the New Pantagruel

Deconstructing the Cathedral

by John J. Desjarlais

t first, it looks like the typical tangle of tourists debarking from busses at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. But the crowd is larger than the usual mix of pilgrims and panhandlers, and there are a number of native New Yorkers gawking skyward — people who never do this at the risk of being called a tourist. I look too, and notice that the familiar iron web-work of scaffolding has been removed from the just-completed twin towers of Peter and Paul. They are festooned with bright balloons. A taut wire is strung between the towers, and a man in a striped bodysuit is walking the wire, juggling hoops.

“What’s this?” I ask someone.

“Hundredth anniversary of the cathedral.”

Yes, I recall seeing something in The Times about it, I say.

Camcorders hum. The aerialist dances on the wire; I imagine absurdly that the architects sent him there to test its tension, to assess the strength of the towers.

When Charles Jencks popularized the term “postmodern” to describe a movement in architecture which despoiled styles from diverse periods, he might have had the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in mind. New York Times architecture critic Herbert Marchamp once called it “New York’s greatest postmodern skyscraper.” The hulking, two-thirds complete behemoth, the second largest church in the world next to St. Peter’s, has been compared to a grand novel — built in fits and starts, not quite up to the original vision of the work, revised continually, and interrupted by a series of contentious editors. It may be more like a sprawling postmodern novel, lacking a linear narrative with many of its disconnected pieces previously published in disparate journals over several years, a comic self-parody.

Cathedrals narrate the centuries that build them. Medieval structures reflect a unified and cohesive worldview marked by symmetry. God is One, a Unity discerned in the unifying, unchanging principles of mathematics. Seeing God manifest in the underlying coherence of sacred geometry, masons felt privy to the secret knowledge of the divine architect of the universe.

Furthermore, Christian ethics, like architecture, followed orderly, balanced standards, using the spiritual plumb lines of sacred shapes and numbers: seven cardinal virtues and seven corresponding deadly sins. Avarice, lust, and pride — money, sex, and power in today’s terms – shadowed the monastic ideals of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Paul summed up Christian ethics in the trinity of faith, hope, and love; a cathedral education began with the Trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic.

The Cathedral of St. John narrates a different time, a fragmented century, one that gave us doubters like Sartre and deconstructionists like Derrida. No wonder Muschamp calls it “an existential cathedral, both alienated and engaged.” It is historically characterized by structural chaos and social activism. The first bishop, Henry Potter, invited black clergy from nearby Harlem to dinner and worked with them to clear area slums. Today, there’s a homeless shelter, a soup kitchen, and an AIDS clinic.

The initial 1886 design of George Heins and C. Grant LaFarge for St. John the Divine was the winning entry of an international competition and a collection of contradictions from the get-go. “A bold and florid piece of eclecticism, more Byzantine than Romanesque within, more Gothic than Romanesque without,” said one reviewer. The first phase of the project called for a central dome topped by a pyramidal tower and lofty spires at the north and south transepts. But the four granite arches and eight buttresses that were to support the central dome sank in quicksand made by underground springs hitherto undiscovered on Morningside Heights, and the original design sank with them. From the beginning, it seems, the cathedral rejected foundationalism and sought a moral mooring somewhere else.

The prize-winning plan was abandoned; the architects were dismissed. Ralph Adams Cram replaced them in 1911 and is responsible for most of the cathedral that stands today. He did not use the word “postmodern,” but he loathed modernity. As an “anti-modernist” rather than a “postmodernist,” Cram snubbed the modernist dictum that form follows function, designing buildings as criticisms of modern life. Knowing full well that it was an anachronism to build in a thirteenth-century French Gothic style, he did so, while retaining the Romanesque chancel. Ponderous, rounded arches co-existed uneasily with graceful, lace-like lattices. Goths and Romans always had an ambivalent relationship.

All Pages | 1 |  2  |  3