Religion for Atheists

IX

Architecture

1.

Given how ugly huge stretches of the modern world have become, one might wonder whether it really matters what things around us look like, whether the design of office towers, factories, depots and docks truly merits the consideration of anyone beyond those who directly own or use these structures. The implicit answer must be no. It is surely foolish, precious and ultimately dangerous to be overly receptive to whatever is in front of our eyes; otherwise, we would end up unhappy most of the time.

So far as the law is concerned, property development is just another branch of private enterprise. What counts is who owns a piece of land, not who is forced to stare at, and then suffer from, what has been built on it. The legal system is not geared to recognize the sensitivities of passers-by. To complain that a tower or motel offends the eye is not a category of distress that contemporary planners are skilful at honouring or addressing. In its tolerance of landscapes which generally leave us no option but to look at our feet, the modern world is resolutely, and in a secular sense, Protestant.

When Protestantism took hold in northern Europe in the first half of the sixteenth century, it manifested an extreme hostility towards the visual arts, attacking Catholics for their complicated and richly decorated buildings. ‘For anyone to arrive at God the Creator, he needs only Scripture as his Guide and Teacher,’ insisted John Calvin, giving voice to the anti-aesthetic sentiment of many in the new denomination. What mattered to Protestants was the written word. This, rather than elaborate architecture, would be enough to lead us to God. Devotion could be fostered by a Bible in a bare room just as well as it could in the nave of a jewel-encrusted cathedral. Indeed, there was a risk that through their sensory richness, sumptuous buildings could distract us, making us prefer beauty over holiness. It was no coincidence that Protestant reformers presided over repeated incidents of aesthetic desecration, during which statues were smashed, paintings burnt and alabaster angels brutally separated from their wings.

(illustration credit 9.1)

Relief statues in the Cathedral of St Martin, Utrecht, attacked during campaigns of Reformation iconoclasm in the sixteenth century. (illustration credit 9.2)

These same reformers meanwhile constrained their own architects to the design of sober and plain hangars which could shelter the members of a congregation from the rain while they read the Bible, but would leave them undistracted by any thoughts of the building they were in.

It was not long before Catholicism was goaded into a response. Following the Council of Trent in 1563, the papacy issued a decree insisting that, contrary to the impious suggestions of the Protestants, cathedrals, sculptures and paintings were in fact integral to the task of ensuring that ‘the people could be instructed and confirmed in the habit of remembering, and continually revolving in mind the articles of faith’. Far from being a diversion, sacred architecture was a reminder of the sacramental truths: it was a devotional poem written in stone, wood and fragments of coloured glass. To drive home the argument, the Catholic Church inaugurated a massive programme of construction and decoration. Alongside the pale, featureless halls of the Reformation, there now arose a new generation of ecclesiastical buildings intended to breathe passionate emotion back into a threatened faith. Ceilings were overlaid with images of heaven, niches were crowded with saints and walls were affixed with heavy stucco mouldings, above frescoes depicting miraculous incidents in Jesus’s ministry.

Left: Chapel at Schloss Hartenfels, Torgau, Germany, 1544. Right: Chiesa del Gesù, Rome, 1584. (illustration credit 9.3)

To derive a sense of the aesthetic gulf that had opened up between the two branches of Christianity, we need only compare the sobriety of the earliest extant Protestant chapel, at Schloss Hartenfels, in Torgau, Germany (1544), with the ecstasies of the nave vault (‘the triumph of the name of Jesus’) of Rome’s Chiesa del Gesù (1584).

2.

In arguing for the importance of architecture, Catholicism was making a point, half touching, half alarming, about the way we function. It was suggesting that we suffer from a heightened sensitivity to what is around us, that we will notice and be affected by everything our eyes light upon, a vulnerability to which Protestantism has frequently preferred to remain blind or indifferent. Catholicism was making the remarkable allegation that we need to have good architecture around us in order to grow into, and remain, good people.

The foundations of Catholicism’s respect for beauty can be traced back to the work of the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus, who in the third century AD made an explicit connection between beauty and goodness. For Plotinus, the quality of our surroundings counts because what is beautiful is far from being idly, immorally or self-indulgently ‘attractive’. Beauty alludes to, and can remind us about, virtues like love, trust, intelligence, kindness and justice; it is a material version of goodness. If we study beautiful flowers, columns or chairs, Plotinus’s philosophy proposed, we will detect in them properties that carry direct analogies with moral qualities and will serve to reinforce these in our hearts via our eyes.

