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Imagined faiths I: Mesopatamia

What was it to be a Mesopatamian peasant, in say, 3000BCE? A pointless question in a way; this culture left little trace of what anyone but its elites believed — yet even that knowledge something remarkable, for it is also the first culture anywhere whose religion we know anything substantive about. And I have spent a few days now immersed in this belief system, an immersion that only reminds me how hard it is to recapture with full imaginative force the word of those who grow in a ‘faith’ that is simply a description of how the world is.

Our man might live in the countryside, but the focus of this countryside is the city, and the focus of the city, the temple, service to which, however indirect, is his raison d’etre. He can see it now, high and white, its geometrically buttressed walls throwing a sharp, tight rythm of shadow in the distance, raised above the city itself, dominating the flat, fertile plain, the reed-groves and waterways.

Its presence is, I think, a comforting one; it is a home: the home for a god. He or she inhabits the images in its dark, richly appointed inner sanctuary; but he or she is also everywhere else: if he is a sky god he is in the sky and the temple and any statue consecrated to his name; if the god of the sweet waters, in likewise. There are a thousand others, but a handful dominate, of which these are two. Knowledge that such beings, or perhaps one should call them natural forces with personalities, natural forces that respond to being treated well by human beings. Knowled, then, that he or she is being properly fed, and attended to, and honoured, is a reassurance.

Because these powers, duly cared for — as is the duty of humanity — are beneficient. But they are also capricious. Our peasant knows only too well how the skys and the sweet waters, and specific winds and specific conditions of the stars, and a thousand other things large and small, each animated by a named force we call a God, can break their order and fail us. Everything is animate, conscious, posessed of power, he knows; but some powers matter more than others. If the wind switches or the water’s don’t rise, the great flat plain on which he grows the food for himself and the food for the gods will bring nothing forth, and all will starve, and it will be our fault. There is a deep strain of fatalism and fear here, a certainty of our dependence on this all-powerful forces, at once distant and immanent.

Every city serves a different god; every object, every person, has a supernatural accompaniment. Great myth-cycles — Gilgamesh, Creation — might be sung when he gets home, stories of the doings of men and gods. The priests rule his city on their behalf; if its fate diminishes, it is they, more than anyone else, who are likely to have done wrong.

Their rituals are elaborate, and private; but over the ensuing millenia they will become more grand, and more political. The priests will become kings, and need theologies to justify a new phenomenon: the ruling of one city by another. The gods will become more like human personalities, with internal politics of their own, and plans and intentions. Architecture will become more vainglorious in the service of these powers: great palace and temple complexes, built around an enormous pyramid-like ziggurat of rammed earth. Cities, empires, cultures within this great continuum — in which there is nothing else in the universe but the great plain, its twin rivers, and its surrounding mountains — will rise and fall. By the time Babylon reaches its imperial pomp, in the first millenium BCE, the entire city will be built around the structures designed to houses the great, 12-day New Year festival: a processional way through gates made of bright tile, dominated by massive winged gods; a ziggurat brightly painted topped by a tiny, mysterious temple.

Yet this very festival has our peasant’s concerns at its heart, for during it the gods reconfigure the bonds on which the cycle of nature depends, and, if things go wrong, the very laws of the universe will be broken, and the forces of nature and chaos, which underly everything, and from which man himself was fashioned, will take over. And it’s all down to the king, and the rituals of scapegoat and cleansing that he and his priests enact around the city in those days, to which all the gods are brought in a mighty procession of inhabited images.

Our peasant’s faith is curiously unconcerned with death. A vaguely-imagined netherworld, configured much as a darker, less happy version of the one he inhabits, exists; people are buried with grave-gods, sometimes in elaborate subterrenan vaults. But the focus of this faith, this worldview, is the land of the living, in which mighty, capricious gods are immanent, and humanity’s duty is to serve them and ensure the annual rising of the waters, on which existence depends, recurs.

Last call for tours 2012

upstaging York Minster for beginners

With lots more people visiting here in the wake of the recent re-broadcast of my How to build a cathedral, I thought I’d announce the imminent closure of bookings on some of my upcoming, ever-popular, in-depth-yet-accessible, blow-your-mind architecture, tours of cathedrals and other churches. Last chance, everyone!

There are just two places left on Medieval Fenland Churches, 25-27 May; and a few further slots on Medieval Cambridge (20-22 July), and Medieval East Anglia (11-15 June — an excuse to go round Norwich, Kings Lynn, Lavenham and other delights,  looking at the towns as well as their churches). Great food and acommodation, too.

