THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE MYSTICAL BODY

 THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE MYSTICAL BODY

HOW TO BUILD CHURCHES AFTER THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL

 

Steven J. Schloeder

 

  THE PROBLEM OF A CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS ARCHITECTURE

The general theme of this conference is contemporary religious archi- tecture. And the specific theme asks us to consider contemporary sacred architecture within some dialectical framework between concept and iden- tity. For me, the key term here is contemporary: of our time. This seems to presuppose a particular historical consciousness: that we are aware, or at least we believe, that our particular place in history should demand, or elic- it, a way of thinking about sacred architecture that is respectful of our con- temporary condition. It also suggests that our contemporary response might be different from past ages.

But every age is contemporary. And all we can do is contemporary architecture. We simply cannot think about architecture except as contem- poraries of our age. We can no longer cut stone into sculpture with the eye and the mind of a mediaeval mason. Nor are we any longer engaged in the Counter-Reformation polemics which gave form to the glorious Baroque churches. We are no longer involved in the Christological debates that informed the architectonics of the churches in the age of Justinian. No Gothic Revival building is not understood as a modern age interpretation of a true medieval building. No Renaissance classicism can ever be con- fused for an ancient Greek or Roman temple, just as none of these con- temporary neo Classical churches could ever be confused for a work of Renaissance genius like Palladio, Bramante or Alberti. So I think the fas- cination with the notion of contemporary is problematic.

Furthermore, the term itself presents theological and ecclesiological difficulties in that it absolutises this time we are living in as contemporary. Absolute from ab-solvere is to cut off from, and does not allow for a con- tinuity in tradition. It does not allow for a universality to the human condi- tion that transcends time and place. It does not permit a Church that is fully operational and fully equipped in every age, and in every culture, to respond to the demands of whatever age and culture she finds herself. As St. Augustine reminds us, «The Church of today, of the present, is the Kingdom of Christ and the Kingdom of Heaven»1. Yet who here can imag- ine the Bishop of Hippo hosting a conference in the year 400 on Contemporary Religious Architecture?

Yet this question of contemporary sacred architecture seems to be the core dialectic that architects and liturgists have been enmeshed in for the past hundred years or so. I would point out that we do need to respect the particularities of our age, and it is helpful to examine to what degree they should influence our decision making process, and what values are being embedded in our approach to sacred architecture. But to what degree it should influence our approach to sacred architecture is much more limited.

So let us return to this question of the dialectic between contemporary and sacred. This dialectic expresses a whole series of stresses and strains in our experience of the modern world, our approach to architecture, and in our thinking about religion itself before we get to the question of con- temporary religious architecture.

Architecturally we can see the tension between an architectural vocabu- lary of forms that are derivative and expressive of the natural world and an architectural vocabulary that is based on a whole other set of determinants: the efficiencies of concrete, steel, sheet glass, plastics, mechanical ventila- tion and artificial lighting. This is a tension between an approach to build- ings derivative of preindustrial materials of load bearing stone and hand crafted wood and one that is derived from and expressive of the very real need for mass production necessary for provisioning for the massive urban populations with food, water, housing, public services and consumer goods.

In terms of specifically religious architecture, it is really a tension between an approach to sacred architecture that considers the church build- ing as an emblem and expression of a transcendental supernatural reality and an approach that considers the church building as a functional accom- modation for an immanent local gathering of people. In previous ages the question of sacred architecture was enmeshed in a matrix of ideas about revealed forms of the Kingdom of God and divine proportion and the dig- nity of the human form and the majesty of worship. Today we seem uncomfortable with and unsure about making grandiose and declarative statements about God, beauty, the human person or the objective sacra- mental reality of the Christian faith.

This is not so much to criticise our contemporary world—we are where we are—but rather to point out what the implications of this tension are. It is with such an overarching view that I want to explore this theme of con- cept and identity as relates to contemporary sacred architecture, and to give some context for understanding this tension.

 

PARADIGM SHIFTS IN THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY

The context of this understanding is the previous century that witnessed radical new ways of thinking about, approaching and designing sacred architecture. Even a casual glance at virtually any Catholic church build- ing erected before the First World War and the vast majority of churches built after the Second World War will demonstrate this.

The typical rhetoric of the mid century liturgical authors was that we ought to build churches for modern man or constructed to serve men of our age. Styles and forms from previous ages were declared as defunct, or no longer vital. One even finds the condemnation of wanting a church that looks like a church as being nostalgic: an unhealthy yearning for a past golden age that really never was2.

