American Aristocracy | GODS OF COPLEY SQUARE | Centerpiece 7

I wonder what Italo Calvino would think of our rediscovery in this series of Trinity's presiding Madonna and Child? John Updike, the leading Bostonian author of the time, hailed the Italian author in the 1980s as " a genial as well as a brilliant writer [who] took fiction into new places where it had never been before." For his part, Calvino certainly saw the value of Boston's Brahmin legacy. In an interview in Paris Review about his choice of which Italian city to seek citizenship, he remembered that for a long time he could not choose between Milan and Turin. "Had I chosen Milan, which is a more active, livelier city, things would have been different," he wrote. "Turin is a more serious, more austere place. The choice of Turin was, to some extent, an ethical one. I identified with its cultural and political tradition. Turin had been the city of the anti-Fascist intellectuals, and thus appealed to that part of me fascinated by a kind of Protestant severity. It is the most Protestant city of Italy, an Italian Boston."Ethical is the key word here, key to the title deeds of Brahmin Boston, too often forgotten today, when Boston seems somehow no longer “the more serious, more austere place” perhaps the best part of the Puritan-Patriot-Brahmin legacy that has earned the city its place in the imagination of the world.However, what is one to make of Calvino's attitude toward what he clearly saw as another and much less noble Boston? In American Diaries he worried that there was "great danger that the Democratic candidate [for US president] will be the Catholic Kennedy," following up on that pronouncement with another – that he was "violently frightened by the face of American Catholicism I saw in Boston, where the Madonna continues to loom large over the old cradle of Puritanism." One winces. He meant, I suppose, the 35 foot high statue at the Don Orione Shrine in East Boston. It was an attack which missed the mark in the Puritan become Emersonian capital in every sense. The Holy City shudders.The response of Calvino, as I suppose, to the gargantuan Madonna across Boston harbor, perhaps also gives the clue to why Trinity's Madonna was by the 1900s, when such things mattered far more, so obviously being downplayed by the parish. But for Brooks and for La Farge, her sponsors in Copley Square – courtiers I'd have to say were I to include Henry Adams – Trinity's Madonna had to do with other and larger issues. Madonna / My Lady – Our Lady – not of Copley Square, remember – though that, too, of course, historically – but (somewhat in the way the Pope gives his blessing to "the City [of Rome] and to the World") – was above all the Madonna of the prairie, for so Adams called her; what La Farge – perhaps Phillips Brooks too – meant by "Protestant America.""Madonna of the Heart" I call her – for did not La Farge promise (foresee?) that one day she would be the heart of Trinity Church?  It must be said, though: the lighting of Trinity's interior today, as opposed to when The New York Times in the 1870s noted how well-lit were the tympana murals of the tower, retards that hope considerably. But then again Trinity's lighting problems are larger than that.  When people complain about Trinity's lighting design today, I explain, La Farge-like, that the solution is obvious – votive candles, racks of them. Those candles – what they represent – what Henry Adams called in connection with the Madonna "the anxiety of prayer" – constitute the difference between a living church and a dead one even in a "serious and austere" place like Copley Square! Which is why during 9/11 even Trinity unbent and there were candles even on the front steps. (Although the Taize liturgies have been discontinued, at Trinity today a variation on them is a "contemplative eucharist" which uses candlepower very effectively in the darkened church and allows the congregation to light their own candles in the course of the liturgy).Adams, of course, looked so closely at Trinity Church in Esther, where he not only couldn't find St Cecelia; saw little use either perhaps in a Madonna that could not be seen, even less in one where you could not light a candle and say your Ave. He lacked Brooks's certitudes about the power of hidden Madonnas. But anyone who has seen Trinity's chancel alive with “praying” candles for the Taize liturgy will know Adams was right in his practical way, even as was La Farge in his more spiritual way. The problem with Trinity's lighting today, a matter of chiaroscuro artistically, is a matter of values, spiritually.That said, I wonder, for example, if the more pertinent literary figure to advance our understanding of all this is William Butler Yeats, whose work seems more affirming of Trinity's tug-of-war, so often destructive, but sometimes enabling, as when Phillips Brooks succeeded, as he sometimes did, in uniting the "true believers" and the "do gooders."  Yeats, the Anglo-Irish Nobel laureate was himself a bundle of contradictions. He held a lifelong sympathy with  the values of the "Protestant Ascendancy" in Ireland that many parishioners of Trinity Church would have recognized as their own, but he was also an ardent Irish Nationalist, with which point of view the same Brahmins would have had much less sympathy than with, say, Italian Nationalism (remember that attacking the Pope was one thing, attacking Queen Victoria quite another).Yeats, whose religion nobody has yet really fathomed, would have understood Trinity's Madonna and the parish's ambiguous response to the icon of the Mother of God perfectly. Had not the author of "Sailing to Byzantium," like Brooks a man of more global than local resonance, had he he not sailed in his own mind's eye to the same ancient capital Brooks sought out? And had not Yeats made the experience as compelling in poetry as Phillips Brooks in church building?The largest meaning for us here of Yeats's work – like Rose Macaulay's Towers of Trebizond, the book that best addresses Canterbury's relationship with Byzantium – is that it surely abolishes the idea that the millennia and more that separates Trinity Church from the Byzantine world – much more than the matter of the Madonna – was too wide a gulf to be bridged even by the creative genius of Richardson and La Farge and by Brooks’s theological sympathies. It is true that Yeats did not arrive in the former Byzantine capital until 1927, by which time it had been for five centuries the Ottoman capital and was becoming the metropolis of the new nation of Turkey – thus a generation after Brooks – but "Sailing to Byzantium" – a metaphor, of course, for spiritual journey, or what Harold Bloom calls an "odyssey of the spirit" – was the same quest, more or less, Brooks had undertaken in his time – so Bloom notes, indeed, citing Ruskin's Stones of Venice as the book that marked Brooks's generations own more likely odyssey.And where is the difference after all? Byzantium become Constantinople become Venice, never mind (in our context here) Istanbul; so Hagia Sophia become San Marco, never mind the Ottoman Imperial mosque; San Marco endowed with so much of Hagia Sophia's treasure. Brooks saw the empty husk in Istanbul; he saw the glorious issue in Venice. There is more than one way to conjure the gold and silver tree of the Byzantine emperor, with its gilt silver enameled bird "set upon a golden bough to sing," Yeats tells us, "To Lords and Ladies of Byzantium/ Of what is past, or passing, or to come." Not least to come in Brooks's and Richardson's and La Farge's vision of Trinity Church in Copley Square, where – consider why – a statue Constantinople's 6th-century saint-bishop, the "golden tongued" Chrysostom himself, stands witness to this day on Trinity's great memorial  pulpit to Boston's 19th-century saint-bishop.  The commemoration of each great preacher today in the calendar of saints is only a week or so apart. Liturgical time is different than regular time.Consider too – it is something else that has been forgotten in the church's and the square's long history – the appearance in Trinity Church in the year of Phillips Brooks's death of a most extraordinary figure, no apparition, but an ambassador of the highest rank from the Byzantine world, an ambassador whose greeting in America's Hagia Sophia was all that Brooks could have asked for, his message as modern and as ecumenical as his blessing was ancient and conclusive.2.His Eminence, Archbishop Dionyius Latus of Zante, a great luminary of the Greek Orthodox Church hierarchy who visited America in the early 1890s, made by all reports his most important visitation to Boston and to Trinity, the occasion being the episcopal consecration of William Lawrence, who Dionysius greeted publicly as a fellow bishop of the Church of God and as Phillips Brooks's successor. A remarkable event. The Archbishop was in America at the special invitation of the Episcopal Bishop of New York, Henry Potter, to attend the World Parliament of Religions held in 1893 in Chicago. A moderate High Churchman and close friend since seminary days of Phillips Brooks, Potter preached at Brooks's consecration two years earlier as Bishop of Massachusetts and may also have been the first member of the Episcopal Church's hierarchy to imply right after Brooks's death that he was a saint, concluding a speech to the Massachusetts Diocesan Convention in 1893 with this splendid coda, an echo of the first Book of Common Prayer of 1549:

