Ss3

TIME GENEALOGY “The churchouse” Let’s return to what makes outstanding and tries to stabilize the presence of the sacred, the fact that it has room right there: in temples, in some monuments and cenotaphs. Like any human foundation, they all play a stabilizing and condensing part. When these constructions, in particular, – Heidegger warns us – as oeuvres of art, are “workings of art”, we are actually dealing with instances of truth. Which is enough though for us to consider them hovering at the modest limit of their declared capacity, i.e. that of means to fix memory (collective and individual) with a view to invoking the sacred. Heidegger maintains that such constructions “keep unhidden the being as a whole” (81). They open up a world (66) and at the same time instill heimatliche Grund (native soil) qualities into that world, building it anew unto the threefold soil of the work. In Song of Earth Michel Haar speaks of the threefold aspect of the earth in this text by Heidegger on the origin of the work of art: the earth as a material making up the work (and here we should mention the special situation of the work of architecture the material of which is, in happy cases, equal to the soil on which it is situated), the earth as natural soil, of the cultural and ethnic context of the community from which the work draws its sap, and finally, the earth as location. The engine of this situation in the open is the character of Sacred space (Ss) of the temple, the presence of the god which the temple made possible. How long does this fold stay unwrapped through which, the philosopher tells us, one can see the proper character of things and of people? “As long as the god has not left” (67) the sacred space, the pillared hall, the temple itself. In a certain way, the Biblical idea according to which the temple was the House for the Name of the Lord is somehow more accessible to the common mind. To human beings it seems unbearable that the god itself should live in the temple erected by them. In heavenly Jerusalem, that seen by the prophets, it is possible that in the Most Holy Temple (i.e. the archetypal model for any temple, starting with that in “lower” Jerusalem) there should live “the Almighty and the Lamb”. But down here not even king David, in all meekness, believes this thing. The Jewish-Christian god does not allow Himself to be seen other than by intermediaries (cloud, shadow, smoke, fire) and interlocutors (David, Solomon, the prophets, Messiah, and finally, in the Gospels, via His Son, Jesus) apt to negotiate and humanize His presence. It seems more “reasonable” to accept that it is not God who lives there (in the sense that He becomes embodied in space) in the church after consecration (or as those who believe in the definitions of the sacred as criticized in the beginning would say: as a result of consecration) but a representation, “an envoy” of His that stands for God himself. It is not only the church that warns us against such an understanding of the Sacred space but also the philosopher. The church, the icon, the statue are sacred because they are topoi of the god himself, because they “make room” for him down here. “The same happens with the statue the victor dedicates to the god. It is not a copy from which you may learn more easily what the god looks like. It is a work that makes the god himself be present and which thus is the god himself. “ (Heidegger, 1995, 67). Here where? In the sacred space, localized in works like the temple, the icon, the statue. Just like the bread and the wine of the Eucharist are the flesh and the blood of Jesus, similarly the god himself “has room” in the sacred space. As far as the nature of the buildings where we live is concerned, the Temple is not at all the only possible container of Ss: the house is also equipped to receive and celebrate it. To buttress up this assertion we will not invoke Heidegger but Heraclitus who invited his guests not to shy from the fire in his kitchen Once here, we will note that Heraclitus’ words, quoted by Aristole in On Animal Parts 644.b.31 are the best criticism to be brought to Kahn and his slavish/enslaved spaces. What the kitchen loses of prestige, it gains in density of intimacy, being the most used family space; on the contrary, the space of the “finest” room, containing Hestia’s hearth or the lares is the alien space of the dwelling, excentric in relation to the idea of intimacy. I suggest to the readers the discussion intimacy vs. alieanation in the analysis of the dichotomic nature of the domestic space presupposed by the couple Hestia/Hermes in the old Greek culture, a discussion carried on by J. P. Vernant in Mit si gandire in Grecia antica, Meridiane Publishing House, 1995, the chapter “The organization of the space” pp. 189 and the fol.; on the one hand, the hearth is under the care of the woman and impregnated with her attributes; on the other hand, the idea that the most intimate, frail area of the house is left in the care of a stranger brought in – the same woman – destabilizes the “final” character of feminine attributes.. where he used to warm himself up since in the kitchen there are gods, too. “This means that the sacred is not delimited in certain places, for instance the altar of Hestia but the entire physical reality, the whole universe