HUMANIST ART REVIEW 

  

The Heavenly City, the Earthly City, and the Parish Church: 

The Church Building as Sacramental Sign and Neighborhood Center

by Philip Bess

 

 

INTRODUCTION  [slide #1]

 

The lengthy title of my talk this afternoon is a tribute to both the complexity of my topic and the audacity of my thesis---a thesis which is no less audacious for not being originally mine.  The existential distance between the City of God and a post-conciliar parish church today is on the one hand so vast for most of us that we can barely see a relationship, if indeed we can see any relationship at all.  On the other hand, the City of God and the parish church are also very close: they are as distant from and close to one another as the Body and Blood of Christ are from and to ordinary bread and wine.  So my talk today is not about the sacred and the profane; rather my talk today is about the sacred and the mundane---which is to say, my entire talk presumes the Catholic sacramental sensibility that matter matters:  which in good Aristotelian / Thomist thought also means that form matters.  What is of the world (mundus) is of value by virtue of both its original created goodness and its sacramental potential, its ability to both signal to us and manifest among us that sacred order that is otherwise other, but that is also our Origin, our Destiny, and our Companion along the journey.  Thus I am asking you to think with me this afternoon about the Church building in the City and the Church building as a City; about the inside significance of the Church building and the outside significance of the Church building; and above all of the Church building as a sacrament of and visible witness to the Christian Paschal Mystery of the ongoing Life, Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus.

 

In noting the dichotomies (however relational) not only between the sacred and the mundane but also between the church building and the neighborhood, I have left myself the difficult choice of where actually to begin.  G.K. Chesterton wrote of the philosophical writings of St. Thomas Aquinas that beginning on the lowest rungs of the ladder of logic, “St. Thomas besieged and mounted the House of Man;” and “by arguments as honest and laborious, he climbed up to the turrets and talked with angels on the roofs of gold.”  Given my own temperamental affinities to this bottom-to-top inductive approach to things, I would like to begin with a consideration of “Cities and the Good Life,” a short introduction to and apologia on behalf of urbanism that includes consideration of the traditional Christian understanding of the reciprocal and hierarchical relationship between the earthly city and the heavenly city.  I will then proceed to a consideration of the formal order of traditional cities---a kind of “Urban Form 101” that focuses upon the neighborhood as the basic unit of urban form---and ask you here to note along the way the prominence of church buildings in that traditional urban formal order.  I will then turn my attention to the church building itself, not only as a neighborhood center---the “lowest rung of the ladder” as it were---but as a sacrament of the City of God, higher than which we do not rise.  This portion of my talk will briefly consider not only a typology of historic church form, but also some arguments for legitimate diversity in church form and its limits; as well as a pragmatic argument for self-limitation in church form today.  I will conclude with a practical suggestion about how parishes and dioceses might go about promoting a better relationship between churches and their neighborhood context---indeed, how parishes better might go about promoting neighborhoods.

 

CITIES AND THE GOOD LIFE

The City is a central metaphor and theme of historic Christianity.  Christian scripture depicts the end of the human pilgrimage as a heavenly city, the New Jerusalem; and the relationship between this world and the next was articulated paradigmatically for subsequent Christian theology in the 5th century A.D. by St. Augustine in The City of God.  Systematic philosophical thinking about urbanism antedates Christianity, however, going back to Aristotle, who wrote some four centuries before Christ that the best life for individual human beings is the life of moral and intellectual virtue lived in community with others, and most particularly in a polis.  Aristotle’s argument really constitutes two claims about the good life for human beings: one about the centrality of moral and intellectual virtue, the other about the centrality of the polis; and these were the subject matters of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and Politics respectively.  A consideration of the importance of moral and intellectual virtue to thinking about, making, and living in cities today is a subject well worth pursuing; but not here.   My immediate purpose is to ask for your attention to the polis and its formal order.  

 

If Aristotle is the intellectual wellspring of western thinking about cities, it was Augustine who identified most clearly a peculiar and distinctive character of the individual and corporate Christian life and vocation, which is that Christians are members of two cities: an earthly city and a heavenly city, the City of Man and the City of God.  In Augustine’s view of things, the Church is a sacramental mystery that seeks to make Her members over the course of a lifetime fit citizens for the City of God; and we become thus in part by learning to be good citizens in the City of Man, and by loving the City of Man with a properly ordered love, never forgetting that our first loyalty is to the heavenly city that is our origin and destiny.

