Islands in the Din of the World

(c) J. A. Tillmann

“One can pray everywhere and anywhere, yet there are places where prayer finds its natural climate; those places are churches…” – writes Anthony Bloom, who lived at the crossroads of the cultures of Eastern and Western Christianity. On the basis of the surviving traces of the beginnings, it seems that this “natural atmosphere” was once Nature itself – the temple of nature. As, however, even the earthly landscape is not homogeneous, with the land composed of sites of higher or lower intensity, so for early man, distinguished places rose up from his regular environs: mountains, cliffs, gorges, caves and groves. More often than not, it was remarkable forms and places of unusual beauty that became the stage for theophanies, for transcendent experiences, but likewise, entirely remote, simple, even perfectly “neutral” locales, like the d eserts, presented themselves.

Everywhere, well known are the places that the given culture has distinguished, set apart and where – intensifying their characteristics – edifices are raised. These are at times merely signs composed of unworked stones, while at others, they are edifices of great complexity, which bear on them and within them the quality of the surrounding milieu, and its distinguishing signs.

Partition – the discrepancy between here and there, out and in, from here and beyond – is man’s fundamental experience. In religious respects, the distinction between sacrum and profanum, the sacred and the profane, has been determinant all the way up to modernity. Even our word “temple” originally meant – and not as it did later: edifice – a separation and enclosure: a quadratic extract directed toward the heavens, a templum, an augury for sightings.

In various eras and diverse cultures, temples and places of worship were built in an extensive array of forms; however, this principle of separation remained unchanged: “When we build a church or set aside a place of worship we do something which reaches far beyond the obvious significance of the fact.” This, too, was written by Anthony Bloom, English Russian Orthodox Metropolitan, but his statement was of universal validity, just as in the following: “A church, once consecrated, once set apart, becomes the dwelling-place of God. He is present there in another way than in the rest of the world.” And this other type of presence appears, “When we choose a minute part of it, calling upon the power of God himself, in rites which convey his grace, to bless it, when we (…) set it apart to be God’s foothold on earth, (…).”

While the temple is “the house of God”, it is primarily man who has a need for this shelter. And not so much the individual as the congregation of the faithful. Collective prayer desires a space that lends itself to receiving them, and while it divides them from the din of the world, at the same time, it opens to the totality of the world: ‘at once empty and saturated, every side expanded and oriented to the East, but at the same time, open to the infinite expanse’ – writes Frits van der Meer on Early Christian architecture. Collective prayer ‘desires spaces for congregation that remain absolute, almost drastically pure.’

The demand for raw, unornamented purity is increasingly operative in the case of today’s temple architecture. The builders should create a space which, faced with the provocative multiplicity that incites scatteredness, offers the respite of simplicity. The principle characteristic common to the edifices presented here is not the contemporary – nonexistent – uniform style, or the identical architectural technology, nor is it the relative similarity of function. For the architects of the synagogue, the church and the mosque, simple and original forms were the benchmark. Unadorned planes, arches, columns, quadrates. Just as in the work of the great architect of the 20th century, Mies van der Rohe, where the primordial form of the cube and the quadratic space appeared unconcealed, so it is in today’s temple architecture, as well – after various detours and aberrations – it seems to have found its way back to the elementariness of the basic forms. As one of the masters of church architecture of the last century, Rudolf Schwartz, has written: ‘To us today, the cube is not a heavy material, but a fine formation of glass and space formed from the membrane of the walls that is thin as air. But what can this not do? Even the Pantheon was half-composed of spirit. We can still hear the ancient message about the greatness of the geometric primordial forms, and if someone is unable to comprehend it, s/he is obviously not an architect or master builder.’

Just as in the majority of today’s architectures, it is not the stone and the brick, but reinforced concrete that is the decisive building material, this is likewise the case with respect to church architecture. (Architects do not like for this rough, grey material to be seen; they generally cover it, fitting it out with mortar, paint or other coating material. Sometimes, however, it is the intention of the designers to leave it uncovered, so that its particular poverty turns to the contrary precisely through the power of the modelling – as in the case of Van der Laan’s monastic church in Vaals.) In the case of such edifices, the use of reinforced concrete is chosen less for its favourable price than rather for its strength and durability. Yet, even the buildings produced from the strongest materials and consecrated to be the home of God cannot withstand destruction. This is shown by the devastation of the Temple in Jerusalem, just as the fate of the cataclysms of the past century on those edifices which those on view here were built to replace. Nevertheless, there is also a positive side to this fragility and volatility. When shelters are demolished, both the d eserts and the temples of the world are more strongly perceptible. Their indestructible and unsurpassable majesty are likewise more pronouncedly tangible. Benefiting from this experience are equally religion, architecture and philosophy. From the direction of the latter, Hannes Böhringer formulated it in this way: ‘contemplation, the regard of a universal temple, which was already always built. Logos architecton. The reason of the world is real architect. Compared with that, every art form seems impoverished. The architecture, symmetry and decorum of the cosmos elevate the one who lives in it and beholds it.’ The Book of Psalms says: “the Lord over the mighty waters (…) All in his palace say: Glory!” ( Psalm 28)

J. A. Tillmann

Anthony Bloom: Living Prayer, Springfield (IL): Templegate, 1966, p. 67.

A ‘place for sighting’ developed within the precisely defined limits of the Augurs, outside of which every space was referred to as tescum (d esert). Pauly. Lexikon der Antike, Vol. 5, p. 584.

Anthony Bloom, Op. cit., pp. 67-68.

Quoting Frédéric Debuyst: A hely szelleme a keresztény építészetben [The Spirit of the Place in Christian Architecture], Pannonhalma, 2005, p. 61.

Frédéric Debuyst, Ibid., p. 54.

Rudolf Schwartz: Die Baukunst der Gegenwart (1958), Cologne: Schwann, 1975, p. 17.

Aristotle: Politica , 1260 a 20.

Hannes Böhringer: “Dedalos or Diogenes”.