SACRED SPACE AND CIVIL SPACE - BY GIANFRANCO RAVASI

 https://www.vatican.va/news_services/or/or_quo/cultura/2011/013q04a1.html

SACRED SPACE AND CIVIL SPACE - BY GIANFRANCO RAVASI 

 Open doors between the temple and the square 

We are publishing the text of the "lectio magistralis" that the cardinal president of the Pontifical Council for Culture holds on January 17 in Rome at the Faculty of Architecture of La Sapienza University. 

The world is like the eye: the sea is white, the earth is the iris, Jerusalem is the pupil and the image reflected in it is the temple". This ancient rabbinic aphorism clearly and symbolically illustrates the function in the temple according to an intuition that is primordial and universal. There are two ideas underlying the image. The first is that of the cosmic "center" that the sacred place must represent, a theme on which the great scholar of religions Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) has offered an extensive documentary dossier. The external horizon, with its fragmentation and tensions, converges and subsides in an area that for its purity must embody the meaning, the heart, the order of the whole being. In the temple, therefore, the multiplicity of reality is "concentrated" which finds peace and harmony in it: just think of the plan of certain radial cities connected to the ideal "sun" represented by the cathedral located in the central urban hinge (Milan, for example, "centered" on the Duomo is an evident example, as New York is the testimony of a different vision, more dispersed and Babelic). From the temple, then, a breath of life, of holiness, of illumination is "de-centered" which transfigures the everyday and the ordinary texture of space. And it is at this point that the second theme underlying the Jewish saying mentioned above enters the scene. The temple is the image that the pupil reflects and reveals. It is, therefore, a sign of light and beauty. In other words, we could say that sacred space is the epiphany of cosmic harmony and is theophany of divine splendor. In this sense, a sacred architecture that does not know how to speak correctly - indeed, "splendidly" - the language of light and is not the bearer of beauty and harmony automatically decays from its function, becomes "profane" and "profaned". It is from the intersection of the two elements, centrality and beauty, that what Le Corbusier dazzlingly defined "the unspeakable space" blossoms, the space that is authentically holy and spiritual, sacred and mystical. Of course, these two main axes carry with them many corollaries: let us think of the "deafness", the inhospitality, the dispersion, the opacity of so many churches raised without paying attention to the voice and silence, the liturgy and the assembly, the vision and to listening, to ineffability and communion. Churches in which one finds oneself lost as in a congress hall, distracted as in a sports hall, crushed as in a sferisterio, brutalized as in a pretentious and vulgar house. At this point we would like to propose a reflection of a more specific nature that has as its reference code those Biblical Sacred Scriptures which were undoubtedly "the great code" of Western artistic civilization itself. The importance that a "theology" of space has in them is indisputable, even if - as will be seen - it is inverted in a higher theology, that of time and history (the Incarnation summarizes these two dimensions in itself, putting them back in their hierarchy ). "The stones of Zion are dear to your servants" (Psalm 102, 15). This profession of love of the ancient psalmist could be the very motto of the Christian tradition which has always given an extraordinary importance to the sacred space, starting with the "stone" of the Holy Sepulcher, a sign of the resurrection of Christ, around which a of the emblematic temples of all Christianity. Among other things, it is curious that symbolically the three monotheistic religions are anchored in Jerusalem around three sacred stones, the Western Wall (popularly called "of the Wailing"), a sign of the Solomonic temple for the Jews, the rock of the ascension to heaven of Mohammed in the mosque of Omar for Islam and, in fact, the overturned stone of the Holy Sepulcher for Christianity. What is certain is that, without Christian spirituality and liturgy, the history of architecture would have been much more miserable: let's just think of the clarity of the early Christian basilicas, the refinement of the Byzantine ones, the monumentality of the Romanesque, the mysticism of the Gothic, the radiance of the Renaissance churches, the sumptuousness of the baroque ones, the harmony of the eighteenth-century sacred buildings, the neoclassicism of the nineteenth century, to reach the sober purity of some contemporary creations (an example for all: the fascinating church of the aforementioned Le Corbusier in Ronchamp). Therefore, in Christianity there is a constant celebration of space as a seat open to the divine, starting precisely from that supreme temple which is the cosmos. A great historian of theology Marie-Dominique Chenu (1895-1990), at the end of his life regretted having reserved too little space for both literary, figurative and architectural arts in his history of religious thought, because "they are not just illustrations. aesthetic but true theological subjects ". From the anonymity to which the great builders of cathedrals relegated themselves, it would be enough to bring out, by way of example, an architectural and artistic genius such as Abbot Sugero of Saint-Denis (13th century). Having said this, however, there is a very heavy component in the Christian conception which - as we said - shifts the theological center of gravity from space to time. And it is on this aspect that we would now like to focus our attention. In the last page of the New Testament, when John the Seer looks out over the plan of the new Jerusalem of perfection and fullness, he is faced with a data that is at first disconcerting: "I saw no temple in it because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are his temple "(Revelation 21, 22). There is no longer any need for spatial mediation between God and man; the encounter is now between people, divine life intersects with human life in a direct way. From this discovery we could go back through a sequence of equally unexpected scenes. Let's imagine running after this red thread by grabbing it at the opposite end. David decides to erect a temple in the newly formed capital, Jerusalem, so as to also have God as a citizen in his kingdom. But here is the surprising negative oracular response issued by the prophet Nathan: the king will not build any "house" for God but it will be the Lord who will give a "house" to David: "The Lord