 

Aristotle wrote of the polis that it is a community of communities, “the highest of all, embracing all the rest…[aiming] at the highest good: the well-being of all its citizens.”  Now at one level a Christian might say this is not quite right, inasmuch as the Church would be characterized as the highest of all communities, aiming at the highest good: the eternal well-being of all its citizens.  But here again, Augustine offers the insightful hermeneutical key.  In its life on earth, the Church is but a single member of and participant in that community of communities which is the earthly city. But with respect to Her divine vocation, the Church recognizes that here she has no lasting city, but seeks the City that is to come---and not only seeks but represents and to some extent even embodies it.  And so more than even Aristotle himself knew, the highest of all communities---embracing all the rest, aiming at the highest good: the well-being of all its citizens---is indeed a City: it is the City of God [SLIDE #2], of which the Church is its earthly herald, symbol, and embodied anticipation.    

 

We get something of the flavor of Augustine’s and the Church’s inclusive urban vision, and of the interesting and complex relationship between the earthy and heavenly cities in the following passage from The City of God:

[The] heavenly city, then, while it sojourns on earth, calls citizens out of all nations and gathers together a society of pilgrims of all languages, not scrupling about diversities in the manners, laws, and institutions whereby earthly peace is secured and maintained, but recognizing that, however various these are, they all tend to one and the same end of earthly peace.  [The heavenly city] therefore is so far from rescinding and abolishing these diversities, that it even preserves and adopts them, so long only as no hindrance to the worship of the one supreme and true God is thus introduced.  Even the heavenly city, therefore, while in its state of pilgrimage, avails itself of the peace of earth, and, so far as it can without injuring faith and godliness, desires and maintains a common agreement...regarding the acquisition of the necessaries of life, and makes this earthly peace bear upon the peace of heaven....In its pilgrim state the heavenly city possesses this [heavenly] peace by faith; and by this faith it lives righteously when it refers to the attainment of that peace every good action towards God and man; for the life of the city is a social life...

        

The life of the city as “a social life” is a reality and ideal that since the Enlightenment and the rise of the industrial city has become increasingly problematic.  There is now a large volume of academic and popular literature devoted to the individualist and emotivist turns of modern society, and to modern society’s discovery and celebration of the “autonomous self.”  What was noted by Tocqueville in the first half of the 19th century as an inherent tendency of democratic societies to foster a culture of individualism has moved from a tendency to a triumph, as Philip Rieff declared in the (ironic) title of his 1966 book The Triumph of the Therapeutic.  But what Rieff there prophetically identified as “an impossible culture” is becoming more obviously self-contradictory; and so it was that in July of 2001 I listened with great interest to a lecture at Calvin College by New York University psychologist Paul Vitz about “the self in post-modern therapeutic culture.”  Professor Vitz spoke of the current trajectory of the modern self toward being defined by consumption; he spoke of the dis-integration of the modern self, and the celebration of that condition in the theory and literature of post-modernism; and then he spoke of an emerging theory of the “trans-modern” self emerging from the work of thinkers who are re-examining and re-appropriating certain pre-modern views of the self as being---note well---both embodied and relational.  

 

One of those thinkers, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, has reminded us in After Virtue that good histories are not just about ideas, and not just about actions in the world; but rather about how ideas are shaped in a social context of actions, and about how actions are the embodiment and expression of ideas.  And if there is a reciprocity between actions and ideas, I would like to take this notion one step further and suggest that there is likewise a reciprocity between a society’s view of self-hood and the physical and spatial forms of the built environment---and that there is also a contemporary crisis of architecture and urbanism coincident with and no less profound than the contemporary crisis of the self.  The name (and physical expression) of this intellectual and institutional crisis is post-WWII suburban sprawl [SLIDE #3]; and it has affected if not corrupted virtually every institution responsible for the creation of the built environment: from the profession of architecture, to the institutions of architectural education, to the institutional patrons of architecture, to the organization of the construction industry, to the rule-of-thumb manuals of transportation engineers, to the lending policies of banks, to the legal framework represented by zoning ordinances that regulate where and how buildings get built.  The vision of both the City of Man and the City of God to which I have referred earlier stands in the sharpest possible contrast to the suburban ideal that has become our culture’s dominant paradigm for the good life. 

