CHAPTER TWO: GARBETT'S RELIGION
Young versus Old
Garbett ended his life
as a member of the Peculiar people. That at least, is the label he added after
his name in a book promoting a scheme of national health published just before
he died.
[1]
The Peculiar People were an evangelical sect started by William Bridges in
1838.
[2]
Their distinguishing feature was the fact that they accepted the divine
inspiration behind every word of the Bible. This led them to a literal
interpretation of James 5.14,15: ...and
the prayer of faith shall save him that is sick. As a result of this the
Peculiar People chose to receive no medical care, instead relying on prevention
through wholesome living and constant prayer.
But Garbett as a young man was a very different person to
the older one he grew into. The intervening period is dotted with several
important events which threw him off course rather violently. The most
significant of these were the publication of
the Essays and Reviews of
1857, Darwin's Origin of Species of
1859 and Joseph Ernest Renan's Vie de
Jésus of 1863. These books not only altered many of Garbett's views but
caused him to take a definite and frequently extreme stand on the issues which
these publications launched.
Such a relatively clear-cut pigeon-hole regarding his
religious attitudes does not extend to Garbett as a young man. In the Treatise Garbett's
precise attitude to religion is never made explicit and can only be distilled
from vague impressions thrown up by the style of his prose and his intellectual
frame of reference. Much later he would describe himself as a young man as "a
poor agnostic". But this has to be taken as the disapproving judgement of a
puritanical old man and consequently relativated. The style of his early writing
does not perhaps point to any specific religious convictions beyond a vague
low-church Anglicanism imbibed through the bible, the book of Common Prayer and
the sermon, but it was unmistakably religious in tone.
[3]
In 1850 Garbett's views on religion had not yet been
forced to congeal and harden. It is unlikely, for instance, that Garbett as a
young man was as stringent and as uncompromising in his acceptance of the
literal truth of the Bible as the older version certainly was. In any case, the
question did not have the urgency about it in 1849 and 1850 which it was to
achieve after Darwin's theory of evolution was published some ten years later.
Towards the end of his life Garbett does talk of a religious experience which
he was supposed to have had on returning from Jamaica in 1845, at the age of
21. This experience, of which we are never given any details or description,
had made Garbett "see" the imminent fulfilment of Daniel's
prophecies. This vision would increasingly dominate his later life as an
evangelist of a new sort of obscuritanism which had science to serve its cause.
The conclusion is that one cannot take the beliefs of
Garbett as an old man, which were so heavily influenced by events during the
two decades following 1850 and which were so strangely coloured by bitterness,
obsessiveness and, dare one say, mental instability, to illustrate the much
younger, much more rational and perspicacious Garbett of the Treatise.
Even so, it must become immediately obvious to any reader
that the Treatise was constructed on
an aesthetic model heavily dependent on the metaphysical implications of a
Newtonian universe which at the same time took the Platonic and Neo-Platonic
metaphors which pervaded Christian belief much for granted. Beyond that, the
bible and its influence on the prose and imagery of the period cannot be
ignored. To gain a better understanding of Garbett's world it is necessary to
produce a generalised picture of Religion in the nineteenth century,
concentrating on those aspects which might be relevant to an analysis of
Garbett's theory of architecture.
Methodism as Method
Religious thinking and
belief were snowballed into a period of revitalisation during the first half of
the nineteenth century. Many historians place the role played by the Church, or
rather the churches, at the very centre of a concentric picture in which all the
various aspects of mid-century England are neatly arranged.
[4]
The magic word in this picture is Evangelicalism. This word encodes an attitude
to religion and to daily life that did not confine itself to any one religious
sect but pervaded the whole of society.
[5]
A special case of the evangelical revival which encapsulated its spirit better than
any other form of dissent, was Methodism.
In the eighteenth century the Wesley brothers had given
religion a new impetus. The ball which had been set rolling by them took its
time to achieve some momentum. By the time the Catholic Relief act had been
passed in 1829 and the Oxford Movement had been founded in 1833, the effects of
that momentum could be felt throughout England. All of these developments must
be seen as extensions of this process of revitalisation and as supplements and
reactions to the spirit of Evangelicalism. When the Test and Corporation Acts
had been repealed in 1828, officially allowing dissent in all walks of life,
this impetus had taken on the proportions of a movement which could no longer
be controlled.
