Press Releases12 Nov 08

Archbishop of Armagh Speaks of Significance of Sacred Space

Archbishop of Armagh Speaks of Power and Significance of Sacred Space

The Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, the Most Revd Alan Harper, OBE gave a notable talk on 12/11/08 entitled, ‘The Power and Significance of Sacred Space’ at the Armagh Club, Upper English Street, Armagh, organised by the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society.

In his wide-ranging paper, which discussed sacred buildings, sites and structures in a ritual landscape and the importance of burial grounds, he expressed his belief that sacred spaces offer an opportunity to experience ‘otherness’ and called for ‘a more reverent and less utilitarian approach to our estimation and evaluation’ for burials.

Archbishop Harper said, ‘Intimations of the sacred continue to exert powerful influence even in the absence of any commitment to faith, especially but not exclusively where sacred space is demarcated by “landmark buildings”. This is not merely because of the quality of such buildings but also, crucially, because of those intimations of an encounter with “otherness” that such places enshrine’.

Drawing on his former archaeological experience, the Archbishop spoke of the ancient significance of hilltop sites such as the Hill of Armagh and the choice of lofty sites for both of the city’s two cathedrals. He also spoke of the importance of ritual landscapes as at Navan and Tara. He commented that he, ‘longed for the day when something can be done to restore and render accessible some vestige of Lough na Shade in its integral, spatial and historical relationship with the ritual landscape that is Emain Macha’.

Finally, he spoke of graveyards bearing the ‘sequential fingerprints of change’, remarking, ‘So rich a repository of human knowledge and self understanding are our graveyards that their respectful care and preservation need to be seen as both a human and scientific necessity’.

The full transcript of the talk follows:

THE POWER AND SIGNIFICANCE OF SACRED SPACE

Surely one of the supreme ironies of the age is this: that in an era that has witnessed a flight from religious belief, adherence and practice, there is a hunger – a hunger people are prepared to pay very large sums of money to satisfy – for alternative forms of what I might call “self help spirituality”. There is also an appetite for the opportunity to enter and experience the built expressions of a timeless resort, the resort to “otherness”. Whatever about the shopping mall as the cathedral of consumerism, as places set apart for avowedly non commercial purposes, cathedrals and churches were never more sought out for the “visitor experience” than they are today.

Furthermore, I contend that the “visitor experience” of a living, working building is a much fuller experience than that of a building that has ceased to be worship space and instead become, perhaps, exhibit space or commercial space. Asset value” is only maximized in the experience of the visitor when a place continues to be devoted to its primary function.

It may surprise some of you to know that Belfast Cathedral is the second most visited free tourist venue in the whole of the City of Belfast. You may also be amused to know that the parish church of St Mark, Dundela, together with the former childhood home of CS Lewis, is an optional visitor excursion for persons (especially Americans) on cruise ships visiting the Port of Belfast. You may even be surprised to learn that since we began to count visitors to my own cathedral here in Armagh, from the end of March until mid October this year, 26,311 pairs of feet have found their way through the tank traps of the city centre and the dangers of “wing mirror alley” (or Dawson Street as it is more prosaically known) into St Patrick’s Cathedral, a number that has surprised and heartened the Dean and Chapter. However, so as not to become too readily carried away, let me also record that visitor numbers for St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin average around 300,000 annually.

So, my preliminary point is this: intimations of the sacred continue to exert powerful influence even in the absence of any commitment to faith, especially, but not exclusively where sacred space is demarcated by “landmark buildings”. This is not merely because of the quality of such buildings but also, crucially, because of those intimations of an encounter with “otherness” that such places enshrine.

It is not my purpose tonight to retread the well explored ground of the relationship between doctrine and liturgy on the one hand, and architectural form on the other. Nor shall I comment in detail on the repercussions for the architecture and adornment of a building of changes in doctrinal and liturgical emphasis. It is sufficient to note these things and refer you to the standard works on the topic by commentators such as Addleshaw, Yates and Duffy. This is a rapidly developing area of research. Those of you who know the great Cathedral of Linkoping in Sweden, with its ornate and magnificent pulpit, may be aware that the recently retired Dean devoted his final period in office to restoring the pulpit to its original position, part way down the nave, and away from the position to which it had earlier been moved, at the entrance to the Quire. Both repositionings of the same pulpit reflect sequential variations in doctrinal emphasis and liturgical practice: as soon as you introduce a “nave altar” internal spatial relationships amongst other components of a traditional building are radically compromised. 

