Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion (23 page)

Not coincidentally, surely, it was the Protestant countries in Europe which first witnessed the extremes of ugliness that would become so typical of the modern world.
Manchester,
Leeds and other cities like them subjected their inhabitants to hitherto unparalleled degrees of unsightliness, as if they were testing to the full
John Calvin's contention that architecture and art have no role to play in the condition of our souls and that a godly life can therefore satisfactorily unfold in a slum tenement with a view on to an open-cast coal mine, just so long as there is a Bible to hand.

This ideology did not pass unchallenged – and Catholicism once again had a hand in resisting it. When the nineteenth-century architect
Augustus Pugin, a devout Catholic, considered
the new landscapes of industrial England, he attacked them not merely for their appearance, but also for their power to destroy the human spirit. In two contrasting illustrations, he showed a typical English town, first as he imagined it had looked in the fifteenth century under an aesthetically sensitive Catholic regime and then, four centuries later, as it was in his own day, grossly blighted by the oppressive workhouses, mills and factories of the Protestant order. As Pugin saw it, Protestantism had directly promoted the reckless, hugely influential (and, for developers, hugely convenient) notion that one might destroy a city's appearance without in any way damaging the souls of its inhabitants.

It would be easy enough to accuse Pugin of gross partisanship and far-fetched aestheticism, but the more daunting and anxiety-producing possibility is that he was essentially right, if not in his attack on Protestants, then at least in his underlying assessment of the impact that visual forms can have on us. What if our minds are susceptible to more than just the books we read? What if we are also influenced by the houses, hospitals and factories around us? Might we not hence have good reason to mount protests against ugliness – and, despite a thousand obstacles, strive to put up buildings that could advance a case for goodness through their beauty?

3.
In the secular parts of the world, it is common, even among unbelievers, in fact especially among them, to lament the passing of the great days of religious architecture. It is common to hear those who have no interest in the doctrines of religion admit to a nostalgia for ecclesiastical buildings: for the texture of stone walls on hillside chapels, for the profiles of spires glimpsed across darkening fields and perhaps for the sheer ambition involved in putting up a temple to house a book (Judaism) or a shrine to one of the rear molars of an enlightened saint (Theravada Buddhism). But these nostalgic musings are always cut short with a reluctant acknowledgement that an end to faith must inevitably mean an end to the possibility of temples.

Behind this assumption lies the implicit idea that where there are no more gods or deities, there can be nothing left to celebrate – and hence nothing more to emphasize through the medium of architecture.

Yet upon examination it in no way logically follows that an end to our belief in sacred beings must mean an end to our attachment to values or to our desire to provide a home for them through architecture. In the absence of gods, we still retain ethical beliefs which are in need of being solidified and celebrated. Any of those things which we revere but are inclined too often to overlook might justifiably merit the founding of its own ‘temple'. There could be temples to spring and temples to kindness, temples to serenity and temples to reflection, temples to
forgiveness and temples to self-knowledge.

What might a temple without a god in it look like? Throughout history, religions have been zealous in laying down uniform rules regarding the appearance of their buildings. For medieval Christians, all cathedrals were expected to have cruciform ground plans, east–west axes, water basins for baptisms at the
western ends of naves and sanctuaries with altars at their eastern ends. To this day, South-East Asian Buddhists understand that their architectural energy has no option but to be channelled into constructing hemispherical stupas with parasols and circumambulatory terraces.

In the case of secular temples, however, there would be no need to follow such canonical laws. The temples' only common element would have to be their dedication to promoting virtues essential to the well-being of our souls. But which specific virtues would be honoured in the various venues, and how the idea of them would be successfully conveyed, could be entirely left up to their individual architects and patrons. The priority would be only to define a new typology of building rather than to design particular examples of it.

Nevertheless, to demonstrate the approach, we could outline a handful of possible themes for secular temples, along with a few architectural strategies to complement them.

Considering how much of our lives we spend exaggerating our own importance and the magnitude of the insults and reversals which we suffer as a result, there could be few more pressing priorities for a new temple architecture than answering our need for perspective.

We seem unable to resist overstating every aspect of ourselves: how long we are on the planet for, how much it matters what we achieve, how rare and unfair are our professional failures, how rife with misunderstandings are our relationships, how deep are our sorrows. Melodrama is individually always the order of the day.

Religious architecture can perform a critical function in relation to this egoism (ultimately as painful as it is mistaken), because of its capacity to adjust our impressions of our physical – and as a consequence also our psychological – size, by playing with dimensions, materials, sounds and sources of illumination. In certain cathedrals that are vast in scale or hewn out of massive, antique-looking stones, or in others that are dark save for a single shaft of light filtering in from a distant oculus or silent but for the occasional sound of water dripping from a great height into a deep pool, we may feel that we are being introduced, with unusual and beguiling grace, to a not unpleasant sense of our own insignificance.

To be made to ‘feel small' is, to be sure, a painful daily reality of the human playground. But to be made to feel small by something mighty, noble, accomplished and intelligent is to have wisdom presented to us along with a measure of delight. There are churches that can induce us to surrender our egoism without in any way humiliating us. In them we can set aside our ordinary concerns and take on board (in a way we never dare to do when we are under direct fire from other humans) our own nullity and mediocrity. We can survey ourselves as if from a distance, no longer offended by the wounds inflicted on our self-esteem, feeling newly indifferent to our eventual fate, generous towards the universe and open-minded about its course.

Such feelings may visit us in non-ecclesiastical buildings too: in a massive, narrow tower with charred timber walls, in a concrete void extending five storeys underground or in a room lined with stones bearing the fossilized imprints of minuscule shelled ammonites which partook of life in the tropical waters of Laurentia (modern-day eastern North America and Greenland) during the Palaeozoic Age, some 300 million years before our first recognizable ancestor had the wit to stand upright or to fashion a canoe.

A new Temple to Perspective might end up playing with some of the same ideas as are explored in science museums and observatories. There might be items of palaeontological and geological interest in the walls, and astronomical instruments in the ceilings and roof. And yet there would be important distinctions between these two types of institution at the level of ambition. Like a science museum, a Temple to Perspective would hope to push us towards an awareness (always under threat in daily life) of the scale, age and complexity of the universe, but unlike a science museum, it would not bother to pretend that the point of the exercise was to give us a grounding in a scientific education. It would not in the end matter very much whether visitors ever mastered the differences between, say, the Triassic and Cambrian eras, the detailed explanations of which are often so painfully laboured over by museum curators and yet so likely to have been forgotten by most of their audience by the time they reach the car park. This would be science roughly handled and presented in the interests of stirring awe rather than in the name of promoting knowledge, science leaned upon for its therapeutic, perspective-giving capacity rather than for its factual value.

It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilization's most important achievements has come under unprecedented assault. We are almost never far from a machine that guarantees us a mesmerizing and libidinous escape from reality. The feelings and thoughts which we have omitted to experience while looking at our screens are left to find their revenge in involuntary twitches and our ever-decreasing ability to fall asleep when we should.

Because we are drawn in architecture to styles which seem to possess some of the qualities we lack in ourselves, it is little wonder that we should be readily seduced by spaces that are purified and free of distraction, and in which stimuli have been reduced to a minimum – places, perhaps, where the view has been carefully framed to take in a few rocks, or the branches of a tree, or a patch of sky, where the walls are solid, the materials are enduring and the only sound to be heard is that of wind or flowing water.

A Temple to Reflection would lend structure and legitimacy to moments of solitude. It would be a simple space, offering visitors little beyond a bench or two, a vista and a suggestion that they set to work on unravelling some of the troubling themes that they have been using their normal activity to suppress.