Sacramental Views:
The Architecture of
Ralph Adams Cram
by Daniel Manheim
A
t the end of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction ," Walter Benjamin observes that public
architecture is prototypical of works of art that are received
by an audience in what he calls "a state of distraction," in
which "habit" constitutes the primary manner of appropriating the
artifact. "This mode of appropriation," he argues, "in certain circumstances acquires canonical value. For the tasks which face the
human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone.
They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile
appropriation."! In other words, architecture, in Benjamin's terms,
constitutes not merely a statement of cultural values, but an intervention into how those values are construed. Not merely addressing,
but positively reconstituting, the shape of urban landscapes and the
movements and habits of people, public buildings serve as training
grounds in which and because of which transformations of consciousness occur. Insofar as they become part of people's· lives, they delineate, and to an extent restrict, what it is possible to do in the world.
Thus debates over the legitimacy of architectural styles-particularly
for such buildings as schools, churches, and houses of legislature,
buildings that should represent the center of a population's conception
of its identity-have at times been more politically charged than
debates over any other putatively aesthetic consideration. In 1913,
Episcopal Bishop Frederick Kinsman (shortly to convert to Roman
Catholicism) described the lower Manhattan skyline as a ')umble of
The Hudson Valley Regional Review, September 1991, Volume 8, Number 2
35
uneven tops" that are so "huddled together without reference to
each other" as to constitute "the ugliest thing in the way of a skyline
which any great city can show." Kinsman insisted that the city can be
improved only "when this Protestantism in architecture has been
Catholicized."2 The language-"uneven tops," "huddled together"betrays patrician anxieties over changes in the ethnic and class
composition of the culture; but what is perhaps even more compelling
in Kinsman's image than the politics of "Catholicizing" America is
the architectural metaphor itself Anchoring his critique of America's
social and religious incoherence in the material composition of
American urban civilization, Kinsman displaces the literal source of
his anxieties-his sense of disenfranchisement engendered by cultural
confusion and rampaging individualism-onto the features of the
urban landscape. The buildings become the center of everything
wrong with society.
Citing architecture as the most important locus of cultural reform
is particularly apt for a reactionary critic who felt that society must
be rebuilt according to fundamentally different principles. Kinsman
wanted to see a return to buildings like the Capitol in Washington,
which represented "the comprehensiveness of view and subordination
of detail which our national problems most need" (Kinsman, Protestant,
90). Altering the material composition of the urban landscape itself,
Kinsman implies, would provide a basis for altering the disposition
of the culture altogether. John Rosenberg points out that in the cultural
criticism of such nineteenth-century English ideologues as Augustus
Pugin, William Morris, and John Ruskin, architecture was singularly
important because it provided "a means of reshaping the national
life"-quite literally-and because it provided a form oflabor in which
the members of a society actively create the material of their own
culture. 3 Such reshaped living and laboring involves what Benjamin
means by "habit" and "tactile appropriation." Change the ways in
which people interact with their cultural environment, and you change
the substance of the culture.
As Peter Conn has observed, critical tactics like those of Kinsman
and his ancestors, Ruskin and Pugin, were quite common in the
early years of the twentieth century.4 Because of its centrality to the
ways a society occupies its time and represents itself, architecture
frequently served as an index to American society'S moral foundations.
Conn notes that "the battle over style has been fought with the weapons
of moralizing rhetoric" (200), and quotes such diverse ideologues as
Brooks Adams, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Thorstein Veblen discovering
evidence of the moral turpitude of whole segments of the culture in
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the materials and forms of its buildings. As often as not, the critic
found, like Kinsman, that the villainous tendency in architecture
was eclecticism. For Archbishop Kinsman, such eclecticism was a
figure at once for cultural heterogeneity and Protestantism;
reunification of the architectural landscape would presumably
constitute a step toward reunification of the whole culture under
one principle, one head, one holy, Catholic, and apostolic church.
His position was elaborated by the architect and fellow Catholic
convert, Ralph Adams Cram. 5 Born in 1864 the son of a somewhat
freethinking New Hampshire Unitarian minister, Cram early on began
to identify with his mother's side of the family, fallen gentry of
early-New England stock, and delighted in locating nobility in both
lines. Flirting in his youth with socialism and royalism while studying
architecture during the 1880s in Boston, he grew interested in
Catholicism-and in its medieval monuments-while on a trip to
Europe in 1889. Upon his return, he converted to Anglo-Catholicism,
and subsequently devoted his life, both as a professional architect
and as a lecturer and essayist, to grafting the spirit of medieval Europe
onto the face of modern America. As the leading member of the
firm that designed such Gothic edifices as Saint Thomas's Church
and the Cathedral of St.John the Divine in New York; the Graduate
College at Princeton and the administration complex at Rice; and
several buildings at the U. S. Military Academy at West Point, Cram
attempted to restore what he felt was an architecturally Catholic
sensibility to the principal medieval centers of cultural authority: the
Church, the Academy, and the Military.6
Not content merely to build his own works, however, Cram was an
active proselyte for neo-Gothic architecture, serving on a host of
academic, institutional, and editorial committees, and he was as
disturbed as Kinsman about architectural eclecticism. Complaining
from early in his career that in contemporary architecture, "style
follows style, as fashion changes," leading to the current situation of
"absolutely futile confusion," a "Babel of tongues.'" Cram later went
on to broaden his critique of styles into an indictment of the entire
culture. He called architecture the "truest history man can record,"8
and sought through his works at least to defy and perhaps to transform his historical period. Through a series of polemical essays, mostly
written during and shortly after the First World War, America's preeminent neo-Gothic architect composed a sometimes astonishingly
reactionary denunciation of the modern world and made proposals
for cultural regeneration. Cram's polemics could be fiercely religious and ardently political. Aggressive and prolific, his works comSacramental Views: The Architecture o f Ralph Adams Cram
37
Cadet Chapel. Courtesy U.S. Anny.
