The Classical Moment
The Catholic Church boasts two thousand years of sacred buildings, and a tradition characterized by diversity, inventiveness, and beauty. The approach of the third millennium creates an opportune moment to reflect on this vast architectural panorama behind us, and moreover, to reconsider what constitutes appropriate architecture for liturgy and devotion.
Across the Church's long history, three general strains of church architecture stand out: the Classical, the Medieval, and most recently, the Modernist. Classicism encircles the mainstream of architectural expression, shaping later developments. The baptized Classicism of the early Church led to the massive Romanesque, the soaring Gothic, the ordered Renaissance, the complex Baroque and the cerebral Neo-Classical. As the Scholastics were the children of the Church Fathers, medieval architecture can be seen as the daughter of the Classical style, with the Renaissance as her son. Modernism also comes from the Classical family, though as an inversion of or a reaction against Classical principles and tradition.[1] The Modernist inversion reacted against the whole sacred panorama of two millenia of Christianity.
At this moment, the Church exists side by side with an exciting secular revival of Classical architecture. The Church has nurtured, patronized, and formed the theoretical basis of the Classical for almost two millennia. It then comes as no surprise that the Classical revival contains some principles congruent with Roman Catholicism. Among these principles are: a reliance on tradition, a respect for the human figure as a basis of form, and a view towards eternity. Like Christianity, Classicism is concerned with the past, present, and the future. With this revival, Classicism could once again advance the aims of Catholic architecture.
ARCHITECTURE AND TRADITION
Sacred architecture, like the faith it seeks to represent in three-dimensional form, should reflect its own tradition. Each church should be a work of art in which one finds references to and acknowledgment of previous greatness. The Church remembers the Council of Nicea and the Last Supper every time she celebrates the liturgy. Likewise, every time she builds a church she remembers the holy places of her tradition. The church building is an anamnesis, or a participation, in the representation of the holy mountain, of the tent of meeting, of the Temple in Jerusalem, of Golgotha, of the upper room, and of sacred buildings throughout the centuries.
Classicism too continuously looks to its past tradition to verify, correct or challenge contemporary notions. As a mainstream tradition, it allows great latitude for expressive variety. Lately, however, contemporary notions have not been measured according to the yardstick of tradition. For many architects trained during the last fifty years, "tradition" is at best a foreign concept and at worst even anathema. There are some who argue that Modernism is our tradition today (and therefore Classicism is the avant-garde). It is an interesting argument. However, the Church takes a longer view of things. Tradition is a deeper concept, connecting us back to the finest architecture of our history.[2]
Tradition... cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense .... the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. ...No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone: you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.[3]
This "historical sense" requires the architect to immerse himself in great architecture. He studies buildings the way the theologian studies texts: through careful analysis and interpretation. Like the disciple, the Classicist looks to treatises and paradigms that draw him into the architectural tradition and shed light on the present. Today the architect can cut his teeth on a wealth of information on great works of the past. He himself must be willing to investigate the deep and broad architectural stream, and relearn tradition before seeking to innovate. Poetry comes only after competence in prose. And architectural innovation comes only after competence in the language of architecture.
Classical architecture is a large extended family of buildings that bear a visual resemblance to one another. The classical architect, then, has it "in his blood" to design within a proven tradition, and he has excellent advisors. The great works of the past are his forbears and advisors. He bounces new ideas off these masterpieces and tries to learn from them how they solved similar problems. When he designs, it is not just for himself or for today; he designs for and in conversation with the Classical architects who have gone before him. He designs for the future, aware that others will come and continue the conversation.
Architectural "imitation" is a bit like religious discipleship. In joining a religious order within the Church, or a lay apostolate, one lives according to the rule and the spirituality of the founder and other exemplars, within the context of the whole faith. Similarly the architect, while embracing Classicism, may imitate a particular rule or style: Early Christian, Spanish Colonial or Italian Renaissance. He may even choose to model his work on the oeuvre of a great master, such as Palladio or Schinkel. Even in doing so he must be conscious of the broad stream of Classicism, just as a Franciscan friar must be conscious of his Catholicism. For instance in the 15th century, Leon Battista Alberti based the facade of St. Maria Novella in Florence on the 12th century church, St. Miniato al Monte. At the church of St. Andrea in Mantua, Albert's interest in the Etruscan temple type and the triumphal arch inspired him to invent the composite church type. A century later, Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola's design for the Gesu in Rome paid homage to Alberti, and indirectly to St. Miniato. In the succeeding centuries, some of the greatest architects such as Maderno, Borromini, Mansart, and Wren, designed churches imitating Vignola (and therefore Alberti).