 

I don’t have time here to discuss either the distant origins or the immediate causes of post-war sprawl; nor do I wish to suggest that divine grace is wholly absent from post-war suburbia.  The Apostle’s Creed, after all, professes that Christ “descended into Hell,” so we really have no reason to doubt that He makes himself present in suburbia…  [This is a joke.  Christians are bound to the demands of both justice and charity, which obviously calls for us to hate the suburbs, but love the suburbanites.]  Anyway, I want to argue that sprawl is problematic because it renders embodied, cross-generational, mixed-class communities of place impossible.  The automobile suburb---of its very nature, owing to its physical characteristics---effectively de-mobilizes and disenfranchises that significant percentage of the population at any given moment too young, too old, too poor, or too feeble to drive an automobile.  The automobile suburb makes all parents chauffeurs and all children totally dependent until late adolescence, at which time---voila!---it grants them complete and free control over several tons of lethal machinery.  In addition, Suburbia as a democratic cultural ideal is contradictory because it is impossible to realize in that it consumes the landscape that is the very substance of its promise.  The automobile suburb cannot deliver on its promise of convenience, mobility, the beauty of the natural landscape, and individual freedom and well-being for all.  Its dynamic is inherently expansive; and its contradictory nature is evidenced in that the persons who have most recently arrived in suburbia are often the people most vociferously opposed to its continuing extension, the political phenomenon that has come to be known as NIMBYism.  But our suburban cultural habit is perhaps most insidious in the way it undermines the formal and cultural patterns—the urban patterns--by means of which human beings have traditionally sought to achieve the good life.  The post-war American suburb is a cultural conspiracy catering to the illusion that unpleasantness in life can be avoided.  But Catholic Christians above all must surely understand that unpleasantness in life can not be avoided; and I think it is not too much to say of the traditional city that it is a complex institution designed to address and transform the unpleasantries of human life by means of community, culture, and civil society.

 

URBAN FORM 101 [SLIDE #4]

 

I would like at this point to introduce a brief account of the formal order of traditional cities, what I call “Urban Form 101.”  Although there is ongoing discussion among the growing number of design professionals interested in traditional architecture and urbanism about the best agents and mechanisms by means of which to deal with land-use issues at metropolitan and regional scales, there is a virtual consensus among us that the mixed-use walkable neighborhood is the sine qua non of urban design and ought to be a focus of both public policy and our design efforts, whether such neighborhoods are considered in isolation or in relationship to other neighborhoods.  A neighborhood standing alone in the landscape is a village; several neighborhoods in the landscape, a town; many contiguous neighborhoods in the landscape together constitute a city or a metropolis.  But to make traditional neighborhoods today requires a conscientious rejection of the way we’ve been making human settlements for the past fifty-seven years.   

 

Every city (or town or village) is a dynamic, overlapping, conflicting, and multi-dimensional order; and if we think of any good city, we can identify at least four kinds of order: an ecological order, an economic order, a moral order, and a formal order.  A good city quite clearly is itself and occurs within an ecological order.  A city is a trans-generational artifact by means of which the human animal dwells in and on the landscape.  If this artifact is made intelligently and well, both the human animal and the ecological order of which it is part will thrive.  If the city is not made well, both the human animal and the ecological order will suffer in both the short and long term--but especially human beings, because in a strictly natural frame of reference, nature always wins.  The economic order of a good city is characterized by marketplace diversity and entrepreneurial freedom.  Its purpose is twofold: to create and distribute the material goods and services necessary to the material well being of the populace; and beyond this to create the surplus wealth---and hence, the leisure---necessary for the various kinds of non-subsistence cultural endeavors—music, art, scholarship, sport--that are the very hallmarks of urban culture.   Just as important however is the recognition that a good city is also a moral order.  The marks of this order are the existence of various religious, civic, and political institutions that are sufficiently strong and influential to restrain the excessive individualism that a free economy encourages.  Such institutions will seek to educate individuals in a variety of moral and intellectual virtues, and to promote among individuals a sincere regard for the common good.  If these institutions are in good working order, they will be promoting and sustaining a shared sense that the city is not only a marketplace but also a moral community; and that the market exists for the community and not the community for the market.  Finally, the formal order of the city is what architects typically deal with, and is what architects typically think of when we think about the city.  Most people intuitively understand the relationship that exists between the formal order of a city and its economic order, because it requires economic power to build significant buildings; but we may have more trouble seeing the relationship between the formal order of a city and its moral order.  I want to suggest that the traditional western view of the good life as individual excellence lived in community is evident also in the formal order of the traditional city, and is a counterpoint to our own individualist / emotivist culture that manifests itself physically as suburban sprawl. 

