The Sacred Community: Art, Sacrament, and the People of God

10. The Sacred Community and the Space of Architecture

135 Chapter 10 The Sacred Community and the Space of Architecture For some chapters now we have been considering the place of art and the artist in our reflections upon the possibility of the sacred community. In the last chapter, our thoughts were more political, and, perhaps, social. We now turn to the question of space and the place of community, for even as we sing the Sanctus in heavenly harmonies , we are creatures whose bodies occupy a place here on earth as we stand, sit, kneel to pray. So let us begin with a meditation on infinity and eternity by Maurice Blanchot. But where has art led? To a time before the world, before the beginning. It has cast us out of power to begin and to end; it has turned us toward the outside where there is no intimacy, no place to rest. It has led us into the infinite migration of error. For we seek art’s essence, and it lies where the nontrue admits of nothing essential. We appeal to art’s sovereignty: it ruins the kingdom. It ruins the origin by returning to it the errant immensity of directionless eternity.1 In his book The Space of Literature (1955, French ed.) Blanchot proposes a radical vision of the warfare between religion and the arts, and for us especially the visual arts, after modernity: a vision far beyond the theological irresolutions of the ancient spirit of iconoclasm in the Western church or even the dark abysses of the twentieth century within which, seen with the eyes of Paul Tillich, art alone perhaps reveals.2 Blanchot’s vision is of the art that leads us 136 The Sacred Community to a place and a moment before any possible theological articulation , outside the familiar comforts of time and space, to the nothing that is the end of the vision of the Kingdom. This is the antithesis of any art that submits and functions in servitude, as but the handmaid of religion, and thus invariably falls into the unendurable “petty historicity of our church-sponsored art.”3 At the same time, it is an art that longs to draw us back toward what Mircea Eliade once described as that “cosmic religiosity” that effectively vanished from the West after the cultural and political triumph of Christianity and the church following the time of Constantine. For it was actually Christianity itself, Eliade suggested, that instigated the process of the desacralization of Nature, and in its wake— emptied of every religious value or meaning, nature could become the “object” par excellence of scientific investigation. From a certain viewpoint, Western science can be called the immediate heir of Judaeo-Christianity. It was the prophets, the apostles, and their successors the missionaries who convinced the Western world that a rock (which certain people have considered to be sacred) was only a rock, that the planets and stars were only cosmic objects— that is to say, that they were not (and could not be) either gods or angels or demons.4 Admittedly, “from a certain viewpoint” this can indeed be said. For in a context of global violence, which was particularly virulent in the last century, the theory of religion and the idea of the holy or the sacred have become fields of wide debate—sociological, anthropological , phenomenological, and more—engaged in by many, from Durkheim to Otto, and of which the sense of and adherence to the idea of the sacred within the community of the church has been varied, complex, and in some cases quite non-existent.5 At the same time, and for good and ill, the very recovery in art from the estrangement of the human condition from the divine—a demolition of the contrived distinction between the sacred and the secular that has haunted us at least from the time of the Reformation—renders the sacred itself barely recognizable, hidden not only in the matter of creation but often within forms of seeming profanity that are, perhaps , far distant from the reach of any conventional religious language .6 The resultant dilemma for the claims of such “conventional” language becomes painfully clear in the development of modern art The Sacred Community and the Space of Architecture 137 from representation to abstraction and formalism and the “progressive surrender to the resistance of its medium.”7 Depth vanishes into two-dimensionality, reference into pure self-reflexivity, brush strokes become physical moments...