prise what has been called "the zenith of intellectual reaction in the
United States."9
Recently, such cultural historians as Conn and Jackson Lears have
noted a connection between Cram's medieval aesthetic and a range
of other late-nineteenth-century cultural developments. 1o Lears, for
example, investigating the attraction of New England Protestants to
Catholic forms of worship, identifies Cram as a primary advocate of
"religion of beauty," and locates his religious sensibility in the way
the beauty of the churches and the sacraments satisfied a "hunger
for the miraculous" (202) and combatted a pervasive sense of cultural
"weightlessness." It is doubtlessly true that Cram's interest in the
sacraments hints at a desire for the miraculous; but Cram was
responding to much more than the aridities of his futher's Unitarianism
and the banality of nineteenth-century church-building. While he
frequently lamented that the modern world was insufficiently
"sacramental," the term has an idiosyncratic meaning in his lexicon,
wider than its ecclesiastical usage, with implications that are as much
aesthetic as religious. Unlike such converts as Kinsman, who filtered
their social criticism through more or less ecclesiastical debates and
questions of faith, Cram tended to address religious and social issues
as problems of beauty and form. So Lears is in a sense right that for
Cram "beauty was an infallible gauge of moral worth" (205). But
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amid fierce debates over eclecticism, beauty was itself a complicated
and vexed issue. Cram's aesthetic guide was intensely personal, and
was important to him for that precise reason. It authorized
interpretations of anything else that came within its orbit. Perfectly
coherent within its own terms, Cram's aesthetic sensibility resulted
in a political agenda remarkable less for its conservative reaction
than for its arbitrariness and authoritarianism.
Always somewhat discontented, Cram came, by the time of the
shelling of French cathedrals during the First World War, to detest
practically every aspect of his contemporary world. Catholicism, as
the oldest and most traditional form of Christianity, especially in its
medieval form, became for him the most effective center of resistance to what he called the "errors of modernism."11 That he chose
Canterbury over Rome is scarcely surprising: the Roman church,
due to a "steady change in the personnel of her adherents" and the
"contamination of modernism" (Sins 107-8), had fallen away from its
former position of spiritual authority. As the church most closely
associated with the rising tide of immigration, contemporary Catholicism came too close to one of the symptoms of modernism that
Cram, a disciple of racist ideologue Madison Grant, most abhorred. 12
Thus he preferred the Anglican Church because he felt it had
most closely preserved the traditions of medieval Catholicism. The
Church in his conception of it, embodied everything he wanted to
restore to the present world, and he attributed the magnificence and
decorum of medieval art to its Catholic origin, arguing that "the
word 'Gothic' as applied to the plastic arts of medievalism is
synonymous with the word 'Catholic.' "13 Like Kinsman, Cram invested
architectural work with overarching cultural implications, referring
to Gothic churches as "the concrete civilization of Catholic Europe."14
For Cram, the Middle Ages, Gothicism, and Catholicism ultimately
became three more or less synonymous terms representing a distinctive
code for rendering all experience intelligible. The variety of terms
arose because what he saw as the central truth of his sensibility, the
Gothic "spiritual impulse,"1 5 could be apprehended spiritually,
sensually, socially. The bulk of Cram's polemical writing can be seen
as addressing in one way or another the apprehension of this truth.
Gothic architecture represented the production of a Catholicized,
and hence democratic, society. The perfection he perceived in
medieval art and architecture recorded the temporary resolution of
the varied European cultures into "a working whole"-a balanced,
organically functioning system-through the operation of and
adherence to "one religion and one philosophy" (Heart 13). Medieval
Sacramental Views: The Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram
39
society's organicism represented the achievement of European history's
closest approach to "the democracy of ideal," as opposed to modern
"democracy of method," which he deplored. Democracy, when he
was not using the term pejoratively, chiefly referred in Cram's political
taxonomy to the abolition of privilege. It is a little unclear how he
reconciled his calls for the abolition of privilege with his dreamy
advocacy of hereditary aristocracy elsewhere,16 but in the general
manner in which all his ideas were put forth, the abolition of privilege
would, he felt, by gu~ranteeing equal access to all social positions,
simultaneously ensure that those with the greatest abilities in a position
would rise to that position. In this way proper leadership would be
sure to emerge, and skilled, capable technicians would perform all
the offices of the society. In the "democracy of method," which he
felt had prevailed since the Renaissance, preeminence had been
discouraged and mediocrity promoted through a blind insistence
upon a "fictitious social equality" (Quest 23), and a presumed universal
equivalency of human merit. Human beings had become
interchangeable mechanical parts. Cram conceived of people neither
as singular, independent practitioners of an occupation nor as
indistinguishable gears in a machine, but as parts of a body, each
having its own independent motion and individual operation, while
at the same time participating in the larger system. His individual is
neither autonomous nor subservient, but rather an integral component
of a larger organism.
This interdependency of all social functions, according to Cram,
meant that what medieval society produced was less for the profit of
individuals than for the good of the whole group. In the ideal, organic
community, he assumed, production would be generated by genuine
and worthy needs rather than the needs' being concocted by the
producers themselves. Because the producer would merely be
responding to the desires of other members of the social body, there
would be no need for the intermediary managers, the capitalist class,
except in coordinating roles. The bulk of profit would go to the
creator of the product, and all members of the production team
would share equally the responsibility for whatever was created. 17
His preeminent example, though not a typical commodity, was the
medieval cathedral. Rather than being the product of a single architect
who was alone supremely responsible, the cathedral was the
cooperative effort of designers, artists, sculptors, artisans, and manual
laborers, and each recognized the vital importance of all of the others
to the enterprise!8 Like the individuals within society, each member
of a production team served as a kind of microcosm of the whole
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system: the creative work that went into each activity was reproduced
in every other and represented the creative enterprise of the group.
In short, all of the social systems in Cram's Middle Ages operated
as coherent organisms, proceeding upward and outward from local,
individual units. The "primary social unit" that served as the model
for all social relations and social organizations, from the cathedralconstruction team to the militia, was the family. As the paradigm of
social structure, it extended in replication through the clan, the village, the township, and the state, and as the principal locus of authority it was replicated in "the guild, the club, the university, the monastery,
[and] the order of knighthood" (Siru 27). While Cram rejected the
individualism of what he called "political, economic and social anarchists," he nevertheless insisted that "the essence [of the family] is
autonomy and self-government" (Siru 27). In other words, the primary social unit was something at once collective and autonomous,
and the individual was empowered only through submission to it.
