Worship Spaces vs. Liturgical Dwellings: Church Architecture’s Subtle Language

Last week ago I spoke about William Daniel’s treatment in his book Christ the Liturgy of the meaning of leitorugia as “work of the One for the many” (instead of its mistranslation as “work of the people”). Today I wish to look at some of his insights about church architecture, which are mainly found in chapter 3 — a searching (and often entertaining) inquiry which argues convincingly for traditional ecclesial design from the vantage of modern philosophy and psychology intersecting with biblical and patristic verities.

Daniel is uncompromising about what is at stake in how we build our churches:

The spatial structures we inhabit and the practices by which we inhabit them, as well as those with whom we relate in our environments, are modalities of contingency that incline us to perceive, and thereby understand, what it means to be (alive). (88)

He rejects the idea that architecture could ever be a neutral space, a mere “placeholder.” Even the most empty warehouse already communicates a purpose and a spirit that affects what takes place within it and the people who go there.

Researchers have only recently begun to explore the impact of architecture on the human psyche. What is interesting, however, is that without digging too far beneath the surface to understand the long-term effects of space on human cognition, we know that people’s behavior changes in relation to the space they inhabit. For instance, Jan Gehl has observed that people walk more quickly in front of buildings with blank facades. James Danckert and Colleen Merrifield have found in their work on cognitive neuroscience that people who visually take in a “boring” environment, for instance the plain frontage of a Wal-Mart store or the shadowy glass exterior of a Whole Foods, develop increased levels of cortisol, the stress hormone related to heart disease and diabetes. 8 Not only this, but Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb has discovered that rats living in enriched environments are markedly more intelligent than those that live in more “Spartan” environs…. [H]ow does the space “work on” the worshipper, even, or especially, under the radar of human awareness? (91-92)

He gives many examples, based on research, of how even something as simple as the material and design of chairs and desks affect the mood and productivity of workers. Natural materials such as wood, and the presence of live plants, play a role in maintaining better spirits than obviously artificial materials and a solely man-made environment. In a way this seems obvious when stated, but that which “goes without saying” is very often nowadays simply ignored or denied.

While our individual personalities and habits may work with or fight against such spatial configurations, it is inevitable that the places we inhabit will over time affect our patterns of life, thereby conditioning us to perceive the world and others in relation to their warmth or coldness. (98)

Moving into the ecclesiastical realm, Daniel describes a High Church Anglican chapel, St. Mary the Virgin of Nashotah House Theological Seminary, where he studied for the ministry, and which he obviously found a “warm” space:

Those who inhabit the space as the dwelling place of God, where a person can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell God, experience the connective tissue of the wood, incense, bread, wine, water, chanting, stained glass and much more as a space of freedom, where scales fall from the eyes, burdens fall from the shoulders, and peace is made manifest, not as restrictive but restorative, transformative, extending one’s very body beyond itself as worshippers stand amidst the great cloud of witnesses whose prayers are still savored today.
          Not every liturgical space provides access to this divine, connective tissue. And while I in no way intend to limit the kyriake oikia to the physical structure itself, which too would betray the making involved in the Lord’s house, I seek to wonder here for a moment whether the empty space of the warehouse or strip mall church can be said to be a dwelling place for God, in the sense of ligare noted by David Jones. That is, is cylinder block or drywall conducive to liturgy? Does the warehouse afford the worshipper an attachment to the space of liturgy beyond the scheduled act of worship? If a person walked into the room would it be clear what the space is for, or are such spaces an inadvertent cutting of the ligament that binds the human physically to the celestial, giving way to a kind of spiritual atrophy? (103-4) 

St Mary the Virgin at Nashotah House

 

Mars Hill Bible Church

A rhetorically effective contrast is developed between St. Mary the Virgin and the “Mars Hill Bible Church” in Grand Rapids — a typical multi-purpose Protestant set-up with a stage platform and movie-theatre-like chairs, whose frequenters even nicknamed it “the Shed.”

