Irish Theological Quarterly

http://itq.sagepub.com Architecture and Spirituality

Thomas K. Carroll Irish Theological Quarterly 2003; 68; 35 DOI: 10.1177/002114000306800104 The online version of this article can be found at: http://itq.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/68/1/35

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Pontifical University, St. Patrick's College, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland

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Thomas K. Carroll

Architecture and

Spirituality

Re flecring on the changes made to church buildings - in particuimr to the sanctuaries - in the name of liturgical renewal, the author seeks to identify the specificaLLy theological or spiritual character of church architecture.

while pIe should

Abbot of Ampleforth, the late Basil Cardinal Hume in his simand saintly way warned that Satan would strike the sanctuary, liturgical renewal be confused with mere restructuring or the moving around of furniture. Some now see the damage done as war begun, and ministry its first victim: others continue, blissfully and blindly, on their way forward. But for most of us, forty years in this wilderness of change have been our lot: in music, the folk-Mass has come and gone; in language, ICEL remains its own worst enemy; in art, little came to be and less has endured; in architecture alone has the damage done been permanent and beyond redemption. In nearly all our Catholic churches, those age-old principles of architecture - proportion, integrity, clarity - have been violated by the authority of the bishop and the advice of the architect. Consequently, as Rome asserts its authority, a new debate rages about the reform - and the reform of the reform - and words like Restoration and Enlightenment, long ago dead and buried, have found a new lease of life in this reformation of the Reformation. But the words of the poet, W. B. Yeats, get to the heart of the matter here, as everywhere, in a few lapidary lines: like the more redemptive verbum of the prophet, such is the creative power of the poets word:

John Synge,

I and Augusta Gregory, thought All that we did, all that we said or sang Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact everything Anteus-like grew strong. We three alone in modern times had brought Everything down to that sole test again, Dream of the noble and the beggarman.2

away from nature,

1. Basil
its way into the

In time, indeed the hour now is, when the way of the Messiah leads us history and design; from this mountain and even from

Hume, Searching for God, London, 1977;cf. also Paul VI: Satans smoke has made Temple of God through some crack (LOsservatore Romano, July 13, 1972). 2. W. B. Yeats, Selected Poetry (ed. Norman Jeffares) London: Pan Books, 1974, 193.
35

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36

JerusaIem, to new depths and heights of seeing and being in the Father. As in language and music, so in every art form of liturgical renewal, especially architecture, worship in spirit and in truth must be for us the soil,
transcendent and immanent - a divine presence in us, personal and cosmic, mysterious and sacramental, symbolic and real, substantial and accidental. From contact with this soil and its mysterious potencies, hidden and revealed, communicated and incarnated, everything Anteus-like grows strong: Christ and his Church, worship in his world. At Jacobs well, near the field Jacob gave his son Joseph, the Messiah told the city woman of sin all the wrong she had ever done, and much more besides: God is Spirit and true worshippers worship the Father in spirit and in truth; such does the Father seek to worship Him (Jn 4:24, RSV). Jesus the Messiah, the woman of sin, Jacobs well in the field of grace, and the sinful city of Sychar in Samaria, combine to constitute the images and events that are our symbols of revelation, and inspire in our age, as in the past, the Constitutions of the Second Vatican Council on Christ, on the Church, on Worship, and on the Church in the ~Xlorld.3 Without this sole test of our biblical faith and the resulting theological tradition developing it from age to age, our rich soil is much impoverished, as artist, architect, musician, and poet - like disciples and hierarchy - seem to have gone into the city to buy food. Mystery, in its every shade of theological meaning - christological, ecclesial, liturgical, missionary - is the essence of this encounter between heaven and earth, the field of God and the city of man, as Messiah and sinner, Spirit and flesh, meet at the deep well of living water and undo the damage done in the original deed. Such is the Spirit of God in our flesh - a spring of water welling up to eternal life. In a field near Sychar, the prophetic deed of Jacob was fulfilled in the messianic word. On the womans word, they left the city, came to Him, heard for themselves, and came to know Him as Saviour of the world. Not understanding, his disciples besought him saying, Rabbi, eat. But Jesus said to them: My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to accomplish his work. I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see how the fields are already white for harvest. The field was near to the city, but the well was deep down within it: such is the mystery of Gods Spirit and our salvation. In the words of the first theologian in Latin,4 our flesh, caro, is the hinge, cardo, on which our encounter with Gods spirit and our salvation hangs. Such encounter or worship in spirit and in truth is with the Triune reality of sacramental being, its very sum and substance. Unlike our symbolic participation in the poetic being of the soil, spirituality in the tradition of faith has a sacramental significance, grounded as it is, in verbum or biblical being: as the ruach of the Hebrew scriptures, pneuma of the
3. Cf. Dei Verbum, 2 (Christ); Lumen Gentium, 3 (Church); Sacrosanctum Concilium, 4 (Worship); Gaudium et Spes, passim (World). 4. Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ (ANF. Vol. 3, 521f).