Rather, it was felt that the Church must deal with the reality of con- temporary life and embrace a contemporary architecture and reformulate the liturgy to be appreciable to the contemporary consciousness. In some manner this was seen as actually medicinal for the neuroses of the modern age: Romano Guardini and Dietrich von Hildebrand both believed (and

think correctly) that submission to the liturgy was curative for the soul, although Guardini was more willing to rework the liturgy to meet the human person on the contemporary grounds than was von Hildebrand. But the leading architects and liturgical theorists of the past century seem to have approached this question of contemporary life on a rather materialis- tic and fashionable level; and tried to find reasons to build churches that would be well received by their secular colleagues, rather than first and foremost with regard for the people who actually would have to use these buildings. There is, in my estimation, a whole lot of half baked thinking among liturgists and architects of the past century that passed for mean- ingful architectural theory, without ever touching the core of what it means to build a church.

For instance, Edward Mills, in The Modern Church wrote:

 

If we do not build churches in keeping with the spirit of the age we shall be admitting that religion no longer possesses the same vitality as our secular buildings3.

His book concerns topics such as efficient planning, technology, cost abatement, and environmental considerations. It is worth mentioning that only a few years before this book, Mills had written The Modern Factory, with the same rationalistic concerns for efficient planning, technology, cost abatement, and environmental considerations. Similarly, writing from the Episcopalian perspective, but in words that would have found resonance in the minds of many of his Catholic contemporaries, Jonathan Sherman suggested:

 

To say that there is some relation between the appearance of a church, a fac- tory, a theatre, or an exhibit hall is to proclaim its contemporaneousness and in no sense to condemn it4.

There is a lot going on here in terms of culture and theology. I read a sense of unease among many liturgical and architectural writers with even promoting the idea of religion: after all, we are children of Galileo and Einstein, moderns who more easily hold a materialistic view of the world than a spiritual one. How credible can it be to the secular world or the academy to state that we are designing buildings intended for the worship of the Trinity, or to create an apt and even holy place for the offering of the Eucharistic sacrifice of the Son of God for the salvation of the world, or to model our designs so as to sacramentally participate in the great and revealed archetypes of the Body of Christ, the Temple of the Holy Spirit, and the Heavenly Jerusalem?

  

That all sounds so antiquated, so pre modern, so medieval, so benight- ed. So there is a sort of legerdemain to give credence to the project of mod- ern church buildings, it is thus that these passages proclaim the need for contemporary architecture not only to validate church buildings but to val- idate the very project of building a church.

But this goes a level deeper. It was not sufficient merely to change the external style of the church, but the internal arrangement as well. One of the chief characteristics that defines the modern approach to architecture is the notion that the building is an expression of the function. The plan is the generator of the form as Le Corbusier proclaimed. Form follows function as Mies van der Rohe would phrase it. The problem of church architecture became the problem of radical functional analysis according to Hammond.

In his highly influential book Liturgy and Architecture, Peter Hammond noted that of the two hundred and fifty or so post-war Anglican churches built in England, virtually all of them were built in revivalist styles— Gothic,  Georgian,  Byzantine  or  Romanesque—and  further  opined that

«these churches have no message for the contemporary world»5. By way of contrast, he wrote enviously of the new French churches:

 

These plans are of great variety. There are circular and octagonal churches with central altars, others in the form of a square, with the seats for the con- gregation on three sides of a free standing altar and those for the clergy placed against the east wall, as in the early basilicas. There are other plans founded on the ellipse, the hexagon and the trapezoid6 (Fig. 1.1).

While Hammond seemed to want anything other than a traditional cru- ciform basilica, he purportedly wanted to get beyond mere stylistic mod- ernism. He claimed to be disinterested in whether a church was in a con- temporary or traditional style, but rather that it was programmatically informed by the latest insights of «biblical theology and patristic and litur- gical scholarship»7. In short, he called for the same approach to churches as any other contemporary building:

 

that good churches—no less than good schools or good hospitals—can be designed only through a radically functional approach8.

Hammond’s view was concisely summarised in his oft-quoted statement,

 

the task of the modern architect is not to design a building that looks like a church. It is to create a building that works as a place for liturgy. The first and essential requirement is radical functional analysis9.

Now in itself, this is hardly a problem. One can argue quite cogently that the entire history of Christian building has been faithful to the notion that the building is an expression of the liturgical requirements of the build- ing program. This per se does not require any change in style or arrange- ment, and is not beholden to any past style or historical contingency. The builders of Hagia Sophia, Chartres and San Ivo would have had no prob- lem agreeing with the notion that the church should express its function.

