Whitewashing the Faith
When traveling, it’s the churches I want to see. The old ones, big and small, nestled in the cleft of city centers or country towns, bathed in centuries of prayer and worship. Walking among their walls, kneeling in their chapels—a person cannot help but sense the reverence of those that hewed the stones, took brush to wall, glass to frame, chisel to wood and marble.
Sometimes, in passing by a column, I let my hand run along its surface. I wonder at the lives of the men who shaped it long ago, how they might have loved God, their desire to build a house of worship for His people—one that in its very shape proclaims the gospel and otherness of Him in whom “we live and have our being.” And this proclamation especially on the art-adorned walls and ceilings: the life of Christ in His saints, “such a great cloud of witnesses,” that old and always communion, evidence of things unseen; a mosaic or fresco of Christ, perhaps, vaulted overhead in a dome—His hands welcoming, or offering a blessing to all who pass below.
In such places I feel small, no matter what size the building. Somehow, these churches preserve the largeness of God—the very space calling to mind the famed words of St. John the Baptist: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” Looking into the eyes of the faithful departed, vibrant in paint, glass and colored tile—I remember that I am not alone, and that the family of God extends hand to hand through the depths of time. Kneeling, I kneel with them. Singing, I sing with all of heaven and earth.
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Not everyone has this experience. Otherwise the saints would not be swathed in whitewash and masked by plaster in many old churches. Published today by First Things is an article entitled “Those Whitewashed Walls” by Matthew J. Milliner. The author recounts a recent research trip to Nicosia (Cyprus) where he discovered the demise of ancient churches, now in ruins or converted to mosques. Milliner’s observations lead him to reflect on experiences of churches in the west.
The whitewashed mosques of Nicosia bear an uncanny resemblance to the Protestant churches of Amsterdam. A most famous example is Amsterdam’s Oude Kerk which, in 1566 and 1578, was whitewashed by Protestant enthusiasts (with the exception of ceilings they couldn’t reach). It might seem a low blow to suggest that a church nestled among prostitution booths has not fulfilled its call to be salt and light in the surrounding community. However, recent visitors to the Oude Kerk know better than to exempt it from responsibility. On a visit there in 2005, I witnessed risqué art exhibits in the sanctuary space—a trend that, I learned from a more recent visitor, has escalated to include a near-pornographic video installation. The saturation, one might suggest, is complete. Odd how Protestant iconoclasm—initially a sometime good-intentioned attempt to rid the church of idolatry—has in retrospect paved the way for her to resemble the temples of Aphrodite where prostitutes once lined the sanctuary as well.
Next, Milliner briefly turns his attention to North American churches, highlighting one that clearly (if you’ve spent any time in a good amount of churches) is representative of many.
One would like to think that America, having largely missed the glories of church decoration in the first place, is exempt from such whitewashing. But my recent visit to a church in the Boston area proved otherwise. After the scandals that rocked that diocese, an Evangelical congregation was able to purchase an impressive Catholic church in a prime neighborhood. I visited the church one Sunday to see what they had done with the space. The barrel vault is now naked white, and soundboards hang from the ceiling to facilitate the acoustic rock-worship. The church has been completely reoriented, or to be etymologically exact, disoriented. The eastern end, where the apse and altar once were, has been refitted as an entrance, lined with flashy welcoming literature. This takes seeker-sensitivity to an entirely new level: In the holiest part of the sanctuary now stands the newcomer. In early Church history, catechumens were asked to leave during the Eucharist (the disciplina arcani), and now, following the apotheosis of the seeker, they have almost replaced it. A look upwards reveals another accommodation made to those uncomfortable with the privileging of saints. While a strip of original artwork in the church mercifully survived, the communio sanctorum that had once filled the apse has been, following the Nicosia-Amsterdam school of church decoration, plastered over.
Ten years ago, I wonder if I would have cared about such whitewashing. I might have been satisfied with a regurgitated line or two about idolatry or wasting money as justification for keeping the walls free of color (let alone murals and the like). And I would have completely missed the point, to be honest, neither knowing nor comprehending the ethos of architecture and art (particularly iconography) in worship. Having visited several cathedrals and parish churches in various parts of the world—Anglican, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian—I have come to appreciate this iconic approach to bringing the truth of our faith into physical expression.
In her essay, “The Christian Imagination,” Janine Langan notes that “the Christian imagination is iconic. It seeks to reflect faithfully the face of the Beloved.” And regarding the person employing his imagination to create sacred art: “The iconic imagination wishes its individuality erased, the better to allow Christ’s person to take over. It seeks transparency so as to orient the viewer to the self-revealing Invisible One and establish contact with the prototype of its work. It offers itself to the fire of love like glowing iron, sure of the divine power to transfigure matter, to glorify the body. It has one aim, Marian in nature: to give flesh here and now to the Holy One.”
There’s an old saying that icons—depictions of saints and Christ for the purpose of enriching Christian worship—do with paint what Scripture does with words. They engage our minds in a way that listening or reading cannot.
Like any good thing, art can be abused. Misplaced faith or ignorance can lead to misuse or gross distortions in practice. But this shouldn’t preclude any use of sacred images or architecture in the life of the Church.
In the destruction of images, there is not love but fear. Such activity has historically been tied to a denial of the goodness of creation—the earth and the human body—and unorthodox views of Christ’s dual natures. There is destruction of memory and a tendency toward reductionism that can leave the faith puddle-deep and as inspiring as white-painted walls.
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After visiting churches around the world and gladly discovering restorative efforts going on, Milliner appears to have found hope. In some cases, the whitewash and plaster have preserved these ancient works of devotion.
Saints…have a marvelous track record of rebound. In Ohrid for the last leg of my research trip, I entered the massive basilica of St. Sophia, perhaps the most important site of Slavic Christianity. The walls there too had also been covered, owing to the time when the church had served as a mosque under Ottoman rule. Perhaps it was only this whitewash that enabled them to survive. A thorough cleaning in 1949 uncovered acres of extremely rare 11th century frescoes, a cloud of whitewashed witnesses, now revived.
Milliner concludes that “all is not lost then for Nicosia mosques, Amsterdam churches, and New England worship centers, granting that the heroic, underappreciated profession of fresco restoration endures. In the meantime, however, a lesson of both Church and art history emerges: Whitewashing images of old saints is an effective way to prevent new ones.”
I’m probably not the one to make an apology for such things. I’m not a theologian, an architect, historian, artist or anything that would qualify me. I can only speak of my own experience, and express my hope that others will find what I have in decorated churches (though it’s so much more than that) both large and small. I can only speak of my own ignorance and that which I assumed about sacred images, architecture and the people that used them. They were simply not true and born out of wrong judgment and misinformed generalizations.
Art within the life of the Church, as it has been handed down through the centuries, encourages the faithful to remember God first of all, and the communion of saints—living and active in Christ, those here and those resting with Him. It preserves knowledge of ourselves, our collective memory, and reminds us that we stand on the shoulders of great men and women. We are not alone.
The Christian life is more than reading and thinking. God gave us mouths to taste, noses to smell, ears to hear, and eyes that we might see.