Praxiteles

Cathedral of St Pierre de Beauvais

Interior showing the central position of the Crucifixion roundel in the axial Lady Chapel

Earlier, we looked at representations of the Crucifixion, starting with the famous 8th century Irish example in the library of Sank Gallen, and we noted that the ealy depictions featured the crucified Christ flanked by St Longinus and Stepathon, offering the sponge with vinagre. We saw that later depictions substituted these figures with those of Our Lady and St John the Evangelist whose image was subsequently exchanged for other saints.

Here, however, we have a very interesting piece of iconography from the central rose panel of the axiel lancet of the axial chapel of the chevet of Beauvais Cathedral where we see the integration of the two earliest forms of the crucifixion depictions: Christ with Longinus and Stephaton, with these two figures flanked externally by those of Our Lady and St John. Underneath the Cross is a figure rising from the tomb and holding a chalice to receive the Blood of Christ from the Cross. This figures represents Adam and the redemption of mankind by the sacrifice of Christ, the New Adam, on the Cross.

This window dates from about 1240 and belongs to the earliest glass in the Cathedral. It is also likely still to be in situ. The window was restored in 1854 by our old friend Adolph Napoleon Dideron. Despite 19th century enthusiasm, well over 80% of the glass in this panel is original.

And an example of Vasi’s print of St. Peter’s Square published in 1774 and dedicated to the Cardinal Duke of York, brother of Bonnie Prince Charles, and bearing his arms as de jure Henry IX of England, Ireland, Scotland and France.

From this morning’s Irish Times a timely reminder that education (and especially University education) is not about training people to become efficient factory workers or IT application operators – a view, unfortunately, which seemed to have dominated Irish Universities during the era of the late Celtic Tigre thereby devastating a whole generation and, in the specific case of ecclesiastical architecture, one which has often left us with persons designing churches as though they were up-market haybarns simply because they were never introduced to the cultural and intellectual roots and tradition of Western (to say nothing of Eastern) Christianity and whose education appears to have been measured merely in terms of a technical ability to opeate CAD software. In fairness, it should be added that we have also seen the rise the modern “industrially” trained cleric who, oftentimes, is impervious to all efforts at mind broadening and who, despite long years of expensive efforts at “education” is unleashed on the public barely knowing how the administer the sacraments (even in a colloqual vernacular), almost completely oblivious to the sources of thoelogy and blisfully unaware of anything like literature, science, art or mucic, in short, of what used to be called the Humanities. A re-think, me thinks, is in order:

Newman’s seminal work had its roots in Dublin

TALKBACK: Newman’s famous work remains the most enduring argument for higher education, writes PÁDRAIC CONWAY

The Blessed John Henry Newman

IN THE century and a half since its publication, John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a Univ ersity has exerted extraordinary influence over the discussion and conceptualisation of higher education. At a time when the eminence of his newly attained status risks distracting from his distinctive thought, it is worth reconsidering this seminal work and its Dublin roots.

The Idea of a University is a text of two parts. The first part is made up of nine discourses, five of which were delivered in what is now the Rotunda Hospital, on successive Monday evenings between May and June, 1852. They were published, with a 10th discourse, which didn’t make the final cut for the Idea, as Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education in November, 1852.

The second part of the text consists of 10 offerings prepared by Newman between 1854 and 1858; these were first published in 1858 as Lectures and Essays on University Subjects. It was on February 2nd, 1873, that the text we now know as The Idea of a University was published. New- man continued to re-edit to the ninth edition, published in 1889, the year before his death.

The Idea begins by defining the university as a place for teaching universal knowledge. Newman argues that the mooted Catholic University should provide a liberal as opposed to a profess- ional education. This sentiment is captured most powerfully in the title of his fifth discourse: Knowledge is its Own End. For him, the purpose of a university education is expansion of the mind and the consequent enhanc- ed civic and social capacity.