Unto the Almighty and Everlasting God we yield most high praise and hearty thanks for the wonderful grace and virtue of declared in all His saints who have been the chosen vessels of His grace and the lights of the world in their several generations, but here and today especially for his servant Phillips Brooks . . . true prophet, true priest, true Bishop, to the glory of God the Father.

As welcome as Bishop Potter always was at Trinity, Archbishop Dionysius was even more welcome. Among the best preachers known to Athens, Dionysius was famously liberal according to Orthodox History, the website presided over by Mathew Namee. Notable in Greece for the fact that he "spoke out against anti-Semitism, advocating . . . dialogue with the Episcopalians, and was skeptical that any sort of union would happen with Rome," the Archbishop said as much and more in his address in Trinity Church, all in the vein we have mined here of Auden. So important was his Boston address at Lawrence's consecration Eucharist that in his discussion of the Archbishop's American visit Namee asserts it was "a good deal more interesting than anything [he] said at the Parliament of Religions;" and later in the same city at an Episcopal synod, Dionysius declared: "[I] repeat here before you, word for word, my address which I pronounced in Trinity Church, Boston." Herewith what The Boston Evening Transcript found most of interest:

[W]hile you are all Protestants, you are at the same time Catholics, and you will continue to draw to you the attention of the Catholic Church: for while you have protested you have accepted a great part of the rites of Catholicity and you have not rejected all of the Catholic traditions. All Christian churches will cast their eyes toward you in the future when, by the grace of God, all take steps for the union of all the Christian world. . . [and] I greet you as my brethren in Christ. I embrace your Church, – this Church, – as my Church.