Every other social institution, operating on the family model, submitted to its authorization. "Liberty of action," Cram wrote, "inhere[d]
in the family, the primary unit" (Siru 28), and was surrendered to the
larger units only in the smallest measure possible. The state exercised only that authority that individual families and the intermediate holders of authority could not exercise; it was, in a sense, the
family's deputy. Thus his ideal society for the future, the walled town,
modeled on medieval walled towns, would be composed of a collection of independent family units mutually bound by their subscription to an organically ordered society empowered by the principle
offamilial hierarchy.19 Monad-like, the family makes over the entire
society in its image.
Throughout Cram's social theories this pattern of parts reflecting
the whole recurs, and again and again he celebrates medieval society for its "human scale." Both notions suggest that society should be
corporate, coherent-like a body. Just as architectural eclecticism drove
him to advocate a return to the unified style of the Miqdle Ages,
cultural multiplicity drove him to advocate a return to a cohesive,
ordered, intelligible society. Although his social program involved
making the disparate ends of society cohere in a body, his organicism is the exact opposite of the tendency toward organization-what
Alan Trachtenberg calls "incorporation"2o-that Cram felt had for
some time been taking place in many areas of American and European society. "Incorporation," rooted in the corpus, would seem to
be what Cram was calling for-the gathering of individuals into a
body for a common purpose. Instead, however, Trachtenberg's incorSacramental Views: The Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram
41
poration is closer to what Cram meant by "imperialism." Under the
imperialist order, individuals are bound not through true organic
incorporation, but through what he called "aggregation," implying a
chaotic assemblage of particles. Whereas in the organic society authority proceeded from the center, the family, imperialism involves "the
working downward of delegated authority from a high and omnipotent source" (Sins 17).
In other words, unlike a society of walled towns, in which local
units were autonomous, and authority resided at the lowest possible
level, under imperialism individuals had grown far removed from
the motive and meaning of their occupation, and authority had
inevitably become alienated from local centers of activity. Such
"aggregation," according to Cram, began to occur between the
Renaissance and the Modern Age in the political, industrial and
financial spheres. According to the architect's historiography, the
degradations of modern history began when the Renaissance and
subsequently the Reformation started to replace the cultural unity
of the Middle Ages. After the Church began to weaken, in Cram's
words, "Renaissance, Reformation, Rebellion, and Revolution followed
... and the fabric of medievalism crumbled to dust" (Church Building
268). With each subsequent stage of cultural dispersion, centralized,
"imperial" authority grew stronger, subsuming the power and cultural
authority formerly exercised by local organizations.
For many an anti-modern critic of expanding industrial capitalism;
from Thomas Carlyle to Charles Maurras, the grave sin involved in
this assumption of authority by those with political and financial
power was more moral than political. Thus even while Cram
acknowledged colonization as a form of imperialism, he insisted that
its principle error was its generation of an excess of commodities,
and more generally, "an excessive covetousness of wealth" (Sins 74);
and he characterized the entire civilization operating under
"imperialist" order as "bloated and unwholesome" (Sins 37). In these
images of sybaritic debauchery, what is most explicit is the moral
tenor, and it indicates the moralistic foundation of his whole
anti-imperial polemic. Revising the course of social conduct, the
tendency toward social degeneration, that he felt had finally led to
the World War would require a repudiation of "the contemporary
spirit" ((best 22) and its corresponding moral assumptions. "Salvation,"
he insisted, "lies only in a fundamental psychological and spiritual
revolution in the minds of the mass of men" (Sins 44).
Thus the social reorganization that he proposed according to the
plan of a medieval walled town required a corresponding reorgani42
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zation of the moral sense. Taking his title from a movement in the
Catholic Church that Popes Leo XIII and Pius X were busy purging,
Cram identified the moral sensibilities of a less specifically theological "modernism," and opposed them to the organicism that characterized life in the Walled Town. 21 This "modernism" emerged with
the fall of the medieval social world. With the beginning of the Renaissance, Cram argued, individual distinction began to count more
than community benefits, and individual judgment superseded
inherited values. Debased religion merged with a more general
debasement of value, as it "degenerated through Protestantism to
Puritanism, and thus to agnosticism and final materialism" (Quest
24). What the Catholic Middle Ages possessed that the Renaissance
abandoned is what Cram called "a super-material standard" (Sins 9),
a transcendent principle for the "measuring and determining of all
things" (Sins 8). As the "clearly defined motives" of medieval architects were replaced by increasing degrees of "affectation" (Church Building 23), so were the principles guiding every other realm of social
action replaced by a multiplicity of private, local, provisional motives.
Without a system of transcendent standards, society had, as it were,
nowhere to grow but out-nothing to do but to accumulate. Bigger
was better. Between rampaging individualism and insatiable acquisitiveness, the world became an insane clatter of disparate motives
and ideas.
Essentially, then, he criticized the aggregating sensibility itself more
than any of its material expressions. Aggregation, effectively a function
of individ.ualism, might generate "realism, naturalism, impressionism,
or "eclecticism" in art, "agnosticism and rationalism" in philosophy,
and "democracy and ... mammonism" in politics; but just as all the
goods of the Middle Ages centered in the moral authority of the
Gothic spirit, all these latter were manifestations of the same underlying
tendency of the post-Gothic world. The essence of that tendency, for
Cram, lay in its failure to generate a reliable system of "standards"
for determining value and right conduct. In the absence of such a
system, he argued, the usual measure of value had come to be the
"quantitative standard," a reliance on a "numerical equivalent" (Sins
73) in the determination of value, rather than on "quality"-essential
value. Effectively, Cram's search for a single standard of value for all
things represented an impulse toward the assimilation of all values
into a unified hierarchy of ethical goods, where each value would
be a more or less intense reflection of the same interior principle.
Predictably, the neo-Gothic architect modestly proffered as the
principle for determining value something that ended up sounding
Sacramental Views: The Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram
43
St. Thomas Church, New York City. Courtesy Archives of St. Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue.