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Septuagint,

or spiritus of the Vulgate, it means the Creator-Spirit of the earth-mother or matter. In this profoundly biblical sense, spirit is always physical but invisible, like the air we breathe and odour we smell. Hence, in the powerful and mysterious verses of Genesis and Apocalypse, the essential nature of spirituality in the udaeo- Christian tradition is revealed as a journey out of the non-being or being in sin, so to speak, into the being of grace and glory. It is the Exodus and Covenant that once was, now is, and ever will be, in ritual as in history, until the End. It is the Pasch of salvation, our resurrection from His tomb. This sense of journey is special. The Celestial City that ends the Bible is not the Garden of Eden that begins it. For the Christian, unlike the Greek, the soul is eternal and not immortal, as after death there is no return to a familiar homeland:

There is a dynamism about this Christian view of the spiritual life, shared with the whole created order, as it groans and longs for all that lies ahead: secondly, Christian spirituality is rooted not only in our nature as creatures but in our nature as children, adopted in Christ and by his free grace; thirdly, there is no absolute distinction between matter and spirit, (between the physical material world and a wholly spiritual one,) as we await the redemption of our bodies, the transformation into the inconceivable glory that Christ has opened for us; finally, prayer is what we are called to do as we wait in hope, a prayer that the Spirit articulates for us and in us and that is always forward-looking, as creation waits with eager-longing for the revelation of the children of God.~5
In this tradition of biblical spirituality, as in sacramental ontology, Church architecture is much more than a mere branch of sacred art; it must be grounded, as poet and prophet might say, in the soil of Israel, as in the local soil, for religious art is religious before it is art. Here action counts before skill or artistic insight, as religious images reflect what people need for the souls joumey: such popular art openly engages its viewer, and therefore annoys those who dont wish to be engaged: most people dont care what engages and concentrates the mind, as long as it does the job. If taking some water home from the spring at Lourdes is your aim, then buy one of the bottles on sale; plastic is cheap and wont break in your luggage, and you could choose one in the shape of the Virgin Mary as a reminder of who revealed the source. What looks ridiculous to some seems ingenious to others.6 This mode of knowing, ontological and epistemological, respects the objectivity of worship in spirit and in truth and avoids the subjectivity of celebration in style and appearance.
5. G. Mursell, English Spirituality; From Earliest Times 6. M. Visser, The Geometry of Love (London: Viking,
to

700 (London: SPCK, 2001) 12f. 1 2001) 143.

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At Jacobs well, the words of the Messiah to the Samaritan sound in that biblical place mysterious and deep, more begotten than made. There place and language in their different ways, cosmic and human, poetic and biblical, bring to light and life the mysteries of place and the mystery of every place or building that is called a church. Indeed, it is no accident that the one word denotes place and people: the word is derived from kyriakon, house of God in the Greek, whereas words of Latin origin, like eglise, are rooted in the Greek ekklesia: assembly of the people. In the first case, the word comes from the place and is applied to the people; in the second, the word refers to the people, while the building is metaphorical. Poets of the kind Yeats thought John Synge and Augusta Gregory to be, feel the reality of metaphor and place: so too church architects must have a feel for the holiness of their place or sanctuary: the house their Fathers built; ecce tabernaculum Dei cum hominibus. Here reredos and tabernacle are symbol and sacrament of Gods being or presence among them in eternity and time; as for their Fathers, so too for the generations, altar and altar-rails are the one place of Christs sacrifice and the peoples communion.

On this topic, the words of Cardinal Cahal Daly to the Maynooth Summer School in 1968, a mere twelve months after his consecration in the sanctuary of the Cathedral of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise, are relevant.

I have
sion

no

desire

to

put my head in the hornets

nest

of the discus-

regarding the proper placing of the tabernacle. But I have been struck by the fact that two different theologians as Rahner and Mascall question the desirability of systematically separating altar
and tabernacle. Rahner says: the sacrament, which remains after the sacrifice points much more impressively to the past sacrifice and the future sacrificial meal than does the altar alone. And when the two signs are combined, the altar and the sacrificial food resting upon it, this gives us, in the most impressive way, a sign in space and time that Christ has sacrificed himself and now approaches us as our salvation. On the other hand, Mascall, an Anglican, writes: the method of reservation whereby the consecrated elements are placed in a safe in a church wall and removed from association with the altar seems calculated to encourage every wrong view of the reserved
sacrament
conceivable.

The words of the Messiah about worship in spirit and in truth give to the Samaritan woman, as to the waters of Jacobs well, and the pastures of Josephs field, a new significance. In this order of sacramental being, everyone and everything has significance. The significance of a sacral building as a place reflects the mystery present in every form of
7. P. McGoldrick, (ed.)

Understanding the Eucharist (Dublin, 1969)

107-8.

