The God of the Senses and Church Architecture
by Sister Joan L Roccasalvo, C.S.J.
The Catholic Church faces escalating challenges to faith—secularized culture turned into secularism, disbelief, neo-paganism, and a virulent anti-Catholicism. Living as though God does not exist has brought about this spiritual and cultural crisis.1 It is no secret that the Church has lost many of its members. Those, with little grasp of Eucharistic worship, have turned to evangelical churches where their emotions can be freely expressed. Others, seeking higher states of consciousness, have embraced Buddhism or New Age groups. Still others have embraced the beauty of the Orthodox or Episcopal liturgy.2
In March, 2008, the Pontifical Council for Culture devoted its meeting to the challenges of secularization and the need for the evangelization of culture. Of major concern was and is the question of beauty. Msgr. Peter Fleetwood, a consultor for the council, spoke about "the blight of and iconoclastic Puritan streak in North and North West Europe which has inevitably had an effect on all forms of art, including church architecture."3 He has also noted that, during the utilitarian trends of the Soviet Empire, the Eastern Churches, both Orthodox and Catholic, "seem to have successfully stood their ground, with an amazing talent for beautifying the insides of their unutterably drab buildings."4
This article raises three issues basic to sacred art forms, and in particular, to church architecture: (1) the Incarnation as the theological basis of sacred architecture, (2) its role in Catholic faith and (3) Vatican documents on church architecture.
The Incarnation
That God would enter our human condition is a beautiful truth to contemplate! God's Son condescended to become one of us in all things but sin, and chose to be subject to it (Phil. 2:6-9). The pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world, Gaudium et Spes, plainly states that Jesus "worked with human hands, he thought with a human mind, acted by human choice, and loved with a human heart."5
Jesus expressed a faith that was bodily. He used simple materials—bread and wine, fish, oil and water—as symbols of divine truths. His touch healed people, even with spittle and clay. Christianity stands on the Hebrew Scriptures where the biblical perception of God is sensory; it cannot be spiritualized.6 In the eighth century, St. John Damascene taught that the doctrinal basis for venerating sacred images lies in the fact of the Incarnation: "The Creator of matter became matter for us and, through matter, redeemed us?7 Because Jesus is the "image of the invisible God" (Col. 1:15), he could be depicted in his human nature. In the mystery of the Incarnation, the formless becomes a visible form. Gnosticism, of whatever period, contradicts this mystery because it denigrates the physical, which is unthinkable.
What does it mean for the Christian to see in a Christian manner, to hear, touch, taste and smell in a Christian manner? Hans Urs von Balthasar observes:
The distinctive characteristic of Christianity is that here we not only start from the corporeal and the sensory as from some religious material on which we can then perform the necessary abstraction; rather, we abide in the seeing, hearing, touching, the savoring and eating of this flesh and blood, which has borne and taken away the sin of the world.8
If Jesus embraced what is bodily, then Catholics must follow him. Without the body, there is no humanity. The body is essential in every detail of life, for it introduces us to everything and provides us with everything, including our salvation. Who of us has remained unmoved by the Negro spiritual, "Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?" Overwhelmed by its wailing phrases, the soul vibrates, and the entire person wells up in tears.
The Eucharist
When we go to worship, we "care enough to give God our very best."9 If Israel's worship renewed their covenant with Yahweh, so too in Catholic worship. In the sacraments, Catholic and Orthodox Christians are united in the preeminent social act of praising God. This concrete, expressive form sacramentally re-enacts the new covenant—the regenerating deeds of Christ in his Paschal Mystery. The Eucharist places before the Christian the most profound of mysteries: Jesus gives himself as food to the Church, and if we receive worthily, we become what we eat.10 The form of the Eucharist externalizes itself in the physicality of the senses, in taste, hearing and singing, smelling, and touching the Word of Life. The Eucharist is a feast of the senses. When the physical is awakened within the liturgy, the body is united in prayer with head and heart. We worship God in the flesh with "full, conscious and active participation."11 Such an experience is a deeply satisfying encounter with God because God's house is also ours.
Transformation into Christ
Catholic art forms are theology in different modes of expression. They symbolically express, reflect, and mediate the saving mysteries of Jesus. Through sacred art forms, we feel God with the mind; we grasp God with the senses. St. Paul describes this transformation into Christ as a vocation, that of becoming "God's work of art" (Eph. 2:10) and to ascent "from glory to glory" (2 Cor. 4:18).