And then there’s just one more cathedral dayschool this year, Wells — at once the greatest and most loveable of all the medieval cathedrals – on 30 June. This, too is almost sold out.

As to next year, watch this space for (I can say this now the contract is in the post) not one but two further major books; and a nine-day residential jamboree, touring the cathedrals of England for the esteemed Martin Randall Travel.

To find out more, contact me in the first instance: jon_cannonATSIGNhotmail.com.

Medieval-eyes: Maurice Sendak, RIP

Giovanni di Paolo, St John enters the Wilderness

I can’t think of a small-children’s book more beautifully written than Where the Wild Things Are. It is a miracle of perfectly placed and poised prose: an infinite pleasure to read, time and time again. I’m not the first to say that, of course, but less often commented on is its profound debt to the medieval era.

It’s true to an extent of the story, which in its storm-in-a-teacup journeying to a land of far-off beasts and adventue, and home in time for tea has just the combination of exotica, danger, quiet poetic oddness and ultimate sealed-in safety of much medieval literature. Indeed the Wild Things are ultimately medieval creatures: gargoyles, babewyns, woodwose, wild men, at once terrifying, safe, at-the-edge.

But it’s Maurice Sendak’s pictures which show a man who has spent many happy hours looking at medeival painting, especially perhaps the Italian/International Gothic imagery of c.1350-1450 — from the Wilton Diptych to Sassetta, the stylised, stage-set mountains and trees, mismatched scales, and dreamlike larger-than-life creatures are all there; so, too is the curiously static, near-posed approach to story-telling. Giovanni di Paolo — shown here, in an oft-repeated cycle about St John, the example of which I’ve shown here in appropriately enough in Chicago rather than Siena or London — gets as oddly-close as any artist to depicting the stuff of dreams, even if he doesn’t know it. Sendak’s Wild Things do the same.

Patterns of cathedral-building

There are all kinds of intriguing patterns among the English cathedrals: the distinction between those with monastic chapters (mostly Romanesque/late C11/episodically added to) and those that were secular (mostly Gothic/wholesale rebuilds of the late C12-late C13) is one of my favourites. But there are others, too. For example, though they have very different characters and histories, all the ‘minnows’ — the poorest sees, with the smallest churches — are on the fringes. There’s Rochester and Chichester on the south-east coats, both the ghosts of lost (in Rochester’s case only posited) Anglo-Saxon kingdoms; and Hereford and Carlisle in the west and north-west, the one a sizeable and ancient see, the other a small but rugged one, an outpost of civilisation in a kind of medeival ‘third world’ in the English north-west, and also the last see to be created before the Reformation.

And then there’s the Northern Giants, Lincoln, York, and Durham: dramatically different — an end to end gothic rebuild, a series of grand projects extending over half a millenium and a substantially Romanesque church respectively — but all colossi, in exceptionally wealthy and powerful dioceses, and all along the north-east coast.

What I’d not noticed before is the pattern of rebuilding in the south west. Two gothic seculars, Salisbury and Wells, were rebuilt there around 1200, to be joined by 1280 by Exeter; the many parallels between the three ‘model’ secular cathedrals added to by the overlap of personnel in their Chapters and, in some cases, their builders and the fact that none had a true in-house saint’s cult, at least until Osmund at Salisbury was canonised in the fifteenth century. Exeter would be the last end-to-end rebuild (C12 towers excepted, as at Lincoln the C12 west front was kept and at Wells and Salisbury aspects of the preceding church encoded in the design) before the Reformation — were it not for Bath, still underway when the monastery there was dissolved. So every cathedral west of Worcester/Winchester had an end to end gothic-era rebuild, two of them later by some distance than any others in the country.

The contrast with the situation in the far east is particularly remarkable, for here, at monastic Norwich and Ely and (though these were not at the time cathedrals) St Albans and Peterborough, not to mention a host of other monastic sites, from Bury to Wymondham, colossal churches in a near-indistinguishable muscular Romanesque survive. It is as if local one-upmanship affects west country ambitions dramatically, while an equally powerful regional tradition in the east says that great churches should look romanesque, righ up until the Reformation. Oddly, this pattern turns the underlying geological one on its head: the great gathering of ancient churches in the far east, stands on the youngest rocks, in the flattest landscape; and the hilly, ancient geological palimpsest of the south west attracts the newest cathedrals, the fashionable and experimental rebuilds of the gothic era.

Medieval-eyes: Scotland

Site of St Kentigern’s shrine, Glasgow

Spaces stretch out as you head north: medieval polities of enormous size and power: York; Durham and its more edgy neighbour Newcastle. A blackened twelfth-century tower and a battered town church swing by. The first Norman bishop, murdered in a 1070s back street.

