Sacramental Views: The Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram by Daniel Manheim

At the end of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction ," Walter Benjamin observes that public architecture is prototypical of works of art that are received by an audience in what he calls "a state of distraction," in

which "habit" constitutes the primary manner of appropriating the artifact. "This mode of appropriation," he argues, "in certain cir­cumstances acquires canonical value. For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history can­not be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation."! In other words, architecture, in Benjamin's terms, constitutes not merely a statement of cultural values, but an inter­vention into how those values are construed. Not merely addressing, but positively reconstituting, the shape of urban landscapes and the movements and habits of people, public buildings serve as training grounds in which and because of which transformations of conscious­ness occur. Insofar as they become part of people's· lives, they deline­ate, and to an extent restrict, what it is possible to do in the world.

Thus debates over the legitimacy of architectural styles-particularly for such buildings as schools, churches, and houses of legislature, buildings that should represent the center of a population's conception of its identity-have at times been more politically charged than debates over any other putatively aesthetic consideration. In 1913, Episcopal Bishop Frederick Kinsman (shortly to convert to Roman Catholicism) described the lower Manhattan skyline as a ')umble of

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uneven tops" that are so "huddled together without reference to each other" as to constitute "the ugliest thing in the way of a skyline which any great city can show." Kinsman insisted that the city can be improved only "when this Protestantism in architecture has been Catholicized."2 The language-"uneven tops," "huddled together"­betrays patrician anxieties over changes in the ethnic and class composition of the culture; but what is perhaps even more compelling in Kinsman's image than the politics of "Catholicizing" America is the architectural metaphor itself Anchoring his critique of America's social and religious incoherence in the material composition of American urban civilization, Kinsman displaces the literal source of his anxieties-his sense of disenfranchisement engendered by cultural confusion and rampaging individualism-onto the features of the urban landscape. The buildings become the center of everything wrong with society.

Citing architecture as the most important locus of cultural reform is particularly apt for a reactionary critic who felt that society must be rebuilt according to fundamentally different principles. Kinsman wanted to see a return to buildings like the Capitol in Washington, which represented "the comprehensiveness of view and subordination of detail which our national problems most need" (Kinsman, Protestant, 90). Altering the material composition of the urban landscape itself, Kinsman implies, would provide a basis for altering the disposition of the culture altogether. John Rosenberg points out that in the cultural criticism of such nineteenth-century English ideologues as Augustus Pugin, William Morris, and John Ruskin, architecture was singularly important because it provided "a means of reshaping the national life"-quite literally-and because it provided a form oflabor in which the members of a society actively create the material of their own culture.3 Such reshaped living and laboring involves what Benjamin means by "habit" and "tactile appropriation." Change the ways in which people interact with their cultural environment, and you change the substance of the culture.

As Peter Conn has observed, critical tactics like those of Kinsman and his ancestors, Ruskin and Pugin, were quite common in the early years of the twentieth century.4 Because of its centrality to the ways a society occupies its time and represents itself, architecture frequently served as an index to American society'S moral foundations. Conn notes that "the battle over style has been fought with the weapons of moralizing rhetoric" (200), and quotes such diverse ideologues as Brooks Adams, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Thorstein Veblen discovering evidence of the moral turpitude of whole segments of the culture in

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the materials and forms of its buildings. As often as not, the critic found, like Kinsman, that the villainous tendency in architecture was eclecticism. For Archbishop Kinsman, such eclecticism was a figure at once for cultural heterogeneity and Protestantism; reunification of the architectural landscape would presumably constitute a step toward reunification of the whole culture under one principle, one head, one holy, Catholic, and apostolic church.

His position was elaborated by the architect and fellow Catholic convert, Ralph Adams Cram.5 Born in 1864 the son of a somewhat freethinking New Hampshire Unitarian minister, Cram early on began to identify with his mother's side of the family, fallen gentry of early-New England stock, and delighted in locating nobility in both lines. Flirting in his youth with socialism and royalism while studying architecture during the 1880s in Boston, he grew interested in Catholicism-and in its medieval monuments-while on a trip to Europe in 1889. Upon his return, he converted to Anglo-Catholicism, and subsequently devoted his life, both as a professional architect and as a lecturer and essayist, to grafting the spirit of medieval Europe onto the face of modern America. As the leading member of the firm that designed such Gothic edifices as Saint Thomas's Church and the Cathedral of St.John the Divine in New York; the Graduate College at Princeton and the administration complex at Rice; and several buildings at the U. S. Military Academy at West Point, Cram attempted to restore what he felt was an architecturally Catholic sensibility to the principal medieval centers of cultural authority: the Church, the Academy, and the Military.6

Not content merely to build his own works, however, Cram was an active proselyte for neo-Gothic architecture, serving on a host of academic, institutional, and editorial committees, and he was as disturbed as Kinsman about architectural eclecticism. Complaining from early in his career that in contemporary architecture, "style follows style, as fashion changes," leading to the current situation of "absolutely futile confusion," a "Babel of tongues.'" Cram later went on to broaden his critique of styles into an indictment of the entire culture. He called architecture the "truest history man can record,"8 and sought through his works at least to defy and perhaps to trans­form his historical period. Through a series of polemical essays, mostly written during and shortly after the First World War, America's pre­eminent neo-Gothic architect composed a sometimes astonishingly reactionary denunciation of the modern world and made proposals for cultural regeneration. Cram's polemics could be fiercely reli­gious and ardently political. Aggressive and prolific, his works com-

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Cadet Chapel. Courtesy U.S. Anny.

prise what has been called "the zenith of intellectual reaction in the United States."9