Recent experience of the re-ordering of churches to provide for new interpretations of liturgical necessity has not always been a happy one. Nor, on the other hand, in the case of church buildings in the Republic, has the application of draconian limitations imposed by the state on the re-ordering for liturgical purposes of church interiors been a thoroughly satisfactory process. Change and adaptation is a normal and appropriate process so long as it is carried out in careful, sympathetic fashion and to the highest possible professional and artistic standards. The arbitrary fossilization of a building at a particular era is problematical to say the least. Life is dynamic and by its very nature programmed for change; buildings, and especially buildings conceived as working sacred space, are also living, dynamic entities subject to death when consigned to the forces of fossilization.

So far I have directed attention solely to structures, but I want also to say something about contexts and approach a broader concept of sacred space: sacred space in the context of spatial relationships.

I hope that everyone is, by now familiar and comfortable with the concept of the “ritual landscape”. In essence this concept embraces the following:
1. That individual sacred sites are sometimes (not always but quite often) distributed geographically in relationship with one another;
2. That sometimes this is because the sites are organized in such a fashion by design in a particular era;
3. That sometimes, however, it arises because a succession of sites within a particular area or landscape followed one upon another but bear a relationship one with another that is more than merely successional;
4. That sometimes what has conveyed cultic or sacred status to a site is related to a primary sacredness attaching to the landscape or to particular landscape features which have also gained significance through historical or mythological resonances;
5. And that therefore the full assemblage and the spatial relationships between individual sites in their landscape setting are integral to and significantly enhance the importance of any site considered individually. Indeed, to consider a site as an individual entity without reference to its place in the ritual landscape is potentially to damage or undermine the significance of the site itself.

By way of example, let me take you just a couple of miles down the road to Navan Fort, Emain Macha. Many of you will recall the planning application to extend the working quarry at Navan, virtually to encircle the monument known as Navan Fort. Quite apart from the damage that might have been done to the unexplored sub-surface archaeology, the work would have further destroyed the historic ritual landscape within which the Navan is set and with which it is intimately related. The Navan Ring, Lough na Shade, the King’s Stables and Haughey’s Fort, to name only the most prominent individual sites, would have been wrenched from their context and stripped of their collective power and significance, for the whole is infinitely greater than the sum of the individual parts. Personally, I long for the day when something can be done to restore and render accessible some vestige of Lough na Shade in its integral, spatial and historical relationship with the ritual landscape that is Emain Macha.

Perhaps I might also remark that the kind of concerns I am expressing relate equally and directly to the historic ritual landscape in Co Meath that has Tara at its heart. The destruction of archaeological sites along the route of the new  motorway (with all its ancillary structures) is only part of the issue at Tara; the sundering of the spatial integrity of disparate elements within an assemblage of sites set in a landscape of huge ritual and historic significance is of equal concern.

Let me bring you now to the very doorstep of the building in which we meet tonight. Famously, it is known and understood that the street pattern at the core of this city is both evocative and reflective of settlement provisions dependent upon the ritual pre-eminence of the “high place”, that is to say, the Hill of Armagh. That pattern is both radial and concentric; the early divisions of the settlement into “trians” supposedly reflect social distinctions among the population, some indigenous, some transient, some permanent. The ritual occupation of the Hill itself within its formerly massively defined ritual enclosure has stamped its character on the street pattern to an impressive degree. In all probability the Hilltop was a “High Place” of ritual significance before it becoming the focus of the Patrician tradition.

Interestingly, the cultic tradition of the “high place”, biblical, extra-biblical and post biblical, finds at least an echo in the decision to erect the magnificent Roman Catholic Cathedral of St Patrick, Armagh on its own equally prominent eminence, its own “high place”. Along with all the other reasons for choosing the site of what is now Cardinal Brady’s Cathedral, surely part of the reason is a memory of the cultic appropriateness of such a location. Comparisons with other examples such as the Rock of Cashel come immediately to the forefront of one’s mind. An ancient rationale such as defensibility taking its place alongside the more fundamental consideration: that of cultic appropriateness.