The minimalist design of the space communicates to the worshipper that while worship does occur inside it remains detached from the building itself. In other words, the space is not a space meant to be inhabited; it is not a place of dwelling. If a person were to walk into the Shed at any other time, there would be no visible markers or signs that allow one to recognize it as a place where worship occurs...
          The contrast between the Chapel of St. Mary the Virgin and the Shed are profound. The former is a space designed to be inhabited by both worshipper and worship, a building that is itself involved in the liturgical action. The latter is transitory by design, which houses a temporary action separable from the space and, perhaps, the worshipper herself. The difference is between inhabiting a space and enacting something within a space. What is missing from the warehouse church is a deep connection with what the Christian worshipper believes and thinks — the tangibility of faith. The visceral sense of the space is impermanent. Its homogenous character neither requires anything from nor offers anything to its occupants. (105) 

Interestingly, the author pivots to a well-known sociological phenomenon — namely, that most people in the Western world, even agnostics and cultural Christians, seek “traditional”-looking churches for weddings — and offers an explanation for it:

It is telling that many who worship in these [“Bible church”] spaces refuse to be married in them. When couples desire a “church wedding,” more often than not they inquire at another local church that “looks like a church,” or they have their wedding outdoors. Why? Because marriage, something intended for a lifetime, needs a permanent space for vows to feel permanent. The temporary space of the abandoned store signals to young couples that their marriage may not last. The expressed desires are “good wedding pictures,” “memories in a holy place,” and “for it to feel like a church wedding.” The message hidden from a couples’ immediate awareness is the need to feel like God is present for their wedding and that their covenant will last. To be and to dwell, as Heidegger notes, are inseparable. (ibid.) 

Returning to the contrast between the Anglican chapel and the Shed, Daniel draws out further implications.

The major difference between the two spaces of worship noted above is that one, the Chapel at Nashotah, is incorporated daily in the making of Holy Eucharist, while I cannot say if this ever occurs at Mars Hill. The irony is that the name Mars Hill invokes a somewhat sacred site, where the Apostle Paul preaches before an altar dedicated to “the Unknown God.” One might speculate that Mars Hill in Grand Rapids bears the marks of an Unknown God, given its lack of symbolism or anything that might disclose the space as Christian. Perhaps the name is deliberate to invoke Paul’s mission to speak amidst the false god of consumer capitalism, witnessed by the abandoned storefront. Nevertheless, the Eucharist — the sacramental action whereby God creates the church — is that which makes any space a space of dwelling. For this reason it is easy to recognize a space that has been designed by and for Eucharistic action. These are not temporary structures separable from the liturgy, even if they lend themselves to more than just prayer and the breaking of bread. Rather, these are eternal structures created by and for an eternal action, an action that remains present even when the building is empty of its people, because it is separable neither from the people who worship there, nor the God whose action the building and people inhabit. (106) 

Then he asks the provocative question: “If worship occurs in a space that conveys temporariness, is the worshipper inclined by the space to treat the liturgical action as temporary?... A utilitarian space breeds a utilitarian liturgy” (107).
 

After a fascinating analysis of tools, economics, and alienation from the process of production (it would no doubt be too Marxist for some, but it seemed to me spot-on, in the vein of William Cavanaugh), Daniel returns to his main theme, this time weaving in a metaphor from viticulture:

Terroir in French has to do specifically with wine making, yet in a deeply cultural sense of the taste of a place, gout de terroir. For this reason, it is actually illegal to label a wine with the name Burgundy if it is not from Burgundy, France. Burgundy is at once the wine and the place; the two are inseparable. The gout de terroir draws the deep connection that the soil and the hands that work it are inseparable from the taste of the wine. In other words, the wine — its fullness of taste and heightening of the senses — cannot be separated from any of the environmental circumstances within which it is produced.
          In like manner, Christian liturgy is inseparable from the space and people intervolved in the action, all of which are intervolved in what we might call the grammar of God. We might even go so far as to call it the gout de Dieu, as it is in, by, and through the Eucharistic space that the worshipper learns what it means to taste and see that the Lord is good. The taste of the place, the smell, the touch, the sights and sounds of the kyriake oikia are all a language that conditions perception in the worshipper as she is spoken into being through them and called to attention by them, as the unspoken language demands not words but, perhaps, silence. (118-19) 

We must continue to develop such tools of analysis for explaining why our traditional church designs are objectively superior and necessary, and cannot be written off as habitual and sentimental models to which we are lazily attached and for which we ought to find (or be content with) “modern” substitutes. If Christ the Liturgy is correct in its argumentation, there can be serious negative psychological and spiritual effects of bad church architecture — and this is before we even broach more properly theological and liturgical questions.

