We cannot leave this topic without referring to what the Cambridge Camden Society has said with respect to architectural competition. [Footnote 6] It is a fact that at this time many competing designs are manufactured in an architect's office, by some of his clerks, as if by machinery: if a given plan is chosen, the architect is summoned, and sees his (!) design for the first time, when he is introduced to the smiling committee-men. It is another fact that there is at this time in London a small body of persons, with no other qualification than that of having been draughtsmen in an architect's office, who get up a set of competing designs for any aspirant who chooses to give them a few instructions, and to pay them for their trouble. How much it is to be wished that there were some examination of an architect's qualifications, before he should be allowed to assume the name! It seems strange that the more able members of the profession do not themselves feel some esprit de corps, and do not at {xxvi} least endeavour to claim for their art its full dignity and importance. We fear however that very few, as yet, take that religions view of their profession, which we have shown to be seemly, even if not essential. If, however, we succeed in proving that religion enters very largely into the principles of church architecture, a religious ethos, we repeat, is essential to a church architect. At all events, in an investigation into the differences between ancient and modern church architecture, the contrast between the ancient and modern builders could not be overlooked: and it is not too much to hope that some, at least, may be struck by the fact, that the deeply religious habits of the builders of old, the hours, the cloister, the discipline, the obedience, resulted in their matchless works; while the worldliness, vanity, dissipation, and patronage of our own architects issue in unvarying and hopeless failure.
[Footnote 6: See Ecclesiologist, vol. i, pp. 69, 85.]
We said that there were philosophical reasons for the belief that we must have architects—before we can have buildings—like those of old. If it be true that an esoteric signification, or, as we shall call it, Sacramentality, [Footnote 7] ran through all the arrangements and details of Christian architecture, emblematical of Christian discipline, and suggested by Christian devotion; then must the discipline have been practised, and the devotion felt, before a Christian temple can be reared. That this esoteric meaning, or symbolism, does exist, we are now to endeavour to prove.
[Footnote 7: It may be proper to distinguish between five terms, too generally vaguely employed in common, and which we shall often have occasion to use: we mean, allegorical, symbolical, typical, figurative, and sacramental.
'Allegory employs fictitious things and personages to shadow out the truth: Symbolism uses real personages and real actions (and real things) as symbols of the truth:' British Critic, No. lxv. p. 121. Sacramentality is symbolism applied to the truth
the teaching of the Church, by the hands of the teacher: a Type is a symbol intended from the first: a Figure is a symbol not discovered till after the thing figurative has had a being.]
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We assert, then, that Sacramentality is that characteristic which so strikingly distinguishes ancient ecclesiastical architecture from our own. By this word we mean to convey the idea that, by the outward and visible form, is signified something inward and spiritual: that the material fabric symbolises, embodies, figures, represents, expresses, answers to, some abstract meaning. Consequently, unless this ideal be itself true, or be rightly understood, he who seeks to build a Christian church may embody a false or incomplete or mistaken ideal, but will not develope the true one. Hence, while the Parthenon, or a conventicle, or a modern church, may be conceived to have, on the one hand, so much truthfulness, as to symbolise respectively the graceful, but pagan, worship of Athene—the private judgment of the dissenter—and the warped or ill-understood or puritanised religious ethos of the modern churchman; and, on the other hand, to have so much reality as to carry out most satisfactorily Mr. Pugin's canons; yet, inasmuch as in neither case was the builder's ideal the true one, so in neither case is his architecture in any way adapted to, or an embodiment of, the ideal of the Church. Reality, then, is not of itself sufficient. What can be more real than a pyramid, yet what less Christian? It must be Christian reality, the true expression of a true ideal, which makes Catholic architecture what it is. This Christian reality, we would call Sacramentality; investing that symbolical truthfulness, which it has in common with every true expression, with a greater force and holiness, both from the greater purity of the perfect truth which it embodies, and from the association which this name will give it with those adorable and consummate examples of the same {xxviii} principle, infinitely more developed, and infinitely more holy in the spiritual grace which they signify and convey,—the Blessed Sacraments of the Church.
The modern writers who have treated on Symbolism seem to have taken respectively very partial views of the subject. Mr. Pugin does not seem in his books to recognise the particular principle which we have enunciated. We have shown that his law about Reality is true so far as it goes, but that it does not go far enough. He himself, for example, is now contemplating a work on the reality of domestic, as before of ecclesiastical, architecture. Now, nothing can be more true, nothing more useful, than this. Yet even he does not seem to have discerned that as contact with the Church endues with a new sanctity, and elevates every form and every principle of art: so in a peculiar sense the sacred end to which church architecture is subservient, elevates and sanctifies that reality which must be a condition of its goodness in common with all good architecture; in short, raises this principle of Reality into one of Sacramentality. We should be sorry to assert that Mr. Pugin does not feel this, though we are not aware that he has expressed it in his writings: but in his most lasting writings, his churches namely, it is clear that the principle, if not intentionally even, and if only incompletely, has not been without a great influence on that master mind. Yet even in these we could point to details, and in some of his earlier works to something more than details, which shew that there is something wanting; that in the bold expedients and fearless licence which his genius has led him to employ, he has occasionally gone wrong; not from the fact of his departure from strict precedent, and his vindication of a certain architectural freedom, but because in these escapements from authority, he has not invariably kept in view the { xxix} principle now advocated. However the author of the 'True Principles' might point to his churches, to prove that a reverent and religious mind, employed in administering to the material wants of the Church, (even though that reverence be misapplied, and that Church in a schismatical position), cannot fail to succeed, at least in some degree, in stamping upon his work the impress of his own faith and zeal, and in making it, at least to some extent, a living development and expression of the true ideal.
Mr. Poole, the author of the 'Appropriate Character of Church Architecture,' would appear to believe the symbolism of details rather than any general principle. He was the first, we think, to reassert that the octagonal form of fonts was figurative of Regeneration. In the latter edition of his Book he has adopted several of the symbolical interpretations advanced by the writers of the Cambridge Camden Society.