the sense of continuity with those who have gone before, those who have passed through the gate of Heaven to the Celestial Jerusalem, of which the church building is the earthly image. Noting with regard to churches that “a monument is not venerable, unless a long history of the past be, as it were, inscribed beneath its vaulted canopy, black with age,” Chateaubriand points out the immense worth of tradition and continuity with the past ages, observing, “God is the eternal law; his origin, and whatever relates to his worship, ought to be enveloped in the night of time” (Vicomte de Chateaubriand, The Genius of Christianity, p. 285).
Within the church edifice, its religious images also serve as places of encounter with Heaven. Drawing upon the Jewish author Philo of Alexandria’s first-century interpretation of the veil in the Temple of Solomon as the boundary between time and eternity, between the world of visible things and that of invisible realities, the Byzantine scholar Alexei Lidov describes icons and other forms of Christian religious painting as a metaphorical veil between Earth and Heaven, a boundary where Earth and Heaven meet and interact (Alexei Lidov, “The Temple Veil as a Spatial Icon: Revealing an Image-Paradigm of Medieval Iconography and Hierotopy,” Ikon, volume 7, 2014, pp. 101, 104).
Seen in this light, religious images convey a sense of heavenly mystery, serving as a Christian counterpart to the veil of the Temple of Solomon that imparted a profound sense of mystery to the Holy of Holies concealed by it. For just as the latter served as a boundary between the Holy and the Holy of Holies, so too the religious image serves as a symbolic boundary between what is earthbound (the realm inhabited by the person beholding the image) and what is beyond Earth (the sacred realm depicted in the image).
The physical image of a sacred personage or place can depict only so much, for what it depicts remains mysterious — it goes beyond the visible, it transcends what we can grasp or behold in this life.
The special Baroque form of religious imagery known as “illusionism,” employing a unique marriage of church art and architecture, creates a visual convergence between the world outside a religious painting and the sacred realm portrayed in the image by means of architectural and natural scenography within the painting.
There is in this art an effort to break down the barrier between the realm of the devout soul, the time and place in which he is situated, and the time and place of the sacred event or sacred place he is contemplating. This is done in various ways, including the depiction of objects such as clouds that appear to spill over the physical edge of the painting, as well as the depiction of architectural structures in the painting, such as vaults, stairways, and balconies, that appear to form a continuum with the architecture of the physical church in which the painting is situated — for example, the “illusion” of an upper story of the building, or the illusion of a dome.
This was done most especially with ceiling murals and frescos that created the illusion of gazing upward through a multi-tiered dome or vault that seemed to open upon Heaven itself, an artistic realization of the church as the threshold of Heaven.
The admission of sunlight into the church through its windows is key to the worshipper’s sense of encountering Heaven in the sanctuary of God. In Romanesque churches, the heavy, thick walls of these early medieval structures necessitated relatively small windows, yet these windows were strategically employed to focus the light at key times of the day upon what mattered most.
In a study of the Spanish Romanesque church of La Trinidad in Segovia, a team of five architectural scholars, who describe Romanesque churches as “bridges between Earth and Eternity,” discovered that a few small windows, four on the east end of the church and two on the western end, directed light upon the altar at the times of dawn and dusk respectively.
The dawn light from the eastern windows would have provided an almost mystical backlighting for the priest celebrating Mass at that hour. The western windows would have cast a direct light upon the altar toward sunset, the time for celebrating the evening offices (M.C. Diez-Pastor Iribas et al., “Light as a Symbolic Definer of Spaces in Romanesque Architecture,” in Peter Irenaus Schneider and Ulrike Wulf-Rheidt, Licht-Konzepte in der vormodernen Architektur, Regensburg, Schnell and Steiner, 2011, pp. 311, 315).
In the Gothic architecture of the High Middle Ages, sunlight passed through stained-glass windows that created a kaleidoscope of varied colors strewn across the church floor. The sense of having entered the Heavenly Jerusalem created by stained glass is overwhelming in St. Louis IX’s Sainte Chapelle in Paris, the sanctuary he built to house relics of the Passion.
Imperishable
And Eternal Light
Baroque churches employed light in yet another way to evoke the splendor of Heaven. Ample, clear windows are employed to bathe the church interior with sunlight, where it brightly illuminates the profusion of colorful paintings, statues, and ornamentation that fill these churches. The windows of the cupola of the chapel that the archbishop of Valencia St. Juan de Ribera (1532-1611) built for the Royal College and Seminary of Corpus Christi which he founded flood the sanctuary with celestial light.
In Baroque churches, the two complementary dimensions of the Paschal Mystery harmoniously meet. The church’s religious imagery would retell the sufferings of our Lord with unflinching realism. Yet in the overarching vaults and domes of these churches, the triumph of Christ’s Resurrection and the glory and joy of Heaven, expressed in paint and brilliant sunlight, shine down upon the faithful.
In all these different styles of church architecture, incense has always imparted a symbolic fragrance of Heaven. Its visual ascent revealed by sunlight echoes the ladder to Heaven that Jacob saw.
The thought of just how close Heaven comes to us when we enter a church and when we attend the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass will keep us going in facing and overcoming the gathering darkness of the world outside. For that darkness can never dim the imperishable and eternal light of Heaven.
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