§3
There is no art more akin to mysticism than architecture. Abstract, geometrical, musical and yet dumb, passionless, it depends entirely upon symbolism, form, suggestion. Simple lines, and the harmonious combination and numerical relations between these, present something mysterious and at the same time incomplete. A building, a temple, does not comprise its object within itself; it differs in this respect from a statue or a picture, a poem or a symphony. The building needs an inhabitant; in itself it is a prepared space, a setting, like the shell of a tortoise or marine creature; and the essential thing is just this, that the outer case should fit the spirit and the inhabitant, as closely as the shell fits the tortoise. The walls of the temple, its vaults and pillars, its main entrance, its foundations and cupola, should all reflect the deity that dwells within, just as the bones of the skull correspond exactly to the convolutions of the brain.
To the Egyptians their temples were sacred books, their obelisks were sermons by the high road.
Solomon’s temple is the Bible in stone; and so St. Peter’s at Rome is the transition, in stone, from Catholicism to a kingdom of this world, the first stage of our liberation from monastic fetters.
The mere construction of temples was at all times accompanied by so many mystical rites, allegoric ceremonies, and solemn consecrations, that the medieval builders ranked themselves as a kind of religious order, as successors to the builders of Solomon’s temple; and they formed themselves into secret companies, of which freemasonry was a later development.
The Renaissance robbed architecture of this essentially mystical note. The Christian faith began to contend with scepticism, the Gothic spire with the Greek façade, religious sanctity with worldly beauty. This is why St. Peter’s at Rome is so significant; in that colossal erection Christianity is struggling to come alive, the Church turns pagan, and Michael Angelo uses the walls of the Sistine Chapel to depict Jesus Christ as a brawny athlete, a Hercules in the flower of youth and strength.
After this date church architecture fell into utter decadence, till it became a mere reproduction, in varying proportions, either of St. Peter’s or of ancient Greek temples. There is one Parthenon at Paris which is called the Church of the Madeleine, and another at New York, which is used as the Exchange.
Without faith and without special circumstances, it was hard to build anything with life about it. All modern churches are misfits and pretentious anachronisms, like those angular Gothic churches with which the English ornament their towns and offend every artistic eye.