From
the dangers of Agenda 21
to
the more humane visions of the Congress for the New Urbanism
and
Philip Bess
town
planning is getting a fair amount of attention.
Father Andrew Phillips, however, in his 2003 essay ‘Sacral
Town-Planning’ gave us some of the best touchstones for beginning any new town
development. Here is some of what he had
to say.
Introduction
Modern
cities are planned not around churches, shrines and crosses, but around temples
of commerce, shopping shrines and the car-idol. It was not always so.
Contemporary society has descended a long way from the aisles and galleries of
churches with squares for religious processions, to the 'new, improved' aisles
and mercantile galleries of today with their automobile processions. For there
was once such a thing as Orthodox, i.e. Christian, town-planning. What was it?
The Sacred City In Orthodox Russia
The
greatest expert on Orthodox town-planning in Russia was undoubtedly the late
historian and theologian Fr Lev Lebedev (1939-1997). In a sequence of
well-written articles, first published in the 1970's and 1980's in samizdat and
smuggled to the West, he described how the plans of all the great mediæval
cities, for example, Moscow, Kiev, Novgorod, Arkhangelsk, Sergiev Posad, are
all sacred designs in theology. They embody the circle of God's completeness,
the triangle of the Holy Trinity, the centrality of the Cross, and the outline
of the Heavenly Jerusalem which St
John the Divine describes at the end of the Book of
Revelation. Thus, in Moscow, the church of St John the Divine is outside the city
walls, for he bears witness to the City. Inside the walls, the Kremlin, or
stronghold, contains churches dedicated to the Mother of God, the Archangel
Michael and the Twelve Apostles - Heaven and Earth meet. Outside it, 'Red Square', actually meaning 'Beautiful Square', was in fact a giant
open-air church. Its altar was the well-known church of the Protecting Veil
(usually miscalled St Basil's church)1. Thus the
whole city-centre was a sacred ecclesial space, its altar a church-building.
Russian city walls usually had twelve gates, again to correspond to the
description in the Book of Revelation (Rev. 21, 21). In this way the
home-cities of Orthodox Russians were images of the Heavenly Jerusalem, images
of the world to come in the here and now, Heaven on Earth.
. . . in the early, i.e. Orthodox, West, the
same sort of town-planning operated, for example in Gaul, northern Italy and England
[as in Russia--W.
G.]. After all, when so many Bishops, Kings, Queens, together with the mass of
common people, devoted themselves to the Church, how could their Faith not be
reflected in the cities and towns of the new Orthodox world in which they
lived? Let us look at examples of town-planning from Orthodox England to
illustrate our point.
The Sacred City in Orthodox England
Most
English towns were laid out in a circle or ellipse, symbolising the Unity and
Eternity of the Holy Trinity. Within the circle, however, there was a cross
which drew together the circumference of the circle around a central preaching
cross or high cross. This usually marked where the Gospel had first been
preached in the town by monks, who had then proceeded to baptise townsfolk in
the nearest river or stream. Such preaching-crosses, usually set high on steps
and sometimes very ancient, can be seen in countless villages all over England and even in many Roman-founded cities,
for instance, in Canterbury, York
and Chester.
(Nowadays, it must be said, in many places this high cross is known as a
'market cross', or else has been replaced by a twentieth-century war memorial,
which sums up the history of that dark and godless age).
From
the high cross, there radiated out streets, north, south, east and west. (Often
they retain these same names today - East Street, West Street etc). Many of the towns
founded or re-founded by King Alfred the Great illustrate this, notably Wallingford in Oxfordshire or Chichester in Sussex.
However, earlier towns like Bristol and Ipswich show the same pattern. Smaller settlements, even
villages, are similar, although they have no defensive walls.
Let
us look at two examples of cities in England, one Roman, the other
post-Roman in origin, to see this sacred topography in reality.
Canterbury
Where better to start this brief survey than in the
City of England's Mother-Cathedral?
Originally a Roman town, Canterbury already had elliptical Roman walls
encircling the river before its Christianisation. Taking the original Roman
roads, but significantly deviating from them, the first English Orthodox used
them to make the sign of the cross over the City, thus quartering it. At the
centre of the cross there used to stand not a preaching-cross, but All Saints
church, thus making clear the sacred nature and goal of Canterbury - to make a land holy. To the
south-west of the cross of streets there used to stand St Helen's church, thus
bearing witness to the Cross, as still does Holy Cross church to the north-west
of the cross of streets. The eastern quarter of Canterbury,
facing Jerusalem, is particularly sacred -
within it stands Christchurch, the Cathedral of
the Saviour, Mother-Church of All England. Here the high altar is
raised up, a model of Golgotha, with chapels beneath it mirroring the
topography of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The chapel directly underneath the
altar is called the chapel of Adam's Skull, just as at Golgotha.
Outside the walls, to the north, stood the church of St John
the Divine, keeping watch for the Second Coming. Outside the walls also stood
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (the cemetery church) and St
Martin's, the original Roman church. Also outside the city walls,
to the north-west stands guard the church dedicated to St Dunstan, a beloved
Archbishop, who was seen as the Protector of the City.
. . .
Conclusion
As
Orthodox Christianity was gradually lost in England, so the art of Orthodox
town-planning was also lost. During the 'Renaissance' (i.e. the rebirth of
paganism), Western Europe became obsessed with
the rational logic of the 'Classics'. 'Enlightened' in the eighteenth century
by heathenism, it began planning towns in God-excluding grids or curves. The
few churches that were built took the form of heathen temples. This was a
reflection of the mechanistic rationalism of the age and an obvious throwback
to Roman paganism. Not so much post-Christian as pre-Christian. Not so much
progress as regress. The cross gave way to squares, rows and crescents. The
Victorian system went even further, building rows of regimented houses for its
serfs, together with a scattering of mock-mediæval churches where the working
classes could be made obedient with bigoted puritan moralism.
In
our own age, having taken the cross away from the city centre and ruined its
sacred geography, intruding buildings disproportionate, especially in height,
today's cities and their centres are dying, boarded up or vandalised. For,
naturally, without the cross, 'the centre cannot hold', to quote T. S. Eliot.
The masses have fled to the temples of commerce out of town where they can
worship in the aisles of soulless consumerism. Here man, reduced by Darwin and
Freud to an animal with mere bodily aspirations and bodily functions, can
worship the gods of bread and circuses, just like the pagan Romans. That was
the society that people wanted, now they have it. Whether the still-present
memory of the Orthodox past can make a difference or not remains to be seen.
But many of the witnesses to past values still stand. Let those who have eyes
to see, see.