The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy recalls that the Church does not simply make us feel good, spiritual or transcendent. These ambiguous words are fashionable today. Rather, the Church specifies her role and mission: she is "both human and divine... and so constituted that in her, "the human is directed and subordinated to the divine, [so that] the faithful can express in their lives and manifest to others the mystery of Christ and of the real nature of the true Church.12 The faithful are to be transformed by both the particulars and the whole of the celebration; then, nourished by it, to bring about God's kingdom.
Church building
Museums and ball parks evoke different feelings because their purposes differ. Museums call for hushed voices, sports events, cheers and jeers. A church building differs from both. A visitor, on entering an Orthodox church and a Puritan-style church, for example, will be struck by the differences of their architectural features and the atmosphere they express. One celebrates the senses; the other does not.
A church building expresses beauty, functionality and strength. There the Mystical Body of Christ comes together for ecclesial prayer, deep and meaningful. The cruciform in churches has a twofold symbolism: (a) the head of the body is the sanctuary, the body is the nave, and the arms, the transept; (b) this image of humanity, though the summit of creation, is completed "in the image of Christ outstretched on the wood of the cross in expectation of the resurrection."13
Inculturation
Places and objects intended for use in worship cannot be beautiful unless they are adapted to those who are experiencing the forms because the Church Universal embraces all cultures and their indigenous art forms.14 The Church is a communion of differences15 and "being Catholic means being fully catholic."16
Some years ago, the Morehouse Collegiate Choir performed a Nigerian Christmas carol at the Kennedy Center. As its complex meters vibrated to a dramatic climax, I found myself transfixed by the rhythms and by the conviction of music and singers. This carol, of a culture different from mine, was universal enough to communicate the birth of Jesus so dramatically that it evoked spontaneous tears of joy! The chiaroscuro of African American spirituals or gospel songs can evoke similar responses, for they have emerged from deep shared suffering transformed into sparks of light.
In Japan, the Eucharist is celebrated in its typically spare manner while in the liturgies of the Christian East, the body-senses amply participate in liturgical celebrations.17 Graceful and restrained, both liturgies avoid extremes of sweetness and severity.
In the nineteenth century, the groundwork for liturgical renewal had already been prepared for the Second Vatican Council.18 Sweeping changes have come with and since the council. At the turn of the century, artists influenced by post-Impressionism and Cubism were designing abstract works. While, for centuries, the Church had promoted the arts and artists, the issue of abstract art did not engage her support; the relationship between artists and the Church suffered.19 Then came the two world wars.
Vatican documents
In October 1932, as Pius XI inaugurated a new art gallery at the Vatican, he took the occasion of praising the elevated position of sacred art; he also referred to works of art that caricature and profane the sacred. Without naming names, he called them deformed, indecent and ugly (deformations, sconciamente, brutti) and lacking a glimmer of renewal.20 He asked the question: is this art beautiful?
In 1947, Pius XII published his third encyclical, Mediator Dei, the "Magna Carta" of the liturgical movement. It praised religious art, but it also contained sharp directives about abuses and excesses in church art and architecture. The Pontiff questioned extreme realism, kitsch and excessive symbolism, art that lacked feeling and inspiration:
Modern art should be given free scope in the due and reverent service of the church and the sacred rites, provided that they preserve a correct balance between styles tending neither to extreme realism nor to excessive 'symbolism,' and that the needs of the Christian community are taken into consideration rather than the particular taste or talent of the individual artist. Thus modern art will be able to join its voice to that wonderful choir of praise to which have contributed, in honor of the Catholic faith, the greatest artists throughout the centuries. Nevertheless, in keeping with the duty of Our Office, We cannot seem to help deploring and condemning those works of art, recently introduced by some, which seem to be a distortion and perversion of true art and which at times openly shock Christian taste, modesty, and devotion, and shamefully offend the true religious sense. These must be excluded and banished from our churches....21
Modern art forms in general
Twentieth-century art ushered in minimalism and abstract art. Modern artists tend to reject traditional forms, rules and methods of the past, though some have successfully adapted the classical spirit to modernity.22 Modern art forms use rests (space) as an integral part of their structures. Verbal or musical phrases are disconnected from one another.23 Figurative modern art depicts joyless models whose angular postures suggest various stages of tension, anxiety or ennui. Positive affectivity or emotional content is absent from the work. To ask what a form is or what it means is irrelevant. The totality of the form is its meaning, and viewers may interpret the form as they wish. Contemporary art forms make for stimulating visits to museums, concert halls and other public places.
