Somebody in the South Thanet constituency association of UKIP referred on Twitter to a photograph of Westminster Cathedral as a mosque. The Guardian and many others are taking this slip terribly seriously. How much UKIP is hated - the verb is exact - and feared. Our rulers are very insecure about their hegemony.
It is an understandable mistake - nothing looks less English than neo-Byzantine Westminster Cathedral and after the Hagia Sofia in Constantinople was turned into a mosque this great Byzantine church became the model for the design of mosques to the present day.
In fact Catholic churches can never be national monuments. We are an odd, subversive foreign institution in the eyes of our Protestant compatriots, not part of English life, though we created England. I like this, the feeling of being an outsider that we share with Communists (it's not the only thing).
Of course Pugin, the fanatically Catholic architect who designed the Houses of Parliament, thought Gothic was the only true Catholic architectural style but it is not accidental that the two most famous and most loved Catholic churches in London, the Brompton Oratory and Westminster Cathedral, are not English Gothic but Italian baroque and Italian Byzantine respectively.
I love Westminster Cathedral more than any church in England, even though it is not nearly the most beautiful. Even though someone aptly said the interior resembles the bathroom department in Harrod's.
I loved it since I went there aged three for the first time. Even though the Masses are mostly in English it does not feel like the modern low church Catholic Church. It is intensely, giddily spiritual, unlike the much more beautiful St. Paul's, which is as spiritual as a garden shed. The Abbey, like other medieval Anglican churches, has the faintest trace of spirituality, which is all that remains of its Catholic origins, buried by restraint, good taste, national monuments and moth-eaten flags.
I go to Westminster Cathedral whenever I am in London, even on brief visits. Possibly its un-Englishness it part of what draws me. Perhaps it reminds me that the only genuinely religious emotion that the English ever experience is hatred of Catholicism.
I wonder which is hated more, Catholicism or UKIP.
Paul, perhaps the effect of the "protest vote for UKIP" has had the desired impact on the main parties: of scaring them witless. And I mean witless.
ReplyDeleteGood post tho this is wrong
ReplyDelete"after the Hagia Sofia in Constantinople was turned into a mosque this great Byzantine church became the model for the design of mosques to the present day."
Dome of Rock, Umayyad palaces etc were almost exclusively Byzantine. It could be argued that Islam started miming Byzantium at the start until it later flavoured it with its own genius.
Henry Hopwood
Your comment about the English hating Catholicism set me thinking. Of course, it was not always so. Until Henry VIII renounced Roman Catholicism and plundered the assets of the Catholic church in England (for purely personal reasons!), England had since the arrival of Christianity upon its shores adhered to the Catholic church. But the English have always had a strong non-conformist, even puritanical streak that sits uneasily with the pomp and circumstance of Catholicism. I remember as a small boy of perhaps 9 or 10 entering for the first time our local Roman Catholic church, in a small town in northern England. I was surprised by the decorations and ornamentation of the church - so different from the plain exposed stone and whitewashed interior of the Church of England establishment to which our mother took me and my siblings. In fact, even to me at that age it felt alien, foreign. Perhaps that is one of the problems of the Catholic church in England: it is based on southern European religious concepts that include opulent decoration and ornamentation of its places of worship. This is quite out of kilter with English non-conformist traditions, particularly in the north of England, where such decoration is regarded as a distraction from devout worship. of A friend of mine, a stern Protestant, once visited a church in southern Spain that was sumptuously decorated, with large quantities of gold leaf and paintings in rich colours. He said to the priest, how can the church justify such a rich display to its congregation, which was largely drawn from an abjectly poor district? The priest's reply was that the church represented an earthly indication of the riches to come in the after-life; not a view that would find ready acceptance in England.
ReplyDeleteAfter the Catholic hierarchy was restored in 1851 Old Catholic families complained about the Italian pronunciation of Latin being used in the Mass rather than the traditional English pronunciation which we still use in words borrowed from Latin like 'alibi', etc. But medieval churches in England in Catholic times were as elaborately, even gaudily, decorated as any on the continent. See Pugin's church of St Giles at Cheadle, his masterpiece and the only time he had enough money to play with. That church is more like a medieval Catholic church than any real medieval church after the Reformation.