All this transpired several decades ahead of the decision in 1922 of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in the former Byzantine capital to recognize Anglican priestly orders, and the power of that moment in 1893, in Phillips Brooks's church, must have been electric. Indeed, it can be felt even today, 120 years later, if you go to the website of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. There you will find a discussion of its involvement in the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, described as "a global movement that began as early as 1910 under the guidance of Charles Brent, an American Episcopal bishop." Brent was, of course, according to his biographer, the "devoted protege" of Phillips Brooks.For the first time, meanwhile, in the American Hagia Sophia the ancient liturgical language of Constantinople's Great Church was heard.  Certainly the newspaper account makes plain Dionysius was accorded the unprecedented honor – remember Brooks had never allowed anyone not in Episcopal orders to officiate or preach in Trinity – of pronouncing the final priestly benediction of Lawrence's consecration liturgy. Quoth the Transcript: "The benediction was pronounced by the Archbishop of Zante and the procession of bishops and clergy was re-formed, marching down the aisle, through the church, while the recessional was sung." A contemporary reported that Dionysius, who had "made an address in English and gave a benediction in Greek,” was certainly "the most interesting person in the long procession,” with his "high black crepe headdress" and "purple robes,” both held in place, everyone noticed, by "beautiful jeweled clasps.” Dionysius's effect? As reported in The Outlook, (“The Parliament of Religions" in the September 30, 1893 issue), that the effect was of "an apostolic benediction by the hand of this magnificent white-haired prelate, direct historical representative of the very first Church of Christ."3.Because of who was in also in attendance that day I will now propose an abrupt change of scene – to Park Avenue in Manhattan.  The the four larger-than-life statues that dominate the main facade there of St. Bartholomew's Church – Saint Paul, Martin Luther, Francis of Assisi and Phillips Brooks – will perhaps seem a less abrupt shift when one learns that among the clergy in attendance at that consecration service in Trinity Church at which Archbishop Dionysus was the rector of St Bartholomew's, Leighton Parks, a fervent admirer of Brooks, who two decades and more later in 1914 commissioned architect Bertram Goodhue to design that magnificent New York church comparable in so many ways to Trinity.What there is to learn at St Bart's – often one learns most about Trinity, Boston, through other places, from Bombay/Mumbai to Stanford  – is how Trinity's Brooksian chancel and liturgy inspired Parks as much as the saint-bishop himself. It was at such great Diocesan services like the consecration Dionysus all but stole the show at that Trinity shone like the heavenly Jerusalem, so to speak – in an age, remember, where gas jets were modern candles, as it were – and its link with Hagia Sophia and San Marco was very evident. You will see that at St Bart's as well, but you will also see the way the architectural (not opposed to the apostolic) succession continues after Hagia Sophia and San Marco with Trinity Church at St Bart's, and then doubles back so as to influence Trinity's third chancel in 1938.Of that more soon here. Sufficient now to point out that because the author of Saint Bartholomew's Church in the City of New York (Oxford University Press, 1999) is Harvard historian of medieval and renaissance architecture Christine Smith, a scholar secure in Western history as many Americanists are not, to read her marvelous book is to gain a better understanding of Trinity/Boston than anything else. She illustrates the Copley Square basilica, indeed, making two points that need to be underlined from this wider perspective. First, that Trinity's crossing, a Byzantine feature derivative of Hagia Sophia, was of larger than only 'preaching' significance, having to do with "the modern requirement that the congregation both see and hear the service" as well as the sermon. Writes Smith: "in a church designed to satisfy the potentially conflicting aims of seeing the altar and of seeing and hearing the preacher, the crossing was the ideal seating area." In this respect, note, Trinity's galleries relate to both, not just the preaching! San Marco's in Venice has galleries both in the transepts and at the west end, just like Trinity, and in fact there is almost as much seating in the galleries as on the main floor. Second, she quotes Leighton Parks himself to very good effect about what the key aspects of Trinity's first chancel, and what Parks calls "the apsidal chancel”:

In the early Romanesque churches the seats for he clergy were ranged against this circular wall. The middle seat was occupied by the bishop, and so, the earliest form of the Episcopate was preserved by the symbolism of the chancel. There was no throne, as in the later churches, separating the bishop from the presbyters[priests]. They all sat together. The bishop was only the elder brother of the other clergy, and as the worshipers gazed upon the pastors sitting around the Holy Table, they were led to think of them not as a special order with magical powers, but as the encircling pastorate of the Church. The Holy Table was not placed at the end of the chancel, but but in the middle of what is now called the sanctuary, that ministers and people might gather around it as the family gathers around the father's table, and in the Holy Communion the bishop naturally took the place that tradition assigns to our Savior at the Last Supper, not turning his back upon the people but facing them, as a father faces the family when he breaks the daily bread.

4.By the time of Lawrence's consecration Trinity had become famous for its great Diocesan liturgies, widely reported in the Boston and New York press. Here, for example, is a New York Times report of October 14, 1891 as reproduced in Dunbar's and Farrar's Phillips Brooks:

The consecration of Bishop Brooks was an imposing ceremony.  On the morning of October 14th, 1891, Trinity Church was completely filled . . . When the procession reached the altar the attending ushers stepped aside as the bishops took their places at the altar . . . The litany and suffrages, the music of the anthem, the retirement of Bishop Brooks and his return, wearing the rest of the Episcopal habit [led to] . . . the 'Veni Creator Spiritus' . . . the laying on of hands . . . [T]he singing of 'Sanctus' and the Eucharistic hymn . . . [T]he communion . . . the benediction . . . closed a memorable service.

Often reporters showed confusion in describing ceremonies which incorporated what were to become Liturgical Movement principles as yet not widely in use. A Boston Globe story on Brooks's consecration noted that the "the clergy formed a great semi-circle in two lines around the wall of the apse" without the altar rails, while within them "the bishops in the full robes of their office took their seats around the altar," which was described as "draped with a white cloth, on which stood the full communion service." The same ceremonial in 1891 in the October 15th New York Times report of Brooks's own consecration referred to "the high-backed chairs of the bishop's surrounding the [altar-] table and [that] the whole effect was that of a banquet table ready for the guests." One can almost sense the reporter's bafflement at just the effect, of course, Phillips Brooks was trying to achieve!The Boston Globe was no less challenged at the liturgical magnificence of a more Protestant than Catholic-seeming worship, noting, for instance, that "the Bishop of Massachusetts sat at the right of the altar, the Bishop of New York on the other side, and facing the congregation were two other prelates behind the altar," all con-celebrating (as we would say today when the custom is normative) facing the people, a most un-Catholic ceremonial in 1877 or 1891. The Boston Evening Transcript was even clearer: "in the central place [the islanded sanctuary] were seated the bishops . . . facing the people." Another reporter ventured: "in the centre, within the chancel [ie., the altar] rail[s] were seated the bishops in solemn array like some great supreme court, giving hearing to some case of national importance. In the center of the little semi-circle, seated on an elevated high-backed chair, was the venerable presiding bishop [the primate] of the American Episcopal Church."

