Nous qui dans ce mystère représentons les chérubins

The Cherubic Hymn, beginning with the words “Nous qui dans ce mystère représentons les chérubins,” gathers the novel’s religious imagery into a vision of worship that is at once celestial and earthly. Its progression through angelic ranks and its final injunction to lay aside worldly care lend sacred form to a story in which relics vanish from churches and synagogues, only to reappear amid the wreckage of a burning home.

Liturgical Words and Their Setting

The hymn appears as part of a projected baptismal scene. Adèle is about to have a child, and Père Josef is to baptize the baby. In the same imagined ceremony, his wife will arrive in new stockings, while Petro and Felix will wear fine suits made by Monsieur Baumel. The ordinary particulars of clothing and family preparation place the hymn within a communal rite rather than an abstract theological discussion.

Its words begin by identifying the worshippers with the cherubim represented in the mystery, then turn to the singing of the thrice-holy hymn in honor of the life-giving Trinity. The sequence culminates in the appeal to set aside every worldly care. In the narrative, that appeal gives the passage its hinge: the wedding-like warmth of a hoped-for baptism meets a world crowded with danger, loss, physical suffering, and material anxieties.

The Celestial Choir

The vision expands from the six-winged Seraphim, whose burning throats pour out the Lord’s love, to the four-faced Cherubim, with lion mouths and eagle beaks, pouring forth heavenly wisdom. Thrones sing in calm serenity, nearest to God; Dominions carry the principal theme, while Virtues move across the highest notes and Powers answer with a steady hum that draws a sacred circle. Each order is assigned a distinct part in a vast composition.

The image then widens beyond the choir. Archons unfurl the starry sky, move waves and clouds, play with the winds, and cover everything with a snowy softness. Archangels place the planets among the stars like notes on a staff, tracing human destinies. The hymn’s imagined music thus encompasses both cosmic order and human life: the heavens become a score, while each angelic order contributes a different voice to its pattern.

The passage does not stop with remote celestial beings. Ordinary angels, carrying trumpets and golden bowls filled with divine wrath, join the chorus with the rustle of their heavy wings and stiff, large feathers; they are described as comparable in every respect to ordinary mortals. That likeness draws the sacred down toward embodied life. The choir is not only an image of an unreachable heaven but a gathering whose members have weight, voices, and physical presence.

The Hymn and the Missing Treasures

The invocation of a sacred order resonates against the novel’s accumulating reports of thefts from places of worship. An ancient monstrance disappears from a cathedral at Ozeriany despite locked doors, intact windows, and an orderly interior. At Mykulyntsi, two gold patens vanish from a locked metal chest; at Tchortkiv, a silver etrog container disappears from hidden synagogue caches, and the rabbi says it held something else that must remain secret. Brody loses a kiddush cup, a lion-adorned hanukkiah, and an emerald-set yad. The list of absences crosses religious communities and unsettles the distinction between theft, miracle, and omen.

The interpretation of these losses remains contested. Petro suggests that the clergy themselves might be responsible, while Père Josef proposes that the disappearances coincide with performances by Ernest Thorn, the magician and swindler. At another encounter, Monsieur Baumel mourns stolen Torah ornaments and calls the theft a dark sign, insisting that the Torah is a living book and that Yahweh’s garments cannot simply be taken. Such responses make sacred objects more than valuable property: their disappearance threatens communal trust and invites incompatible readings of crime and supernatural agency.

Objects Recovered in the Fire

In the final fire, the stone woman falls through the roof beside the narrator and Adèle. Precious objects spill from the jar she carried on her head, revealing a material collection that answers the earlier reports of unexplained losses. The objects include the sun-rayed monstrance, the gold patens depicting the Nativity at Bethlehem and Christ’s tomb, and a delicate case set with dark-red stones. The silver etrog box, the blackened kiddush cup, the golden-lion hanukkiah, and the emerald-inlaid yad are there as well.

The hymn’s ordered celestial pageant is thereby brought into sharp contact with a chaotic earthly disclosure. What had seemed to vanish into heaven is found among stolen goods, exposed as the stone figure’s hidden cargo while flames lick at the scattered treasures. The recovery gives a concrete answer to the mystery of the sacred objects without erasing the force of the religious imagery that had gathered around their disappearance.

Narrative Significance

The hymn’s appeal to leave worldly cares aside is not a simple escape from the novel’s material world. Its imagined choir includes divine wrath as well as love, and its angels have wings that rustle with physical weight. Likewise, the ritual’s promise of spiritual order unfolds alongside a plot in which sacred vessels have been removed, concealed, and finally exposed in a domestic catastrophe. The language of worship gives the scene grandeur, but the objects scattered across the burning floor keep that grandeur bound to the consequences of human action.

As a recurring frame for the story’s religious imagination, the Cherubic Hymn joins family hope, communal ritual, and the unresolved tension between supernatural appearance and ordinary crime. Its heavenly music promises a world arranged in harmonious parts; the revealed cache shows how that order has been broken and concealed. The hymn’s final call to set aside worldly care consequently sounds not like proof that worldly suffering has passed, but like a prayer spoken directly within its reach.