Now, for the sake of comparison, consider a settlement grid deriving its origins and inspiration from a post-enlightenment context, a context shaped by a rationale to do with the expression of social rather than cultic relationships. The Mall in Armagh provides an example. Here the Courthouse and Gaol find themselves logically and companionably located at opposite ends of the Mall in the “new town”. As social symbols they might be said to represent, perhaps, order, judgment and retribution. The two are separated by a racecourse. Nearby are centres of learning in the shape of the Observatory and the Royal School. All the above are overseen, from a suitably imperious distance and eminence, by the occupant of the Primatial Palace, then the Primate by law established, now his administrative and executive successors, the City and District Council. This is no ritual landscape, rather it bids fair to be called a “rational landscape” or perhaps a “civil landscape” although, I note, conceived and executed in an age that knew not the benefit of the arcane procedures of the Planning Service!

What am I trying to say? Perhaps these things:
1. sites and structures in a ritual landscape are as likely (and are probably more likely) to possess an inner coherence when compared with those in a rational or civil landscape;
2. the inter-relationships of components of a ritual landscape are significantly more important than the considerations underlying the assemblage of components in a rational landscape. Considerations of inter-relationships of components of the ritual landscape significantly less utilitarian for they have always possessed and still retain assumptions and resonances which are hard to articulate or express, (for example) on any balance sheet. Ritual considerations are intrinsic to the coherence of the whole.

I want now to add a final section to what I should like to say about sacred space and ritual landscape.. It concerns another component of the landscape and built environment which is also intrinsically ritual. I want to speak about burial space, graveyards. I gave a paper some years ago on this general topic and I want to return to some of the things I said on that occasion.

Burial is, essentially, a sacred act. The earliest ritual monuments known, dating from pre-Homo Sapiens communities in Spain are burial sites. The burials signal religious or ritual elements in their arrangements. Death and bereavement constitute an experience of disintegration and incoherence. They require the imposition of order and structure in circumstances that have seen the collapse of order and structure. They require us to seek meaning in circumstances of pain and anguish and to relate the fragility and impermanence of life both to the cosmic realities of the observable universe and to our sense of that which is or may be beyond the observable. In other words, death and religion are intimately related since the end and purpose of religion is to offer a framework and an account of the relatedness of humanity to all life and to the source and ground of our being.

Religious doctrine, ceremony and ritual, therefore, involve not only a belief system but also a way of doing things that reflect the content of both the faith and hope of the believer, modified by the additional cultural norms and structures of wider society. Graveyards are ordered spaces, sacred spaces, because within the context of the human psyche a measure of the sacred attaches to the dead, whether or not the circumstances of interment comprise any acknowledgment of a specifically religious dimension. As such, therefore, graveyards also comprise a “ritual landscape” whether directly associated or not with other ritual components like churches, processional avenues or objects of pilgrimage or veneration.

Graveyards are very much more than merely “green space”. They are a resource for the genealogist, and, indeed, for the geneticist. They bear the sequential fingerprints of change: social-economic change; changes in the spheres of religion, philosophy and ideas; changes in fashion. They are also the preservers of distinctions in perceptions of status and self image. So rich a repository of human knowledge and self understanding are our graveyards that their respectful care and preservation need to be seen as both a human and a scientific necessity.

Therefore, I caution against the instinct to tame and to homogenize. Graveyards should not be seen as requiring the imposition of uniformity, except in those specific cases where uniformity was from the beginning determined upon for reasons of principle. Here I think for example of graveyards provided for members of the Society of Friends or given over to burial of the fallen in war and conceived of to reflect something of the regimentation associated with armed conflict and the equality of esteem attributed to the fallen.

Idiosyncrasy and diversity are, however, generally of the essence of traditional burial places, and I do not mean merely in respect of their native flora and fauna. The lawn mower and the strimmer, the chemical weed killer or growth inhibitor are tools to be deployed with true discretion. This is a man made landscape, a ritual landscape, one not best accorded the treatment required by savagely risk averse social legislation. A graveyard, after all, is a gathering of people of all shapes and sizes with all manner of social expectations and pretensions. Death may be the great leveller but graveyards may as well reflect the essential lumpiness of life just as the distribution of matter in the cosmos represents the lumpiness of creation.

There was once a fashion for clearing and rearranging the gravestones and monuments of graveyards to make them easier to mow and maintain, and turn them into more “user-friendly” public open spaces. In that process, of course, a graveyard has become redefined as a public open space, designed for, rather than merely patient of, recreational use. This has usually resulted in two things: first, damage to the headstones; and second, a divorce between the burials recorded on the headstones and the location of the buried remains.

