Flames in the Darkness of God:
A Twilight Visit to the Chiesa Nuova

The evening of the second Latin Mass I heard at Rome, that wonderful serene evening, I took a long and wandering path home, not quite knowing where I was going nor where I was supposed to go. I found myself, inevitably, back on the Corso, coming out a few steps from the old Oratory, the home of that strange and smiling saint, Filippo Neri, who exalted the humble and cast the mighty from their thrones--by asking his aristocratic charges to follow him about with the tails of foxes fixed to their breeches.

Nobody can hate Pippo Neri, or even dislike him. He is like St. Francis in that respect; those who know him even slightly love him. But what looks like love, in this fallen world, is dangerous. In this misinterpreted and baroque city, love can look like sentimentality, and in this misinterpreted and modern metropolis, sentimentality can look like love. Like so many lovable saints, their affability obscures their holiness, and we love them like we do a senile grandfather.

For example, it's the love-affair that the Victorians had with the little poor man of Assisi that turned him into the shapeless concrete garden knome we all know instead of the fierce Giotto saint who walked on flaming coals before the cruel Sultan. We don't expect sweet little Pippo or his church to be profound. Gentle. Pretty. Cute. Nice, even, but not terrible as an army with banners. But it is. The big-eyed Christ of the Holy Cards should not eclipse the Jesus we see cleansing the Temple of iniquity.

And the Chiesa Nuova, the church of San Filippo's Oratorians, is the church of the saint who was Apostle of Rome, the saint who buried himself in the theologians and philosphers of the Church for three year's study at the Sapienza, not just the sentimental, smiling, bearded grandpa we remember from our childhood books of saints.

There was some traces of the mythical Pippo at first glance. Some descendents of his beloved urchins clustered on the steps playing soccer in the twilight, just like Pippo allegedly once drop-kicked a cardinal's biretta, if I remember the tale right. But beyond the portals of the church was another world. It was dim, half-lit by dozens of gilded sconces down the nave, coronas of light ringing the tomb of San Filippo beyond the east transept. Gilding was everywhere, throwing off sheens of antique gold in the transparent darkness, nighttime cloaking everything but concealing nothing. Dionysian light-mysticism tells us that it is in this Divine darkness that we fully experience God, a very different darkness from the murky gloom of the dim alleyways of our minds.

It was spectacular. San Filippo's humility may have made him opposed to the decoration that later gloriously incrusted the church, but it and only it could truly communicate the overpowering love of the saint. All I could see was the sharp highlights of gold amid the darkness, on the legs of angels, on the polychromy of pillars; everything else was irrelevant. We lose something when we floodlight our churches. The candles of our forefathers were for sight as well as symbolism. Christ, the light, is always represented by the flame of a candle, and St. Thomas tells us that we will see God, not with our own eyes in heaven, but directly in His light, for it only is sufficient.

Pippo knew that candles meant light, but they also meant fire. God is light, represented by a candle, but He is also the fire of the Holy Spirit. Love, real love, baroque love, was fiery. Love is dangerous, not sentimental or trite. It was this that made Pippo into San Filippo.

A few days before the feast of Pentecost, 1544, the birthday of the Church, he experienced a remarkable miracle. A great globe of spiritual fire slid down his throat in a vision and lodged itself in his heart. He was so overcome with fiery love, he threw himself to the ground to cool himself, bathed himself to quench the fire in his breast. Still, filled with great agitation, he discovered his heart had swollen in his chest with a bulge the size of man's fist. After his death long after, an autopsy revealed this remarkable change had broken two ribs, bending them into an arch. Not a single twinge of pain accompanied this prodigy, but forever after whenever he performed a spiritual action, his heart would beat wildly.

It was the church of that great, burning heart, which grew from the silence and darkness of contemplation and the tiny flickering tapers of human love, that I visited. For all the darkness of those massive, cavernous spaces, it seemed familiar as a home, a place of great comfort and love, a love that is so great that sometimes it nearly consumes us with fire.