Along the way, Plotinus’s argument served to emphasize how seriously one would have to consider ugliness. Far from being merely unfortunate, ugliness was recategorized as a subset of evil. Ugly buildings were shown to contain equivalents of the very flaws that revolt us at an ethical level. No less than people, ugly buildings can be described using terms like brutal, cynical, self-satisfied or sentimental. Furthermore, we are no less vulnerable to their suggestions than we are to the behaviour of ill-intentioned acquaintances. Both give licence to our most sinister sides; both can subtly encourage us to be bad.

Not coincidentally, surely, it was the Protestant countries in Europe which first witnessed the extremes of ugliness that would become so typical of the modern world. Manchester, Leeds and other cities like them subjected their inhabitants to hitherto unparalleled degrees of unsightliness, as if they were testing to the full John Calvin’s contention that architecture and art have no role to play in the condition of our souls and that a godly life can therefore satisfactorily unfold in a slum tenement with a view on to an open-cast coal mine, just so long as there is a Bible to hand.

This ideology did not pass unchallenged — and Catholicism once again had a hand in resisting it. When the nineteenth-century architect Augustus Pugin, a devout Catholic, considered the new landscapes of industrial England, he attacked them not merely for their appearance, but also for their power to destroy the human spirit. In two contrasting illustrations, he showed a typical English town, first as he imagined it had looked in the fifteenth century under an aesthetically sensitive Catholic regime and then, four centuries later, as it was in his own day, grossly blighted by the oppressive workhouses, mills and factories of the Protestant order. As Pugin saw it, Protestantism had directly promoted the reckless, hugely influential (and, for developers, hugely convenient) notion that one might destroy a city’s appearance without in any way damaging the souls of its inhabitants.

It would be easy enough to accuse Pugin of gross partisanship and far-fetched aestheticism, but the more daunting and anxiety-producing possibility is that he was essentially right, if not in his attack on Protestants, then at least in his underlying assessment of the impact that visual forms can have on us. What if our minds are susceptible to more than just the books we read? What if we are also influenced by the houses, hospitals and factories around us? Might we not hence have good reason to mount protests against ugliness — and, despite a thousand obstacles, strive to put up buildings that could advance a case for goodness through their beauty?

3.

In the secular parts of the world, it is common, even among unbelievers, in fact especially among them, to lament the passing of the great days of religious architecture. It is common to hear those who have no interest in the doctrines of religion admit to a nostalgia for ecclesiastical buildings: for the texture of stone walls on hillside chapels, for the profiles of spires glimpsed across darkening fields and perhaps for the sheer ambition involved in putting up a temple to house a book (Judaism) or a shrine to one of the rear molars of an enlightened saint (Theravada Buddhism). But these nostalgic musings are always cut short with a reluctant acknowledgement that an end to faith must inevitably mean an end to the possibility of temples.

Might ugliness harm our souls? The Catholic city (top) versus the Protestant one (above) from Augustus Pugin, Contrasts (1836). (illustration credit 9.4)

Behind this assumption lies the implicit idea that where there are no more gods or deities, there can be nothing left to celebrate — and hence nothing more to emphasize through the medium of architecture.

Yet upon examination it in no way logically follows that an end to our belief in sacred beings must mean an end to our attachment to values or to our desire to provide a home for them through architecture. In the absence of gods, we still retain ethical beliefs which are in need of being solidified and celebrated. Any of those things which we revere but are inclined too often to overlook might justifiably merit the founding of its own ‘temple’. There could be temples to spring and temples to kindness, temples to serenity and temples to reflection, temples to forgiveness and temples to self-knowledge.

What might a temple without a god in it look like? Throughout history, religions have been zealous in laying down uniform rules regarding the appearance of their buildings. For medieval Christians, all cathedrals were expected to have cruciform ground plans, east — west axes, water basins for baptisms at the western ends of naves and sanctuaries with altars at their eastern ends. To this day, South-East Asian Buddhists understand that their architectural energy has no option but to be channelled into constructing hemispherical stupas with parasols and circumambulatory terraces.

