Cultural Presence of the Gothic Cathedrals in England
/An abridged version of the Dean's address at the International Congress of Medieval Cathedrals held in Milan from 24th to 28th September, 1986.
'Lara was not religious - she did not believe in ritual. But sometimes, to enable her to bear her life, she needed the accompaniment of an inward music and she could not always compose it for herself. That music was God's word of life and it was to weep over it that she went to church'. (Dr Zhivago I 17).
That quotation from Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak conveys to me the essence of our vocation in the cathedrals of Europe to preserve, convey and make available to our contemporaries the music of God's word of life. It also, incidentally, illustrates the importance of art in its ability to convey multum in parvo by evoking rather than describing or defining. The values of art are not those of science and technology or of the market place; they point rather to those invisible realities of mind and spirit of which faith is the substance and hope a foretaste.
The form in which God's word of life came to Lara was the chanting of the Beatitudes - Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are they that mourn, blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness - but it could have come through glass or painting, through sculpture or embroidery or simply through the building itself.
And I want to insist that it is the cathedral itself - the cathedral in its wholeness and integrity - which is our main concern and something greater than any of its parts or the sum of its parts. For cathedrals witness, in an age of fragmentation and specialisation, of analysis rather than synthesis, of division rather than cohesion, to a unity of purpose and a harmony of many different voices which can convey wholeness and healing to a generation which needs these things above all else. These great buildings by their size and magnanimity and by the regular offering of worship can give a shape to God's two great gifts of space and time, for people who in their everyday lives never have enough of either, because they perceive them as formless and of no worth. Cathedrals speak freely of the spaciousness and generosity of God in creation as well as of the continuity of the church and the creativity of men and women through the ages, including our own. This is one reason why entry to cathedrals should, if possible, be free. Entry into the building should be an experience, not a transaction; and all the English cathedrals now give great care to welcoming visitors and helping them appreciate what they find. it is a fine art to make available sufficient explanatory material while still leaving enough unspoken, so that visitors are given the opportunity to have their own experiences of transcendence, rather than have second-hand experiences thrust upon them. As a rule, we only let our own people act as guides - members of the Foundation or of our own congregation who know the building as a place of worship first and as a cultural monument second. In all that we do, we seek to help tourists become pilgrims, because we know that pilgrimage is a fine and enlarging human experience while tourism can be narrow and alienating. Pilgrimages grew up because of the association of saints and sanctity with particular places; and it has always been a task for the church to lead pilgrims on from an interest in physical objects to the personal and spiritual associations
• Breat English mediaeval
music and she could not always compose it for herself. That music was God's word of life and it was to weep over it that she went to church'. (Dr Zhivago I 17).
That quotation from Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak conveys to me the essence of our vocation in the cathedrals of Europe to preserve, convey and make available to our contemporaries the music of God's word of life. It also, incidentally, illustrates the importance of art in its ability to convey multum in parvoby evoking rather than describing or defining. The values of art are not those of science and technology or of the market place; they point rather to those invisible realities of mind and spirit of which faith is the substance and hope a foretaste.
The form in which God's word of life came to Lara was the chanting of the Beatitudes - Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are they that mourn, blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness - but it could have come through glass or painting, through sculpture or embroidery or simply through the building itself.
And I want to insist that it is the cathedral itself - the cathedral in its wholeness and integrity - which is our main concern and something greater than any of its parts or the sum of its parts. For cathedrals witness, in an age of fragmentation and specialisation, of analysis rather than synthesis, of division rather than cohesion, to a unity of purpose and a harmony of many different voices which can convey wholeness and healing to a generation which needs these things above all else. These great buildings by their size and magnanimity and by the regular offering of worship can give a shape to God's twO great gifts of space and time, for people who in their everyday lives never have enough of either, because they perceive them as formless and of no worth. Cathedrals speak freely of the spaciousness and generosity of God in creation as well as of the continuity of the church and the creativity of men and women through the ages, including our own. This is one reason why entry to cathedrals should, if possible, be free. Entry into the building should be an experience, not a transaction; and all the English cathedrals now give great care to welcoming visitors and helping them appreciate what they find.