What then is this evangelical spirit? And how could it
affect architecture? The word spirit
frequently stands for a mood which is thought to have come from a specific
source (in this case an evangelical sect) and subsequently acquires a
multivalence able to order and define a person's attitude to all sorts of
issues. This was very much the case with Methodism. The name Methodism stands for a religiosity
shaped by the methodical study of
Scripture. The Wesley brothers consciously modelled their religious
experience on academic habit, a new form of scholasticism which been allowed
time to absorb the implications of a new view of the world and its mechanisms.
At one level Methodism advocates an invigorated approach to conversion and
instruction. By instituting Sunday schools, cheap literature and huge open-air
meetings, Methodists inaugurated the mechanisation of belief as described by
Thomas Carlyle in his "Signs of the times": Not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but
the internal and spiritual also.[6]
Dissemination and even soul-procurement had become subject to mechanisation.
Evangelicalism (including Methodism) promoted an
attitude, a method of approach to
religion and to daily life based on the belief that virtue could be achieved
through strict moral conduct and propriety. In other words it promised to
formulate a simple mechanics of
virtue. This was considered possible as the causes of evil and vice were
thought of as palpable. They could identified as absolute values and obviated.
The increase of knowledge was considered the most effective medium towards
perfectibility. The old Socratic maxim that vice is the direct and exclusive
result of ignorance, was rejuvenated in this frame of mind, and became a
justification for the idea of progress. Cardinal Newman in his Apologia explained the mechanics
involved:
Virtue, he writes, is the child of knowledge; vice of ignorance, therefore education,
periodical literature, railroad travelling, ventilation, and the art of life,
when fully carried out, serve to make a population moral and happy.[7]
This passage is, among
other things, a direct a summons to architects. Architects are invited to
contribute to the physical and therefore the moral health of the nation by
improving their buildings by way of ventilation.
[8]
A similar conclusion concerning the role of architecture in society was reached
thirty years earlier by another converted catholic, Augustus Welby Pugin in
1836. But even Pugin was not the first to reach the intersection between
architecture and social reform.
[9]
It is even doubtful whether he can be said to have brought the debate to
England.
[10] Alfred
Bartholomew, whose Specifications
were very popular within the building world, had also intended to improve
society by improving the excellence of its physical structure. What is
important is that English architecture became filled with a mission at around
the time that Pugin published his Contrasts, of which
it has still not let go.
[11]
The architect/architectural theorist could no longer be exclusively concerned with
buildings; through buildings the theorist wanted to improve society as a whole.
If the word Methodism belongs to religion, the general
attitude it promoted was infused with the world order which the eighteenth
century had been trying to construct for itself as a result of the surge of
scientific discovery and the consequent re-ordering of aesthetic and
metaphysical norms. During the eighteenth century, religion started breathing
the same air of method and regularity with which science was achieving such
amazing successes. That regularity was expressed in a general morality. Whether
Evangelicalism was directly influenced by science and scholarship or vice verse
is not a useful question. What is important, is that science and religion had
certain icons in common. This is not so strange, after all religion and science
represent different ways of trying to explain the same thing: our being here,
and applying that knowledge to further the ends of mankind.
The religious Methodist and the scientific experimentalist
both advocated an attitude to experience which was based on a morality which
exalted methodical regularity, a certain stringency with regard to habit and
which demanded strict accountability to be measured by various forms of
approbation. With science the aim was to confirm an understanding of nature, or
alternatively, to enlarge that understanding. The success of scientific
predictions implied knowledge of the truth. With religion, and especially
religious morality, strict behaviour was an act of acceptance of a metaphysical
world-view already assumed to be true. Method would ensure moral and religious
completion, that is, salvation.
Happiness was not only considered to be the ultimate aim of society, but
it was thought that there was a simple mechanical model by which that happiness
could be achieved under controlled conditions. An illustration of this wish for
a controlled progress was Bentham's rather awkward Felicific Calculus. That
system formed the basic ingredient of Ruskin's early aesthetics.