Recently, such cultural historians as Conn and Jackson Lears have noted a connection between Cram's medieval aesthetic and a range of other late-nineteenth-century cultural developments.1o Lears, for example, investigating the attraction of New England Protestants to Catholic forms of worship, identifies Cram as a primary advocate of "religion of beauty," and locates his religious sensibility in the way the beauty of the churches and the sacraments satisfied a "hunger for the miraculous" (202) and combatted a pervasive sense of cultural "weightlessness." It is doubtlessly true that Cram's interest in the sacraments hints at a desire for the miraculous; but Cram was responding to much more than the aridities of his futher's Unitarianism and the banality of nineteenth-century church-building. While he frequently lamented that the modern world was insufficiently "sacramental ," the term has an idiosyncratic meaning in his lexicon, wider than its ecclesiastical usage, with implications that are as much aesthetic as religious. Unlike such converts as Kinsman, who filtered their social criticism through more or less ecclesiastical debates and questions of faith, Cram tended to address religious and social issues as problems of beauty and form. So Lears is in a sense right that for Cram "beauty was an infallible gauge of moral worth" (205). But

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amid fierce debates over eclecticism, beauty was itself a complicated and vexed issue. Cram's aesthetic guide was intensely personal, and was important to him for that precise reason. It authorized interpretations of anything else that came within its orbit. Perfectly coherent within its own terms, Cram's aesthetic sensibility resulted in a political agenda remarkable less for its conservative reaction than for its arbitrariness and authoritarianism.

Always somewhat discontented, Cram came, by the time of the shelling of French cathedrals during the First World War, to detest practically every aspect of his contemporary world. Catholicism, as the oldest and most traditional form of Christianity, especially in its medieval form, became for him the most effective center of resist­ance to what he called the "errors of modernism."11 That he chose Canterbury over Rome is scarcely surprising: the Roman church, due to a "steady change in the personnel of her adherents" and the "contamination of modernism" (Sins 107-8), had fallen away from its former position of spiritual authority. As the church most closely associated with the rising tide of immigration, contemporary Cathol­icism came too close to one of the symptoms of modernism that Cram, a disciple of racist ideologue Madison Grant, most abhorred.12

Thus he preferred the Anglican Church because he felt it had most closely preserved the traditions of medieval Catholicism. The Church in his conception of it, embodied everything he wanted to restore to the present world, and he attributed the magnificence and decorum of medieval art to its Catholic origin, arguing that "the word 'Gothic' as applied to the plastic arts of medievalism is synonymous with the word 'Catholic.' "13 Like Kinsman, Cram invested architectural work with overarching cultural implications, referring to Gothic churches as "the concrete civilization of Catholic Europe."14 For Cram, the Middle Ages, Gothicism, and Catholicism ultimately became three more or less synonymous terms representing a distinctive code for rendering all experience intelligible. The variety of terms arose because what he saw as the central truth of his sensibility, the Gothic "spiritual impulse,"15 could be apprehended spiritually, sensually, socially. The bulk of Cram's polemical writing can be seen as addressing in one way or another the apprehension of this truth.

Gothic architecture represented the production of a Catholicized, and hence democratic, society. The perfection he perceived in medieval art and architecture recorded the temporary resolution of the varied European cultures into "a working whole"-a balanced, organically functioning system-through the operation of and adherence to "one religion and one philosophy" (Heart 13). Medieval

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society's organicism represented the achievement of European history's closest approach to "the democracy of ideal," as opposed to modern "democracy of method," which he deplored. Democracy, when he was not using the term pejoratively, chiefly referred in Cram's political taxonomy to the abolition of privilege. It is a little unclear how he reconciled his calls for the abolition of privilege with his dreamy advocacy of hereditary aristocracy elsewhere,16 but in the general manner in which all his ideas were put forth, the abolition of privilege would, he felt, by gu~ranteeing equal access to all social positions, simultaneously ensure that those with the greatest abilities in a position would rise to that position. In this way proper leadership would be sure to emerge, and skilled, capable technicians would perform all the offices of the society. In the "democracy of method," which he felt had prevailed since the Renaissance, preeminence had been discouraged and mediocrity promoted through a blind insistence upon a "fictitious social equality" (Quest 23), and a presumed universal equivalency of human merit. Human beings had become interchangeable mechanical parts. Cram conceived of people neither as singular, independent practitioners of an occupation nor as indistinguishable gears in a machine, but as parts of a body, each having its own independent motion and individual operation, while at the same time participating in the larger system. His individual is neither autonomous nor subservient, but rather an integral component of a larger organism.

This interdependency of all social functions, according to Cram, meant that what medieval society produced was less for the profit of individuals than for the good of the whole group. In the ideal, organic community, he assumed, production would be generated by genuine and worthy needs rather than the needs' being concocted by the producers themselves. Because the producer would merely be responding to the desires of other members of the social body, there would be no need for the intermediary managers, the capitalist class, except in coordinating roles. The bulk of profit would go to the creator of the product, and all members of the production team would share equally the responsibility for whatever was created. 17

His preeminent example, though not a typical commodity, was the medieval cathedral. Rather than being the product of a single architect who was alone supremely responsible, the cathedral was the cooperative effort of designers, artists, sculptors, artisans, and manual laborers, and each recognized the vital importance of all of the others to the enterprise!8 Like the individuals within society, each member of a production team served as a kind of microcosm of the whole

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system: the creative work that went into each activity was reproduced in every other and represented the creative enterprise of the group.

In short, all of the social systems in Cram's Middle Ages operated as coherent organisms, proceeding upward and outward from local, individual units. The "primary social unit" that served as the model for all social relations and social organizations, from the cathedral­construction team to the militia, was the family. As the paradigm of social structure, it extended in replication through the clan, the vil­lage, the township, and the state, and as the principal locus of author­ity it was replicated in "the guild, the club, the university, the monastery, [and] the order of knighthood" (Siru 27). While Cram rejected the individualism of what he called "political, economic and social anar­chists," he nevertheless insisted that "the essence [of the family] is autonomy and self-government" (Siru 27). In other words, the pri­mary social unit was something at once collective and autonomous, and the individual was empowered only through submission to it. Every other social institution, operating on the family model, sub­mitted to its authorization. "Liberty of action," Cram wrote, "inhere[ d] in the family, the primary unit" (Siru 28), and was surrendered to the larger units only in the smallest measure possible. The state exer­cised only that authority that individual families and the intermedi­ate holders of authority could not exercise; it was, in a sense, the family's deputy. Thus his ideal society for the future, the walled town, modeled on medieval walled towns, would be composed of a collec­tion of independent family units mutually bound by their subscrip­tion to an organically ordered society empowered by the principle offamilial hierarchy.19 Monad-like, the family makes over the entire society in its image.

