The Geometry of Love : Space, Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an Ordinary Church. PDF
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EARLY BIRD BOOKS FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY BE THE FIRST TO KNOW ABOUT FREE AND DISCOUNTED EBOOKS NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY! PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF MARGARET VISSER The Rituals of Dinner Winner of the IACP’s Literary Food Writing and Jane Grigson Awards A New York Times Notable Book “An illuminating approach to the history of mankind.” —The New Yorker “Ms. Visser reveals unexpected cultural connections and curiosities of natural history. A consistently thoughtful and entertaining book.” —The New York Times “The breadth of her knowledge is impressive, and she is irrepressibly enthusiastic about her subject.” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto) “[A] banquet of a book.” —Publishers Weekly “Visser offers a balanced explanation of how and why rules governing eating arose and why they persist.… [She] has collected a wealth of information from a varied list of sources, making her book a valuable document.” —Library Journal “Another feast for trivia-blotters with a taste for class.” —Kirkus Reviews The Geometry of Love A Globe and Mail Book of the Year A Toronto Star Best Book of the Year “Enthralling, absorbing and exquisitely researched.” —Publishers Weekly “The guidebooks tell you very little about the church, and even a keen visitor to Rome is likely to miss it.… Margaret Visser makes the journey urgent and necessary, revelatory.” —Jeanette Winterson “Visser’s thoughtful perspective gives license to those who find transcendence and majesty—secular or religious—in spiritual architecture. Recommended.” —Library Journal “Reading the church building itself as a text, [Visser] renders its language of marble and mosaic into a splendid narrative whose subject is how an architectural space ‘can both express and recall epiphany’.” —The New Yorker “Wonderful food for the intellect as well as the soul.” —Toronto Star “Margaret Visser’s excavation of what oblivion has buried is quietly fascinating and deeply pleasurable.” —Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography “Delightful … a guidebook that starts where ordinary guidebooks leave off … a profound analysis of [St. Agnes Outside the Walls] as a representative of churches, specifically Roman Catholic ones, everywhere.” —The Christian Science Monitor “Visser is a bestselling writer with a far-reaching mind, to whom readers can turn when, convinced of and satisfied with their own rational view of the universe, they wish to know more about that mysterious force that holds millions of people around the world— among them legions of rigorous thinkers, scientists, minds both scholarly and skeptical—on their knees in adoration in an ‘ordinary’ church.” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto) The Geometry of Love Space, Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an Ordinary Church Margaret Visser FOR COLIN, of course CONTENTS Preamble 1 The Door Swings Open: Threshold 2 Space and Time: Narthex and Ground Plan 3 Trajectory: Nave 4 Alpha and Omega: Altar 5 World Without End: Apse 6 Living Stones: Chapels, Left Side 7 One Body: Chapels, Right Side 8 Eternal Rest: Outside 9 Finer Than Gold: Road, Crypt, and Tower 10 Virgin Martyr: Tomb Notes Select Bibliography Index Acknowledgements About the Author Do you know, I once came across a book which enumerated the uses of common salt and sang its praises in the most extravagant terms, and not only salt but all kinds of everyday commodities. Now isn’t it, as I say, an extraordinary thing, Eryximachus, that while all these screeds have been written on such trivial subjects, the god of love has found no man bold enough to sing his praises as they should be sung—is it not, in short, amazing that there should be so little reverence shown to such a god! Plato, Symposium Wer den Dichter will verstehen muss in Dichters Lande gehen. (Those who poets would unravel Must to poets’ country travel.) Goethe, Der Westoestlichen Diwan PREAMBLE People who include sightseeing in their travels can scarcely avoid visiting churches. Places of worship—temples, chapels, pagodas, synagogues, cathedrals, and mosques—are often the oldest, and usually the most famous, the strangest, the most beautiful buildings any town has to offer. For these and other reasons, they tend to survive much longer than anything else in the town. I must have visited hundreds of religious edifices in my life, most of them churches—ugly ones and lovely ones, dusty old neglected ones, plain ones, vulgar ones, and awe-inspiring masterpieces. The famous ones have “guide” books explaining them. These will tell you, typically, how many columns a church has, and also give you their heights and diameters. They will describe for you the façade before which you are standing, and star the objects you are supposed to look at, giving their creators and their dates. All this is potentially useful information, and might serve to focus a resolute visitor’s attention. The problem is that guidebooks offer little else. I remember sitting at the back of a tiny, isolated church some years ago, on top of a hill in Spain. A Japanese tourist was driven up to the front door and led round the building by a guide he must have hired in the town some distance away. The guide told him, in English, the dates of various parts of the building and then proceeded to dilate upon the superb stone vaulting. The tourist did not even raise his head to look at this. He stared aghast—as well he might—at a horrific, life-sized painted carving of a bleeding man nailed to two pieces of wood. When the guide had stopped talking, the man gestured wordlessly towards the statue. The guide nodded, smiled, and told him in which century it had been carved. Experiences like this one—I have known many—and my own unanswered questions combined to make me embark on this book. I had once written an account of the meanings, the culture, and the history embodied in a single meal. I set out to do the same thing now with a church: take one particular example and see what I could find out about it. Casting my net as widely as possible in order to explain it to myself, I resolved to look at history and politics, theology,
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