125 - The Gothic Image: Church and College

The Gothic Image: Church and College

THE relation between the church and the academy, or between religion and learning, is as old as time. Medieval cathedrals were not only sacred spaces for worship but also centers of scholarship. It is perhaps the Gothic image in architecture that best illustrates this church-and-school association. Churches in this style, whether in the past or more recently, often find parallel examples on college and university campuses. The Gothic Image, as Emile Mâle showed in his classic volume (1913), was replete with an overload of biblical, natural, and archetypal symbols. Inside and outside, Gothic provided a visual history of the world, with nature and the spiritual life entwined in harmony and symmetry, reflecting sensations of security and permanence.

Erwin Panofsky's slender but still fascinating monograph, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951), does for the medieval universities, the encyclopedias, and the theological summae what Mâle did for the churches and cathedrals, with the same sense of inclusiveness and stability, Thomas Aquinas' Summa is comprehensive in its scope, aspiring in its imagination, and, like many cathedrals, never completely finished, Today we could note a parallel between Barth's unfinished Church Dogmatics and the agonizing delays in completing the National Cathedral in Washington and Saint John the Divine in New York.

Ralph Adams Cram, the American neo-Gothic architect whose name is associated with dozens of churches, chapels, and graduate schools, thought of Gothic as a wrap-around experience of sight, sound, and color. He assumed, no doubt naively, that the building would be an open book and speak for itself. His architectural philosophy is elaborated in great detail in Richard Stillwell's The Chapel of Princeton University (1971). The story is told that shortly after the chapel was dedicated in 1928, a trustee committee waited on the architect to register a modest complaint that while the building was beautiful, no one could hear anything beyond the third row of pews. Cram testily replied that those in the pews should look rather than listen. Shortly thereafter, a public address system was installed, but the acoustics will always be terrible.

The story is a perfect illustration of the ambiguity many sense today about Gothic architecture, whether church or campus. For most of our

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contemporaries, the Gothic image is a closed, not an open, book, but we share, nonetheless, a compelling and instinctive awareness that the Gothic structure is a special sort of space.

There is not much Gothic construction in recent years simply because it is too expensive, not energy-efficient, and the supply of stone-masons and wood-carvers steadily diminishes. We are, today, less lavish in our decorations and more utilitarian and functional in our designs. The December 1989 issue of Library Journal is devoted to designs for "the modular library," which means simply a flexible overplan. The same approach is apparent in a newly published handbook by J. Cy Rowell, The Church's Educational Space: Creating Environments for Teaching and Learning (1989). The booklet makes lots of suggestions for movable partitions, expansive walls, and pragmatic use of limited space. Much is said about art, aesthetics, and visual resources, but the illustrations and room designs lack coherence and anything remotely resembling the intention of the Gothic image to get everything all together. Everything seems to be all over the place, in every which way, and that may be an unintentional commentary on church, education, and theology in our day.

But it could be that we are capitulating too soon and too readily to the contemporary form-follows-function modular and pragmatic tendency in design. The revival of interest in Joseph Campbell's mostly secular but appreciative interpretation of ancient mythology and the burgeoning excitement about "New Age" explorations should caution us against a merely functional view and encourage us to probe deeper into the symbolic reality of things. Mircea Eliade, in his many writings, liked to hint that every new building-structure, whether cathedral, medieval walled-town, or any new establishment repeated the original creation of order out of chaos. The classic Gothic image was not only cruciform in the sense that it reproduced the cross of Christ, but it also suggested the crossroads of reality, the intersection of the vertical with the horizontal, what Eliade called the axis mundi. The four points or walls might correspond with the four compass directions, the four winds, the four seasons, the four humors ' the four Gospels, and so on and on. Jung would probably say that such archetypal associations are part of humanity's "collective unconscious," and that if the church doesn't perpetuate them in sacred spaces, they will emerge in secular society and culture disguised, for example, as shopping malls, resort hotels, and on cruises to exotic places.

These scattered comments are occasioned by reading a beautiful little book by William Morgan, Collegiate Gothic: The Architecture of Rhodes College (University of Missouri Press, 1989, 106 pp., $28.00). Formerly known as "Southwestern at Memphis," the name was changed in 1984 to honor Peyton Nalle Rhodes, the college president during a long tenure. But the mastermind of this little Gothic gem was Charles E. Diehl. A graduate of Princeton University, he knew about Ralph Adams Cram and hired a friend of Cram's, Charles Klauder, as

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architect for the Southwestern campus. The book is loaded with pictures and designs, and it has obviously been put together with tender loving care. The author is Professor of Fine Arts, the Allen R. Hite Art Institute, University of Louisville. If, as Emerson said, "an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man," Southwestern (or Rhodes) reflects the person of Charles E. Diehl. Morgan dedicates Collegiate Gothic to Minot C. Morgan, his grandfather, and Charles E. Diehl, "friends in faith." They were also roommates in both Princeton University and Seminary, the one to become a distinguished Presbyterian minister in Greenwich, Conn., the other a college president who made sure his campus buildings were made of "living stones" (I Peter 2:5).

Is Gothic a viable design for today's churches and colleges? Who knows? As they say about fashion design, if you keep your old clothes long enough, they'll come back into style.

Hugh T. Kerr