Throughout Cram's social theories this pattern of parts reflecting the whole recurs, and again and again he celebrates medieval soci­ety for its "human scale." Both notions suggest that society should be corporate, coherent-like a body. Just as architectural eclecticism drove him to advocate a return to the unified style of the Miqdle Ages, cultural multiplicity drove him to advocate a return to a cohesive, ordered, intelligible society. Although his social program involved making the disparate ends of society cohere in a body, his organi­cism is the exact opposite of the tendency toward organization-what Alan Trachtenberg calls "incorporation"2o-that Cram felt had for some time been taking place in many areas of American and Euro­pean society. "Incorporation," rooted in the corpus, would seem to be what Cram was calling for-the gathering of individuals into a body for a common purpose. Instead, however, Trachtenberg's incor-

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poration is closer to what Cram meant by "imperialism." Under the imperialist order, individuals are bound not through true organic incorporation, but through what he called "aggregation," implying a chaotic assemblage of particles. Whereas in the organic society author­ity proceeded from the center, the family, imperialism involves "the working downward of delegated authority from a high and omnipo­tent source" (Sins 17).

In other words, unlike a society of walled towns, in which local units were autonomous, and authority resided at the lowest possible level, under imperialism individuals had grown far removed from the motive and meaning of their occupation, and authority had inevitably become alienated from local centers of activity. Such "aggregation," according to Cram, began to occur between the Renaissance and the Modern Age in the political, industrial and financial spheres. According to the architect's historiography, the degradations of modern history began when the Renaissance and subsequently the Reformation started to replace the cultural unity of the Middle Ages. After the Church began to weaken, in Cram's words, "Renaissance, Reformation, Rebellion, and Revolution followed ... and the fabric of medievalism crumbled to dust" (Church Building 268). With each subsequent stage of cultural dispersion, centralized, "imperial" authority grew stronger, subsuming the power and cultural authority formerly exercised by local organizations.

For many an anti-modern critic of expanding industrial capitalism; from Thomas Carlyle to Charles Maurras, the grave sin involved in this assumption of authority by those with political and financial power was more moral than political. Thus even while Cram acknowledged colonization as a form of imperialism, he insisted that its principle error was its generation of an excess of commodities, and more generally, "an excessive covetousness of wealth" (Sins 74); and he characterized the entire civilization operating under "imperialist" order as "bloated and unwholesome" (Sins 37). In these images of sybaritic debauchery, what is most explicit is the moral tenor, and it indicates the moralistic foundation of his whole anti-imperial polemic. Revising the course of social conduct, the tendency toward social degeneration, that he felt had finally led to the World War would require a repudiation of "the contemporary spirit" ((best 22) and its corresponding moral assumptions. "Salvation," he insisted, "lies only in a fundamental psychological and spiritual revolution in the minds of the mass of men" (Sins 44).

Thus the social reorganization that he proposed according to the plan of a medieval walled town required a corresponding reorgani-

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zation of the moral sense. Taking his title from a movement in the Catholic Church that Popes Leo XIII and Pius X were busy purging, Cram identified the moral sensibilities of a less specifically theologi­cal "modernism," and opposed them to the organicism that charac­terized life in the Walled Town.21 This "modernism" emerged with the fall of the medieval social world. With the beginning of the Ren­aissance, Cram argued, individual distinction began to count more than community benefits, and individual judgment superseded inherited values. Debased religion merged with a more general debasement of value, as it "degenerated through Protestantism to Puritanism, and thus to agnosticism and final materialism" (Quest 24). What the Catholic Middle Ages possessed that the Renaissance abandoned is what Cram called "a super-material standard" (Sins 9), a transcendent principle for the "measuring and determining of all things" (Sins 8). As the "clearly defined motives" of medieval archi­tects were replaced by increasing degrees of "affectation" (Church Build­ing 23), so were the principles guiding every other realm of social action replaced by a multiplicity of private, local, provisional motives. Without a system of transcendent standards, society had, as it were, nowhere to grow but out-nothing to do but to accumulate. Bigger was better. Between rampaging individualism and insatiable acquisi­tiveness, the world became an insane clatter of disparate motives and ideas.

Essentially, then, he criticized the aggregating sensibility itself more than any of its material expressions. Aggregation, effectively a function of individ.ualism, might generate "realism, naturalism, impressionism, or "eclecticism" in art, "agnosticism and rationalism" in philosophy, and "democracy and ... mammonism" in politics; but just as all the goods of the Middle Ages centered in the moral authority of the Gothic spirit, all these latter were manifestations of the same underlying tendency of the post-Gothic world. The essence of that tendency, for Cram, lay in its failure to generate a reliable system of "standards" for determining value and right conduct. In the absence of such a system, he argued, the usual measure of value had come to be the "quantitative standard," a reliance on a "numerical equivalent" (Sins 73) in the determination of value, rather than on "quality"-essential value. Effectively, Cram's search for a single standard of value for all things represented an impulse toward the assimilation of all values into a unified hierarchy of ethical goods, where each value would be a more or less intense reflection of the same interior principle.

Predictably, the neo-Gothic architect modestly proffered as the principle for determining value something that ended up sounding

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St. Thomas Church, New York City. Courtesy Archives of St. Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue.

