Cherubic Hymn

At the midpoint of the Byzantine Divine Liturgy the gifts of bread and wine are carried from the table of preparation through the body of the church to the altar, the procession called the Great Entrance, and the Cherubic Hymn is the music of that journey. The chronicle tradition of Byzantium records that the chant was introduced under Emperor Justin II, around the years 573 to 574, which makes it one of the datable landmarks of the liturgy's growth, a moment when the transfer of the gifts, once a practical necessity, was clothed in a theology. The hymn's text does something subtle, it describes the singers rather than the procession.

We who mystically represent the cherubim, it says, and who sing the thrice holy hymn to the life giving Trinity, let us now lay aside every earthly care, that we may receive the King of all, who comes invisibly escorted by the angelic hosts. The congregation is told what it has, for the moment, become, the earthly image of the angelic choirs, and what it must therefore do, put down everything else. The chant is deliberately slow, among the longest sustained pieces in the liturgy, unfolding while the clergy commemorate the living and the dead, and its unhurried motion is itself part of the meaning, earthly time set aside while the King enters.

The Cherubikon is not one text on all days. On Holy Thursday it yields to the communion hymn Of Thy Mystical Supper, on Holy Saturday to Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence, a text from the old Liturgy of St James that passed into English hymnody in the nineteenth century and is now sung, to the French tune Picardy, in churches that have never celebrated a Byzantine liturgy, and at the Presanctified Liturgy of Lent to Now the Powers of Heaven. These substitutions are the exceptions that display the rule, each replacement doing the Cherubikon's work, silencing the earthly in the presence of the heavenly, in the register of its own day.

Musically the hymn has been a summit of Orthodox composition for centuries. Byzantine chant elaborated it into settings of great length and ornament, and the Slavic tradition made the Cherubic Hymn a genre of its own, with Bortniansky's settings becoming fixtures of the Russian repertoire, Tchaikovsky composing three within his liturgical works, and Rachmaninoff crowning the line in his Liturgy of St John Chrysostom. Because the chant covers a liturgical action rather than filling a fixed span, composers write into an elastic silence, and choirs measure their singing to the procession, music, movement and theology fitted together as closely as anywhere in Christian worship.