It is a fine art to make available sufficient explanatory material while still leaving enough unspoken, so that visitors are given the opportunity to have their own experiences of transcendence, rather than have second-hand experiences thrust upon them. As a rule, we only let our own people act as guides - members of the Foundation or of our own congregation who know the building as a place of worship first and as a cultural monument second. In all that we do, we seek to help tourists become pilgrims, because we know that pilgrimage is a fine and enlarging human experience while tourism can be narrow and alienating. Pilgrimages grew up because of the association of saints and sanctity with particular places; and it has always been a task for the church to lead pilgrims on from an interest in physical objects to the personal and spiritual associations which they bear. All the great English mediaeval shrines were destroyed in 1547; but their sites have remained known and hallowed and they are not only increasingly appreciated today, but are even being added to. Canterbury, for example, the scene of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, now houses in its Corona a notable Chapel to the Martyrs of the twentieth century. Rochester was the Bishopric both of John Fisher (+1535) and of Nicholas Ridley (+1555), who died for their faith and for conscience sake though on different sides at the time of the Reformation. The double cult of these martyrs is an inspiration to us now in the ecumenical perspectives of the late twentieth century. Many people visit our Cathedral because it was the church which Charles Dickens - now I believe the most popular author in the world - knew and loved; and other cathedrals have their own literary and secular saints. The continual re-telling of heroic tales and the preservation of the corporate memory of society through annual commemorations is part of the rhythm of cathedral life and a great contribution to the culture of the nation.
The needs of visitors and tourists to understand their experience and relive it must be met by the provision of worthy guide books and souvenirs. This is a complex area, because many of our cathedrals need substantial income from gift stalls and shops in order to maintain their fabric and ministry. But commercial considerations cannot be the only criteria; and cathedrals which accepttheir vocation to maintain the highest standards in every other sphere, should also be seeking to educate public taste, when it comes to marketing souvenirs, not just to profit from it. Those who have debased the sensibilities of the faithful by feeding them on kitsch will have something to answer for at the Day of Judgement.
Schools are increasingly coming to appreciate the educational value of visits to cathedrals; and many of our English cathedrals have now a very happy experience of co-operation with the education authorities in producing workpacks and study-sheets, geared to the needs of different age groups. We also produce our own audio-visual programmes and provide scripts for professional productions. The past few years have seen a move away from mainly art-historical descriptions to bolder attempts to penetrate the mystery of these great buildings and to expose the faith of those who built them and of those who still worship in them. Educational material of this kind may properly be called evangelistic, for it prepares the mind to receive the great realities which produced and still produce Christian faith - creation, incarnation, redemption, the forgiveness of sins and the hope of glory.
So can exhibitions, which take many forms, depending on the history and the possessions of particular places as well as on the availability of suitable rooms. In recent years cathedrals have been developing explanatory exhibitions of their own history and of the history of their cities. An age which has witnessed the loss of so much of its heritage through war, 'development' and neglect looks to cathedrals as previous ages looked to monasteries and abbeys to preserve at least a remnant of its culture.
Apart from permanent exhibitions, cathedrals are increasingly staging temporary exhibitions which may be of works by celebrated contemporary artists or by local schoolchildren; they may be displays by missionary societies or other church agencies; they may set out dramatically some of the great issues of the day such as war and peace, hunger and plenty, human rights and deprivation. Whatever they are, their promoters feel that in some way which is difficult to specify their message is enhanced by the setting of the cathedral, which in this sense acts as a loud-speaker for them. English cathedrals are becoming more adventurous in the range of topics thought suitable for exhibition in a cathedral; they are returning to that open-hearted acceptance of concern for the whole of human life which characterised the high Middle Ages at their best. Certainly, we find that the oldest part of our cathedral, the Romanesque (Anglo-Norman) nave and crypt have a more robust and less fragile atmosphere than many more modern parish churches; the sense of the sacred re-asserts itself with an effortless ease which gives us the courage to welcome the so-called secular.
We may have been led astray by our consciousness of the sheer durability of much which we have received from the past into assuming that permanence is a necessary quality of all art and culture. But cathedrals - because of their intrinsic sense of antiquity and permanence - make excellent settings for the impermanent, the transitory and the ephemeral.
Perhaps the most notable example of this in England - so everyday that we take it for granted and scarcely reckon it to be culture - is flower-arranging.
Every week (except in penitential seasons) the most wonderful displays are created by enthusiastic amateurs, only to fade and be replaced by yet more wonderful displays in which art and nature are skilfully allied to the glory of God and the delight of His children.
