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| Christopher Wren's magnificent Cathedral of Saint Paul in London |
From Sunday September 2nd until
Wednesday September 5, 1666, a raging fire swept through the City of
London. Londoners from King Charles and
his brother, the Duke of York, down to street vendors and rag-peddlars joined
arm-in-arm fighting the appalling conflagration but without much success.
Archeological evidence shows that the fire reached 3,092o
Fahrenheit (1700 degrees Celsius),
virtually able to incinerate stone.
When The Great Fire of London was finally extinguished the “City”—the
square mile within the old city walls—was gone.
Over 13,000 homes, 87 parish churches, and the great medieval Cathedral Church
of Saint Paul were destroyed. The fire
gave the Diocese of London encouragement to redraw many parish lines as not all
the destroyed churches were to be rebuilt, but the Cathedral, of course, had to
be rebuilt.
There had been talk even before the fire of
rebuilding Saint Paul’s. The vast
medieval Cathedral, the second largest
church in medieval Europe after the Abbey of Cluny, was 586 feet in length, 100
feet wide, with a span of 290 feet at the transepts. In its day it had been glorious with the
highest spire and the best stained glass in England. Ironically its construction had begun in the
11th century to replace an older cathedral destroyed by fire in
1087. A 1561 fire had toppled the spire
but left the cathedral itself undamaged, but that fire combined with the
Puritan indifference to cathedrals had led to a century of decay. With the Restoration of the Monarchy (and
bishops) in 1660 the decision had to be made: restore or build anew. The Great Fire put an end to the discussion,
there was no longer a choice but to rebuild.
The Architect chosen for the work was Christopher
Wren (1632-1723), a brilliant polymath who was expert in geometry, anatomy,
astronomy, and physics as well as an architect who would build or rebuild over
50 of the London Churches after the fire.
Wren’s initial design reflected the Protestant ideal of simplicity and
an emphasis on hearing the Word with a cathedral designed primarily for
preaching rather than for pageantry. The
design was initially accepted but with the 1660 Restoration of the monarchy and
episcopacy certain shifts both in theology and taste had already begun to occur
and the clergy mounted a campaign for a more elaborate—and traditionally
formatted—building. The clergy insisted
on the Latin cruciform plan with nave, transepts, and a deep choir. A second design was submitted, approved by
the King, but still did not meet clerical standards. A third and final design received the Royal
Warrant but King Charles permitted Wren discretionary use to make alterations—“more
ornamental than essential”—as the building proceeded. The finished Cathedral bore little
resemblance to the final plan as Wren used that discretionary power
widely.
One interesting story is that in laying out the
design for the new cathedral, Wren sent a workman to fetch a stone, any stone,
to mark the exact spot that would lie beneath the center point of the projected
great dome that would rise over the crossing at the midpoint of the Cathedral.
The worker brought him a fragment of a gravestone that had been in the pavement
of the old cathedral and it was marked with the Latin word, Resurgam: “I shall rise.” Wren was deeply impressed by this and took it
as a sign of his Divine Mission to rebuild the cathedral.
In the end he produced a magnificent building,
and one that bespeaks the emerging via
media of the 17th century Caroline Anglican tradition. The cornerstone was laid on June 21st
1675 with Masonic rites. While some
critics complained that it “had an air of popery about it,” it really isn’t
very Catholic at all, but neither is it very Protestant. It is in the baroque style of the day but has
an air of Protestant reserve rather than Catholic enthusiasm. There
was a wooden communion table, not a stone altar, at the eastern end of the
choir. Wren had wanted a proper altar
beneath an elaborate baldachino—very much like what stands there today—but the
Church of England was not about to go that “Roman” yet. On the other hand, there was a traditional
choir screen separating the chancel and altar from the nave. The screen was removed in the 19th
century to give the view of the chancel from the entire length of the
nave. The screen, or pulpitum as it is properly called, bore
the great organ, a “Father Smith” organ (named after the great German organ
builder of the day, Bernard Smith) in a case designed by Wren’s team and carved
by Grinling Gibbons who was perhaps the finest artist to work in wood the world
has ever known. Gibbons also carved the magnificent
choir stalls in the chancel. The wrought
iron work was done by Jean Tijou, the premier iron worker of his day.
There is a humorous anecdote about the
organ. Wren didn’t want one in the
church because he thought that the chancel screen to bear it and the organ
itself would cut his cathedral in half and break that magnificent view from
back to front. But the clergy insisted
on an organ. The puritan days were over
and there was to be no reserve when it came to good music in church. Wren would always refer to the instrument as
“that confounded box of whistles.” In
the nineteenth century the screen was taken down, the organ moved to the wall
on the north side of the choir, and Wren’t desired view was finally
opened.
The construction of Saint Paul’s testifies to an
Anglicanism searching to find its unique identity. There was no desire to return to the
Calvinism of Edward’s and Elizabeth’s days.
This was a cathedral built for processions and ceremony; while not for Catholic
pomp, certainly for an English decorum. It
was at its heart, Protestant—a wooden communion table stood in place of an
altar; but there was a Catholic attention to fine point, a persnicketyness
even, in the detail of the carvings and ironwork and other décor. While it was suited for preaching, it was
designed for liturgy. It reflected the
theological shifts of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and while the Oxford
movement and its ritualism were still centuries off, so too the sacramental
slovenliness of Puritan Anglicanism was left in an unremembered past. But then London itself was being reborn as a
European center in rivalry to Paris and its cathedral—and the religion it
represented—could hardly be that Geneva Gown and Psalm singing cult of the days
of James I. Londoners were becoming less
rigid ideologues and more cosmopolitan consumers.
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