Some years ago, my family attended the small-town Methodist church where my children’s cousin was being confirmed. We entered the church—a beautiful wooden 19th century structure—and took our seats in a graceful wooden pew. I had grown up in this church; though my own family were not big churchgoers, and though I had left Methodism as a teenager, seeking more than this tradition could give, it felt like home. I was grateful to be there.
Suddenly, I felt one of my sons, then aged seven, poke me in the ribs. “Dad, Dad,” he said, alarmed. “Where are the icons?”
The boy had been raised in Orthodoxy; this was, I realized, his first time in a non-Orthodox church. To him, the chaste bareness of this Methodist temple did not look like a church to him. After the service, I explained to him, as best I could given his young age, why a low Protestant church is so bare, and why our Orthodox churches are, by contrast, filled with color, candles, incense, and images. The two outward forms of the Christian faith reflect very different understandings of how God communicates with His people, and how we communicate with Him.
I thought of my son’s question when looking at images of St. Hedwig’s, the Roman Catholic cathedral in Berlin, which just re-opened after a six-year, €44 million renovation. The interior of the vast structure has been stripped utterly bare, its interior an all-white canvas of nothingness. It is so vacant of any sign of not only the Catholic faith, but of Christianity itself, that even a strict Calvinist would be left puzzled over which God is worshiped inside this whitewashed modernist sepulcher, this costly monument to the Void.
“The building is a visible sign for the dead German church,” pronounced the German-born U.S. Catholic theologian Ulrich Lehner. “It is a shell without any life inside. Nobody will pray here.”
Utterly, damnably true. That did not prevent Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki, a former Archbishop of Berlin, from rhapsodizing about the hideous new design. “When I entered the room, I was completely overwhelmed. I was speechless at the brightness, the size, and the freedom that this space breathes. It is actually unrecognizable when you compare it to the room I remembered.”
“Speechless” is about right, and so is “unrecognizable.” The 18th century cathedral, constructed under Frederick the Great as the first Catholic cathedral in Berlin since the Reformation, was built firmly in the modern tradition, but its round interior, which intentionally recalls the Pantheon in Rome, nevertheless was recognizably Catholic. No more.
“No colorful pictures, no cherubs, no large cross, no steps to the altar, no choir screens between the altar and the chairs, between the priest and the believers,” said Deutsche Welle. Architect Peter Sichau told the news service that the renovated cathedral is a “space of celebration” designed to “help people experience God…free of all distractions.”
Well, there certainly are no distractions in this empty barn. Heiner Koch, the current Archbishop of Berlin, believes the aesthetic vacancy of the multimillion-euro ruin is an advantage. “We made sure that we also appealed to people who are not rooted in the Christian faith,” he said.
Really? There is scarcely anything visibly Christian about the space. Aesthetically and symbolically, it invites visitors to worship the sacred Nothing. It is a “clean, well-lighted place,” in the nihilistic sense of Ernest Hemingway’s 1933 short story of the same name. It is a hauntingly spare tale about an elderly, suicidal Spanish man who frequents a certain café, described in the story’s title, seeking refuge from nihilism. In the tale, an older waiter in the café reflects on why the clean, well-lighted café drew men like the suicidal customer:
What did he fear? It was not a fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.
This is the perverse prayer one imagines visitors to the bleached-out St. Hedwig’s will pray, if they pray at all.
Prof. Lehner is right: St. Hedwig’s stands for a dead church. The Catholic Church in Germany is a shell of its former self. Membership in the church has long been in freefall, a decline that has accelerated after revelations of the clerical sexual abuse scandal. Nevertheless, flush with revenue from the state church tax, the liberal German bishops play an outsize role in the global church. They, along with colleagues from the equally feeble churches in the Low Countries, have been leaders in Pope Francis’s “Synodal Way,” a reform movement seeking to take the Catholic Church even further from its roots than the Second Vatican Council did, starting in the 1960s—a period of catastrophic decline for European Catholicism.
It is hard to grasp why senior Catholic Church leaders are so eager to embrace the suicidal path symbolized by this clean, well-lighted place on Berlin’s Bebelplatz. Do they imagine that a people lost in the meaninglessness of post-Christian life will find anything here but confirmation of their fears? Or do they, like Hemingway’s waiter, believe that a church like the new St. Hedwig’s is the only proper response to the contemporary condition? That instead of being called out of the bleak, blasted heath of modern Germany, the best they can hope for is the sacral expression of their dead souls?
This is not what Catholicism is supposed to be. In the Catholic sacramental tradition, God communicates to mankind through Scripture, yes, and also in prayer and worship. But He also does so through the body, through material things. This is why Catholics, since time out of mind, have filled their churches with statues, images, color, texture, candles, sound, and the intoxicating aroma of incense, meant to convey the presence of the Holy Spirit.