In the case of secular temples, however, there would be no need to follow such canonical laws. The temples’ only common element would have to be their dedication to promoting virtues essential to the well-being of our souls. But which specific virtues would be honoured in the various venues, and how the idea of them would be successfully conveyed, could be entirely left up to their individual architects and patrons. The priority would be only to define a new typology of building rather than to design particular examples of it.

Nevertheless, to demonstrate the approach, we could outline a handful of possible themes for secular temples, along with a few architectural strategies to complement them.

— A Temple to Perspective

Considering how much of our lives we spend exaggerating our own importance and the magnitude of the insults and reversals which we suffer as a result, there could be few more pressing priorities for a new temple architecture than answering our need for perspective.

We seem unable to resist overstating every aspect of ourselves: how long we are on the planet for, how much it matters what we achieve, how rare and unfair are our professional failures, how rife with misunderstandings are our relationships, how deep are our sorrows. Melodrama is individually always the order of the day.

Religious architecture can perform a critical function in relation to this egoism (ultimately as painful as it is mistaken), because of its capacity to adjust our impressions of our physical — and as a consequence also our psychological — size, by playing with dimensions, materials, sounds and sources of illumination. In certain cathedrals that are vast in scale or hewn out of massive, antique-looking stones, or in others that are dark save for a single shaft of light filtering in from a distant oculus or silent but for the occasional sound of water dripping from a great height into a deep pool, we may feel that we are being introduced, with unusual and beguiling grace, to a not unpleasant sense of our own insignificance.

To be made to ‘feel small’ is, to be sure, a painful daily reality of the human playground. But to be made to feel small by something mighty, noble, accomplished and intelligent is to have wisdom presented to us along with a measure of delight. There are churches that can induce us to surrender our egoism without in any way humiliating us. In them we can set aside our ordinary concerns and take on board (in a way we never dare to do when we are under direct fire from other humans) our own nullity and mediocrity. We can survey ourselves as if from a distance, no longer offended by the wounds inflicted on our self-esteem, feeling newly indifferent to our eventual fate, generous towards the universe and open-minded about its course.

The advantages of being made to feel small: Tadao Ando, Christian Church of the Light, Ibaraki, Japan, 1989. (illustration credit 9.5)

Such feelings may visit us in non-ecclesiastical buildings too: in a massive, narrow tower with charred timber walls, in a concrete void extending five storeys underground or in a room lined with stones bearing the fossilized imprints of minuscule shelled ammonites which partook of life in the tropical waters of Laurentia (modern-day eastern North America and Greenland) during the Palaeozoic Age, some 300 million years before our first recognizable ancestor had the wit to stand upright or to fashion a canoe.

A new Temple to Perspective might end up playing with some of the same ideas as are explored in science museums and observatories. There might be items of palaeontological and geological interest in the walls, and astronomical instruments in the ceilings and roof. And yet there would be important distinctions between these two types of institution at the level of ambition. Like a science museum, a Temple to Perspective would hope to push us towards an awareness (always under threat in daily life) of the scale, age and complexity of the universe, but unlike a science museum, it would not bother to pretend that the point of the exercise was to give us a grounding in a scientific education. It would not in the end matter very much whether visitors ever mastered the differences between, say, the Triassic and Cambrian eras, the detailed explanations of which are often so painfully laboured over by museum curators and yet so likely to have been forgotten by most of their audience by the time they reach the car park. This would be science roughly handled and presented in the interests of stirring awe rather than in the name of promoting knowledge, science leaned upon for its therapeutic, perspective-giving capacity rather than for its factual value.

A Temple to Perspective whose structure would represent the age of the earth, with each centimetre of height equating to 1 million years. Measuring 46 metres in all, the tower would feature, at its base, a tiny band of gold a mere millimetre thick, standing for mankind’s time on earth. (illustration credit 9.6)

— A Temple to Reflection

It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilization’s most important achievements has come under unprecedented assault. We are almost never far from a machine that guarantees us a mesmerizing and libidinous escape from reality. The feelings and thoughts which we have omitted to experience while looking at our screens are left to find their revenge in involuntary twitches and our ever-decreasing ability to fall asleep when we should.