Refuting the Commonplace that “Liturgy” Means “Work of the People”

In 2020, Angelico Press released a very interesting book entitled Christ the Liturgy by William Daniel. Serious students of liturgical theology should pick it up if they have not already done so. While I do not agree with all that the Anglican author presents, he offers unique perspectives I have not seen elsewhere and, in particular, makes a deft and profound use of both Church Fathers (Clement, Ignatius, Cyprian, Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus) and modern philosophers (Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Voegelin, Gadamer, Pickstock).

Chapter 1, worth the price of the book all by itself, delves into true and false, or perhaps we should say truer and falser, meanings of the term leitourgia, “a word,” writes Daniel,

that has been mistranslated, the first instance of which appears to have been at The Fourth General Council of the Alliance of The Reformed Churches holding The Presbyterian System (London, 1888), whereby liturgy is translated as “the work of the people.” To speak of “the work of the people” assumes a work, an offering, or the human capacity to give something to God that God doesn’t have. Translating leitourgia as “the work of the people,” a distinctly post-Enlightenment translation, inverts the human’s relation to the salvific offering of the Son to the Father. That is, this redefining of liturgy elicits a lack in God—the lack of God’s own worship. Additionally, liturgy as the “work of the people” separates the liturgical action from the creative agency of the Son and the human’s volitive participation in the re-creating of the world, infinitely actualized—recapitulated—in Christ. The Transcendent is hereby absolutely transcendent; there is no mingling of God and creation. What is important to note at the outset is that to translate or (re)define leitourgia as “the work of the people” detracts from the inherent, relational nature of liturgy as that which gathers the people of God into the eternal life of reciprocity that is Holy Trinity. (1–2)

This mistranslation is very prominent among supporters of the liturgical reform in the Catholic Church. For example, Kevin W. Irwin in his book Responses to 101 Questions on the Mass (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1999) speaks of “the Greek term leiturgia, meaning “work of the people” (p. 31).

The author then looks carefully at instances of classical and patristic texts that employ the term leitourgia to make his case. His goal is 

to lay the foundation for understanding liturgy as the manifestation of divinity in Christ, attested to by the early and medieval church, and as the anagogic relation of participation that is the essence of the church Catholic. Liturgy is hereby to be understood not as “the work of the people” but as “the work of the One for the sake of the many.” Christ himself is this “work,” this event, who is the Liturgy he enacts—both priest and victim, an offering to the Father for the life of the world. (2)

In ancient Greek authors, leitourgia first means “public work” or “public service” (laos ergon), which often took the form of a sacrificial gift or financial offering without expectation of repayment, solely for the common good, such as sponsoring a festival or holding (without pay) a public office. In Aristotle, leitourgia names the bearing of a communal burden for the benefit of the many. Not just the rich who fund banquets, choruses, and lyric contests, but also priests, doctors, the miliary, and innkeepers are all “liturgists” in this context. It is always a gift of one for the sake of the many.

St. Paul uses the term in continuity with Plato and Aristotle to refer to the one who gathers and offers funds for the sake of the building up of the Church, in analogy with the priests of the temple who gather the offerings to give glory to God. Paul describes himself as a libation poured out for the people. The one ministers to and for the many:

Paul is the liturgy he enacts—Christ. His liturgical role is to serve as Christ, to gather the offerings of the faithful into the offering Jesus is in himself. Only in this way do the liturgical actions—offerings—of a people become bound to the offering of Jesus to the Father—the one, holy acceptable offering. (8)

In the first epistle of Clement, leitourgia points to the hierarchical office that belongs to the various members of the body, all acting in and through Christ to participate in His high-priestly offering; but most especially the bishop, whose role is to gather up the many into the One (11). “Leitourgia is a sacrificial offering to God, which is consequently beneficial to others” (12). 