The question centres on how one defines the function: whether an immanent and material function, or whether a spiritual and transcendental function. How does the body move through space, or how does the soul move toward God? Of course, for the Catholic thinker these are never in contradiction: the Incarnation itself resolves the tension between the pure- ly spiritual and the purely material.

But we see something else going on in the mid century writers. One cannot simply discard two millennia of sacred architectural forms and styles without having a new paradigm to replace it, and one cannot have a valid new paradigm without have grounds for discarding the old paradigm. The paradigm itself needed to change. All the better if the new paradigm was promoted as the authentic paradigm: a recovery or what was lost, a return to an original purity that was polluted by various accretions and deviations and missteps and perversions from the true purpose of Christian community, liturgy and building as intended by the Church’s founder and his successors.

 

THE MYTH OF THE DOMUS ECCLESIAE

Within this rhetoric of building churches for our age and in the willing- ness to discard the past is an embedded mythos. By this accounting, only around the time of the Edict of Milan, when Constantine first legalised Christianity and soon actively sponsored building projects for the Church, did the Church begin to formalise her liturgy, her architecture, and the trap- pings of her hierarchy with elements take from the Imperial court10. Prior to this Pax Constantiniana, the Church was largely a domestic enterprise, and the model of domestic architecture—the domus ecclesiae (literally house of the church)—was the simple, humble, and hospitable residential form in which early Christians gathered to meet the Lord and meet one another in the Lord for fellowship, meals, and teaching. Such a model is often implic- itly valued as a model for contemporary worship and self understanding11. The early house church—seen as pure, simple, unsullied by later liturgical and architectural accretions without the trappings of hierarchy and formali- ty—was to be model for liturgical reform.

As Richard Vosko surmises,

 

the earliest understanding of a Christian church building implies that it is a meeting house: a place of camaraderie, education and worship. In fact, the earliest Christian tradition clearly held that the Church does not build tem- ples to honor God. That is what the civic religions did12.

This notion was put most forcefully by Sovik in writing:

 

It is conventionally supposed that the reasons that Christians of the first three centuries built almost no houses of worship were that they were too few, or too poor, or too much persecuted. None of these is true. The real reason that they didn’t build was that they didn’t believe in ecclesiastical building13.

The notion of simple domestic house converted for Christian worship was given impetus with the discovery of the church at Dura Europos in the 1930s (Fig. 1.4). This discovery was of profound importance given that it was the only known identifiable and dateable pre-Constantinian church: which was obviously a residence converted to the needs of a small Christian community. It was also, significantly, a rather late dated church—about 232 AD—and quite in keeping with the expectations from all the various scriptural references to the various domestic settings in which the Church first gathered14. From then on, especially in the late 50s and the 60s, the thesis of the domus ecclesia as the architectural model for pre Constantinian Christian architecture became dominant in liturgical cir- cles. The common vision for new parishes built in the wake of Second Vatican Council was toward simpler, more domestically scaled buildings in emulation of the domus ecclesia in which Christians supposedly gathered before the Imperial approbation of Christianity in the 4th century.

The only problem is that this model of a domestic residential architec- ture for a small gathering of early Christians in communities celebrating a simple agape meal, as romantic as it sounds, is of dubious merit.

 

Let us first be clear that the term domus ecclesiae—popular among liturgists to emphasis the communal nature of the assembly—is not a par- ticularly apt term. More to the point, it is simply anachronistic. The phrase domus ecclesia is not found in Scripture. No first, second or third century author uses the term to describe the church building. The phrase domus ecclesiae cannot be found to describe any church building before the Peace of Constantine (313 AD), and afterward seems more to imply a building owned by the Christians rather than any sort of formal architectural arrangement: let alone an informal arrangement as the liturgists would have us believe15.

While there were many terms in the early Church to identify the church building, domus Dei seems to be of particular importance. Throughout the New Testament, the assembly of Christians is called domus Dei: the house of God. Paul’s passage in 1 Tim 3:15 could not be clearer: «in domo Dei ... que est ecclesia Dei vivi» (the house of God, which is the church of the liv- ing God). Likewise, domus Dei or its derivative domestici Dei (household of God) is found in Eph 2:19, Heb 10:21 and 1 Pt 4:17. Following scripture, Tertullian used domus Dei in a way that can only mean a church building. The Greek equivalent, oikos tou theou is found in Hippolytus, and the sim- ilar oikos kyriakon (house of the Lord) in Clement of Alexandria. Eusebius also calls the church an earthly house to Christ and commonly a house of prayer (oikos). But even the term oikos or domus does not suggest any res- idential or domestic association. Oikos is generally a house, but it can also serve to describe a temple (as in a house of the Gods). Similarly, domus could also refer to the grandest of buildings, such as the Emperor’s palace— domus divina—such as Nero’s ostentatious Domus Aurea. These are hardly small scale and intimate associations. I propose that long before the time of Constantine, the Church had already long ago moved out of the residential environments we read of in the book of Acts and the letters of Paul.