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quite a bit like pure aesthetic taste. Aesthetics and morals, of course,
were joined for him in the Catholic Church. Like many nineteenthcentury English and American patricians of Protestant background,
all of them more or less under John Ruskin's influence, Cram was
initially attracted to the Catholic Church by the sheer beauty of its
buildings, forms, and rituals. During an architectural tour of Europe,
reeling from his first exposure to medieval architecture, he had been
coaxed by an Anglo-Catholic friend into attending a midnight Mass
on Christmas Eve in an Italian church (ironically enough he derides
it as "Rococo of the most elaborate sort"). Cram describes the event
as an almost mystical transformation. He begins by fusing the beauty
of the scene with the ardency of the devotees:
[The church] was blazing with hundreds of candles, crowded with
worshippers and instinct with a certain atmosphere of devotion and of
ardent waiting. For the half-hour after we arrived it was quite stiil except
for the subdued rustle of men and women on their knees and the delicate
click of rosaries. Then, in their white and gold vestments, the sacred ministers
came silently to the high altar, attended by crucifers, thurifers and acolytes,
and stood silently waiting.
Then the scene sweeps him away, and his conversion descends upon
him with a kind of aesthetic inexorability. He is suffused with sensation:
Suddenly came the bells striking the hour of midnight, and with the
last clang the great organs and the choir burst into a melodious thunder
of sound; the incense rose in clouds, filling the church with a veil of pale
smoke; and the Mass proceeded to its climax with the offering of the Holy
Sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Christ. I did not understand all of this
with my mind, but I understood (Life 57).
Incense, organs, bells, choirs-Cram's conversion occurred through
an orgy of sensual apprehension, and a consequent repudiation of
the effectiveness of rational faculties. Such a confession was generically certified. The revelation of Catholic truth for a great number of
American converts around the tum of the century, prepared though
it was in the context of social change, ultimately came through sensory perception: they were enraptured by a religion that they felt
centered in beauty.-Cram, however, could never wholly separate beauty from religion
and morals. Not content to be sensually overwhelmed by medieval
building and art, he tried to adduce larger principles from the
experience. "Art and religion," he insisted, could not be "dissociated
Sacramental Views: The Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram
45
without mutual loss, for in its highest estate the former is but the
perfect expression of the latter" (Church Building 270); and the Catholic
religion was inextricably bound up with medieval social order. Thus,
once the beauty of the Church was brought into association with his
subsequent polemical requirements, it took on for him less purely
sensual implications. Even before this climactic comprehension of
Catholic truth, his exploration of Europe's Gothic cathedrals had
taught him that he could not "isolate one art from another or these
from life" (Life 52), and his later explicit yoking of art and religion
led him to believe that evaluation of the cathedrals could be relied
upon as a basis for judging the societies that built them, for all art
was rightfully "the measure of civilization" (Church Building 1). Thus
in his autobiography he deemed beauty "the best test and measure
of value that man has at his disposal ... whether in art or religion,
philosophy, government, or the social fabric" (Life 52). Beauty became
the touchstone of all other values.
If"beauty" is the principle underlying all these regions of human
activity, then it must be more or less synonymous with "order," and
with "organicism." Without "beautiful ideas," "beautiful modes of life,"
and "beautiful environment"-all the things that would make up life
in walled town-there would be no art (Church Building 2). And as
the beautiful object derives from proper scale and inner relation, so
must the ugly be somehow disorderly, a "thing of the wrong or evil
shape" (Life 52), like, perhaps, the modem world of "slums," "suburbs,"
"mills," and "railway yards" (Walled Toums 4). Those parts of the material
culture that offended Cram's sensibilities became wrong by virtue of
that very fact: his aesthetic sense validated his moral sense and his
social vision. Each vision at once established and confirmed the validity
of the others. What is orderly is beautiful; what is beautiful is of
proper scale; what is of proper scale is orderly.
This fundamentally circular conception of beauty again betrays
two polemical agendas. First, it emphasizes Cram's extreme
conservatism. Since the search for a qualitative standard undergirding
social, philosophical, and religious organization prompted him to
wish for a class of people not motivated by greed and self-interest-a
class cap£\J}le of governing according to something other than what
he considered a purely accretive standard of value-he mourned
the loss of a hereditary aristocracy. But a more important effect of
founding his arguments on such arbitrary reasoning had to do with
his religious sensibility itself. To some extent, his question-begging,
the argument that disorder is un-beautiful, reduces the set of things
to be deemed ordered and organic-and hence of value, worthy of
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preservation-to the set of things that Cram finds beautiful. After all,
in a period of architectural eclecticism, with one historical period
celebrated after another, the Gothic was simply another form in the
whirl of eclectic methods, except insofar as Cram found it most
beautiful, hence most ordered, hence most organic, hence most worthy
of preservation. One could easily imagine the same claims made by
the neo-classicist Thomas Hastings,2' or by Frank Lloyd Wright, who
insisted that his buildings were "rational," and that his organicism
was "appropriate to modem tools, the machine."24 What justified
Cram's method, and by extension not only his entire political and
moral program, but his religious sensibility as well, was aesthetic fiat
The arbitrary authority of his aesthetic sense led him to a highly
personalized Catholicism. Ultimately Cram's renunciation of the
Protestant churches, and his preference for Anglo-Catholicism to
the Roman Catholic Church, rested on his sense that the dissenting
churches, along with the rest of Europe and America from the
Renaissance on, had become, in Cram's terms, irremediably
materialistic. The medieval Catholic Church, and Cram's faction within
the Church of England from the early nineteenth century on,25 had
always preserved its sense of right order by maintaining what Cram
calls a "sacramental view of life." Accretive, imperialistic, and
materialistic, modem society, in Cram's view, had lost the sense that
"man ... is compact of two absolutely different things, matter and
spirit" (Sins 84). Although "man approaches ... spiritual things not
only through material forms but by means of material agencies" (Sins
87), the revelatory perception, that which will uncover the true quality
of the material world, must be animated by a sacramental sensibility.
Things do not mean what they seem to mean; they are translated by
the converting faculties of the spirit. And only those who possess the
appropriate powers of understanding can appraise the world at its
true value. Thus, he warned his readers in the preface to The Substance
of Gothic to attend to the difference between "substance" and
"accidents"-between essences and mere visible forms. The world
becomes a mask for its own underlying metaphysic.
There is nothing particularly astonishing about such coded
perception from the point of view of any orthodox Christian theology:
an enlightened vision always reveals the world to be somehow other
than it appears, whether in allegorical, typological, or anagogic terms.