Office and action, as in the ancient world, are inseparable in Christ. The hierarchical administration of the liturgical economy is a division of labor, not a partitioning of classes. Just as the bishop makes the people available to God, likewise do the people make God available to the bishop. There is a logic of reciprocity embedded in the action. By necessity of her communion with God, the Christian must be in fellowship with Christ’s holy church, through its bishops. (19) 

We are led to see from the sources that in no sense is liturgy understood as the working of the people at some activity that is primarily theirs to claim or to conduct. On the contrary, they are the receivers of the largesse of the Father in Christ poured out by the Spirit through the Church’s rites enacted in obedience by those who are in the position of rulers and benefactors, who bear the communal burden, who “put on” liturgy (so to speak). In this vision there is no competition between parts of the body, but only gratitude for the complementary roles that allow worship to come alive. God gives the offering to the priest, and the priest returns it to God for the people: “the work of the One”—Christ, or His hierarchical representative—“for the sake of the many.”

The politicization of the liturgy, the jockeying for roles, the spreading out of activities, appears therefore to be a fundamental misreading of the economy of worship, in which “God is the sole giver of gifts; and it is only God who can receive God. Abraham’s giving and receiving are to be understood, therefore, as a participation in the giving and receiving of God from and to God” (24).

Daniel reaches his conclusion, invoking a major theme of the theologians associated with Radical Orthodoxy: 

The commonplace (mis)translation of leitourgia as “the work of the people” describes a chasm between what Christians do when they gather to worship and who the God they confess to worship is. The modern translation of this term dislocates the human from the action of Christ, thereby suspending the gift from the recipient—giver and receiver remain separate. In a falsely humanistic attempt to emphasize the work of humans in liturgy, “the work of the people” actually narrates a deistic understanding of the human as completely separate from God, or univocally maintains a sameness between God and humanity in “Being.” (34)

Almost as a corollary, Daniel points out how this univocity traps God in a human construct and evacuates our experiences of the possibility of redemption:

Paul’s sufferings (cf. 2 Cor 4:8–12; Col 1:24) are the sufferings of Christ, born in his body, for the sake of the church. It is the cross that is paradigmatic for participating in divine action—in the Liturgy-Christ. The cross is also that which makes all suffering intelligible and meaningful. The oft-repeated notion that Christ suffers when we suffer is yet another aggrandizing of the human in relation to her sufferings. We must not invert the relation between the suffering of Jesus and the sufferings of humanity. Again, while it may at first seem to elevate the suffering of humans to say that God suffers with us, it has the adverse effect of flattening human suffering as something that in no way transcends the present sensation of pain. What makes human suffering meaningful is that it participates in the bodily suffering of God on the cross. (35–36) 

At the end of the chapter, Daniel ties together his research into a thundering critique of the contemporary misappropriation of a noble ancient term:

We have seen how liturgy as “the people’s work” locates a person’s identity in her own hands—the human nature entirely separable from divinity—a liturgical nominalism, as it were. Naming, as it does, the service of worship of the church, liturgy has been mistaken to be humanistic in the worst sense of the term. It has been wrongly understood as an isolated act in time, either performed by a professional class of persons (clergy) for an audience (laity) or enacted collectively as a body of people (priesthood of all believers), which can only be assented to by faith, not participated in through the reason of the body.
          In each instance the understanding is the same: God has given salvation to those who follow Christ; Christians, therefore, perform liturgies to offer thanks and praise for the gift of salvation. The assumption here is that the baptized have a gift to offer unto Almighty God, i.e., their selves. To say that the human has something she can give—even herself—to God, is to suggest that a person possesses within her being the capacity to initiate contact with God, thereby inverting the Creator-created relation. It is at once a rejection of human contingency and a denial of God as his own absolute contingency. God becomes somehow dependent on creation.
          This “self-possession” is the ultimate affront by the created to her Creator; it is the sin of all sins—it is Adam and Eve. Leitourgia as illuminated throughout the writings of the early fathers refuses both the Gnostic rejection of matter and the humanist departure from metaphysics. The modern mistranslation is more than a matter of semantics; it is an ontological chasm. (38–39)

