Ralph Adams Cram: An Architect's Four Quests- Medieval, Modernists, American, Ecumenical

10. The Ecumenical Quest

10 THE ECUMENICAL QUEST The assembling of all the other arts—music, poetry, drama and ceremonial—in one vast organic work of art built up of every one of them raised to its highest level of possibility, and all fused [with architecture] i s . . . the greatest artistic achievement. —Ralph Adams Cram [My only ambition] is to be a parish priest and, though not much of one, would as a college president be still less. —Phillips Brooks The real impact of any work is the extent to which it unifies contrasting notions, opposing points of view. The easy method of meeting contrasting problems is the feeble compromise. The solution for the contrasts between black and white is gray—that is the easy way. Sun and shadow does not mean a cloudy day. The need for black and the need for white still exist. —Marcel Breuer 45- Liber Precum Publicarum at Princeton: one of PhillipsBrooks's most "devoted proteges," in Brooks's biographer's words, was another saint-bishop as it has turned out, Charles Brent, Ralph Adams Cram's godfather. An ecumenist like Brooks, Brent was president of the first World Conference on Faith and Order in Lausanne in 1927,heralding the eventual founding of the World Council of Churches. Cram, himself Brent's godson and equally an ecumenist, seized upon the opposition to his Princeton Chapel to propose solutions both ecumenical and liturgical.One of his ideas was a "Princeton Liturgy" according to the Latin edition of the Anglican Prayer Book. 1 HOUGH a soloist—who truly did dance, ideologically, with F.D.R.—Ralph Adams Cram was still just in the national chorus, so to speak, as a social and political thinker. As a religious leader, however, his was a unique and remarkably ecumenical influence, comparable in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States only perhaps to that of Phillips Brooks, Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts in the 18905 and before that, in Cram's youth, rector of Boston's Trinity Church. In our own era a similar ecumenical influence was felt in America —though, of course, at a much greater distance both geographically and culturally —from Pope John XXIII. But in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, Brooks and Cram stood alone. They were very different men of succeeding generations, in appearance very much at odds with the other. Though Brooks was a man of fierce doctrinal beliefs (the Trinity and especiallythe Incarnation of the God-Man were absoluteessentials for him to Christian faith), he was also a dedicated Broad Church Anglican whose truths led him always to an inclusivity,particularly with Protestants of every variety , causing scandal for instance in his insistence on open communion to all Christians . Always he was quicker to stress what unites Christians rather than what divides them. Cram, though more liberal than most realizetoday (as we learned in the last chapter) was nonetheless an ardent High Church Anglican, and the truth as he saw it led him to a strict exclusivity in all matters of faith and doctrine. Cram, though he despaired often of Catholicism, despised Protestantism, and said so frequently , causing thereby hardly less scandal in his prime than Brooks in his. Brooks and Cram—who certainly met and made common cause together on at least one occasion and had several close mutual friends but were not themselves friends, so far as we know—were in many important respects as similar as they were different. If they were, indeed, as I propose, more similar than not and the older Brooks influential in Cram's work, it was because both were passionate Christian aesthetes. DREAMS MEDIEVAL AND MODERN: AN ECUMENICAL LITURGY FOR PRINCETON San Marco, near Byzantine Old World splendor, Venice's storied basilica; Trinity Church, Boston's famouslyRichardsonian basilica, the grandeur of the New World; Ralph Adams Cram, dreaming: an exotic enough imagination, yet Emersonian in 343 T H E E C U M E N I C A L Q U E S T spirit—the result a better word picture by far than any other from his youthful pen (he was thirty-two), ardent, rich in devotion, richer yet in self-disclosure—very purple prose, much edited by me, from Modern Art in 1894—dream of Venice or of Copley Square, Ralph Adams Cram's dream: Distant music, ... a faint, mellow light... the odor of...