Because we are drawn in architecture to styles which seem to possess some of the qualities we lack in ourselves, it is little wonder that we should be readily seduced by spaces that are purified and free of distraction, and in which stimuli have been reduced to a minimum — places, perhaps, where the view has been carefully framed to take in a few rocks, or the branches of a tree, or a patch of sky, where the walls are solid, the materials are enduring and the only sound to be heard is that of wind or flowing water.

A Temple to Reflection would lend structure and legitimacy to moments of solitude. It would be a simple space, offering visitors little beyond a bench or two, a vista and a suggestion that they set to work on unravelling some of the troubling themes that they have been using their normal activity to suppress.

It is only in the age of the BlackBerry that large numbers of people can finally sense why monasteries were originally invented: Gougane Barra church, County Cork, Ireland, 1879. (illustration credit 9.7)

A place to lie in wait for the shy, elusive insights: a Temple to Reflection. (illustration credit 9.8)

There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it. We can be sure that we have something especially crucial to address when the very notion of being alone grows unbearable. For this reason, religions have always been forceful in recommending that their followers observe periods of solitude, however much discomfort these might at first provoke. A modern Temple to Reflection would follow this philosophy, creating ideally reassuring conditions for contemplation, allowing us to wait in a restful bare room for those rare insights upon which the successful course of our life depends, but which normally run across our distracted minds only occasionally and skittishly like shy deer.

— A Temple for the Genius Loci

Among the more intriguing features of Imperial Roman religion was that it not only provided for the worship of cosmopolitan gods such as Juno and Mars (whose temples could be found all across the empire, from Hadrian’s Wall to the banks of the Euphrates) but also allowed for the reverence of a panoply of local deities, whose personalities reflected the character, either topographical or cultural, of their native regions. These protective spirits, known as ‘genii locorum’, were given temples of their own and developed reputations — which sometimes drew travellers to them from afar — for being able to cure a variety of ailments of the mind and body. The spirits from the coastline south of Naples, for example, were thought to be particularly well suited to the abatement of melancholy, while the genius loci of Colonia Iulia Equestris (modern-day Nyon, on the shore of Lake Geneva) was supposed to have a special talent for consoling those oppressed by the vagaries of political and commercial life.

Like so much else that seems sensible about Roman religion, the tradition of the genius loci was absorbed by Christianity, which made comparable connections between specific localities and their curative powers, though it chose to talk of shrines rather than temples, and of saints instead of spirits. The map of medieval Europe was dotted with holy sites, many of them built upon Roman foundations, which promised to grant the faithful relief from their physical and mental ills via contact with assorted body parts of dead Christian saints.

A Pilgrimage Map of Medieval Europe (illustration credit 9.9)

Altotting, Germany

Staving off the Plague (Virgin Mary)

Bad Munstereifel, Germany

Excessive Fears of Lightning (St Donatus)

Barrios de Colina, Spain

Infertility (San Juan de Ortega)

Buxton, England

Miracle Healings (St Anne)

Chartres, France

Burning Disease (St Anthony)

Conques, France

Soldiers before a Battle (St Foy)

Dubrovnik, Croatia

Throat Problems (St Blaise)

Hereford, England

Palsy (St Ethelbert)

Larchant, France

Madness (St Mathurin)

Lourdes, France

Magical Healing (St Bernadette)

Morcombelake, England

Sore Eyes (St Wite)

Padua, Italy

Lost Things (St Anthony of Padua)

Rome, Italy; Basilica of San Lorenzo

Painful Molar (St Apollonia)

Spoleto, Italy

Unhappily Married Women

(St Rita of Cascia)

Windsor Castle (Royal Chapen England

Headaches (“Good King Henry [VI]”)

The underlying spiritual seriousness of the souvenir industry: a fourteenth-century badge from the shrine of Thomas Becket, in Canterbury. (illustration credit 9.10)

Believers with painful dental issues, for instance, knew to travel to the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Rome, where they could touch the arm bones of St Apollonia, the patron saint of teeth. Unhappily married women went to Umbria to visit the shrine of St Rita of Cascia, patron saint of those with marital problems. Soldiers looking to embolden themselves before battle might commune with the bones of St Foy, kept in a gold-plated reliquary in the abbey-church of Conques, in southwestern France. Women who were having difficulty breast-feeding could find comfort at the Shrine of the Holy Breast Milk in Chartres. And those with excessive lightning phobias were commended to the German town of Bad Münstereifel, where they could lay their hands on the relics of St Donatus, renowned for relieving fears of fire and explosions.

