Drawn by rain and curiosity, I entered a cavernous hall, sunk in tarry darkness, against which a thousand votive candles stood out, their golden shadows flickering over mosaics and carved representations of the Stations of the Cross. There were smells of incense and sounds of murmured prayer. Hanging from the ceiling at the centre of the nave was a ten-metre-high crucifix, with Jesus on one side and his mother on the other. Around the high altar, a mosaic showed Christ enthroned in the heavens, encircled by angels, his feet resting on a globe, his hands clasping a chalice overflowing with his own blood.
The facile din of the outer world had given way to awe and silence. Children stood close to their parents and looked around with an air of puzzled reverence. Visitors instinctively whispered, as if deep in some collective dream from which they did not wish to emerge. The anonymity of the street had here been subsumed by a peculiar kind of intimacy. Everything serious in human nature seemed to be called to the surface: thoughts about limits and infinity, about powerlessness and sublimity. The stonework threw into relief all that was compromised and dull, and kindled a yearning for one to live up to its perfections.
After ten minutes in the cathedral, a range of ideas that would have been inconceivable outside began to assume an air of reasonableness. Under the influence of the marble, the mosaics, the darkness and the incense, it seemed entirely probable that Jesus was the son of God and had walked across the Sea of Galilee. In the presence of alabaster statues of the Virgin Mary set against rhythms of red, green and blue marble, it was no longer surprising to think that an angel might at any moment choose to descend through the layers of dense London cumulus, enter through a window in the nave, blow a golden trumpet and make an announcement in Latin about a forthcoming celestial event.
What can we believe where?
Left: Elsom, Pack and Roberts Architects, McDonald’s,
Ashdown House, Victoria Street, London, 1975
Right: John Francis Bentley, the nave, Westminster Cathedral, London, 1903
Concepts that would have sounded demented forty metres away, in the company of a party of Finnish teenagers and vats of frying oil, had succeeded – through a work of architecture – in acquiring supreme significance and majesty.
5.
The first attempts to create specifically Christian spaces, buildings intended to help their occupants to draw closer to the truths of the Gospels, date from some 200 years after the birth of Christ. On plaster walls in low-ceilinged, candlelit rooms, beneath the heathen streets of Rome, untrained artists painted crude renditions of incidents in Jesus’s life, in a primitive style which might have done justice to the less gifted students of an art school.
The Breaking of the Bread, Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome, third century AD
These Christian catacombs are only the more touching, however, for their inarticulacy. They show the architectural and artistic impulses in their purest forms, without the elaboration supplied by talent or money. They reveal how in the absence of great patrons or craftsmen, with no skills or resources to speak of, the faithful will feel a need to daub the symbols of their heavens on damp cellar walls – to ensure that what is around them will fortify the truths within them.
From AD 379, when the Emperor Theodosius the Great declared Christianity the official religion of Rome, church architects were free to create homes for their ideals on a grander scale. Their aspirations achieved an apotheosis during the age of the cathedrals, in giant jewels of stone and glass designed to make vivid the Paradise of the holy books.
In the eyes of medieval man, a cathedral was God’s house on earth. Adam’s fall might have obscured the true order of the cosmos, rendering most of the world sinful and irregular, but within the bounds of a cathedral, the original, geometric beauty of the Garden of Eden had been resurrected. The light shining through the stained-glass windows prefigured that which would radiate in the next life. Inside the holy cavern, the claims of the Book of Revelation ceased to seem remote and bizarre, and became instead both palpable and immediate.
Touring the cathedrals today with cameras and guidebooks in hand, we may experience something at odds with our practical secularism: a peculiar and embarrassing desire to fall to our knees and worship a being as mighty and sublime as we ourselves are small and inadequate. Such a reaction would not, of course, have surprised the cathedral builders, for it was precisely towards such a surrender of our self-sufficiency that their efforts were directed, the purpose of their ethereal walls and lace-like ceilings being to make metaphysical stirrings not only plausible but irresistible within even the soberest of hearts.
Above: west front, Reims Cathedral, after 1254
6.
The architects and artists who worked in the service of early Islam were likewise driven by the wish to create a physical backdrop which would bolster the claims of their religion. Holding that God was the source of all understanding, Islam placed particular emphasis on the divine qualities of mathematics. Muslim artisans covered the walls of houses and mosques with repeating sequences of delicate and complicated geometries, through which the infinite wisdom of God might be intimated. This ornamentation, so pleasingly intricate on a rug or a cup, was nothing less than hallucinatory when applied to an entire hall. Eyes accustomed to seeing only the practical and humdrum objects of daily life could, inside such a room, survey a world shorn of all associations with the everyday. They would sense a symmetry, without quite being able to grasp its underlying logic. Such works were like the products of a mind with none of our human limitations, of a higher power untainted by human coarseness and therefore worthy of unconditional reverence.
Islamic architects wrote their religion literally as well as symbolically onto their buildings. The corridors of the Nasrid kings’ Alhambra Palace displayed quotations from the holy texts, carved on panels in a floriated Kufic script. ‘In the name of the merciful God. He is God alone, God entire. He has neither begotten, nor is He begotten. And none is His equal,’ read one hymn which wrapped around a reception room at eye level. In the main chamber of the complex’s Torre de la Cautiva hung a panel featuring letters threaded through with geometric and vegetal shapes in patterns of phosphorescent complexity. Al-mulk li-llah (‘Power belongs to God’), declared the wall, the strokes of the letters prolonged so as to form semicircular arches which divided, crossed and then intersected with the limbs of a second inscription proclaiming, Al-’izz li-llah (‘Glory belongs to God’) – word and image consummately united to remind onlookers of the purpose of Islamic existence.
cupola of the Mausoleum of Turabeg Khanum, Kunya, Urgench, 1370
ceramic tiles, The Alcazar, Seville, fourteenth century
Ibn al-Jayyãb, decorative plaster panel, main room,
Torre de la Cautiva, Alhambra Palace, c. 1340
Al-mulk li-llah = Power belongs to God; Al-’izz li-llah = Glory belongs to God
7.
In both early Christianity and Islam, theologians made a claim about architecture likely to sound so peculiar to modern ears as to be worthy of sustained examination: they proposed that beautiful buildings had the power to improve us morally and spiritually. They believed that, rather than corrupting us, rather than being an idle indulgence for the decadent, exquisite surroundings could edge us towards perfection. A beautiful building could reinforce our resolve to be good.