St. Isaac’s Church, St. Petersburg

By Jack Krayenhoff

Standing in front of St. Isaac’s church in St. Petersburg, you can see: this is BIG. It is, in fact, the fourth largest cathedral in the world. That gold central dome is more than 100 meters high. And the gold is real gold! Hard to imagine how much actual metal that took.

(And by the way, it cost sixty workers their lives. Gold has to be dissolved in mercury to be applied as a covering; mercury vapour is very toxic to the kidneys, and these men died of renal failure. How many lives is a beautiful golden dome worth?)

And the columns of the portico, and all the others, 112 of them - they are all enormous pieces of red granite, all of one piece – that is how they were carved out of the rock and then transported the whole distance from the quarry to the cathedral. I have seen Greek temples with big columns, but they were built up from cylindrical pieces. This was done in the first half of the 19^th century, long before any of these enormous steel pieces of equipment of today existed – at the most, some primitive steam-powered cranes or moving devices.

And now step inside. Again: this is huge! At the other side of the church some tiny human figures stand, looking upward at very large paintings depicting the life of St. Isaac of Dalmatia. They look like paintings, but when you come up very close, you can see that in fact they are mosaics. Apparently originally they were paintings, but when the paint started to crack a bit, they were not restored, but replaced by mosaics in exactly the same colours as the original paint. Money was no problem, it seems.

And talking about money! Inside there are also many very tall columns, not made of granite, but of either deep blue lapis lazuli or green malachite. Again: seamless, out of one piece. These minerals are used for their beauty in jewellery – but these colossuses! I did not know they were found in this gigantic size. All this, plus gold decoration and ornamentation everywhere.

So here you had it all: a vast space, dwarfing human dimensions; beauty over-all and in every detail; and finally an air of inexhaustible resources and unlimited opulence. Is this the ideal church? One thing is sure: it conveys the hugeness, the vastness of God, His beauty, His endless resources. I’m sure it is as effective as Solomon’s temple in this respect.

But we no longer go to Jerusalem to worship, for Jesus said to the woman at the well that the place where we worship is not important: true worship is a matter of the spirit. And where have most of us had our really significant encounters with God? In beautiful churches or elsewhere? I have to say that my own deepest spiritual experiences happened in unassuming places: in living rooms, in bare school gyms, in a car. The Holy Spirit does not need cathedrals; He needs needy, open human hearts. Those He makes into building stones of His spiritual Church.

So what is the value of St. Isaac’s, in God’s eyes? They help us to worship. But the key word is HELP.. But I think that God conducts most of His business in human hearts, not at all necessarily in gorgeous, vast cathedral spaces.