Minimalism in church art
A church building reduced to its barest essentials—to bare walls, bare sanctuary, and bare ceiling, may draw visitors curious about its mass and proportion. But this edifice is no more a Catholic church than is an auditorium. If the Incarnation is the mystery of God in flesh and blood, how can the Incarnation be expressed in a bare building or an auditorium? We worship like human beings, as the statement below affirms:
Houses of worship have traditionally been decorated so as to provide a festal setting for the assembly and the celebration: hangings, lights, and precious materials have always been used for this purpose. Pictorial decoration in the form of frescoes, mosaics, sculptures, and stained glass windows contribute to the festive atmosphere; in addition, they function as a kind of prolongation of the liturgical signs, with the emphasis especially on the heavenly and eschatological aspect of the liturgy. This is why iconographic themes cannot be left to chance; in the East, they are often predetermined in great detail.24
How do artisans craft their respective materials in order to breathe Christ into their work? Their art forms must have a human, sensate and accessible component with wide appeal, as well as a reserved component appealing to the sublime, the spiritual aspect of the person.25 The human and divine must unite to bring about a sense of heaven on earth.26What if a church building has been constructed like a machine? The domus Dei is not a utility (uti), a thing to be used or controlled. Together with the faithful, it symbolizes fruitfulness (frui)— life and growth, the sacred place where the faithful realize their vocation in Christ.27
The after-effects of war
The widespread destruction of European countries necessitated the building of new churches. Professional artists, regardless of their religious views, were commissioned to design them.28 Gone was nostalgia for the past. The dispiriting effects of war prompted architects to reject continuity of styles from the Romanesque to the Rococo. Efforts were justifiably made to purge sugarcoated devotional objects from churches. New shapes and materials, borrowed from technology, were cast in extreme minimalism. Abstract art replaced sentimental and decorative art. While praise abounded for this architectural vitality, its critics were appalled that church buildings and their interiors signaled a desacralization of churches. Did these architects intend to serve the vision of the Church, or were they intent on serving their own ends?
Pope Paul VI (1963-78) and reform
In 1964, Paul VI addressed artists regarding sacred art and architecture. He acknowledged that the friendship between the Church and artist had to be re-established:
But may We be frank?... We do not know what you are saying, nor do you yourselves many times. The result is the language of Babel, of confusion.... Your language for our world, then, has been docile, yet all but restrained, forced, and unable to find its own free voice.... We felt dissatisfaction with this artistic expression...we then treated you worse. We have walked along crooked paths where art and beauty and, even worse, the worship of God have been badly served.29
In 1965, at the close of the Second Vatican Council, Paul VI entreated artists: "We need beauty to keep us from falling into despair."30
At first, the reforms used simple abstract ornamentation in sanctuaries and stained glass windows. Devotional objects were moved to keep the liturgical action as the main focus of the congregants. In many cases, good intentions to purify excessive realism gave way to excessive purification. This "stripping of the altars," some cried, resembled the cleansing of Catholic churches in previous centuries.31
The Pontifical Council for Culture (2006)
In 2006, the Pontifical Council for Culture published "The Via Pulchritudinis [Way of Beauty], Privileged Pathway for Evangelization and Dialogue."32 Though this council had previously issued many statements, this one was different. It was entirely devoted to the ways of beauty to evangelize and dialogue with others. Critical of sacred art for its banality, superficiality and negligence in liturgical celebrations,33 it mandated "that beauty be returned in church buildings and that churches be aesthetically beautiful in their decorations and in their choice of music."34 The document paraphrased Paul VI's address in 1964 as "the divorce between art and the sacred that has characterized the twentieth century and the ugliness of some churches and their decoration; their desacralization is the consequence of this estrangement, a laceration that needs to be treated in order to be cured."35
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and exaggerated church architecture
Almost fifty years after Pius XII's encyclical, the USCCB published, in 2000, Built of Living Stones. This document restates that the Church does identify with all forms of architecture, and "is ever open to embrace newer forms that have grown organically from her rich heritage of artistic expression; [but], architecture that draws more attention to its own shape, form, texture or color than to the sacred realities it seeks to disclose, is unworthy of the church building."36
Many contemporary churches "have grown organically" from the Church's rich heritage. However, the exteriors of others have been described as extreme, and even ugly. The famous exterior of Notre Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp (1955) has mystified observers. Designed by Le Corbusier, it has been called a study in primitivism, an imitation of a sea shell or sail boat, a nun's veil, Peter's barque or Noah's ark.37 Richard Meier's Millennium Church of the Great Jubilee (2003) is constructed of three sparkling, jagged, white and steel concrete curvilinear panels with glass walls. It is located in the center of a poor village just outside of Rome. The Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland (2008), designed by Santiago Coltrava, is shaped in the form of an imposing technological tent.
