The numinous and the profanization of church spaces
Writing about the atmosphere of church spaces is not an unexpected challenge for a philosopher, though it is a delicate one. By responding, he pays off a debt of gratitude, as it were, to an origin he had to abandon in order to experience and to think the phenomenon of atmosphere as such. Hermann Schmitz, who first coined atmosphere as a philosophical term, relied not only on Ludwig Klages’ preparatory work in doing so (see p. 19), but he also drew, quite substantially, on Rudolf Otto’s research concerning the numinous (1932). Atmospheres, as expansively diffused feelings, are experienced as poignant forces. This distanced and enlightened, that is, phenomenological description of experiences can also be explained as impressions by divine beings, or as visitations by demons. Accordingly, Hermann Schmitz succeeded in providing a convincing reinterpretation, and consequently also rehabilitation, of the Greek world of gods through his phenomenology of atmospheres (Schmitz, 1969). Mind you, this was a rehabilitation of the Greek world of gods, who, within the frameworks of psychologism, could conversely also be regarded as projections of human emotions: Eris as strife, Ares as militancy, Aphrodite as love, and Zeus as ire. Vis-à-vis such theses about projections, it is the merit of the phenomenology of atmospheres to have showcased the aspect of suffering in such emotions, as well as their trans-subjective character: the experience of an emotion is the affective concernment with something that appears to me from outside, and which I can therefore share with people around me.
It would seem obvious to apply the instruments of a phenomenology of atmospheres to the experiences of impressions made by church spaces as well. Are they not prime examples of the relationship between environmental qualities and dispositions, of tuned spaces, and of quasi-objective feelings? Is one not tempted to proclaim for church spaces, with and against Heraclitus who claimed this for his squalid dwelling: ‘This here, too, is full of gods’?
That, however, precisely indicates the venture’s delicate nature. Church spaces, after all, belong to institutions that claim authority even over the interpretation of experiences occurring in these spaces or, conversely, attach importance to their design, such that only certain experiences are possible. Thus, even in our times, they show no hesitation in condemning experiences of the numinous in church spaces as relapses into paganism and natural religion (Biéler, 1965). On closer examination, however, what is allowed and intended in church spaces in terms of experiences differs according to denomination and the finer points of the interpretation of dogma. Nevertheless, a kind of fundamental consensus prevails among Christian denominations, which historically goes back to the confrontation with paganism (and which makes Christianity appear strangely enlightened and rationalistic to phenomenologists), namely that churches, as such – with their inventory of altar, crucifix, figures of saints and relics – are actually not at all places of the presence of God. As such – and this must be emphasized; according to Christian doctrine, God is, because of what happens in them, particularly the sacraments, present in churches, after all. According to Catholic doctrine, God is present in the Eucharist celebration, that is, the Holy Communion, in the figure of Jesus Christ, according to Jesus’ words of the investiture when he offered the bread: ‘Take and eat; this is my body’ (Matthew 26:26). According to Protestant doctrine, God is present in the figure of Jesus Christ in the community assembly as such, in keeping with Jesus’ word: ‘where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them’ (Matthew 18:20). The churches’ interpretative practices seem strange to the phenomenologist because they block all empirical evidence, namely the engagement with the experiences of impressions in church spaces. From an ecclesiastical point of view, there are simply admissible and inadmissible experiences, and this may well explain successive waves of iconoclasm and austerity in design. Impressions that can be experienced in church spaces, even independently of liturgical activities, tend to be perceived as pagan threats. In any event, the phenomenologist, with his aforementioned tendencies towards polytheism, feels expelled.
