We F°cked Up Church
by R.G. Miga
This essay was first published at Another World, our supporters’ journal. To read essays like this before everyone else and often exclusively, for free course enrollment and digital downloads, and for discounts on purchases, become a supporting member.
In 2019, a research group from Stanford University produced an ambitious musical project: Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia, “the first vocal album in the world to be recorded entirely in live virtual acoustics.”
The Icons of Sound research team at Stanford captured digital recordings of reference sounds within Hagia Sophia—a massive basilica built in 537 AD in present-day Istanbul, which stood as the largest interior space in the world for a thousand years after its construction. It was not possible to record a live performance within the physical space of Hagia Sophia: the basilica was converted to a mosque in 2019 and now prohibits singing. Instead, the reference sounds collected from within the space were engineered into a digital signature of its acoustic qualities. This was overlaid over Capella Romana’s performance of traditional Byzantine chants, producing a recreation of how medieval sacred music would sound within the extraordinary architecture of Hagia Sophia.
It is, as the kids say, a banger.
There is no easy way to contextualize this performance. Describing the structure of the basilica is challenging; explaining its acoustic qualities is challenging; grasping the human experience of both at the same time, without hearing it and seeing it, is damn near impossible. Which is why Lost Voices is so valuable.
First, there’s the architecture. Hagia Sophia was the largest enclosed space on the planet for a thousand years. It was one of the first structures—and also the largest—to incorporate a fully pendentive dome, using triangular supports to build a round central dome over the square worship space below, accompanied by several semi-domes around its periphery. The expansive marble floor recalls the movement of water across the ocean. The interior’s gold ornamentation would have best captured the light at sunrise and sunset, when the morning and evening liturgies were performed. Those standing beneath the basilica’s domes during worship would have been enveloped in radiant glimmering, evoking both the familiar waters of the nearby Aegean Sea (the Sea of Marmara that forms Istanbul’s harbor means something close to “Marble-Shimmering Sea”) as well as the primordial Cosmic Ocean of Creation. The smoke from burning incense would highlight and solidify the golden shafts of sunlight streaming through the windows, as well as scenting the air.
In addition to being visually stunning, the domes of the basilica also create an extraordinary acoustic environment. Researchers measured a reverberation time of 11 seconds within the central space, which is five times longer than the average (2 seconds) of modern performance spaces. Crucially, this m akes regular speech almost unintelligible; however, it produces remarkable effects for singing, and especially chanting: “the kallichoros responds to the chant in the entire range of the human voice by producing high-frequency harmonics; thus, the singers’ notes—smeared over time—end up harmonizing with themselves.”
This resonance changes the way that choristers perform within the space. Traditional sacred music in the Hagia Sophia takes on a unique personality and encourages the singers to adapt their performance to the environment. The human singers respond to what is essentially the basilica singing in its own voice, harmonizing together in praise of the Divine.
Furthermore, the Stanford researchers paint a beautiful picture (worth quoting at length) of how the combination of physical architecture and resonant acoustics would shape the worshippers’ experience: “Raised almost fifty-seven meters above the floor, the cupola reflects and scatters the sound waves, producing the effect of an acoustic rain over a much wider area of the floor. The dome causes the high-frequency short-wavelengths of the harmonics that the space produces to concentrate here, and be reflected and scattered continuously. This phenomenon stirs the synaesthetic effect of aural and optical brightness, as it combines the acoustic reflection with the visual reflection of light off the gold mosaics. As a result, the sonic brightness acts like a mirror, reflecting the human vocal energy, and, in the process, produces a radiant vision of the imagined splendor of the angelic choirs. This luminous celestial voice is more prominent when the building is full. At these moments people and their clothing absorb most of the reflections off the polished surface of the floor. This process enhances the experience of an ephemeral concentration of sonic energy in the golden superstructure. In its volatile state, it quickly transforms into a golden sonic ‘rain.’”
To recap: a visually stunning sacred space was designed and built to enhance the unique qualities of worship music, creating a full-sensory transcendental experience for those coming in from the discordant mundane world outside—joined together in praise of God, surrounded by shimmering gold and marble and pillars of golden sunlight, with a golden sonic rain cascading down from the soaring dome of a structure that would have no equal for another forty generations. The effect would have been literally life-changing for those who witnessed it in its original context.
While the awe-inspiring qualities of the worship space within Hagia Sophia are spectacular, the approach was in no way unique for most of human history. The Lascaux Cave is one of the oldest known sacred spaces. The best interpretation for why prehistoric people would have gone to the trouble of painting elaborate murals hundreds of feet underground is that they were part of a consciousness-shifting ritual: the depths of the caves, the darkness, and the disorientation were necessary components of the experience. Researchers have described the terrifying experience of crawling through the darkness of the caves for hours—a literal descent into the underworld—hemmed in on all sides by unyielding rock, only to emerge into an expansive space filled with flickering light and striking images. We can only imagine the effect on people living in a world where representational art was uncommon, let alone with the additional preparations of fasting, chanting, invocations, and maybe the use of psychedelics that are common to shamanic magic around the world. Although more of a dark inverse of Hagia Sophia than a direct analogue, Lascaux would nevertheless have been a deeply resonant space that created a full-sensory experience of transcendence for initiates.