In Classical architecture, tradition is always balanced by innovation. A living tradition always develops and grows. Michelangelo, considered one of the most inventive architects of all time, chose to remember Brunelleschi's Old Sacristy when he designed the Medici Chapel. His design reflects the composition, materials and proportions of the Old Sacristy while at the same time rivaling it through a rigorous application of the Corinthian elements. The past becomes a role model and a standard for contemporary work to rival. Upon entering the newly built and glorious church of Hagia Sophia the emperor Justinian is reputed to have cried out, "Solomon I have vanquished thee!" In a similar way, Michelangelo looked to Bramante as the standard, the basis for his plan of St. Peter's, but he also reconfigured the plan so as to improve it spatially, compositionally, and structurally. Most great buildings mix innovation and tradition. Baldassare Longhena's S. Maria della Salute and Benjamin Latrobe's Baltimore Cathedral both drew inspiration from the Pantheon in Rome. Yet in their siting, overall form, proportions and details they are innovations on and transformations of the Pantheon. The Tempietto, built on the site of St. Peter's martyrdom in Rome, was the first Doric building in the Renaissance, as well as a reinterpretation of the pagan temple of Vesta. Here again are innovation and tradition. Brilliant works of innovation become elegant conventions for later architects: Michelangelo's invention of the "giant order" on the exterior of St. Peter's became the standard solution for the exteriors of churches across Europe and the New World.
ARCHITECTURE AND THE FIGURE
Catholicism is an Incarnational religion and in its architecture there should be an appreciation of the human body. As people created in His image, aware of Christ's willingness to clothe Himself in flesh and blood, we recognize the goodness of the body. Catholicism is a religion of the senses: a religion of good food, passionate opera, nursing Madonnas, dancing angels and mystery plays. And the Church's accomplishments in the arts and architecture are unsurpassed. Catholicism is a sacramental religion utilizing human touch and the material elements of ashes, water, oil, bread, and wine. The church building has been one of Catholicism's most powerful "sacramentals," as the place set apart by the Church for receiving spiritual grace. Historically, the church building has employed a figurative architecture, an ensoulment in stone which represents spiritual truths through material form.
Unfortunately the past fifty years have witnessed an unparalleled aversion to the figure and a rejection of the sensual, which has adversely affected the Church's painting, sculpture, music and architecture. Like the iconoclasts of Byzantium and the Protestant Reformation, modern iconoclasts have destroyed statuary, altarpieces, tabernacles, and altars, but they have also bested their iconoclastic forbears. Not content to limit images of saints and call for noble simplicity in the liturgy, Modernism has recognized the existence of the figure latent in architecture itself and sought to expunge it as well.
The traditional church building is anthropomorphic: modeled on Christ's body in its general form, embodying the saints and martyrs in its elements, and expressing the Church and its beliefs through iconography. The analogy of the body in the church is an accessible and profound way to understand the meaning of the Universal Church. The analogy grows out of the early Christian tradition of building churches over the graves of saints or on holy ground where a saint lived or was martyred. The Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and St. Peter's in Rome were built over tombs. The physical presence of Christ or the saint makes the site holy and reminds us that the Church is built on its saints, "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church."[4] Cardinal Newman writes, "the Temples of God are withal the monuments of His Saints, and we call them by their names while we consecrate them to His glory."[5] Preeminent among the saints is the Blessed Virgin Mary after whom many churches have been named. Early tradition ascribed the name Synogoga to Mary before the Annunciation. As Mother of God she becomes venerated as Ecclesia, since it was she who carried the body of Christ in her womb. And just as Jesus became incarnated through Mary, so the worshipper meets Christ in the Ecclesia, often a church dedicated to Mary.
