Without form and void

[anglomedved]

Let me comment on some earlier journal entries which have been heavily critical of post-war Christian architecture. I can understand this from a Russian standpoint, but let me suggest a western European slant on this.

Dare I suggest that in much of European Christianity there is a sense that tradition – predanya – has got so lost, confused or compromised, that one has to venture out afresh. And to do so by a radical going back to roots, as far back as Genesis 1 when 'the earth was without form and void', very literally. To a situation in which, in Gospel language,  'rebirth' or ‘new creation’ becomes possible.

Many post-war churches literally reflect this 'without form and void'. It strikes horror into many Orthodox souls, but it is perhaps a salutary passage, at least in the western situation, and at least for some. It may indeed be that an entire culture has to be rebuilt. And expressed in the church in terms of a whole rethinking, reassembling of liturgy:  language, vestment, iconography, vestments, music everything. Not everything will be new (the Christian rebirth itself is basically a re-directing of existing material), but it must come together into a consistent whole.

In any event there are three caveats:

a) This does not have to be a mono-culture situation. The ideal for the moment may be to keep the very new and the quite traditional running side by side. The worst situation is the neither-nor solution (I'm thinking here of Würzburg and Munich cathedrals).  

b) This reworking is going to take time. Two, three, four generations. Don’t try and ‘cast in stone' after 10 years. Indeed try to cast it in stone as little as possible. Roger Schutz of Taizé used to speak of the ‘dynamique du provisoire’.  

c) On a similar line: it is going to take an incredible deep level of religious experience to get right and anchor any new culture. I am not sure whether there is enough of this experience around – in particular in the areas of art, architecture and liturgy. Much of the new architecture and most of the new art bespeaks a lack of depth. Curiously enough, one man who may have got it more right than most is the Spanish mystic-architect Gaudí. Looking at the towers of the Sagrada Familia, I feel he might have been on the right track.

The inevitable result is that outwardly a lot of this look - at least for the time being, very bleak, ‘Zen’ – bare, almost bleak, naked. But it may be that it is a necessary nakedness. What also strikes me is that this 'Zen nakedness' works quite well against a background of Cistercian and early Dominican architecture. Which is perhaps where we in the west have to go back to in order to get back to solid roots and perhaps reconnect with some sort of tradition.

Comments

[ursusanglicanus.livejournal.com]

I sense that I am being drawn sideways into a debate - that of the Shoah - which I did not intend to get drawn into. It is a debate that is at once brutal and delicate and too often misused, and which I hesitate to get involved in here:

If I can summarize my immediate reactions to both Yakov and Mme Kourdukova (a dangerous exercise, because of the risk of passions)

1) What is left of art, and of the concepts of art, like form, that art theoreticians tell me that I, a theologian, that I should accept as axiomatic, in the ruins of Dresden or Würzburg or the horror of Ausschwitz? (Psalm 78)

2) I do not want to deny the existence of evil in any way, in its very varied forms. Far from it. Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that at some stage in the Christian experience you have to look this evil directly in the face, both in yourself and in the community you are part of. You have to take it onto you, like and with Christ on the cross, through death and resurrection, death and rebirth, loss of form and refinding of form. And when I say ‘take onto you’, I mean regardless of whether you are yourself guilty (as in a court of law). And not as something distant which is done to you, which you suffer from outside, but something which you are co-responsible for as a member of the human race.
Could this mean that the Russian church (if not publicly, at least those who pray deep inside it) begging God for forgiveness for the Gulag as co-responsible, possibly even Jews in the same way for Ausschwitz? Could it mean that we must not use either Gulag or Ausschwitz as the foundation of identity in the future? Remember we must.