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quite a bit like pure aesthetic taste. Aesthetics and morals, of course, were joined for him in the Catholic Church. Like many nineteenth­century English and American patricians of Protestant background, all of them more or less under John Ruskin's influence, Cram was initially attracted to the Catholic Church by the sheer beauty of its buildings, forms, and rituals. During an architectural tour of Europe, reeling from his first exposure to medieval architecture, he had been coaxed by an Anglo-Catholic friend into attending a midnight Mass on Christmas Eve in an Italian church (ironically enough he derides it as "Rococo of the most elaborate sort"). Cram describes the event as an almost mystical transformation. He begins by fusing the beauty of the scene with the ardency of the devotees:

[The church] was blazing with hundreds of candles, crowded with worshippers and instinct with a certain atmosphere of devotion and of ardent waiting. For the half-hour after we arrived it was quite stiil except for the subdued rustle of men and women on their knees and the delicate click of rosaries. Then, in their white and gold vestments, the sacred ministers came silently to the high altar, attended by crucifers, thurifers and acolytes, and stood silently waiting.

Then the scene sweeps him away, and his conversion descends upon him with a kind of aesthetic inexorability. He is suffused with sensation:

Suddenly came the bells striking the hour of midnight, and with the last clang the great organs and the choir burst into a melodious thunder of sound; the incense rose in clouds, filling the church with a veil of pale smoke; and the Mass proceeded to its climax with the offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Christ. I did not understand all of this with my mind, but I understood (Life 57).

Incense, organs, bells, choirs-Cram's conversion occurred through an orgy of sensual apprehension, and a consequent repudiation of the effectiveness of rational faculties. Such a confession was generi­cally certified. The revelation of Catholic truth for a great number of American converts around the tum of the century, prepared though it was in the context of social change, ultimately came through sen­sory perception: they were enraptured by a religion that they felt centered in beauty.--

Cram, however, could never wholly separate beauty from religion and morals. Not content to be sensually overwhelmed by medieval building and art, he tried to adduce larger principles from the experience. "Art and religion," he insisted, could not be "dissociated

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without mutual loss, for in its highest estate the former is but the perfect expression of the latter" (Church Building 270); and the Catholic religion was inextricably bound up with medieval social order. Thus, once the beauty of the Church was brought into association with his subsequent polemical requirements, it took on for him less purely sensual implications. Even before this climactic comprehension of Catholic truth, his exploration of Europe's Gothic cathedrals had taught him that he could not "isolate one art from another or these from life" (Life 52), and his later explicit yoking of art and religion led him to believe that evaluation of the cathedrals could be relied upon as a basis for judging the societies that built them, for all art was rightfully "the measure of civilization" (Church Building 1). Thus in his autobiography he deemed beauty "the best test and measure of value that man has at his disposal ... whether in art or religion, philosophy, government, or the social fabric" (Life 52). Beauty became the touchstone of all other values.

If"beauty" is the principle underlying all these regions of human activity, then it must be more or less synonymous with "order," and with "organicism." Without "beautiful ideas," "beautiful modes of life," and "beautiful environment"-all the things that would make up life in walled town-there would be no art (Church Building 2). And as the beautiful object derives from proper scale and inner relation, so must the ugly be somehow disorderly, a "thing of the wrong or evil shape" (Life 52), like, perhaps, the modem world of "slums," "suburbs," "mills," and "railway yards" (Walled Toums 4). Those parts of the material culture that offended Cram's sensibilities became wrong by virtue of that very fact: his aesthetic sense validated his moral sense and his social vision. Each vision at once established and confirmed the validity of the others. What is orderly is beautiful; what is beautiful is of proper scale; what is of proper scale is orderly.

This fundamentally circular conception of beauty again betrays two polemical agendas. First, it emphasizes Cram's extreme conservatism. Since the search for a qualitative standard undergirding social, philosophical, and religious organization prompted him to wish for a class of people not motivated by greed and self-interest-a class cap£\J}le of governing according to something other than what he considered a purely accretive standard of value-he mourned the loss of a hereditary aristocracy. But a more important effect of founding his arguments on such arbitrary reasoning had to do with his religious sensibility itself. To some extent, his question-begging, the argument that disorder is un-beautiful, reduces the set of things to be deemed ordered and organic-and hence of value, worthy of

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preservation-to the set of things that Cram finds beautiful. After all, in a period of architectural eclecticism, with one historical period celebrated after another, the Gothic was simply another form in the whirl of eclectic methods, except insofar as Cram found it most beautiful, hence most ordered, hence most organic, hence most worthy of preservation. One could easily imagine the same claims made by the neo-classicist Thomas Hastings,2' or by Frank Lloyd Wright, who insisted that his buildings were "rational," and that his organicism was "appropriate to modem tools, the machine."24 What justified Cram's method, and by extension not only his entire political and moral program, but his religious sensibility as well, was aesthetic fiat

The arbitrary authority of his aesthetic sense led him to a highly personalized Catholicism. Ultimately Cram's renunciation of the Protestant churches, and his preference for Anglo-Catholicism to the Roman Catholic Church, rested on his sense that the dissenting churches, along with the rest of Europe and America from the Renaissance on, had become, in Cram's terms, irremediably materialistic. The medieval Catholic Church, and Cram's faction within the Church of England from the early nineteenth century on,25 had always preserved its sense of right order by maintaining what Cram calls a "sacramental view of life." Accretive, imperialistic, and materialistic, modem society, in Cram's view, had lost the sense that "man ... is compact of two absolutely different things, matter and spirit" (Sins 84). Although "man approaches ... spiritual things not only through material forms but by means of material agencies" (Sins 87), the revelatory perception, that which will uncover the true quality of the material world, must be animated by a sacramental sensibility. Things do not mean what they seem to mean; they are translated by the converting faculties of the spirit. And only those who possess the appropriate powers of understanding can appraise the world at its true value. Thus, he warned his readers in the preface to The Substance of Gothic to attend to the difference between "substance" and "accidents"-between essences and mere visible forms. The world becomes a mask for its own underlying metaphysic.