The churches’ dogmatic attitudes stand in remarkable contrast to the actuality of church spaces. For the latter contain a great many characteristic atmospheres, and, over the course of church history, some have even formed that are typical of Christian churches. The churches themselves, through their architects and their collaboration with artists, have actually contributed to the formation of atmospheres. However, it seems like they do not want to recognize the staging of the numinous, which occurs through the production of atmospheres in church spaces. One really has to talk about repression here, considering that key theoretical texts about church architecture comment only on the placement of altar, pulpit and baptismal font and their relationship with the liturgy, or discuss the contrast between centrality and frontality in relation to a particular dogma; a book by the title of Church Architecture and Liturgy (Kirchenbau und Gottesdienst, Biéler, 1965) effectively deals only with floor plans. Only very rarely will a historian of ecclesiastical history mention the atmosphere of a church or the aura of a monastery (Norman, 1990). As of the rest, the atmospheric may be assigned a supporting role in the edification of the faithful or the community, at the most. Thus, Paul Brathe, in his book Theorie des evangelischen Kirchengebäudes (A Theory of Protestant Church Architecture, 1906: 127f), determines the ‘basic mood of the Protestant Christian and the Protestant parish, in their relationship and communion with God’, as ‘filial trust paired with reverence’. He continues,
already on entering, the church architecture must help awaken this basic mood. It must make entrants feel that they are with the Father – with the Father high above, of course, who became their father only out of mercy. The church, then, must have the basic character of something familiar and heart-warming, yet at the same time not lacking sublimity and solemnity, without which the familiar would tend towards all-too-human coziness. (p. 128)
By comparison, according to Brathe, Catholicism represents God rather as majestic and fearsome, so that ‘Catholic church architecture, likewise, has to aspire to a character of solemn greatness and sublimity’ (p. 120f). However, such consideration of the characteristic attunement of church spaces is, as said, extremely rare among theorists of church architecture, and one can sense the fear, here, too, that atmospheres might break out of the subsidiary role assigned to them.
Today, a greater impartiality vis-à-vis atmospheres in church spaces might have arisen in ecclesiastic circles. This is certainly linked to a growing ecumenical openness and tolerance concerning dogma, but the main reason is probably a recognition and acceptance of the profane consideration and use of church spaces. It may well be anachronistic to regard church spaces simply as objects of art history even for epochs during which nothing akin to autonomous art existed yet – autonomous, that is, with respect to the religious realm. However, the monuments of church art are (no different from, say, classical Greek temples) given to us and accessible even without the attendant religious practices, after all, and one need not justify this by reference to Hegel, who accorded art a higher stage than religion in the development of objective spirit. Factually, church spaces are considered like art works – in Europe, it is to be expected that the number of tourist visitors of churches will reach or exceed that of religiously motivated church-goers.
The general question then arises as to which experiences are available to visitors of church spaces independently of their religious affiliation. A great number of church spaces have also already been released from the context of religious practice. This is partially a consequence of historically recurring waves of secularization and partially of the dwindling numbers of church members and the shrinking financial basis of the churches themselves. There are, consequently, many church buildings that have been assigned to a different use, as museums, concert and lecture halls, and even as storehouses or shelters for the homeless. Finally, the churches themselves have opened their spaces to non-liturgical forms of use. Lectures and presentations outside of church services are no longer unthinkable, and art exhibitions are already almost normal in church spaces. Such non-liturgical use of church spaces often relates explicitly to the prevalent atmospheres there; in any event, to take these atmospheres into account cannot be avoided. Therefore, historically, it is now time to thematize the atmospheres of church spaces as such. With that, different aspects will come to the fore from the already mentioned classical instances that preoccupy the theory of church architecture (altar, pulpit, font, rood screen, choir, centrality versus frontality, etc.): namely, the generators of atmospheres. Architectural forms need to be considered with respect to their impressive qualities, particularly their movement suggestions; further, light and twilight, stone, figures and images, the acoustic qualities of a space, colours, materials and insignia of age, and, finally, Christian symbols, of course, which are still effective in profane use or contemplation.