St. Paul uses the analogies of the body and of the building to describe the Church. "So we though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another."[6] "For no other foundation can any one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ."[7] "Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone."[8] Thus it is natural for Christians to equate the building where they assemble with the mystical body of Christ, Just as the crucifix allows us to see the manner of the Savior's death, the cruciform church plan holds within it, and presents vividly to us, the bodily sacrifice of Christ in the Mass. Medieval and Renaissance drawings articulate beautifully the figure of Christ inscribed within the plan of a church. "The arrangement of a material church resembleth that of the human body: the chancel, or place where the altar is, representeth the head: the transepts, the hands and arms, and the remainder — towards the west — the rest of the body. The sacrifice of the altar denoteth the vows of the heart."[9] The church building, therefore expresses the body of Christ as both sacrifice and the people of God. In his description of St. Peter's piazza, Bernini writes that "since the Church of St. Peter's is the mother of nearly all the others it had to have colonnades, which would show it as if stretching out its arms maternally to receive Catholics, so as to confirm them in their faith, heretics, to reunite them to the Church, and infidels, to enlighten them in the true faith."[10]
Classicism too is anthropomorphic in its basis. The first architectural treatise, De Architectura, written in 30 B.C. by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, portrays the human body as the measure and the module for architecture.[11] From the description of the "body" of the temple to the descriptions of the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders based on human proportions, Classical theorists have always seen the human figure as the inspiration for and the analogy with architecture. Leonardo's famous drawing of the Vitruvian man expresses the belief that the human body is perfect in proportion and geometry. Michelangelo said an architect must first be able to master the human form before designing buildings, and his own sketches of anthropomorphic architecture show moldings based on the measurements and profiles of the human face. Even individual Classical elements echo the human form.
Individual elements are figural in sacred architecture, implicitly or explicitly. Perhaps the most poetic description of the church building comes from Bishop Durandus of Mende who, following St. Paul, develops the analogy between the material and the spiritual Church. Durandus writes that a church building is built of the living stones of the faithful, with Christ as the door, bishops and doctors as the piers of the nave and preachers as the protecting beams of the roof.[12] These ideas are made clear in numerous churches through use of carved column capitals, sculpture, inscriptions and symbolic decoration. In the chapel of the Holy Shroud in Turin, Guarino Guarini explicitly incarnated the body architecturally, by transforming the Corinthian pilaster into an image of the passion and death of Christ, complete with a crown of thorns, nails and blood.
Figurative painting and sculpture are central tools for the aims of Classical architecture. The Hebrew and Christian saints are witnesses worshipping with us, and the church's iconography makes us aware of their presence. The traditions of placing images of the four evangelists at the crossing, or sculptures of the saints on the facade or retable of the material church, remind us of the true construction of the spiritual Church. Paintings and statues of saints remind us we are part of the mystical body of Christ. The church as body is a beautiful way to conceptualize the building in which people are baptized into Christ's body, partake of His body and blood, become one body with another, and finally have their body delivered by the Church into its eternal home.
ARCHITECTURE AND THE ETERNAL
The Roman Catholic Church is timeless, enduring and permanent. So the church building is a prolepsis, or anticipation of the future; a three-dimensional introduction into the heavenly kingdom. It promises us future glory, and is a place which should make us desire to "dwell in the house of the Lord forever."13 In expressing the inexpressible, the mysterious, the beatific vision, the church is a place of eternity amidst the suffering and temporality of life. In liturgy and private devotion we partake of the heavenly liturgy in which we will worship eternally, the heavenly banquet in which we shall feast forever. Surrounded pictorially by the heavenly banquet, with saints and angels painted on the ceiling, in the decoration of the walls, or as icons in the side chapels we come in contact with the eternal. The building is an act of eternal worship, which participates in the worship of heaven. As a prolepsis of eternity it must be timeless, transcendent, beautiful and durable.