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39

sacramental language and liturgy: even the twelve crosses on the walls of a Catholic Church evoke the twelve gates of the Heavenly Jerusalem, the twelve Apostles, the twelve tribes of Israel. In any service of dedication, when the House of God, like a member of the People of God, is baptised and confirmed, the poetic link between place and people is made concrete. The walls are first sprinkled and then anointed. Each member of
the congregation is expected to identify with the church building, making the association with ones own baptism and confirmation, when each became a temple of the Holy Spirit. In this reality of faith and sacrament, much more is involved than mere symbolic participation in a secondary sense. Secondary, non-ontological symbolism, rampant in contemporary Church architecture, empties the liturgy of its reality, and frequently reduces it to bad theatre, not to say bad taste. On the other hand, both in its being as in its becoming, church architecture (which is, to use Vissers phrase, the Geometry of Love)8 belongs to the language of metaphor and not to the verbiage of any school or institute, technological or theological. Poetic vision is the essence of language ; it both is and is not, at one and the same time, what it seems and says about reality, and avoids insipid definition like a dead letter. But imaginative literalism in Christianity conveys a vision of spiritual life that transforms and expands our own: this double vision, mythical and metaphorical, frees us from a God, human and historical, that is the source of our dogmatic and demonic literalism, our descriptive and logical propositions. Such faith keeps in being a society of divine praise to pray each day in the words of the psalmist: Swithin your temple we ponder your loving kindness, oh God. Such words of worship, now as then, keep God in our midst. In the metaphorical words of the sacred scriptures, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, place and people remain the symbol and sacrament of the Church: when the Day of Pentecost had come they were all together in

place. And suddenly a sound came from heaven ... and it filled all the house where they were ... devout men from every nation under heaven ... and Peter addressed them ... Let all the House of Israel know that God has made both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified the promise is to you and your children and to all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him ... and there were added that day about three thousand ... and day by day, attending the Temple together and breaking bread in their homes, and the Lord added to their number those who were being saved (Acts 2:1-21 ). In one sense all are in place; in another nothing can possibly be: yet for Paul and other New Testament writers the reality and the biblical metaphor remain one and the same: You are part of a building that has the apostles and prophets for its foundations and Christ Jesus himself for its cornerstone. As the whole structure is aligned on him, all grow into
one
...

8. The sub-title is of note:

Space, Time, Mystery and Meaning in an Ordinary Church.

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40
one holy temple in the Lord; and you too, in him, are being built into a house where God lives in the Spirit (Eph 2:19-22). In so many places in Paul, as in Peter, the new people are to be living stones, making a spiritual house. The metaphor of place and people would so cement in the early Christian ages that the word Church would mean the same, be it place or people, and for over a thousand years the Church would be the Church in both its senses: Francis of Assisi, soon after his conversion in 1205 experienced an epiphany in the little crumbling church of Damiano: he heard Christ telling him Restore my Church. Obediently he repaired the dilapidated building. Only later did he understand what the command really meant: Francis was being asked not merely to fix a Church building, but to reinvigorate the Church as a whole, the Church as a people.9 This problem, more anthropological than historical, reaches the heart of the matter, and the very nature of religion. Primacy of place as much as people has ever been a constant in the mystery of the Church; strategic position is profane power, but numinous space is sacred mystery: to walk into a beautiful church is to hear echoes of the souls own experiences of epiphany responding directly to columns, arches, domes, and colouring carving, or to the memory of the people who have filled this building in the past thanks to the care of my fellow human beings a place has been made ready for silent contact with something enormous and present for anyone who wants it.1 On the other hand, when Christians need to rebel against the organised Church and its traditions, living rooms or bare halls are preferred, and at times basements and garages are sufficient. Such seasons come and go, but truth is beauty and beauty is truth, and like truth is great and will prevail, as it did at the truth and beauty of the Mass-rock! Dedication is our term for this consecration of place to the presence and worship of God: the King and all the children of Israel dedicated the House of the Lord (1 Kings 8:63). In the time of Jesus, the re-dedication of this same Temple, which bodied forth the riches and wisdom of Solomon, was the same place of presence and worship. That transcendence and immanence of God, in nature and history, that marked the very being of Israel and made her chosen for the well being of the nations was seen and felt in her every institution. Jerusalem, in history the City of David, was in Israel pre-eminently the Holy City, or Sion, and Temple and tabernacle were her light and life. These human constructs were the divine dwelling that foreshadowed the Incarnation and are fulfilled in the Gospel words: destroy this temple and in three days I will rebuild it (Jn 2:19, RSV).l1 In the scriptures this mystical interpretation is continued
...

...

9. Visser, op. cit. 128. 10. Ibid. 126. Cf. also Gorringe, T. J. A Theology of the Built Environment, Cambridge, 2001. 11. Cf. Origen, Commentary on Johns Gospel, in The Divine Office, III, 495-6: the temple will be raised up and the body will rise on the third day, after the present day of evil and the day of consummation which will follow this.