Note how striking were the three great half circles of people, each open to the crossing, each arising out of the chancel's architectural form: the huge half circle of the ordained ministerial priesthood around the apse walls, the smaller circle of the lay priesthood bounding the sanctuary receiving communion, and the smallest circle of all, within the rails around the altar, of the bishops presiding over the liturgy, each open to the crossing, each shifting in and out of dominance at different points in the liturgy.At such great liturgies music played a huge role. A conspicuous example of how important this could be is found in Unsung: A History of Women in American Music, where critic Louis Elson's review of "Praise the Lord, all ye Nations" for chorus and organ, opus 5, by America's first major woman composer, Amy Beach, pivots on Elson's significant notice of that music commissioned from Beach for Brooks's consecration. Wrote Elson: "Boston at last possesses a female composer of merit able to cope with the large as well as the small forms of musical creation." Beach, who had made her debut as a pianist with the Boston Symphony and began to compose in the 1880s, lived on nearby Commonwealth Avenue. After the Trinity anthem, she consolidated her enhanced reputation with her Mass in E-Flat.According to B. J. Reigles in his doctoral thesis, The Choral Music of Amy Beach, the composer was "influenced by the sermons of Phillips Brooks . . . [with whom] it is reported she . . . had frequent discussions concerning the topics of his sermons.That her interaction with Brooks during an early impressionable stage of her life . . . influenced . . . the spiritual tenor of her church music is apparent." So too is the fact that, like Brooks, Beach was a modernist. Writes CUNY musicologist Adrienne Block, she became "the flash point for critical controversy over women as composers,"  and was quick to "explore . . . modernist musical techniques."Music was, in fact, the biggest difference between the great Diocesan or national liturgies and the regular parish round of worship Sunday morning, and nowhere other than in his basic chancel design did Brooks's proto-liturgical Movement ideas stand out more. At his Yale lectures on the teaching of Religion, he declared:

I believe in congregational singing. I believe it should be altogether the chief and preponderant method of our worship. But remember that the question altogether should come first, what is the purpose of singing at all? . . . First, church music is the general utterance of . . . the joy, the poetry of religion. And second, it is the special means by which a special truth is fastened on the soul . . . Now there are two ways in which any strong feeling finds satisfaction and increase. One is by the man, in whose heart it is, uttering it himself in what best way he can; the other is by hearing its ideal utterance from the lips most gifted to declare it.

That was the Lutheran influence, Luther, one of Brooks's heros, being famously encouraging of congregational masses and such. The major liturgical influence on Phillips Brooks, however, was Roman Catholic. Never mind that overall he admitted that he "hated Romanism" – its authoritarianism and exclusiveness, as it seemed to him quite beyond the pale – Brooks nonetheless responded keenly to the grandeur of Roman Catholic liturgical practice, writing home to his brother "Holy Week in Rome is not a humbug, as people say, full as it is of things stupid, tiresome and disagreeable, but [things like] the Miserere in the Sistine [Chapel and the papal] blessing from the balcony [of Saint Peter's], seem to reach very remarkably the great ideal of the central religious commemoration of Christendom."Holy Week in Rome in 1866 was formative for Brooks. He was particularly impressed by "the great blessing of the Palms" at St Peter's, which he described as "a gorgeous service," and was also deeply moved by the Maundy Thursday Eucharist – "the dim chapel, dusky old frescoes . . . by far the most sublime and affecting religious music I ever heard."  This is, indeed, a case where a direct influence can be seen in his liturgy at Trinity, where in his chapter in the 1933 history of Trinity Bishop Lawrence remembered that Brooks was "among the first in the Episcopal Church . . . to introduce the Maundy Thursday evening communion."  Finally, wrote Brooks, "the moment in the Easter service was very solemn when the Host was elevated [and] and the silver trumpets sounded."When the two liturgical traditions that he found most powerful, Lutheran and Roman Catholic, seemed to combine, affecting his own Anglican heritage – Brooks loved the Book of Common Prayer beyond reason – Trinity's rector was transported, nothing less. His response to German musicality in the Roman Catholic cathedral in Frankfurt was ecstatic: not only did he record that the service was characterized by "the most superb congregational singing I ever heard – it rings in my ears now," but the ceremonial excited him tremendously. Of this liturgical experience Phillips Brooks  wrote in his dairy : "Mass . . . I almost trembled when I saw and felt the power . . . splendid procession of the host . . . thrilling incense. . . thrilling music."Fascinating in this connection is Brooks's response to the Anglo-Catholic All Saints' Church, Margaret Street, in London: "altars, candles, genuflections and all that to nausea," and to add insult to injury, "a boy preacher." One is reminded of his sarcastic remark in a letter to a friend that "I conceive the trimming of the altar . . . and the darning of the sacramental linen, on the whole, [as] the noblest occupation of the female mind." (Brooks was an ardent supporter of women's right to vote). In truth, Trinity's rector hated fussiness. But he loved "cathedral evensong" in England and confessed in one letter what "a noble pageant" Queen Victoria's Jubilee had been, even as he "dreaded the pageantry" of his own episcopal consecration.This is not the place to ruminate on his long discussion of such matters in his Yale lectures on the Teaching of Religion, which anyone who wishes to pursue the matter further should read, but sufficient to say here that in those lectures too Brooks refuses to privilege preaching, for all its importance, over worship in general, grouping art and architecture, music and preaching as aids to worship. One is reminded again in the 1933 Trinity parish history, how in his historical sermon Brooks delivered himself of the very pointed observation about Trinity Church that "to many and many a worshiper, this parish is dear because it is where his father worshiped . . . we are a parish, we will not degenerate or dissipate into an audience."  (Emphasis added.)Brooks's chief liturgical cause, by the way, for which he argued at a Liturgical Conference, was for "a larger freedom in their churches, at their altars, at their prayer desks," for the use in addition to the Prayer Book collects of spontaneous prayer. Then again, he was also a very careful presider. Recall Bishop Lawrence noting, "Morning Prayer over, the rector retired to the robing room [at Trinity] and exchanged his surplice for the preacher's black gown."Brooks's manner of officiating was also characteristic. One press account reported: "His manner of entering the church was quite peculiar. He hurried in, sweeping his left arm in long circuits and glancing quickly about and abruptly kneeling at the altar. In selecting his places [at Morning Prayer] in the Prayer Book he continued to glance nervously about." Note not only the kneeling at the altar – even at Matins the altar was the focus – but the abruptness, even the anxiety of it all. This seems to have been what moved people. The report went on. "He is a muscular Christian . . . [A] tall, stout, powerfully built man, with a smooth boyish face, and very near-sighted eyes . . . He is reading the with a rapid, breathless, almost stuttering delivery, yet with a certain impulsive and pleading earnestness that was known to move a Congregationalist to his knees."Well, there you have it: to move a Congregationalist to his knees. Not many people could do that. Boston's grandees – much more, of course, than New York's – like Clarence Day in Life with Father, were not accustomed to such a posture: Boston Brahmins did not kneel. Quick to accept the most radical new ideas intellectually, in daily custom they were immovable. Big things could change. Not small things. I can hear Boston historian Walter Whitehill saying that in my ears as I write. It was as great an accomplishment to move a Brahmin to kneel on Sunday morning as to excite the populace generally on Sunday afternoon.Then there was the Parish Eucharist first Sunday. There Brooks not only moved Brahmins to kneeling but to poetry! Certainly at one such service Julia Ward Howe herself, a professed Unitarian – America's Queen Victoria it is not too much to call her – wrote in her diary, "I felt much drawn to go to communion . . . but thought it might occasion surprise and annoyance," so, instead, she wrote, she sought out "a remote upper gallery . . . and felt I had my communion without the 'elements'." And on the way home, the author of The Battle Hymn of the Republic  found herself writing eucharistic poetry! "The universal bread, / The sacrificial wine."

