31.01.2012
Address by the Archbishop of Dublin at the opening of the Exhibition of the Restoration of Christ Church Cathedral Dublin by GE Street on January 27th 2012
Restoration, in whatever century, city or context, always causes controversy. There simply is no way round it. I say this because the word itself is not a simple term. Nobody is quite sure whether it is reinstatement, replacement or refashioning. Each age brings its own set of values and philosophical presuppositions – as well as its own human preferences. No task is simple and no benefactor is a neutral third party. And therefore no restoration is, or can be, just about fabric. It is about derivation, purpose, statement, quality and beauty. But it is also about intrusion and there is no getting away from that.
Dublin is a place of two great medieval cathedrals, each of which is ancient to the eye of the beholder but each of them has undergone significant restoration in the nineteenth century. And today both are beautiful, each in its own way; together they make up a rather unique heritage of which we, the people of Dublin and of the Church of Ireland, are custodians in our own time for today and for tomorrow. In that rather excruciating modern phrase: ‘What you see is what you get.’ But the aesthetic and theological archaeologies which always lie within the present are always important for us to remember and to honour.
So, what of Christ Church Cathedral and what, again, of what today might be called its ‘makeover’ by George Edmund Street? The second half of the nineteenth century is a time during which we ought never to underestimate the thudding impact of a Disestablishment on a Church of Ireland which, despite its triumphant rhetoric, inevitably brought in its train disappointment and insecurity. Each generation of Irish Anglicans needs urgently to think afresh through the responsibilities and the opportunities of Disestablishment, the imperatives to be a sign of distinctiveness in theological and social witness, while at the same time curbing instincts that we might have an automatic place at the head of any table. The body–blows of history make this a difficult and painful exercise. It is the call to contemporary engagement along with the rediscovery – or, if I may use the prickly word: restoration itself – of a national role and identity. This is happening in a world where humility and leadership go together and where people are angry and hurting at any and every show of power makes it worse for them.
So, again I say: What of Street? In Dublin St Patrick’s and Christ Church, in Kildare St Brigid’s, and in Cork St Fin Barre’s underwent substantial change with varying degrees of surgical radicalness, and of course in the case of Cork a completely new build by William Burges was offered. If you are to embark on restoration, you need to strike it lucky with patronage because patronage means money and money opens up possibilities and possibilities mean éclat. In this regard, Street struck it very lucky in the person of Sir Henry Roe. Street himself became the flagship of what later would be called the High Victorian style. He worked in the office of George Gilbert Scott where he was part of the imagining of the key elements of the High Victorian style: confident eclecticism and a powerful visual language of architecture. What none of them would have accepted, I suspect, is that there is also an utterly un–self–critical instinct for retrospect in their contemporary contribution to the future. Throughout the period of Street’s association with Christ Church, he was Oxford diocesan architect and under the patronage of the bishop, Samuel Wilberforce. Setting Street in context, he held firm to his own High Church principles, yet at the same time scaled back the religious symbolism which had marked earlier Gothic revivalism. Perhaps in the spirit of contemporary post–Modernism, Street viewed architectural history as a system in which elements from different places and periods were transformed by perpetual modernization and development. Street swept into this dynamic eclecticism his own first–hand experience in the Gothic architecture of France, Germany, the Low Countries, Italy and Spain. When, for example, he came to work on Christ Church Cathedral he had both the architectural examples and the philosophical rationale to implement these ideas and designs out of their original context but in a new context of his own envisioning. The Royal Courts of Justice in London, the western façade of Bristol Cathedral and the restoration of Christ Church Cathedral Dublin were projects of magnitude on which Street was engaged at one and the same time in the 1870s.
Michael O’Neill has powerfully distilled the factors which drove the nineteenth century restoration of Christ Church Cathedral and they merit rehearsing: a cathedral competing for metropolitical status, with the hall for the General Synod of the Church of Ireland attached for good measure; the big restoration in the immediately post–Disestablishment period; a wealthy benefactor; a brilliant and busy architect AND if I may add one of my own: that deep competitiveness to show both historical entitlement and territorial grandiloquence by yet another claim to a contestable medieval inheritance post–Reformation but now also post–Disestablishment. The stakes were even higher now to show the Church of Ireland to be the church of a somewhat different Ireland. This was all happening at a time when Dublin Anglicanism was much more self–consciously English than it is now and wide open to introducing English innovations, such as Anglo–Catholicism, however benign and gentle and un–extreme, as in the case of Christ Church.
