Russia, as Seen and Described by Famous Writers

by Unknown

[CHURCH SERVICE]

ALFRED MASKELL

The history of the introduction and early progress of Christianity in Russia is involved in obscurity and overlaid with legendary stories. There is little doubt that it came from Constantinople, and was not only rapidly spread, but firmly established in the country within a short space of time. The date most generally accepted is that of the reign of Vladimir, the great prince of Kief, grandson of Olga. As Dean Stanley remarks in his Lectures on the Eastern Church: "It coincides with a great epoch in Europe, the close of the Tenth Century, when throughout the West the end of the world was fearfully expected, when the Latin Church was overclouded with the deepest despondency, when the Papal See had become the prey of ruffians and profligates, then it was that the Eastern Church, silently and almost unconsciously, bore into the world her mightiest offspring."

CHURCH OF THE ASSUMPTION, MOSCOW.

The Eastern Church was then at the zenith of its splendour. The envoys sent by Vladimir to Constantinople to examine and report upon the religion which he had almost decided to adopt were dazzled with the magnificence of the ceremonial. They were wavering in their choice and weighing the merits of the different systems which had been brought before them. Rome they had not seen; Mohammedanism was foreign to their tastes; Judaism had been found wanting; but the Eastern Church appealed strongly to their imaginations and barbaric love of splendour. Hers was St. Sophia, magnificent now, but how much more gorgeous then! Every effort was made to win them, and the victory was easy.

The intercourse of the newly formed empire of Russia with Byzantium was at that time great. The change of religion had been very sudden and it was necessary to build at once new edifices for the new order of things. It was naturally to Byzantium that they turned for their form and ornament. Very quickly churches arose. Novgorod, the cradle of the Empire and the capital until the removal to Kief, was the Metropolitan See, and the first cathedral is said to have been built there as early as A. D. 989.

The form of a Russian Church underwent little change up to the Seventeenth Century. In the Thirteenth Century the architects imported from Lombardy brought to bear on the exterior the style of the Lombardic or Romanesque architecture which had so long prevailed in their own country. The gilded dome or cupola, of peculiar onion-shaped form which is so especially Russian, was added soon afterwards. The central cupola, which was adopted from the first, was afterwards surrounded by others; their number reached even to twenty or thirty, and it was not until the Sixteenth Century at the time of the establishment of the patriarchate (1589), that these were authoritatively restricted to five, which is now the orthodox and obligatory number.

The practice of having two, three, five, seven, nine and thirteen cupolas or spires is as early as the Eleventh Century. The numbers were figurative; two signifying the two natures of Jesus Christ, three, a symbol of the Trinity, five, our Lord and the four evangelists or the five wounds, seven, the seven sacraments, the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, or the seven recumenical councils, nine, the nine celestial hierarchies, and thirteen, our Lord and the twelve apostles.

Within the dimensions are small and the light obscure. Still, the simple, nearly square disposition of the building, the enormous plain-shafted pillars which support the domes, the mass of gilding, the multitude of lamps, produce an undoubtedly grand effect. It is strikingly oriental; and as in Russian churches there are no seats, but the people stand in a mingled throng, now and then prostrating themselves and beating their foreheads on the ground, each as his own devotion may dictate, the resemblance is still more marked. All the interior is covered with fresco pictures; even the pillars have gigantic figures of the saints and doctors of the church painted upon them. From the high roof hang immense brass chandeliers of a peculiar form with many branches, capable of holding hundreds of candles. In the dim distance, seemingly a wall of gold, is the iconostas, the solid screen which in every church divides the sanctuary from the rest of the sacred edifice.