Newman takes a most positive view of the knowledge that is to be thought in a university. He is a strong defender of the autonomy of individual disciplines within their own spheres and is extremely supportive of the scientific enterprise. He sees little if any reason for conflict between science and religion properly understood. Scientists and theolo- gians should tend to their own spheres and not intrude upon one another’s intellectual territory.

Newman concedes that many scientists are critical of religion because theologians have too often overstepped the mark. Such errors as might arise from allowing high levels of academic freedom to science and other secular subjects will be temporary and, in time, corrected by the exercise of the same freedom.

Newman imagined a university in pursuit of universal knowledge and truth. This was not, however, the universality of the enlighten- ment, where universal knowledge is captured encyclopaedically by a knowing, individual subject. Newman appeals to an older tradition that looked to know the universe and through it the universe’s creator who alone has universal knowledge.

The pearl of wisdom residing in this seemingly archaic formulation is that unity resides in that which is sought, not in those who seek. We, as university people, are participants in a science of learning whose ultimate, unified objects and outcomes always exceed us. This tradition, of which Newman is an exemplar, is a rebuff to human pride but, very importantly, not in any way a denial of human reason. It is rather an affirmation of the university as the institution that refuses to foreclose on the question of universal knowledge while operating on a daily basis as a community of dissenting traditions of enquiry.

Written for and about an Irish university , The Idea of a University , remains the most elegant and enduring argument for the intrinsic value of higher education. It confronts and provokes us in our assumptions – especially any assumption that we have achieved closure on the definition of a university. This resistance to definitive interpretation is reason enough for us to continue to be grateful for our patron of the open mind.

A little something from prof. Duncan Stroik:

The Roots of Modernist Church Architecture
by Duncan Stroik

“The Church has not adopted any particular style of art as her own…. The art of our own times from every race and country shall also be given free scope in the Church, provided it bring to the task the reverence and honor due to the sacred buildings and rites”.

* Sacrosanctum Concilium, no. 123

“If you wish to see great Modernist architecture you must have plenty of time and your own Lear jet”.

– Robert Krier

To many educated observers, it would seem that the reductionist buildings commissioned for Roman Catholic worship today are the direct corollary of Church teaching, modern liturgical studies and contemporary theology. Of course, if that were so, Modernist architecture would be the officially sanctioned style of the Church and difficult to criticize.

Indeed, in the 1960s after the Vatican Council, there was a great surge of construction of austere churches which often resembled commercial or factory buildings, bearing out the belief that they were mandated by the spirit of Vatican II.

But these concrete boxes, barn-like shelters and sculptural masses all had precedent in the pre-conciliar era. In fact, radical new church configurations had been experimented with since the dawn of Modernism in the late 19th century. The idea to model churches on auditoria, Greek theaters, large houses, or theaters in-the-round grew out of low church Protestant worship, whereas the reductionism of post-Conciliar churches grew out of the Modernist architectural movement in Europe.

Modern Theology and Modernist Art

This is to point out that current church architecture is not merely the child of modern theology, it is also a child of the “masters” of Modernism: Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Alvar Aalto, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and others. The Church willingly accepted and even adopted the architecture of the secular realm for its sacred buildings. Yet in promoting this “International Style”, did the Church unknowingly adopt the philosophy of Modernism and unwittingly undercut her own theology?

First of all, it is well understood that the philosophical basis for Modernist architecture can be discovered, like her theological cousin, in the French Enlightenment and German rationalism. What is also of note is the parallel between the architecture of the Protestant Reformation and the iconoclastic architecture at the end of our century.

In the Reformation, Catholic churches were stripped of statuary, paintings and traditional symbols. New churches were designed as “meetinghouses”, as if going back to early Christianity when believers met in each others’ homes. Architecture, having lost its ability to signify the sacred, became seen as merely providing for the assembly’s material or functional needs. The concepts of the church as auditorium and theater in the round derive from early Calvinist buildings which were designed to enable people to see and hear the preacher, such as at Charenton, France.