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with a variety of words and images, but, in the Apocalypse, Temple and tabernacle remain the exclusive terms to inspire from above the exegesis of the Greek and Latin Fathers that would develop down through the ages. So Eusebius says: there was brought about festivals of dedication in the cities and consecrations of newly-built houses of prayer. Such rites of dedication, based on the Jewish prototype, were elaborate in the symbolic East; but in the sacramental West, there was a greater sense of place, with the tombs of the martyrs giving their odour to the altar of sacrifice in the new processional basilicas, and their relics creating our places of pilgrimage. In the Roman Missal, primacy given to the Common for the Dedication of Churches (preceding the Commons of the VirginMother, Martyrs, Pastors, Doctors, Virgins, Holy Men and Women) is telling of the buildings place in the mind of the Church. But more significant is the position of the prefaces for the Mass of Dedication, and its Anniversary, as situated immediately after the festive prefaces for his Presentation in the Temple as Lord, his Transfiguration on the Holy Mountain as Christ, and his solemnity as Christ the King at the end and beginning of liturgical time. Then, and only then, follow two prefaces for the Holy Spirit.&dquo; In this theological arrangement, the sacramental principle or the mysteria carnis Christi, filii Dei vivi, is liturgically at work in all its dimensions eternal and temporal, trinitarian and cosmic, christological and pneumatic or ecclesial, literal and metaphorical - as the body of each preface is a clear expression of the liturgical principle: lex orandi lex credendi, we pray what we believe and believe what we pray: When the celebration takes place within the church itself: We thank you now for this House of Prayer, in which you bless your family, as we come to you on pilgrimage. Here you reveal your presence by sacramental signs, and make us one with you through the unseen bond of grace. Here you build your temple of living stones, and bring the Church to its full stature as the Body of Christ throughout the world, to reach its perfection at last in the Heavenly City of Jerusalem, the vision of your peace.&dquo;3 When the celebration takes place in a church other than the one whose dedication is being celebrated: Your House is a House of Prayer and your presence makes it a Place of Blessing. You give us grace upon grace to build the Temple of your Spirit, creating its beauty from the holiness of our lives. Your House of Prayer is also the promise of the Church in Heaven. Here your love is always at work preparing the Church on earth for its heavenly glory as the sinless Bride of Christ, the joyful Mother of a great company of saints. 114 In these ICEL translations of the sacramental reality, more metaphori-

12. Cf. Missale Romanum; editio typica. 13. Cf. English Edition of the Roman Missal (ICEL). 14. L. Soubigou, A Commentary on the Prefaces and Eucharistic

Prayers of the Roman Missal,

Collegeville, 1971.

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42

cal than liturgical, the presence in place as in people in the mystery of the Church is acknowledged. This vision of sacramenti mundi broadens the cosmos of every believing artist or architect as it once brought hell, purgatory, and paradise within the articulation of Dante. Without this articulation of faith, and that understanding of it called theology, every Michaelangelo remains at best a Petruvius, as every Dante remains a Homer. In this sacramental order of being, it is the biblical Word alone that takes us beyond our own words into those heights and depths, the above and below, which no earthly symbol can make real or communicate. In the strict sense, there is, of course, no such person as a Catholic artist, but there are those like Dante and Michaelangelo, and greater or lesser mortals too of different religious persuasions, for whom the Word of the Cross is no less the heart-beat of their world of work. Such is the theological a priori of Christ, the Church, worship, and the world of the Council, without which there cannot be, nor has there been so far, any renewal of faith; 15 preoccupation with externals of worship in art, architecture, language and music cannot be the New Pentecost Pope John and his Council intended for our world. Dedication and desecration are terms with a long history in Church architecture. From the beginning, in the East, new rites were elaborate, probably due to the memory of the Temple tradition and the influence of the Greek mystery religions. Even the digging of the foundations had its own special blessings and incensings, while the cornerstone was anointed with reference to the stone of Jacob. But the altar had its own unique ceremonial as a wax-mastic in the form of a cross is left to harden and afterwards nailed to a column; then the altar is washed and anointed with red wine, mingled with rose-water. Only then is the church incensed, walls sprinkled, doors anointed, candles lighted, relics positioned, the Hours prayed, and the Liturgy celebrated. Yet iconoclasm, like desecration, soon threatened this dedication. The Latin Rite of Dedication, and its component parts, Roman and Gallican, is no less instructive. When a ceremony of dedication came into being in Rome, at the end of the fifth century, it was virtually identical with the translation of relics to the cavity or tomb in the altar-stone. Every church was thus brought into line with the cemetry chapels of early Rome, as tomb, altar and apse became one and the same place of celebrating the sacred mysteries or sacramental rites we call the work of our redemption. On the other hand, the Gallican rite was more richly symbolic : as the Christian is dedicated by baptism and confirmation, so too the altar first and then the church are consecrated by ablutions and anointings, which increased with the passing of time; indeed the rite described in the Pontificale, or the bishops book of rituals, is an example of secondary symbolism taken to the absurd.
15. T. Carroll, The Council and the Jubilee; Our New Pentecost; Downside Review, No. 413,

pp. 235-242.

