Abstract
The nature and architecture of church buildings and their context relate directly to the liturgy and what the buildings say theologically. This is true to some extent of all buildings in terms of function and context. Church buildings, however, are also in a broad sense sacramental and speak directly of the Christian faith. All these factors are significant as we plan liturgy and seek to reorder our church buildings.
In December 1961, work began on demolishing the great Doric arch or, more correctly, propylaeum which had been the trade mark of London’s Euston Station from the very beginning of the station’s existence in 1837; Euston is the earliest of that series of stations built north of Euston Road, the southernmost point allowable by the government for the capital’s northern railway termini. The demolition of the arch became a key ‘line in the sand’ with regard to the treatment of London’s built heritage. John Betjeman, later Poet Laureate, conducted a vigorous campaign to save the arch, but Ernest Marples, the Minister of Transport, and the Prime Minister himself, Harold Macmillan, both refused to allow the arch to be listed and so preserved. Almost two-thirds of the stonework still lies in the bed of the Prescott Channel, a flood relief canal on the River Lee Navigation. It remains the focus of a lively pressure group’s efforts to get the arch reconstructed somewhere on the Euston site.
This was an important landmark decision for three reasons. First, it was (and still is) seen as an act of gross Philistinism; second, thereafter, both stations and other key public buildings became far less easy to bulldoze, ignoring the environmental lobby: the statue of John Betjeman in the remodelled St Pancras is an iconic reminder of the poet’s part in saving our architectural heritage; third, Euston has become used as an almost paradigm example of how not to bring architecture and utility into conjunction, or, better still, harmony with each other. Visit it at almost any time of the day or night and it remains a monument to inhumane design and planning. The main concourse is a vast featureless box with no artistic or decorative detail to save it. The entrances to the platforms are like entrances to animal traps or rat runs; there is nowhere to sit, no clear pattern for passengers to traverse this great ugly room, and no other human sign of what the space is intended to be.
Happily lessons were learnt, albeit over a complete generation. So, Edward Wilson’s Liverpool Street with Charles Barry’s Great Eastern Hotel adjoining were remodelled between 1985 and 1992. It needed sorting out. This time the refurbishment made a significant bow in the direction of the original architecture. It also took clear note of what the station needed to do, making it more rather than less humane. With still greater panache, St Pancras has been reordered, using the old dray warehouse below the platforms for reception of Eurostar passengers and reclaiming Scott’s great hotel for its original use.
Now it may seem strange to begin an essay on liturgy and church buildings at London rail termini, but there is an essential crossover – to use a railway image. Each of these great buildings – often they became known as cathedrals of steam – was built to say something beyond the purely utilitarian. So Euston, with its fine Doric propylaeum and two attendant lodges, bespoke the power, influence and dignity represented in the extraordinary flowering of English architecture in the great eighteenth-century stately homes. Here were the gateway and lodges to that vast estate which was England, with its historic inheritance and its industrial power. Or there is Lewis Cubitt’s magnificent King’s Cross train shed of 1852, an exercise in supreme simplicity pre-empting most attempts at modernist architecture by almost three-quarters of a century. Here the six low arches at the front of the concourse gave a simple humanity to the vast double roof behind. This building spoke from the start of a confident and clear future and now that statement can once again be appreciated as it was originally intended.
Finally, and pointing architecturally in almost exactly the opposite direction from Cubitt’s pre-emptive modernism, is its next-door neighbour, George Gilbert Scott’s neo-Gothic extravaganza – the last gasp of secular Gothic on such a scale. Here stands a quite different miracle. William Henry Barlow designed the widest arched train shed ever attempted: the base with its dray store of countless cast iron columns was the massive bow-string which held in place the glass arch of this monumental ‘long bow’. More remarkable still is the fact that Scott was quite independently given the contract to design the hotel and other facilities: somehow the two fitted each other perfectly. In his brilliant study of St Pancras, Simon Bradley notes the debt that Scott owed to his own background in church architecture. Architecture and worship were one. Bradley writes of Scott: Thousands of waking hours were … devoted to private prayer, for Scott remained profoundly religious throughout his life, and more concerned with inner stages than outward show.