Modernism was particularly attracted to the auditorium and theater types because of their scientific claims to acoustical and visual correctness, as well as the belief that the form of a building should be determined by its function.

During the Reformation, destruction of altar, tabernacle and sanctuary was commonplace, and often a pulpit or baptismal font replaced the altar as a focal point. The theological proscriptions against images and symbols in the Reformation were taken up by the Modernists in the 20th century, becoming a minimalist aesthetic requiring austerity and the absence of images.

The Need to Break with the Past

An essential tenet of Modernism at the turn of the century was the need to break with the past, in order to find a national architecture or an “architecture of our time”.

In accordance with Hegel’s philosophy, buildings were seen as a reflection of the spirit of the particular age in which they were built, and therefore distinct from previous epochs or styles. This was confirmed by the belief in “modern man” who because of his uniqueness in history required a unique architecture, preferably scientific, progressive, and abstract.

It was made clear by the early promoters of Modernism, such as Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Otto Wagner, that any semblance of historical elements or styles was not of our time and must be rejected.

At first this rejection of tradition took the form of subtracting or abstracting traditional motifs in buildings. Later, inspired by non-objective painting and sculpture, Modernist architecture sought to end the distinctions between floor and ceiling, interior and exterior, window and wall, and sacred and profane, which architecture has historically gloried in.

Technological Triumphalism

Aesthetically, Modernist architecture was inspired by works of engineering including bridges, industrial buildings, and temporary exposition halls which were large, economical, and built fast. An essential paradigm was the machine: Swiss architect Le Corbusier claimed the plane, the boat, and the car were models for a functional architecture. Just as a plane was designed efficiently for flight, so a house was a machine for living in. Just as the anthropological, spiritual, and traditional aspects of domus for dwelling and raising a family were stripped away in the “house as a machine for living in”, so would ritual, icon and sacrament be purged from the “church as machine for assembling in.”

Drawing on the writings of Viollet Le Duc and John Ruskin, it was alleged by the historian Nicholas Pevsner and others that the modern age required not only the use of modern materials such as steel, glass, and reinforced concrete, but that they be visibly expressed in the building as well.

It was also argued that a modern style grew out of the use of modern materials and that these materials lent themselves inherently to a reductionist aesthetic. This was partially a critique of the ongoing construction of masonry buildings such as St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, being built in the 20th century, as well as many chapels and churches built by architects in Classical or Medieval modes.

In fact at the same time Auguste Perret was building a Modernist concrete hall-church in Paris, Ralph Adams Cram and others were building Gothic and Renaissance churches of reinforced concrete (at West Point and in California) complete with ornament, moldings and sculpture. Not unlike the ancient Romans who used concrete hidden within the walls and domes of Classical buildings, early 20th century traditionalist architects brilliantly used the most current technology of construction, heating and plumbing, all within a humanistic aesthetic.

Churches as Abstract Sculpture

While the majority of Catholic churches built in the US before 1940 were traditional in style, many Protestant, Unitarian and Christian Scientist congregations experimented with industrial building forms.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple of 1904 is a cubic auditorium with geometric and floral ornament, while “der liebe Meister”, Louis Sullivan, designed St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in 1914 as an abstracted Roman theater.

In Germany in the late 1920’s, Otto Bartning designed Evangelical churches-in-the-round of glass and steel and concrete with limited icon-ography and articulation.

Dominikus Bohm followed his lead by designing a number of expressionistic Catholic churches, including St. Engelbert, a circular building complete with parabolic shaped ceilings.

Rudolf Schwarz also designed Catholic churches using abstracted geometries and the flowing space of the “International Style.”

Schwarz and Bohm were both associated with the liturgical movement in Germany and produced abstract spaces for Catholic worship long before Vatican II. After World War II, the Modernist movement was embraced world-wide as an expression of the technological triumph of the war. Many pastors followed the lead of government and big business by building abstract, asymmetrical and futuristic churches in modern materials.