is sacred.” (Pierre Hadot, 1997, 112). Take a three-room peasant house where the access is distributed through the central space, and change the manner of crossing it into a linear one going from west to east. You will get a church. The church derived from a house has, in a first stage of differentiation, only the sign of the cross (more) visibly marked on the roof. It goes without saying that from another vantage than that of this text the difference between the temple and the household shrine celebrated by Heidegger is one of “deterritorialization” of the former. “This ‘house of the god’, contrary to domestic altars, to private sanctuaries is a public building, a common good of all the citizens." (Vernant, 1995, 48-9) But this alienation does not rise too complicated problems; the examples referring to Pythagoras’s house turned into a temple, to the house in Jerusalem where the Last Supper took place, to the houses of rich Chinese who often bequeathed them to be turned into temples reveal the overture of the house “to multiply” and “intensify” the domestic shrine up to becoming a house of the god in the true sense of the word. In its superior form, the house can turn without difficulty into a modest temple. The Annunciation Church (1660) and the Holy Archangels (1784) of Deag, Mures have exactly the same planimetry and morphology as any dwelling in the village. The three rooms of equal sizes have to be crossed from the west to the east, unlike a dwelling. The difference lies in their orientation in relation with the space crossing vector. We are confronted with a subtle mixture of house and church. The balance of this ambiguity can be maintained as long as the spaces of such a “churchouse” do not get definitely specialized. When hierarchy becomes the ordering principle of this architecture, the house (i.e. the habitation within it) folds back upon itself up to extinction. The stages are the following: the crescendo marking of the spaces according to their importance in the ritual (porch - pronaos - naos - altar) by the manipulation of height and the other relative dimensions of the respective spaces through small cupolas and/or turrets, by the detachment and different volumetric treatment of one or more such volumes. In the beginning, the altar is not delimited from the body of the church, being the room furthest from the entrance, otherwise equal to the others. The story of the altar standing out in the wooden churches of Transylvania is the story of the separation of the church from its original matrix – the dwelling. If at Valea Larga, two churches (1695 and 1785) and other twenty from the same Mures area have an altar that stands out as a narrower room, in other churches we can note the more and more marked pressure of prestigious urban/cultivated models of brick churches where the altar is a semi-circular apse. The pressure of the model can be notified in the effort to render in wood both the curve in the plan and the semi-cap covering this holy space. These churches and others where the altar is not yet distinct already differ from the house by the morphology of the roof, too. Even if the altar can be still put under the same roof as the rest of the spaces, a turret-belfry tops it, towering higher and higher. This no longer is an ordinary house but the very House (for the Name) of the Lord. The initial generic house is hidden in the penumbra, like the tables of the law in the Most Holy. The Naos-Temple When talking about the architectural origin of the Christian church, the basilica seems to acquire a paramount role: after times of tribulation, once turned into an accepted and then unique religion, Christianism took the space most appropriate – dimensionally and symbolically speaking – to its new status: the basilica, the space of justice in the forum. “Thus, if we study the first expressions of Christian architecture at the time of emperor Constantine, who proclaimed Christianism as state religion,, and when for the practice of the cult, barely freed from the narrow catacombs and refuges, grandiose prayer abodes were needed, we find the architects of the time caught between the concern of building a new bigger type of temple and the requirements of making them as less costly as possible given the uneasy times undergone by the two empires in the wake of the fall and dismantlement of Rome. The emperor’s builders had the skill and the extreme luck of finding in one of the monuments characteristic of the Roman architecture, namely the basilica, the type of building corresponding exactly to the requirements of the new cult (…) Such were the first Christian churches of a general type. They borrowed the plan and the name friom the Roman basilica.” (Antonescu, 1942, 9-10). Moreover, it is a space which already had in its body a special specified area suggesting already the presence of the altar, after the taking into possession as church. Catholic architecture actually turns the basilica into the favorite architectural instrument for the configuration of the new type of urban sacred space. Next we will pursue the destiny of another privileged source for the Christian architecture: the Jerusalemite temple. Historians of the religions and archeologists like Van der Meer, Gough and Danielou showed interest in the proto-history of