The question and the problematic of restoration must centre on the fact, for which we have Professor Roger Stalley to thank, that there is a significant relationship between the masonry styles of English West Country and Irish architecture in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries in the architectural deposit of Christ Church Cathedral. So, Christ Church is more than a Victorian Gothic restoration. A further component of Stalley’s argument is that the amount of architecture and architectural detail which Street enabled to be preserved outweighs the level of loss and destruction. Returning to O’Neill, he pushes his argument harder when he states that, apart from St Fin Barre’s Cork, the restoration of Christ Church was by far the most radical of any of the Irish cathedral restorations. One of his main concerns is the way in which Street’s construction of a drastically shortened choir and the surrounding of it with an ambulatory and short Lady Chapel cut right through any credible argument for the restoration of what was once there, as the original form of the choir is, in fact, mirrored in the shape of the east end of the crypt. Restoration has become an elastic term.
The character of the restoration was such that what the eye saw in the late 1870s in Christ Church was nothing short of a revolution. The long choir had effectively been replaced by the new east end, following the design and lay out of c.1200 but now with stained glass in all the windows, tiled floors and marble columns. The dilemma surely deepens in that Street saw himself as a cautious restorer and congratulated himself – in print! – on the unrivalled quality of his work in Christ Church. However by the middle of the twentieth century much of the glory of Street’s work was being seen as no more than rank Victorianism. Stalley’s argument is that any earlier restoration by Price between 1830 and 1833 itself was restoration which was both drastic and anachronistic. The problem, I suspect, at heart is the Gothic eclecticism of Street. Furthermore, he entered the fray in a climate of escalated rhetorical criticism of Price’s earlier restoration. Price, was in contemporary popular parlance, ‘shafted.’ Never, I say, underestimate the power patronage. If blame as such is to be apportioned, surely the archbishop (Chenevix Trench) is to be implicated. He, as dean of Westminster, was friendly with Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford and both of them were High Churchmen like Street. Romanticism is a feature of the Oxford Movement along with an Anglican free spirit. When applied to built heritage surely it is not surprising that we get something of the character of Street’s restoration of Christ Church.
Whether or not Street was true to idealism or pragmatism, or to a judicious oscillation between the two, is for others of much greater architectural ability and nuance than I to adjudicate. I say only that he steered a complicated pathway with vigour and verve at a time of turmoil – is there any other time, you may well ask? – in Irish Anglicanism where the headwinds of neo–Evangelicalism and neo–Medievalism were in collision mode – and Dublin, then as now, was not immune. To quote Stalley: ‘While he criticized the needless removal of old work, he asserted that restoration should not necessarily involve the preservation of every ancient stone. Rather it was the task of the restorer to recover and recreate the intended design of the original architect, which at times required the sacrifice of later additions or alterations.’ (Christ Church Cathedral Dublin, A History Kenneth Milne ed. Dublin 2000 page 362,3 …. ) With respect, this entitled him to have his cake and eat it all at once. Christ Church is a sustained expression of this philosophy of restoration. The priority of visible liturgy combined with the reality that anyone of distinction wants to make his mark in his own day and his own way.
From the perspective of authenticity, a number of criticisms of Street remains and will remain largely unanswered if he is to be able to substantiate his claim to restoration. The first is that, despite his stated position, he permitted greater removal of ancient masonry than he admitted. The second is that he ironed out anomalies in the interest of uniformity. The third is his insistence on external use of Caen stone from Normandy which rapidly disintegrated in the Dublin atmosphere; this was compounded by his refusal to admit his error. This last sadly enabled him to be pilloried by local architects who might rather have liked the job, to put it mildly.
The Exhibition which now unfolds before us will enable us to see for ourselves and to make up our minds. More than that it will stimulate our imagination so that we think for ourselves and engage personally with the restoration debate in the light of a glorious building which we all love and which every week inspires thousands to seek God, to understand themselves and to admire beauty in all its glorious diversity.