By Matthew Alderman
The Living Church
Church Restoration & Architecture Issue
Feb. 7, 2010

The Lion Companion to Church Architecture
By David Stancliffe. Lion Hudson. Pp. 288. $39.95.
ISBN 978-0745951904

Here’s the story: Lying close to death on a battlefield, one Colonel Skinner made a vow to raise a new church in colonial Delhi. When the old boy — who in my mind is played by that army officer who keeps interrupting Monty Python skits — came to look over the finished product, he told the architect that he’d done a pretty fine job, but his initials were JHS — not IHS. He was not trying to be funny. Bishop David Stancliffe has my eternal gratitude simply for digging up that one anecdote in The Lion Companion to Church Architecture.

This has been a good decade for the ecclesio-architectural bookworm. First, the shiny and strangely overlooked Houses of Worship: An Identification Guide to the History and Style of American Religious Architecture came out in 2003, while Denis McNamara’s excellent and well-illustrated Catholic Church Architecture and the Spirit of the Liturgy appeared in November 2009. Joining them from across the great herring-pond is another meaty, colorfully photographed survey of church architectural history. The longtime bishop of Salisbury, David Stancliffe, has approached his subject as a churchman, liturgist, and patron. As Provost of Portsmouth he oversaw the reordering and completion of the cathedral, and a new font in Salisbury Cathedral (“in experimental use”) is also presumably his work.

The text is straightforward and simply written, spiced with the occasional amusing anecdote and rounded out with a helpful glossary for the uninitiated. The book is structured chronologically, taking the reader from the earliest human encounters with God, through the mosaics of the Constantinian age and the spires of medieval Christendom, up to the present day. It is also refreshing to see, in between, a sympathetic portrayal of the frequently misunderstood Renaissance and Baroque periods.

The accompanying images are magnificent: bold, evocative and clearly illustrative of the concepts discussed. While England and the Church of England take center stage through a fair portion of the book, Stancliffe takes the reader on lengthy field trips to the beautifully preserved ancient Christian basilica at Porec on the Istrian coast, the exotic churches of Coptic Ethiopia, and a wonderfully bombastic Bulgarian orthodox cathedral.

Yet, the English and Anglican focus of the book is significant. Most discussions of post-Reformation English church-building are confined to specialized tomes, but here it is usefully set against the larger European context. Both the reforms of Laud and the much-neglected 18th century garner an appropriate number of pages. Continental Protestantism also receives significant coverage, especially the handsome and richly decorated churches of Lutheran Scandinavia.

In so expansive a survey, something is bound to get left out, and the book does contain a number of idiosyncratic choices and notable omissions.. Stancliffe begins amid the peaks and caves where primitive man sought the divine. This may be an effort to reach the unchurched reader, but a direct appeal to the earth-shaking scandal of the Incarnation — which we encounter some pages later — might have better set the theological stage.

The early chapters also highlight elements that, while interesting, are peripheral or somewhat conjectural, such as the symbolism of the labyrinth, or the essentially unknowable early Christian house-church. And while Stancliffe discusses each era with zest and sympathetic enthusiasm, a few headings toward the end of the Middle Ages, such as “The Preoccupation with Death,” seem somewhat pointed. The stress occasionally falls on change and rupture, rather than growth and continuity.

The final chapter focuses on the 20th century as a whole. This includes the difficult subject of modern church reorderings, renovations, and what some call “wreckovations.” It appears that the prelate stands loosely within what he describes as the post–Vatican II “ecumenical consensus” of centralized liturgics and simplified architecture, but he combines this with a deep aesthetic and historic sensitivity.

Stancliffe is also aware of the shortcomings of much modern planning, as he shows in his critique of Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, a somewhat awkward early foray into in-the-round church design. He stresses, in discussing clumsy church reorderings, that a renovated liturgical space should look “as if it was just how the church was originally conceived to be.” Indeed, the beautifully photographed postwar reordering of the early medieval basilica of St. Pantaleon in Cologne, profiled by Stancliffe, is a model of architectural decorum.

Some of the other renovations he cites, while skillfully crafted, seem stark or unduly novel; and Stancliffe scarcely hints at the continuing controversy that surrounds them. These are disputes as much a part of recent history as the churches themselves, such as the widespread opposition to Rembert Weakland’s reordering of the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, Milwaukee. The roots of modern liturgical trends are similarly pruned. The ideologically complex 20th-century Liturgical Movement is reduced to its later European preoccupations: in-the-round worship and modernistic design. It was never so monolithic. In America, it was just as likely to praise stained glass and Gregorian chant, or, more experimentally, promote an architecture that while fresh was never a surrender to the spirit of the age.

Closer to the present, the final pages of this book focus, again, on outliers: the “slightly eccentric” St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco; a vaguely mosque-like church built recently in Grosseto, Italy; and a parish in Minnesota that splits up the celebration of Word and Sacrament between different rooms. The world-famous and horrendously ugly Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Los Angeles, is curiously absent.

Also passed over are the most vigorous outliers of all: the growing revival of traditional architecture and its spiritual twin, the incipient liturgical renaissance represented by Pope Benedict XVI’s The Spirit of the Liturgy. There seems to be another embryonic “ecumenical consensus” today, centered on a return to traditional liturgy with supporters in Rome, parts of the Anglican Communion and among the Orthodox. Whatever one’s opinion of them, such ideas merit serious discussion. Given the youth and vigor of its adherents, this new liturgical movement is more likely to represent the future than Tadao Ando’s bunker-like Church of the Light, or some attempt to “build on the slender common ground between Christianity and Islam.” Indeed, future historians may find productions like Richard Meier’s neomodernist Jubilee Church in Rome rather quaintly old-fashioned.

Stancliffe nonetheless deserves significant kudos for treating 2,000 years of history and three-quarters of the globe in an engaging and infectiously enthusiastic tome of less than 300 pages. While the liturgical mainstream he presents is less settled than one might think, he shows himself a thoughtful, cultured guide through its currents.

Matthew Alderman, a graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s classical architecture program, frequently writes and lectures on church-building and liturgy, including for the weblog New Liturgical Movement. He works in Milwaukee, at Wade Weissmann Architecture, in ecclesiastical and secular design.