There is nothing particularly astonishing about such coded perception from the point of view of any orthodox Christian theology: an enlightened vision always reveals the world to be somehow other than it appears, whether in allegorical, typological, or anagogic terms. But it is significant that Cram's motive for conversion centered here, in a kind of mystical apprehension. Describing his moment of conversion, he moves from an intensely material and sensual survey of the congregation to an apprehension that seems to dematerialize,

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to sublimate the whole scene into pure spirit (See above, 15). As the "men and women on their knees" melt into mysterious "crucifers and thurifers," and then into "bells striking" and a less specific and more impressive "melodious thunder of sound," and finally into "a veil of pale smoke" that issues into "the Body and Blood of Christ," the attention of the new worshipper is at once removed from the material world and enthralled by an almost mystical vision. The new "understanding" he finds at the Rococo church in Italy cannot be apprehended with his "mind." What the mechanics of his description indicate, and indeed enact, is that Cram's sensibility cannot finally be translated into terms referable to what he would call the materialistic modem world. If spirit or substance underlies all things, and only someone properly attuned can perceive it, then the world itself comes to resemble a kind of parable, comprehensible only to the initiated.

That Cram's conversion centers in an immediate intuition of holy mysteries might seem to indicate a more or less conventional Catholic mysticism. But whereas the mystic never claims a desire to abrogate the laws and popular codes of his community, Cram came to regard his sacramental sensibility as entitling him to impose his own codes upon the world, and he imposed them through the medium of his art. To oppose his world's laws with his private sensibility, however, required a language of authority that did not stem from his world and its laws. Wanting, like any social critic, to attain a point outside of his culture in order to criticize it, Cram sought the sponsorship of the immutable Church. The glory of the Middle Ages, for Cram, was that Catholicism was the "creative force" (Life 308) generating so many of the culture's creative energies. Since then, the Church, though shrunk through schism, had nevertheless remained "changeless and stable, resting serene above the vacillations and vicissitudes of human society" (Church Building 4). Thus the artist whose work derives from that "changeless" tradition remains similarly aloft, undivided by the fractured modem sensibility. It is the religious artist who can render change comprehensible through reference to the immutable, by expressing not only "the Church that is one through all ages; but also ... the changes of human life, the variation of environment ... the manifestation through variety; the eternal through the never fixed" (Church Building 13). If every religious work expresses simultaneously the vicissitudes of history-what Cram in The Substance oj Gothic referred to as "accidents"-and the whole "ecclesiastical past" of the Church, then the acts by which the work is created, and by implication all acts by the creators, are relevant at once to the particularities of the moment and to the tradition from which the meaning of those

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particularities derives. They transform the "accidental" materials into the sacramental substance of the creator's vision.

I say "creator's" not "Creator's." Its "unchangeableness" notwithstanding, Cram's Catholic Church was not ultimately as transcendent as one might expect. Shortly after claiming a space for the Church "above the vacillations and vicissitudes of human society," he confesses that the Anglican Church was "established in America at precisely the worst time in the history of this branch of the Catholic Church .... It was left defenceless in the midst of the rushing social events and political conditions ... " (Church Building 4). Those vicissitudes were not so fur off after all. Moreover, while Cram claimed religion as the most reliable sponsor of beauty, he nevertheless argued as well that "beauty is a valid test of religion" (Substance 216, if. Life 52). We are back in the circle. The private, incomprehensible, unassailable sensibility becomes a rebuke not only to the political, economic, social, and moral codes of the culture, but to the religious codes of its own authorizing sponsor; and the sponsor is dependent on the devotee for the formulation and accreditation of its own transcendence. Thus Cram felt compelled to advise the Anglican Church that it had a "duty" to recognize "that a style is good if it exposes the spiritual idea of the power that employs it, the genealogy and the history, the continuity and the blood, the ethnic affiliations, and the temper of a people" (Church Building 265). The style that fulfills these requirements is, of course, his own. While further pursuing the notion of how to fuse the accidents of the Church's history with its substance, Cram is more importantly submitting the immutable Church to his own aesthetic authority.

Thus his private code of value sanctions circular reasoning, self-enclosure. Hermetically sealed, in its own circularity, from the consequences of history, his private vision has no responsibility to history. Complete self-enclosure has always been a fearful possibility at the outer limit of Cram's type of mystical antinomianism. When Milton's antinomian strongman Samson pulls the theatre down on the heads of thousands of Philistines, he does so at the instigation of "rousing motions" that mayor may not have the sponsorship of some transcendent force. 26 To someone outside of Samson's (and Milton's) sensibility-that is, everyone except a tiny "fit audience" of the like-minded-he could only be a horror. Locked forever within his own sensibility, Cram seems some horrific Samson, recklessly obeying private voices.

Instead of pulling down an edifice, however, Cram erected them, seeking to conquer the alien culture not by strength, but by

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insinuation. Although he made a wide range of specific arguments in his polemical essays, his most formidable polemical rejoinder to the voices of his times-and the chief emblem of his sacramental sensibility-was the medieval cathedral itself. Regarding Gothic architecture as the "perfect material expression" (Heart 14) of medieval culture, he located the essence of Gothic cathedrals in their comprehensiveness and subordination of detail, their "organic syntheses." Gothic, he wrote, was "the most physically complicated of any style, with its concentrated loads, its balanced thrusts and its ... arboreal development from roots to trunk, branches, twigs, leaves, and flowers" (Life 182). Each part of the cathedral had its own quality and function , while remaining integral to the function of another part depending on or undergirding it. Some parts might have been more prominent, some of greater beauty, but all were interdependent, and the totality of the work, in its beauty as well as its architectonics, comprised that interdependency. Every work of Gothic architecture was in this sense corporate, a body-in Cram's words, a "living organism" (Six Lectures 3). At once generated and stabilized by its firmly embedded roots, the Gothic cathedral could proceed upward and outward, taking many forms, without ever flying loose from its foundation in heavy Norman limestone and medieval Catholic moral principles.

