The (Un)Defiled Church
“There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.”
Hubert Robert depicts The Dismantling of the Church of the Holy Innocents, Paris, 1785. One wonders precisely the current events and cultural winds that inspired the painting: had he been working four or five years later, it might have been a depiction of the ecclesiastical disintegration happening around him during the French Revolution. But the narrative is not so simple. As an artist, Robert indulged a deep fascination with ruins, inspired by contemporaneous the intellectual and cultural movements that birthed the forerunner of our modern archeology. His oeuvre contains many paintings of ruins themselves, as well as imagining, in ruins, buildings that were standing during his day — a kind of early form of science fiction.
Charniers constructed in the 14th and 15th C around the perimeter of Holy Innocents helped to relieve the pressure of cemetery overcrowding.
Dismantling probably did depict an process that Hubert witnessed live, however. Holy Innocents was a medieval church in the heart of the city attached to Paris’s major graveyard. A combination of poor planning, ecclesiastical specialization (the clergy of Holy Innocents maintained their living through burial fees) and pressure from a swelling urban population that meant that the graveyard had become a veritable pit of death; an unpleasant and (we can recognize in retrospect) unsanitary pit of decomposing bodies collected from 22 Parisian parishes. It is estimated that over its six centuries of operation, it housed the remains of some 2 million Parisians.
Church and graveyard together were destroyed in the 1780s, for practical reasons — no doubt — as well ideological ones, but these enjoy a certain convergence in enlightenment thinking: over and against the medieval imagination which delights in amassing such a grand monument to death without giving sufficient attention to its consequences for the neighborhood.
It is interesting to note, at any rate, what Robert depicts as the striking industry that has risen up within the hulking remains of the church, among those workers effecting its demise. It is as though the life of the streets has simply moved indoors, and the people are applying their industry to its deconstruction. We see women and children, even a dog in the midst of the scene. It is somewhat chaotic, the inverse of the liturgical drama that once occupied the space, proclaiming and celebrating a hierarchically-ordered universe; and in that sense, a worthy harbinger of the broader dismantling of the church that the Revolution would soon ignite. Yet there is still a certain haunting beauty amidst the ruins.
JH Hoffbauer depicts the open-air market that replaced the church and graveyard, as it stood ca 1850.
Is this church being defiled, we might ask? But it is not what goes into the body that defiles a person, but what comes out of it, as Jesus says. The same might be said of the church. In that sense, Holy Innocents had already been defiled. Undoubtedly, there was a rich tradition and impeccable symbolic logic behind the hulking, macabre monument to death its cemetery became, but the symbolism had come to defy all logic and practicality, to the point that the death housed within the institution was literally bursting through its walls spilling over into the streets, and into the basements of its neighbors. At some point, in some way, Holy Innocents had been defiled. The odor of death was upon it, death was its fruit, what was rising up from it. And ironically, then, its deconstruction by secular forces became an instrument of its purification, of hope, and of renewal.
Only take care, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life.
— The God-Seeing and Glorious Prophet of God, the Lawgiver Moses (Deut 4:9)
Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Texts for This Week
Prayer
O Lord, we pray that your grace may always precede and follow after us, that we may continually be given to good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever
Kontakion for the Departed
Although native to the eastern funerary liturgies, the kontakion for the departed entered the tradition of English worship in the midst of 20th C liturgical renewal, whence it has become a well-beloved anthem for meditating on the mystery of death and resurrection in the midst of the Anglican funeral service. Here it is performed by the (small, austere and socially distanced) choir at the funeral of Prince Philip, 17th April, 2021.
