St John the Unfinished - thoughts on Cathedrals

During my visit to New York City last week, I finally got round to a long-postponed pilgrimage. I took the Subway up to 110th Street to visit what may be the largest Gothic Cathedral ever built. It depends to some extent on how you measure size. It also depends on whether they ever finish it (It is in a way encouraging to know that Cologne Cathedral, similarly vast, was finished in the 19th century after a gap of several centuries, when the original mediaeval plans were rediscovered) .

 

I suspect most visitors to Babylon-on-the Hudson don’t even know that the Cathedral of St John the Divine ( also known as the ‘Cathedral of St John the Unfinished’) exists. It crouches enormously at the frowsy top end of Central Park, well beyond the normal tourist zones, in an area that I was long ago told wasn’t very safe (this may once have been so, but I am reliably informed that it isn’t now, and it seemed fine to me in the blaze of noon).

 

Readers here will know that I collect Cathedrals. I am now repeating a project I began many years ago to visit all the proper English cathedrals. But I am fairly sure I shall never complete my tally of foreign ones  I recently added Aachen to my list (and very unusual and startling it is too, as is that charming, unexpected city). I still need to see several of the great German ones, have hardly started on France and have not begun at all on Spain. These buildings are the most astonishing products of human thought rightly described as ‘frozen music’. Like the great art galleries, only more so because they involve so many more senses, they  compel you to think, consider and recognise the extent of your ignorance about your own culture and history.

 

They are also an expression of something very important – the declaration that the material world is not everything, that belief and faith, poetry, literature and music can raise the human mind to levels it will not reach when it is building a factory or a block of flats. That is why the old East Germany forbade the building of churches in new towns and housing estates. All blank-sheet utopias rely utterly on the view that man is a material object like any other, which can be formed by human will into what authority wishes him to be. That is why they hate the religious insistence that man is created in the image of God, and is fundamentally unalterable. The furious atheism of the left is not an accident or a by-product. It is integral.

 

But back to St John the Unfinished. In some ways like Scott’s mighty Anglican cathedral in Liverpool, this building is the last gasp of the Gothic. Not that it was originally meant to be – its original design was Byzantine – which can clearly be seen by the traveller as he approaches the colossal building and views the monstrous exposed arches on its flanks. The astonishing 50-foot granite columns that dominate the interior are also so huge that the mind reels at the task of quarrying and raising them.   From some angles, it looks like a wounded beast, raw and unfinished, and things were not helped by a  serious fire a few years ago. There is an air of shabbiness about parts of the site which do not really accord with the magnificence of the idea.   Yet amid the melancholy, parts of its west front are astonishing, covered in extravagant sculptures which would not look out of place in Chartres, and enhanced by enormous bronze doors adorned with Biblical scenes in relief. One chapel, dedicated to St Columba, is especially moving because of the many quotations from Durham cathedral in its arches and pillars, and because of the stained glass which gives it a special quiet light.  

 

It is well worth a visit for certain, should you be nearby. It cannot possibly leave any visitor unmoved. But what struck me most about it was that it unintentionally represented the failure of old-fashioned Anglican Christianity in the USA. In the late Victorian and Edwardian days of its design and beginnings, the Episcopal Church was still a great force in American thought and culture, its prayers and traditions (very similar to those of England) known and understood by the well-off WASP middle classes to which it preached and who paid for St John’s, consciously seeing it as a rival to the far better-known (and more centrally-placed) Roman Catholic fortress of St Patrick’s.

 

Now, as here,  that sort of sceptical, thoughtful, educated, serious religious belief has largely faded into agnosticism and liberal politics (Roman Catholic contributors and stern evangelicals will of course inform me here that this problem is inherent in such a wishy-washy church.  I shall just politely say that I disagree, and mention softly that all churches of all types are tempted by worldliness at one time or another and in one way or another).  The original builders’ ambitions remain unfulfilled because the tide of belief has gone out, far out,  and seems in no hurry to turn. Here is one of the most important cities in the English-speaking world, famous for its extravagant architecture (and its enormous wealth) and it has never completed the construction of a building which would have represented Anglican Christianity among the towers of Mammon.  

 

Ruins, as we all know, have a great power to disturb the mind with musings about what was once there and has gone forever. But vast unfinished structures are even more thought-provoking.  Who knows what turns history may take. I remember the old Gendarmenmarkt (Platz der Akademie as it was then)  in Communist East Berlin, whose twin cathedrals were abandoned and neglected so completely that trees grew out of their derelict towers. Now they are restored and the trees are gone. I also remember the curious open air swimming pool near the centre of Moscow, steaming amid the snow, which had once been the site of the great cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which was dynamited (a picture of this appalling event exists) on Stalin’s orders by Lazar Kaganovich in 1931. This was done partly out of anti-Christian spite, partly for plunder and partly to make way for a grotesque ‘Palace of the Soviets’ which was never completed because the ground turned out to be too soft to take its weight.

 

Kaganovich, to everyone’s amazement,  turned out to be still alive in the Gorbachev era (he died in July 1991),  and was much annoyed when journalists started to ring him up in his secluded elite flat in the sinister ‘House on the Embankment’, to ask him to reminisce about the old days of man-made famines and purges, when he and Nikita Krushchev had built the Moscow Metro with slave labour.  Kaganovich is said to have invented the nasty metaphor ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’, to justify his murderous career – to which Arthur Koestler later replied ‘Yes, comrade,  I see your broken eggs, plenty of them – but where exactly is your omelette?’

 

Now, when I return to Moscow,  I am pleased to see that the Cathedral has been rebuilt where it formerly stood. Its ghostly presence had lingered in the steam of the swimming pool, and its former worshippers must have laughed at the failure to complete the Soviet Palace, and the defeated decision of the Bolsheviks to turn the resulting hole in the ground into a scrofulous Lido full of bad-tempered, wallowing old ladies in bathing-caps. And now it is back, a lesson to anyone who thinks that the new Russia is the same as the old USSR. It is fundamentally different, and the rebuilding of that dynamited church shows how and why. Perhaps one day the Cathedral of St John the Divine will be finished, towers and all, and if it is we will know that the USA, too, has changed in a  fundamental way.