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The hotel at St Pancras embodies the new directions taken by the Gothic Revival after 1850. The most iconoclastic buildings of that time were designed by other men, notably the monastically austere High Churchman William Butterfield and Scott’s former pupil George Edmund Street. But Scott was never far behind, and in the public mind he soon became identified as the leading figure of the Gothic party.
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Scott had been influenced by John Ruskin and notably his Seven Lamps of Architecture, 3 although broadly pan-European influences were there too. But here we need not become over-entangled with Scott or Gothic. The point that emerges is broader and deeper. It relates to the extraordinary flowering of architecture during the nineteenth century. In each of the three examples upon which I have focused – Euston, King’s Cross and St Pancras – their architects combined three key elements. First, they were to be beautiful structures in themselves; second they needed to speak to the people through the way they were to function: so their setting within the landscape and links with other modes of transport – roads and increasingly underground – were essential issues; it was not merely a matter of the internal workings of the building itself. Finally the buildings pointed beyond themselves. 4 It may seem pressing terms a little far, but they had virtually a secular sacramental significance. They were symbols for something far beyond the simple matter of getting people on trains. Hardwick, Cubitt, Scott, Wilson and others were building sacraments.
Curiously, then, we have entered the world of sacramentality from the unlikely departure point of railway architecture. These great buildings embody key principles which apply to liturgy and church buildings. Such principles are not exhaustive, of course, but there are certainly key concepts there – and we have seen how ecclesiastical developments interlinked with the secular. Nineteenth-century England, ‘the workshop of the world’, had not yet allowed the things of God to become divorced from the things of everyday life. One of the most difficult problems that Christianity and the Church now face is the mediated nature of human experience. Food, clothing, furniture and almost all else is bought ‘off the peg’ and with little connection with those who produce it. The sense of relying on the forces of nature and the animate and inanimate elements of God’s creation has largely gone. In Victorian times this was not so. The drift from the countryside had just begun. The tasks to which people are now directed in industry were still co-creative with God in shaping human life. Where then does this direct us with regard to ecclesiastical buildings and their relationship to the liturgy? Sacraments are notable for taking the ordinary things of life – water, bread and wine – and allowing them to be transparent mediators of the divine.
A brief reflection on sacramentality itself is illuminating. Holding together a balanced understanding of the mediation of divinity to humanity requires a combination of revealed and natural theology. Barthians may disagree with this assertion, but catholic Christianity has always wanted to hold together an epistemology with roots in revealed and natural theology. This in itself has implications for word and sacrament in the liturgy. It implies that sacramentality is an essential constituent of Christian worship and liturgical practice. There is debate between traditions about both the nature of sacraments and their number, but generally not about their part in the tradition. Odo Casel’s mystery theology roots the sacraments in the history or narrative of salvation. 5
Sacrament and sacramentality have been stretched or extended beyond simply the seven sacraments or indeed in more Protestant circles the two dominical sacraments. In a notable sermon Austin Farrer referred to priests (and presumably by implication to deacons and bishops) as ‘Walking Sacraments’.
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More systematically, in his classic analysis of ecclesiology, Avery Dulles, following Schillebeeckx and others, talks of ‘the church as sacrament’. So he writes: [W]here the church as sacrament is present, the grace of God will not be absent. That grace, seeking its appropriate form of expression – as grace inevitably does – will impel men to prayer, confession, worship, and other acts whereby the church externally realizes its essence.
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[S]omething of the church as sign will be present whenever the grace of God is effectively at work.
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As a divine-human institution the church is about people, so Dulles notes: Since sacramentality by its very nature calls for active participation, only those who belong to the church, and actively help to constitute it as a sign, share fully in its reality as a sacrament.
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This understanding of the nature of the church has become an important element in the agreed statements of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission: The Holy Spirit uses the church as the means through which the Word of God is proclaimed afresh, the sacraments are celebrated, and the people of God receive pastoral oversight, so that the life of the Gospel is manifested in its members.
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This section of the agreed statement on sacramentality begins its final paragraph noting: The sacramental nature of the church as sign, instrument and foretaste of communion is especially manifest in the common celebration of the eucharist.
It concludes: [I]t is sent out to realise, manifest and extend that communion in the world.