That the Catholic cathedral was at the center of Cram's idea of medieval moral and aesthetic principles is not surprising; but he also associated the structure's organicism with his conception of the £amily and the walled towns, the building blocks, as it were, of medieval society. At the end of a discussion in The Sins of the Fathers of the family as the primary social unit, he wrote that "like a great cathedral or system of philosophy or other work of art, the social scheme builds itself up, course by course, from its deep laid foundations of the human social unit" (30). Like the cathedral, the social body was "arboreal": each part issued from the central foundation, the famil y, but had nevertheless its own distinctive function, and the identity of the whole was, of course, greater than the sum of its parts. And just as the rigidity and legibility of the social structure assured Cram of the society's moral perfection, the elegance and proportion of the cathedrals helped to assure him that they must have been in every way perfect. The cathedral became for Cram almost a hieroglyph, representing within its tight, locked identity the whole of his vision of the medieval world.

Thus it was in his professional productions that Cram's sensibility was most intensely expressed and his vision of his personal situation within his times most clearly and permanently articulated. For Cram

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did not merely brood over past ages, he tried to restore them to the present by planting their essential representatives, his buildings, in as many places as he could, at the behest of those figures of authority-the Church, the Academy, and the Militia-that he most esteemed. Jackson Lears argues intriguingly that in his insistence on Gothic forms for certain buildings and not for others Cram was advocating a kind of "sacramental eclecticism" in architecture, where the secular works would be eclectic and the sacred ones Gothic (Lears 206). While this notion accurately reflects Cram's disdain for his contemporary culture and its architecture, it falsely implies that Cram felt Gothic and other architecture could coexist rationally in the same field of urban design, or the same imaginative spirit. In fact, Cram's sense that medievalism and modernism were incommensurable and that his own personal vision was inimical to everything in his world did not preclude his confronting and engaging that world. His polemical engagement was less satisfactory, because he had to rely on the linguistic materials of his enemies; the real engagement came through his works. Gothic buildings, employing languages alien to the contemporary dialect of the tribe, somehow must represent both his antinomian rejection of all worldly codes of identity in favor of the incommunicable "rousing motions" of his spiritual sensibility, and his simultaneous desire to transform the world's codes to accord with his own.

Effectively, the paradox centers in the question of agency: who-what spirit or material-sponsors the artist's actions? For again, Cram not only rejected the world's prevalent laws, but also sought to be the transcendent agent of forces larger than himself.27 Generally, when not explicitly ecclesiastical, these ambiguous forces were called "the Gothic Spirit" or "sacramentalism"; but the thirst for transcendence occasionally took other forms. Midway through the chapter on the designing of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Cram's architectural autobiography, he refers to the architect as "a sort of amanuensis," through whom is expressed "something of far greater magnitude and import than his own personality" (Life 176). Seeking the authorization of some transcendent power to validate his creative work, the architect receives the sponsorship of "the creative energy of a time" (Life 176): each generation produces its own distinctive creative terminology and the artist takes dictation.

But of course the "creative energies" of Cram's time dictated to him an artistic message far removed from the time's other energies and general spirit. Ground was broken for Cram's portion of the Cathedral only a few months before the beginning of the First World

Sacramental Views: The Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram 51

Plan of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, N. Y. Reproduced from My Life in Architecture by Ralph Adams Cram (Little Broum & Co. 1939).

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War-an event in which he saw the culmination of the materialistic "Renaissance-Reformation" sensibility (Six Lectures 62). The Cathedral was to repudiate all that was signified by War's turning the "splendid works" of medieval Europe into "embers and ashes" (Six Lectures 56). Thus, shortly after characterizing the architect as an "amanuensis," in describing how he and his fellows had "worked out a general scheme for the entire Cathedral Close" (Life 177), Cram suggests the arena of the church to be a kind of space directly opposed to his time's spirits. The most striking feature of the scheme was to have been a row of low buildings running along llOth Street and around Amsterdam Avenue up as fur as the steps leading to the west entrance, then resuming along the north and east boundaries of the close until the area became completely "enclosed and set apart from the tumultuous secular city without" (Life 179). The Cathedral, he insisted, was planned as a kind of "walled town," and almost monastic sanctuary for retaining a saving remnant of culture from the forces of attrition on the outside. In these terms, instead of revising socially accredited systems of meaning, Cram's church would provide a fearful refuge from them, apparently acknowledging the superior potency of the secular forces that opposed it. Religious space would be sealed off from other spaces, and religious experience, by implication, would not partake of the kind of secular experience prevailing outside of the cloistered walls.

Thus the plan reveals a curiously contradictory conception of what the role of public architecture, and of the architect, ought to be. Inspired by the world in which it was to emerge, along lines intended as a specific rebuke to that world, the Cathedral nonetheless contained none of the world's elements. Somehow it was to be a transcendent artifact that remained operative in the transcended world. But such a motive need not be contradictory. Cram not only praised the similarly composed walled towns of the past but avidly promoted them for the future: he proposed that they could reject the "roar of industrial civilization" through a restoration of "small human units" animated by the "philosophy of sacramental ism" (Walled Toums ll, 19). "Sooner or later," he wrote, "men, women and children will seek refuge in the walled towns they will build, as they have gone time out of mind, into the monasteries and convents of religion"; but in order "to correct this silly artifice, to obliterate this preposterous, wrong-headed and insecure way of life."28 In other words, the walled towns, essentially monastic, would be conceived precisely in repudiation of the values of the secular world, and would by their very presence-by offering "that real and wholesome and joyful and simple and reasonable

Sacramental Views: The Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram 53

living that has long been forbidden by the conditions of modem civilization" (Towns 36)-serve as an antidote to the outside world.