 

CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE BEFORE CONSTANTINE

Rather than a domestic model, we have strong reasons to think that even from its earliest days, the Church was looking to expand her influence politically, socially, and culturally within the Roman Empire. What organ- isation does not look to grow and to advance its political and social status? What organisation does not look to promote itself, to build significant buildings, and to establish its presence in the urban fabric? Why should the Church not have been doing this from its earliest days?

The problem is that we know very little about pre Constantinian litur- gy or Christian architecture. It is important to realise that at the beginning of the 3rd century there were perhaps only a couple of hundred thousand Christians in all of the Roman Empire (perhaps under 1-2% of the popula- tion of over 60 million)16. Any trace left by these Christians is remarkable at all and not much can be extrapolated from archaeological or palaeo- graphic evidence. Furthermore, several widespread Imperial persecutions called for, and presumably did, demolishing any sort of Christian meeting place, which also destroyed scriptures and other writings that might have given us insight into the lives and intentions of the early Christians. So the vast majority of evidence that we have regarding the liturgical and archi- tectural culture of the early Christians is only from the beginning of the 4th century, in the age of Constantine.

Yet from the scant literary evidence we do have, it is generally accept- ed that even in the second century the Church owned land and built special buildings for the community. The account of the earliest special purpose church building seems to be from Chronicle of Arbela, a 5th century Syrian manuscript which tells us that Bishop Ishaq (135-148) «had built a large well-ordered church which exists today»17. The Chronicles of Edessa men- tion a Christian church destroyed in a city wide flood around 20118. This presupposes an existing building from the late second century. Later, in the first half of the 3rd century, Christians acquired a piece of public property in a dispute with inn keepers to build a church with the explicit blessing of Emperor Severus Alexander, who determined

 

that it was better for some sort of a god to be worshipped there than for  the place to be handed to the keepers of an eating-house19.

The pagan Porphyry, writing in the second half of the 3rd century, attacks the Christians who in

 

imitating the erection of the temples, build very large houses, into which they go together and pray, although there is nothing to prevent them from doing this in their own houses, since the Lord certainly hears from every place20.

Likewise, the Emperor Aurelian makes passing reference to a Christian church (christianorum ecclesia) in contrast to his own religious temple (templo deorum omnia)21. I submit that if the Emperor of the Roman empire in the middle of the third century knew a Christian church when he saw one, it was no simple obscure house.

 

 

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE LITURGICAL MOVEMENT

So my contention is that the very model of domestic architecture in the early church is essentially flawed. But the error is compounded with the way the rest of architectural history is handled. After all, if the early church’s domus ecclesia was to be the true and ideal model for the liturgy, what then to make of the intervening 1600 years of architectural and litur- gical history and development? Within this reading of history, the trajecto- ry from the 4th century to the 20th century was a series of missteps and deviations from the core truths of the meaning of the liturgy for the assem- bled faithful, a gradual eroding of the vitality of Christian worship for the believer, reducing him and her to a remote, detached, and disinterested observer in whatever the priestly class was doing at the altar on their behalf.

The changes in the age of Constantine are implicated for the advent of clericalism, turning the congregation into passive viewers at a formalistic ritual, the loss of liturgical and spiritual intimacy, the subjugation of the Church’s evangelical mission to the politics of the Emperor, the transfor- mation of Christ from a shepherd for this flock to a king, a ruler and a judge, reflecting how the emperor took on the identity of a surrogate Christ, as well as the adoption of the architectural formalism of the Imperial basilica; which served both the new found prestige of the Church in the urban cityscape and accommodated the spectacles of religious pageantry, ritualism expression, and grand processions22.

With this understanding, which is essentially a hermeneutic of rupture from the true intention of the Church, the years between 313 and 1920 were essentially just stylistic matter of artistic inspiration that were based upon deviations of the Gospel, where the piety of the church was replaced by the ecclesiastical polity23.