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The notion of the sacramental is much broader than that, though. A friendship can be sacramental, a sunset or a rainbow can be sacramental, a view can be sacramental, a person saying sorry can be sacramental. George wouldn’t use that kind of language, but it is about seeing signs of God’s presence in the ordinary things of everyday life, and not just church things.
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This may feel to be a fairly loose use of theological language, but it certainly implies a broader use of the sacramental. So, if such sacramentality is true of the Church itself then, what might be said of the buildings in which the sacramental community meets and in which the sacraments are celebrated? This question received a fulsome answer from the Cambridge Camden Society. Two key ‘Ecclesiologists’, Benjamin Webb and John Mason Neale translated a thirteenth-century manual of symbolism by William Durandus, the Rationale Divinorum Officiorum. They produced a lengthy introduction to this, setting out clearly their agenda: We assent, then, that Sacramentality is that characteristic which so strikingly distinguishes ancient ecclesiastical architecture from our own. By this word we mean to convey the idea that, by the outward and visible form, is signified something inward and spiritual … This Christian reality, we call SACRAMENTALITY; investing that symbolical truthfulness, which it has in every true expression, with a greater force and holiness both from the greater purity of truth which it embodies.
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In floreate manner elsewhere in their journal, The Ecclesiologist, they wrote: A church is not as it should be, till every window is filled with stained glass, till every inch is covered with encaustic tiles, till there is a rood screen glowing with the brightest tints and with gold, nay if we would arrive at perfection, the roof and walls must be painted and frescoed.
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The Camden Society and its followers saw church architecture as a vocation and not simply a profession. The devoutness of Scott which we encountered earlier was there in so many architects of this era. John Loughborough Pearson commented: ‘My business is to see what will bring people soonest to their knees.’ Charles Eamer Kempe, the stained glass artist, had considered ordination. In the twentieth century the tradition continued with Sir Ninian Comper and Stephen Dykes Bower.
The nineteenth-century ecclesiological enthusiasts understandably did not take everyone with them. Nevertheless, if we skim off some of the most exaggerated froth and make proper links with sacramental theology, we can still argue for the sacramentality of church buildings. What was true, in a curious and more secular way, of railway stations, is essential to these places built for the worship of Almighty God. They are imbued with a true sacramentality, hence our title here ‘Building sacraments’. There is within that title a deliberate allusiveness. Sacramentality, however, is not somehow restricted to the gothic style. Instead, to talk of building sacraments or of buildings having a sacramental nature, is to say something about all buildings built for the worship of Almighty God through Jesus Christ. What might this mean in practice?
Just a momentary reversion to our discussion of railway termini may help us to address this question. We noted three key issues about the great railway stations of the Victorian age. First, the beauty of the building was an essential starting point. Second, the buildings were designed with a proper sense of purpose and function and with a clear concern for their humanity. Third, the buildings pointed beyond themselves and said something of the society within which they were embedded. If this is true of a secular building it is more profoundly true of a church. Beauty, setting and purpose are all crucial.
Let us begin with the setting. The parish system which has been endemic to Western Christendom means that the local church is not only embedded but also focal within its own local community. So, for example, Norfolk has more mediaeval church buildings than any other area within Western Europe. It is said that at any point one can normally see at least four or five church buildings. Towers and spires across Norfolk help define the landscape and hint at the divine. Mediaeval demography is still made manifest by church buildings even where villages have disappeared. A similar reflection can be made of our towns and cities where the architecture of the church often makes the building visible from a distance.
Settings vary, however, and this is very clear when comparing cathedrals and parish churches. So St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh, is set spaciously in the elegant layout of Adam’s classical ‘new town’ as if it was designed to be there, even though it came far later. Salisbury Cathedral sits among the billiard table-like greens of the Close with its majestic cloister even though it was never built to be inhabited by monks. Norwich Cathedral and its Close occupy the same footprint given to them by the Benedictine Herbert de Losinga just before the turn of the twelfth century. Truro Cathedral is set hugger-mugger among the old houses of that tiny city, packed in to breathe an atmosphere similar to the cathedrals of France. How churches relate to their wider community is essential to the healthy life of these sacramental buildings. Even the positioning of paths and the relationship of paved to grassy areas is crucial to patterns of life in each place. British Home Stores erected a glass-clad building in Wakefield’s Kirkgate which reflects almost perfectly the cathedral opposite – so there are in virtual terms two cathedrals. Perhaps that was intended? A similar set of comparisons could be made with the settings of parish churches in villages, towns and cities. The placing of a church, then, says something of how its founders, architects and community understood the sacramental significance of the building.