Christianism and, implicitly, of its sacred spaces. It seems that only architects in their positivistic histories have ignored the formative pressure exercised by the space configuration of the temple on Christian Orthodox architecture. We, Romanians, were flattered by the fact that ours is the only Romance language in which “the church” is designated by a word of definite Latin origin and which, what is more – again unlike the other sister languages – designates not the meeting of the faithful but the built object that houses it: the basilica. Thus we ceased researching the influence of the other sources on a genre of architecture consecrated mostly in the provinces, (with the house serving as original source) which, isolated from the privileged examples of the Byzantine world, got direct inspiration from the Bible with a view to devising new spaces for prayer. The temple is not merely accepted as source but also celebrated in this guise by the theologians: “From the very beginning all the Christian temples feature the same plan originating in the vision of the Temple in heavenly Jerusalem.” (Evdochimov, 1993, 127). The temple itself did not surge up from scratch. It has its own contorted history. Two major stages can thus be perceived in the becoming of the architectural space destined for payer and sacrifice in the Bible, underlying the two sections of the text: the Old Testament and the Gospels. What occurs in exile, from the tent giving shelter to the ark of the law to the Jerusalem Temple designates the first stage (with destructions and subsequent reconstructions); all the configuration and construction stages are revealed, from the tent tabernacle used in exile (including the form of the tabernacle itself) to the plan of the temple shown by David and also those glimpsed by Solomon or Ezekiel. Between them, despite the identity of ontic status there are differences hard to explain, given the variation of proportions between sizes, not only of scale. The first tent that had to travel together with the chosen people in the wilderness of its exile, had sizes on measure and consisted of materials befitting its nature. Likewise, it already contained the whole (even if bent upon itself) content of sacredness of the Temple. For Cosmas Indicopleustes, the author of the Christian Topography, the 6th century, the tent that God showed to Moses on Mount Sinai represented the image of the world (Delumeau, 39). The tabernacle (Exodus, 36:8) was made of “finely twisted linen and blue, purple and scarlet yarn…twenty-eight cubits long and four cubits wide.” The tent was made of “curtains of goat hair, eleven altogether, and the same size, thirty cubit long and four cubits wide. (Exodus, 36: 14-15) “Then they made for the tent a covering of ram skins dyed red, and over that a covering of hides of sea cows.” (Exodus, 36:19) “They also made upright frames of acacia wood for the tabernacle. Each frame was ten cubits long and a cubit and a half wide. (Exodus, 36:20) Gold over the frames of acacia wood, silver for the bases of the posts, and bronze for the tops of the posts. The materials ennobled the other modest construction materials brought by the people in such a vast amount that it overwhelmed the builders (Exodus, 36: 5-7)… A gold molding, the four horns, the accessories of the altar, the gold rings to hold the poles used to carry it, by their richness and glitter made up for what the primary materials could not offer. Decorative splendor is added as a supplement parergon (Derrida) to the tabernacle-artifact. This cladding in precious materials of the tabernacle points to the different ontic status of the tabernacle in relation to the other artifacts from the reality of the exile. Further on, at the time of Solomon, the status of parergon of the precious materials is one more time specified. These special materials do not merely “frame” the temple but are also an opportunity for “a parallel commentary” and “an essential supplement” of the work, “ergon” as Michael Benedikt defines the term of parergon. (1991, 340) Noble, and/or precious expensive materials (at least for that time and place) become part and parcel of the construction. They are not added like a supplement, as with the tabernacle. Some are imported: the wood is no longer acacia but cedar and cypress of Lebanon, from Hiram, for the big house Here we have other two contradictory pieces of information. On the one hand, Solomon imports cypress and cedar from Lebanon, and on the other we find in 2 Chronicles 9:27 that “cedars (made) as plentiful as sycamore-fig trees in the foothills.” The depreciation following a “crisis of superproduction”, of gold, that has come to be like pebbles on the road and of the most precious wood, the materials used to decorate the temple, all this casts an unfavorable light on the construction episode. (the Most Holy Place of the Temple). Almugwood, until then not seen in Israel, as precious as gems, is brought to make supports and steps for the temple (I Kings, 10:11-12). Big, large quality stones, put in what we call today “Cyclopean masonry”, dressed like the wood, for three years, were used in the temple and the royal palace by craftsmen of Jerusalem and Byblos, and those sent by king Hiram (I Kings 5;18) The two bronze pillars, Jakin and Boaz,6 6 The two pillars