249 - Revolution, Place and Symbol

Revolution, Place and Symbol
Edited by Rolfe Lanier Hunt
New York, International Congress on Religion, Architecture, and time Visual Arts, 1969. $5.95.

In any serious sense, reviews of books of this kind are impossible. Too many people said too many things that required review, yet mentioning them all is useless. To pick out what seem to me the "highlights" would end up, as I probably will, reporting the conference as though its main purpose were to develop my opinions.

Meetings like this have their own unplanned character and personality; all discussions and seminars create and develop from this climate of character and are not very intelligible to those who were not there. Thus Sections VI and VII, "Highlights of Sessions and Seminars" and "Published Reports and Evaluations," are primarily of internal interest, although there is much rather aphoristic material culled from notes that probably can start the reader very profitably on his own way.

The weakest section is the first, "Locating the Problem: The Situation in Which We Find Ourselves." Abbe Francois Houtart surely wins the Rip van Winkle Award of the Year for saying "Time now becomes not only philosophically, theoretically, but ethically in the life of man a linear concept with a past, a present and a future" (p. 10). He also says we have to reach the people where they are. This is, I judge, not just incidental silliness; much of this paper and many others assume a "we," i.e., the church, meeting "the people" who are, apparently, something else.

250 - Revolution, Place and Symbol

At a decidedly different level, Joseph Sittler offers a characteristically elegant and enlightening report on the theological situation. But he ends (p. 3 1) "What then does one do when he does not know what to do but must, nevertheless, do?" He supposes the rest of the people are in the same predicament, which seems true of most of the theologians but hardly at all of the artists and the architects. For all their disagreements the artists, including the architects, seemed to know very much what they are about.

There is something painfully pathetic about men at the end of their careers finding the meaning of their work so problematical; it is not only pathetic but dangerous to the whole enterprise to find so many younger theologians at the same impasse. I am not a theologian and I not only feel no such despair, no such alienation from my own purpose, I find others in all fields who are happily and creatively at work. This leads me to suspect that the trouble may be more with the way theologians are doing their work or even with the way they define their work rather than anything central to the work of the mind. This ceases to be pathetic and becomes oppressively dangerous when these men decide that, because they do not know what to do, then no one else can be permitted to do anything, which has caused as many creative people to be fed up with "the church" as the apparently more stultifying bureaucracy.

Section 11, "The Religious Community and the City," was more useful in reporting where we are because, presumably, it did not deal with abstractions but descriptions. Harvey Cox seems to have popped up all over the conference and most usefully here in his essay "Man's Religious Visions," a brief but commanding statement of the interaction, the mutual shaping, of religious visions and the spatial environment of the cities. He begins to do for space what other theologians have done with time; space is a theological language:

"Man needs a new vision of the city in order to assume a mastery of it which is not a violation of the order of the gods. Man also needs to plan his cities in order to provide the experience out of which a confident religious vision can emerge. The two processes are simultaneous and complementary. Therefore our movement toward planning our cities for man is a religious undertaking before any temple is constructed" (p. 51). There is much debatable material, but in my judgment the question is here being put in the proper terms.

In my judgment, the best and most useful essay in the book is Richard Rubenstein's "On the Meaning of Place" which introduces Section IV, "Building for Religious Communities." He avoids the tangle theologians so often get themselves into when their deductive analysis collides with what actually happens with men. In this case, what happens, despite

251 - Revolution, Place and Symbol

theorizing, is sacred space, not just place. Since Americans are nomadic, "I would caution architects against the futility of attempting to create American sacred places through art, imagination, and invention. Men can never deliberately create sacred precincts" (p. 150). "Nevertheless, as long as people are born, pass through the course of growth, maturation and death, they are going to need structures and institutions in which they can celebrate times sacred to them" (p. 152). And "The religious edifices of America must be constructed primarily for the purpose of sharing sacred time." "Tents of meeting are all we can construct in nomadic America" (p. 151). "Above all, the architect must not attempt to force the gods. We live in a godless age, whether we call it the time of the death of God, or the time of no religion. The architect cannot create the holy; he can create structures which meet the actual needs of the religious community to create a structure in which sacred time can be shared" (p. 152).

For all the diversity and disunity of the book, there is much else of merit that I cannot take space to note. It would be nice to report that some common policy emerged but that was hardly to be expected. I rather imagine that the total effect of the congress was both greater than and other than the sum of its (mostly excellent) parts. The congress is triennial; the second is to be held in Brussels this fall. If enough of the same people come back to give the deliberations some continuity there might be some advance toward corporate understanding. Reports that come to me indicate that the program will be more nearly a workshop in the avant-garde techniques. This is usually a mistake since ecclesiastical agencies are usually as much as two fashions behind when they are trying to be avant-garde; if I forget to read Art News I sometimes miss out on a fashion altogether. By running hard, New York based churchmen sometimes manage to keep up better than that but such a congress is not likely to accomplish as much as this one. I hope I am wrong, for it is a most promising enterprise.

John W. Dixon, Jr.
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill North Carolina