Norwich Cathedral is an instructive case in point. Here in the eleventh century, the founder, Herbert de Losinga, a Benedictine monk and one of the new Norman overlords, albeit a priest and bishop, was clear about his task. As with the move of the see from Dorchester to Lincoln and Selsey to Chichester, the Normans set their cathedrals in key centres of trade; here the move was from Thetford to Norwich. Herbert built the cathedral across the main east--west/north--south intersection in this already thriving Saxon city. Still today one can see how these main thoroughfares were diverted by the construction of a great new basilica. Indeed it is a basilica with a cruciform plan. 16 The presbytery is basilican in shape and, uniquely in northern Europe, the bishop’s throne is high up in the apse mimicking the role of the Roman prefects. Over the north door he placed an effigy of St Felix. Felix was a second-generation monk from Rome via Canterbury and the key Roman founder of the Church in East Anglia. The pulpitum marks the boundary of the monk’s church, the monastic choir. The long nave and the large triforium (or tribune) galleries gave ample scope for processions with the nave doubling up as the ‘people’s church’ and even something of a mediaeval hall for public events. The monastic community, with the bishop as the abbot and the prior running the church, was one chamber of the new beating heart of this Norman city where the castle defined the nature of the other more secular ventricle. The cathedral was a sacramental sign of God’s kingdom at the heart of the city and region.
But what of the design of the buildings themselves? Churches, of course, began in private houses, gathering small local communities. This was a common pattern for the first three Christian centuries. Following Constantine’s baptizing of the Imperium into the Christian faith, buildings were built ‘fit’ for purpose as we now say, using that rather ugly cliché. The key pattern followed was a secular model. As we see happening later in Norwich, it was basilical and based on the public hall used by the local Roman prefect. The Aula Palatina in Trier survives and for a time was a Christian church. The pattern is rectangular with an eastern apse. The bishop usurps the place of the prefect at the centre of the apse and his chapter or familia surround him. Exactly this pattern is still there untouched in the basilica of St Sabina in Rome on the Aventine Hill; even the bishop’s chair remains. Herbert de Losinga in designing his presbytery in Norwich Cathedral followed this pattern precisely. The Norman overlords made clear their oversight in secular and ecclesiastical affairs alike.
In this past generation this basilical pattern has been rediscovered. Architects Robert Maguire and Keith Murray 17 pioneered this in the new parish church of St Paul, Bow Common in East London, and also in the monastic chapel at Malling Abbey in Kent – here, the configuration has been slightly marred by the need to intrude four reinforced concrete columns to support the concrete roof which was threatening to fail. Richard Giles’s celebrated reordering of St Thomas’s Huddersfield follows this same pattern as does his remodelling of the episcopal cathedral in Philadelphia.
Later, different patterns developed. In abbeys and cathedrals where there was the shrine of a saint, the apse might be expanded into a broader rectangular chapel for the shrine. 18 There might even be an ambulatory so that pilgrims could peer over into the ‘holy of holies’ which housed the saint’s relics. At Lincoln, on the floor of the east end, successive developments are traced within the expanded space, provided by the building of the Angel Choir. Later, cruciform churches with their familiar transepts began to take over from plain basilicas. In parish churches, the apse often became a squared-off sanctuary concluding a longer chancel. Sometimes the actual architecture of a building speaks sacramentally and theologically. Take Canterbury Cathedral. Yevele’s great perpendicular nave is womb-like and speaks of creation. The crossing and ‘martyrdom’ speak of incarnation and redemption. The end of one’s eastward pilgrimage in the Trinity Chapel speaks of the Holy Spirit and of the Communion of the Saints. Hints of the Trinity, then, are also there. Canterbury sits, we believe, on the site of Augustine’s first cathedral, so it speaks too of apostolic history.