Every subsequent age and style comes in for censure: the Byzantine for their imperial courtly formality; the Romanesque for its immensely long naves that separated the people from God24; the later medieval for the pro- liferation of side altars and reliquaries of dubious merit; the Gothic for its alienating monumentalism25; the Baroque for triumphalism, for Tridentine rubricism, for pagan artistic themes and sensuality, for hyper valorisation of the Eucharist in reaction to Protestantism, for dishonesty in the use of materials with trompe l’oeil paintings, plaster work and scagliola26. Bouyer’s judgement of the Baroque liturgy was that it was embalmed: devoid of life and vitality27.

 

Similarly, the revivalisms of the 19th and early 20th centuries are commonly said to show the lack of liturgical, cultural and artistic vigour in the Church. In a typical critique of 19th century revivalism by Peter Anson:

 

The trouble with so many churches erected in the past century is that architects have been far more concerned with the superficial beauty than with the nature of the building. Their object, so it seems, was to create a building that looked what most people believed a church ought to look  like rather than a building that fulfilled the practical functions of a place  of worship...28

The decided trend of mid 20th century liturgical and architectural think- ing was to reject historical styles. Clearing the table to start anew, with a sweep of the hand, Fr. Reinhold dismissed all previous architectural eras, styles and forms:

 

Conclusion: We see that all these styles were children of their own day. None of their forms are ours. We have concrete, steel, wood compositions, brick, stone, glass of all kinds, plastic materials, reverse cycle heat and radiant heat. We can no longer identify the minority, called Christendom, and split in schisms, with the kingdom of God on earth. Our society is a pluralistic one and lives in a secularist atmosphere. We are not the Church of early persecutions, nor the queen of creation as in the Middle Ages, nor the guarantee of order as in the bourgeois period. The divine Presence, the permanent Parousia, made by the liturgy, is a again in a new way, a mus- tard seed and a leaven. For this our architects must find as good an expres- sion in our language of forms, as our fathers did in theirs29.

In my estimation, this is a myopic view of history, and a truncated understanding of sacred architecture. These styles might have been chil- dren of their own day, but it is clear from the history of Christian sacred architecture that until the past 500 years of so, sacred architecture was not a question of style. Only in the 16th and 17th centuries did any sort of architectural theory begin to distinguish between medieval architecture— the maniera tedesca—and the Greco-Roman classical orders30.

Before the Renaissance, the concern of all Christian sacred architecture was to design in harmony with the revealed images of Scripture: notably the images of the Temple, the Heavenly City, and the Body of Christ. Without going into depth, we find Temple imagery to be the most common expression of the liturgical assembly in the post-Apostolic fathers: Clement of Rome, Lactanius, Ignatius of Antioch, the Didascalia Apostolorum and the Apostolic Constitutions. Invocations of the Tent of Dwelling, Solomon’s Temple and the City of Jerusalem are found throughout Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 275-339), who was the first expositor of Christian architecture (Fig. 1.5).

 

THE LANGUAGE OF CHURCH ARCHITECTURE IN EUSEBIUS

In Eusebius we find not a nascent architectural theory, but a fully devel- oped sacramental vision for the church building. In his dedication speech for the Cathedral at Tyre, he compares Bishop Paulinus to his predecessors Beseleel, Solomon and Zerubabel: thus invoking the Tent of Dwelling, and the first and second Temples. There are several interwoven themes running through Eusebius’ speech: the church building as an earthly expression of a heavenly model; the building as a presentation of the heavenly Jerusalem and the city of God as well as the desert tabernacle and Solomon’s temple; and the building as a body—reflective of the greater Church and local com- munity—but both the Body of Christ and the Bride of Christ in a nuptial relationship.

Above all, this building is seen by Eusebius as a true sacramental real- ity, built by Paulinus as

 

this magnificent temple of the highest God, corresponding to the pattern of the greater as a visible to an invisible31.

The architectural writings of Eusebius, which are so fully formed as to suggest that he was more continuing a tradition of architectural thinking than inventing one, have informed the course of Christian sacred architec- ture well into the 20th century. Eusebius was already working within an established tradition of Scriptural metaphors for the Church, and of the church building for the Church herself. Symbols such as the Body of Christ, marriage, the desert tabernacle and the Temple, the great and king- ly house, the various architectural metaphors of columns and doors and building blocks and cornerstones, and the city all are employed by the authors of the New Testament to give insight into the nature of the Church herself. Eusebius would have been intimately familiar with them all, and it would in fact be surprising had he not employed them to describe the arrangement of the new church building in drawing out the correspondence between the visible and the invisible.   