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43

Like the iconoclasts in the East a thousand years earlier, so too for English Puritans in their zeal for the purity of the Gospel, such accretions were jugglings of the Antichrist in their reformed Church. Two decades of civil war followed, and Cromwells name became synonymous with sanctuary desecration. Yet the rite of dedication survived, and still is in the Book of Common Prayer, as The Form of the Consecration of a Church, when the Deed of Conveyance hands over the land to the Church for its use and blessing.16 Here is that contact with the soil - or sole test - again, about which the poet spoke; in this primal sense, the creature hands back to the Creator not just the first-fruits but the very land that is their source, and is His own creation, as portion for his kyriakon or dwelling among us. In this cosmic context, the words of Jeremiah, the prophet, take us beyond the words of the poet into the wisdom and mystery of worship:

Stand

at the gate of the House of the Lord, and there proclaim this message: hear the word of the Lord, all you of Judah who enter these gates to worship the Lord. Reform your ways and your deeds, so that I may remain with you in this place. Put not your trust in these deceptive words: this is the temple of the Lord; the temple of the

Lord; the temple of the Lord. Only if you thoroughly reform your ways and deeds; if each of you deals justly with his neighbour; if you no longer oppress the alien, the fatherless or widow; or shed innoblood in this place, will I remain with you in this place, in the land I gave of old to your fathers and for ever (Jer 7:1~8).I
cent

But while the paradox of the Church as House of God and as People of God is evident, it is nonetheless as difficult as ever to preserve the balance. As always in the Christian view, when one of the opposites becomes rampant at the expense of the other, things quickly fall apart. Today, community or solidarity - the apparent opposite of individualism - is stressed as the essence of liturgical or Christian assembly. Accordingly, there arose the necessity to restructure the sanctuary for the sake of this assembly and a more equal distribution of functional roles. This New Liturgy, the work of regional and national conferences of bishops and commissions, instant experts in art, architecture, language, and music, began in Church architecture a reordering of sacred dedicated space that has surpassed in our times the desecrations of Iconoclasm and Puritanism. Such words as assembly and celebration, dominant in the New Liturgy, do not express the sacramental reality of the rites of dedication, nor the biblical or patristic tradition, as in the Second Reading of the Office of Readings for Wednesday, Week 17:
16. L. Clarke (ed.), Liturgy and Worship ; A companion to the Prayer Books of the Anglican Communion, (London: SPCK, 1964) 703-714. 17. Cf. also Bede, On the Tabernacle and Temple, Texts for Historians, Vol. 21 (Liverpool: University Press, 1995).

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44

The Church, that is, the assembly, is designated by this apt term, because it assembles all as the Lord says in Leviticus: assemble all at the door of the Tent of Meeting. Moreover it is worth noting that this word assemble is first used in scripture where the Lord appointed Aaron to the high priesthood. And in Deuteronomy God says to Moses: Assemble the people that they may hear my words; that they may learn to fear me. He mentions the Church or assembly again when he speaks of the Tables of the Law. In them were written all the words which the Lord spoke with you on the mountain, on the day of the Church or assembly; or to put it more clearly, on the day when you were called by the Lord and assembled together. The psalmist also says: I will give thanks in the great Church, in the gathering of the throng. The second Church our Saviour built from the Gentiles, our holy of the Christians....18
A tabernacle within a tabemacle developed in Roman tradition to express the real presence, per modum substantiae, as the notion of transubstantiation developed in the 14th century.&dquo; This dual presence, like the ark in the Holy of Holies or the scrolls in the Tent of Meeting, neither diminished the real presence of mystery in the church or kyriakon as a whole, nor separated it in any way from the crowd or assembly to a place apart. In the renaissance, soon to follow, church architecture, like every other discipline, was born again as tradition was lived and relived in all its fullness - classical and biblical, theological and philosophical, and the new sanctuary preserved the balance between Church as place and Church as people. In the unity of reredos and tabernacle, altar and altarrails, eternity and time met in space. In this new expression of Orientation and Apse, of candle-light and flower-life, the communion of saints and the sacrament of the new creation are one in being and representation : in the same way, altar and altar-rails are no less one in their sacramental representation and communion. At this altar on earth, the Gate of Heaven, Passover bread and Covenant cup present and represent, from the rising of the sun till its setting, the Bread of Life and the Cup of Eternal Salvation, and here priest and people are in full communion with the sacrifice of redemption. This action and prayer called Eucharistia is the eternal praise of the Mystery celebrated; it is also Benedictus at Morning Prayer, and Magnificat at Evensong. The reordering of this dedicated space, for no theological reason, struck a mortal blow at the church as kyriakon, and was seen by many as desecration. Still, the proliferation of pastoral Directories from episcopal
18. Cf. The Divine Office, III, 362. A different understanding of assembly is put forward by Richard Hurley, architect, in his recent publication, Irish Church Architecture in the Era of Vatican II (Dublin: Dominican Publications, 2001). His work speaks for itself and is visible in this collection of photographs. 19. Cf. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, translated by John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000) 85f.

