Venerating Reason

I visited Washington DC, the Capitol Building and the monuments associated with it.  The layout is perfect, with the Capitol at the highest point (Capitol Hill), facing East, and the memorials and monuments behind it to the West.  This layout precisely follows key aspects of spatial iconography in Church architecture.  The highest place in the building is where the Eucharist is prepared on the altar, facing East, where the rising sun is the icon of the Rising Light of the Son who is worshipped, the True Light.  Being steeped in this tradition, the layout in Washington DC required no explanation; it was obvious.

Even more impressing on me was the cathedral like buildings and the statuary and iconographic paintings representing scenes of the founders, tributes to ideals--persons, or Hellenistic deities as avatars of virtues, of reason, of human achievement, of principles.  Once again, with my being steeped the Sacred iconography of the Church, I recognized immediately the significance of veneration depicted by the Capitol building, the Library of Congress, the Washington memorial, Jefferson's and Lincoln's Memorials.  No explanation required.  The veneration was deep, was real.  The ideals WERE the deities of the founding; the founders WERE the demiurges and heroes.  This is not metaphor, but truly how the architecture speaks.

On the Sunday of my visit I went to divine liturgy at St. Nicholas Orthodox Church, the OCA cathedral, where every square inch of the walls is covered in traditional iconography, beloved Saints and scenes everywhere.  Oh how comforting to see iconography employed properly, feeling the imagery emanate from to the True Light of Christ, turned in purity and love toward the True Light.   Seeing the Saints soothed me, their glory not as theirs but Christ's showing through them.  All the images united in worship of One who is Worthy to hold it all together, He being the Author of all things.

The Capitol's iconography, on the other hand, venerated achievement, elevating its deities as the glorious tools by which Mankind itself may govern his fellows benevolently and well.  And who doesn't want that?  Still, it struck me both as powerful yet distorted.  I felt the weight of this veneration, bathing the founders and those charged with carrying the project forward, those now in office.  The buildings themselves confer this weight of expectation.  It's no surprise that anyone in elected office could be caught up in an outsized estimation of himself, being invested with this power, this venerated history.

And, like the beautiful Cathedrals of Europe, those once revered spaces of worship, the Capitol buildings are visited like spectacles.  They are, in effect, museum pieces.  Quaint, interesting, and safely tucked away in the past with other interesting irrelevancies.  Excuse me while I check my phone.