A Tale of Two Churches

La Sagrada Família and Nuestra Señora del Rosario de Filipinas

It was close to 10pm on a November night, my friend and I were walking back to an Airbnb in Madrid. Among the buildings crowding the busy road stood a concrete titan. It was like a giant’s anvil; a brutalist assault on the uneventful street. It split the architectural agnosticism of Madrid, a city that can’t ever decide if it’s sleekly modern or stylishly classic and loomed over us, grey and tinged in the glare of the streetlights. The antimodern in me groaned, but something drew me towards it. We saw a gap the shape of the Chi Rho stamped on its grey face, a straight path of discolouration dribbling down the building’s chin. I had stumbled on a church, Nuestra Señora del Rosario de Filipinas.

I expected my friend, a Traditionalist Catholic, to be as appalled as I felt I ought to be, but something held us stunned. Some light remarks were made, “haha should we go in?” What a lark it would be, right?. Perhaps subconsciously fighting the realisation that we were entering one of those moments when the real interrupts the everyday; jolting you awake as if you’d been sleepwalking for weeks.

Through a heavy door we were greeted with something grimly magnificent.

The great frowning boss of the ceiling dominated my whole perception, and the noise of the world was shut away. The sombre hall was shot with a seemingly heavenly light, leaning forth, towering above. In a not enormous space I felt more sense of the colossal than among any of Madrid’s must-see’s and I was entranced in wonder. Our gentle footsteps were thunder in the silence as we found a pew, all but one of which was wholly empty. One old Lady sat in silent prayer (A sad indicator of the collapse of Catholicism in Spain). By instinct of my upbringing I made the sign of the cross and my friend did the same as we sat down to a good quarter-hour of silent thought.

It’s a long time since a Christian place of worship has affected me like that, and it has since met with some prestigious competition.

We are finally nearing the time when the great “buffering” icon on the Barcelona skyline, La Sagrada Família is due to be completed. Despite knowing Barcelona quite well, I only went inside Gaudí’s unfinished masterpiece a few weeks ago for the first time. It’s no secret that the Cathedral is a controversial work. It would be hard to find a building that yields quite so many different reactions in people as the world’s tallest church in waiting does. George Orwell called it “one of the most hideous buildings in the world”,¹ wishing that the anarchists would destroy it during the Spanish Civil War, as they did (or at least damaged) so many of Barcelona’s other places of worship.²

On the flip side, it’s a beloved attraction to millions, a remarkable innovation and testament to the genius of Catalonia’s hero-architect, Antoni Gaudí i Cornet. Gaudí’s modernist dream was, rather than lingering on past forms, to bravely step forward into regions untrodden and to build something unique and special for his own age. His vision was not a negation of ideas of glory, beauty and sacrality, but instead an attempt to realise these in a radical form. It’s anathema to the ‘50s brutalism of NSRF, although both “modern” styles, the design philosophies could not be further apart.

I won’t go far into either the long and convoluted story of Barcelona’s Basilica or into the history of modern architecture, but instead explore the different impressions that these churches left on me.

The only saving grace of the Temple of the Sagrada Família was the fact that it was unfinished, the dream of a genius driven crazy by mystic reveries. Now it will be completed with the money of tourism, and when its walls are finally enclosed, there will be no one inside but Japanese tourists.³

A depressing prophecy that, although North-Face clad Germans were more in vogue on the particular day I spent €26 to enter, has largely come true. Very little abiding sense of sacrality away from the world can be expected from a building that requires an airport-style security check to get inside. I am sure I could write for days about how tourism and Instagrammification have throttled the sense of wonder out of any number of places, the Sagrada Família (SF) included, but I think most of what needs to be said on that has been said.

I am equally not accusing it of failing to deliver on being a peaceful refugium. The SF isn’t trying to do the same thing as NSRF; it’s a cathedral for heaven’s sake. I feel like my issues with it would remain even were it not for its being swamped the year-round in floods of vague humanity. I suppose we’ll never know for sure, but it is my contention that Gaudí’s undoubtedly impressive work does not manage to embody sacrality in the way that older cathedrals did. I am afraid to say that, despite the lovely effect of many-coloured daylight in its stained-glass windows and its enormity, I found it profoundly unaffecting.

It struck me as I waded through the selfie-taking crowd that this building was an example of something I have written about a great deal on this blog, and something very pertinent to my last article. This would be the notion of modern attempts to replicate something from the past lacking the authentic quality that is possessed by what they are referencing, because they exist out of arbitrarity and not necessity, or not through some more natural process that arises in a context of limitation.

What the SF does not do is copy the style of the past and try to recapture its essence through counterfeit. It doesn’t commit the sin of Poundbury our once-Prince now King’s pet-town in England, which deserves it own article; using modern methods to build a cookie-cutter, prefab, mock-Georgian town, with zero necessity or embeddedness in the vernacular context that gave rise to those styles in the first place. Instead, it tries something far more commendable and for which I have tremendous respect - as mentioned, it recognises that the fire must be preserved, and not the ashes worshipped. The problem is: can the fire be carried into modernity?

As I have explored in the past, modern conditions distance us from contact with a context of necessity, which gave rise to ways of being that were particular and grounded and “authentic” for their limitation. My last essay looked at how this process affected religion in particular and how contact with divinity becomes difficult when one goes beyond the “World of Tradition”, as the prior conditions allowed the divine to reveal itself. “For our generation walks as in Hades, without the divine.”⁴ We are increasingly immersed in the formless void that threatens to engulf the organised and ordered cosmos. This is the result of a lack in limitation-bound existence, as limitation gives order and shape to things. The distance between us and the former necessity gives rise to a general absurdity which we are not built to withstand. The nausea of an "arbitrary" world.

Religious man’s desire to live in the sacred is in fact equivalent with his desire to take up his abode in objective reality, not to let himself be paralysed by the never-ceasing relativity of purely subjective experiences, to live in a real and effective world, and not in an illusion.⁵

The Sagrada Família is a brave and daring step beyond tradition, searching for new forms to embody the sacred truths of Christianity - a new statement in a grand conversation. It braves the dark reaches of chaos to produce some new vision of Christian man’s “objective reality”, a new symbolically “founded world” in Eliade’s own terms. Unfortunately, it remains, in my eyes, one genius’s unbound speculation. It remains a statement of something wholly subjective, without reference to an established body of architectural form. There is no place like it, that is for sure, because its style is Gaudí. Its world is Gaudí. Ironically, it inadvertently becomes an orientation of the world around Gaudí’s own vision, not around a collectively worshipped god. It represents the exact historical process of spiritual oblivion and dissolution of sacrality that it stood against. It is commendable, brave, ludicrous and sad.

Does not NSRF do the same? In a sense, yes. It is absolutely tied up in chaos and arbitrarity. Rather than trying in vain to wrangle old glory through modern means, it is a candid stare into the encroachment of the abyss. But amid the concrete tarpaulin, shines the light of Christ - the light of the real. Flowery adornments in a modern “style”, which means any number of arbitrary and incidental modes that the architect happens to select, would ultimately not glorify the object of worship, but instead the artist’s own vanity. Here is the tragedy of the Sagrada Família. It just ends up feeling like a big building, stacked full of subjective postulations of one man’s idea of God, which ends up reflecting only the artist himself.

1. Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia.

2. Anarchists did in fact attack the Cathedral and destroyed most of Gaudí’s plans and sketches in the process. Subsequent efforts have involved a lot of guesswork.

3. Vincent, Manuel. Article in El Pais.

4. Hölderlin, Friedrich.

5. Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane, p28.