 

A SACRAMENTAL VOCABULARY OF CHURCH ARCHITECTURE

In the remainder of this paper, I want to build on the ideas of these architectural metaphors to offer a basic vocabulary of sacred architecture. In doing so, I want to suggest that the dialectical tension between concept and identity, or between contemporary and sacred need not concern us since they are already resolved in the revealed images that help us to understand the church.

The rudimentary vocabulary—and therefore the meaning—of ancient Christian architecture is given to us from the Scriptures. There are sever- al dominant metaphors in the New Testament that are used to explain the mystery of the Church (Ekklesia): the Body, the Temple and the City being the main figures. There are other images that Jesus uses to describe the kingdom of God (in itself a figure), or are otherwise found in scripture such as the tree, the vine and the branches, the Holy Mountain, the Ark of Noah, the shepherd and his flock, the farmer’s field, the Bride and the Groom, etc. Yet the three Scriptural precedents that seemed most to inflame the imaginations of church builders from the earliest record are those of the Body of Christ, the Temple, and the Holy City.

I would suggest that these three scriptural metaphors for the Church are so powerful because they are rooted in such primal human experi- ences: the body of Christ speaks to the very notion of embodiment. We can all relate by the very experience of having our own body. The various models of building all speak to the primal notion that human civilization is only possible once we separate ourselves and protect ourselves from the raw power of nature. The model of the city speaks to the fact that human communities require cooperation and common purpose for us to thrive and find human perfection.

The prime metaphor is undoubtedly the Body of Christ (Fig. 1.6). In all its layered meanings—the Incarnation, the Eucharist, the Church universal, and the Church assembled—the body speaks at once to our most basic real- ity that we ourselves are embodied: that we exist, sense, operate, interact, and connect as integrated composites of body and soul. The metaphor also speaks to the relationship of parts to the whole: we as individuals are one body com- prised of different parts—hands, heart, eyes, spleen, limbs—each with unique and distinct functions, forms, locations, relationships, and meaning. This is the power of Paul’s metaphor in 1 Corinthians:

 

The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. For we were all baptised by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink... Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.

The metaphor of the Temple, the great and kingly house, is rooted in the primal and now largely forgotten experience of what it means to set apart a place for human habitation from raw and brutal nature (Fig. 1.7). Safe from storms and wild beasts, mankind created shelter to dwell and establish civilisation. Walls for defense and to block the wind, a door for access and security, windows to allow light and breeze, a pitched roof to shed the rain – these basic elements of dwelling have been with us from time immemorial: what Joseph Rykwert calls Adam’s House in Paradise. Following Fustel de Coulanges, the family unit is the primal religion: something sacred is going on in the family that involves our continuity in the human race, the mystery of marriage, sexuality, life and death. For the ancients, the family house was the first church: the sacred hearth was reli- giously tended in perpetual remembrance of the ancestors32.

Used to explain the ecclesia, in this metaphor we also see a relationship of parts to the whole: with Christ as the Door and the cornerstone and cap- stone, and the apostles as columns, of which we are all living stones: each with a specific purpose and indispensable to the whole. This metaphor was particularly elaborated on by Eusebius in his dedicatory address for the Cathedral at Tyre, and further allegorized by other theologians such as Maximus the Confessor, Rabanus Maurus, Honorius of Autun, Hugh of St. Victor, Sicard of Cremona and comprehensively by Durandus of Mende. These architectural allusions continued to inform Christian architecture throughout the Renaissance and the early modern period in the writings of St. Charles Borromeo, in the works of Bernini, Borromini and Guarini, and throughout the Gothic Revival in the work of the Cambridge Ecclesiologists.

The third metaphor of the city recalls the establishment of community: families banding together for common purposes, setting apart the commu- nity from the wilds of nature and marauding tribes, creating a secure place for family life and commerce. For the ancients building a city, which involved selecting the site with the assistance of the augers, con- scribing the walls, digging the foundations, and marking the centre with the sacred fire, was a sacred duty and a religious act.

As early as the second century, Melito of Sardis would draw the spiri- tual analogy between the earthly city and the heavenly city:

 

the temple below was precious,

but it is worthless now because of the Christ above. The Jerusalem below was precious,

but it is worthless now because of the Jerusalem above33.

