Powers and Principalities, Part 2 4 comments

By Brian Volck

…all / our school text-books lie. / What they call History / is nothing to vaunt of, / being made, as it is, / by the criminal in us
                                          —W.H. Auden, “Archaeology”

Washington, DC in early spring can be lovely: forsythia and daffodils in tiny front stoop gardens layered with the scent of reawakening rosemary. All-day meetings are dreary enough with endless reports and dull action items talked over in windowless rooms, but they’re torture to those who know what beauty beckons outside.

It was a relief, then, to venture outside on our day for Hill visits, though the sun had given way to clouds and sporadic rain. On my way to the Hart Senate Building, I passed the Peace Monument, where Grief, History, Victory, Mars, and Neptune gaze westward and, rather less conspicuous on the monument’s eastern niche, Peace, having lost her marble dove, keeps company with industry, science, literature, and art.

The monument commemorates Civil War sailors who died, as the inscription proclaims, “that their country might live.” Beyond it, a wooded street sweeps both past and toward the halls of elected power: offices, the Supreme Court, and Congress itself.

Visiting members’ offices is far less grand than it sounds. Even with a scheduled appointment, private citizens typically steal time from a busy twenty-something staffer, part of the smartly-dressed army that keeps Congress in what one might call working order.

With two Senators and a Congressman to see, one gets the drill down: a handshake and introductions followed by a businesslike exchange, some pleasantries, a one page “leave behind” reminding the staffer what you were there for, the exchange of business cards, a handshake and farewell. You leave for another appointment, they to greet the next suitor.

Crossing the Capitol’s east front, one can’t help but notice the conspicuous monumentality. The only structure between Constitution and Independence Avenues not resembling a church is the United Methodist Building. When Thomas Walter designed the second (and current) Capitol dome, he studied cathedrals in Rome, London, and St. Petersburg.

I was on my way to a briefing, so I entered the Capitol on the House side, far from the tourists. Past the metal detectors and the suited men asking my business and destination, I walked the long Hall of Columns, where statues reverence state heroes.

The Hall ends in the Crypt, a somber arched interior built explicitly to house, at the very center of the L’Enfant’s District plan, the body of George Washington. Washington’s will, however, stipulated his burial site as Mt. Vernon, so the crypt never served as reliquary.

One floor above the Crypt is the Capitol Rotunda, where visitors mill in tour groups or alone, some inspecting Trumbull’s vast depictions of British surrenders and national beginnings, or later paintings of Columbus, praying Pilgrims, and Pocahontas’ Anglican baptism.

At the center of the dome, directly above the space meant for the first President’s mortal remains, is Brumidi’s immense fresco, The Apotheosis of Washington. I had just enough time to take a look.

At Washington’s 1789 inaugural in New York City (following an election in which he received every electoral vote), some wondered if they’d exchanged George III for George the First. President Washington, however, maintained a careful balance of pomp and the common touch, and willingly left office after his second term.

By the 1860s however, Washington, the war hero and president, was the one historical figure capable of unifying a violently fractured imagined community. In his fresco, Brumidi paints Washington, flanked by Liberty and Victory, achieving the status of god. Thirteen maidens dance about this trinity, surrounded in turn by personifications of American prowess. The nearest of these to Washington is War, dressed as Armed Liberty, and brandishing a sword against tyranny, kings, and the schismatic Jefferson Davis.

In the century and a half since Brumidi painted his fresco, nations learned subtler and more secular ways to praise the state’s mystical power as savior and protector. President Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech follows the contemporary formula, condemning religious violence while accepting the tragic necessity of secular wars in which Americans spill their blood out of “enlightened self-interest.”

I know no language sufficient for such veiled complexities than “powers and principalities.” Whether in the name of civil religion or enlightened self-interest, the imagined community of which I am a gratuitous beneficiary is constituted and preserved by blood sacrifice.

My visit to the Capitol came in the final weeks of Lent, so I was conscious of the Passion story the Church was entering. I was conscious, too, of Auden’s warning:

Not that all rites
should be equally fonded:
some are abominable.

There’s nothing the Crucified
would like less
than butchery to appease Him.

I couldn’t stay in the Rotunda. I needed to flee my thoughts and attend to business. I headed toward the briefing, scheduled in one of the conference rooms reached by a corridor running outside the original Capitol walls, covered by a clear plastic roof which reveals the sky.

Walking briskly, I ran my hands along the white stone of the Capitol, unable, from where I was, to see the statue of Armed Freedom atop the dome. But in that moment, as I tried to fix my mind on matters I could remedy, I remembered that what stood between me and Armed Freedom had been built, in part, by men neither white nor free.

There’s no fleeing the powers; not this side of the eschaton. It’s everywhere, in everything I touch and see and hear. All creation groans for redemption. The parts that serve me best still eagerly await adoption.

Even during the season of Easter, when nature itself seems reborn, we live in that long Saturday between death and resurrection, between the now here and not yet, while the life yet to come gestates in the womb of the cross.