Bishops filled the churches of the Baroque era with extravagant color and statuary, in contrast with the intentionally modest Reformation sanctuaries, to seize the imaginations of the faithful, and prevent them from defecting to the austerities of Protestantism. Though this style is not to everyone’s taste (I find visiting these churches to be like praying in a pâtisserie), Baroque churches at least embody the deeply Catholic principle of sacramentality, which proclaims that God calls us in part through Beauty.
“The healing of the soul begins with noticing God’s many theophanies and falling in love with them,” writes the Orthodox theologian Timothy Patitsas, in his The Ethics of Beauty. “In other words, it begins with eros [desire] for beauty.”
Both the Catholic and Orthodox traditions hold that Beauty is not mere decoration, a pleasant add-on to the roughness of the world, but is in fact a manifestation of the divine. In Dante’s late medieval Commedia, the supreme expression of literary Catholicism, all the cosmos is enchanted, imbued with meaning and the presence of God. Only our sinfulness blinds us to divinity everywhere present, and filling all things.
It is desire for the beauty of Beatrice, God’s messenger, that leads the pilgrim Dante out of the dark wood of confusion and despair. As the pilgrimage of repentance purifies Dante’s sight, he learns that his desire for Beatrice, rightly ordered, is really a desire for the God who shines through her. The more Dante contemplates her beauty and goodness, the greater his ability to see her true worth, not as an object of contemplation in her own right, but as an icon of God. The more he desires to fill himself with her beauty, the greater his own spiritual advance toward unity with God, the source of all Beauty, Truth, and Goodness.
As I write in my new book Living In Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning In a Secular Age:
We humans are like fish dwelling at the bottom of a pond. We perceive the sun’s light filtered imperfectly to the depths. Sometimes we catch a flash of light reflected in a piece of matter drifting down from on high, and our attraction to it causes us to rise toward the light beyond the surface. The higher we rise, the more clearly we see. The beauty shining through great art—painting, poetry, sculpture, dance, music, architecture, and so forth—calls us out of the depths of our spiritual slumber and up toward the pure light.
I know this because it happened, and does happen, to me. Indeed, my first encounter with the medieval Catholic cathedral of Chartres obliterated in a stroke the teenage agnosticism that came about when I grew bored with the starkness and simplicity of Protestantism. Standing in the nave of that glorious French Gothic masterpiece, beholding the glory of God made manifest in its soaring vaults and jeweled stained-glass windows, I somehow knew as I never had before that God exists, He really exists! And I desperately wanted to know the God that inspired men of the Middle Ages to raise such a temple to His glory.
I left the cathedral that day on a spiritual journey that eventually took me to Catholicism, and after a later crisis, into Orthodoxy. Many years later, reading the Russian Orthodox believer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, I learned from him that true beauty is “completely irrefutable, and it forces even an opposing heart to surrender.”
This, I believe, is why Pope Benedict XVI once said that the best arguments the Church has for itself in this time of unreason and unbelief are not the propositions within its theology, but rather the art the church produces, and her saints. Why? Because to be confronted with divinely inspired beauty in Christian art and architecture, and in the God-given goodness (moral beauty) of holy men and women, is to know in one’s heart, if not yet in one’s head, that the faith is true. Falling in love, then with beauty (both aesthetic and moral), leads us to fall in love with its source, God, and thus with the Truth.
Humanity never needs beauty more than when it seems all hope is lost. In Andrei Tarkovsky’s great 1966 film Andrei Rublev, a fictional account of the medieval Russian iconographer, the title character kneels broken in the ruins of a cathedral sacked by Tatar raiders and their treasonous Russian confederates. Despairing that his work creating beautiful images to God’s glory matters in a world of such sin, chaos, and violence, Andrei receives a visit from the shade of his mentor, Theophanes.
The older man returns from beyond the grave to tell Andrei that he has a sacred responsibility to continue creating beautiful iconographic images, for they proclaim the ultimate reality of order and goodness, in defiance of ever-present suffering in the life of the world. And this, Theophanes says elliptically, is how the grief-stricken hold on to hope.
The beauty of Christian art and architecture pierces the hard hearts and closed minds of men with the truth that delivers them from despair, and calls them out of themselves, to God. Will visitors to the whitewashed sepulcher of German Catholicism called St. Hedwig’s find hope? Or will its ugliness confirm them in their sense that Catholic Christianity, after so many centuries, has lost faith in God and in itself, and at last has nothing left to offer the world.?
If Dostoevsky is right to say that “beauty will save the world,” then on evidence of St. Hedwig’s, the faithless Catholic leaders of Berlin have surrendered to defeat, and the world into which God was born to save is well and truly lost. Yet even in these woebegone days, there are people who do not wish to surrender to nihilism, and who have faith that somehow, and somewhere, God can be found in a church. Germany still has such places; it’s just that the seeker must look in still-enchanted quarters left blessedly unseen by iconoclastic bishops.
Rod Dreher’s new book Living In Wonder was reviewed last month in The European Conservative by Sebastian Morello.