In various ways, this civic vision infused the imaginations of church builders. We see urban imagery in church design from the fourth century, where the Constantinian basilica was but one main building in an assemblage of other buildings surrounding the piazza. In the fifth century the builders of San Stefano Rotondo evoked the Heavenly Jerusalem as the perfection of the Desert Tabernacle, with the temple in the middle of a larger complex (Fig. 1.9-1.10). The Romanesque abbeys were built in the wilderness, creating urban complexes which later often grew into significant cities.

In other ages, the Gothic cathedral emulated the vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem in Revelation 21: the city that shone with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal. The Gothic genius was to dematerialise the dense stone, to create a city of glass. Every feature of the Gothic style: the pointed arch, the ribbed vault, the highly articulated verticality, the flying buttress, the massive expanses of stained glass: was not merely an artistic device but used to cre- ate the sense that the worshipper was not in a building of stone, but in the Heavenly Jerusalem itself (Fig. 1.11-1.12).

Like the urban fabric of a city, the Gothic cathedral can be read as a har- monious assemblage of small structures: chantry chapels, side shrines, the chancel screen, towers, piers, choir stalls, buttresses and so forth. The artic- ulation of the building itself as a complex composition of smaller aedicules lends itself to being perceived as an urban expression.

  

The same device was used much later by Borromini in his remodelling of the Lateran Basilica. While ensconcing the old Constantinian pillars in a series of massive pilasters to stabilise the structure, Borromini created a series of aedicules to honour the Twelve Apostles, giving each a separate residence within the city of God, and inscribing their names on the base in tribute to the vision of Revelation 21:14 where

 

the walls of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.

Today we have largely lost the sense of what it means to live in a civi- tas. Our cities no longer have protecting walls, defensive portals, plazas and marketplaces, sacred precincts, common wells, and such. In our post agrarian urban and suburban lifestyles, with bedroom communities, shop- ping malls and strip centres, sprawling housing tracts, highways and arte- rials for transportation, and cities merging into cities, it is difficult to imag- ine the reality that spoke so clearly to the early Christians (Fig. 1.13). But the notion of the heavenly city, the perfection of the earthly Jerusalem, ful- filled the image of the Twelve Tribes assembled around the Desert Tabernacle: the community of Israel centred about God. In the New Testament we find images of the city with the individual Christians as tem- ples of the Holy Spirit, arrayed in a city that is surrounded by walls with the Apostles as foundations, and Christ the Lamb as the temple and the source of light.

Both in Scripture and in ancient thought these themes of body and tem- ple and city are deeply interwoven. The body is a type of a house: a house for the soul; and the temple is a particular type of house: a house for the gods. Paul tells us that the body is a temple (1 Cor 6:19); and Jesus tells us that the temple is a really a body (Jn 2:21). Peter calls his body a tent (2 Pet 1:13) while St. Paul considers the body to be a temple of the Holy Spirit (2 Cor 6:16). Elsewhere he says that the earthly tent will become «an eternal house... a heavenly dwelling» (2 Cor 5:14).

This understanding however predates Scripture. Archaeological investi- gations show that the earliest temples, the Neolithic earth temples of Malta, symbolically express the woman’s body , and Schwaller de Lubicz’s works shows an uncanny parallel between the human skeleton and the ancient Egyptian temple. It was with this deep and now obscure understanding that Jesus could announce that his body was the true temple, and that St. Paul could liken the Body of Christ to the Church.

Similarly, the city is a house writ large, primitively as the house of the tribe, the body politic. The king dwelt there, as did the gods. Primitive cities were often both palace-cities and temple-cities, such as Nineveh and Jerusalem. Even today we speak of cities as being incorporated.

In scripture we see these three themes come together symphonically in the fantastical vision of John in Revelation 20—well worth rereading for this consideration—where the themes of embodiment, dwelling, city, and marriage are now seen as interweaving images that combine to express the ineffable. This matrix of symbolic forms—body, temple, city—expressed over the centuries in a variety of architectural styles—Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Revivalist—constitutes a pri- mary vocabulary of Catholic architecture. There is no reason this cannot happen in the vocabulary of modern materials as well.

So the problem for us contemporary architects, liturgists and church- men is to rethink these metaphors and see how we can let them again inform the discussion of sacred architecture. We need not worry about being contemporary or doing contemporary architecture: that is all we can do. We need not worry about resolving some tension between concept and identity. The concept is the identity: the Church is the Body of Christ, it is the Domus Dei: the Temple of God, it is the Heavenly Jerusalem. That is the message of Christian architecture, and that is the identity that each of us involved in building churches must strive to communicate.

 

NOTES

2   See for instance, Maurice Lavanoux, «Religious Art and Architecture Today», in Frederick McManus, (ed.), The Revival of the Liturgy (New York: Herder and Herder, 1963), 152-154.

