Unlocking the Church: The Lost Secrets of Victorian Sacred Space by William Whyte.

Review by Joseph Shaw

Oxford University Press 2017; £12.87

The central idea of this fascinating and entertaining book is that the explosion of church building and restoration, by all denominations, from about 1830, was accompanied by a strikingly new understanding of what church architecture was all about. Churches built or adapted in the 18th century were about the facilitation of preaching; Victorian ecclesiastical architects took it upon themselves to create churches which conveyed a sacred message to the congregation through symbols, and not just words.

This was a revolutionary idea and lead to a revolution in how churches were designed and understood. Whyte is careful to distinguish what concerns him from the fashion for the Gothic style, which came earlier, and from the ‘Cambridge Ecclesiologists’, who represented the new approach but appeared on the scene when the trend was already underway. He also wishes to include Catholics, who were building plainly furnished churches in the 18th century for aesthetic as well as f or economic reasons ( the chapel at Wardour Castle being an example), and Low-Church communities, at least some of whom built churches of the new type as the 19th century wore on.

It is nevertheless true that this change in the understanding of churches was a change from a more Protestant to a more Catholic view. This was well understood at the time, and the new churches aroused strong opposition from evangelical writers as Popish, resembling as they did the great Gothic and Baroque Catholic churches of the Continent, and the churches of England’s own Catholic past.

It would be wrong to say that a plainly decorated 18th century ‘preaching box’ type church is theologically problematic in itself, but the attitude of mind which rejects in principle the use of architectural and decorative symbolism and devotional art is contrary to the whole spirit of Catholic art and sacramental theology: of the use of beautiful created things in the service of God. This attitude was decisively rejected in the 19th century, and this undermined an important aspect of the Protestant critique of Catholicism.

The 17th and 18th centuries had witnessed at tempts even by European Catholics, under the influence of the Enlightenment, to clear out the sacred clutter of devotional objects, Rood Screens, and stained glass. The results can be seen in many continental churches to this day. Part of the story of a revival of interest in the glories of medieval churches was a reaction by French Catholics to the vandalism of the Revolution, as well as the Romanticism of Schleiermacher and Coleridge, which shifted the emphasis from reason to the emotions.

The plainness of 18th century churches was not simply negative. It was designed to starve all the senses but hearing, in order to accentuate the latter, for preaching and the proclamation of Scripture. Galleries were built in every available space in order to bring as many people as close as possible to the preacher, ensconced in a towering pulpit with a ‘sounding board’ above it. False ceilings were installed to bounce the sound back to listeners, while matting on the floor, cushions, and curtains around box pews muffled the sound of fidgeting and people coming and going. These box pews, which represent the extreme of this tendency, and few of which survive today, enclosed a family on four sides, giving them a high degree of privacy, but not only impeded the view of the liturgy, but actually had people sitting with their backs to the east end of the church.

Medieval Catholic churches, of course, did not always have ideal sight-lines to the High Altar, which stood behind a Rood Screen. But as has been demonstrated by Eamonn Duffy and others, these screens were designed to frame and accentuate, not hide, the Elevation; on weekdays, Masses would have taken place at side altars and nave altars with no such protection. The Protestant poet George Herbert refers to a Catholic when he writes of the ‘Sweet rose, whose hue, angry and brave, /bids the rash gazer wipe his eye’: Catholics were people who wanted to look; Protestants wanted to hear.

Victorian church restoration stripped out box pews, false ceilings, and many if not all of the galleries; newly built churches never had these features. The result was a transformation of what church interiors looked like. They became far less suited to lengthy sermons, the pews being less comfortable and less private than before. The acoustics of churches were also transformed: not only were the words of preachers lost in the vaulted ceilings, but the cave-like spaces favoured Gregorian Chant over most forms of music.

Contemporary writers were also delighted to note the greater discipline of congregations, including children, whose every wriggle on their hardwood pews would be visible to the people behind them, sitting in serried ranks facing the same way, and whose whispers would be echoed by encaustic tiles below and granite vaults above.

One issue Whyte neglects in this book is that of the liturgy. He notes that pre-Victorian High Church Anglicans favoured church decoration which gave the liturgy a suitably dignified setting, but were still far from taking the view, expressed at the consecration of Littlemore church by John Henry Newman, that a church should be so filled with symbolic detail that it could be read like a book. This apparently makes Whyte think that the liturgy is more or less irrelevant to the 19th century change of attitude to sacred space. But even if Congregationalists and Presbyterians came to accept that a church only looks like a church if it exhibits Gothic arches directing the people’s gaze heavenward, the idea of a church as a sacred space only really makes sense if it is the locus of sacred activity.

This question came to centre stage in the 1960s . A reaction against all things Victorian itself engendered a reaction, leading to a civil war within Anglicanism, between proponents of conservation and those eager to chuck out anything more than twenty years old. Whyte points out that even the latter party appears to admit that the churches they dislike can house highly successful worshipping communities (to use the modern jargon), and suggests that this ma y be because, and not despite, of their architectural heritage. The progressives’ demand for bland, flexible s paces occupied by stackable chairs, Whyte suggests, seems to be an end in itself.

This is surely unfair. Progressives in Anglicanism, as in Catholicism, have a distinct liturgical vision, a vision flowing out of a distinct understanding of God and how to engage with Him. They want a worshipping community sitting in a circle on comfy chairs and with warm feelings of community, rather than a column facing the Lord, represented by Altar, Crucifix, and Tabernacle, accompanied by images of the Saints, and serving God with the best available music and art, with order and beauty. Progressive theology and liturgy are implicitly opposed and practically hindered by traditional church architecture which evokes hierarchy, ritual, and self-effacement, and it is no surprise that progressives should be implacably opposed to it. The restoration or destruction of stenciled walls and devotional statues, of decorated tiled floors rather than carpets, of altar rails, of centrally located tabernacles, and above all of ad orientem altars, are skirmishes in a theological war in which there can be no stable compromise.