DeleteThe Spanish priest was right. Unfortunately the late Cardinal Heenan, when he was Archbishop of Liverpool, took another view and decided not to build Lutyens's wonderful projected cathedral because he could not, he said, have looked the poor of Liverpool in the face had he done so. I am glad they did not think like that when they built Chartres.
So the English are uncomfortable about the pomp and circumstance of Catholicism - where it exists for the glory and honour of the King of Kings, yet have boundless attachment (to this very day) to the pomp and circumstance of the local Kings and Queens. I wonder what this says about the English.
DeleteMy own observation would be that English Protestantism, like any other Protestantism, gives with one hand and takes away with the other, and couldn't give a fig about being consistent.
That is Erastianism.
DeleteIt must be remembered that Thanet is a terribly backward part of Kent. But what does it matter?
ReplyDeleteHugo
Of course the ridicule and scorn poured on this mistake is yet another example of the assumed superiority of the Islington-dwelling, guacamole eating Metropolitan Elite, whose downfall UKIP may well precipitate.
ReplyDeleteSebastian
I have a horrible fear that the British people have been persuaded that Ukip is not nice:
DeleteEasily done.
ReplyDeleteSuleiman the Magnificent (?) mistook the Cathedral of St Sophia for a mosque, as well.
Every time somebody in the media takes the mickey out of UKIP i think that a few more people decide to vote for them.
ReplyDeleteIt does look like a Mosque!
ReplyDeleteYes, up to a point.
DeleteNo, I have to come back to this. Westminster Cathedral looks more like a Mosque than any other building in Central London. But trust the poor old press to leap on it instead of giving all those for whom it is not the main church of their religion in Britain a guided tour around the wonderful interior.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was working in Westminster one of my colleagues came up from Deal every day and always ate his sandwiches at work - one day he and my boss took him to a Chinese Restaurant and for the first time he saw Westminster Cathedral " Look at that - another train station in Victoria" !!!!! The mind boggles !!!!
ReplyDeleteDoesn't look like any church I have ever seen. I just have to smile at the press these days. Instead of being adult about it and responding via intelligent comment they revert to the tactics they used in the case of gay marriage. Shout everyone with an opposing view down and shun them if they don't agree. Already we are seeing biased reports about immigration on the news suggesting that there is no down side to it.
ReplyDeleteSir Humphrey: "Bernard, do you want the Lake District turned into a gigantic caravan site? The Royal Opera House into a bingo hall? The National Theatre into a carpet sale warehouse?"
ReplyDeleteBernard: "Well, it looks like one, actually."
Sir Humphrey: "We gave the architect a knighthood so that nobody would ever say that!"
I also have always found Westminster Cathedral quite beautiful and at the same time an architectural oddity in London, in particular now that it has been decontextualized by the drab office blocks which have popped up after the war due to bomb damage and which now encircle it (rather like those churches you partially see in Bucharest, almost entirely suffocated by communist popular housing blocks). My son sang in the cathedral choir a few years ago, and I had the privilege of sitting with the boys on the upper gallery. It was entrancing. Afterwards we were treated to a lecture on the “cultural vandalism of Vatican II” by the headmaster of Westminster Cathedral Choir school.
ReplyDeleteI had a rather odd experience in Saint Pauls recently. I found something incredibly beautiful, and also spiritual, about the open spaces and the austere classicism. I probably wouldn’t have felt it a few years ago. I suppose we are all change over time. By the way, there never used to be a way of seeing St Paul’s properly, in all its splendour. It has been explained to me that the English monarchs, unlike the French (or Mussolini it Italy who completely demolished all the mediaeval urban fabric around St Peter’s to make way for the horrid Via della Concilazione), simply did not the power to clear up the urban space around important buildings, hence the lack of proper vistas of historical sites in the city of London. However, the new pedestrian bridge which connects the City to Tate Modern now provides for a splendid vantage point to see St Pauls’s, and it is particularly enchanting a night time.
Ion