The Dominican Monastery of La Tourette near Lyons, also designed by Le Corbusier in 1953, is a massive rectangular box that could be mistaken for a forbidding office structure or a prison. Defective construction closed it; renovations were scheduled in 2005. According to Michael Rose, "its oppressive structures drove out most of the monks."38 The English minimalist John Pawson was commissioned to design the Trappist monastery of Novy Dvur in the Czech Republic. Judging from the available photos, its bare walls, bare sanctuary, and bare ceiling evoke not serenity but madness.39 The Church of the Holy Trinity in Vienna, by Fritz Wotruba, is constructed in huge concrete blocks, arranged in irregular angular patterns. The church has been nicknamed Stanahaufen, "a pile of rocks."40
The cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles (2002) was designed by Jose Raphael Moneo. The warmth of its interior mitigates its outer severity, a study in angularity.
The film Into Great Silence beautifully proclaims and confirms that even the Carthusian Order, the most austere in the Church, greatly values sensate beauty in worship and in daily life.
The classical spirit
Fashions come and go, but the classic look is always in style. Haute couturiers like Hubert de Givenchy and Oleg Cassini designed elegant fashions for elegant women like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, "first lady of fashion." Her signature was the simplicity of elegance—simplex munditiis. Though she played down her attractiveness, we delighted in her beauty. Similarly, every artist cultivates style, and without it, there is no artistic expression. Tourists flock to European Catholic churches because they know that beauty and the Church belong together. Each year, millions of pilgrims, with or without faith, visit the cathedral at Chartres for its overwhelming beauty and spiritual message. We can only imagine the deep satisfaction and joy it offers them, as it unites them in spirit.
The beauty of simplex munditiis has remained the Church's gold standard by which other styles are measured. The artistic spirit, if authentic, is made for fruitfulness (frui) and not for utility (uti). Msgr. Fleetwood has surely touched a raw nerve. Instinct tells us that we want to worship God in beautiful buildings in a beautiful environment that is cared for, as Benedict XVI recently observed.41 We want to worship God with strong and courageous words set to lovely music. Simply put, we want our Eucharist to be celebrated with simplex munditiis. We deserve it, and so do those who have left the Church!
End notes
1 "The Via Puchritudinis, Privileged Pathway to Evangelization and Dialogue" (Rome: Pontifical Council for Culture, 2006).
2 In some churches, half the congregants are former Catholics.
3 Msgr. Peter Fleetwood, "Which pastoral perspective for the evangelization of culture in Europe?" Sixth Session of Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for Culture (Rome: 2008).
4 Ibid.
5 Pastoral Constitution on the Church, Gaudium et Spes, The Documents of Vatican II, general editor Walter M. Abbott, S.J. (New York: Herder and Herder and Association Press, 1966), No. 22.
6 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics Vol. I: Seeing the Form (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1961, 982), 313-4.
7 John Damascene, On the Divine Images: Three Apologies Against Those Who Attack Divine Images, trans. David Anderson (Crestwood, NY: SVP, 1980), No 16, p. 23.
8 Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, 313-4.
9 Paraphrase of the Hallmark advertisement.
10 St. Augustine of Hippo, Homily, 227.
11 Sacrosanctum Concilium, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, No.14.
12 Ibid., No. 2.
13 Maurice Dilasser, The Symbols of the Church, translated by Mary Cabrini Durkin, OSU, Madeleine Beaumont, and Caroline Morson (Collegeville, MN: A Liturgical Press Book, 1999), 121.
14 The Church at Prayer: An Introduction to the Liturgy, new edition, Volume I: Principles of the Liturgy by Irenee Henri Dalmais, et al, translated by Matthew J. O'Connell (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1987), 206.