The Christian life is a journey towards the heavenly home. Our architecture is eschatological; it looks forward to the new heaven and the new earth. An architecture of journey should transport us out of ourselves and into God's presence. The church can articulate this journey beginning with the siting and design of the exterior, which should call out to us. The facade is a heavenly ladder, or a gate of heaven through which we must pass. The colonnades of the nave line our procession towards the eternal. The dome of the crossing, the generous apse and the reredos draw us up into heaven and are decorated as such. The triumphal arch separating the sanctuary from the nave is a threshold towards the eternal. Our journey towards Christ is like our procession to the altar, the place where heaven breaks into our world. From the sanctuary we receive eternity in the Eucharist and in his word.
The church is eschatological. A place designed for the future, timeless and universal rather than stylish. A car assembly line must be retooled to stay competitive, but church architecture must speak to its time and beyond its time. It should seek to be undatable, the same yesterday, today and forever. Great churches imitate the "ideal church" which is, much like Christ's sacrifice, outside of physical time and space. A Catholic architecture is universal. Every church in every culture has the same purpose, and so can be experienced universally. Typologies such as the basilica or the centralized church go beyond specificities of time, culture and style. The interior of the 5th century St. Sabina in Rome is the same type as St. Lorenzo in Florence, built one thousand years later, and as St. Mary of the Lake in Chicago, built in the 20th century. Universal elements such as columns, arched windows, and cornices are understood as part of a universal architecture that is recognizable to all nationalities, cultures and times. The missions of the Southwest, the Bavarian Rococo church, the early Christian baptistry and the Byzantine monastery are understood by all as sacred places and make all people feel at home.
To manifest transcendence, the church building must make us remark on the awe and wonder of God. The rule understood by all cultures, epochs and styles is that a sacred temple should be vertical in form, extending heavenward. The elements of the building, whether windows, doors, paintings or columns, should reinforce this vertical aspiration. They should be monumental elements, larger in scale than those used in other buildings. This is not so much to make us feel small as to make us feel the grandeur of God's house. The vertical upward thrust of the church places great emphasis, then, on the ceiling, full of angels and saints, and re-presents the heavens by its shape, using domes, vaulting, or coffering. In the Byzantine and the Baroque styles, the glory of transcendence is achieved by the de-materialization of walls and ceilings in mosaics, painting, and iconography. An important aspect of transcendence is the sense of mystery created through natural light. Light from the clearstory windows is literally light from above, the cupola full of light is the dome of heaven. Mysterious light can come from an unseen source, to the side or above, to illuminate the altar or tabernacle.
All cultures have sought to capture beauty in their art and architecture. While the concept of beauty is debased today, the Church continues to uphold the beauty of God's house as the ideal. Beautiful things go beyond mere fashion or superficial interest. Architectural beauty should reflect Cod's creation, particularly man created in his image. Classical theory defines beauty as the correspondence of the parts with the whole, from which nothing can be added or taken away.
Catholicism and Classicism are discriminating, with high standards of excellence. These standards are the perfection of the eternal. The architect is called to be perfect as his heavenly Father is perfect.[14] Excellence is not a matter of being merely better than another, rather it is striving to reach the eternal standards. Excellence demands finding brilliant architects, using worthy materials and the highest possible craftsmanship. For a building to be excellent, its design must be studied over and over again. A mediocre design, poor construction or shoddy materials each would be a poor witness to the place of the eternal in our lives. In this sense it is not enough for a building to "look like" a church; it must be in its essence a church. The mediocre church building is a compromise, reflecting a superficial understanding of tradition, and no understanding of the eternal standards. If sacred architecture is a prolepsis of the eternal, we architects can not afford to be lukewarm.
The church, a building for the eternal, seeks durability, so as to be used by future generations. It is an investment in the faith of our children and so should be built with great care. The eternal must be expressed in an architecture of permanence rather than transience. In most countries permanence is ensured by masonry construction with good foundations, thick walls and generous spaces. The church building is an offering to the eternal, so we employ the best materials and the finest construction techniques. The House of God should, always and everywhere, be fashioned in a way superior to the best public buildings or houses. It should be a model building for the neighborhood or the town, and as it endures it will continually speak of eternity and transcendence. "[T]hey remain, those holy places, where they were: for the Church abides for evermore, and her Temples, in their deep foundations, and their arching heights, are her image and manifestation."[15]
A NEW RENAISSANCE
The arts must die and be born anew of water and the spirit. A revitalized architecture presupposes a prior renewal of our sense of the sacred and appreciation of the eternal. In turn, the eternal we seek is furthered by an architecture which is beautiful, transcendent and durable.
