Lately I have been reading, with profit and enjoyment, Glenn W. Olsen’s masterly The Turn to Transcendence (CUA Press, 2010). With regard to modern styles of church architecture (pp. 292-3), the complaints of its critics, he says,
often resulted in an uncritical rejection of the new, but what the more serious critics of modernism targeted . . . was an architecture which had forgotten its purpose. The goal of much ‘modern’ ecclesiastical architecture seemed to be the reaction of an abstract space so denuded of iconic connections with the past that the church building evokes more a sense of puzzlement than of mystery.
He goes on to cite Sidney Callahan’s lament on “the sterility and lack of mystery and sacramentality of many contemporary (American) churches”:
In a real cathedral or church my spirit expands if there are dim corners where worshippers can pray privately before illuminated icons and banks of vigil lights . . . . Without this transcendent eschatological dimension of worship, fully embodied in art, music, beauty, ritual, and sacred space, Cromwell wins. . . . Habitual exposure to the stripped-down aesthetic of a school cafeteria or supermarket presents peculiar difficulties for the spirit.
Surely Christians interested in truth and beauty would be dismayed at a secularized aesthetic imposed on the places they meet for worship (all understanding that, faut de mieux, Christians can worship anywhere). And one can certainly sympathize with someone who, loving large iconic banquets, feels that the minimizing of Christian symbolism in churches is also the minimalization of their Christianity.
But what would he say of the New England meeting house with its bright, white clapboards, its place at the head of the green with surrounding oaks and maples, so glorious in the autumn, the Lord’s Table with the people and below the high pulpit for the declaration of the Word, with the light from its windows playing over woody sanctuary, reverberating with Psalms? Can one find the ghost of Cromwell here? And if so, is it a maleficent spirit? Have the altars indeed been stripped in accordance with the dictates of secularism or anti-religion–or have the objects of idolatry simply been removed so God can more readily be worshipped in spirit and truth?
We must take great care here not to divide from each other unnecessarily, in unreflective reaction to identify another form of beauty as ugliness in mere accordance with our tastes–without surrendering to the temptation to relinquish the judgment we are always called upon to make on what is good, true and beautiful, and so also necessarily on what is bad, false, and ugly.
Let us agree that beauty and truth may be given in complexity or simplicity, and let us also agree that there is no Christian worship apart from a full table of the symbols of our faith. Then we may go on to ask what is really happening in the worship. Might we also agree that every discrete set of tastes and tendencies has its own potential idolatries and sectarian (that is, heretical) temptations? In other places I have suggested that the “catholic” tendencies, as exemplified in the Callahan quotation above, are those of the jungle, and the “protestant” ones, for which he uses Cromwell as a symbol, those of the desert–one, the tendency to overproliferate and the other, in reaction, to denude.
This does not call for a via media as the Christian standard, but understanding and wisdom–not the study of art and artifice, or lack thereof, in and of themselves–but of what these are doing among the people. While secularity, simple or complex, is un-Christian, neither symbolic copiousness nor parsimony in or of themselves are indications of it.
The judgment that must be made is of a spiritual nature and is a pastoral responsibility. I believe it is possible that, despite frequent failures in our history in this regard (the iconoclastic controversy rages as fiercely as ever it has), it is possible, in the Spirit–given who He is–for credally united pastors to agree, and to say on such matters, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us. . . .”
Truly, it is unfortunate that today we live in a crudely secular world…not a supremely religious one as was the case in the days of the cathedrals. The deeply religious continue to suffer damage to the spirit from the secular world. Years are needed for a new worthy church architecture to develop. Nor did it help that so many factors diminished religiosity. Permanent community became mobile and transitory was simply the beginning. So much more to say. Books can be written about it and probably will.
Steve,
Behold, the once in a year disagreement between me and you! Or once in two years…
I have been reading Regine Pernoud’s marvelous and witty book, Those Terrible Middle Ages! The exclamation point is hers. Therein I read that stained glass windows in French Gothic cathedrals survived the Enlightenment iconoclasm in just four places: Chartres, Mans, Strasbourg, and Notre Dame de Paris. It is astonishing to consider the irreplaceable losses, just to the world of art, let alone the devotions of the people. That iconoclasm fits well, though, with the general reductiveness of the Endarkenment.
Recently I heard a talk by the Baptist scholar Ralph Wood — who is spending the year at Providence College as our Randall Chair of Christian Culture — who drew a connection between Cotton Mather and Emerson, that is, between the Puritan of good clean liturgical spareness, and the man who eventually could not celebrate the Lord’s Supper even as a Unitarian minister. It reminds me painfully of the words of Adams to Jefferson, when they were reconciled again in their old age, about the absurdity of believing that the creator of all this universe was born a Jew and laid in a manger.
I agree with your point about noble simplicity, as would the Cistercians, and Bernard of Clairvaux. But we are embodied souls, and we need our images, and not only words. I live in New England, and it is saddening to see those lovely old churches ….
“I live in New England, and it is saddening to see those lovely old churches ….”
Especially as many of those became Unitarian, and those that did not have ended up in much the same place.
Alas, Bill, it is not only lovely old Protestant churches that have ended up Unitarian, or in much the same place. The churches were built by Calvinists, but as Edmund Morgan somewhere said (and Max Weber would surely agree), their wealthier and worldlier children could not bear their austerities, so abandoned their faith. This phenomenon, I think, has a polar counterpart, and I would keep both poles in view. Personally, I have a “taste” for both, but am suspicious of taste, for it has always misled me.
MR. Hutchens,
What would that polar counterpart be?
I think it is also important to remember, as Dr. Esolen alludes to, that there is a counter-balance to the beauty of the liturgy and the complexity of church government in the ascetics, like St. Anthony the Great, or St. Mary of Egypt.
I am reminded of a moment from the life of St. Mary where she meets a priest carrying the sacrament and both prostrate themselves towards the other, asking for a blessing. The point is, as I understand it, that both are in a position to bless the other. The priest ought to bless this woman, because that is his function as a priest, but he also must prostrate himself before such an incredible ascetic. It is the necessary tension in the church between Councils, Bishops, and Dogma, and personal holiness. To dismiss one in to upset that delicate balance.