Was Durham the single largest building between here and the north pole? One does wonder. Melrose, St Andrews, Kirkwall: serious buildings, but not on this scale. Holy Island, its older sibling, swings by on its WideOpen bay after a bewilderingly long time: things are bigger up here; bleaker, too, if the housing estates are anything to go by. You can see Holy Island from Arthur’s Seat; Northumbria has barely stopped being a buffer state.

Edinburgh, Stirling, two crag-burghs. Their subsequent history – Stirling the Renaissance focus, Edinburgh the modern one, remaking itself into a capital with spiky flair – make them very different places, but their medieval selves may not have been so different. Both dramatically set, with real crags on the doorstep; both a castle-fastness, a long road lined by burghage plots, a grand town church. 

These Scots town churches are bewildering to southern eyes. Firstly, I can’t date anything. The south aisle at Stirling has plainly been made from mason’s templates cut in England in the 1310s-30s at latest, yet all the guides — Buildings of Scotland included — are happy that it is C15. The great apse looks to the Continent: there’s no Perp at all up here. The vaulted aisles speak of real ambition, yet the overall size is nothing special compared to the mightiest urban churches in England, and little of this work is well cut, beyond a certain mighty grandeur that might have been positively oppressive when filled with the undying devotions of the Holy Rude. Much the same could be said of St Gile’s, Edinburgh, whose complex story reveals a much lesser early medieval self, but also a C15 collegiate church-ification, with a tierceron vaulted chancel such as would be exceptional anywhere; and both have plain as plain can be clerestories, weirdly originally open to only one side. Style-wise St Giles is Continental Flamboyant throughout: I’m reminded of St Nicholas, Galway. Even the famous crown-like tower top redoes in English motif  with Scots/Continental detailing. All in all, these two churches speak a voice of their own: massively impressive, plainly detailed, vaulted aisles, stub-transepts, side chapels added by individual patrons off the nave; little trace of anything substantive predating the C15.  But I’m still adjusting to this aesthetic, trying not to see it through Sassanach-tinted spectacles. The stacked mouldings of the St Giles chancel looked like misunderstood Renaissance detailing — until I saw just the same thing in the C13 at Glasgow cathedral: indeed I wonder to what extent, with its powerful design, short transepts and lack of high stone vaults, Glasgow set the standard (and the limits) to which Scottish churches aspired throughout the ensuing centuries.

Holywell abbey is something else: well-carved, lots of good work of the late C12 and a little later, looking strongly to Lincoln but speaking a voice of its own, too. Yet it’s also nothing grander than a host of lost mid-ranking Augustinian houses might have been.

I climb Arthur’s Seat, and find the detritus of this near-shocking wilderness within the city: how many midnight shags/forgotten rave-ups/wild walks/break-ups have happened up here? And more traces of a lost landscape: here’s a neatly vaulted polygonal wellhead from some sacred spring; there, crag-like and covered in graffiti, a two-storey hermitage.  

Then, on the way back, Glasgow, and arguably the only medieval building in Scotland (though I’d love to come face-to-face with Rosslyn, Kirkwall, St Andrews) that adds something significant to the Grand Narrative. Here is a serious cathedral, again full of the voice of Lincoln — translated, as it was in Scandinavia, into something of-its-own; and as at Trondheim almost unnervingly cultic – next to a little crag — today the Necropolis, but before that, what? — small, tight and intense, its windows a history of the possibilities of c.1230 (just as tracery is on the brink of invention), and its extraordinary crypt. Little was done here after the C13, and what was seems to go out of its way to fit in with past designs. And even here the transepts are but stumps, and there are no high vaults. Perhaps Scotland north of the Borders could never afford them?

Here, in the crypt, lay Kentigern: a proto-Merlin, a magical hermit saint, in the middle of this grand and Empire-blackened metropolis. The spaces around him are choreographed with shocking intensity, the visitor led down vaulted passages, moved from one subtle space to another until he reaches the shrine on its raised platform. Medieval Scotland certainly had something to offer, something powerful and of its own; something even more comprehensively lost in their more sweeping Reformation even than ours.

Greece II: ascent/descent

Memories fade and crumple, but my single day’s descent into deep Greek island landscapes lasts strong. It began in a village where even the roads where flagged in white marble, high and cold on a mountain ridge, from which an ancient marble road descended down a long and increasingly deserted valley. Farmed at first – olive, oak, barking dogs, thick scents of thyme, oregano, basil – the valley became increasingly barren, but the path stretched on. After a solid hour it had rounded several bare hills and was approaching a knoll overlooking a deep gulf that led out towards the island-sea; and there, by a farmhouse surrounded by goats, was a tiny bare church, naked of whitewash, camouflaged by age, merely an outcrop, though once clearly just off an important route.

