The Habsburg Cafe by Andrew Riemer Page B

colour and texture contrives to suggest tiers of galleries and boxes rising in a semicircle around the altar.
    The various strands that constitute the dreams and fantasies of this world come together more clearly in this place than anywhere else in the former imperial capital. Here distinctions between vulgarity and refinement, between the secular and the spiritual, between substance and shadow all vanish. A temple dedicated to the worship of an all-powerful Creator, before whom all human vanity and ingenuity must be humbled, is an extravagant display of the human arts of construction, decoration and illusion. It is a baroque Tower of Babel, a challenge to the Almighty to excel, in his own theatre of nature, the ingenuity and brilliance of the Habsburgs’ architects, painters, sculptors and masons. The Karlskirche, like the other flamboyant instances of the South German baroque, seems more a monument to human megalomania than an expression of humility and adoration.
    Religion and even spirituality in this world have little to do with the mysterious bonds of meditation and prayer that bind creature and Creator. There is not even the incense-heavy mystery of the churches of the eastern rite, enamelled saints and prophets glowing darkly in a vague, indistinct sea of burnished gold. Here everything is light, pomp and spectacle. The emphasis is always on communal celebration, not on private worship. God and the Emperor seem to have been on equal footing here, notwithstanding the pieties of humility God’s anointed might have declared while kneeling before the shrine of the Invincible. Church and state merge within the operatic interiors of these buildings just as cathedral, palace and opera house define the cardinal points of the imperial capital.
    In another, though cognate, sense these shrines of regal might and magnificence are also treasuries and armouries, guarding securely the wealth and the armaments to ensure that this realm, its monarchs and its people may continue to enjoy their unique privilege as those most favoured by God. No doubt in some ecclesiastical office somewhere in this city there must be a register listing the holy and venerable relics cocooned in their reliquaries of gold, crystal, precious gems and the rarest of marbles. How many splinters of the True Cross or how many thorns of the Passion are listed in that register? Does anyone have an accurate count of saints’ bones, nail clippings, hair, bits of parchment-like skin, dried organs and viscera? Is there a fragment here of the swaddling bands in which the immaculately conceived Virgin wrapped her infant son, the Incarnate God? Is a piece of the scourge with which he was flayed after his betrayal by the Jews, preserved in an imperial or episcopal chapel? How many ampoules of his most precious blood lie hidden in chests and tabernacles?
    These relics, objects of worship and veneration, provide guarantees of salvation or at least of remission. The holy places of Vienna are a pharmacopoeia for the next world, a spiritual pharmacy containing the best and most costly drugs to ensure immunity against perpetual damnation, a powerhouse ofweapons with which to fight sin and the devil. These engines may be turned, nevertheless, against God too. So much of his power is concentrated in this realm, and so many of his lieutenants too (albeit in bits and pieces) that their possessor might well attempt to vie with the all-powerful, denuded as his treasury is of its potency.
    The iconography of baroque absolutism (in Austria as much as in the rest of Europe) was obsessed with apotheosis. On the ceilings and in the domes of civic halls, rooms of state and audience chambers in this city, the Franzes and the Josefs, the Ferdinands and the Rudolfs are depicted borne aloft in glory, their ceremonial robes billowing in the breeze, flights of angels guiding them through the swelling clouds. The deification of kings and emperors may have been more than a poetic fancy,