5.Phillips Brooks's death in 1893 meant an end to all this. Absolutely. His chancel design particularly, from which proceeded what was most distinctive and moving about Trinity's liturgy, was too far ahead of its time to long endure. Indeed, its historical significance faded quickly, and memory of Trinity's unique proto-Liturgical Movement cathedral chancel was lost really. It was only after the triumph of the movement in the wider church – in the work of the monks of Solemnes and the writings of Dom Gregory Dix and finally in the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council – that the significance of Brooks's design began to become evident, so unexpected, it is fair to say, it took another half century before the design's discreet influence on Ralph Adams Cram, the preeminent American church architect of the 20th century, gave the impetus to study the matter further.The beginning of the end came less than a decade after Brooks's passing, when in 1902 a new stone parapet, in itself quite handsome, and massed tiers of choir stalls also, were erected in front of the altar, barricading it off from the people. The final death blow came in 1914-16 when Brooks's altar itself was replaced by a new marble-or-was-it-plaster extravaganza wherein a new altar was backed up to a columnar reredos supportive of a lofty baldichino. The most advanced chancel in America, liturgically, had been replaced by one of the most conventional, albeit in the latest taste, Edith Wharton might have said. It is a dismal ending to the centerpiece of Copley Square, too dismal; let us jump ahead and carry the tale through to its conclusion in the 1930s.That conclusion was a miracle. Or so' twas said. Yes, the Anglican theologian and mystery writer Dorothy Sayers famously promulgated in just this period a rule that still holds -- NEC DEUS INTERSIT NISI DIGNUS VINDICE MODUS / NOR LET GOD INTERVENE UNLESS THE MATTER BE WORTHY OF HIS ATTENTION – and yes, it almost never is. But the reason in the case of Trinity chancel the miraculous seems the easiest explanation for what happened is not only because of how the problem was solved, but the form the solution took. Behold, the Third Chancel, which seemed to come out of nowhere in 1937-38, was the apotheosis  of the First Chancel – the same footprint of  free-standing altar in an islanded sanctuary – and the same profile – no reredos or baldichino but this time not in carved black walnut and surrounded by plush red velvet kneeling cushions, but in marble and mosaic and Venetian glass and gold, magnificently detailed. It must have seemed, this new design, if not a miracle, than a mirage. There was also the fact that the new design connected Trinity in yet another way with Hagia Sophia.That Brooks and Richardson had all along yearned for mosaic splendors is not any sort of new discovery or revelation. The evidence has just been ignored. In Brooks's case there was his letter from Venice to Robert Treat Paine, quoted by Allen, wherein Brooks wrote, "How many things I have coveted for our new church. There was a big mosaic at Salviatti's that would glorify our chancel, but let all that wait." And in Richardson's case Henry Adams's biographer confirms "Richardson's . . . projects for the further improvement of Trinity . . . [including] a daring scheme of mosaic." Furthermore, it would seem these dreams were not secrets. When a student in the 1890s of the MIT School of Architecture came to write in 1927, The Story of Architecture, he by then a famous architect, Thomas Tallmadge, wrote of Trinity that "[Richardson's] dream was of mosaics such as those that glorify the mighty vaults of Hagia Sophia." Tallmadge evidently knew whereof he spoke.6.The Orient Express never stopped at Back Bay Station in Copley Square. But the historical figure with whom the tale of Trinity's Third Chancel begins, Thomas Whittemore, many times a patron of the train that famously ran from Paris to Istanbul and back,  alighted at Copley Square as often as not on the last leg of his journey home from Istanbul to Boston. Not quite so exotic as Archbishp Dionysius, Whittemore, however, also came from the Byzantine world bearing gifts for Trinity Church. Distinctly a player on the international scene in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, enough so that he figured as "Professor X" in Evelyn Waugh's When the Going was Good, and "X" in Graham Greene's Convoy to West Africa, Whittemore hosted a dinner party on June 12, 1929 in Istanbul that got the whole play going, as it were. Yale historian Robert Nelson describes the scene well in his Hagia Sophia, 1850-1950: (University of Chicago Press, 2004):