[12]
In fact, the tenet of Bentham's utilitarianism, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, became the
motivation for legislation and the English judicial system as a whole. Society
had taken the apparently mechanical and essentially Euclidian nature of the
universe to heart, and was using that image to formulate its own rules.
Most people would have agreed with Newman that happiness
could be promoted through knowledge. But the word knowledge had a very personal
connotation. Knowledge meant certainty and conviction. The evangelic approach
to the attainment of happiness therefore, was to spread its own certainties
systematically. Dissemination became the moving power behind this
felicification of society:
...every machine, writes Thomas Carlyle
in his "Signs of the Times,"
must have its moving power, in some of the great currents of society; every
little sect among us, Unitarians, Utilitarians, Anabaptists, Phrenologists,
must have its Periodical, its monthly or quarterly Magazine;-hanging out, like
its windmill, into the populis aura, to grind meal for the society.[13]
The conditions of
happiness were set by specific actions, specific conduct, and this is important
when describing the foundations of architectural theory. Because of its
emphasis on a strict personal morality, on regularity and on predictability,
Evangelicalism could be applied to any social occasion or purpose.
The renewed enthusiasm for religion in the first half of the nineteenth
century must be seen in relation to a very similar enthusiasm for popular
science. Science and religion fed on each other. It was at that time difficult
to set them up as opposites. Loyalty to either was far from mutually
exclusive.
[14]
Their intellectual vicinity provoked confrontations which sometimes resulted in
a strong antipathy either way but this did not happen often during the first
half of the nineteenth century. At this time religious and scientific discourse
resembled each other to an uncanny degree. This was because they were perceived
to have a common purpose.
The spirit of Evangelism
is logically and closely connected to the much felt need for reform in all
strata's of society. The mid-Victorians may often be characterised as a
swaggering, maudlin, and complacent lot, revelling in their own sense of
respectability, but such a description is caricatural.
[15]
A lot of them were deeply conscious of their society's short-comings. They were
saved from despair by a common belief in cure. The great tide of architectural
polemics conducted in the period leading up to 1850 stem from a deeply felt
dissatisfaction with the state of architecture as it was and the belief that
reform was possible and that through architectural reform society could be
notably improved. In other words, architectural discussion was characterised by
a grand sense of purpose. But this larger purpose reciprocates in the sense
that many architectural theorists looked far beyond their own discipline to
form their opinions about architecture. Through the causal analysis of the
processes of perception and beauty, through the re-evaluation of the purpose of
architecture, many and diverse thinkers quietly intruded into the realm of
architectural theory. Thinkers such as John Locke, David Hume, Francis
Hutcheson, Archibald Alison and others began to have an enormous influence on
the appreciation of architecture. They supplied the basic metaphysics, the
framework of experience, upon which aesthetic fashions could be constructed.
But their specific contribution to Garbett's Treatise will be discussed where appropriate. It is now necessary
to concentrate on another, more generally pervasive source for Garbett, namely,
natural theology. In 1850 the argument of design still was a force to be
reckoned with, a force moreover which let science and religion co-habit in a
shared logic: that of Natural theology.
Garbett's architectural doctrine is clearly based on the
logic of natural theology. Natural theology, as represented by the writings of
William Paley and the Bridgewater
Treatises, takes the attempt to prove the existence of a God to a
self-consciously scientific level.
Two authors of the Bridgewater Treatises,
Charles Bell and William Whewell, were not only eminent scientists in their
day, they were also important theorists in the field of art and architecture
and direct influences on Garbett's Treatise.
The silent paradigm
Garbett was well aware
of the latest developments in philosophy, theology and the sciences. Having
said that, science and the reading of nature were used by Garbett to confirm an
old aesthetic model, in which, by way of illustration, the perfection of the
circle still dominated. His most radical thinking is paradoxically used to
service a deep-rooted conservatism. Almost all the ideas with which he intends
to change architectural norms are made to justify and qualify preferences and
attitudes which are already well-established. Garbett's definition of good architecture is far from
revolutionary. It is based on an aesthetic of excellence which was shared by
every artisan and connoisseur. In fact that definition made use of certain
scholastic ideas. Only through the rigor of his conservatism and his supposedly
scientific approach, did Garbett hit
on new ideas.