In France, for the rustic church of Notre Dame at Assy, Dominican Father Pierre Marie-Alan Couturier commissioned fifteen of the best known Modernist artists to make murals, tapestries, mosaics, and stained glass.

Also under the patronage of Father Couturier, the French architect Le Corbusier designed perhaps the two best-known churches of this century: the pilgrimage church, Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp (Figs. 1a, 1b) and the Dominican Monastery, Ste. Marie de la Tourette (Fig 2).

Le Corbusier made it very clear from the beginning that he was not a religious man and undertook the projects because he was given freedom to express his ideas within an open landscape. Ronchamp is the epitome of the church as abstract sculpture and was likened by Le Corbusier to a temple of the sun.

La Tourette, on the other hand, is a severely orthogonal building with a tomb-like concrete chapel and a cloister that can not be used.

The monastery had many problems, including a high incidence of depression due to its prison-like cells and oppressive spaces which forced it to close. (For a time it became a retreat center for architects).

Father Couturier, believing that all “true art” is “sacred art,” argued that it was better to have a talented atheist making Christian art or designing churches than to have a pious artist who was mediocre. This premise was the opposite of the historic view of the church as a “sermon in stone,” a work of faith by architect, parish and artisans.

For Father Couturier, the church building was no longer seen as a teacher, minister, or evangelist but rather as a functional space for assembly. Likewise, the architect was no longer an inspired co-creator; instead, his work became a conduit for his own personal expression and of the “spirit of the age”.

Liturgical Progressivism

It is noteworthy that other than Wright in the US and Aalto in Finland, few of the Modernist “masters” were interested in designing churches or synagogues (Le Corbusier refused other commissions). Part of the belief in “modern man” was that religion was something unscientific, and hence churches were irrelevant to contemporary needs. While most of the Modernists came from Protestant backgrounds, the majority were atheists or agnostics. Exceptions were Mies van der Rohe and Eero Saarinen, whose churches can be seen as sublime objects, yet when imitated by others the originals lost their iconic power.

The Benedictines in the US were the equivalent of the Dominicans in France, being great patrons of Modernist art and architecture, as well as being liturgically progressive. At Collegeville, Minnesota they hired Marcel Breuer, originally of the Bauhaus, and at St. Louis they commissioned Gyo Obata, designer of the St. Louis Airport, for new abbeys (Figs. 3, 4). These buildings were sleek, non-traditional, and critically acclaimed by the architectural establishment.

Contemporary with these buildings, the documents of Vatican II were being developed. The chapters pertaining to the arts, though brief, are poetic, inspiring and alive to the artistic tradition of Catholicism. However, in spite of the intention by the Council to reform and recover liturgy, particularly early Christian liturgy, there was little interest shown by architects in the recovery of early Christian architecture.

The Council’s acceptance of the styles of the time and rejection of limitation to any particular style can be seen as a careful opening of the window to Modernism. The architectural establishment, by this time thoroughly cut off from its historical tradition, came in like a flood. A few architects and designers such as Anders Sovik, Frank Kaczmarcik and Robert Hovda made an effort, following Schwarz and Couturier, to argue for a modern architecture imbued with a Christian theology. Basing their views in part on the studies of liturgical scholars, Jungmann, Bouyer, and others, they promoted a “non-church” building emphasizing the assembly, without hierarchical orientation, fixed elements, or traditional architectural language.

These architects’ rejection of most of Christianity’s architectural and liturgical development, coupled with their promotion of an abstract aesthetic, seemed to baptize, confirm and marry Modernism to the Church.

These principles of modern liturgical “spaces,” later embodied in the Bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy document of 1978, “Environment and Art in Catholic Worship”, are essentially the iconoclastic tenets of 1920s Modernism.