3  Edward Mills, The Modern Church (London: The Architectural Press, 1956), 16. Also Mills, The Modern Factory (London: The Architectural Press, 1951).

4 Jonathan Sherman (ed.), Church Buildings and Furnishing (Greenwich: Seabury Press, 1958), 95. Quoted in Mark Torgerson, An Architecture of Immanence (Grand Rapids: Erdmann’s, 2007), 91.

5 Peter Hammond, Liturgy and Architecture (London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1960), 3. 6 Hammond, Liturgy, 4.

7 Hammond, Liturgy, 7.

8 Quoted.

9 Hammond, Liturgy, 9.

10 Cf. Kevin Seasoltz, A sense of the Sacred (London: Continuum, 2005), 95-98.

11 The list of influential authors who hold this model is quite extensive: Peter Hammond, Liturgy and Architecture (quoted), 29; Kevin Seasoltz, The House of God (New York: Herder and Herder, 1963), 78- 80; J.G. Davies, The Secular Use of Church Buildings (London: SCM Press, 1968), 1-9; Edward A. Sovik, Architecture for Worship (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1973), 98; Michael DeSanctis, Building from Belief (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2002), 28-34; and Richard Vosko, God’s House is Our House (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2006), 17. All of these authors seem to assume this model without consideration of counter evidence.

12 Vosko, God’s House, 22.

13  Edgard A. Sovik, «The Place of Worship: Environment for Action», in Mandus A. Egge (ed.), Worship: Good News in Action (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1973), 98. Quoted in Torgerson, An Architecture, 152-153.

14 Cf. Kimberly Bowes, «Early Christian Archaeology: A State of the Field», Religious Compass 2/4 (2008): 575-619.

15 Cf. Katerina Sessa, «Domus Ecclesiae: Rethinking a Category of Ante Pacem Christian Space», Journal of Theological Studies 60:1 (2009): 90-108.

16 Cf. Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (San Francisco: Harper, 1997), 4-12.

17 Cf. Sources Syriaques, t. 1 (Mosul: Imprimerie des Peres Dominicains, 1907). Davies gives the dates even earlier as 123-136 in his The Origin and Development of Early Christian Church Architecture (London: SCM, 1952), 14.

18  Cf. Uwe Michael Lang, Turning Towards the Lord (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 67. Harnack makes note of this in his The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries (London: Williams and Nougat, 1908).

19 Lampridius, Life of Severus Alexander, 2.49.

20 Porphyry, Adversus christianos, known to us from the fragment addressed by the later Macarius in Apocriticus, 4.22.

21 Cf. Epistle of Aurelian, quoted in Joseph Bingham, Origines Ecclesiasticae (London: 1722), 8.1.1. 22 Vosko, God’s House, 27.

23 DeSanctis, Building from Belief, 30.

24 Joseph Rykwert, Church Building (London: Burns and Oates, 1966), 81.

25 Hans Ansgar Reinhold, The Dynamics of Liturgy (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 87.

26  Reinhold, Speaking of Liturgical Architecture (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1952), 13.

27 Louis Bouyer, Life and Liturgy (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1965), 7. Also Seasoltz, The House of God, 110-114.

28  Peter F. Anson, Churches: Their Plan and Furnishing (Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1948), X-XI. Quoted in Torgerson, An Architecture, 81.

29 Reinhold, The Dynamics, 32.

30 Vasari in Lives of the Artists speaks of the German manner as barbarous. Later, Wooton and Evelyn both disparage the Gothic in contradistinction to the Classical Orders. From Wooton: «both for natural imbecility of the sharpe angle itself, and likewise for their very uncomelinesse, ought to be exiled from judicious eyes, and left to their inventors, the Goth or Lombards, amongst other relics of that barbarous age» (Henry Wotton, Elements of Architecture. London: 1624, 51). Similarly, from Evelyn: «The ancient Greek and Roman architecture answered all the perfections required in a faultless and accomplished build- ing; but the Goths and Vandals destroyed these and introduced in their stead a certain fantastical and licen- tious manner of building: congestions of heavy, dark, melancholy, monkish piles, without any just propor- tion, use or beauty, compared with the truly ancient» (John Evelyn, A Parallel of the Ancient Architecture with the Modern. London: 1707, 9).

31 Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, 10.4.27.

32 Fustel de Coulanges, La Cité Antique. Paris: Durand, 1866. 33 Melito of Sardis, On Pascha.