He returns to this point at the start of chapter 4, providing an especially helpful summary of his position, which certainly shares much in common with the traditionalist critique of the radical branch of the Liturgical Movement and its triumph in the post-Vatican II liturgical reform with its humanist, activist, utilitarian, consumerist, and reductionist assumptions and stylings:

What is often misunderstood about liturgical action, specifically as it regards Christian liturgy, is that it is neither performative nor initiative. That is, it is not a performance before God to somehow please God or curry favor, nor is the Christian to understand herself as one who initiates contact with God. As outlined in the first chapter, this is a gross misrepresentation of liturgy that stems from a mistranslation and misunderstanding of the word and meaning of leitourgia. Any claim that liturgy is instigated by, or an experience simply to be taken in or enjoyed by, humans reduces liturgical action to a temporary, flattened affair that has little or nothing to do with God, save the gross objectification of the same. Such a reduction bears an implicit, disenchanted anthropology, a conception of humanity that is biological at best and animalistic at worst.
          Liturgy, however, does not originate in human action, even though it implicates humanity in its activity and elicits human participation. Liturgy is the creative agency of God who in Christ has gathered human nature into divine reciprocity, a reciprocity that is without beginning or end. The human’s participation in this eternal action is medial by nature. That is, the human is caught up in the divine self-relation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Liturgy hereby names the self-relation of eternal reciprocity that God himself is. To worship, therefore—to participate in the liturgical action—is to be involved in an action that begins outside of human agency yet implicates the human in divine agency. (121–22)

Based on this conclusion, Daniel then goes on later in the book to emphasize that liturgy is “medial”—that is, neither pure activity on our part, nor pure passivity, but both and neither, like the “middle voice” of some ancient languages.

One way to say this, however awkward it might strike the modern English-speaker’s ear, would be to say, “I was gathered into the offering of the Son to the Father.” Shorthand would be modestly simpler: “I participated in the self-offering of God today.” (127) 

One can see the care with which he banishes the idea that the worshipers are the primary agents, which has been the bane of liturgical reform for the past hundred years, and has led to many absurdities: making everyone say all the responses and do all the actions together in lockstep; giving clerical tasks to laity; opening up space for creative and spontaneous expression and motion on the part of the clergy; the statement that “I like Fr. So-and-so’s Mass best”; mobilizing the chickabiddies to make felt banners for their first communions; erupting into applause for the efforts of musicians or other groups; and so forth. In fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that the entire framework of the Liturgical Movement was always tainted with a certain Pelagianism, with what Jordan Aumann called “the heresy of activism.” The middle voice was lost: the insertion into the action of God that begins before we even exist and is eternally simple, circular, fruitful, and silent. Daniel concludes:

Liturgy, hereby, is not a matter of self-expression. It is not to be governed by the whims of any one individual’s sensibilities. Rather, liturgy is the confluence of linguistic worlds which have passed through the torcular of Christ, who is the wine press of God…. It is in this sense that liturgical mediality can be understood as an active-passivity, perhaps our best way of pointing toward the middle voice. It is a giving of ourselves to an action happening to us, to an agency that is not our own. Hereby do we become leitourgia—the work of God. We become Christ in proportion to our participation in the work of the One, which is for the sake of the many. (157–58)

To sum up: leitourgia does not mean “the work of the people.” It means “the work of One on behalf of many.” This definition is properly theocentric and Christocentric; it justifies, even as it relativizes, the “sacerdotalism” (in Dix’s expression) of all traditional liturgical rites.

There is much else of value in this book, such as its treatment of church architecture in chapter 3 (about which I will write separately). I encourage you to check it out.

William Daniel. Christ the Liturgy. Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2020. 206 pp. Paper ISBN 978-1621385554, $17.95. Cloth ISBN 978-1621385561, $32.00.