Solomon’s temple is the Bible in stone; and so St. Peter’s at Rome is the transition, in stone, from Catholicism to a kingdom of this world, the first stage of our liberation from monastic fetters.
The mere construction of temples was at all times accompanied by so many mystical rites, allegoric ceremonies, and solemn consecrations, that the medieval builders ranked themselves as a kind of religious order, as successors to the builders of Solomon’s temple; and they formed themselves into secret companies, of which freemasonry was a later development.
The Renaissance robbed architecture of this essentially mystical note. The Christian faith began to contend with scepticism, the Gothic spire with the Greek façade, religious sanctity with worldly beauty. This is why St. Peter’s at Rome is so significant; in that colossal erection Christianity is struggling to come alive, the Church turns pagan, and Michael Angelo uses the walls of the Sistine Chapel to depict Jesus Christ as a brawny athlete, a Hercules in the flower of youth and strength.
After this date church architecture fell into utter decadence, till it became a mere reproduction, in varying proportions, either of St. Peter’s or of ancient Greek temples. There is one Parthenon at Paris which is called the Church of the Madeleine, and another at New York, which is used as the Exchange.
Without faith and without special circumstances, it was hard to build anything with life about it. All modern churches are misfits and pretentious anachronisms, like those angular Gothic churches with which the English ornament their towns and offend every artistic eye.
§4
But the circumstances in which Vitberg drew his plans, his own personality, and the Emperor’s temperament, all these were quite exceptional.
The war of 1812 had a profound effect upon men’s minds in Russia, and it was long after the liberation of Moscow before the general emotion and excitement subsided. Then foreign events, the taking of Paris, the history of the Hundred Days, expectations and rumours, Waterloo, Napoleon on board the Bellerophon, mourning for the dead and anxiety for the living, the returning armies, the warriors restored to their homes,—all this had a strong effect upon the least susceptible natures. Now imagine a young man, an artist and a mystic, endowed with creative power, and also an enthusiast spurred on by current events, by the Tsar’s challenge, and by his own genius.
Near Moscow, between the Mozhaisk and Kaluga roads, a modest eminence dominates the whole city. Those are the Sparrow Hills of which I spoke in my early recollections. They command one of the finest views of all Moscow. Here it was that Ivan the Terrible, still young and unhardened, shed tears at the sight of his capital on fire; and here that the priest Silvester met him and by his stern rebuke changed for twenty years to come the nature of that monster and man of genius.
Napoleon and his army marched round these hills. There his strength was broken, and there his retreat began. What better site for a temple in memory of 1812 than the farthest point reached by the enemy?