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conferences continued, prompted by the consilium as distinct from the Council, and put that emphasis on people more than place which emphasis destroys the paradox of the Church and the building metaphor. Nonetheless, people were not allowed to protest although workmen were frequently reluctant to strike the first blow at the altar their fathers had built, and many even felt its resistance to move; some lost faith and most lost heart but the restructuring continued with a passion. In our Catholic West, the scale of destruction may well have rivalled the victory of Iconoclasm, albeit pyrrhic, in the East; certainly, our forty years in the wilderness have doubled the reign of Cromwell, but restoration may not be far away! Time is telling; people are seeing and remembering; aftercomers are guessing the beauty been! Theologians like Aidan Nichols and historians like Eamon Duffy are focusing more and more on the need for a reform of the reform;&dquo; even Rembert Weaklands Ave atque ~a~e may not have been in vain! Like the word assembly, many more terms in liturgical usage must recover their biblical and patristic significance. For example, altar is no mere table for our fellowship meals of bread and wine. The origins of the Lords Supper must be found not only in the annual family meal of the Passover, but equally in the Chaburoth, or weekly meals of the Covenant, as in the Temple sacrifice. Hence the full significance of the Passover bread and Covenant cup in the ritual meals and Berekoth of salvation history, if the Eucharist is to continue the tradition: the celebration of God revealed and communicated, of the paschal mystery, in a prayer of a special type, where the prayer itself links up the proclamation of the mirabilia Dei with their representation in a sacred action, that is the core of our ritual.2 In the Roman tradition, mere architectural reordering without theology, philosophy and poetry, to ground it in the substance or soil of faith creates confusion as to where the tabernaculum Dei should be. Without transubstantiation there is no grasp of the mystery or its place. On the other hand, the position of the celebrant at the north side of the altar in the Caroline tradition of the Church of Ireland invites the faithful to lift up their hearts to the East and behold the heavenly sacrifice of Christ, which their earthly sacraments represent upon the altar - versus populum is not their problem and their kyriakon remains intact: for us the assembly is more than the place as the Chair replaces the tabernacle; yet the Pope says everything must be made to converge on the tabernacle, the New Tent of Meeting.&dquo;
20. Cf.

Liturgy
21. L.

Antiphon: A Journal for Liturgical Renewal, published by the Society for Catholic English-speaking Countries, three times per year; Mundelein, Illinois, 60060. Bouyer, Eucharist: Theology and Spirituality of the Eucharistic Prayer (Notre Dame:
in

University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 1, 49.

22. Cf. John Pauls Letter to the Diocesan Eucharistic Congress at Benvenuto, where the Mass was celebrated by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (LOsservatore Romano, 26 June 2002).

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In this Tent of Meeting, as Old as it is New, the shea,ubread or Bread of the Presence that once was in the Holy of Holies is now the Salutaris Hostia of our every kyriakon or Lords house. David and his men ate this bread in their hunger, although it was reserved for the priest. (1 Sam 21:6). Jesus near to Capernaum recalled this event, as the disciples plucked and ate on the Sabbath day the ears of grain, but, as the Bread of Life (Jn 6:33), he understood their hunger and did not condemn (cf. Mk 2:25). Likewise in the O.T., wine is associated with festivals and covenants, and in Isaiah (63:2) the red juice of the crushed grape will be the blood of the suffering servant, and Jesus too will be the true vine (Jn. 15:1). Yet in the N.T., the Covenant rite of the Lords Supper or Cabburah will be known as the breaking of bread, (Acts 27:35), just as the agricultural or solar festival of unleavened bread continued as Passover. This tradition Paul received, (1 Cor. 11:17) and passed on for the ages to understand and develop. The permanence of this paschal action as food in the Church flows from the words of institution - do this in memory of me. But the Bread of Presence and its permanence (Ex 25:30) is no less divine in its origin, and in time it would shew itself anew in our tabernacles like the twelve loaves that were in theirs. Discourse about mystery, as about history, is difficult from age to age and place to place, as in English memory is more subjective than zikkaron in Hebrew, anamnisis in Greek, or memoriale in Latin. These more objective expressions preserve a sense of reality in which eternity and time are one, as space and place are the same: this concrete sense of being one and the same in epistemology preserves an ontological awareness of biblical image and Greek symbol, which flourished in medieval/Latin metaphysics as signification and transubstantiation. Thus for Aquinas, it is this bread of presence or memoriale mortis Domini that gives divine life to mortal man - panis vivus vitam praestans homini, the very figura of our God adored, as oer ancient forms departing / Newer rites of grace prevail. In these terms, more sapiential than theological, the Angelic Doctor, like the Doctor Gentium, is teaching with the spirit and power of scripture: the cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? ( Cor 14:16). Spirituality and architecture, in various cultural epochs, reflect the development of revelation that then took place in theology and philosophy. Words like transubstantiation or transignification were attempts by the schoolmen to express aspects of their world as sacramental mystery. But the mystical heights of this experience in thought and language by Aquinas are seen in his liturgical composition for the feast of Corpus Christi, as Office and Mass combine selections of scriptures, Old and New, responses and psalms, hymns and antiphons: 0 Saving Victim, opening wide / The Gate of Heaven to man below. The deepened awareness of faith that He is there in the sacred species came upon the Middle