But it is significant that Cram's motive for conversion centered here,
in a kind of mystical apprehension. Describing his moment of
conversion, he moves from an intensely material and sensual survey
of the congregation to an apprehension that seems to dematerialize,
Sacramental Views: The Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram
47
to sublimate the whole scene into pure spirit (See above, 15). As the
"men and women on their knees" melt into mysterious "crucifers
and thurifers," and then into "bells striking" and a less specific and
more impressive "melodious thunder of sound," and finally into "a
veil of pale smoke" that issues into "the Body and Blood of Christ,"
the attention of the new worshipper is at once removed from the
material world and enthralled by an almost mystical vision. The new
"understanding" he finds at the Rococo church in Italy cannot be
apprehended with his "mind." What the mechanics of his description
indicate, and indeed enact, is that Cram's sensibility cannot finally
be translated into terms referable to what he would call the materialistic
modem world. If spirit or substance underlies all things, and only
someone properly attuned can perceive it, then the world itself comes
to resemble a kind of parable, comprehensible only to the initiated.
That Cram's conversion centers in an immediate intuition of holy
mysteries might seem to indicate a more or less conventional Catholic
mysticism. But whereas the mystic never claims a desire to abrogate
the laws and popular codes of his community, Cram came to regard
his sacramental sensibility as entitling him to impose his own codes
upon the world, and he imposed them through the medium of his
art. To oppose his world's laws with his private sensibility, however,
required a language of authority that did not stem from his world
and its laws. Wanting, like any social critic, to attain a point outside of
his culture in order to criticize it, Cram sought the sponsorship of
the immutable Church. The glory of the Middle Ages, for Cram, was
that Catholicism was the "creative force" (Life 308) generating so many
of the culture's creative energies. Since then, the Church, though
shrunk through schism, had nevertheless remained "changeless and
stable, resting serene above the vacillations and vicissitudes of human
society" (Church Building 4). Thus the artist whose work derives from
that "changeless" tradition remains similarly aloft, undivided by the
fractured modem sensibility. It is the religious artist who can render
change comprehensible through reference to the immutable, by
expressing not only "the Church that is one through all ages; but
also ... the changes of human life, the variation of environment ...
the manifestation through variety; the eternal through the never fixed"
(Church Building 13). If every religious work expresses simultaneously
the vicissitudes of history-what Cram in The Substance oj Gothic referred
to as "accidents"-and the whole "ecclesiastical past" of the Church,
then the acts by which the work is created, and by implication all
acts by the creators, are relevant at once to the particularities of the
moment and to the tradition from which the meaning of those
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particularities derives. They transform the "accidental" materials into
the sacramental substance of the creator's vision.
I say "creator's" not "Creator's." Its "unchangeableness"
notwithstanding, Cram's Catholic Church was not ultimately as
transcendent as one might expect. Shortly after claiming a space for
the Church "above the vacillations and vicissitudes of human society,"
he confesses that the Anglican Church was "established in America
at precisely the worst time in the history of this branch of the Catholic
Church .... It was left defenceless in the midst of the rushing social
events and political conditions ..." (Church Building 4). Those
vicissitudes were not so fur off after all. Moreover, while Cram claimed
religion as the most reliable sponsor of beauty, he nevertheless argued
as well that "beauty is a valid test of religion" (Substance 216, if. Life
52). We are back in the circle. The private, incomprehensible,
unassailable sensibility becomes a rebuke not only to the political,
economic, social, and moral codes of the culture, but to the religious
codes of its own authorizing sponsor; and the sponsor is dependent
on the devotee for the formulation and accreditation of its own
transcendence. Thus Cram felt compelled to advise the Anglican
Church that it had a "duty" to recognize "that a style is good if it
exposes the spiritual idea of the power that employs it, the genealogy
and the history, the continuity and the blood, the ethnic affiliations,
and the temper of a people" (Church Building 265). The style that
fulfills these requirements is, of course, his own. While further
pursuing the notion of how to fuse the accidents of the Church's
history with its substance, Cram is more importantly submitting the
immutable Church to his own aesthetic authority.
Thus his private code of value sanctions circular reasoning,
self-enclosure. Hermetically sealed, in its own circularity, from the
consequences of history, his private vision has no responsibility to
history. Complete self-enclosure has always been a fearful possibility
at the outer limit of Cram's type of mystical antinomianism. When
Milton's antinomian strongman Samson pulls the theatre down on
the heads of thousands of Philistines, he does so at the instigation of
"rousing motions" that mayor may not have the sponsorship of some
transcendent force. 26 To someone outside of Samson's (and Milton's)
sensibility-that is, everyone except a tiny "fit audience" of the
like-minded-he could only be a horror. Locked forever within his
own sensibility, Cram seems some horrific Samson, recklessly obeying
private voices.
Instead of pulling down an edifice, however, Cram erected them,
seeking to conquer the alien culture not by strength, but by
Sacramental Views: The Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram
49
insinuation. Although he made a wide range of specific arguments
in his polemical essays, his most formidable polemical rejoinder to
the voices of his times-and the chief emblem of his sacramental
sensibility-was the medieval cathedral itself. Regarding Gothic
architecture as the "perfect material expression" (Heart 14) of medieval
culture, he located the essence of Gothic cathedrals in their
comprehensiveness and subordination of detail, their "organic
syntheses." Gothic, he wrote, was "the most physically complicated of
any style, with its concentrated loads, its balanced thrusts and its
... arboreal development from roots to trunk, branches, twigs, leaves,
and flowers" (Life 182). Each part of the cathedral had its own quality
and function , while remaining integral to the function of another
part depending on or undergirding it. Some parts might have been
more prominent, some of greater beauty, but all were interdependent,
and the totality of the work, in its beauty as well as its architectonics,
comprised that interdependency. Every work of Gothic architecture
was in this sense corporate, a body-in Cram's words, a "living organism"
(Six Lectures 3). At once generated and stabilized by its firmly embedded
roots, the Gothic cathedral could proceed upward and outward, taking
many forms , without ever flying loose from its foundation in heavy
Norman limestone and medieval Catholic moral principles.
