The Cross and Creation in Liturgy and Art

Christopher Irvine

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780281069088
• eBook ISBN: 9780281070992
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Art

Explore the intersection of art movements and spirituality in this insightful book, linking the crucifixion, creation, and our commitment to environmental stewardship.

The book gives an account of various movements in art and their relation to the visual and in churches and in liturgy, for example the Franciscan movement, different approaches to the crucifixion, and the restoration of creation. It recovers the links between the cross and creation, and relates the baptismal covenant to a commitment to care for creation.

Chapter 1

Seeing liturgically

There are many ways of seeing, and how something is seen depends at least to some extent on where the object is seen and, indeed, on what occasion. The specific aim of this chapter is to establish a way of seeing the cross and images of the crucifixion that takes cognizance of the physical setting in which they are seen, and the building’s primary purpose, which in the case of a church is worship. The experience of worship is closely bound up with the ambience in which it takes place and the visual impact of its physical setting. Following the edict of Milan in 313, when Christianity became a legally permissible cult, and the subsequent political annexing of Christianity,¹ Christians in the urban centres of the Roman Empire adopted the basilica – literally, a ‘royal hall’ – as the most appropriate shape and building plan for their churches. With toleration came a significant increase in the number of Christians, and as their worship became more public, so a public building such as the basilica provided the best model for their worship space. The first secular basilica built in the city of Rome dates back to the time of the Republic (500 BC–AD 31), and served a civic function. The basilica was basically a rectangular shape and typically had clerestory windows and columned aisles on either side supporting a timber roof. In an urban cityscape in which there were temples and shrines on every corner, the basilica did not have a particular religious connotation or significance but provided a gathering space for business transactions and judicial functions and purposes.

From the earliest times we know that Christians had adapted domestic architectural spaces for the purpose of worship, but in the second half of the third century, as they grew numerically in cities such as Rome, they acquired larger premises, such as store houses, in which to gather for worship. These were known as the aula ecclesiae.² Following the conversion of Constantine and throughout the fourth century, there was an ambitious and extensive programme of adapting previous basilicas and of building new ones. Constantine himself was responsible for building a number of new basilicas to mark the significant sites within the Christian world, and by this stage it is evident that important changes were made to the basic ground plan of the basilica in order for them to serve the purpose of Christian worship. Such changes included the orientation of the building,³ so that on entering it one entered a pathway that drew the eye to its focal point – the concave apse in which the centres of liturgical activity, such as the bishop’s chair, the ambo and the altar, were centrally placed.⁴ The Christian basilica was an architectural space, specifically designated and adapted for worship, and as such was more than simply a convenient meeting space. Indeed, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that as an architectural space, the development of the Christian basilica deliberately combined notions of the public ‘meeting space’ with that of the ‘sacred space’ of the temple in which worshippers invoked and encountered the triune God in worship.⁵

We know that these buildings, such as the basilica of St John Lateran, built on the edge of the city of Rome and consecrated in 324, were lavishly decorated with glittering mosaics, fabrics and sculpture, and contained certain furniture, such as the altar table, that was assigned symbolic importance and value. The development of the basilica reached its apogee in the fifth century, and a stunning example is the brick-built basilica of Santa Sabina, which was built on the site of a small house-church that allegedly had originally been the titled property of the martyr St Sabina, during the pontificate of Celestine I (422–32), and would have been regarded at the time as monumental in scale. The interior of the building was lavishly decorated, and on one of the surviving cypress-wood doors to the basilica, in relief sculpture, is one of the earliest depictions of the crucifixion, showing an oversized Christ figure with the two thieves on either side.

The deliberate combination of social and sacred space in the Christian basilica led to its name as the basilica domenicana, where people were called together by God to be the people of God. The basilica provided an ample and expansive space, a space for all together, and given the scale of ordinary domestic buildings, many worshippers must have been struck by the sheer sense of space that they experienced as they took their place for worship. The very architectural arrangement articulated a dynamic sense of movement as the colonnaded nave drew the worshippers’ attention towards the Holy of Holies, inviting them to approach the altar,⁶ which came to be covered by a fabric canopy or by an architectural ciborium, and beyond which was the concave apse, the visual climax where the eye eventually came to rest⁷ on the place of encounter with the triune God. The basilica provided ample space for worshippers to gather as a corporate body, and as it seems likely, from the material visual evidence of the orantes painted by jobbing artists in the Roman catacombs, that Christians prayed with open eyes, the sight lines of the building and their destination must have had a direct and dramatic impact on their experience and understanding of worship.