The reorderings at Mirfield have also been deliberately designed to make the monastic church of the Community of the Resurrection into a pilgrimage church. 19 The structure of these buildings speaks of the faith expressed in the liturgy. Both Canterbury and Norwich have screens. Screens mean that new vistas will eventually reveal themselves on the journey. At Mirfield the nave screen has gone but still in the upper church the chapel of the Resurrection takes one on to a transcendent place. Both Canterbury and Norwich Cathedrals are used for pilgrimage and stational liturgies; the buildings themselves are often the focus of pilgrimage by individuals and groups.
Recent liturgical and architectural developments have offered some interesting contrasts. Take four modern cathedrals: Coventry, the Anglican and Roman Catholic Cathedrals in Liverpool, and the Roman Catholic Cathedral at Clifton in Bristol. Coventry Cathedral, radical and modern in many of its features and artwork, in structure feels like the last of the mediaeval buildings. It just predated the impact of the liturgical movement. At Liverpool, the Anglican cathedral with its vast central space, while being designed fifty years before Coventry, allows for an unexpected flexibility. Its sister cathedral at the other end of Hope Street opted for a circular design with a central altar. Such a pattern, especially with westward eucharistic celebration, emphasizes the sacramental gathering of the Christian community as it celebrates the Eucharist: the family is gathered round the altar. This too, however, has its disadvantages. Some people are still placed behind the altar; also, everyone faces inwards. This neither presents a clear missionary view of the Church looking outwards or even forwards as with eastward-facing celebration, nor is it easy for the outsider to penetrate the circle. The Roman Catholic cathedral at Clifton opted instead for a quadrant floor plan which avoids the problems of a circular design. There are contrasts in new churches too. So, in West Yorkshire, the new churches of St Peter, Gildersome, and St Catherine, Sandal, have followed the Clifton model. In both cases an immersion font is part of the plan. The font at Sandal is over-dominant but challengingly placed at the entrance of the church; the font at Gildersome is in better proportion to the size of the building, but placed at the side and feels to be more of an afterthought. Both buildings have style and make good use of daylight. The quadrant design speaks well sacramentally, with the community gathering round the altar, but still with a sense of the church building pointing forward, and thus including both a transcendent thrust together with a feeling of being on a missionary journey. It also feels more open to the external world; people can slip in and feel part of the gathered community.
Reordering also requires that the liturgy and the structure of the building work together to allow the building to echo its full sacramental value. How is the nature and mission of the Church, as the Body of Christ, expressed through the building and its setting within the community? Put in a more general manner, the question is – how is one best equipped effectively to ‘build sacraments’, that is, to build anew or to reorder a church building so that its sacramental value is both clarified and enhanced? The Cathedrals Fabric Commission for England 20 has sought to answer this question using a model first used in the realm of conservation.
Since the late 1990s English Heritage and the other environmental and heritage agencies 21 have introduced an element of good practice for all who are responsible for the maintenance and development of heritage buildings. Such individuals and agencies are recommended to produce a conservation plan. This is a rigorous and expensive exercise since it requires the services of other specialized professions. Nonetheless, despite the energy and expense there is much merit to the process. Church buildings are extraordinary treasuries of our inheritance, almost one might say palimpsests where each generation has written over the canvas of others.
But alongside conservation, we should be still more rigorous, focused and imaginative in relating the liturgy to the development of church buildings. So in pursuit of this, the Cathedrals Fabric Commission now recommends that cathedrals should also develop a ‘liturgical plan’, the intention of which is to produce a clear rationale and understanding of the building, to seek integrity and not approach the building piecemeal. The plan should include a clear circulation pattern and there should be clarity about how visitors and pilgrims are to walk around the building, so that the mystery or narrative of the gospel is encountered through the sacramental patterning of the building. It should also show an awareness as to how a church building, as sacrament, is expressed in the liturgy. The plan should also show an awareness as to how a church building, as sacrament, is expressed in the liturgy. The Roman Catholic rite for the blessing and dedication of the church is instructive here. At one point in the service it notes: We now anoint this altar and this building. May God in his power make them holy, visible signs of the mystery of Christ and his Church.
Then later on: May it (the church) be a place of salvation and sacrament where your gospel of peace is proclaimed and your holy mysteries celebrated.
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