That the Catholic cathedral was at the center of Cram's idea of
medieval moral and aesthetic principles is not surprising; but he
also associated the structure's organicism with his conception of the
£amily and the walled towns, the building blocks, as it were, of medieval
society. At the end of a discussion in The Sins of the Fathers of the
family as the primary social unit, he wrote that "like a great cathedral
or system of philosophy or other work of art, the social scheme builds
itself up, course by course, from its deep laid foundations of the
human social unit" (30). Like the cathedral, the social body was
"arboreal": each part issued from the central foundation, the famil y,
but had nevertheless its own distinctive function, and the identity of
the whole was, of course, greater than the sum of its parts. And just
as the rigidity and legibility of the social structure assured Cram of
the society's moral perfection, the elegance and proportion of the
cathedrals helped to assure him that they must have been in every
way perfect. The cathedral became for Cram almost a hieroglyph,
representing within its tight, locked identity the whole of his vision
of the medieval world.
Thus it was in his professional productions that Cram's sensibility
was most intensely expressed and his vision of his personal situation
within his times most clearly and permanently articulated. For Cram
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did not merely brood over past ages, he tried to restore them to the
present by planting their essential representatives, his buildings, in
as many places as he could, at the behest of those figures of
authority-the Church, the Academy, and the Militia-that he most
esteemed. Jackson Lears argues intriguingly that in his insistence on
Gothic forms for certain buildings and not for others Cram was
advocating a kind of "sacramental eclecticism" in architecture, where
the secular works would be eclectic and the sacred ones Gothic (Lears
206). While this notion accurately reflects Cram's disdain for his
contemporary culture and its architecture, it falsely implies that Cram
felt Gothic and other architecture could coexist rationally in the
same field of urban design, or the same imaginative spirit. In fact,
Cram's sense that medievalism and modernism were incommensurable
and that his own personal vision was inimical to everything in his
world did not preclude his confronting and engaging that world. His
polemical engagement was less satisfactory, because he had to rely
on the linguistic materials of his enemies; the real engagement came
through his works. Gothic buildings, employing languages alien to
the contemporary dialect of the tribe, somehow must represent both
his antinomian rejection of all worldly codes of identity in favor of
the incommunicable "rousing motions" of his spiritual sensibility,
and his simultaneous desire to transform the world's codes to accord
with his own.
Effectively, the paradox centers in the question of agency: who-what
spirit or material-sponsors the artist's actions? For again, Cram not
only rejected the world's prevalent laws, but also sought to be the
transcendent agent of forces larger than himself.2 7 Generally, when
not explicitly ecclesiastical, these ambiguous forces were called "the
Gothic Spirit" or "sacramentalism"; but the thirst for transcendence
occasionally took other forms. Midway through the chapter on the
designing of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Cram's
architectural autobiography, he refers to the architect as "a sort of
amanuensis," through whom is expressed "something of far greater
magnitude and import than his own personality" (Life 176). Seeking
the authorization of some transcendent power to validate his creative
work, the architect receives the sponsorship of "the creative energy
of a time" (Life 176): each generation produces its own distinctive
creative terminology and the artist takes dictation.
But of course the "creative energies" of Cram's time dictated to
him an artistic message far removed from the time's other energies
and general spirit. Ground was broken for Cram's portion of the
Cathedral only a few months before the beginning of the First World
Sacramental Views: The Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram
51
Plan of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, N. Y. Reproduced from My Life in Architecture
by Ralph Adams Cram (Little Broum & Co. 1939).
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War-an event in which he saw the culmination of the materialistic
"Renaissance-Reformation" sensibility (Six Lectures 62). The Cathedral
was to repudiate all that was signified by War's turning the "splendid
works" of medieval Europe into "embers and ashes" (Six Lectures 56).
Thus, shortly after characterizing the architect as an "amanuensis,"
in describing how he and his fellows had "worked out a general
scheme for the entire Cathedral Close" (Life 177), Cram suggests the
arena of the church to be a kind of space directly opposed to his
time's spirits. The most striking feature of the scheme was to have
been a row of low buildings running along llOth Street and around
Amsterdam Avenue up as fur as the steps leading to the west entrance,
then resuming along the north and east boundaries of the close
until the area became completely "enclosed and set apart from the
tumultuous secular city without" (Life 179). The Cathedral, he insisted,
was planned as a kind of "walled town," and almost monastic sanctuary
for retaining a saving remnant of culture from the forces of attrition
on the outside. In these terms, instead of revising socially accredited
systems of meaning, Cram's church would provide a fearful refuge
from them, apparently acknowledging the superior potency of the
secular forces that opposed it. Religious space would be sealed off
from other spaces, and religious experience, by implication, would
not partake of the kind of secular experience prevailing outside of
the cloistered walls.
Thus the plan reveals a curiously contradictory conception of what
the role of public architecture, and of the architect, ought to be.
Inspired by the world in which it was to emerge, along lines intended
as a specific rebuke to that world, the Cathedral nonetheless contained
none of the world's elements. Somehow it was to be a transcendent
artifact that remained operative in the transcended world. But such
a motive need not be contradictory. Cram not only praised the similarly
composed walled towns of the past but avidly promoted them for
the future: he proposed that they could reject the "roar of industrial
civilization" through a restoration of "small human units" animated
by the "philosophy of sacramental ism" (Walled Toums ll, 19). "Sooner
or later," he wrote, "men, women and children will seek refuge in
the walled towns they will build, as they have gone time out of mind,
into the monasteries and convents of religion"; but in order "to correct
this silly artifice, to obliterate this preposterous, wrong-headed and
insecure way of life."28 In other words, the walled towns, essentially
monastic, would be conceived precisely in repudiation of the values
of the secular world, and would by their very presence-by offering
"that real and wholesome and joyful and simple and reasonable
Sacramental Views: The Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram
53
living that has long been forbidden by the conditions of modem
civilization" (Towns 36)-serve as an antidote to the outside world.
The Cathedral, proposed as a walled town, would presumably (if
Cram had had his way with it) have functioned in the same way.