15 A.E. Shorter, "Inculturation, Theology of," New Catholic Encyclopedia 19:186-87.
16 Joan L. Roccasalvo, The Eastern Catholic Churches (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1992), 8.
17 R.E. McCarron, "Liturgical Inculturation," New Catholic Encyclopedia 19:180.
18 The first occurred in the sixteenth century when the Congregation of Rites imposed a liturgical rigidity regarding the Eucharist and others sacraments. The second took place at the Diocesan Synod of Pistoia (1794), called by Bishop Scipione Ricci to address the problems of Jansenism, especially with regard to pastoral and liturgical matters. The third period fostered a patristic revival. The final period, the monastic, took root in four stages: the first began with the work of Dom Prosper Gueranger, Benedictine scholar and liturgist at Solesmes. The Scholarly Liturgical Movement continued with foundations in research by international scholars. The American Popular Movement began with the era of Dom Virgil Michel. He traveled to the European monasteries. His visit to European monasteries changed him and the face of American Catholic liturgical reform. Between 1934 and1945, the Liturgical Movement in America widened. H. A. Reinhold, O.S.B. wrote a widely-read monograph, entitled Speaking of Liturgical Architecture, second printing (Boston: Daughters of St. Paul, 1961). Among Catholic philosophers, theologians, and artists who supported the Liturgical Movement were Henri Bergson, Charles Peguy, Paul Claude!, George Bernanos, Odo Casel, Pius Parsch, Romano Guardini, Josef Jungmann, Gerard Ellard and Martin Hellriegel.
19 R.J. Verostko, "Abstract Art," New Catholic Encyclopedia 1:47.
20 Pope Pius XI, "Abbiamo poco,"Allocuzione (27 October 1932). Author's translation.
21 Pope Pius XII, Mediator Dei, No. 195.
22 For example, Igor Stravinsky's "The Firebird Suite."
23 In classical music, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton von Webern used twelve-tone serial techniques. In literature, the same principle applies to James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, as it does in the modern dance to Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring."
24 The Church at Prayer, 205.
25 For an extensive history, discussion, numerous photographs and floor plans of church buildings from Early Christianity to the present, see "Church Architecture," New Catholic Encyclopedia 3: 758-844.
26 Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, No 8 and Rev. 21:2; Col. 3:1; Heb. 8:2;
27 "The Via Puchritudinis, Privileged Pathway to Evangelization and Dialogue," II.1.
28 R.J. Verostko, "Assy," New Catholic Encyclopedia, 1:981. See also H. Schnell, "Church Architecture: #10 Contemporary European," New Catholic Encyclopedia, 3: 814-23.
29 "The Friendship between Artists and the Church," The Pope Speaks Vol. 9, No 4 (1964), 392-93.
30 Paul VI, "To Artists," Closing Messages of the Council, 732.
31 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 654.
32 "The Via Puchritudinis."
33 Ibid., HI. C.
34 Ibid., III. C, Pastoral Proposals.
35 Ibid., II. B.
36 Built of Living Stones (Washington, D.C.: USCCB), Nos. 44, 45.
37 Le Corbusier followed his slogan, "a house is a machine for living in... it makes no difference whether the building be sacred or profane." Thomas Gordon Smith, "Church Architecture and 'Full and Active Participation,'" Adoremus Bulletin Online Edition Vol. X No. 2-3 (April-May 2004). See also Mark Irving, "Ronchamp: A space made sacred at last," The Tablet (December 6, 2005). Ronchamp has its own curious history that includes the activities of the Dominican priest, Father Marie-Alain Couturier, O.P. See Flora Samuel, Le Corbusier in Detail (Oxford: Architectural Press, 2007).
38 Michael S. Rose, In Tiers of Glory (Cincinnati, PH: Mesa Folio Edition, 2004), 103-04.
39 Julie V. Iovine, "A Minimalist Chapel Opens in the Czech Republic," New York Times (Sept 2, 2004, F7).
40 See http://www.tourmycountry.com/austria/wotrubakirche-church.htm.
41 Benedict XVI, "Pope Urges Caring for Houses of Worship," November 10, 2008.
Sister Joan L Roccasalvo, C.S.J. teaches in the theology department at Fordham University. She holds two Ph.D.s, one in musicology and the other in liturgical studies. After publishing extensively on musicological topics and on Eastern Christianity, she is now focusing on the topic of beauty, theological aesthetics and the sacred arts as expressions of faith. Her last article in HPR appeared in August-September 2008.
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