One can broadly distinguish two types of sources for
Garbett's thinking. The first source consists of evidence which fits within an
obvious architectural tradition from Vitruvius onwards although includes the
relevant evidence from archaeologists, scientists, artists, philosophers as
well as the more inbred world of architectural theory.
The second source is largely silent. It reveals itself
only by vague impressions beneath the film of rhetoric. This is where the
paradigms of the imagination, upbringing and desire have taken hold. The
symptoms of those influences are only occasionally given the chance to surface.
Even so, the logic of natural theology and the argument of design can be shown
to have exercised an immense compulsion on Garbett. The most popular version of
the argument of design was given in the opening paragraph of William Paley's Natural Theology.[16]
Garbett uses scientific discourse in the way that natural
theology used it, not for the unprejudiced reading of nature but for the
confirmation an established aesthetic ideal, and for the confirmation of the
purpose underlying all things. In Paley's case that aesthetic ideal was
represented by a Christian God. In Garbett's case it was his conception of
Nature. He believed he had been able to distil true and permanently valid principles from his reading of nature.
He believed he had found these natural
principles confirmed by his analysis of the pure
architecture of the Greek and Gothic builders.
The attraction of natural theology as a rhetorical model
for architectural theory is that it is able to argue its case by way of a simple
analogy which connects the productions of animal, man and God along a
presupposed chain of being. That analogy is subsequently supported by an
immense wealth of pertinent illustrative material, ranging from the eye to the
heavenly spheres as the greatest symbol of God's omnipotence and the beauty of
the creation. Every scientific discovery only added to the strength of the
argument. Indeed, Paley's Natural
Theology is no more than an encyclopaedia of examples to support the
initial, rather simple argument which is that a watch implies a designer. The
world is a mechanism comparable to a watch and therefore must imply a designer
too. Paley's study of nature is in the first instance intended to further the
glory of God and give intellectually satisfying proof of his existence. His
scientific illustrations are supplementary to that purpose.
Garbett's objective is to complete the circle of the
argument, thereby involving himself in a paradox. If natural theology needed
the purposiveness of human products to prove the purposiveness of the phenomena
of nature, Garbett took God's providence as a given and used it to show how he
and the Greek and Gothic architects had successfully gone back to nature to
establish the principles of design in architecture. In other words
purposiveness in nature was used to extrapolate rules for architecture.
For Garbett, Natural theology was his methodological and
metaphysical paradigm; it provided Garbett with both the basic assumptions as
well as the structure of his argument. The arguments of natural theology
whisper through the bars of every sentence, moulding the grammar of his
discourse.
2. Hastings (1917) Vol. 9, entry: "Peculiar People"; Cavendish (1983) Vol. 78, entry: "Peculiar People."
4. See for example the chapter headed "Moral Conscience," Thomson (1978, repr. 1985) p. 107 ff; Young (1934); Trevelyan (1967) p. 522 ff; The most comprehensive history of the church itself is Chadwick (1966 & 1970); Cowling (1980) p. xii, writes concisely: It is from religion that modern English history should begin. I also used Davies (1961) & Davies (1962)
7. J.H. Newman (1967) Note A, p. 262. I found the passage in Pevsner (1972) p. 219. He in turn quoted it from G.M. Young (1934) p. 7.
8. The Builder during the forties, fifties and sixties, carries many an article on ventilation and sometimes a heart rendering print of the results of bad ventilation.
10. On Pugin's Intellectual debt to France see Andrew Saint (1983); Phoebe Stanton and Nicolaus Pevsner (1972)
14. Science was not generally seen as in opposition to religion before the publication of the Origin of Species, but as part of a widely accepted natural theology. in: T.W. Heyck (1980) p. 162.
16. I wish to quote the opening passage of Paley's book in full: In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer, that for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever; nor would it perhaps, be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given -that, for anything I knew, the watch might always have been there. Yet why should not this serve for the watch as well as for the stone? Why is it not as admissible in the second case as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, viz., that when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose. William Paley, (n.d) p. 17-18.