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Ages with
must

wholly new intensityT; the consequence is inescapable: we proper place for this Presence. If this presence is to touch us in a concrete way, then the tabernacle must also find its proper place in the architecture of the Kyriakon as a whole, as helm of the nave - and it
a

make

cannot

be side-chapeled. Transubstantiation in this spirituality inspired the ceremony of Benediction, as the paschal action of the altar is considered more from the substantial than the subsistential perspective. In architecture, variations of the ark, or the arcane, followed accordingly, and the mystery, seen and hidden in ciborium or baldachino over the altar, is no less present in substance and form, as tabernacle and reredos, under the mosaic-filled apse. Here the Monstrance or Vessel of Singular Devotion, set among candles and flowers, shews the Sacrament of the New Creation, while incense, cross, and organ-prelude lead the procession to its j ourneys end. For six hundred years, the unity of aisle and apse in the sanctuary housed this evening ceremony of adoration and Divine Praise, as God was blessed in His angels and in His saints.&dquo; The separation in thought and language that followed the separation in time and place of East and West prepared the way of separation in theology of sacrament and sacrifice that would divide and separate the churches of Christendom and the chapels of the Lords House. At Trent, Eucharistic doctrine was formulated in divided words and in two sessions: 1 ( 1 ) the Decree on the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist in 1551 and (2) the Doctrine of the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in 1562. On the other hand, Vatican II on the Most Holy Mystery of the Eucharist (SC 47) is an admirable synthesis of those theological divisions. And yet, architecture now separates helm and nave, tabernacle and Temple. With the chair where the Bread of Presence should be, there is neither journey nor direction. Gone too is the Christian version of the ubiquitous religious symbol or axis mundi - that shaft, static and dynamic, around which everything revolves to express the vertical aspiration of the horizontal

Church.&dquo; The mystery of the Temple and its tabernacle, or Holy of Holies, was for Greek and Latin Fathers the symbol and sacrament of Christ and the Church, or the place of worship in spirit and in truth in the world: the tabernacle or ciborium remembers the Tent that housed the Ark of the Covenant, carried by Jews during their Exodus journey. In the Temple, the Ark filled the Holy of Holies until it was lost in the Exile, and in the Second Temple the Holy of Holies remained as a Tent or tabernacle, emptied of its Presence. But this same Tent would also express the Churchs view of itself as a band of people on the move, searching for the liberation
23. M. Rubin, Corpus Christi. The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: University Press, 1991) 185f. 24. L. Bouyer, Liturgy and Architecture (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,

1967) 1-8.

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of the world from oppression: wayfarers seeking and getting lost, yet trusting in the promises and struggling onward on a journey that seems, at times, will never end. 15 Recently a new life has risen phoenix-like from the ashes of recent controversy with Margaret Vissers biography of Sant Agnese fuori le Mura, a church in Rome. In The Geometry of Love (2000), she considers space, time, mystery and meaning in an ordinary church, and so gives her readers an inkling of the spiritual, cultural and historical wealth hidden in every Church. Sant Agnese is a building that is intentionally meaningful ; it reveals itself fully only to those prepared to respond to its language. Already there are what are called rave reviews in every major publication, as she brings tourism back to its lost origin, the Christian pilgrimage ; others compare her with Dante and his multiple layers of symbolism and allegory: solid brick, marble and wood dissolve to reveal the deeper meaning of things, as the Church is a ship or navis, forest, paradise garden, or image of eternity.&dquo; As is clear from its subtitle, the book transcends architectural and religious history, as its author (classicist and anthropologist) takes her readers into the deep primal impulses that stir human beings to erect places of worship and, against the odds, do what it takes to preserve them into eternity. Every building covers a plot of land, but the Church does so in the narrative sense. It is this plot that governs this book: the people in the Church are on a journey, the journey of life, towards their destiny, which is God. Time - the lifetime of each individual person - is expressed as space. Moving up the nave and aisles is moving towards our end. Movement and immovability, the temporal and the eternal, time and space: all these oppositions are expressed in a journeys geometry.&dquo; Unlike a place for viewing (theatron), the church {kynakon) can go on working when there is no performance or crowd. One comes into a silent, oblong church to respond to building and meaning. The central aisle is the road forward, a symbol of the length of life, of creation, of humanity. Even the floor of the nave is the path of every biblical journey Abraham trusting in the Promised Land; Moses in the wilderness between Egypt and Sinai, Exodus and Covenant; Jesus on Calvary and in the Tomb. In this place of mystery in history, Agnes is buried. Her tomb caused this Church to be built, and here her death has never been forgotten ; empty tomb and mosaic apse end her journey at our altar, tabernacle, and baldacchino of life. In his Spirit of the Liturgy Cardinal Ratzinger, like the earlier Guardini, has also given us a classic of liturgical theology to present in the definitive way of the Council the fresco of the liturgy its scholars had
-

