The Millennium Footbridge, spanning the river Thames in London, is a work of art – or, at least, a work of arty engineering – built to commemorate a nominally religious event. It physically and symbolically links two great cultural and religious monuments: St Paul’s Cathedral to the north and Tate Modern on the south bank. One is a temple, one is a museum, but which is which? One charges a hefty entrance fee to camera-wielding tourists; the other is a shrine to the genius of human creativity. In fact, both are temples and both are museums – or perhaps mausoleums – to the death of Christianity.
Museums and cathedrals are both cultural objects and sites of cultural activity. Both draw millions of tourists (or pilgrims?) every year, who come in their droves to participate in the spectacle. People visit these places because there is something to look at. They may also experience their visit at an emotional, aesthetic, or spiritual level. But the cathedral as church is also the site of ritual activities – primarily the celebration of the sacraments of the Christian faith – that are the principal reason for its existence and which define the worldview it represents. It is hard to see any parallels in a museum. Or is it? Art can medium through which people explore, reflect on and share narratives of who they are and how they make sense of the world. This sounds a bit ‘religious’ to me. Similarly, it is sometimes suggested that modern tourism has roots in religious pilgrimage, but what is the difference or relationship between them? Today, the majority of visitors to cathedrals are essentially tourists. Is there any corresponding sense in which people visit art museums as pilgrims? How do they perform their visit? Are they merely disinterested spectators, or do they also engage in meaning-making rituals, such as the obligatory visit to the gift-shop to buy postcards?
The Cathedral: role and significance
A cathedral is a place of witness to the value-system and worldview of Christianity. It may be a site of encounter with the sacred, and very often it will also be a place of intrinsic historical and architectural significance. In addition to being an artefact in itself, it may also – like a museum – be a repository of artefacts, in the form of painting, sculpture, woodcarving, stained glass, metalwork, textiles and ritual objects.
The medieval cathedral would have dominated its city. Indeed, it would have been, and in many of our provincial cities still is, by far the largest and most impressive building in the area, visible from a distance, acting as a beacon for visitors. To this day, the colossal structure of Lincoln Cathedral dwarfs all the other buildings around it, including the castle; while Salisbury Cathedral’s famous 14th century spire is still the tallest in England. Indeed, until the building of the Eiffel tower in 1889, it was the tallest surviving structure to have been built in Europe since the great pyramid at Giza. Monumental architecture always has an agenda, namely the projection of the power of the institution it represents. The medieval church represented not only the dominant worldview, but also had a legal role with its courts, was involved in education with its schools, and had a significant economic profile with its extensive property portfolio. A cathedral was, and is, the site of the bishop’s throne – literally the seat of his power – and in the middle-ages bishops tended to be very powerful men indeed. Many commanded private armies, held high office in the secular realm, and were extremely rich. The cathedral was thus the ultimate symbol of the church’s power, wealth, and influence.
In addition to representing the institutional power of the church, the cathedral also proclaimed the central tenets of the Christian faith in its very design and fabric. The great gothic cathedrals are typically cruciform in shape – embodying, quite literally, the human form of Christ on the cross – and usually laid out in a pattern that denotes increasingly sacred space as one moves through the building from the west – often the site of the font – to the east end and the high altar. The ornate decoration of the sanctuary offers mortal eyes a glimpse of the heavenly realm. More than just a display of wealth, power or taste, the stained glass, painting and sculpture found in churches has an explicitly didactic function, serving to narrate the Christian story for a non-literate society in primarily visual media.
It is hard for us to imagine the impression that a cathedral would have had on a medieval pilgrim coming upon it for the first time. In a world where no other buildings matched these for size – and which had no theatre, cinema, TV, or for that matter, art galleries – there was no other experience that could compare with the impact of a cathedral, especially during the great religious festivals. The stunning west front of Wells Cathedral (1174-1240s) is impressive enough today: how much more so in the 13th century? Originally the life-sized statues would have been brightly painted. Trumpet holes and other openings behind them for musicians and singers would have made it appear as if the statues themselves were alive. It would undoubtedly have been the most spectacular thing many people would ever see. And so it remained until the dawn of the modern era.
St Paul’s Cathedral
Fast forward now to London in the late 17th century. The modern world, born in the turmoil of the Protestant Reformation, was growing up fast. The civil war was over, and Oliver Cromwell gone. The English colonies in the Americas were coming to maturity, the East India Company (founded 1600) had established trading posts on the sub-continent, and science was on its way to becoming the new religion of the intelligentsia. Great advances in our understanding of the natural world were achieved by the likes of Isaac Newton (1643-1727) and Robert Boyle (1627-1691), one of the founders in 1660 of the Royal Society. Following the great fire in 1666, London was being rebuilt, rapidly and on a grand scale – as befitting the capital of an emerging global super-power.
