In the year 867, Patriarch Photios delivered a homily on the occasion of the dedication of an icon of the Virgin and Child installed in the apse of Hagia Sophia. In it, he emphasizes the importance of visual beauty in our churches, and even goes so far as to teach that learning by sight is superior to learning through hearing. In other words, a beautiful painting over the altar might be able to teach more truly and deeply than the actual words of the priest in the homily (a humbling thought for me, a priest).
At the very least, I would say, both types of knowledge are necessary – both the knowledge conveyed through visual beauty and the conceptual knowledge contained in a verbal exhortation.
Photios is keen to emphasize his point about the value of icons because the 9th century was a time of healing from a century of damage done by the iconclasts – those who rejected all visual imagery in churches because they confused it with idolatry.
Photios explains that the icon of the Virgin and Child is a revelation of divine truth, that through it, God himself is worshiped. What’s more, through the icon Our Lady and her Son look at us. It’s not only us doing the looking. There’s a crossing of glances. We are captured by beauty and a relationship is formed.
This, I think, is why people react so strongly when they’re inside a particularly beautiful church. This is why tourists stream into the great cathedrals of Europe. People are sometimes converted to the faith simply by going inside one of these magnificent buildings. The beauty of the architecture and the art unveils a connection between us and God. Saturated by beauty, we come to know something important about our inner life and the purposes for which we were made.
One of the church spaces I’ve always loved to look at (and would love to visit someday and spend a whole day inside) is Sainte Chappelle in France. Built by St. Louis in the 13th century, it’s a gothic chapel built specifically to house the Crown of Thorns. When St. Louis brought the Crown to Paris from Byzantium, he commissioned a fitting home for it, essentially a church-sized reliquary.
Here in St. Louis, Missouri, where I live, King Louis IX is a beloved figure, so I feel a personal kinship with him. Every year, our Oratory goes all out to celebrate his feast day on August 25.
We try, in the spirit of Sainte Chappelle, to make it as beautiful as possible. We don’t have a relic of the Crown of Thorns to process with, but we do have a relic of St. Louis himself. Relics are items of particular devotion in the Catholic faith, so it makes sense the St. Louis took great care to guard the relics of which he was steward.
Sainte Chappelle, even in pictures, is stunning. Often described as a medieval jewel, light floods in through the massive stained glass windows. The sunlight refracts into prismatic color and the air overflows with jewel tones. Built in the gothic style, everything about the chapel is meant to convey to visitors the knowledge that Heaven is much closer than we think. Whenever we step into a Church, we enter eternity.
The 13th-century theologian Jean de Jandun, on his first visit to the chapel, writes,
“The choice colors of the painting, the costly gilding of the carving, the delicate translucency of the red glowing windows, the splendid altar carvings, the miracles working power of the sacred relics, and the decorations of the shrines sparkling with their precious stones lend this house of prayer such an intensity of adornment that entering one would think one had been transported to Heaven, setting foot in one of the finest rooms of Paradise.”
The gothic architecture emphasizes light, vertical space, and structural lightness. The goal is for the stone walls to merge with the light, for the columns to become a growing forest, an enclosed garden, everything shimmering, everything alive. In Sainte Chappelle, about 75% of the walls are glass, merging interior and exterior space. Worshipers are set free to spiritually fly. The columns are slender and the arches pointed, emphasizing weightlessness and height. The ceiling, painted like the night sky, seems to float overhead.
Jewels for a crown of torture
All of this to house a crown made of thorns. All of this a jewel-box for a blood-stained instrument of torture.
I can’t help but note the irony. The church building resplendent, revealing the inner, hidden glory of a humble, spiked tool of pain. The Crown of Thorns was meant to humiliate Christ. Not only was it meant to draw blood but also to mock him. If he was a king, his only crown was to be a woven weed, an outlaw plant. On the exterior, his crown was a sick joke. He was a criminal and reject. A nothing. But here’s irony. His crown was actually real. It was a corona or halo of light. His Cross was a throne. His blood the redemptive glory of the cosmos.
In building a sparkling temple of light for the Crown, St. Louis reveals a truth of great depth. Even the ordinary, the painful, that which we would like to forget, even our embarrassments and failures, all of this, even this, is wrapped up into glory.