The event took place at the Hotel Tokathan . . . a grand establishment. Baedeker's guide regarded it as the finest hotel in [Istanbul] and Agatha Christie stayed there . . . As a sure sign of the international prestige of the Tokathan, Christie had Hercule Poirot dine in its restaurant at the beginning of Murder on the Orient Express. In the novel, two Americans sat at another table that night . . . All three boarded the Orient Express later that evening, but [one man] did not survive the journey.

He was murdered, of course, and I for one would not be surprised to learn (I am not a mystery reader) that Poirot's star witness was Thomas Whittemore. "At once abstemious, mysterious, elegant pensive and positive . . . an aesthete with an iron will" – these the words of his biographer in the Dictionary of American Biography – Whittemore was a Tufts and Harvard graduate in 1894-98, a literary historian who morphed into an art historian. A Bostonian, at home he was likely to be found on Beacon Hill at Cowley Saint John's or in Copley Square at the Museum of Fine Arts where he kept company with the museum's assistant director, Matthew Prichard (both he and Whittemore were gay), and their mentor, Isabella Stewart Gardner, whose Matisse, the first to enter an American museum, Whittemore – like Prichard a friend of the French modernist master – gave to Gardner. In Paris Whittemore studied Modernism, in Boston something else. It is believed it was Prichard who introduced Whittemore to Byzantine art, so it was all very much a Copley Square affair.It was Whittemore's role in Istanbul, however, that brought matters to a head and so impacted Trinity Church, for that 1929 dinner launched the Byzantine Institute of America,  with headquarters in Boston (in rooms provided by that Back Bay grandee dame Sarah Choate Sears), library and archives in Paris and field office in Istanbul – at Hagia Sophia! Whittemore's purpose was extraordinary, put this way by Ben Major in his 2010 Rutgers honors thesis on the subject: "Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the Turkish Republic and . . . launched a cultural revolution, one which had to redefine Hagia Sophia's such that it reflected Turkey's place at the crossroads of civilizations. . . . Ataturk's maestro was . . . Thomas Whittemore."The reason being? As Nelson recounts, Whittemore "knew well the Boston literati and enjoyed the confidence of that American patron class, a primarily Protestant aristocracy, "and that aristocracy was  his secret weapon in fulfilling his and Ataturk's dream.” Headlined the article in The New York Times on October 18, 1931: "St. Sophia's Mosaics Will Be Seen Again: Plastered Over Since the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 They Will Glow in Restored Church"; and, again, on August 5, 1932, "American Professor Recovers Sancta Sophia's Mosaics." (Whittemore was by then a member of Harvard's faculty.)That Protestant aristocracy, Boston-led, faithfully funded the restoration of the mosaics, and doubtless included more than one parishioner of Trinity Church. Alas, no membership lists of the Institute survive. But one Trinity figure with a compelling interest in the matter was its new rector of 1930, Arthur Lee Kinsolving, inheritor of Trinity's neo Byzantine splendors but as well its dismal Second Chancel. The new rector, Milda Richardson recounts in her essay in The Making of Trinity Church, wanted "an altar with more reverential appeal."

