Justinian builds Hagia Sophia
The greatest church in Christendom
On December 27, 537 AD, the emperor Justinian enters the newly completed Church of Holy Wisdom — Hagia Sophia — and walks to the center of its enormous nave.
He looks up. The dome above him seems to float — suspended from heaven on golden chains, as contemporary witnesses put it — its base ringed with forty windows that flood the space with light. The mosaics cover every surface. The marble columns came from pagan temples across the empire. The floor shimmers.
Justinian stands in the center of it and reportedly says: Solomon, I have surpassed you.
The building is the largest in the world. Its dome, at 102 feet in diameter, will not be surpassed for a thousand years. It is the architectural expression of a theology: that the God of the universe, who cannot be contained in any building, can nevertheless be encountered in a human-made space of extraordinary beauty.
Procopius, describing it, says it seems to be suspended from heaven rather than resting on solid masonry. He says the light seems to be generated from within the building itself rather than entering from outside.
Hagia Sophia will be a Christian church for nine hundred and sixteen years. It will become a mosque in 1453 when the Ottomans take Constantinople. It will become a museum in 1934. It will become a mosque again in 2020.
The building outlasts every political arrangement around it. It is still the most beautiful enclosed space in the world.
“The church flashes and glitters with light. One might imagine that the place has not been illuminated from without by the sun, but that the radiance comes into being within it.”
— Procopius, On Buildings I.1, c. 560 AD
“so that the priests could not stand to minister by reason of the cloud; for the glory of the LORD filled the house of the LORD.”
Justinian built the most beautiful building in the world as an act of worship — as an expression in stone and gold and light of what he believed about the God who deserved the very best humanity could produce.
The tradition of building beautiful churches has always had its critics: the money should go to the poor, the grandeur is idolatrous, the beauty distracts from the content. The tradition has always had its defenders: beauty is itself a theological statement, a declaration that the one worshipped is worth the best effort, that the transcendent deserves a space that gestures toward transcendence.
Both concerns are right. The tension is permanent and productive.
What does the space where your community worships say about what it believes about the one it is worshipping?