For Christians worshipping in the basilica, worship was as much a visual as an aural experience. As well as the sight lines there were also clearly defined pathways through the interior space, along aisles that facilitated the flow of the movement of people in and through the building and that were used for a number of liturgical processions and movement, such as the entrance procession, the Gospel reading, Offertory and Communion. And so on entering the great longitudinal architectural space of the basilica, the worshipper may indeed have felt led by the series of columns in that expansive area to step out along a processional pathway into a liminal place of encounter, where sight lines converged in what was the largest unified space for the artist above and behind the altar.⁸ The whole architectural design with its deliberate orientation conspired to bring the eye to rest on what functioned as a visual canopy above the particular loci of liturgical activity. Thomas Mathews (1993) has argued that what the apsidal mural or mosaic invariably presented was an aspect of the person or work of Christ. If this view is taken as a correct reading of the evidence, then we can see a correlation between the central visual icon and the one whose presence was understood to be mediated through the proclaiming of the Word, the sacrament of the Eucharist and the assembly itself as Christ’s ‘body’. In Chapter 5 I will take up the question of what was represented in the visual focal point of the basilica in a discussion of the apsidal mosaics in two ancient basilica churches in Rome, St John Lateran and St Clemente.

Meanwhile, my concern here is not so much to engage in the renewed debate about the ways in which Christian worship was shaped by the ground plan of the basilica but to highlight the visual impact and the kinetic aspects of what it is to enter into a rectangular hall-shaped building, whether that building is an ancient basilica, such as the Roman basilica in Trier, or the lofty Gothic architecture of Rheims Cathedral. In more recent times in London, we have seen a remarkable adaptation of a hall-shaped building for a specifically visual purpose, namely the conversion of Bankside power station into the Tate Modern art gallery. Designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, Bankside was originally an oil-fired power station, and its turbine hall is some 200 metres in length (660 feet).

This building project, designed by the international architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, has been a phenomenal success, converting the inside of a modernist industrial building into a number of light and capacious exhibition spaces. The building work began in 1995 and was completed in January 2000, and during its first year the gallery attracted some one million visitors, far exceeding the projected number. On entering the building, visitors find themselves in the cavernous space of the turbine hall, and it would be fascinating to compare the response of visitors on entering that capacious space with those who enter the nave of a cathedral. Comparisons have been made, and the turbine hall was described as being ‘cathedral-like’ in the official publication describing the building project.⁹ Tate Modern occupies a prime site on the south bank of the Thames, directly opposite St Paul’s Cathedral, and continues to expand with the addition in 2012 of a new gallery and meeting space in the original industrial oil tanks, for which Tate managed to raise £175 million at a time of severe financial stringency and global economic uncertainty. A second phase of development providing new galleries is expected to be open by 2016. The two iconic buildings of Tate Modern and St Paul’s Cathedral are linked by the London Millennium Footbridge, and this linking is not without its ironic dimension. Has the turbine hall at Tate Modern, for which there is currently no charge for entry, become the kind of ‘public space’ that Christopher Wren intended for his cathedral? St Paul’s was built, incidentally, by public subscription to be the sacred space in the City of London for the people of London. It could be said that as both buildings attract a significant high ‘footfall’ as major visitor attractions in the capital, there is little by way of competition, and some commentators might also add that any comparison between the two buildings is invidious because of the difference in their primary purposes. Nevertheless, in terms of how architectural spaces work, and the visual impact they have on the people who enter them, some comparison seems at least inevitable.