the second chancelSuch a desire was in no way seen as a distraction from the Byzantine Institute's focus. As Nelson points out, "the patronage network that sustained the American involvement with Hagia Sophia" also "supported the building of neo-Byzantine churches" such as the full-fledged Byzantine Revival Christ Church that Ralph Adams Cram designed in the 1930s in Manhattan. Cram, whose influence by the 20's and 30's was paramount, would certainly have been known to Kinsolving, who he met probably through John Nicholas Brown.Brown was at that 1929 dinner in Istanbul at the Hotel Tokathan. He was also at the founding dinner of the Medieval Academy of America at Cram's Beacon Hill townhouse in the same decade. (Indeed, Brown was the initiator of many such dinners himself. In the 1980s he staged another such to try to incite me into founding with him a Ralph Adams Cram Society along the lines of a sort of 'Gothic" version of "Classical America." Alas, I did not follow his lead.) A close friend of Cram, who was, like Brown himself, a friend of Whittemore, his fellow worshiper at Cowley St Johns, Brown was also as it happens the brother-in-law of Trinity's new rector! The Browns and the Kinsolvings both summered at Fishers Island on Long Island Sound, where Brown courted and wed Kinsolving's sister, Ann, in 1930, the year Trinity's new rector was installed.All of these men – Whittemore, Brown, Cram and, of course, Kinsolving – were Episcopalian. Moreover, Whittemore's, Brown's and Kinsolving's signatures were all to be found as well, I can now disclose, in the guest-book of Cram's country house in Sudbury, outside Boston, all of them overnight guests of the architect and his wife in the late 20s and 30s. That in turn suggests perhaps more than one such dinner at Cram's Beacon Hill townhouse, certainly well-known to Brown and also to Whittemore, for it was where in the early '20s Cram's wife, Elizabeth Cram, had presided over a Russian Relief organization organized by Whittemore which  Major calls "the predecessor to the Byzantine Institute." Certainly Cram was a huge supporter, devoting more than two pages of his 1935 autobiography to Whittemore's efforts.The plot thickens. Not quite on the order of Murder on the Orient Express, but a letter in Trinity Churches archives at the Massachusetts Historical Society from Kinsolving to Cram, written in June of 1937, documents that Trinity's rector had long talked all this over with Cram, acknowledging "a hope long entertained that some day your touch might enhance and ennoble the chancel of Trinity Church,” and acknowledging too that "it was you [Cram] who inspired me to . . . know that something could be done."Finally, lest Whittemore, very much the visionary of this group, be thought of as only a socialite historian, one does well to consider the testimony of Mildred Bliss, one of his patrons, testimony visitors to Trinity Church might usefully recall too when studying La Farge's very Byzantine frescoes:

to visit Hagia Sophia under [Whittemore's] guidance was a memorable privilege. A curious quiet -- one might almost say silent -- word would be dropped into one's consciousness, distilling a chain of awareness, until one found oneself participating in the Byzantine intention. One didn't look at what one saw; one became a part of it; and that, even more than the visual impact, was the experience. 'The art of the Byzantine was conceptual, not perceptual as in the Western world,' [Whittemore] said: 'One must watch and become integrated.

7.It was at the art museum, we've seen, that Prichard probably intrigued Whittemore with Byzantine art in the first place, and it was at the MIT School of Architecture on the other side of Trinity that Cram's successor there as dean, William Emerson, took so keen a hand in the affair – incited perhaps by Cram? – that Kinsolvoing named him chair of the jury Trinity appointed to judge the architectural competition when the decision was made to proceed with a new chancel design. "Emerson . . . visited Hagia Sophia in 1936 . . . [and] saw the research potential of the now empty and secularized building and resolved to survey the architecture. Emerson . . . favored . . . like Cram . . . travel and foreign experience for his students . . . With Whittemore's help, Emerson applied to the Turkish authorities and was granted permission to investigate the building under the general authorization given the Byzantine Institute in 1931 . . . Initially, Emerson himself paid for the work and his first publication."Nothing makes plainer the idealism of Emerson, who like Whittemore, Brown, Cram and Kinsolving were all true believers, idealists, romanticists if you insist, for whom all this was very much a cause. So much so the plot, if I may call it such, thrived through to completion despite what was potentially a major contretemps: the Cram firm, one of six invited to submit drawings in a blind competition, did not win. Instead, the firm of Charles Donagh Maginnis won, he being Cram's chief follower in the modern American church architecture movement of the 1920s and 30s, but also Cram's chief rival.Although his firm, Maginnis and Walsh, had hitherto done only Roman Catholic work – all they ever did – whereas Cram's had done not only Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant work nationwide but were as well the court architects of the Episcopal WASP establishment, the truth was that Cram, aggressively High Church and famously acerbic, was so disliked at Trinity (the new rector's high regard notwithstanding) nobody was going to object, anti-Roman Catholic prejudice notwithstanding, and doubtless many rejoiced. Thus in the aforementioned letter to Cram, Kinsolving also wrote that while he agreed with the decision for Maginniss's design, it was "with real personal regret" that his hopes of working with Cram had been dashed, and that he was "sorry not to have this prospect in common with you."Both men knew the old history. Cram had fallen in love with Trinity when it was built and indeed had taken the lead as a young architecture student in the 1880s in preserving the open space in front of it so as to insure Copley Square would be all it could be. But he trashed Brooks's chancel . . . "The whole design of the church demand[ed]," Cram wrote, "a lofty altar under a towering baldichino." Note "lofty altar." Young Cram began as a Victorian after all, for whom altar without reredos was beyond comprehension, just the reform Brooks was attempting to achieve, and which by the 1930s Cram too had come to see the virtue in it. But much had transpired in those decades. Cram's influence had been the driving force in creating the taste that led to the destruction of Trinity's First Chancel and the creation of its highly problematic Second Chancel with just the new altar-and-redos-baldichino he longed for.Ironies abound on every side. Moreover, by the late 1930s Cram was fading fast, increasingly blind. Maginnis, on the other hand, had through the years made rather a specialty of the sort of neo-Byzantine work clearly called for at Trinity. His St. Catherine's Church in Somerville, truth to tell, was a far better design than Cram's Christ Church for that fashionable Manhattan church, and it is not hard to see, given what one now sees in Trinity Chancel, why Maginniss's work carried the day. Moreover, a letter to Maginnis in the Trinity Archives from Chester Brown, one of Cram's designers, suggests Cram seconded him to Maginnis's office for the Trinity project. In fact Cram much admired his distinguished follower's work and thus in more than one sense Kinsolving got "[Cram's] touch" after all. Though perhaps at a price. Kinsolving remained as rector only a little over a year after the controversial new chancel's completion, resigning from Trinity – which was unusual – to take up another rectorate elsewhere.