Inside is bare, almost skeletal; the wind moves with quiet warmth. A narthex, an aisle, a nave and apsed chancel seperated by a dome; and fading, barely clinging to the element-open walls, frescoes that date back to the eigth century, aniconic frescos that would have covered the interior in geometric patterning, animals, vegetal motifs, anything that could not be interpreted as a human image.

And then the climb back, and now up, to a knoll of limestone that rose like a sheer knuckle from the island floor; from a distant utterly bare and inaccessible, except for the tiny white pimple of a little church.

In fact a broad road encircles and climbs, suggesting access is required reasonably readily; and the naked limestone close-up is awash with mountain flowers. But the wind beats so hard here I can barely stand up, and corvied nesting below rise and wheel in alarm and the mad approaching Englishman. Chamomile is snatched away as soon as scented.

Finally, barely crawling over the naked stone, the church rears in front of me. The mountain top has been flattened, save a rocky knoll for this chapel to cling to. A bell on a frame. A door of hard gloss blue, a white dome so small and geometrical you could Tardis it away.

A push, and it is open. Tiny icons, tiny iconastasis, candles, wicks, oil and matches. But the wind is shaking the mountain top with near-tectonic force, and this tiny white throat-like interior seems to groan and echo with something from far down and far below. And can these stone walls three feet thick really be vibrating?

Greece I: questions and thoughts

Greece, of course, presents insights galore: as a non-specialist viewer who is going to have to write about this stuff before the end of the year, both are crucial.

First – moving backwards in time – there is Greece’s Christian heritage. More than anything else, the experience of being in the homeland of ‘Greek’ orthodoxy is a forceful reminder of how the world looks from the faith’s heartland. For exampe, and in spite of Rome’s crucial role in the faith’s early years, Catholicism as we know it — let alone the various Protestantisms and Nonconformisms that have happened since — is a johnny-come-lately compared to this. Nowhere else is the New Testament in its first form also the vernacular; nowhere else is Kyrie Eleison, and much else, more than an exotic-sounding incantation. Not only does this version of the faith go back as close to its roots as any (give or take a Syriac or a Copt or two), but it has comparitively speaking changed comparitively little since its inception. Attendance at an Orthodox mass is not an experience of C3 or C4 Christianity — but it is certainly relevant to understanding that of, say, the C8 or the C9, and the culture from which the western Christian world grew, and which was a continuum with what (for example) Anglo-Saxon religion looked like.

Most astonishing, in this respect, is the density of the ‘popular’ sacred landscape. It is not unusual to see five, six, or more small churches, chapel or shrines in a patch of now-depopulated countryside much smaller than the average English parish; they presumably have developed through complex accretion of two thousand years of unbroken development; one may have parochial status, another have been founded as a burial chapel, a third be associated with a well or rock of cultic significance. Often they are tiny, perched on dramatic hilltops, nestling in hollows. A great many replaced or reused classical temples, and there may well be continuities of holy places, too: such claims, we should remember, while easily contested here in Britain, are less so in a place whose paganism (unlike ours) we know much about, and which was perfectly alive and well when the new cult from Palestine was officialised.

Much medieval practise is alive, too. Roadside shrines, maintained (presumably) by an invisible army of black-clad old ladies, dot every road we drive down, often more frequently than emergency telephones on an English motorway; some are old and neglected, but others are brand new — you can pick up a two-foot Orthodox chapel on a plinth from any builder’s merchants – and contain a few icons, some candles, oil, and a lighter. The respectable self-made businessman will place a walk-in concrete chapel in his garden. And the images on the iconostatis in any parish church, especially those of Mary or Christ, are hung with ex votos just like those we know were left at medieval shrines: here, little metal models of healed limbs, or even offerings such as watches and jewellery.

Yet it is only an accident of history that Greek Orthodoxy is so alive and kicking in Greece: the original epicentre of this culture was significantly to the east: until it was hemmed in by Islam, Greek Byzantium and Anatolia where were it was at. Indeed years of foreign domination, as with Poland, have probably done much to keep the faith vital. No splittist Reformation, no Dissolution, no iconoclasm since the C9, though in the modern world attendance is fading. It is from this root that the culture I study, younger and further west, bifurcated, and as much is explained by seeing this as by knowing it for an intellectual fact.

