The “Economy of Incarnation” and the Cherubic Hymn in Nineteenth-Century Russia

The Russian Orthodox liturgy constantly hovers on the boundary of representation and supposed real presence of the divine. This tension is dramatically illustrated by the Cherubic Hymn, which purports to “mystically represent” angelic song and accompanies the transfer of the bread and wine that will be transformed into the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist. The Cherubic Hymn was the most commonly set liturgical text in modern Russia, attracting many of Russia’s leading composers, including Dmitry Bortniansky, Mikhail Glinka, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Milii Balakirev (who arranged the text to Mozart’s Ave verum corpus), and Alexander Kastalsky. In this article I analyze Cherubic Hymns from Bortniansky to Kastalsky to demonstrate a gradual shift from an emphasis on formal clarity and localized mimetic devices to a musical idiom based on medieval chant melodies and folk-inspired polyphony. I argue that this shift embodied a profound transformation in Russian religious thought across the long nineteenth century, wherein rational, enlightenment sensibilities ceded to a mystical emphasis on the interpenetrability of the material and spiritual worlds, or the “economy of incarnation.” Drawing upon intellectuals ranging from the novelist Nikolai Gogol to theologian Sergius Bulgakov and prominent critics of the so-called New Direction that emerged in Russian sacred music at the end of the nineteenth century, I show that the Cherubic Hymn, and liturgical music at large, became invested with the ability not simply to imitate angelic song but to join in it, a perceptible and embodied participation in the activity of the divine. In doing so, I aim to demonstrate the persistence of sacred epistemologies in the modern world and develop an analytic approach that attends at once to musical detail and liturgical meaning.