Fascination and Admiration
by James Matthew Wilson, appearing in Volume 47
The Catholic Church over several generations has suffered a grievous impoverishment. It has lost its sense of the scope and expression of the sacramental in its sacred architecture and so lost sight of the multitude of functions that architecture serves. The explanation for this impoverishment lies, in part, in modern architects’ looking back to a classical understanding of the relationship of architectural form to sacred function and their distinctly modern misreading of that relationship. Let me begin, however, with two illustrative anecdotes, both from my own childhood, that speak of this modern misreading. I will then offer some more abstract reflections on the function of sacred architecture before exploring its meaning by way of two poems.
The parish of my youth (Saint Thomas Aquinas, in East Lansing, Michigan) was a hulking modern building, whose central nave rose up to allow a great stained-glass window, covering the whole rear of the church, to shine out on the darkness of the night. The details of the window celebrated Aquinas as the great theologian of faith and reason; they showed the conspicuous activities of the region, namely the auto industry and the scientific research of Michigan State University, as useful fruits of the Church’s great intellectual tradition. The window was most impressive for its size; less impressive for the quality of its glasswork; and one must note, it was the only ambitiously ornamental feature of the building.
The outside of the church was sheeted with aluminum and so, despite the grandeur of the stained glass, the sides of the building looked like a pole barn. Except for the intricately detailed window, the interior was austere. It had been constructed so there was nothing to fascinate the eye besides the tabernacle in the sanctuary. That tabernacle was squat and rectangular in form and its small doors were winged and covered in a tiled mosaic. It seemed primitive and modern as did the burnt orange carpet covering the floor of the sanctuary.
During my childhood, the tabernacle was removed from the sanctuary and placed in a side chapel. “Placed” sounds almost too reverent for what was done. While the side chapel had a mosaic of the Wedding at Cana that matched the style of the tabernacle, the tabernacle was not repositioned to give it any kind of prominence in its new home. Rather, it was shoved into a corner, near a sliding glass door that separated the side chapel from the main church, as if the tabernacle served the same function as a broom closet: a place not to be contemplated, but to be forgotten about until it was retrieved for one specific use.
Many years later, the tabernacle was returned to its proper central position in the sanctuary. The old, squat mosaic one was replaced with a tabernacle of hammered gold whose dimensions rose more obviously toward heaven. It was a vast improvement.
My extended family were among the early settlers of the level plains of Northwestern Ohio and eastern Indiana, a region largely peopled in the nineteenth century by German Catholic farmers, who built a series of over thirty “cross-tipped churches” during their first decades in the United States. The parish to which my grandparents belonged, Immaculate Conception in Celina, Ohio, was a great red brick Romanesque pile—awe-striking from the outside. The interior was elaborately painted with sacred art and outfitted with statuary. What particularly captured the eye, however, was the marble altar, with its elaborate towers and turrets giving it the appearance of a palace in miniature—sublime, marmoreal, and labyrinthine. Sitting in the choir loft during an overflowing midnight Mass one Christmas, I stared down upon the altar and imagined myself shrunken down to a miniature-size; I dreamed of being set loose, this miniature self, to explore the secret, extensive passageways somewhere hidden within that ornate palace.
Saint Thomas was, it seemed, a modern church whose form was ostensibly fitted to its function. There was nothing about it to distract the eye from the liturgy taking place. Immaculate Conception was the antithesis. My eyes reeled from detail to detail and, when they had exhausted what could merely be seen, they dwelled upon that high altar and imagined a miniature world within the actual world. Saint Thomas seemed to demand that one contemplate the action of the liturgy simply by offering nothing else. Immaculate Conception, by contrast, provoked one’s fascination and admiration.
As a matter of etymology, the word “fascination” leads us back to the idea of bewitchment, of being cast under a spell and rendered passive and incapable of resistance. “Admiration,” by contrast, suggests an activity: that which is admirable provokes one actively to look (mire) toward (ad). Together, they suggest the wonderful experience of being spell-bound by some enchanted object and, thereby, the leaving of oneself behind, via the pathway of the eyes, to enter into a beauty that is genuinely awe-inducing. Such language suggests the danger of fascination and admiration: we are no longer in control of ourselves; we go out of ourselves in ecstasy; we lose ourselves in the reality of another. And yet, it also intimates something more. Fascination and admiration are the incipient stages of contemplation. The eye, the imagination, and the mind, must first be arrested, be fascinated, by the admirable if they are to rest in the concentration, the non-discursive awe, of contemplation that lies at the center of all free acts of thought, prayer, and worship.
These two church buildings of my youth have something to teach us. Saint Thomas Aquinas had done away with nearly everything that could fascinate, no doubt so the mind of everyone in the pews could look with greater concentration on the liturgical action in the sanctuary. Immaculate Conception, by contrast, displayed a teeming largess of sacred imagery, and while my young mind was led to pay more attention to the palatial recesses of the high altar than to the homily preached at the ambo, that youthful admiration was itself a preparation for the mature contemplation of prayer.
I would go one step further. This youthful fascination strikes me as the necessary and proper preparation. The austere simplicity of the Church of Saint Thomas Aquinas provided no means of initiation into the mystery of the liturgy. Far from purifying the church building for its intended purpose, its austerity rendered the liturgy itself less intelligible than it could have been. It was not a purification. It was merely an impoverishment.
With these personal reflections as a point of departure, I would like to reflect now more generally on sacred architecture and its function.
Every modern architect will know Le Corbusier’s definition of a house as “a machine for living.” The problem here is not merely the language of the machine, but also the underlying relation of form to function. As another modern sacred architect, Pietro Belluschi, stated in his own statement of architectural principles, modernism was a kind of classicism. The modernists attempted to recover the classical philosopher Aristotle’s essential insight about the relationship of “the causes.”
Aristotle had argued that one could know the truth about something only in terms of its causes—of which there were four: the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final. According to Aristotle, the final cause—the why or purpose of a thing—determined everything else. To know the truth about something, we must first know why finally it is to be done or made. What is its reason for being in the first place? From this knowledge of the telos (the end), we may discern three things: how it may be brought into being (the efficient cause), what it is to be made of (the material cause), and what it should be (the formal cause). Modernist architects seem to have thrilled at the possibility of posing as Aristotelians. They would define what a building was for (its final cause) and build the form to suit. A house is a machine for living. A church, our modern sacred architects contended, was a machine for liturgy. Once this had been established, the premise of “form follows function” could take care of the rest.
If many modern churches seem austere, primitive blocks it is because the sacred architects discerned that churches are for liturgical purposes and so should be formed for that use and that use alone. But is it so?
What if we replaced the definition of “a machine for liturgy” with a more obvious one: “a machine for the sacraments”? Churches are the consecrated home of the Mass, but also of all seven sacraments, most of which participate in the liturgy, but some of which are celebrated outside the liturgy. Perhaps the church is not a simple liturgical machine, but a seven-times more complex structure for the sacraments.
Perhaps even that is not enough. Catholics know that the noun “sacrament” has the adjectival form “sacramental,” in the sense of “pertaining to the sacraments.” But we also use the term “sacramental” as a noun. Used as a noun, a “sacramental” refers, according to the Catechism, to all “sacred signs instituted by the Church to prepare us to receive the fruit of the sacraments and to sanctify different circumstances of our lives.” Crucifixes, rosaries, icons, medals, and holy water are examples of sacramental objects. But sacramentals are also specific actions of devotion: prayers to saints, the Stations of the Cross, making the sign of the cross, wearing a scapular. All these belong to the category of the sacramentals, a category that includes items numbering in the hundreds if not the thousands. All the sacramentals merit some place within the sacred dimensions of the church building. If we define a church as a “sacramental structure,” its function is not one (the liturgy), it is not seven (the sacraments); it is supernumerary (the liturgy, sacraments, and sacramentals taken altogether).