will make you great, because a house will make the Lord for you. "(ii Samuel, 7, 11). In Hebrew it plays on the ambivalence of the term bayit, "house" and "family". God, therefore, prefers the presence in a house-family to the sacred space of a house-temple, that is, in the history of a people, in the Davidic dynasty that will be colored with messianic tones. Of course, space is not desecrated. David's son Solomon will erect a temple that the Bible describes with admiring emphasis. Yet when he is pronouncing his prayer of consecration, he must necessarily ask himself this way: "But is it really true that God can dwell on earth? Behold the heavens and the heavens of the heavens cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built!" (1 Book of Kings, 8, 27). The temple, then, is only the setting for a personal and vital encounter (it is not for nothing that the Bible speaks of the "tent of encounter") which sees God bending down "from the place of his dwelling, from the sky" of his transcendence towards the people who flock to the sanctuary of Zion with the reality of its suffering history of which the various dramas are listed. The prophets will reach the point of undermining the religious foundations of the temple and its worship if it is reduced to being only a magical-sacral space, dissociated from the life of the civic square, that is, from the ethical-existential commitment, and entrusted only to a presence purely and hypocritically ritual. Suffice it only, among the many prophetic passages of similar tenor, to read this paragraph of the prophet Amos (eighth century before the Christian era): "I hate, I reject your feasts and I do not like your meetings. Even if you offer me burnt offerings I I do not accept your gifts. I do not even look at the fat victims of pacification. Far from me the din of your songs, the sound of your harps I cannot bear it! Rather let law and justice flow like water like a perennial torrent! " (5, 21-24). But let's enter Christianity directly. Christ, like any good Jew, loves the Jerusalem temple. He does not hesitate to take up a whip and strike at the merchants who profane him with their businesses, he attends the liturgies during the various solemnities, as will his disciples who will even reserve their space in the area of ??the so-called "Portico di Solomon". Yet Christ himself, on that sunny afternoon at Jacob's well, in front of Mount Gerizim, the sacred place of the Samaritan community, is not afraid to say to the woman who is drawing water: "Believe me, woman, the time has come when neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father ... The time has come, and it is now, when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father seeks such worshipers. God is spirit, and those who worship him must adore him in spirit and in truth "(John 4, 21-24). There will be a further turning point that will establish the divine presence in the very "flesh" of humanity through the person of Christ, as the famous prologue of the Gospel of John declares: "The Word became flesh and placed his tent in the midst to us "(1, 14), with evident reference to the" tent "of the temple of Zion. Among other things, the Greek verb eskénosen, "pitched the tent" follows the radical s-k-n of the Hebrew word with which the divine "Presence" was defined in the temple of Zion, Shekinah. Jesus will be even more explicit: "Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up". And the evangelist John notes: "He spoke of the temple of his body" (2, 19-21). Paul will go further and, writing to the Christians of Corinth, he will affirm: "You do not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you ... So glorify God in your body!" (i, 6, 19-20). "A temple of living stones", therefore, as Saint Peter wrote, "used for the construction of a spiritual building" (i, 2, 5) a sanctuary not extrinsic, material and spatial, but existential, a temple in time. The architectural temple will therefore always be necessary, but it must have in itself a symbolic function: it will no longer be an intangible and magical sacral element, but only the necessary sign of a divine presence in the history and life of humanity. The temple, therefore, does not exclude or exorcise the square of civil life but it fecundates, transfigures, purifies existence, giving it a further and transcendent meaning. For this reason, once the fullness of the communion between divine and human is reached, the temple in the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of hope, will dissolve and "God will be all in all" (1 Corinthians, 15, 28). We end our reflection with three testimonies. The first summarizes the degrees of the speech made so far. It is a medieval Kabbalistic Hebrew chant that recalls the various passages to find the place where God truly meets. Here is the refrain in Hebrew, an assonant refrain that is repeated with each verse: hu 'hammaqôm shel-maqôm / we'en hammaqôm meqomô. With a play on words and a dazzling intuition it is said: "He, God, is the Place of every place, / yet this Place does not take place". The second testimony is linked to the figure of St. Francis and is taken from chapter 37 of the Second Life of Thomas of Celano, a Franciscan from Abruzzo. A friar says to Francis: "We no longer have money for the poor". Francesco replies: "Undress the altar of the Virgin and sell its furnishings, if you cannot meet the needs of those in need otherwise". And immediately afterwards he adds: "Believe me, it will be more dear to the Virgin that the gospel of her Son is observed and one's altar naked, rather than seeing the altar adorned and despised by her Son in the son of man". Should we, therefore, only strip ourselves of the temple and its beauty? No, because Francis is convinced that God will offer us the temple again, with all the ornaments: "The Lord will send whoever can return to the Mother what he has given us on loan for the Church". The third and final consideration is offered to us by Orthodox spirituality. A well-known Russian secular theologian of the twentieth century who lived in Paris, Pavel Evdokimov, declared that between the square and the temple there must not be a barred door, but an open threshold through which the scrolls of incense, the songs, the prayers of the faithful and the flickering of the lamps is also reflected in the square where laughter and tears resound, and even the blasphemy and the cry of despair of the unhappy. In fact, the wind of the Spirit of God must run between the sacred hall and the square where human activity takes place. In this way we find the authentic and profound soul of the Incarnation which interweaves space and infinity, history and eternity, contingent and absolute. (© L'Osservatore Romano 17-18 January 2011)