 

Leon Krier, the most influential traditional urbanist of our time, has graphically compared the traditional urban neighborhood to a slice of pizza [SLIDE #5].  A neighborhood is to the larger city what a slice of the pizza is to the whole pie: a part that contains within itself the essential qualities and elements of the whole.  In contrast, the separation of uses typical of the modern suburb (and typically mandated by modern zoning) is analogous to separating all the ingredients of the pizza from each other: the crust here, the sauce over there, the cheese someplace else, the pepperoni way out yonder, et cetera.  [SLIDES 6-11, zones and arterials]  This latter arrangement has all the ingredients of the pizza, but it is not a pizza precisely because it does not have the form of a pizza.  Similarly, the post-war suburb has all the ingredients of a city, but it is not a city because it lacks both the physical and the social form of a city.  And the reason this matters (again, as all Catholics should know) is because very purpose of the city—the good life for human beings—is not so separable from the formal order of the city as our cultural ideal of suburbia leads us to believe.

 

So what are some of the key features of the formal order of traditional towns and cities?  Another famous Krier drawing illustrates diagrammatically several characteristics of the formal order of the traditional city [SLIDE 12]:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[SLIDES 34-39]  Thursday projects: Armour Field / Ada, MI / Greensboro, NC

These then are some of the formal characteristics of traditional urban neighborhoods.  And I can summarize our current situation by saying on the one hand that making neighborhoods of such quality today is as simple as looking closely at, emulating, and attempting to improve upon the most beloved cities and neighborhoods in the world; and on the other hand that making such neighborhoods is as hard as the fact that in most places in America today it is literally illegal to build such environments, and also---to complicate matters even further---that we have lost the cultural habit of doing so. 

 

I’ve so far been contrasting two formal paradigms of human settlement: the traditional urban neighborhood and the post-war automobile suburb.  And lest you think I exaggerate the point by dividing the history of human settlements into pre-1945 and post-1945 periods, I contend that this essential division is warranted, precisely because it represents the temporal demarcation between walkable human settlements and those that require mechanical transportation to perform the majority of life’s daily tasks---though I will be the first to admit that the cultural antecedents of sprawl go back much further.  (Oh, and did I mention that obesity rates in our auto-centered culture are at an all-time high?)  Anyway, the Catholic Church too has been engulfed by the suburban tidal wave of the past half-century, with less than happy consequences for both the Church and the Church’s witness to and evangelization of the world.  But alarm bells are sounding; and there is now a swelling chorus of voices claiming that the social and cultural costs of sprawl are excessive, that sprawl itself is both culturally and environmentally unsustainable; and that the only alternative to suburbia is the revival of the art of making traditional cities.  So I want to spend the rest of my talk this afternoon pursuing the implications of these ideas for church architecture, especially in light of recent history in the post-conciliar Catholic Church.

 

CHURCH FORM: LITURGY AND THE LOGIC OF ARCHITECTURE     [SLIDE 40]

The architecture of the post-conciliar Catholic Church is noteworthy above all for the manner in which its forms typically have been shaped by the alleged demands of the post-conciliar Catholic liturgy, as interpreted by “liturgical consultants.”  I here want to challenge this recent practice, not on the basis that the liturgy is unimportant---it clearly is important---but rather on the bases that there both has been historically and now ought to be more that goes into our thinking about church architecture than simply making forms suited to the liturgy.  And for this I think it is necessary to turn briefly to the history both of architecture generally and church architecture in particular to examine both some natural and some historical foundations for thinking about church architecture.  Catholics believe that Grace completes nature, after all; and that Grace manifests itself in specific historical contexts that are themselves being directed by Grace toward history’s telos in the City of God.  So let’s give some thought to both nature and history.

