Sacral Town-Planning
Al
http://www.orthodoxengland.btinternet.co.uk/v07i2.htm
Excerpt from: Volume 7 Issue 2 Date 1st December 2003
Sacral Town-Planning
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. I had not seen
Fr Lev face to face since 1976, when in early 1990, as soon as
possible after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, he came to our home. Here
he showed me his plans and documents, which I immediately photocopied
and sent to Bishop Hilarion in New York. (We still feared that
'perestroika' would be followed by 'perestrelka' [the firing-squad]).
However, I was also able to point out to Fr Lev what he did not and
could not know: that in the early, i.e. Orthodox, West, the same sort
of town-planning operated, for example in Gaul, northern Italy and
England. 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.
Bristol
Bristol provides a classic example of a later sacred town-plan. Built
on untouched land on the north bank of the River Avon from the eighth
century on, by the eleventh century it was the most important city in
the West of England. To the south of Bristol ran the River Avon, to
the north the River Frome. Bristol was built within an elliptical wall
between these two natural features, with the north and south sides of
the wall touching on the two rivers. It presented then the form of a
circle. Within the circle, roads running north, south, east and west,
formed the sign of the cross. Thus the whole plan was that of a cross
within a circle, symbolising that the Cross triumphantly dominates the
Universe. At the centre of the cross of streets, there stood a
preaching cross, set up on steps. (This cross was taken down in the
eighteenth century amid much popular protest that something vital was
being removed from the town). The preaching-cross was faced by four
churches, one in each corner of the City. In Bristol today there
survive only two of these: All Saints and Holy Trinity (now called
Christ Church). The two surviving churches are typical city centre
dedications, emphasising the centrality of the Holy Trinity and all
the saints. Close to the centre are other churches. These include St
Mary le Port - the Mother of God stands close by, but apart from, the
Holy Trinity. To the north of the city, outside the walls on high
ground, nearer to Heaven, stands the church of Bristol's Guardian
Angel in the form of the church of 'St Michael on the Mount Without'.
At the northern entrance to the City, St John the Divine keeps watch
in his church, 'St John on the Wall'. By the old port, almost opposite
the church of St Mary le Port, stands the church of St Nicholas, the
Patron-Saint of seafarers. Another church standing inside the city
walls is St Peter's, which looks out towards the castle and its
dungeons, witnessing to St Peter in chains. Standing guard on the
outskirts of Bristol (as around Canterbury and so many other towns and
cities), there were until the 'Reformation' monasteries. Around
Bristol these were dedicated to St Augustine, St Mark, St Bartholomew
and St James.
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.
*****
1 For the universalist symbolism of this church, see the Editor's 'The
Saints of Russia and the Universality of Orthodoxy', p. 268 of
Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition, 1995 and 1997.
___________________________
This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from
http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm