The house of God, explored and explained
Digby Anderson
THE GEOMETRY OF LOVE: SPACE, TIME, MYSTERY AND MEANING IN AN ORDINARY CHURCH by Margaret Visser
Viking, f18.99, pp. 323
What do you see when you look inside a church? Some might see a tablelike thing, chairs with an aisle between and lots of decorations. The historically and architecturally informed would also see periods, dates and styles and know what the purported functions of that table and those decorations were. Margaret Visser sees much more. She says she wants to make the meanings of the symbols more 'accessible' and provide a religiousanthropological guide for the church visitor. But she does even more than this.
When Jacob dreamed his dream, he' dreamt he saw a ladder set up from earth to heaven with the angels descending and ascending. When he woke he called the place at the foot of that ladder 'Bethel', that is the House of God. A church is a place linked to heaven by ladders for prayers to ascend and down which gifts, most importantly sacraments, come. It is a treasure house and Margaret Visser, in painstaking detail, describes the treasures, the histories and their theology.
The Catholic Church has seven sacraments which variously explain a lot of the church's contents and architecture. But it also has many more 'sacramental' objects and actions, such as holy-water stoups, crucifixes, rites for burial which, while not sacraments, also are outward and visible signs of inward meanings and actions. It also has, less mentioned now than before, a doctrine of secondary holiness whereby, for instance, objects which have touched a primary relic become secondary relics or whereby objects which have contained the holy, such as chalices, are treated with reverence. But Margaret Visser goes further. Not only are huge numbers of the things in a church bursting with meaning and sacredness but so are the spatial arrangements of them, the geometry of love.
You enter the church at a narthex, a lobby, atrium or 'paradisus'. The narthex is paradise, the place of first disobedience, the end of innocence but also the beginning of the story of the human race. As we step out of the narthex we leave paradise and start the journey up the aisle, representing the length of time humanity has before it, to the apse where the journey will be ended and paradise regained. Before the apse is the altar, tabernacle and a sequence of domes which reach up to heaven. The sanctuary before the altar is one of a series of spaces which are sacred, from the Latin `sacer', something to be respected, not to be polluted, with boundaries not to be broken. Then the church is crossshaped, the form of the human body, the head by the apse and the heart by the altar.
She calls this organisation of proportion and space, and the sacred objects symbols. But that is not quite right, for we tend to think of symbols as optional ways of seeing things whereas her point, and the object of the book, is to show us how these 'symbols' are rooted in history, culture, language and above all theology.
This is quite the best guide on how to visit a Christian church I have ever seen. There is only one problem. She writes about churches but only through a prolonged visit to one church, that of Sant' Agnese fuori le Mura. in Rome. One could usefully take The Geometry on a visit there, or to several other churches, but not to many churches in, say, France. There the side chapels she spends two chapters describing have been sacked and emptied, one often enters not by the narthex but by some squalid side entrance, and the holy water stoup is empty. Most important, the geometry which depends on having an altar — conversi ad Dominum — and tabernacle at the east end was destroyed when it was replaced by a nave altar — versus populum — with the tabernacle hidden away somewhere at the side of the church.
In her discussion of the chapels she spends some time on the Easter Exsultet and the blessing of the font. It is noteworthy that in neither are the words she says are used still used in the modem rite (there's not even a suspicion of a bee, let alone a mother bee, and the rubrics do not provide for the pouring of oil into the water). The point is that much of the symbolism she so well elucidates is tied to objects, actions, and most of all spatial organisations more associated with traditionally built churches than the new health centres and underground car-park styles and with the Tridentine liturgy rather than the new order of Mass.
It will be replied that all churches still perform the same essential acts and these objects, actions and geometries are only, in the jargon, 'accidentals'. But there is, or was, a link between essentials and accidentals; that Margaret Visser shows very well. She shows just what a treasure trove any church could be. What a pity, how shameful, that so few now are.
Previous page
