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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Beauty, as such, is a perfectly definite thing, but the criteria whereby it is judged are not those of what is known as "reason" . . . but the processes of thespiritual intelligence. Whether this, which is the supreme intelligenceof man, is the result of inherited experience or of that "elder memory" which endures through myriadsof incarnations, being so true Karma, the indestructiblethrough unendingmutations, the soul of man, is a question for East and West to determine betweenthemselves. The decision does not touch the issue; the fact remains that beauty [is] . . . almost the only definite and concrete and visible link that binds men to the infinite. It may almost be called a manifestation of the Absolute. —Ralph Adams Cram How many, I wonder, would entirely agree with Cram today? Not many I think. On reflection, however, some of us might subscribe to more of his view than we realize . So long, that is, as we can suit Cram's belief to our own experience. Inspired as I've always been, for example, by architecture, my first love—by form in space, really—and so too by (especiallymodern) sculpture—it is nonetheless music that argues for Cram's idea, for it is my experience that it is music that is almost invariably for me God's language, which is to say His most beautiful, Her most telling, voice; whether Mahler or Rutter or Bernstein, Langlais or Victoria, it is the way I am found every time; my surest link to Cram's Absolute. While Cram's breathtaking ecumenism as between East and West is as important here as his philosophy of beauty, and well worth making a point of (hence my choice of this particular quotation) because it is an aspect of his life and work too often neglected, it must be said at once that almost the only verity about Cram's repute I will not challenge in this volume is that his definition of the Absolute was utterly Western and Catholic and famously Anglican; his subject, in fact, architecture as the intersection of art and religion as understood in Catholic Sacramental philosophy. Disentangle any of that in either the life or the architecture if you can, and at your peril: I certainly can't. Nor decide either, as between art and religion, which came first. Because Cram was so intensely the artist, I am inclined to vote for art. But then I ask: In aid of what?—and so the debate begins. Readers must make their own call. But not their own way: the biographer's task being as I see it to cut through the accumulated undergrowth perpetuated by Cram's fans (mostly young fogies today) and detractors (now the last of the zealot Europeanist Moderns of the 1960s) so as to contrive a kind of map of Cram's incredibly long ix P R E F A C E A N D A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S career—he opened his office in 1889and was still at work when he died in 1942.— raising along the way some necessary guideposts. The retired Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of Scotland, Richard Holloway, a brilliant writer and preacher whom I read regularly, can help here: though a fiercely independent thinker and eloquent expositor, he too is famously Anglican, and in a book of his of 1986,The Sidelong Glance, he seems to me to identify two notes of Anglican spirituality, both of which speak of this intersection of art and religion so key to understanding Cram's thought and architecture. The first is reserve—reserve and understatement; the reason, I suppose, Episcopalians have so often been called God's Frozen People. Anglicans, too, Holloway assures us, have glimpsed the vision glorious, but we are somewhat reluctant to share it with the local encounter group, partly because we feel that it is none of their business, but mainly because we feel that reserve is intrinsicto the spiritual search. We know how prone we are to self-deception and inflation and how mysterious are the ways of God with our souls . . . Ours is a sidelong spirituality . . . knowing how fugitive and wary is the object of our longing. We are wary of manipulativespiritualities. Think T. S. Eliot, counsels Holloway, aptly calling that Anglican convert the "poet of understatement." Understatement and quiet: "try as we might," Holloway adds, "[Anglicans] cannot get used to bleeding statues or plasticflowers."And now think Ralph Adams Cram...

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