New St. Peter's

Present-day Saint Peter's is such a prodigious structure it resists description.  Large enough to contain 60,000 people, "colossal" is an understatement.  A popular story recounts that 10,000 troops once attended Mass.  When the commanding officer entered and didn't see them he thought his troops had not yet arrived.  But in fact they were there—in one of the transepts.

On plan, New Saint Peter's exterior measures 600 x 450 British feet. Interestingly, if we convert these to "British cubits" based on the 1:1.5 rule, Saint Peter's has an elegant British measure of 400 x 300 cubits.

New Saint Peter's was evidently not patterned after Solomon's Temple exactly since its proportions are not the same. However, the most fascinating thing about Saint Peter's today is not its plan but rather its great body.

High above the altar lies the crown of Saint Peter's, its light-filled dome. Designed by Michelangelo to actually dwarf the dome of the Roman Pantheon nearby, it is smaller than the Pantheon in diameter, but much higher. 

Beneath this wonderful piece of architecture stand four large pillars. As you might expect by now, this base takes the form of a cube, 200 x 200 x 200 Roman feet. Thus, Michelangelo's dome caps a great cube.

The cube beneath Saint Peter's dome encloses the altar, the most sacred area.  It corresponds with the cube Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple. As the most important location within the church, that is why the dome is located there at all: to “crown” the altar.  But where the dome is recognized as a type of heaven, the cube beneath has received little comment.

It might seem that the dome and cube represent two worlds: the dome “heaven” above, and the cube, “earth” below.  Certainly the arching dome is intuitively identified with the arching sky.  But the cube is not quite the “earth”.

To my way of thinking, the cube occurs just as often in sacred and heavenly instances as it does in earthly and mundane ones.  The cube is not the earth in the terrestrial sense but perhaps as the enclosing world—not “earth” but “cosmos” would be a better word for it, in its original Greek sense of the whole world (Gk. kosmos, "order").  Here, the cube is not so much the “earth” as it is everything we know.  Above this and beyond our comprehension sits the great dome.