Lastly, it is important to recognize that, with the disintegration of the authority over dogma, the atmospheric unity of church spaces begins to crumble, as it were. That is why, already in the title of this section, atmospheres are referred to in the plural. For this reason, too, the following can only exemplify individual characteristic atmospheres and discuss an arbitrary selection.
Sacred twilight – diaphanous light
Abbot Suger, whose construction work on the abbey church of St. Denis initiated, if not invented, the Gothic style, introduced, in my view, light into church architecture to generate atmospheres. Of course, this occurred within a Christian metaphysics appropriated from neo-Platonism. Here, light was understood as the creative power emanating from God. By contrast with Plato, in whose cave allegory earthly light was but an analogy for the idea of the Good’s power of Being, the unified world view of neo-Platonism allowed this power of Being itself to be experienced in light. This is a rare case in which architecturally staged, impressive qualities are interpreted in terms of religious experience (G. Böhme & H. Böhme, 1996: 153ff).
What kind of experience was this, and of what kind was the light mediating such experience? Today, we can re-enact this experience ourselves – if not necessarily in St. Denis, then in many other Gothic churches: this is not light in terms of brightness but light in the sense of appearance or visible radiance. That is, this is a kind of light that is experienced on the basis of darkness, out of holy twilight. Indeed, to be in the dark lies at the basis of this experience of light. We must therefore first question the holy twilight (heilige Dämmerung) itself.
Heilige Dämmerung is by now a common German expression for a typically ecclesiastic atmosphere. Is this simply about twilight as it is also experienced in nature, but that is called holy twilight only when it fills church spaces? What is holy about it? It seems to me that it is phenomenologically possible to distinguish between twilight as a natural phenomenon and the holy twilight in church spaces. A way of putting this distinction to the test would be scenographic staging, that is, for example, when the question is how to produce a type of twilight that would be suitable for the Cathedral scene in Goethe’s Faust.
FIGURE 12.3 Holy twilight, Münster St. Maria and Markus, Insel Reichenau / © 2006 Gernot Böhme.
Crucial for twilight in church spaces is their limitation. Everything here, too, disappears into indeterminate space, yet things do not disappear in an indeterminate expanse as in nature. This is why twilight in church spaces lacks that dangerous moment of getting lost in vastness that during dusk can contribute to the experience of anxiety. By contrast, holy twilight tends to be enclosing and protecting. On the side of the subject, the character of the holy is matched by the intuition of a secret that twilight harbours. This intuition can, indeed, be stimulated by church insignia and architectural characteristics. However, it seems to me that something like soft light is more likely to articulate twilight in this sense, namely shades of gold and perhaps individual candles. For this intuition and vague expectation, it is important that twilight in church spaces (characteristically delimited in contrast to natural twilight) disappears upwards, as it were. In the high Gothic nave, the columns and buttresses that make twilight dense by their mass at the bottom, where the viewer is, disappear towards the heights, one could say they clear up. And from here, from the upper clerestories, light rakes: as sheaves of light, as stripes, and often – this must have been how it was originally in St. Denis – as bursts of colour.
Characteristically, this type of light and its atmosphere appear in the dark, or on the background of darkness, and, further, its radiance is without source. It gathers up the expectation forming in twilight and leads it upwards. To a Christian, this upward lift may well convey an experience of redemption. Significantly, a related phenomenon in nature is called God’s finger in the German vernacular; the expression designates a radiant glow that becomes visible between dark thunderclouds covering the sun. Precisely because the source is not visible, it can be intuited as transcendental: the view itself transcends the light, following the shaft towards its source.
Conversely, radiance in the dark conveys the experience of creation through light. The light shafts lift single objects out of the twilight, sometimes grazing and sometimes directly illuminating. They act as a principle of individuation (principium individuationis).
While holy twilight can also exist by itself, diaphanous light appears only in a dusky atmosphere. It articulates and provides direction, it creates zones of light and redeems individuals who experience the atmosphere, as well as individual objects, from being lost in the indeterminate.