But flowers are not the first thing which come into an Englishman's mind when he hears the word 'cathedral. Almost certainly his first thought will be music, for our cathedrals preserve the tradition of daily sung services - some both morning and evening - though most now only at Evensong, with Choral Mattins and Sung Eucharist also on Sundays only. They have a unique sound, quite different from choirs of men and women. They each preserve a repertoire of more than a 1000 pieces from the thirteenth century to the present day, with something of a bias towards the English church music of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and the revived musical tradition of the nineteenth century. Daily practice enables young choristers from the age of eight not only to sing complex music confidently, but also to sing the psalms meditatively and prayerfully to Anglican chant, the psalter remaining as always at the heart of the daily office. It is a strange fact that the Church of England, with its comparatively restricted resources, sustains much of the professional musical life of the nation.
Apart from maintaining their own tradition, cathedrals also serve as centres for the musical life of their dioceses and regions. They are the venues for choral festivals, raising the standards of music in the parishes and preserving a tradition of participation in an age when so much music is mechanical and consumerist.
In many places the cathedral is the only really large building suitable for the performance of great works; and so it finds itself acting as host for concerts put on by other bodies. Perhaps more important than professional concerts, though, is the opportunity which cathedrals now give to local young people to perform great music in a noble setting. Through enlightened educational policies in schools, England is now teeming with talented young musicians, many of them from very modest and cramped homes. It is a joy to us in the cathedrals to offer them a rare chance to participate in transcendence and to be touched by greatness.
Other performing arts tend to take second place to music; but the mediaeval tradition of sacred drama (mystery plays and passion plays) has been revived - and new pieces are also being produced. The great turning point came with the commissioning by Dean Bell of Canterbury of 'Murder in the Cathedral' by T. S. Eliot shortly before the second world war; but drama is now an accepted part of a cathedral's programme and dance is increasingly so.
Where the visual arts are concerned much of our effort and of our resources necessarily goes into the conservation of the glass, the sculpture, the wood work and the comparatively small amount of painting which is left to us. But in recent years there have been many new commissions and even new art forms, like engraving on glass. Some of these have been integral to the design of new cathedrals of which Coventry is the best known example.
But new windows by Marc Chagall, for instance, have been commissioned for the ancient cathedrals of Chichester and Salisbury, new statues for Llandaff and Salisbury and Rochester, a new tapestry for Chichester and a set of new banners for Winchester. There has been an unexpected renaissance in embroidery in England in the last decades, comparable to the unexpected renaissance in hymnography.
Many of us long for the day when once again the church will be a major patron of the arts; and once again men's eyes will be formed by the expression in wood and stone, in bronze and silk of a truly Christian humanism. For the moment, the financial means just do not lie to hand; and we can only report isolated instances and the attempt of some churchmen, at least, to stay in contact with creative artists and craftsmen. Some cathedrals, notably Durham, have employed an artist-in-residence. The clergy speak of the enrichment and challenge which come to them and to their modes of perception from having an artist in their midst and the artists of the inspiration which comes from the cathedral - both as a building and as a way of life.
For the greatest contribution cathedrals make to culture is not patronage or preservation of individual works of art. It is the living of life in a community, open to the world around it and sensitive to its needs, but deriving its rhythms and its values from elsewhere, so that it may continue to offer something new and challenging, healing and refreshing to the world. All the elements which sociologists tell us are necessary for community are there; space, time, folklore, symbols, shared memories and common purposes. These things make possible mutual care, reliable relationships and growth into personal maturity for the poor in spirit and them that mourn. And by making the major concerns of the age their own and conveying them to their dioceses, they can also encourage and succour those who hunger and thirst after righteousness.
The cathedrals of England have developed a culture which goes some way to replacing what was lost in the life of the nation at the Dissolution of the Monasteries. In the so-called dark ages, Benedictine monasticism preserved what could be saved of the culture of Greaco-Roman antiquity and transmitted the Gospel to the new nations of northern Europe. In our age, which is also characterised by new energies and new forms of barbarism, the cathedrals have a unique role in civilising and evangelising Europe with the music of God's word of life.
John Arnold
An abridged version of the Dean's address at the International Congress of Medieval Cathedrals held in Milan from 24th to 28th September, 1986.
The Friends of Rochester Cathedral were founded to help finance the maintenance of the fabric and grounds. The Friends’ annual reports have become a trove of articles on the fabric and history of the cathedral.
Canons, colleagues, volunteers and staff have shared their memories and reflections in many forms over the years.