The unquestionable success story of Tate Modern could well be read as irrefutable evidence for the sociologist’s theory of secularization. Indeed, an interesting statement is made in the published story of its building that the experience of the visitor to the turbine hall ‘is as close to a spiritual experience as one might find in today’s secular world’.¹⁰ However, the statement should not be taken on face value as the term ‘spiritual’ is nebulous and fluid, and the assumption that we live in a ‘secular world’ is one that is increasingly contested. The theory of secularization is constructed from the observation of a combination of social trends, including the mentality that we occupy a closed technologically regulated world that is solely of human making,¹¹ and the empirical discrepancy between religious belief and actual practice.¹² These social trends underpin the sociologist David Martin’s claim that the art gallery and the concert hall are the new foci of high seriousness and contemplation in our plural social world.¹³ But this claim, made without any reference to the other factors leading to the prominence of such urban spaces in contemporary society, such as the market-driven art world and culture of celebrity and sensation, merely echoes the confident claim of André Malraux, who in the middle of the twentieth century announced that the gallery or art museum would be the only shrine of the modern age in western democracies.¹⁴

We may well detect in Malraux’s writing a hint of the modern tendency towards opposition; that is, the tendency to oppose categories such as religion and spirituality, the religious and the secular, which in turn can be traced back to the doyen of modernism, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It was Nietzsche who famously opposed ‘Dionysius’ to ‘the Crucified One’.¹⁵ But there is no necessary a priori reason to posit an opposition between art and religion. They are far from being in competition, and besides, even the theory of secularization, predicated on the empirical basis of the numerical decline of institutional religious allegiance and practice, is now seen to be a more complex phenomenon and is treated in a more nuanced way.¹⁶ The assertion that museums are now our cathedrals and cathedrals now our museums has a definite rhetorical ring, but it is hardly a sufficient statement of the intended purpose of both kinds of buildings. It may well be the case that the architectural design of some but by no means all nineteenth-century galleries and museums had architectural similarities to major religious buildings, but it is not simply the case that these buildings, whose primary purpose or function was the display of visual materials and historic artefacts, were superseding the function of cathedrals and other significant religious monuments.

What is indisputable is the notable increase in the popularity of museums and galleries that was noted towards the end of the twentieth century¹⁷ and continues in a particularly huge way with the ongoing developments at Tate Modern. The trend continues, and two impressive new British galleries, the Turner Contemporary Gallery in Margate and the Hepworth in Wakefield, both designed by the architect David Chipperfield, achieved their target for visitors for their first year within seven months of opening. But statistics alone do not in themselves prove that the gallery has become the temple of art in our western mass society. There is in any case a plurality of functions for church buildings as well as for museums and galleries, and both kinds of building continue to attract significant numbers of visitors and pilgrims. According to a pilot survey commissioned by the Association of English Cathedrals, well over 11 million people visited cathedrals during 2006, and among this figure some 45 per cent of respondents to a questionnaire engaged in an explicitly religious act of saying a prayer and lighting a candle.¹⁸ More research is needed here, but this overtly religious behaviour does support the view that cathedrals and churches meet the human need for sacred space. The need, that is, for those places that are described by the poet Philip Larkin in ‘Church Going’ as a ‘serious place’, and that, as the sociologist concedes, can provide space for symbolic expressions in times of personal crisis, or of more public anguish and celebration.¹⁹ Further, alongside these occasional uses of sacred space there is the statistical evidence that bucks the overall trend in the decline of affiliation to religious institutions, and that Grace Davie²⁰ may count as evidence for a residual or nominal Christian belief and practice, which is the consistent three per cent annual rise in the number of worshippers attending services in English cathedrals during the decade following the turn of the millennium.²¹

It could be the case that what motivates the visitor to a cathedral is the desire to connect in some way to the past or simply to view the art and architecture, but even so, the evidence suggests that in terms of what leads people to visit such a place, one cannot simply equate a cathedral with a museum or gallery. Parallels between the function of galleries and museums and churches and cathedrals have been drawn and analysed. But the mapped similarities have focused on the intended social effect of both kinds of building on their clientele.²² The fact remains that what is found in the museum may well inform and inspire the visitor, but the artefacts seen in a worshipping context are there as part of the pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author information
• Title page
• Imprint
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Seeing liturgically
• 2. Salvation seen
• 3. The cross in blood and in bloom
• 4. The noble tree
• 5. The living cross
• 6. The tree of life
• 7. Restoring paradise
• Select search items for works of art
• Search items