I received an e-mail from someone asking if my belief that traditional architecture is the best way to build Catholic churches was some form of nostalgia for something “not of our time.” The question was really asking if some sort of Romantic desire for the lost paradise of another age was really the motivating force behind my academic and architectural work. This is the usual post-Enlightenment way of looking at the world: the happy days of easy belief in traditional things are long gone, so all the arm’s-length observer of tradition can do is critique those who still believe. Yet, deep down the observer desires to believe, and to cover up his inner discomfort, he tears down as irrelevant that which he fails to comprehend. Often some “more relevant” modern theory is developed as a substitute. Yet somehow, a candle-lit church fascinates him even as he scorns the belief that lies beneath it. This dynamic of the Enlightenment’s lack of faith and the Romantic response has been beautifully discussed in a new book by Roger Scruton called An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture.
This is all a long way of saying that a desire for traditional things in liturgy and its art and architecture can be something other than mere uncritical sentiment. We are all longing for something we don’t have: completion and perfection in Christ. The world has groaned for it ever since the Fall of Adam and Eve. And so we want liturgy and architecture which show us our true home where God is all in all: heaven. God has infused this desire in us at baptism. Since very few of us are transported mystically to heaven on a regular basis, we have to be satisfied with the “signs and symbols of heavenly realities” of the sacred liturgy. Liturgical music is meant to sound like angels singing at the throne of God. Incense gives us the sweet smell of prayer rising to Him. The building looks like heaven and is full of heavenly beings portrayed in statues or icons. The gold, silk, wood, paper and leather of the vessels, vestments, pews, and books gives our sense of touch an experience of something elevated above the earthly fallen world. The Eucharist gives us a taste of heaven, supremely transmitting God’s Divine Life to us by giving us Himself as our food and drink. All of our senses are utilized to receive God’s revelation. This is the high calling of a sacramental system of worship. This is not mindless Romanticism. This is God’s chosen method of salvation, and it’s not to be taken lightly. God meets us in beautiful things which delight our senses, and we should expect nothing less! Heaven will delight us even more, but God gets us prepared for it now in the sacred liturgy when our priests, architects, artists, musicians and liturgy directors make it their mission to help God reveal it.
September 6, 2007 at 8:47 pm
I am going to bookmark this post for the next time someone accuses me of being attached to the past.
Thanks.
September 6, 2007 at 8:52 pm
I’ve always wondered why the need for appropriate art in sacred spaces is so hard to understand. Back in art school, as part of learning the psychological aspects of the craft, I read “The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany”. (One of many good books on the subject.) Hitler (or at least his cronies)understood the effects of art on the minds of the people, so did the Socialist, so does every penny-ante dictator who throws up a statue of himself. If the bad guys get it, why is it so hard for good Christians to understand the effect a properly adorned space can have on the attitude and mindset of worshipers?
September 6, 2007 at 9:42 pm
“Attached to the past.” We are told that evolving forms of art and architecture are at this highest ideal, when they build upon previous forms (as in the transition from Romanesque to Gothic to Baroque and so on), rather than eschew them (as in Walter Groupius and his deconstructivist disciples who dominate much of modern church architecture). But I wonder out loud, to what extent the growing interest in revival of old forms is building upon the past, as opposed to merely copying it.
September 6, 2007 at 10:39 pm
That’s a great question, and an important one. There are, and, I think, and have always been, two sorts of artists who deal with the tradition: Those who are of lesser gifts who ape the past (which is still better than rejecting it) and those who use the past respectfully as the lexicon of our architectural understanding, but still manage to say something new. It would be the difference between photocopying someone else’s poem and using the English language to write a new poem. Both require the stable medium of the English language, but one makes a new or better revelation. Novelty isn’t the key consideration– the Good and the True and the Beautiful are. If someone does that better, or in a way that a contemporary society understands more clearly, art advances. When one decides that “English” is a heritage that we can toss out because it is connected to the past or was used by people to say bad things, then all we get is babble, in language as well as architecture.
The are some in the New Classicism movement whose work is a bit too close to precedent for my taste. But going beyond the precedent requires first mastering it, and the dominance of the Modernist architectural schools means that many people have had to teach themselves. Their time to invent will come. There are others, like Thomas Gordon Smith, for instance, who know the tradition so well that they can be inventive already. I think this is just the beginning of the flowering of the rebirth of traditional architecture.