25. Y. Congar, The Mystery of the Temple. The Manner of Gods Presence from Genesis to the Apocalypse (London: Bums & Oates, 1962) 151f.
26. Visser, op. cit. 54-57. 27. Ibid. 29f; cf. 61-64, 71, 80, 91.

to

His Creatures

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discovered and restored. But the fresco, according to Ratzinger, is threatened now with destruction by our different interpretations of the Council. In an astonishingly simple work, this gentle theological giant does not use the power of his office; rather he presents the organic unity of the Councils Dogmatic Constitutions on Christ and the Church, as the basis of its pastoral Constitutions on Worship and the World. His aim is to assist in a renewal of the faith and its celebration in the liturgy of the Church. The task is daunting, but his masterful work is presented in the theological, historical, spiritual, pastoral and juridical way of the Council. This Master in Israel is at home in all aspects of Temple and tabernacle as symbol and sacrament. His every word speaks for itself: during the Exile, the Ark of the Covenant was lost, and from then on the Holy of Holies was empty. That was what Pompeius found when he strode through the Temple and pulled the curtain. He entered the Tent full of curiosity and in the very emptiness of the place, discovered what is special about biblical religion. The empty Tent had become an act of expectation, of hope, that God would one day restore his throne. 121 Excursus
on

Time, Space, and the Liturgy of the Hours

The words from Cyril of Jerusalem quoted above are of the essence of liturgical language and typical of the treasures hidden in the revised Liturgy of the Hours. Yet little from this source of nourishment - and even less from the chapter on the Divine Office in the Councils Constitution that inspired it - are expressed in the endless pastoral directories about the place of worship, frequently so trivial and - sadly - so trite. In the conciliar theology of the Divine Office, Christ is described as the high priest ceaselessly engaged in praising the Lord, and interceding for the salvation of the world; the very prayer which Christ, together with his body addresses to the Father. (SC 84) Therefore the Council called for an extensive reform of the Divine Office, in keeping with the venerable tradition of the universal Church, to restore Lauds as Morning Prayer and Vespers as Evening Prayer, the two hinges on which the daily Office turns (SC 89). This sense of time was seen by the Council as urgent and crucial: because the purpose of the Office is to sanctify the day, the traditional sequence of the hours is to be restored so that as far as possible they may once again be genuinely related to the time of day at which they are prayed. Moreover, it will be necessary to take into account the modem conditions in which daily life has to be lived, especially by those who are called to labour in apostolic works(SC 88). This intention inspired drastic changes in the number of psalms, scripture and patristic readings, lives of saints, martyrs and hymns, but everything was done that the day might be truly sanctified and the hours prayed at the true canonical time (SC 94).
28.

Ratzinger,

op. cit.

65; cf also Bouyer, Liturgy and Architecture, 8-24.

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Since the Divine Office is the voice of the whole mystical body publicly praising God, it refers not only to the internal devotion of the mind, but also to the external manner of celebration. Thus pastors of souls should see to it that the chief hours, especially Vespers, are celebrated in common in church on Sundays and the more solemn feasts. And the laity, too, are encouraged to recite the Divine Office with the priests, or among

themselves,

or individually (SC 100). Depth of liturgical knowledge and sincerity of liturgical zeal can be judged solely by fidelity to the Liturgy of the Hours, for Office and Eucharist are the one sacrificium laudis or the continual praise of the Mystery. Nevertheless, apart from Westminster Cathedral in London, I have found in my travels in the English-speaking world neither cathedral nor church for the celebration of this Sunday minimum! This complete neglect of prayer alone explains our obsession with the practicalities of reordering, about which the Council had nothing to say. but such neglect does not explain our failure to recognise in the O f fice of our sep-

arated brethren or sister Churches the substance or core of our search: The Offices of Morning Prayer and Evensong, as performed even today in St Pauls, Westminster Abbey, York Minster or Canterbury Cathedral are not only some of the most impressive, but the purest forms of Christian common prayer to be found anywhere in the world.&dquo;9 This perennis lauds mysterii continues the building in the grace, or being, of its dedication, and preserves it from the desecration of becoming a mere assembly hall in the secular sense of the term. But our pastoral pronouncements about the meaning of liturgical assembly can be as trite and trivial as the entire assembly is celebrant.3

29. L. Bouyer Life and Liturgy, Liturgical Piety (London: Sheed and Ward, 1956) 47. 30. Cf. Irish Episcopal Commission for Liturgy, The Place of Worship (Dublin: Veritas,

1994) 8.

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