We now have many years’ proof of the vandalism visited on the Church by modernist architectural theories and church re-ordering. And yet, still the bishops push throughunpopular and destructive re-orderings. Journalist and writer, Moyra Doorly, has launched the Ouch! Campaign (Outcry against Ugly Churches) to fight back against these iconoclastic trends. Here, she introduces Ouch! and then goes on to pinpoint the relativist fallacy underlying so much contemporary church building and re-ordering.
There has been a great building disaster – a disaster in church building. It goes deeper than the question of whether modern churches are ugly or banal, as popular sentiment would maintain. The appearance of the modern church building is only a symptom. The problem is that today’s churches are built according to the principles of relativist space.
The aim of the Ouch! campaign is to identify the spirit of relativism that has become incorporated into the very fabric of today’s church buildings and at the same time argue for a return to traditional architectural and liturgical forms. Only this re-turning can counter the relativist spirit of the age which has brought about both the dismantling of the form of the church building and the collapse of the liturgy.
Contemporary architectural and liturgical forms are earth-bound and inward-looking. Implicit in these forms is a denial of the transcendent and of the concept of sacred space. The spirit of relativism has emptied churches across the world. The first step in turning the tide is the ending of the unprecedented practice of Mass facing the people.
Mass facing the people is a result of the paradox of living in a relativist universe. In the modern search for unlimited freedom, space has been liberated from all constraints and this has emptied the universe of meaning, leaving no direction to turn other than inwards. The ending of the practice of Mass facing the people is the first and crucial step towards reclaiming both the transcendent vision, which turns the gaze outwards, and the concept of sacred space, which gives meaning and direction to what is out there and beyond. These have all but been eradicated from the contemporary universe and from the modern church building.
The Ouch! campaign can therefore be summed up in three words – turn again, Father!
Everything is relative?
It has been said that the modern age began in 1915 with the publication of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. The equations defined a universe in which the absolutes no longer applied, the traditions were superfluous and objective truth became subservient to subjective reality. The theories were an answer to the already well-known and often-repeated Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 which showed that light does not behave in accordance with Newton’s absolute laws of motion. Einstein’s revolutionary proposal was that each individual occupies his or her own space and time in which the speed of light is always constant for that person. From then on, one individual’s reality would be as true as any other; one person’s version of events as real as the next.
Objective truth or authority cannot be acknowledged in a universe in which all versions of reality are equally valid because to do so would imply a standard against which opposing viewpoints might be measured. There can be no absolute values in a relativist universe. What may be right for an individual in certain circumstances may not be right for an individual in different circumstances. ‘Everything is relative’, is one of the mantras of the age.
The principles of relativist space have defined both the form of the contemporary universe and the modernist style of architecture, which has been adopted by the Church. Relativist space is homogeneous, direction-less and value-free. In the relativist universe it’s the same everywhere you look because nowhere has any more or less significance than anywhere else. Relativist space is empty of meaning because it’s up to the observer to give significance to what he or she sees.
You could travel for an eternity through the infinite space of the contemporary universe and the end you reach might be no more significant than the place you started from. All possibilities and unlimited freedoms exist out there but which one do you choose, which way do you go. In the relativist universe there’s no particular place to go and nowhere special to look. The relativist universe is vast, empty and meaningless from here to its infinitely distant ends.
From celestial realm to human psyche
The abode of God, the angels and the saints was once the celestial realm which lay beyond the orbit of the Moon. But in the modern age the heavens have been emptied of the divine. There is no actual place for God in the relativist universe, no location for Heaven or hell, nowhere for the angels and saints. The map of the heavens has been rubbed out, the signposts have been taken down and the pathways obscured. There is only one truly sacred place in the relativist universe - the human psyche. The psychoanalysts have turned God and his angels and saints into archetypes, into personifications of the unconscious forces which originate from within the human being. In the modern age it is within the human individual that the sacred is to be found and in the human unconscious that the path to the divine must be sought.
Bauhaus and God’s house
The Bauhaus School of design was founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany by the architect Walter Gropius to create a clean, new architecture for a clean, new future. Many of the big names of modernism taught there, such as the artists Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Since the traditions were considered obsolete, all the talk was of ‘starting from zero’. A universal aesthetic was to be found through the use of honestly expressed materials, geometry and mass production. The styles were redundant. All forms of embellishment and decoration were out.