Great moments of religious revival have often been accompanied by the construction of churches. Our spiritual exemplars were often also great builders. The Franciscans, Benedictines, and Dominicans gave cities and neighborhoods large, spacious and beautifully decorated churches and buildings, for the spiritual good of the community. Abbot Suger and St. Bernard, though seen as having opposing views on architecture, were both great patrons and builders. The Society of Jesus built hundreds of churches, schools, and hostels, just within the first century of their founding. And the Oratorians founded by St. Philip Neri built oratories specifically for sacred music and eloquent preaching. Religious revival goes hand in hand with architectural revival.
In his The History of Western Architecture, David Watkin argues that the history of architecture in general has been a series of revivals.[16] Renaissances of architecture occurred in ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Constantinian Rome, Carolingian Germany and Ravenna, 12th century France, 13th century Tuscany, 15th century Italy, 17th century Germany, 18th century Russia, 19th century Europe, and 20th century America. Each renaissance sought to rediscover ancient truths for modern life. Now, at the turn of the third millennium, there is a new renaissance of Classical architecture and the traditional city. Buildings and towns are being built in accordance with humanistic principles and inspired by previous epochs. If the Church can see herself reflected in this movement, she will patronize it as she has in the past. She must see that revival is the story of architecture, and that each time, a revival brings with it new strength and innovation.
In 1963, Sacrosanctum Concilium called for a "general restoration of the liturgy."[17] In 1997, we are in need of a general restoration of liturgical architecture.
But is not the very idea of "restoration" a regression to the past? Not necessarily. Burckhardt reflecting on restorations, also religious restorations, in history: "Their greatness lies in the effort they evoke in the power to realize a cherished ideal, which is not the actual past, but its image transfigured by memory. The result is necessarily somewhat strange, since it is established in a changed world" .... It is new. It may be the transfigured past that is our future. ...Because each moment of history is genuinely new, we do not simply replicate the past. ...There is no "future" to guide our present decisions. There are only possible futures that we can strive to advance or resist. More precisely, there is no "future" until it happens, and then it is fleetingly the present on the way to becoming the past.[18]
The future of sacred architecture depends on a rediscovery of both architecture and the sacred. And while there is a great hunger today for both, and legitimate movements seeking these goals, they are pursuing them at this time separately. It is the Church alone who, in seizing the moment, can reunite architecture and the transcendent. A new springtime in the Church's life will produce a new church architecture of great vitality and spirituality. The patronage of an architecture which is traditional, figural, and eternal can enable us to have a "sacred architecture" once again. This is the Church's classical moment.
Duncan G. Stroik is a practicing architect and associate professor of architecture at the University of Notre Dame.
ENDNOTES
1 See D. Watkin, Morality and Architecture, Clarendon, 1977. A. Colquhoun, Modernity and the Classical Tradition, MIT, 1989.
2 "The very essence of a style, properly so called, is that it should be practiced for ages and applied to all purposes: and that so long as any given style is in practice, all that is left for individual imagination to accomplish must be within the scope of that style, and not in the invention of a new one." John Ruskin, Lecture to Architects, 1857.
3 T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Sacred Wood, Methuen & Co., London, 1920, p. 49.
4 Matt. 16:18.
5 John Cardinal Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Ignatius, 1987, Sermon 19.
6 Rom. 12:5, also I Cor. 12:12.
7 I Cor. 3:11.
8 Eph. 2:20. see also Acts 4:11, I Pet. 2:7.
9 William Durandus, Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, 1287, 1:14. 10 Codice Chigiana H. II, 22.
11 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. by Morris Hicky Morgan, Dover.
12 William Durandus, Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, 1287, 1:9, 26-31. See also Gal. 2:9.
13 Psalm 23:6.
14 Matthew 5:48.
15 John Cardinal Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Ignatius, 1987, Sermon 19.
16 David Watkin, The History of Western Architecture, Thames and Hudson, 1986.
17 Sacrosanctum Concilium, III.21, 1963. 18 Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square, Eerdmans, 1984, pp. 192-3.
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