will become essential components of the Mason temples as well and will also be present in the Christian architecture. It is possible that the two towers at the entrance of big churches in the Western world stand under the sign of this original double; and if they also represented the two principles – masculine and feminine – then we can easily understand why these two towers are often treated differently or one is not finished like the other. In Vienna there is a baroque church whose entrance is flanked, in the guise of Jakin and Boaz? – by two replicas of Trajan’s Column. as tall as the façade of the temple (eighteen as to twenty cubits)7 7 By comparing the two sizes and other indications in the text we may deduce the two pillars did not have a “carrying” structural role for the architrave but a basically symbolical one. This symbolical dimension can be found in the masonic interpretations of Jakin and Boaz. were cast by Hiram of Tyre, brought on purpose for this by Solomon from Jerusalem. The size difference between the temple and the tent is an essential one, especially if we mention the overall dimensions of the new sacred space: “sixty cubits long, twenty cubits wide, and thirty cubits tall” with a portico that is ten cubits wide and as tall as the temple. (I, Kings, 6:2-3) Although both serving the same “functions”, the two artifacts are totally different physically (minus a few decorative elements). Nonetheless, there is a connection among them: “The priests then brought the ark8 8 “There was nothing in the ark except the two stone tablets that Moses had placed in it at Horeb..” (I Kings, 8:9) of the Lord’s covenant to its place in the inner sanctuary of the temple, the Most Holy Place, and put it beneath the wing of the cherubim.” (I Kings, 8:6) Thus the ark becomes “a particular case” of the temple, being contained by the Most Holy. It stops being perceived physically by the faithful, dissolving itself in the new abode that it warrants. The ark is the essential ingredient of the sacredness of the new edifice. Halloed by the genuine character of its exile experience it will “contaminate” also the temple inside which it is placed. Thus, the Most Holy Place is one more time hallowed, condensing yet another layer of sacred significance. We learn from the Book of Jubilees (167-140 B. C.) that the garden of Eden is the Most Holy and the bower of God (Delumeau, 37). With Ezekiel it will become the place where the Lord Himself stays; and it is also the place where the first revelation is stored. The temple in heavenly Jerusalem as revealed to Ezekiel had other sizes than the one built, destroyed and remade: one hundred cubits long, one hundred cubits wide, yard and everything, and inside twenty cubits, just like “the real one”. The diversity of the information referring to the holy abode breeds bothersome questions for the theologians first of all. If the Temple is revealed according to an ideal, heavenly plan how can several patterns of holy places exist in the real world, function of the stage and the circumstances of the chosen people at a given moment? Or, in other words: how can revelations “evolve”? Then the Temple is a palimpsest – adjustments of the plans revealed over and over are added – layers upon layers, destruction upon destruction, in an endless oscillation between the ideal and reality? The second phase is less specified architecturally as long as it contains the activity of Jesus in the temple and His references to its contemporary and future destiny, so that, subsequently, from the Last Supper onwards the reasons be already accounted, even if almost never explicitly, for a religious space alternative to the temple. The temple is one of the indisputable origins of the church as a sacred space delineated by construction, even when it operated mostly as a textual reference rather than a prototype followed by construction proper. The “domesticated” and accommodated representations of Jerusalem, both the real and the heavenly ones, in the wall paintings of the Christian Orthodox churches speak about this sub-textual presence (Jerusalem “is” Constantinople too, and also local stronghold besieged by the Turks, as founder Rares needed it to be and the imagination of his painter fancied it to be). Naturally, the basilica played its own role but it had to contain a space already configured under the symbolical pressure of the Jerusalemite temple, genetically implanted in the spatial distribution of the Eucharistic ritual carried out in underground Rome. Once in the basilica, the Christians adapted their rituals to the new type of space. In their becoming, the rituals would require modifications of the plan. To stop here would be a much too “functional” attitude. Nowhere else is more utterly erroneous the modernist relation between “function” (that is ritual) and “form” (that is architectural expression) as it is reduced to being univocal as in the case of the becoming of the Christian space. On the contrary, it is obviously valid and mutual: the spatial distribution of the ritual has become adapted too when the nature and the scale of the building used made it necessary (be it only because performing a ritual in a catacomb is different from unfolding it in a cathedral the size of that of Cluny or before that, of Saint Sofia).