“Deconstruction” of Modernism

Ironically, at the same time that the Catholic Church was reconciling herself with Modernism in the early 1960s, the architectural profession witnessed the beginning of a serious critique of Modernism.

Architects Robert Venturi, Louis Kahn, and Charles Moore, in their buildings and writings, proposed a new/old architecture of memory, symbol, and meaning, spawning what became known as the “Post-modern” movement. They also inspired the work of numerous other architects including John Burgee, Michael Graves, Allan Greenberg, Philip Johnson, Thomas Gordon Smith, and Robert Stern, who willingly embraced humanistic urban planning and a variety of architectural styles.

While allegiance to the Modernist style continues, many of its philosophical beliefs have been questioned and criticized during the past thirty years. The preservation movement, repentant Modernist architects, along with architectural historians and structural disasters, have exposed the limitations and failures of Modernism.

The liturgical design establishment, on the other hand, has barely acknowledged the critique of Modernism and continues to promote Modernist revival or even “deconstructionist” church buildings, as witnessed in two recent international competitions, one for a new church in Rome, the other for the Los Angeles Cathedral.

A Vital Tradition — Back to the Future

While most architects trained since World War II have a limited background in classical-medieval architecture, there is an ever-increasing number of architects all over the world practicing in traditional aesthetic languages, as well as a number of architecture schools teaching humanistic alternatives to Modernism.

Of great inspiration to architects, pastors and laity alike are the chapters in the Catechism of the Catholic Church devoted to the Universal Church’s teaching on sign, image and the church as a visible symbol of the Father’s house.

In recent decades we have seen a number of new or renovated Catholic churches which express these aims and those of Vatican II through the restoration of sign, symbol and typology. These include the renovated St. Mary’s Church in New Haven, the renovated Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City, the parish of San Juan Capistrano in California, Immaculate Conception Church in New Jersey, St. Agnes in New York, and Brentwood Cathedral in England.

These and other buildings indicate that the future of Catholic architecture will go beyond the narrow confines of the Modernist aesthetic to the broad and vital tradition of sacred architecture.

–Duncan Stroik, a frequent contributor to the Adoremus Bulletin, is Chair of the architecture school of Notre Dame University and founder of the magazine Sacred Architecture.

The Cathedral of Fulda:

A virtual tour:

http://www.mi360.de/bistum-fulda/tour.html

Westminster Cathedral

The new St David mosaic designed by Ifor Davies and executed by Tessa Hunkin

The mosaic is wonderfully bright and full of gold and silver that really bring the wall outside St Paul’s Chapel alive. In the centre is a depiction of St David, the patron saint of Wales, standing on the mound at Llandewi Brefi, defending the church’s teaching against the Pelagian heresy.
In the mosaic of the mound is an actual piece of rock from Llandewy Brevie in Wales, where it was said that the ground rose beneath St David as he was preaching to allow people to hear him better. Around his head is written ‘Dewi Sant’, his name in Welsh, and just above is a small red, sixth century bishops mitre recognising that Saint David was made a bishop of the Roman province of Menevia.

The final product has been thanks to two people in particular – Ifor Davies, the Welsh artist who designed and painted the original image, and Tessa Hunkin who created the mosaic itself – both of whom had to work to a very tight deadline to have the mosaic completed.

________________

This new mosaic of St David was designed by Ivor Davies, and was assembled and installed by Tessa Hunkin’s workshop. It is a meditation on one of David’s titles: the Waterman, or Aquaticus (“Dewi Dyfyrwr”, in Welsh). This title refers to the fact that David and his monks drank nothing but water, as a witness to the virtues of temperance and self-denial. The artist has used the theme of water, as well as elements of the so-called “Celtic Church”, in quite an adventurous and mystical way. I noticed that, in an attempt at historical accuracy, the Saint has the Celtic (or British and Irish) tonsure, as opposed to the classical Roman one*.