 

The diagram on the screen, again, is Leon Krier’s.  Its intent is to illustrate both the relationship and the difference between building and architecture; and I show it to illustrate a premise.  There is some debate about how self-conscious primitive human beings were about our first buildings; but there is really no debate that our oldest examples of architecture are of sacred architecture, buildings literally offered to the sacred; nor is there any doubt that, compared to vernacular building, these examples are, in a word, monumental.  Broadly speaking, all sacred architecture exhibits some or all of the following six characteristics (though specifically Catholic church architecture is also characterized by a specifically Catholic iconography); these characteristics are:

1)  a recognizable verticality, in either or both height and depth

2)  a concern for light and shadow

3)  a care for craft, durability, and material particularity

4)  the conscious use of mathematics and geometry as formal ordering devices

5)  a compositional and artistic unity; and

6)  a sense of hierarchy, by which I simply mean formal evidence that some

             things are regarded as more important than others

 

Grace completes nature, we believe; so I want to begin by focusing upon two of these characteristics---verticality and unity---as naturally constituent elements of sacred architecture.  [SLIDE 41]  We often hear talk that associations of verticality with the sacred are a kind of carryover from the culture of Newtonian physics from which we post-Einsteinians would do best to free ourselves.  But this represents both an abstracted and---more significantly---disembodied assessment of the category of the vertical and the symbolic meanings we attach to it.  If we---consistent with both empirical observation and the teaching of the Church---think of the human person, the self, as both embodied and relational, then verticality and its significance may be best understood not in terms of the abstract relativity of up and down, but rather in terms of the relationship of the human body to a physical context of gravity in which up and down are in fact not abstract categories at all.

 

The perceptual psychologist Rudolf Arnheim has described succinctly the elemental importance of verticality for human beings in his 1975 book The Dynamics of Architectural Form.  Human beings, he writes, experience ourselves in the world asymmetrically.

Among the infinitely many directions of three dimensional space along which [a human being] theoretically can move, one direction is distinguished by the pull of gravity: the vertical….  Geometrically there is no difference between going up and going down, but physically and perceptually the difference is fundamental.  Anybody climbing a tree, a ladder, or a staircase, feels he is striving to overcome a counterforce, which he locates in his own body as weight.  Thus the gratification in climbing consists in the conquering of one’s own inert heaviness for the purpose of attaining a high goal---an experience inevitably endowed with symbolic connotations.  Climbing is a heroic liberating act; and height spontaneously symbolizes things of high value...  To rise…from the earth is to approach the realm of light and overview…the achievement of enlightenment and an unobstructed outlook.  Digging below the surface, on the other hand, means becoming involved with matter rather than relinquishing it….  To dig is to explore the foundation on which all life rests and from which it sprouts.  Digging creates an entrance to the realm of darkness, and therefore it stands symbolically for deepening, i.e., for exploring beyond the superficial.  Whereas rising is the means of becoming enlightened, digging makes the light shine in the darkness. 

 

In architectural circles, the formal and spatial representation of the intersection of the transcendent vertical with the imminent horizontal is called an axis mundi, the sacred axis of the world around which life and the world are organized.  It is a minor but I think telling point that although the most recent bishops’ document on architecture “Built of Living Stones” speaks of both the transcendence and the imminence of God, the word "vertical" occurs nowhere in the text.  Nor is there any suggestion in the document of symbolizing the transcendence of God in the height of the church building and its interior space.  It is perhaps not surprising therefore that post-conciliar churches are noteworthy for their comparative absence of verticality.  As Arnheim suggests, to downplay the significance of the vertical dimension may accord with our abstract knowledge of nature.  It is however contrary to both our bodily experience and our symbolic instinct.

 

Unity should be of interest to us as well, because of its intrinsic relationship to beauty.  "Built of Living Stones" says that church buildings should be beautiful, but has relatively little to say about the nature of beauty itself.  Now, beauty is an almost meaningless category in modernist art and architecture.  Modernists will talk of function and modernists will talk of meaning and modernists will talk of things being of our time.  But modernists will rarely talk of beauty; and when they do it usually requires some prior explanation of why some modernist thing is beautiful, because its appeal is not immediately apparent to the senses.  If we look more closely at the Catholic intellectual tradition however, and specifically to Thomas Aquinas and to Leon Battista Alberti, we find some suggestive ideas that amount to uncommonly sophisticated characterizations of our ordinary common sense of beauty.  St. Thomas says that something is beautiful when it is well made; when it exhibits unity and a harmonious relationship between the parts and the whole; and when it possesses the virtue of "clarity," i.e., when it reveals the essence of the kind of thing it is---in other words, not a lot of explanation needed. (That Thomas Aquinas: he was pretty good!)  Alberti’s characterization of beauty is better known to architects, but is similar to Thomas’s.  Beauty is "the harmonious relationship between the parts and the whole in whatsoever subject it occurs, such that nothing could be added, subtracted, or altered but for the worse."  These two definitions may be inadequate for settling every dispute over aesthetics; but are sufficiently clear to at least help us to settle some.