design for the third chancelTrinity's Third Chancel is not without flaw. One such was the change in the (Brooks-Liturgical-Movement-mode)  front-facing Bishop's Chairs, which in their marble form do not face the congregation, but face inward. Another was the failure to complete the menorah to either side of the altar. (Their splendid bases now relegated to the chancel's shadows and used as flower stands!) An ecumenical touch pioneered by Cram at John Nicholas Brown's family church in Newport, Rhode Island, which contains such menorah, Cram's way of countering the increasing anti-Semitism of the 1920s and '30s, commemorated the Jewish roots of Christian worship. (They should be restored and Maginnis's sanctuary design made whole. They would be especially meaningful within sight as they would be of Burne-Jones's Temple window.)That said, what was controversial then is well called a masterwork today, this new sanctuary – the apotheosis of Brooks's First Chancel – and the re-decorated apse around it, with its gilt bronze reliefs by Ernest Pellegrino, and very few have not felt its majesty. One Brooks scholar who disagrees is David Chesebrough, but the grounds on which he does so entirely misrepresent the character of the First Chancel. Far more knowing was the first great Richardson scholar, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, who in a later edition of his 1936 classic The Architetcture of H. H. Richardson and His Times (Museum of Modern Art, 1936) wrote,

The apse and all its furniture has, since 1936, been entirely re-done by Maginnis and Walsh. Without being at all plausibly Richardsonian, the result is yet preferable to the earlier work of Richardson's successors, [the Second Chancel of 1902-1938 by Charles Coolidge]. In richness of materials and color it [the 1938 Maginnis and Walsh chancel] is not perhaps too unlike what he [Richardson] himself might have wished to provide had there been more funds available.

8.Finally, there is a secret to be shared about Trinity Church, a secret characteristic of Phillips Brooks's chancel design. Walking there in the apse, behind the islanded sanctuary with its free-standing altar, look westward, toward Copley Square: suddenly there will come into alignment with altar and hanging cross – between the candlesticks, so to speak – what I call "Phillips Brooks's altar-piece”: the three western stained glass lancets of John La Farge. Glimmering a hundred and more feet away over the West Door, these compel attention, as well the legend about them – that Brooks asked LaFarge to put something there that would inspire him preaching. The story is doubtful. But bearing in mind the tug-of-war that once forced itself on us in the matter of pulpit or altar in Richardson's sketches, suddenly the story becomes more likely when one realizes that standing behind the altar is Phillips Brooks's view, from Phillips Brooks's altar, for Brooks by most accounts celebrated the Eucharist facing the peopleIf Trinity is "the glory of America forever," La Farge's western lancets, his work of 1883, are the glory of Trinity forever. Think of Ruskin's decription of San Marco's: "There opens a vast cave, hewn out in the form of a cross . . . saints flash . . . and sink back into the gloom . . . overhead a succession of crowded imagery . . . [dominating all] the figure of Christ in the utmost height of it, raised in power."I call La Farge's composition "le moderne Christ," preferring French because La Farge shared that background with the distinguished critic, Sigmund Bing, who wrote of these windows that their "astonishing brilliance surpassed in its magic anything of its kind in modern times." In fact, the western lancets may be the greatest 19th-century stained glass in the world. Why I call them modern, however, is because of an 1883 review by Robert Jarvis – he all unknowing I'm sure because he meant to criticize what I like so much more with more modern eyes – that Christ seems to be, in Jarvis's words, "shouldering his way into the church with a force which appears to threaten destruction to the building." This is all the stronger an effect because Helene Weinberg is entirely correct to say that "Christ appears almost silhouetted against a vibrating background of roughly cut blue-green nuggets that visually lengthen the nave by suggesting abstract space beyond."Seen from behind the altar, this luminous altar-piece is all the more magnificent for the darkness and spatial drama of the vast space through which it glimmers. Indeed, studying La Farge's western Christus in relation to Charles Maginnis's sanctuary and altar, suddenly both come into sharper and startling focus: stained glass, Venetian glass, gold and mosaic and marble all so brilliantly reflect the bold simplicity of Phillips Brooks's liturgical vision; yet in such luscious, gorgeous detail.Today's poor lighting design again retards seeing things for what they are. However, back in the great crossing, under La Farge's frescoed tower, if the time of day when the sun is just right is caught, the visitor will be amazed: Phillips Brooks's altar glitters.And the peacocks. Oh, the peacocks? "The most beautiful things in the world," Ruskin held in Phillips Brooks's beloved Stones of Venice. They were also William Morris's favorite motif. And in C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia peacocks adorned "Aslan's Table" at "the beginning of the end of the world,” a table that "suggests the spirituality of the ancient Arthurian legends, and being Aslan's table, suggests the eternal refreshment of the Eucharist." Trinity Chancel has lost La Farge's doves; only the ghostly silhouette above the hanging cross reminds. But the peacocks, oh, the peacocks! The peacocks dance.

____Douglass Shand-Tucci is an historian of American art and architecture and Boston/New England studies. His most recent book is the second volume of his study of the architecture of Ralph Adams Cram (Univ.of Massachusetts Press, 2005) and he also teaches at the Boston Architectural College in the Masters degree program in Historic Preservation. He is the founder of the innovative new history site, Back Bay Historical | Boston CentricGlobal Studies, where his monthly longform blogs have become his principal publishing outlet.