In 1675, King Charles II laid the foundation stone for the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, while a few miles to the west, work began on a new cathedral that would self-consciously imitate the great basilica of St Peter’s in Rome. It took over thirty years (1675-1708) to build Sir Christopher Wren’s monument to England’s growing confidence as a major player on the world stage. It was to be the biggest and most expensive building in London – by a considerable margin. Indeed, it remained the tallest structure in the city until the 1960s. But by the time it was completed, the new age of the enlightenment had already dawned, and in retrospect it looks like a grand folly to an age that had already had its heyday. In 1687, while the scaffolding was still up, Newton published his Principia Mathematica, in which by explaining universal gravitation and the three laws of motion he spelt out what he believed to be a knock-down proof for the existence and agency of God.
Far from justifying belief in God, however, for many prophets of the new science, Newtonian mechanics freed them to imagine a universe without God. Little more than a century later, the very laws Newton saw as confirming the existence of God actually provided the necessary tools for Laplace (1749-1827), the great French astronomer and mathematician, to dispense with divine agency altogether, in his Systeme du Monde of 1796. When asked by the emperor Napoleon how he could have written a learned treatise on the workings of the universe without once mentioning its creator, Laplace is said to have coolly replied that he had ‘no need of that hypothesis’.
By then he wasn’t the only one. A few years earlier, the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote a devastating critique of what is now sometimes known as ‘intelligent design’ in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in 1779, while Immanuel Kant, the great philosopher of the Enlightenment, declared in 1784 that it was time humanity learned to think for itself. During the century that followed, this new ‘spirit of the age’ fed on and was fed by the excitement of ever more revolutionary scientific discoveries, not least Darwin’s evolutionary theory – still the subject of heated debate over 150 years later. Lyell’s Principles of Geology, in which the earth was demonstrated to be several million years old, was published in 1830; Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. In response, the Catholic Church declared the doctrine of papal infallibility in 1870 – the year before Darwin’s publication of the Descent of Man in 1871. In 1882, barely two hundred years after Newton thought he had provided conclusive evidence of divine agency, Nietzsche announced the death of God.
Interestingly, God’s demise was immediately preceded by the birth of modern art, with works such as Edouard Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe (1863) paving the way for the first impressionist exhibition in 1874. With modern art came the irresistible rise of the cult of the artist-as-celebrity, who having once been content anonymously to reflect the divine glory, now sought to express his, or her, own. In other words, with the death of God came the divinisation of the artist, as the artist assumed the divine prerogative as human creator of a human world.
The Cathedral Today
Today, cathedrals are still the seats of bishops. They continue to function in much the same way as they did in the high middle-ages, with the daily round of Christian worship as their primary purpose. But they no longer represent the political and economic clout that the church had in the past. These days, rather than pilgrims, cathedrals attract tourists visiting a visitor attraction in much the same way as they would visit an art gallery, museum, stately home or national monument. Indeed, research indicates that people who visit cathedrals as secular tourists actually resent being made to engage with the building as a religious space – such as by having to be silent for midday prayers – especially if they have had to pay an entrance fee.
For their part, churches seem to resent being thought of as museums: it is common to see a notice somewhere saying ‘this is not a museum, but a living house of prayer’. And yet, it is significant that in much promotional material – such as guidebooks and postcards – church interiors tend to be photographed empty, presumably in order to show off the pristine features devoid of the messy clutter of people. But, of course, depicting a church as a lifeless historical artefact, rather than a dynamic site of both religious and cultural activity, only reinforces the notion that the church is a museum after all.
It is interesting to note, however, that visitor numbers to cathedrals are rising at the same time that religious affiliation generally is declining. Moreover, around a quarter of these visitors light a candle, which suggests that for a significant number the visit is more than just tourism. Reflecting on this fact, it is sometimes suggested that the popularity of lighting candles has become a quick substitute for traditional models of congregational worship. It is also interesting to note that this activity is most popular among younger generations. Those in their 20s & 30s are more likely to light candles than the over-60s.
Cathedrals have been and still are cultural venues as well as places of worship. Long before the invention of the museum or art gallery, the church was one of the principal patrons of the arts. Nowadays many cathedrals struggle just to keep the doors open, and most of the art in churches is historical. Having said that, however, cathedrals are still vibrant sites of diverse cultural activity. They are used for concerts, exhibitions and other events, some run artist-in-residency programmes and a few even commission new works.
To be continued…
In Part II we will explore the idea of the modern art museum as the cathedral of contemporary life.