Just as relativity had helped free universal space from the absolutes, so architectural space was to be liberated from traditional concepts. New construction methods employing steel and reinforced concrete allowed greater spans to be achieved without so much solid masonry. Space could now ‘flow’ because there was no longer any need to restrict an activity to an area enclosed by heavy walls. Sliding doors and partitions would allow activity areas, or zones, to be closed off and opened up again as the need arose.
Buildings were no longer to be considered in terms of connected but individually defined spaces, but as an expression of unbounded, non-hierarchical space, space which could be multi-functional and flexible because nothing need be fixed or absolute. The old formalities were lifted; the boundaries were dissolved; open-plan was born.
Lightweight curtain walling and extensive areas of glazing would help lighten the perimeters of buildings and visually connect their interiors with the exterior. Raising buildings off the ground on columns, or ‘piloti’ would allow the space around them to flow without restriction or limitation. Abandoning the traditional patterns of streets, squares, avenues and courtyards, etc., would liberate the city, and buildings would no longer need to fit into an imposed ground plan.
The search was on for the elemental purity to be found in the primary geometric forms - circles, squares and triangles, and the primary colours - red, blue and yellow. The belief was in the universality of these forms and that paring everything down to these basic elements would release a universal truth. Searching for nameless essences has been an activity seriously undertaken in the modernist age. A set of monochrome canvases takes on new significance if they are really a meditation on the theme of yellow. A single note played by a symphony orchestra then becomes a contemplation of that one sound, a study on that one note. Colours and sounds have vibrations and by tuning into them their truth can be known.
The dematerialising of the arts and the dissolving of the boundaries between them was cited as evidence that a new epoch was dawning. The aim was to shatter the forms completely and merge them into one another. Plastic art and plastic architecture, in which nothing is fixed and nothing is permanent, were the goal. Space, light, colour, sound and materials would express the one underlying truth that unites everything.
During the search for the essence of things, the appearances could be discarded. The emptied out minimalism of the modernist style spread across the world, and a universe that had been stripped of meaning found its expression in an architecture that had been stripped of style and everything unnecessary. Modernism was trumpeted as the style for a new dawn, the new epoch that had begun. But the sun rose on the Birmingham Bullring which is scheduled for demolition, on the Peckham Estate which is being demolished, and on Liverpool Cathedral which should be demolished.
How churches became temples
One of the most frequent complaints people make about modern church buildings is that they don’t look like churches, which in some quarters may only be evidence of a sentimental attachment to outmoded concepts and might elicit a response like, ‘But we’ve been freed from the limitations of traditional forms, so who’s to say what churches should look like?’
But this complaint points to a devastating fact. The twentieth century saw a great deal of church building, most of it in the modernist style. The fact that the results are generally unloved is bad enough. What is worse is that in spite of all the building activity that went on, hardly a church was built. The modern church building doesn’t look like a church because it hardly is a church. The modern church building is, rather, a temple to the spirit of the age.
The Church today worships in a relativist universe and the contemporary church building reflects this, both in its interior and exterior. Inside, the typical new church appears as one single space that can be taken in at a glance. Gone, or greatly diminished, are the distinctions between the sanctuary and nave and between the nave and narthex. Gone is the hierarchy of spaces created by these distinctions and all sense of movement and progression from the world towards God. The interior of the church building today reflects the unbounded and infinite emptiness of today’s value-free universe.
The modern church building is set in a cosmic context that denies the existence of the sacred. Sacred space requires that boundaries be created and distinctions drawn between places of greater and lesser significance. The concept of a place set apart, a holy place, is alien to the relativist spirit that is embodied in the architectural style of the age. The traditional form of the church building is considered outmoded and has been blown apart.
As a consequence, the ‘appearances’ have also been stripped away, with the superfluous being disposed of to reveal the so-called essentials. Statues, carvings and wall paintings have been removed and decoration and embellishment have been thrown out. The aim is a pure and functional aesthetic that has been stripped down to the bare brickwork, the rough concrete, the unpainted wood.
Circles are also favoured in contemporary churches. The priest faces the people, creating a closed, circular arrangement, and the sanctuary and altar have been pushed forward so that the people can gather around and take part. But circles direct the attention inwards, which is the only direction to look in a relativist universe that is empty of any objective truth or reality out there.
Back to the early Church?