 

Grace reveals itself in history, we believe.  If the foregoing considerations have suggested some general implications from nature for sacred architecture, the considerations that follow touch upon the history of Catholic church architecture in particular.  I offer them to draw your attention to the formal logic of historic church form and its relationship to Christian liturgy.  [SLIDE 42]  There are two paradigmatic forms of Christian church: the centralized plan and the basilican plan, with several variations on each type.  If I may speak in an abstract and diagrammatic way of the formal logic of these two paradigms I would say that while both of them can be characterized as possessing a formal unity, the unity of the centralized plan (owing to its omni-directional quality) is a unity of stasis and perfection; while the formal unity of the basilican plan (owing to its privileging of a particular direction) is a unity of dynamism and procession.

 

[SLIDE 43] I spoke earlier of the idea of the axis mundi, the sacred vertical axis of the world around which life and the world are organized; and the diagram of the axis mundi in a centralized church plan is about as simple as can be, reflecting the unity, simplicity, and repose essential to the circle and the sphere. 

 

[SLIDE 44]  Now, where the formal logic of the centralized plan is omni-directional from a single point and hence static, the formal logic of the basilican plan is linear and hence dynamic.  It entails procession: the movement of the faithful along a path, at the end of which---in the sacrament of the Eucharist---we encounter God.  Its axis mundi looks like this.  In the prototypical basilican plan church [SLIDE 45], there is a high nave with side aisles, with the nave terminating on a typically semi-circular / hemispherical apse-cum-sanctuary framed by what is in effect a triumphal arch, beneath which is often a baldacchino or canopy that shelters the altar and creates what is in fact a kind of localized axis mundi [SLIDE 46].  This basic basilican plan was transformed in the middle ages first for pragmatic reasons into the cruciform plan [SLIDE 47], but which quickly became symbolic of the church as the body of Christ, in which the nave was crossed with a transept.  To the east of the crossing of nave and transept (typically) was located the choir and sanctuary and, at the farthest end, the altar.  Nevertheless, whether in its original basilican form or in its cruciform version, and with or without a dome, a critical feature of this plan form itself has always been its linearity.

 

Consider now the relationship between church form and liturgy, and the logic of each; and that there is an observable and perennial (albeit perhaps unnecessary) "mis-fit" between the liturgy and the formal logic of both historic and contemporary church buildings.  [SLIDE 48]  Think, for example, of the centralized church plan and the implications of its formal order for the liturgy.  Catholics believe that Christ is present in the worshipping community in a variety of modes---in the consecrated bread and wine upon the altar, in the Word preached from the ambo, in the person of the celebrant, in the assembly of the faithful, in the waters of baptism, and in the church building itself.  Of these, the hierarchically most prominent element of the liturgical celebration is the altar, because the eucharistic celebration is "the source and the summit" of the Church’s shared life in Christ.  So, given the formal logic of the centralized plan and its strong axis mundi, and giving pride of place to the positioning of the altar, where would we expect to find the main altar in a centralized church plan?  I contend that both considerations would rightly lead us to look for the altar directly under the dome; at the center of the space; at the axis mundi.  But in fact, we almost never see this.  Why not?  Why is the altar in a centralized church plan typically set to one side of the space, which by the abstract formal logic of the plan is entirely arbitrary?  Well, one reason is the liturgical custom in the west of locating altars whenever possible to the east, toward the sun and toward Jerusalem.  But there’s another reason, an anthropological reason.  Although the space in a centralized church is omni-directional from its center point, we don’t see the altar at the center of the space because human beings are not omni-directional.  We have a front and a back; and this makes the formal "fit" between the centralized church plan and the celebration of the Eucharist intrinsically problematic.