The Cathedral, proposed as a walled town, would presumably (if Cram had had his way with it) have functioned in the same way. Situated in the middle of America's largest city, but perched on the city's highest hill, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine was to be at once a repudiation of the city's landscape and a revision of it. And since Cram conceived Gothic architecture to contain within itself the formula of ideal society and ideal conduct, it would revise not only the material world, but the society, culture, and spirit of its inhabitants. To recall Benjamin's claim regarding architecture: public buildings are appropriated by people less through visual reception than through habit of use; and this mode of appropriation is simultaneously a mode of inculcation, for buildings intervene in people's lives, their habits of existence. In effect, Cram's churches, graduate colleges, and public buildings were designed to confer upon the world new patterns of sense and habit new codes of ritual. Ritual, the ordered, material formulation of faith, was for Cram the central connecting point between beauty and order. His definition of ritual, comprehending both the forms of the space and the behavioral patterns enacted, reveals the almost totalitarian principle of his cultural agenda. Ritual is "the using of the arts of sound and colour and form and rhythm and harmony, organized by order and law, to influence the souls of men through their senses" (Quest 96). To "influence the souls of men" one must reorganize one's own aesthetic sense, movements, and notions of order.

Taken together, all of Cram's incorporating enterprises-seeking a standard of organization for society, conduct, and desire, and locating this standard in the arbitrarily organizing principles of his own aesthetic sensibility-represent a desire to make over the whole world as a reflection of his own mind; and he enacted that desire in his architectural projects. Since Gothic architecture was not merely analogous to medieval society, but unfurled according to the same moral and aesthetic principles, whoever constructed a Gothic cathedral would be introducing into the body of the world a kind of medieval virus, which would replicate itself in all of the culture's other systems of material and psychological organization. Just as the medieval cathedral-the authoritative guide, as it were, for medieval society, moral conduct, and aesthetic sensibility-enacted within its forms all that was most perfect about the medieval world, Cram attempted in his architectural constructions to realize his vision of medieval society on the face of modem America. He envisioned that, as his walled

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towns spread, the "solitary" would draw around him "first a handful, then a horde"; and "the damp cave or the wattled hut" would give way "to multitudinous buildings and spacious cloisters and the tall towers of enormous churches" (Walled Towns 103), until finally "more and more would ... be drawn within their magical circuits, greater and even greater would become their number, and at the last the new wonder would be accomplished and society once more redeemed" (Walled Towns 105).

This redemptive project is strikingly similar to what Frank Lentricchia refers to in Ariel and the Police as a "will to refine," or, quoting William James, as the desire of the theorist and the imperialist alike to "plant our order" amid a putatively disorganized world.29

Planting not a city but a cathedral upon a hill, Cram sought to transform his entire world into an extension of the theoretical center of his private sensibility.30 Thus it is not surprising that Cram, anti-imperialist though he claimed to be, was pleased by the presence of Great Britain in India, France in Algeria, the United States in the Philippines, and Japan in Korea. These empires had "brought order out of chaos" in the less developed countries (Sins 24). Their "will to refine," even if Cram could not entirely assent to all the refinements, is analogous to Cram's less plausible, but equally hubristic, desire to impose his vision of an ideal culture; for the buildings, he believed, were material realizations of the theoretical motives that founded his sacramental philosophy. In effect he proposed to do for America what he had set out to do for St.John the Divine when he inherited the rudimentary work of prior architects in 1911: "to Gothicize what already existed" (Life 172).31 D

Notes 1. Walter Benjamin, lliuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed., translated by Harry

Zohn (1955; New York 1969),240. 2. FredericJoseph Kinsman, Catholic and Protestant (New York 1913), 89-90. 3. John Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin's Genius (New York

1961),52-3. 4. Peter Conn, The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898-1917

(New York 1983), 197-229, esp; 197-203. 5. Although Kinsman converted from Anglo-Catholicism to Roman Catholi­

cism, while Cram converted to Anglo-Catholicism, the difference is not so signifi­cant as would appear. As a cle ric, Kinsman was involved in ancient doctrinal issues that made the Anglo-Catholic Church appear much more Protestant than it would have to Cram, who approached the apostolic churches as an agnostic Unitarian. Moreover, Cram distinguished clearly between the Anglican Church's "Protestantism"

Sacramental Views: The Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram 55

and its "Catholicism," the latter being a force "instrumental in the recrudescence of Christian art" (editorial in Christian Art, vol. VI, no. 5 [August 1907], 235).

6. The only full-length biography of Cram is Robert Muccigrosso, American Gothic: Ralph Adams Cram (Washington 1980).

7. Church Building (1899; rev. ed., Boston 1924),3. 8. Heart of Europe (New York 1915), 13. 9. Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America (New York 1955), 168. The few

critics who have discussed Cram's social criticism have focused on either his conservatism or his medievalism. Those who regard Cram chiefly as a medievalist tend to be interested primarily in his importance in the history of American architecture (see Robert Muccigrosso, "Ralph Adams Cram: The Architect as Communitarian," Prospects I, [1975]; Douglas Tucci, Ralph Adams Cram: American Medievalist [Boston 1975]; Albert Bush-Brown, "Cram and Gropius: Traditionalism and Progressivism," New England Quarterly 21 [March 1952]; and Arthur Tappan North, Ralph Adams Cram, Contemporary American Architecture Series [New York 1931]), whereas among analysts of American conservatism, Cram has tended to receive scant mention, usually in the service of some thesis relatively remote from Cram's most central concerns. See, for example, David Spitz, Patterns of Anti-Democratic Tlwught (New York 1949) who lets Cram speak for all those who locate the failure of democracy in its valorization of the average person, and virtually ignores his medievalism, aestheticism, and faith (100-129, esp. 100-103). See also Allen Guttmann, The Conservative Tradition in America (New York 1967), 141-2; and Robert Crunden, From Self to Society, 1919-1941 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1972), 164-167.

10. The Divided Mind, 203-214; T.Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace (New York 1981),202-209.

II. These are the general subject of The Sins of the Fathers (Boston 1918). 12. Cram spent several pages in The Nemesis of Mediocrity (Boston 1917, 35-40)

discussing Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race, (New York 1916), in which the latter analyzes the various races of Europe and details in a mixture of coldly scientific tones and apocalyptic implications the dangers of miscegenation and of the "mongrelization" of the Nordic race.