* The ancient British or Irish tonsure, used by monks following the now extinct British rites of the Catholic Church, involved shaving the front half of the hair on top of one’s head, and allowing the hair at the back to grow long. The Roman tonsure was a shaved circle around the head’s crown (as is familiar to those with a knowledge of Western monasticism).

_____________

A new mosaic of St David, by artist Ifor Davies, has been completed at Westminster Cathedral. The mosaic will be blessed by Pope Benedict XVI when he celebrates Mass at Westminster Cathedral on Saturday 18 September 2010.

Welsh artist, Ifor Davies said: “I have been painting all my life and this is one of the most exciting commissions and very close to my heart. I have always been interested in Welsh history and so have done lots of research around St David and the early church in Wales.”

“To start with I made a drawing, about the same size of as the mosaic on very thick paper and painted the image. Together with Tessa Hunkin from the Mosaic Workshop we traced the original image in order to be able to put it into a mosaic format.”

“St David is depicted as standing on a mound, the myth states that he was preaching to a crowd and, in order for them to be able to hear him, better the ground rose underneath him. The bit of stone at the bottom of the mosaic is from Llanddewi Brefi, the spot where the miracle is said to have happened. There are also lots of other references to stories associated with St David, the water coming from his cup represents the fact that he drank only water for example.”

The mosaic has been an important part of the Cathedral’s preparations for the visit of Pope Benedict XVI. Cathedral Administrator, Canon Christopher Tuckwell said: “I am delighted with the mosaic. When I first saw the drawing I could see that there was something new, fresh and alive about it. We are looking forward to the Holy Father coming here to bless the mosaic. It is a great part of his outreach to the people of Wales.”

Tessa Hunkin from the Mosaic Workshop who put the mosaic together said: “It has been a great piece to work on, but a bit more difficult than other mosaics because there is so much gold and you have to use a slightly different technique when working with gold to ensure that it shimmers.”

At the end of the Mass on 18 September, the Pope will bless the mosaic with water from St Nonn’s well in Wales. St Nonn was the mother of St David. He will then address the people of Wales before concluding the Mass in Westminster Cathedral

ST Colman’s Cathedral, Cobh, Co. Cork

The latest incongruity:

From the Irish Times, 18 September 2010

Celestial chorus in a Cobh cathedral

MARY LELAND

It’s an unusual idea that mixes early music with modern technology, while a choir sings the words from a novel about a 16th century nun – but the result promises to be beautiful

THE DISEMBODIED voices echoing along the nave of St Colman’s Cathedral in Cobh have an ethereal quality, eerie, resonating like an echo from a film by Louis Buñuel. Close up, however, they reveal themselves as the team of musicologists Deborah Roberts and Melanie Marshall and technician Mick Daly, setting up for the first performance in Ireland of Sacred Hearts, Secret Music as part of East Cork Early Music Festival. Their subject is not so much the Renaissance music of Italian convents as a matter of plugs and amplifiers, lights, cables and consoles. Nothing nun-like about any of that, were it not that it is precisely because of the nuns singing through the pages of Sarah Dunant’s novel Sacred Hearts that this technical survey is taking place.

Dunant herself participates as narrator of the script she composed in collaboration with Nicholas Renton. What could be called her backing group will be the corps of singers drawn from the Celestial Sirens, of which Melanie, who teaches at the school of music at University College Cork, is a member, and Musica Secreta, of which Roberts is a director with Dr Laurie Stras of Southampton University. All three are specialists in Italian music from 1500 to 1800; their relationship with Dunant began when the writer contacted them for advice on the musical content of her novel, in which a reluctant young novice achieves notoriety by the angelic sweetness and purity of her voice. Purity is not at all what the girl had intended for her life, and the book uses her efforts to escape from her convent in Ferrara as a way of examining power, spirituality and the experience of women in the 16th century.