Church design today is said to recapture the simplicity and sense of community experienced by the first Christians. Above all, people should feel at home. A movement in the 1970s went so far as to promote the non-church building and called for churches that looked like fire stations or community centres. Some said that church buildings weren’t necessary at all and that open fields or friends’ sitting rooms would do just as well. The first Christians met in each others’ houses, after all. Churches needn’t stand out from the library or the post office. Their exteriors should be designed to downplay the significance of the church as a building. From the street, the message must be, ‘There is nothing special here’.
The result of all this has been a great building disaster, one of the greatest building disasters in the history of the Church. For nearly two thousand years, church design evolved as the sensibilities and tastes of the centuries changed. But while the romanesque, the medieval and the baroque might display significant aesthetic and stylistic differences, it wasn’t until the twentieth century that concepts of space changed fundamentally and drastically enough to shatter the spatial principles determining the form of the church building and its relationship to the universe.
It is often claimed that the recent liturgical changes represent an attempt to get back to the worship of the early Church. But discarding nearly twenty centuries of tradition and style in order to emulate the purity and simplicity of a much earlier, uncluttered age is a modernist fallacy. It stems from the belief that there was once an ideal time - the time of the first human societies on the plains or in the forest - and that over the millennia these became corrupted and overloaded with unnecessary rules and stifling customs. Accordingly, religion and morality are seen as tools of oppression and liberation from their constraints is the goal so that the innocence and togetherness of the first human communities can be recaptured.
Hierarchical not relativist
It was Aristotle who proposed the division between ‘nature’ – which was composed of the four elements, air, fire, earth and water – and ‘sky’ – which was of an entirely different substance, aether. And it was the astronomer Ptolemy of Alexandria, who first mapped out the planetary orbits, showing a universe of concentric spheres.
This was the universe known by the first Christians. Just as sacred buildings can be ‘read’ as maps or models of the spiritual heavens, so the physical universe of an age can be understood by studying the sacred buildings of that age. The universe known by the early Church lasted right through the Middle Ages until it was dismantled by Copernicus and Galileo. It was quite unlike the relativist universe the Church today has to contend with, and would not have inspired inward-looking church buildings where people ‘gather round the altar’. A vertical, hierarchical and directional universe does not call people to gather round, but to reach out and move forward. The actions of gathering round and moving forward are mutually exclusive.
An aspirational universe
The medieval universe was both vertical and directional. People knew where they were and they knew that up and down really mattered. This was an aspirational universe. The medieval cathedral was a microcosm of the medieval universe. Its elaborate west façade emphasised that the pilgrim was entering another realm, synonymous with the celestial realm that lay beyond the orbit of the moon. Symbolically the world lay in the west and was outside the door just as the Earth was outside the Heavens and occupied the lowest place in the universe, in keeping with man’s fallen nature.
Once inside, the narthex or porch functioned as an intermediate place, to allow for adjustment and for earthly business to be conducted under Heaven’s gaze. Then the pilgrim passed into the nave, the main body of the church, and then towards the sanctuary which was shielded behind an elaborately carved and decorated rood screen, so profound were the mysteries enacted there. This, the most sacred place on earth, was the preserve of the clergy.
Whether in a cathedral, a monastic chapel or parish church, this progression of defined spaces embodied the aspirational universe of the age. To pass through the door of the cathedral or parish church was to journey from the profane to the sacred, from the fallen world to the highest Heaven.
A failed theory
Evicting God from the universe so that men can become gods has been a modernist project. In such a universe the church building cannot be tolerated and a great many have been almost pulled to pieces. But the relativist universe is only a theory.
A great deal of effort has gone into the denial of the transcendent vision and the dismantling of sacred space in recent decades. But if the architecture of relativist space can be rejected in the secular sphere it can surely be rejected by the Church.
Today there is much talk of the need for evangelisation and great cathedrals and modest parish churches alike have the power to draw people to them. Unfortunately, cathedrals and churches built in recent decades tend to have the opposite effect. Many atheists used to say that whatever they felt about religion, it was impossible not to admire church architecture, art and music. Now there is hardly a Catholic who can admire (modern) church architecture, art and music. That is why the Ouch! campaign has been launched – to begin to make good the destruction of our sacred spaces.
Ouch! is, at present, a one person campaign. The aim is to raise the above argument through articles and the occasional Ouch! bulletin. Any suggestions for how the campaign can be developed would be welcome. Please write to Moyra Doorly via the LMS office (e-mail).
[Taken from the Latin Mass Society's February 2003 Newsletter.]