Sanctioning Modernism: Architecture and the Making of Postwar Identities

Introduction (Timothy Parker)

109 INTRODUCTION timothy parker T he essays in this section address a phenomenon that, from certain points of view regarding modern identity , remains virtually invisible. A long-standing trope of modernity is that it emerges insofar as religion, superstition, and their premodern cognates diminish. Thus, for instance, the modern world is roughly equated with not only the sociopolitical results of industrialization but also the philosophical implications of the scientific revolution and Enlightenment rationality, eventually yielding a disenchanted world, however incomplete its achievement may remain. Such a view is clearly reductive and simplistic, as the spate of “postsecularization ” literature during recent decades in religious studies and elsewhere demonstrates.¹ Nevertheless, a central (even if not defining) condition of modernity is surely an increasing critique of religion, and it hastakenmanyforms.Onestrongthreadofthisdevelopment in the West was the eighteenth-century remaking of religion according to the use by liberal Protestants of anthropological and sociological perspectives upon human history, such that the distinction between religion and superstition was used to relegate the communal, ritual, and typically Catholic forms of religious practice to the premodern or colonial world. By 110 making religion modern the mid-twentieth century, the comparative, historical, and phenomenological methods that had come to dominate the academic study of religion emphasized the idea of mystical experience that is understandable in terms of symbol and myth, yet exists essentially beyond specific religious institutions , texts, and moral codes and is therefore open to appropriation in forming a general theory of religion.² Whether such a general theory of religion would in fact refer to something real, whether religion was sui generis or was instead an ideological construct inherited from the developments sketched above, remains a subject of some controversy.³ But along the way, multiple critiques of religion developed, from Nietzsche’s broad proclamation of the death of God,⁴ to other nineteenth-century proponents of a “hermeneutics of suspicion ,”⁵ to more focused efforts at “demythologization,”⁶ to the functional demise of the institutional metanarrative of Western Christendom due to its progressive disestablishment, to the mere waning of religious authority amidst splintering denominational claims. Such critiques surely exercised their influence on the emerging fields of art and architectural history. And against the backdrop of religious subjects having traditionally dominated these fields, it should be no surprise that religious art and architecture would tend to fall out of the picture during the twentieth century. But they by no means ceased to be produced. It is all the more relevant, then, to address such work expressly in the context of the formation, contestation, and experience of modern identity. The essays that follow in this section concern the complicated interrelationship between religious and architectural engagement with modernity in Western Christianity following World War II. Of central importance in this context was the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), the major event by introduction 111 which the Roman Catholic Church sought to open itself to the modern world. When considered against matters of patronage , reception, interpretation, and the specifics of time and place, however, the various and conflicting roles such events could play are made evident. The same is true with regard to the sanctioning of modernism . In the case of two new cathedrals in Britain, it appeared amidst manifest ambiguity and uncertainty, yet with surprising results. In the case of Luigi Moretti, it served as the foil against which religious institutional change would be architecturally interpreted and celebrated. And throughout the twentieth century, attempts to articulate and advocate for modern architecture were interwoven with efforts to reform and update liturgical practice. Through distinct but complementary methods and analyses, these essays demonstrate not only the complexity of a relatively unstudied part of architectural history but also the value of bringing into dialogue the multiple discourses and histories involved in the phenomenon of modern religious architecture. notes 1. It is also a particularly Eurocentric view, which appears increasingly anomalous when considered from a global perspective. See Peter L. Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999). 2. For a fuller explanation of the debates surrounding “religion,” see E. E. EvansPritchard , Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965) and Steven M. Wasserstrom, Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 3. See especially Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford...