The Cherubic Hymn

In the translation of the Orthodox Church in America the hymn begins: "Let us who mystically represent the cherubim and sing the Thrice-holy Hymn to the life-creating Trinity, now lay aside all earthly cares." There the singing pauses while the gifts are carried out among the people and the commemorations are made — that ceremonial has its own entry — and then the sentence completes itself: "That we may receive the King of All, Who comes invisibly upborne by the angelic hosts. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!" Grammatically it is a single thought, and the procession happens inside it: the hymn is interrupted by the very arrival it announces, and may not say its Alleluia until the King has come in.

Each clause carries weight. "Mystically represent": the congregation does not play-act the angels; in the mystery now beginning, it stands where they stand. In Scripture the cherubim are the throne-bearers of God — "thou that dwellest between the cherubims" (Psalm 80:1) — and the thrice-holy hymn is the cry Isaiah heard filling the temple: "Holy, holy, holy" (Isaiah 6:3). If that is truly where the Liturgy has placed us, the next clause follows with the logic of a command: creatures standing there have no business clutching their errands and anxieties. And the reason is not that earthly things are wicked, but that hands must be empty to receive: the King of all is about to arrive, escorted — "invisibly upborne" — by armies no eye can see.

The Cherubic Hymn is less a description than an instruction, and it is that rare thing, a hymn the singers address to themselves: let us lay aside. It stands at the Liturgy's great threshold. The Liturgy of the Word has ended; the Eucharistic offering is about to begin; and between the two the Church stops to do the one thing without which nothing can be offered or received — put everything else down. The apostle's phrase is close kin: "let us lay aside every weight" (Hebrews 12:1).

While the choir sings, the priest at the altar quietly prays one of the most searching prayers in the whole Liturgy, confessing that no one bound to the desires and pleasures of the flesh is worthy to approach the King of glory, and that Christ Himself is both the offerer and the offering — before this hymn, even the celebrant is not celebrant enough. The hymn makes no claim that we are ready. It does something more honest: it names the gap between what the eye sees — two clergymen carrying vessels — and what is actually happening, and asks us to spend the next few minutes living inside the real version.

The Cherubikon entered the Liturgy at Constantinople to clothe the transfer of the gifts, which until then had been a practical necessity in search of a theology; its introduction is traditionally dated to the reign of the Emperor Justin II, which the Byzantine chroniclers place in the year 573-74. It has held its place ever since in the Liturgies of St. John Chrysostom and St. Basil; only a handful of days each year replace it with other hymns of the same shape — Great Thursday, Great Saturday, and the Presanctified Liturgy, described in the Great Entrance entry.

Because it must last as long as a censing and a procession, the Cherubikon became one of the great canvases of Orthodox church music: unhurried, melismatic, deliberately outside ordinary time. In Byzantine chant it is sung in every one of the eight tones; in the Slavic choral world, composers from Bortniansky to Tchaikovsky returned to it again and again, and their settings are sung far beyond Russia. The music's stillness is not decoration. A hymn about laying every care aside cannot be sung in a hurry; the long, floating lines are the sound of hands slowly opening.