 

[SLIDE 49]  The fit between formal logic and the liturgy is only a little less problematic in historic basilican plans.  The formal logic of the proto-typical basilican plan is a procession of the faithful to encounter Christ in the eucharist.  The altar and sanctuary are located in the apse, the axis mundi that intersects with and guides us on our path through life to the Heavenly City, and the place from where we receive spiritual nourishment for the journey.  The formal problem with the proto-typical basilican plan is that it locates the altar in an incomplete space, the hemispherical / semi-circular apse.  The axis mundi is not as clearly symbolized under the "incomplete" form of the apse as it is under the complete form of the dome; [SLIDE 50] and this I suspect is one of the reasons for the appearance of the baldacchino over the altar, to better represent the axis mundi, the point of intersection between the sacred and the mundane.   [SLIDE 51] The typical cruciform plan, on the other hand, presents us with another apparent mis-fit between the liturgy and the architectural form, both similar to and different from the tensions between church form and liturgy we found in the centralized plan.  In the cruciform plan, the intersection of the nave and transept at the crossing creates the implicit axis mundi, a formally "complete" location that is also the destination of the procession of believers.  [SLIDE 52]  Nevertheless, this is not where one typically finds the main altar in pre-conciliar churches, which instead is again located in the sanctuary at the east end of the plan.  Note in all these examples that I am not saying there are not legitimate reasons for the location of the altar; rather I am pointing to a certain tension between the formal logic of historical churches and the liturgical practices occurring therein. 

 

[SLIDE 53]  This historic tension persists in contemporary church architecture.  But where in the past the Church as architectural patron was able to live more or less happily with these tensions, our impulse today is different (if not relentlessly bureaucratic and inartistic).  The very first principle of new or renovated church building, we are advised in Built of Living Stones, is that the church building "serves the needs of the liturgy."  Let me here re-introduce the suggestion that church building indeed should serve the needs of the liturgy; but that this in fact should not be the first principal of church building.  Because the implication of this is that the liturgy dictates the form of the building.  But, as I have just tried to suggest, it has not done so historically; instead, we have a history of church architecture in which there has been a constant negotiation between architectural typology, the liturgy, and what I daresay is no less than the evangelizing mission, the witness, and even the identity of the church.  And what happens when we focus too exclusively on the liturgy as the generator of form?   The architecture, and consequently the evangelism, of the church suffer.  [SLIDE 54]

 

[Let me here offer visual relief from the previous slide, and as an aside say something about Catholic evangelism.  I was raised a Baptist, so I know something about a certain style of evangelization; and I also know that evangelization is a word that makes most Catholics nervous.  But Catholics do have a very definite evangelical style, whether we actually think of it that way or not.  How does the Roman Catholic Church---how do Roman Catholics---evangelize?  Catholics evangelize by modeling the corporate and individual Christian life in settings ranging from the parish to the family to the hospital to the university to the monastery.  And here a pertinent thought from that alleged bane of theologians and American Catholics, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger:

The only really effective apologia for Christianity [Ratzinger says] comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.  Better witness is borne to the Lord by the splendor of holiness and art which have arisen in the community of believers than by the clever excuses which apologetics has come up with to justify the dark sides which, sadly, are so frequent in the Church's human history....

 

How true this is!  And how much more difficult Catholic evangelism becomes when Catholics cease to aspire to holiness in our conduct, and beauty in the things we do and make together.  End of aside…]

 

Buildings, sacred or mundane, are not merely the result of interior activities and their influence; buildings have other roles to perform as well, public roles.  So we might question the presupposition that church buildings should express first and foremost the liturgical activities they shelter.  A thoughtful critique of this presupposition can be found in an essay by Father Timothy Vaverek in the Spring 2001 issue of Sacred Architecture, entitled "The Church Building and the Paschal Mystery:  Assessing the NCCB Document Built of Living Stones."  I can’t go deeply into Father Vaverek’s argument; but part of what makes it compelling is his reliance not on pre-conciliar or extra-conciliar assumptions about the church and the liturgy, but on the relevant Vatican II documents themselves.  Father Vaverek argues that the first duty of the church building is not to represent the liturgical activity within.  It is rather to be an image of the Church as a whole, of that communion of God and human beings across time wrought through the Paschal Mystery of Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension.  The entire building, quoting Father Vaverek

is therefore "sacramental" in that it visibly represents the Church, the kingdom of God present now in mystery…  The church building is an icon of the Church herself and a witness to the kingdom.  According to Vatican II, the Trinity has chosen to accomplish the saving work of Christ’s [Paschal Mystery] in and through the Church…  The paschal work of the Church is shared in various ways by all her members, living or dead, under the headship of Christ as the basis for all Christian [witness] and ministry.  It follows that daily life and [emphasis added] liturgy are equally real participations in Christ’s saving work…  Therefore, it would be an egregious error to limit the realization of the Paschal Mystery, the spiritual life of Christians, or the activity of the Church to liturgical celebrations.  There is more to the Church and Christianity than the liturgy.

