In Tiers of Glory:
The Organic Development of Catholic Church Architecture Through the Ages

Michael S. Rose

Cincinnati: Mesa Folio, 2004. ISBN: 0-9676371-2-0. Pp. 135

Review © 2006 Branislav L. Slantchev

A superficial, rambling, and unsubstantiated screed that will convince no one and may antagonize even relatively sympathetic fellow travelers, In Tiers of Glory is one devout Catholic's futile attempt to rescue church architecture from the rapacious, ugly, and dysfunctional paws of Modernism and its minions, anti-clericalism, secularism, and sometimes even Protestantism. Mr Rose really, really dislikes every church built during the 20th century that is not some sort of revival of medieval aesthetics. His thesis is that Modernist churches do not adequately convey the sense of sacred, fail to embody the essence of the Catholic Church and its mission, serve as vehicles for the promotion and glorification of their designers rather than God, and are singularly ugly to boot. He wants to claim that Catholic church architecture has developed in an evolutionary way from the Roman times until the end of the 19th century, and that during that time modifications in style always respected the achievements of the predecessors. The 20th century purposeful break with that tradition is unwelcome and detrimental to the function of the Church. Worse, this break has in many cases been spearheaded by the misguided top hierarchy, especially in the post Vatican II era, in its quest to make the Church more relevant to modernity and more competitive with alternative faiths. Unfortunately, Mr Rose contends, this basically reduced the church to a building that is either completely unremarkable and as utilitarian as a doctor's office or self-consciously artistic except that the message it conveys is not that of the Catholic Church but of some unspecified pan-religious spirituality that seeks to antagonize no potential passer-by, a feat of accommodation accomplished only at the price of promoting the message of Christianity.

Whew! This was a mouthful. Let me start by saying that even though I believe Mr Rose utterly failed in his attempt to make his point, I did not come to this book expecting to hate it. Quite the contrary, in fact. The book is so frustrating precisely because I am sympathetic to the thesis the author wants to defend. In particular, I agree that modern churches often lack spirituality and seem like warehouses sometimes littered with abstract art but always being as welcoming as a barbed wire. This I say as an atheist whose interest in churches is mainly aesthetic but who also recognizes the important social and spiritual role these buildings have to believers. However, to establish his thesis Mr Rose has to do a lot more than just state it.

At a minimum, we would want to know how church architecture embodies the concept of the sacred, and how its various elements are used to transmit a particular vision of God, that of the Catholic Church. Then, the various structural elements can be seen as forming a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, an organic House of God (or maybe House to God) whose function will be compromised by thoughtless alterations of the constituent components. Managing to prove this claim would have two salutary effects on the subsequent argument. First, it will show why deviating to a completely new style that consciously eschews anything that has preceded it is likely to produce a building that may have appeal as an art form but that would not be a church. Second, it will also show why the mere adoption of some traditional element or another (e.g., a pointed arch or a ribbed vault) will not necessarily produce a better result. Having establish the basis of a definition of an architecture that reflects a particular concept of spirituality, the next step would have to be to explain why church architecture evolved together with the other arts (and humanities) from Romanesque designs to the ornamental Gothic to the Classical revivals during the Renaissance, followed by an emphasis on expressionism in the Baroque and its ridiculous culmination in the absurdity of Rococo, and why then all of this went through revivalist cycles that mixed and matched elements from all of the above. This particular step is going to be difficult because often the proponents of some development blasted their predecessors (just look at the original meaning of gothic and baroque, both used as terms of derision by detractors of the styles who were seeking to supplant them with their own vision of "proper" expression of the ideal. It seems to me that if one accepts the thesis that architecture reflects spirituality, then he should also conclude that these changes sprang from changing concepts of what Christianity meant. Of course, these periods do often coincide with upheavals in the faith (Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Protestantism, and so on), so this is not far-fetched. Naturally, since architecture also shapes how we perceive our spirituality, this is a two-way effect that is probably quite difficult to isolate.

At any rate, instead of simply cataloguing the history of these developments, which is what Mr Rose does is a perfunctory fashion, a solid argument would establish all these connections. As it is, one is left wondering how come a Renaissance church can be just as Catholic as a Romanesque monastery or a Gothic cathedral, not to mention Gaudi's La Sagrada Familia. For Mr Rose, the simple fact that something is built centuries ago or, if recently built, imitates faithfully something built centuries ago is sufficient. But I beg to differ. One need not read the violent disagreements architects had about their contributions during said centuries (but one may want to read about the construction of St Peter's basilica at the Vatican for getting an idea about how changing tastes brought changes in design). All one has to do is recognize that what Mr Rose now lumps in the category of perfect, beautiful, or merely acceptable churches actually comprises a rather disparate collection of buildings whose authors would strongly disagree with the inclusion of each other's contributions.

Now, it may be true that the Catholic Church has strayed too far in its attempt to embrace some sort of inoffensive multiculturalism that would turn every cathedral into a pantheon. It may also be true that the forces of secularism have greatly undermined church design. However, it may also be true that we live in an age where we define spirituality differently. A modern Catholic is probably quite different from a 12th century peasant: no matter how devoted he is now, the modern person is probably more tolerant and less superstitious, not to mention less willing to accept the hierarchical structure as ordained by God (along with the apostolic succession). If this is true (and it's hard to see one way or another without a good sociological analysis of spirituality), then perhaps what we have in these modern buildings is a search, a groping in the dark if you will, for the appropriate way to express this meaning. Perhaps the abstract, machine-like shapes are uninspiring and cold. Very likely they are failures as churches. But this does not mean that constructing a Gothic temple must be the way to go. After all, many periods have rejected tradition only to learn to integrate with it, fusing elements to create something that is simultaneously new and familiar. This, perhaps, is what a church has to be: it has to reflect the new but it also has to feel welcoming, it has to provide at least some semblance of what we have, for better of worse, come to regard as "proper" church architecture because all these centuries of religious construction have now shaped our expectations.

Mr Rose offers none of this and the book is not even a decent coffee-table ornament because the photographs are average, at best (both in terms of composition and in quality of reproductions). There are no references worth speaking of, and perhaps the only useful thing is a brief glossary of terms at the end. But these are easily found online, so I really do not see why anyone would want to own this book. For a glimpse of what a good book an a similar subject should be, take a look at Robert A. Scott's The Gothic Enterprise or Peter W. Williams' Houses of God. Both excel in their respective areas, the first on the meaning of gothic architecture (with a great discussion of what a cathedral was supposed to accomplish, as an embodiment of man's attempt to create heaven on earth, both as an expression of his piety and an attempt to "lure" God to inhabit that sacred space); the second, in tracing the development of church architecture in the United States (which has seen many splendid revivals).

December 18, 2006