Situated in the middle of America's largest city, but perched on the
city's highest hill, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine was to be at
once a repudiation of the city's landscape and a revision of it. And
since Cram conceived Gothic architecture to contain within itself
the formula of ideal society and ideal conduct, it would revise not
only the material world, but the society, culture, and spirit of its
inhabitants. To recall Benjamin's claim regarding architecture: public
buildings are appropriated by people less through visual reception
than through habit of use; and this mode of appropriation is
simultaneously a mode of inculcation, for buildings intervene in
people's lives, their habits of existence. In effect, Cram's churches,
graduate colleges, and public buildings were designed to confer upon
the world new patterns of sense and habit new codes of ritual. Ritual,
the ordered, material formulation of faith, was for Cram the central
connecting point between beauty and order. His definition of ritual,
comprehending both the forms of the space and the behavioral
patterns enacted, reveals the almost totalitarian principle of his cultural
agenda. Ritual is "the using of the arts of sound and colour and form
and rhythm and harmony, organized by order and law, to influence
the souls of men through their senses" (Quest 96). To "influence the
souls of men" one must reorganize one's own aesthetic sense,
movements, and notions of order.
Taken together, all of Cram's incorporating enterprises-seeking a
standard of organization for society, conduct, and desire, and locating
this standard in the arbitrarily organizing principles of his own aesthetic
sensibility-represent a desire to make over the whole world as a
reflection of his own mind; and he enacted that desire in his
architectural projects. Since Gothic architecture was not merely
analogous to medieval society, but unfurled according to the same
moral and aesthetic principles, whoever constructed a Gothic cathedral
would be introducing into the body of the world a kind of medieval
virus, which would replicate itself in all of the culture's other systems
of material and psychological organization. Just as the medieval
cathedral-the authoritative guide, as it were, for medieval society,
moral conduct, and aesthetic sensibility-enacted within its forms all
that was most perfect about the medieval world, Cram attempted in
his architectural constructions to realize his vision of medieval society
on the face of modem America. He envisioned that, as his walled
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towns spread, the "solitary" would draw around him "first a handful,
then a horde"; and "the damp cave or the wattled hut" would give
way "to multitudinous buildings and spacious cloisters and the tall
towers of enormous churches" (Walled Towns 103), until finally "more
and more would ... be drawn within their magical circuits, greater
and even greater would become their number, and at the last the
new wonder would be accomplished and society once more
redeemed" (Walled Towns 105).
This redemptive project is strikingly similar to what Frank
Lentricchia refers to in Ariel and the Police as a "will to refine," or,
quoting William James, as the desire of the theorist and the imperialist
alike to "plant our order" amid a putatively disorganized world. 29
Planting not a city but a cathedral upon a hill, Cram sought to
transform his entire world into an extension of the theoretical center
of his private sensibility.30 Thus it is not surprising that Cram,
anti-imperialist though he claimed to be, was pleased by the presence
of Great Britain in India, France in Algeria, the United States in the
Philippines, and Japan in Korea. These empires had "brought order
out of chaos" in the less developed countries (Sins 24). Their "will to
refine," even if Cram could not entirely assent to all the refinements,
is analogous to Cram's less plausible, but equally hubristic, desire to
impose his vision of an ideal culture; for the buildings, he believed,
were material realizations of the theoretical motives that founded
his sacramental philosophy. In effect he proposed to do for America
what he had set out to do for St.John the Divine when he inherited
the rudimentary work of prior architects in 1911: "to Gothicize what
already existed" (Life 172).31 D
Notes
1. Walter Benjamin, lliuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed., translated by Harry
Zohn (1955; New York 1969),240.
2. FredericJoseph Kinsman , Catholic and Protestant (New York 1913), 89-90.
3. John Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin's Genius (New York
1961),52-3.
4. Peter Conn, The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898-1917
(New York 1983), 197-229, esp; 197-203.
5. Although Kinsman converted from Anglo-Catholicism to Roman Catholicism, while Cram converted to Anglo-Catholicism, the difference is not so significant as would appear. As a cle ric, Kinsman was involved in ancient doctrinal issues
that made the Anglo-Catholic Church appear much more Protestant than it would
have to Cram, who approached the apostolic churches as an agnostic Unitarian.
Moreover, Cram distinguished clearly between the Anglican Church's "Protestantism"
Sacramental Views: The Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram
55
and its "Catholicism," the latter being a force "instrumental in the recrudescence of
Christian art" (editorial in Christian Art, vol. VI, no. 5 [August 1907], 235).
6. The only full-length biography of Cram is Robert Muccigrosso, American
Gothic: Ralph Adams Cram (Washington 1980).
7. Church Building (1899; rev. ed., Boston 1924),3.
8. Heart of Europe (New York 1915), 13.
9. Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America (New York 1955), 168. The few
critics who have discussed Cram's social criticism have focused on either his
conservatism or his medievalism. Those who regard Cram chiefly as a medievalist
tend to be interested primarily in his importance in the history of American
architecture (see Robert Muccigrosso, "Ralph Adams Cram: The Architect as
Communitarian," Prospects I, [1975]; Douglas Tucci, Ralph Adams Cram: American
Medievalist [Boston 1975]; Albert Bush-Brown, "Cram and Gropius: Traditionalism
and Progressivism," New England Quarterly 21 [March 1952]; and Arthur Tappan
North, Ralph Adams Cram, Contemporary American Architecture Series [New York
1931]), whereas among analysts of American conservatism, Cram has tended to receive
scant mention, usually in the service of some thesis relatively remote from Cram's
most central concerns. See, for example, David Spitz, Patterns of Anti-Democratic Tlwught
(New York 1949) who lets Cram speak for all those who locate the failure of democracy
in its valorization of the average person, and virtually ignores his medievalism,
aestheticism, and faith (100-129, esp. 100-103). See also Allen Guttmann, The
Conservative Tradition in America (New York 1967), 141-2; and Robert Crunden, From
Self to Society, 1919-1941 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1972), 164-167.
10. The Divided Mind, 203-214; T.Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace (New York
1981),202-209.
II. These are the general subject of The Sins of the Fathers (Boston 1918).
12. Cram spent several pages in The Nemesis of Mediocrity (Boston 1917, 35-40)
discussing Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race, (New York 1916), in which
the latter analyzes the various races of Europe and details in a mixture of coldly
scientific tones and apocalyptic implications the dangers of miscegenation and of
the "mongrelization" of the Nordic race.
