The Wall Street Journal ran a fine appreciation of Hagia Sophia, A Beautiful Confusion. Excerpts:

The great Byzantine Emperor Justinian — who smote the barbarians, codified the laws and secured the empire’s borders — built the church from 532 to 537. (Actually, he rebuilt on the site of one recently destroyed by riots and fire.) He fully purposed that it stand as a formidable emblem of faith and power, proclaiming Eastern Orthodoxy as the inheritor of the mantle of Rome in the city of Constantine…

Justinian manifestly never intended Hagia Sophia to have a human scale and informally user-friendly feel. The main communicants, after all, were monks, priests, bureaucrats, noblemen and the royal retinue. He did, however, envision it as magnificently monumental, which is precisely how it feels even today in its deracinated, tourist-infested incarnation. In our time, we often see lofty atriums around us in hotels and office buildings, but the size and height of Justinian’s dome was unprecedented, remained unparalleled for a millennium until Michelangelo’s St. Peter’s, and still seems astonishing at some 15 stories high.

One’s first impression upon entering the central nave (the main space) is of Rembrandt-hued cavernous gloom paneled by shades of marble and studded with huge looming pillars, some borrowed from pagan sites. Veined gray marble, pocked greenish marble, pietra dure in walls and floors, pillars whose marble seems to have flowed with time like thick antique glass, surround the onlooker. Airy radiance dissipates the gloom as the eye travels up past the windowed galleries to the gold-painted ceiling, to the great dome raised on semidomes and arches, finally to the sun-trap of the cupola. One contemporary observed that it all seemed “not illuminated by the sun from outside, but by glow generated from within, so great an abundance of light bathes this shrine all about.” Light symbolized holy wisdom and celestial truth and was intentionally curated into the design, one of the Almighty’s own special effects.

Gold mosaic covered the entire dome-face in Justinian’s time, multiplying the shimmer. An earthquake later shook off much of that mosaic. Also, silver sheeting covered numerous surfaces, such as the bishop’s pulpit, while high officials wore gold ceremonial garb — so one imagines how exquisitely light scintillated about during Byzantine services.

The Way of the Fathers, of course, was way out front on this story, which also crops up in my book The Resilient Church: The Glory, the Shame, and the Hope for Tomorrow.