“Sarah understood that it was music which gave the nuns of that time a kind of power,” says Roberts. “It gave them a voice, and an opportunity to interact with their city or their patrons. The point of the book is that this was a political struggle in which the nuns in a particular convent organised themselves to do battle with the repressive religious authorities.”

Sex is the other subtext, disguised as sensuality but proposing that singing, both for performers and audience, could be a kind of recompense for the loss of a sexual life. “It’s the sheer joy of singing, its physicality,” enthuses Roberts, expanding on the suggestion that the female vocal cords could indicate sexual experience – a dangerous condition in a 16th-century convent. That’s the reason for Celestial Sirens as a title – siren voices drawing the listeners on chains of gold to heaven.

A director of the Tallis Scholars, Roberts is the founder, with Clare Norburn, of Brighton Early Music Festival, where Sacred Hearts, Secret Music had a successful first outing. “Laurie and I were proofing Sarah’s book and we just felt we really had to make a recording to go with it. With both Musica Secreta and Celestial Sirens we produced a CD, and after that Sarah and Nicholas wrote up a 30-minute performance of readings and music which we expanded into a full-length drama.”

Now rejoicing in the acoustic of the great vaulted roof, Roberts accepts that, in a cathedral notorious for the strength of opposition to its re-ordering proposals, she is unlikely to be able to move the altar table to make room for the chorus of nuns, led by Katherine Hawnt as the novice Serafina. Instead they will sing from the side aisles, appearing only after a candlelit procession in the nave. Ambience is everything: “We don’t want people to come into a concert – concerts weren’t invented until the 18th century – but into a convent. We want them to feel that they are there.”

Some comments on the clean up of the sanctuary of Westminster Cathedral by Damian Thompson in the Daily Telegraph:

Westminster Cathedral in 1982 and 2010: look how radically the sanctuary has changed

Today’s Papal Mass in Westminster Cathedral was a model of liturgy in every respect*. I was lucky enough to be present and, like many people I’ve spoken to, I was moved to the verge of tears by its beauty and the poignancy of the Pope’s message. I don’t, alas, remember anything about the Mass celebrated in the cathedral by Pope John Paul II in 1982 – but I’ve been looking at photographs of it and I’m struck by the radically different configurations of the sanctuary in 1982 and 2010:

The high altar at which Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Mass yesterday was actually hidden behind a curtain for the 1982 Mass, which was celebrated by Pope John Paul II at a free-standing altar (now thankfully discarded) much nearer the congregation. In those days Bentley’s high altar was thought to be a beautiful anachronism, redolent of the supposedly defunct Tridentine Mass. (Little did they know…) And note that, in 1982, there was no question of decorating the altar with the enormous candlesticks used today, let alone a large crucifix confronting the Holy Father as he consecrated the Host. I think these would have been regarded as “obstructions” 28 years ago, when there was a much greater focus on the physical presence of the Pope: hence the mocked-up throne facing the people. Benedict XVI, in contrast, views tall candles as symbols drawing attention away from the personality of the celebrant, and the crucifix as an object that orientates (alas, not usually literally) the priest towards Calvary rather than the congregation. It will be very interesting to see whether Westminster Cathedral makes the crucifix a permanent feature of Mass on its altars, in accordance with the Pope’s wishes. I hope so, because today it gave many Catholics their first taste of truly Benedictine worship.

(*Well, almost every respect. Those Gothicky chasubles are fine for welcoming visitors to your planet in a low-budget sci-fi series, but not for Mass. One thing they did get right in 1982 was the vestments – see above.)

Dino Marcantonio, Architect
Thoughts on the theory and practice of architecture.

Parts of the Church Building: the Bema

The term Bema has several different meanings. The word is most commonly a synonym for the Sanctuary, especially in the East. However, it can also refer to:
1. The raised, gated area which projects from the Sanctuary into the nave called the schola cantorum
2. A separate raised platform for clergy which, in antiquity–particularly in Syria–was located in the middle of the nave and completely separated from the Sanctuary (like the bema of a synagogue, or a dislocated schola cantorum)
3. The Ambo
4. The Pulpit (more rarely)

All these meanings stem from the original definition of the Greek word Bema (βήμα): a raised platform, or tribune, for a speaker or, more importantly, for the official seat of a judge.