Far from obscuring the function of a church, such sacred ornaments as the Stations of the Cross posted along the walls of the nave, the side altars and alcoves devoted to saints and housing certain relics, testify to the multiple purposes, the whole sacramental economy that a church building serves. Consider the arch over the doorway into any Gothic cathedral. There, we find Christ at the center, and see him surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses: angels, apostles, prophets, and saints. Church architecture should speak the language of an orderly but never austere fruitfulness.
Even now, however, my account of the purpose of sacred architecture remains reductive. Let us return to that supposedly simple word, “liturgy” once more. As Pope Benedict XVI argued in The Spirit of the Liturgy and elsewhere, “liturgy” does not denote a single, simple function. Catholic liturgical form serves two intrinsic purposes and has two dimensions, one horizontal and one vertical. First, the liturgy recalls the “shadows” of the Old Covenant that anticipate the New, and second, it recollects and makes present the coming of Christ into history, his birth, his death on the cross, and his resurrection. The liturgy takes place “in between,” in the historical moment between the “shadow” of the Old Covenant and the final “reality” that will be made present at the end of history with the coming of Christ’s kingdom.
Liturgy therefore has an essentially historical dimension. It has also a vertical and “cosmic” dimension. Nearly all the religions and philosophies of the world have perceived the purposeful order of nature and considered the contemplation of that order the highest act of all creation. Christ is not only the Savior who redeems history from the Fall, but also, and more fundamentally, he is the Logos, who makes all things, puts all things in order, renders them intelligible to us, and sets them on their course, back to him. The cosmos has a form proper to itself that finds its human expression in the liturgy.
In the liturgy, we are reminded of both the horizontal and vertical dimensions—both of what Christ did in history and what the whole movement of the created order does in its perpetual circling about the Godhead, along with all the angels and saints, giving glory to the Lord forever and ever. Sacred music sings of God’s saving actions for his people, but it also reminds us of the music of the spheres, that the whole cosmos is ordered to worship. Sacred images remind us of the scenes of the Gospels or the holiness of the saints, but they also serve as icons of the in-breaking of the eternal liturgy of heaven into the earthly liturgy we celebrate here and now. Even if our sacred architecture were merely a “machine for liturgy,” it would still require the intricate, adorned, and rich surfaces that modernist architecture stripped away in the name of the liturgical function. The supposed Aristotelian impulse of modern sacred architecture was mistaken on its own terms—even as it also embraced an impoverished, inadequate terminology.
What I have just sought to suggest by way of memoir and the abstract language of theology, I earlier explored by way of verse. And so, I will conclude with two poems. The first one refers to that same Saint Thomas Aquinas Church, where the great stained-glass window proclaimed a Church of faith and reason, an ark capable of carrying its people through the troubles of modernity, even as the shrinking number in the pews tell a different story. The poem, “Return to Saint Thomas,” is a Petrarchan sonnet and appears in my book, Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds.
That is a sonnet of concern about a Church in retreat. But the blessing of the sacramental vision of the Church, including the vision of the cosmic liturgy, is a mystery not so easily forced into retreat. We see all about us the ordering of the Logos. All the world has its sacramental direction, drawing our fascination and admiration to created things and, through created things, to their infinite and eternal Creator. The liturgy is our perfect action in the world, but it is anticipated by our discernment of the order of things. I tried to capture that participation of the natural and the creaturely in the supernatural and uncreated in one section of a long poem called “Quarantine Notebook,” which appears in my book, The Strangeness of the Good.