Such an eventuality at first seemed of little consequence, except that people were no longer able to be sure exactly where the remains of their ancestors lay. Now, however, that recovery of DNA is possible and the Human Genome has been explored, inhumations of the past may have a great deal to tell us about genetic conditions and disease: witness the reconstruction of the virus responsible for the “Spanish Flu”, (an illness that literally decimated populations after the Great War,) and the discovery of the close relationship between that virus and the much feared virulent strain of Avian Flu (H5N1), potentially capable of mutating and crossing the species barrier. The genetic library of the departed has gained greater significance for the general public good as simple Mendelian laws of genetic inheritance are reviewed and scientific techniques become immeasurably more powerful.

I have, in fairness, to qualify my earlier strictures about the divorce between the location of headstones and the burial place of the person thereon memorialized. The qualification is this: the notion of the right to rest in the ground undisturbed and in perpetuity began to emerge as a common expectation only at the end of the 18th century, although it had, of course, always been available to the aristocracy.

Christian doctrine speaks of a general resurrection of the faithful departed “on the last day”, that is, at the Parousia, on the Second Coming of Christ. On that day the mortal remains of the dead are expected to rise to be clothed in glory. Until the notion of burial in perpetuity took hold it had been deemed quite proper to reuse burial space over and over so that many generations of residents were enabled to be buried in relatively small parcels of ground set aside around each parish church for the use of the community. Hopes of resurrection on the Last day were not seen as compromised by the continual and inevitable disturbance deriving from continual reuse of the same ground. When an inhumation was disturbed it was sufficient to gather together the skull and principal long bones (most characteristically the femurs) for reburial in a charnel pit or storage in a crypt or charnel house. Such items themselves: charnel house and charnel pit are components of a ritual landscape associated in their rationale with eschatological hope. Furthermore, the skull and cross bones emblem represented on many a grave stone also has eschatological significance. Far fro being an emblem dark and fear-filled and never employed as the signature of piracy, the emblem is one of eschatological hope, an emblem of the promise of resurrection.

However, a potent mix of less wholesome and less theologically sophisticated factors took over: a fear of the risk of disease associated with the reuse of burial ground, and an equally fearful strand of religious fundamentalism that insisted upon the total integrity of fully articulated and complete skeletal remains for resurrection on the Last Day. These, together with the triumph of individualism and the exaltation of the concept of private ownership over older concepts of corporateness and community, utterly changed the burial landscape. Graveyards remained sacred spaces and were organized as ritual landscapes but underlying assumptions had radically altered.

Perhaps then the contemporary irony is this: the very forces (social and theological) that rendered traditional burial grounds inadequate – the requirement to provide for burial in perpetuity with complete articulation – have, in their turn, through the enormous appetite for more and greater parcels of ground that such a requirement imposes, given impetus for the complete degradation of those relics of old mortality that people so wished to retain (that is to say our skeletal form) by the cost saving, space saving option offered in cremation. This, in its turn, has called for provisions of two different types of interment space: Columbaria and, so called, Gardens of Rest, responding to the continuing deep, human, felt-need to have a specific location with which to identify the final mortal resting place of a family member, loved in life and remembered in death. The ritual of Remembrance takes a variety of forms, each requiring disposition in a ritual landscape enshrining sacred space.

All I have attempted to offer this evening is an outline, a mere framework, for seeing and experiencing coherence in relationships between components that enjoy a functional relationship with those aspects of human experience understood as sacred. I want to suggest that much greater importance ought to attach to preserving and protecting that coherence. I have added some remarks about the special phenomenon of burial places and burial rituals and I hope in so doing to encourage a more reverent and less utilitarian approach to our estimation and evaluation of arrangements for the disposal of the dead. Whether I have succeeded in my enterprise or not I am grateful for your polite attention.

Ends

Notes:

The Archbishop’s lecture was organized by the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society as one of its public events open to members and non-members. It was held in the dining room of the Armagh Club at 33 Upper English Street, an elegant architectural setting, described by the UAHS as ‘the only Gentleman’s Club in County Armagh and a quiet oasis in busy English Street’.

Archbishop Harper was Senior Inspector in Historic Monuments (DOENI) from 1966 to 1974 and was appointed a member of the Historic Monuments Council (NI) in 1980, serving as its Chairman from 1988 to 1995. He was awarded an OBE in 1996 for his services to conservation in Northern Ireland. Archbishop Harper was Bishop of Connor from 2001 to 2007 when he was elected Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland and Metropolitan.