13. Cram, Thomas Hastings, and Claude Bragdon. Six Lectures on Architecture. Scammon Lectures for 1915; first published Chicago, ]917; 44.

14. Cram, The Substance of Gothic, Six Lectures on the Development of Architecture from Charlemagne to Henry VIII; delivered at the Lowell Institute in 1916; first published, Boston 1925; xxii.

15. The Gothic Q!.lest (New York 1907), 57. 16. See, for example, Sins 60-62 and The Gothic QJ.test 23. 17. If this sounds faintly socialist, one should remember that such conservatives

as Cram maintained a more or less Jeffersonian suspicion of centralization, disdaining capitalism and socialism alike. Cram, of course, frequently insisted he deplored socialism for its elimination of private property and of "sacred" individuality (as opposed to individualism). See Towards the Great Peace (Boston 1922) 64-65, and Sins 40-\.

18. Accordingly, Cram described his own architectural firm, despite its changing personnel, as an "indivisible unit ... cooperating on all problems-with surprising unity, considering the diversity in point of character, taste, and talents." My Life in Architecture (Boston 1935),80.

19. Walled Towns (Boston 1919). 20. In The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New

York 1982), Alan Trachtenberg'S "incorporation" refers not only to institutions, but

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to "the reorganization of perceptions as well." Thus he discusses "not only the expansion of an industrial capitalist system across the continent . . . the spread of a market economy into all regions of ... a 'distended society,' but also ... the remaking of cultural perceptions this process entailed" (3). The corporate body of America reflected an increasingly corporate mind.

2l. After listing some thirty inspirational personalities from his youth, he writes, "Looming over all ... was the ivory image of Leo XIII" (Life 7). On the Modernist movement in the Catholic Church, see Alec R Vidler, The Modernist Movement in the Roman Church (Cambridge, Eng., 1934), and Paul Sabatier, Modernism (London 1908).

22. Ruskin himself, however, had written fleetingly of those who were "lured into the Romanist Church by the glitter of it, like larks into a trap by broken glass; . . . blown into a change of religion by the whine of an organ-pipe; stitched into a new creed by gold threads on priests' petticoats;jangled into a change of conscience by the chimes ofa belfry" (quoted in Rosenberg, 59).

23. Whatever we now build," argued Hastings, "whether church or dwelling, the law of historic development requires that it be Renaissance, and if we encourage the true principles of composition it will invariably be modern Renaissance" (Six Lectures 106).

24. Frank Lloyd Wright, A Testament (1957; New York 1972), 160. For both Cram and his politically and architecturally opposite contemporary, the language of organicism comes most directly from Ruskin. John Rosenberg quotes Ruskin's creed that "all beautiful lines are adaptations of those which are commonest in the external creation" (Rosenberg 72); and he finds a strong echo of this in Wright's effort to "make of the tree a building and of the building a tree" (ibid). Cram, despite these rhetorical affinities, disapproved of Wright from early on, deeming him "exceedingly 'modernist' and emancipated" (Impressions of japanese Architecture [1905; rev. ed., Boston 1930]72).

25. See note 5. A staunch Anglo-Catholic, he refers to the American Episcopal church as the "American branch of the Anglican communion of the Catholic Church" (Church Building 43).

26. John Milton, Samson Agonistes, I. 1382, injohn Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, Merritt Hughes, ed. (Indianapolis 1957), 584.

27. For a definition of the ideal of "transcendent agency" in turn-of-the-century America, see Howard Horwitz"s "The Standard Oil Trust as Emerson ian Hero," Raritan 6 (Spring 1987),97-119.

28. Walled Toums 43. According to Cram's "vibratory theory of history," every five hundred years or so since the beginning of the Christian era there has been a resurgence of monasticism in response to tendencies toward chaos in the secular civilization.

29. Frank Lentricchia, Ariel and the Police (Madison, WI, 1988), 113-14. Lentricchia finds in Wallace Stevens' "Anecdote of the Jar" an astonishing analogy to America's desire to "take dominion" over the Philippines and, later, over Vietnam. Citing Michael Herr's analogy of the American combat base at Khe Sanh to Stevens's 'Jar in Tennessee"-both, says Herr, "took dominion everywhere"-he shows the similarity of both images to William James's assault on traditional theory. Philosophy, for James, was like "a kind of marble temple shining on a hill," and James sought to liberate the "tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed" world of the street from its "simple, clean, and noble" restrictions (Lent 113).James, Herr, and Stevens all show the invasion of an uncharted, alien, and, from the point of view of the refiner,

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apparently dissolute world by a more or less antiseptic structure that severely abridges its hitherto almost boundless and locally authorized universe of reference. A devotee of Gothic architecture might resist characterizing Cram's cathedral as "antiseptic"; yet just as Stevens's jar "does not give of bird or bush" and is hermetically sealed against intrusion, the cathedral was to be empty of all things of the world, transforming the world by refusing all its identities.

30. Lentricchia sees John Winthrop, in the trial of Anne Hutchinson, transforming the "city upon a hill" of his "Christian Charity" address into a "metaphor of the imperial city .. . a structure of male authority, purity (Puritanism) in action" (ll5). Here, ironically, it is the antinomian, not the civil magistrate, who attempts to impose the imperialistic order.

31. The subsequent history of St John'S, of course, has not conformed to Cram's vision. As Alfred Kazin observes, "the cathedral is now as ecumenical as it is possible for an Episcopalian to be in torrentially multiracial New York. Jewish intellectuals have been invited to address the faithful; there is a memorial right off the main door to Indian victims in Central America. Late in 1987 memorial services for James Baldwin filled the mighty church . The tributes to Baldwin offered on that occasion by Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and other black artists were as bitter and 'revolutionary' about American society as it is possible to be. In 1967 the then bishop of New York announced that the cathedral might never be completed but its staff would devote its energies to the poverty in the community surrounding it." Alfred Kazin, "American Gothic," in The New York Review of Books (November 23, 1989),45-6.

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Ralph Adams Cram

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