 

Now, Father Vaverek’s point here clearly is not to devalue the liturgy generally, or the Eucharist in particular, as "the source and summit" of Catholic faith and communal life.  It is rather to say that the Paschal Mystery provides the context for Catholic liturgy and not vice versa; and not only for the liturgy, but for the life of individual prayer, for works of charity, for evangelization, for communion with Christians living and dead in the universal church, and—yes—even for church architecture.  So if we consider the future of church architecture from the premise that the church building is properly conceived as an icon of the Church herself, then what form or forms should 21st century church buildings take in accordance with post-conciliar ecclesiology and sacramental theology? 

 

I have two answers to that question, one as a matter of what seems to be in accord with Catholic history and principle, and the other as a matter of prudential judgment suited to our own particular moment in history.  As regards the former, it is evident on the one hand that there is no one form or style of church architecture that can be labeled as the correct form or style of church architecture.  On the other hand, it does not follow that there are no proper formal criteria for church architecture. I have already suggested six characteristics common to sacred architecture generally that seem to me grounded in created nature and human nature, and suggested also that there is yet another set of iconographic criteria specific to Christian churches generally and Catholic churches in particular.  So what I would like to do first is suggest a set of rationales for different church forms and styles that the Church herself has seen fit to adopt over the course of her earthly sojourn.  (Just to clarify: I am speaking of course of the “forms and styles” the Catholic Church has adopted throughout her history, not necessarily her rationales for adopting them.  Please note also that I am not suggesting my list of either forms or rationales is exhaustive.)  Common to all of these rationales is an argument that the church building itself in some way reflects something of the nature of the Trinitarian God who has revealed Himself through created nature and in human history through Jesus Christ and various manifestations of the Holy Spirit.  What I am suggesting about church architecture is analogous to the Catholic Church’s encouragement and recognition of religious orders.  There are hundreds if not thousands of religious orders within the Catholic Church with a distinctive identity (or “charism”) who are recognized by the Church as having a specific vocation of service to or on behalf of the Universal Church.  To take an obvious example: the Cistercians have a distinctive way of life and a distinctive vocation on behalf of the Church; but the Church does not require that all her children be Cistercians, nor are the Cistercians permitted to presume that only Cistercians are true Catholics.  Similarly, I want to suggest that there are a variety of legitimate church forms and styles that may be suitable for certain forms of Catholic community, but not necessarily for all of them.

 

So to begin my very loose taxonomy:

·         [SLIDE 55]  Let me reiterate that there is an argument for the centralized plan based upon the geometry of the circle and its symbolic representation of the unity and changeless perfection of God.

 

·         [SLIDE 56]  There is an argument for the basilican plan based upon the dynamism of both nature and history and their movement toward their end in God.

 

·         [SLIDE 57]  There is an argument for the cruciform plan that includes the preceding argument; but also an argument for the form both as symbolic of the mystical Body of Christ and---at the crossing of nave and transept---best expressive of the intersection of heaven and earth and the communion of God and Man at the axis mundi.

 

·         [SLIDE 58]  There may be a contemporary argument for the elliptical plan that would have to do with the dynamic relationship and movement between the liturgy of the Word and the liturgy of the Eucharist as dual foci of the Catholic Mass.

 

·         [SLIDE 59]  To shift the argument slightly from formal type to style:  There is an argument for Classicism that affirms Classicism’s interest in the proportions of the human figure as a proper form of celebration by the Church of the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity. 

 

·         [SLIDE 60]  There is an argument for the Gothic---apart from its typically cruciform plan---that recognizes in its verticality and its ethereal quality of light a celebration and the mystical presence of God the Holy Spirit. 

 

·         [SLIDE 61]  There is an argument for localized vernacular expressions of ornamental exuberance as a fitting expression of the endlessly creative energy of God the Father.

 

·         [SLIDE 62]  There is an argument for monastic (and perhaps by inference proto-Protestant)