The list goes on: the acoustic qualities of Gobekli Tepe, of the Great Pyramid, of even the most provincial village churches in Europe are all part of a long and very effective tradition of taking sensory experience into account when constructing sacred spaces. Even setting aside the ritual significance of these harmonics—if you want to give people, priests and laity alike, direct access to Divinity, it makes sense to create a space that is manifestly separate from everyday reality, that looks and sounds and smells and feels transcendental. Obviously.
These are not just historical curiosities for those interested in the next stage of human spirituality. There is a blueprint to follow for how to construct sacred spaces—how it was done most effectively in the past, in ways that are still breathtaking for us soul-blind moderns, and how it might be done again in the future. And, crucially, where and how contemporary mainstream religion has failed so spectacularly.
I haven’t done an exhaustive survey of contemporary worship spaces in the United States, let alone the rest of the world. I’m no expert. However, I’ve been in enough American churches—and seen enough videos of the monstrosities that pass for “megachurches” these days, the ostensible cutting edge of religious architecture in this country—to venture that my experience in my home church is typical of modern Christianity in the United States, and probably representative of emerging trends in cost-saving religious architecture.
My family attended a sort-of Lutheran church in the suburbs where I grew up. The building was designed in the Aspirationally Pointy style that seems to be standard for churches in places with three-car garages and no sidewalks. (The condemned architects who serve out their sentences by planning these things all seem to reference the same child’s drawing of a church.) Inside, it had the m ajesty of an interfaith chapel in a small regional airport. The conventional wisdom seemed to be that plummeting attendance was the result of churches feeling too “churchy,” and thus every traditional element had been purged from the sanctuary. Even features as basic as stained-glass windows might spook the herd. The upholstered wooden chairs that took the place of pews were very practical. The wall-to-wall carpeting was very practical. The eggshell paint on the sheetrock walls was very practical. The empty cross above the abstracted altar was as unadorned and unobtrusive as possible. At least there was natural light, presumably because of fire ordinances.
It was a monumental task for anybody to transcend the mundane in a place like that. Worshiping with our congregation was like watching a group of people politely come to terms with the possibility that their drug dealer had ripped them off. A few enterprising souls seemed to catch a buzz through sheer force of will; the rest stayed silent, hoping that it might just take a little longer to kick in for them, afraid that they were wasting their time on a nonexistent high.
The choir waded through “contemporary” hymns that were decades past their sell-by date. The middle-aged rockers of the Good News Band tried to summon some youthful energy while sounding like karaoke night in Purgatory. Pastor Jim—tired, goateed, trudging toward a divorce—addressed his flock with the forced enthusiasm of a man teaching a traffic safety course. His sermons stretched tenuously for a connection between the martyred faith of Scripture and the vexations of modern life, like getting stuck in the drive-thru line at Dunkin’ Donuts. Occasionally, a few hands were raised in imitation of a tent revival, hoping to scoop up whatever wisps of the Holy Spirit might have been caught in the HVAC system. The only deep mystery we confronted was why any of us came back the following Sunday.
When the Good Lord said that He would be wherever two or more were gathered, He probably never imagined anything quite so dismal, else He would have qualified His offer.
And it was nobody’s fault, really. Everybody—Pastor Jim, the choir, the Good News Band, the hand-waving True Believers and the burgeoning atheists in the congregation—did the best they could with what they had to work with. Which wasn’t much. Our little cul-de-sac of Christianity had long since abandoned the idea that sacred spaces should be awe-inspiring, that communion with the Divine should be immediately transformative. Not abstractly; not metaphorically; not after death, once all our devotional merit badges are totted up. Transformative right now. Today. So we went through the motions in that dispiriting Skinner box of a church, and hoped for the best—or anything, really.
If this is typical of what passes for mainstream religion these days, it’s no wonder that the Nones are on the rise. Anybody confronted with the empty pantomime that these soulless spaces tolerate could be forgiven for thinking that the whole thing is a sham—that gods aren’t real, that faith is a collective delusion, that religion exists only to exploit the vulnerable.
Coming from such a flimsy spiritual upbringing, it's beautifully heartbreaking to listen to Lost Voices of the Hagia Sophia: Capella Romana's performance reveals a glimmer of how powerful communal worship could be in the right setting. But we're not creating any more Hagia Sophias. Despite all the engineering prowess we've learned in the intervening centuries, nothing we build today can match the elemental power of light and space and sound and stone, joined together to put humanity in touch with the Divine. We construct superlative monuments to ourselves and then tear them down a few decades later. The sacred spaces we build today are little more than oddly-shaped meeting halls, fulfilling the basic requirements of shelter for whatever religious fervor its congregants can muster on their own. And apparently, judging from the spread of atheism—if not outright nihilism—it’s not enough.
Fortunately, if we’re serious about connecting with the numinous—as many contemporary pagans are well aware—there’s no need for spectacular structures. The wheel of time has brought us back around to the earliest cathedrals, built into the landscape. We’ve returned to Lascaux Cave. The next stage of our spiritual development could just as easily take place—has probably already begun—in dark tunnels etched with strange graffiti, among the standing stones of unfinished overpasses. Initiates will follow hidden voices into cement chambers lit by candles; spray-painted sigils will hold mysteries for contemplation; the ceiling will disappear into the shadows above, stretching higher than the dome of any basilica, and it will be more than enough.
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R.G. Miga
R .G. Miga is a writer living in the Finger Lakes region of central New York State, exploring the genres of magical realism and solarpunk in addition to nonfiction essays