13. Cram, Thomas Hastings, and Claude Bragdon. Six Lectures on Architecture.
Scammon Lectures for 1915; first published Chicago, ]917; 44.
14. Cram, The Substance of Gothic, Six Lectures on the Development of
Architecture from Charlemagne to Henry VIII; delivered at the Lowell Institute in
1916; first published, Boston 1925; xxii.
15. The Gothic Q!.lest (New York 1907), 57.
16. See, for example, Sins 60-62 and The Gothic QJ.test 23.
17. If this sounds faintly socialist, one should remember that such conservatives
as Cram maintained a more or less Jeffersonian suspicion of centralization, disdaining
capitalism and socialism alike. Cram, of course, frequently insisted he deplored
socialism for its elimination of private property and of "sacred" individuality (as opposed
to individualism). See Towards the Great Peace (Boston 1922) 64-65, and Sins 40-\.
18. Accordingly, Cram described his own architectural firm, despite its changing
personnel, as an "indivisible unit ... cooperating on all problems-with surprising
unity, considering the diversity in point of character, taste, and talents." My Life in
Architecture (Boston 1935),80.
19. Walled Towns (Boston 1919).
20. In The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New
York 1982), Alan Trachtenberg'S "incorporation" refers not only to institutions, but
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to "the reorganization of perceptions as well." Thus he discusses "not only the
expansion of an industrial capitalist system across the continent . . . the spread of a
market economy into all regions of ... a 'distended society,' but also ... the remaking
of cultural perceptions this process entailed" (3). The corporate body of America
reflected an increasingly corporate mind.
2l. After listing some thirty inspirational personalities from his youth, he
writes, "Looming over all ... was the ivory image of Leo XIII" (Life 7). On the
Modernist movement in the Catholic Church, see Alec R Vidler, The Modernist
Movement in the Roman Church (Cambridge, Eng., 1934), and Paul Sabatier, Modernism
(London 1908).
22. Ruskin himself, however, had written fleetingly of those who were "lured
into the Romanist Church by the glitter of it, like larks into a trap by broken glass;
. . . blown into a change of religion by the whine of an organ-pipe; stitched into a
new creed by gold threads on priests' petticoats;jangled into a change of conscience
by the chimes ofa belfry" (quoted in Rosenberg, 59).
23. Whatever we now build," argued Hastings, "whether church or dwelling,
the law of historic development requires that it be Renaissance, and if we encourage
the true principles of composition it will invariably be modern Renaissance" (Six
Lectures 106).
24. Frank Lloyd Wright, A Testament (1957; New York 1972), 160. For both
Cram and his politically and architecturally opposite contemporary, the language
of organicism comes most directly from Ruskin. John Rosenberg quotes Ruskin's
creed that "all beautiful lines are adaptations of those which are commonest in the
external creation" (Rosenberg 72); and he finds a strong echo of this in Wright's
effort to "make of the tree a building and of the building a tree" (ibid). Cram,
despite these rhetorical affinities, disapproved of Wright from early on, deeming
him "exceedingly 'modernist' and emancipated" (Impressions of japanese Architecture
[1905; rev. ed., Boston 1930]72).
25. See note 5. A staunch Anglo-Catholic, he refers to the American Episcopal
church as the "American branch of the Anglican communion of the Catholic Church"
(Church Building 43).
26. John Milton, Samson Agonistes, I. 1382, injohn Milton: Complete Poems and
Major Prose, Merritt Hughes, ed. (Indianapolis 1957), 584.
27. For a definition of the ideal of "transcendent agency" in turn-of-the-century
America, see Howard Horwitz"s "The Standard Oil Trust as Emerson ian Hero,"
Raritan 6 (Spring 1987),97-119.
28. Walled Toums 43. According to Cram's "vibratory theory of history," every
five hundred years or so since the beginning of the Christian era there has been
a resurgence of monasticism in response to tendencies toward chaos in the
secular civilization.
29. Frank Lentricchia, Ariel and the Police (Madison, WI, 1988), 113-14. Lentricchia
finds in Wallace Stevens' "Anecdote of the Jar" an astonishing analogy to America's
desire to "take dominion" over the Philippines and, later, over Vietnam. Citing
Michael Herr's analogy of the American combat base at Khe Sanh to Stevens's 'Jar
in Tennessee"-both, says Herr, "took dominion everywhere"-he shows the similarity
of both images to William James's assault on traditional theory. Philosophy, for
James, was like "a kind of marble temple shining on a hill," and James sought to
liberate the "tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed" world of the street from its
"simple, clean, and noble" restrictions (Lent 113).James, Herr, and Stevens all show
the invasion of an uncharted, alien, and, from the point of view of the refiner,
Sacramental Views: The Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram
57
apparently dissolute world by a more or less antiseptic structure that severely abridges
its hitherto almost boundless and locally authorized universe of reference. A devotee
of Gothic architecture might resist characterizing Cram's cathedral as "antiseptic";
yet just as Stevens's jar "does not give of bird or bush" and is hermetically sealed
against intrusion, the cathedral was to be empty of all things of the world, transforming
the world by refusing all its identities.
30. Lentricchia sees John Winthrop, in the trial of Anne Hutchinson,
transforming the "city upon a hill" of his "Christian Charity" address into a "metaphor
of the imperial city .. . a structure of male authority, purity (Puritanism) in action"
(ll5). Here, ironically, it is the antinomian, not the civil magistrate, who attempts to
impose the imperialistic order.
31. The subsequent history of St John'S, of course, has not conformed to
Cram's vision. As Alfred Kazin observes, "the cathedral is now as ecumenical as it is
possible for an Episcopalian to be in torrentially multiracial New York. Jewish
intellectuals have been invited to address the faithful; there is a memorial right off
the main door to Indian victims in Central America. Late in 1987 memorial services
for James Baldwin filled the mighty church . The tributes to Baldwin offered on that
occasion by Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and other black artists were as bitter and
'revolutionary' about American society as it is possible to be. In 1967 the then bishop
of New York announced that the cathedral might never be completed but its staff
would devote its energies to the poverty in the community surrounding it." Alfred
Kazin, "American Gothic," in The New York Review of Books (November 23, 1989),45-6.
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Ralph Adams Cram
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