In this passage from St. Germanus, he is using the term to mean the Sanctuary, the whole raised area reserved for clergy, with a particular emphasis on the area which contains the bishop’s throne at the back of the apse. He states:

“The bema is a concave place, a throne on which Christ, the king of all, presides with His apostles, as He says to them: “You shall sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Mt 19:28). It points to the second coming, when he will come sitting on the throne of glory to judge the world, as the prophet says: “Thrones were set for judgment over the house of David” (Ps 121:5)

The apse of the cathedral in Torcello, near Venice.
Note the prominent cathedra and surrounding amphitheater,
or synthronon, for the officiating bishop and his assistants.
Above, Christ is enthroned in the arms of the Blessed Virgin,
His Apostles arrayed like supreme court justices to either side.

Click to view largeDownload this gallery (ZIP, undefined KB)Download full size (203 KB)

The apse of the cathedral in Torcello, near Venice.
Note the prominent cathedra and surrounding amphitheater,
or synthronon, for the officiating bishop and his assistants.
Above, Christ is enthroned in the arms of the Blessed Virgin,
His Apostles arrayed like supreme court justices to either side.
(Image source)

St. Germanus shows us that there is a second meaning to the architectural element that is the Sanctuary. We have already seen that the Sanctuary looks back in time and makes present the holy tomb of Christ. Now in this passage, St. Germanus shows that it also looks forward in time and makes present the Judgment Seat of Christ. It looks forward both to the end of our own lives when we shall face our Particular Judgment, and to the end of time when we shall face the General Judgment.

There is, of course, a foreshadowing of this architectural element in the Temple at Jerusalem and in the synagogues which imitated it. Once every seven years, in the feast of tabernacles, an elevated platform with a throne for the King was erected in the Women’s Court of the Temple. From the throne, the King would read from the Torah the law against which the actions of all would be judged. Under the New Dispensation, Christ is King, so the throne and judgment seat is naturally moved into the Holy of Holies.

The Bema at St. John Lateran, the Alter Christus, or Other Christ, presiding.
St. Germanus’s cathedral the Hagia Sophia would have had a similar throne.

The Bema is also foreshadowed in the Royal Stoa of the Temple at Jerusalem. This building, located on the southern side of the Temple Mount complex, was a basilica with, believe it or not, an apse at it’s eastern end. The Sanhedrin sat in that apse when they heard cases. It was built by Herod and modeled on the pagan Roman basilica, which also served as a court of law, the judgment seat in the apse.

The Eastern rites have continued the tradition of featuring a bishop’s throne and synthronon at the rear of the apse, even in parish churches. Adrian Fortescue, in his book The Orthodox Eastern Church, was moved to write:

“The principle of having the bishop’s throne in every church of his diocese, which waits till he comes to fill it, is again one of the very beautiful and right practices which the comparative conservatism of the Orthodox Church has kept. It is true that the way in which she clings to one stage of development is altogether unjustifiable theologically, but it results in a number of very curious and picturesque remnants of a past age, which exist only in her services. Nothing in the world is more dead than the Empire that fell with Constantine XII, and yet its ghost still lingers around the Byzantine altars.

In Western cathedrals, the bishop’s cathedra has moved to the side where it is not obscured by the much more elaborate altar than is usually found in the East. And of course, such a move is absolutely unavoidable when, out of practical necessity or other considerations, there is no apse and hence no space behind the altar. Nevertheless, the Sanctuary as a whole in the West remains raised, usually three or five steps, and the seat retains its visual prominence. Its elevation reminds us that Christ is not only Savior, but also Judge.