There, I recorded the events of the first months of the COVID outbreak and the accompanying “lockdown.” Those early days were an opportunity for me personally to help my children master their balance on their bicycles. As I stood in their midst, watching them whirl by me in great orbiting circles, I was reminded of the pageant of angels and saints who circle around the glory of the throne of the Lord. In the everlasting circular motion of things, I found an antidote to the virus, that is to say, I found consolation that the things that matter most will forever repeat their circular pattern, even as the straight line of chronicle and history dragged its long tail through the unhappy hours of the present. Written in iambic pentameter blank verse, the title is the date of its occurrence, “April 15, 2020.”
Return to Saint Thomas
Here we are, with five children we’ve amassed,
The nave a bloated hull of tin, the cross
Dangling from double chains, its weight of loss
Moored in midair as listing decades passed.
A few gray heads, behind, recall a past
When that bright-sharded window cast a gloss
On pews packed full: however time’s waves toss
The Church, it bears its people to the last.
That’s not the obvious lesson it once seemed,
As I turn toward strange faces offering peace,
And fail to find those who were borne with me
Through all the sacraments, those taught to see,
In every fall, a chance to be redeemed,
Never suspecting prayer might simply cease.
April 15, 2020
The children whirl in circles round me there,
Axis and father of them all, their bikes
Humming against cold air, the flash of wheels
Ripping about the empty parking lot
Outside the shuttered public library.
The only person who intrudes upon
Their endless, free procession: one old man
Who comes each day and plugs his laptop in
With an extension cord, its long orange line
Led snake-like to an outlet in the stone.
He sits there, in his car’s back seat, a door
Cracked to admit the power, his white head
Ignoring us and bent in concentration,
As if pure thought turned in upon itself.
But he should see how those kids whip their way
In narrow, then in greater, orbits flying,
As do the hosts of feathered seraphim,
Formed rank on rank, enclosed in brilliant wings,
And giving of the plenitude they circle,
From greater to the lesser, so that all
Share in the splendor of the sourceless font,
That boundless wheel of light which kindles all.
Such ecstasy and glory have they found
In their but recently acquired balance;
They coast within a haze of radiance.
Beyond us, stretch the baseball fields, their backstops
Heavy and dull with chain-linked uselessness,
The diamonds scribbled through with dirt bike tracks.
And, just along the margin of the wood,
The playground we have named for Narnia
Sits idle, swings and jungle gym both wrapped
In orange police tape, snapping back and forth,
Caught in the fitful gusts of April wind.
Just out of sight, still other circles narrow.
The nesting of a man into his lounger,
A case of Lite spread open like a mouth
Beside the leg rest handle. On the set,
An episode recorded some years back
Shows someone spin the wheel or shout out “O.”
A woman, frail and shrunken in her blouse,
Has freshened up her tight perm with a pick,
But let it drop back gently on the couch,
Her breath grown shallow, slowed as sleep descends.
And, in the early morning, fathers pace
With bloodshot, angry eyes, the children yelling
And crowding one another at the sink.
The basin’s thick with aqua streaks of paste
That cling beneath the cold gush jetting downward.
And somewhere, someone’s mother chips a nail
Trying to clean the juice and crumbs that hide
Within the wrinkled padding of a highchair;
And someone locked inside a studio
Whose heart is racing, racing with the boredom
Reels eyes from phone to book to alley window;
While in the paper, blotches pullulate
And overlap upon a printed map
Like an old stack of tiddlywinks we’ve scattered.
Our dogwoods now stand prim with pinkish flowers,
The maple in the side yard, bulging clusters,
While apple and magnolia shed last petals
In skirts that radiate about their trunks.
Yet, even now, the season’s gripped with chill,
And I find, twisting on the air, a few
Stray flurries wend their pointless journey down,
As if to warn us, all that comes to pass
Will be turned back upon itself, in time,
However much time seems one long, straight line.
And, in this spiraling about an axis,
We may see fate, but fate has its own order;
And order brings with it a kind of freedom,
As Thomas proves, when he repeats each arc
About the lot, as if it were the cosmos—
That place of churning planets, winding stars,
And singing angels covering their eyes—
His cycle racing wild its spinning pageant
So fast I hardly note the trepidations.