On their arrival at the appropriate shrine, pilgrims would first head for the nearby shops that sold moulded wax models of the troublesome parts of themselves, from legs, ears and breasts to penises and even whole souls (in the form of babies). Once inside the shrines themselves, they would place their effigies on altars, tombs or caskets, kneel in prayer and beg the spirits of the saints for their help.

Afterwards, the pilgrims would repair to souvenir stalls. Following the declaration by the fourth-century theologian Cyril of Jerusalem that handkerchiefs which came into contact with the bodies of the martyrs would forever possess a supernatural power, these stalls had begun to carry plentiful supplies of linens. They also offered small glass vials containing dust from the floors around the saints’ tombs, which could be resorted to for assistance in moments of distress. A Benedictine monk named Guibert of Nogent once reported that a friend who had accidentally swallowed a toad and nearly choked to death was saved by a teaspoonful of dust from the tomb of St Marcel, Bishop of Paris. Most commonly, visitors were invited to acquire finely sculpted lead badges showing the face of the saint whose relics they had come to see. It was said of Louis XI of France, who had stopped in at every notable shrine in his country, that his hat was ‘brim-full of images which he kissed whenever good or bad news arrived’.

Although few of us would today walk a hundred kilometres to seek help for a fear of lightning, travelling nevertheless remains at the heart of many secular ideas of fulfilment. Our trips retain a role in cementing important inner transitions. While we might call them valuable rather than holy, there are places which by virtue of their remoteness, solitude, beauty or cultural richness retain an ability to salve the wounded parts of us.

Unfortunately, we lack any reliable mechanism or method for identifying these rare and curative locations. Here again, as so often when it comes to our emotional needs in the secular world, we miss the structure once provided for us by religions. Travel agents see themselves as being responsible solely for handling logistical matters — booking connecting flights, negotiating discounts on plane tickets and hotel rooms — and make little effort to help customers find their way to destinations that might bring a targeted benefit to their inner selves. We need psychoanalytically astute travel agents who could carefully analyse our deficiencies and match us up with parts of the world which would have the power to heal us — agents who would send us on travels to connect up with those qualities which we esteem but cannot generate in sufficient quantities at home.

We further suffer from a lack of shrines. Having arrived at our destination, we seldom know what to do with ourselves. We wander around in search of a centre. We long for a plausible crucible of significance, for somewhere, anywhere to go in order that we may touch the essence of the genius loci, but in the absence of alternatives we usually end up listlessly touring a museum, ashamed of ourselves for the strength of our desire to go back to our hotel and lie down.

How much more therapeutic our journeys might be if they could include a visit to a secular local shrine or temple, a work of architecture that would define and concentrate the qualities of its surrounding setting. Inside, we could deposit wax versions of our anxieties and immaturities, attempting thereby to formalize the purpose of our trip — while outside, in a row of small retail spaces, talented artists would sell inspiring tokens of the transformative powers of their settings.

One such shrine might be dedicated to the energy of a capital city, another to the purifying calmness of the deserted tundra, a third to the promises of the tropical sun. These temples would offer homes to otherwise elusive genii locorum, and together teach us to regard travel as a means of existential healing, rather than merely a source of entertainment or relaxation.

A psychotherapeutic travel agency would align mental disorders with the parts of the planet best able to alleviate them. (illustration credit 9.11)

4.

There is no need to catalogue here all the themes that a new generation of temples might take up. There is in the end room in the world for as many different kinds of temple as there are varieties of need.

The point is only to argue that we should revive and continue the underlying aims of religious architecture, by expressing these through secular temples designed to promote important emotions and abstract themes, rather than through sacred shrines dedicated to embodied deities.

No less than the church spires in the skyscapes of medieval Christian towns, these temples would function as reminders of our hopes. They would vary in terms of their style, dimensions and forms — they could range from huts to hangars, they could be made of recycled tyres or gold tiles, they could hang from the sides of office buildings or be buried in illuminated grottoes under the streets — but they would all be connected through the ancient aspiration of sacred architecture: to place us for a time in a thoughtfully structured three-dimensional space, in order to educate and rebalance our souls.