Printed below is the sermon delivered by the Reverend Dr Allan Doig FSA - Fellow and Chaplain to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford at the Company's Annual Service at St Lawrence Jewry on Monday 5 July;
A few days ago I was in Edinburgh
The Book of Common Prayer helpfully defines a sacrament as ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’. Even in the strictest sense, many other traditions recognise a greater number of sacraments than the two, baptism and Holy Communion, discussed in the Book of Common Prayer, and it can be illuminating to try living in a sacramental world, even for brief moments – a sacramental world where God has left his ‘fingerprints’, so to speak, all over his creation. In that small octagonal room punctuated by Poussin, the main transformative and revelatory moments of life rhythmically paused your circuit of the room. Similarly, out in the world it can be more of a syncopated interruption of our journey, as we are frequently surprised by transformative moments of God’s grace, caught and made visible in a plethora of outward signs.
The ‘fingerprints’ God has left on his creation, like all fingerprints, are a sign of the identity of the creator. If you look at a work, the fingerprints, the special characteristics of its form and the relationships within it, you can come to recognise significant things about it creator. That is true of Poussin and those seven paintings, it is true of you and the buildings you create, it is true of the New Jerusalem of living stones being fashioned by that heavenly Architect, and it is true of that great Architect, and the whole Universe he has made.
Job’s life had been collapsing around him, as had his self-understanding, and his understanding of Divine justice, so his faith demanded that he question God. We heard God’s answer in that first reading. God answered Job out of the whirlwind:
“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?
Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions?
Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set?
Or who laid its cornerstone?
When the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?
After this opening, follows a great song of creation – a reflection on God’s Wisdom imposing finely detailed order on chaos.
You have before you a visual reflection and meditation on the same theme. On the service sheet you see a 13th-century manuscript illumination, frontispiece for a Bible Moralisée. Text and image together were a revelation of the Wisdom, the ways, and the works of God.
God made a place for mankind in the order of his Creation. You, as architects do something very similar: you create places for human habitation, human flourishing, and the luckiest of you (or the chosen few) create places for human encounter with the Divine.
Those places of encounter are special places with a special sacramentality that I want to look at in a couple of special examples, but I do not want to pass over the sacramental possibilities of architecture in general. Buildings in general at the very least influence, and sometimes control, the type and quality of human relationships and human flourishing that take place within and around them. If they do that well they can be outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace in the fulfilment of the second part of our lord’s two-fold commandment – to ‘love our neighbours as ourselves’.
Churches, on the other hand, are sacramental signs of the fulfilment of all the Law and the Prophets. As places of encounter and unity of the worshipping community as the Body of Christ in the presence of God and the whole company of heaven, they are a sacramental sign of that Communion and the growing fulfilment of the twofold commandment:
“The first and great commandment is this: to love the Lord thy God with all thy heard, with all thy soul and with all thy mind and with all thy strength; the second is lie unto it, namely this, to love thy neighbour as thyself. No other commandment is greater than these; on these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”
These buildings are sacramental signs of the coming of God’s Kingdom – the New Jerusalem – ‘on earth as it is in heaven’. The apse mosaic of Santa Pudenziana, shown on the order of service, was among the first figural mosaics in Rome Calvary which is surmounted by a jewelled cross. In a golden toga, he is the Emperor of Heaven, surrounded by the Apostles dressed in togas as his heavenly court within the courtyard in front of the Holy Sepulchre. Beyond the arcade of the courtyard are seen the buildings of Constantine ’s new Jerusalem
The message of the mosaic is clear: “the kingdom of this world is become the Kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ”.
“It is a long time coming!” I hear you say? I suppose the answer is the same as God’s answer out of the whirlwind to Job’s challenge: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand!” That is to say, it will come in God’s good time.
Meanwhile there are sacramental signs of its coming, visions of the Kingdom of God
The West Front of Wells (the last illustration on your service sheet) was completed by 1250. The whole elaborate system of niches and aedicules is populated by Old and New Testament figures, saints and angels; all were originally brightly polychromed – ‘angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven’ and indeed there are times when you could hear the ‘singing of their endless praise. In the double register of quatrefoils above the West Doors, and just below the Apostles in the topmost full register, if you look carefully you can see rows of holes. These open from a singers’ gallery within the facade above the Doors, and a musicians’ gallery at the top. Crowning the composition of the facade is the figure of Christ Enthroned, flanked by winged seraphim.
The liturgy of the Sarum Rite is characterised by elaborate processions and dramatic presentations. On Palm Sunday, for example, after the morning office, processions would proceed round the cloister to the cemetery in front of the West Doors. Meanwhile, at the Altar, a consecrated host was placed in a shrine with relics. The ‘Body of the Lord’, present with his saints, preceeded by a light, was taken directly to the West Doors where it met the main procession. Everyone standing in the western graveyard ‘in the midst of death’ was holding a blessed palm and the passage from Matthew 21 was read out: Christ was about to enter Jerusalem
‘And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way; others cut down branches from the tress and strewed them in the way. And the multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried, saying, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest!’
At that there was a blast from the musicians’ gallery, high in the facade and all proceeded to the West Door where ‘Gloria, laus, et honor’, ‘All Glory, laud and honour’, was sung by the choir in the hidden gallery behind the carved angels above the West Door. The congregation responded with the refrains.
From Christ Enthroned with seraphim, through ranks of Saints, angels, biblical scenes and figures, down to the ground where the present generation of God’s people thronged, singing in response to the hidden choirs of angels, the facade was the entry both to Jerusalem of old and the New Jerusalem yet to come – foretold in the Revelation of John the Divine, and already prepared to receive us. It both is, and is to come. So, the processions and the people then entered the Cathedral under the shrine containing the ‘Body of the Lord’ and the relics of his saints held aloft. Inside, they were probably met by the clamour of a nave organ that seems to have been supported by two large corbels still seen in the south gallery. Carefully and elaborately coordinated liturgy and architecture brought all participants into the real presence of the Kingdom of God
So, to return to where I began: that octagonal room in the National Gallery of Scotland had a wall for each of Poussin’s paintings of the Seven Sacraments. That is the traditional, even orthodox doctrinal number, but I invite you, through reflection on the general definition of a sacrament to see yet more sacraments – at the very least, more potential for true sacramentality. The eighth wall of that octagonal room naturally contained the entrance portal. By the time you leave that room, having seen those seven intensely spiritual paintings, the eighth wall and it doorway open into a world with renewed sacramental possibility. Architecture is a powerful force for its realisability. Architecture creates luminal places, places of encounter between people, and between the people and the Divine breaking into the world.
These are places for human habitation, places that hold and shape human experience, places that enhance human flourishing, places that unfold and reveal all that is Good, and Beautiful, and True.
Given these possibilities, you as architects, have a great calling, a Vocation. In theological terms, it is to reveal the Christ, who is the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except by this Way, this Truth and this life, revealed and shaped and enhanced by the places where we meet, those luminal places shaped by you.
You can hold heaven in the palm of your hand. Take care how you handle it.
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