Hagia Sophia is obviously the Great Church of this world; yet moving around this landscape one is struck by the conservatism of its architecture thereafter. The most ambitious buildings are no more elaborate or large than a medium-sized monastic house in medieval western Europe; architectural development involves complex calibrations of dome-and-aisles, dome-and-transepts, pursued within a far narrower range of possibilites than one sees in western Europe in the same time-frame, that is the long C9-c18 from which most churches in both landscapes date. It is an astonishing fact that, after Hagia Sophia in the C6, there is simply nothing in Orthodoxy to match any number of cathedrals in Italy, Germany, France, Iberia or Britain.

There’s nothing wrong with this: the ceaseless inventiveness and ridiculous ambition of western architecture is a unique thing, and born, by coincidence, at precisely this period. And the buildings that result are exhausting in number and scintillating in internal presence; richly painted internally, clothed in whitewash externally, and thick with images, they are merely a reminder of how we once looked.

But still, this conservatism begs questions. Not least about the role of architecture in this culture. This is architecture as a setting for painted imagery, and the significance of the painted image is extraordinary even by medieval western standards. Not stained glass, or sculpture, but icons and frescoes; the former to this day attracting a constrant stream of people who wish to kiss them. Arguably, more than anything else, this architecture is designed as a setting for sacred image-making, and by no means an end in itself. But one would love to get to grips with these tensions between image and its architectural setting, and development or the lack of it.

This is even truer of Classical architecture. I went to Greece wanting to contextualise, to put the rabbit of precocious modernity back in its iron age box. After all, the philosophers were few in number, and didn’t build temples: most people were busy making sacrifices in front of brightly painted and sculpted backdrops, rather than questioning the nature of reality. These all-too familiar myths were once a faith, these gods were real. Indeed it is rather intriguing that Classical paganism, in spite of its disinterment by Robert Graves, does not seem (unlike our home-grown variety) to have been reinvented by New Agers. Perhaps we know too much about it to be able to make things up of our own.  

Yet none of this explains the remarkable thing that happens to architecture from around the C6BCE. These buildings were the backdrop for an exhaustingly complex series of stories and rituals; their interiors were stores of valuable offerings centred on a single great image. They are invariably set carefully in their landscape, and embody a modular architectural canon best compared to the Classical architecture of East Asia.

But they also do something new, something architecture had never done before. For example the developments of orders, in particular the Doric and the Ionic — one rarely sees Corinthian in Greece, except as a Roman re-importation — enables buildings to strike different emotional registers, and I don’t think buildings had ever done this previously. Those of contemporary China, India and Egypt were elaborate and impressive, and did their one thing very well: but it was only one thing. The Orders intimate that architecture can do many things,  have many moods and calibrations, like music does, or painting. That is their most lasting contribution.

One might think that a culture which makes this discovery — obvious in retrospect, but brilliant when first made — would be seeking histrionic effects, would be trying to go all baroque or gothic or safavid or mughal with the many voices it is finding it can make. But no, this impressive discovery is seived always through a matrix of reason, moderation, of a sense that as well as having an expressive range, architecture has a grammar as complex and rich as language. So the achievement is double impressive.

Can it be explained, then, in terms of the religious culture alone? There are certainly contextual things going on that might suggest this would be the case. Homer, writing in probably the C8BCE, had turned the gods into personalities, immortal, super-powered beings, yes, but ones who nevertheless have the emotional complexities and wiles of ordinary human beings.  This rewriting is all, as far as I can see, that seperates the religion out from a myriad other Indo-European paganisms. Did this, I wonder, also have an impact on the cultural artefacts that developed? If one’s gods have the emotions of people, does one not want to please and delight them, rather than simply propitiate terrifying and distant forces? And if one treats one gods like one treats one’s friends, does one not, without hardly noticing, start to create art to please *real* people, too, so that ritual theatre spins out into theatre as we understand it: art/entertainment, and likewise sport, and poetic competitions, and so much else that seems so modern to us about this world? And does that not in turn explain the enormous focus on the sculptud human form which is key to understanding this art, and the grace, discipine and quiet range of the architecture that was its setting?

It’s a good theory, but that’s all it is. And as one walks round the sculptures in the National Archaeological Museum, or reads about the way the most important of these buildings where as much expressions of civic identity, politics and ceremonial as of anything we would recognise as spiritual, it is hard not to escape the simple fact that, contextualise it all you like, something truly extraordinary, precocious and, yes, modern happened here all those years ago. Something about much more than religion, even though the religion was very much alive: something considered, clever, human.