Silence and the sublime
Silence and the sublime characterize many church spaces but certainly not all – much depends on the building style here. Further, for silence and the sublime to be effective, several boundary conditions have to be met. This is most often the case when a church is located in the midst of the urban bustle, like, for example, Cologne Cathedral. For both, silence and sublimity, are in themselves contrast experiences and therefore best articulated through ingression, that is, through experiencing the contrast when entering from a different atmosphere.
FIGURE 12.4 Oberfeld in snow, Darmstadt / © 2005 Gernot Böhme.
One is thus almost struck dead by the silence on entering Cologne Cathedral; or, better put, one can feel oneself entering silence as if walking into a wall of fog. Only when lingering on in the cathedral does one notice that this silence is not at all soundlessness. Rather, the silence raises above the muffled murmur through which the big city is present here, too, whereas sounds outside are manifold, individual and meaningful – a ruptured concert.
Just as silence receives the visitor entering the cathedral in a potent density, so the vast nave pulls the view upwards. Just as silence contrasts with the hearing of individual sounds, so this view contrasts with the fixed gaze on individual objects and signals. Only when the view does not get caught somewhere, can the sublime be experienced in this space. Despite what Kant thought, a confrontation with absolute magnitude is not required in any sense for the experience of the sublime. Rather, a detachment from human scale given in the human body suffices.
The pre-Kantian, classical eighteenth-century theory of the sublime held that its experience is one of ambivalence, that is, of simultaneous pleasure and displeasure. Kant moralized this experience, so to speak, and resolved the ambivalence by making the subject rise above sensibility. For him, therefore, objects proper are not sublime, whether they be mountains or pyramids, but the subject him- or herself.1 By contrast, experiences in church spaces show that the sublime is primarily experienced in one’s own body (primär eine Erfahrung am eigenen Leibe). Together, the dissolution of the fixed gaze and the movement impression (Bewegungsanmutung, see p. 49) of the architecture cause bodily awareness to slide into infinity. Important in this context is that it is precisely this slipping that allows one to feel one’s own limits and thereby the smallness of one’s body. Feelings alternate between slipping into infinity and being thrown back upon one’s body. They thus create the ambivalence that belongs to being affected by the sublime. If this were not the case, that is, if bodily awareness indeed disappeared into infinity, one would not sense sublimity but the so-called oceanic feeling. To sense the sublime – in this case of the church space – contrast is required: the simultaneous sensing of one’s own presence in space, that is, one’s lost, disoriented presence, in an over-large space. This ambivalence in sensing the sublime links that feeling to the experience of silence. For the latter, too, articulates itself particularly well when it is simultaneously an experience of one’s own presence. Silence is always articulated through individual sounds (e.g., the evening’s silence through a dog’s barking in the distance). In the church space, though, silence is most intensively articulated by one’s own footsteps. As with the sublime, the experience of silence is then connected with the sensing of one’s own lostness in space.
Admittedly, sublimity and silence are atmospheres that can occur separately from each other. This can be seen by the fact that a sublime atmosphere in church spaces can be augmented by music, particularly by organ music. Nevertheless, because they appear to the subject in the same ambivalent manner, sublimity and silence often enter an intimate connection in church spaces. Their invitation to disappear into the expanse of space simultaneously throws the subject back on his or her small and limited presence.
Stone and space
Stone can afford a very special spatial experience in churches. This phenomenon needs to be defined precisely since stone, as a material, imprints its synaesthetic characteristics on an atmosphere just as other materials do. Atmospheres, moreover, are always spatial phenomena. Yet, in the case of church spaces in which stone and space enter into a special relationship – one thinks above all of Romanesque and Gothic churches – it is not about an indeterminate spatiality, into which atmospheres are poured, but about a particular, well-composed space: space as spatium. Limitation, contour, direction and an encompassing volume are all part of it.
Not all types of church are able to convey this kind of spatial experience. To the contrary, some church styles even have a tendency to dissolve space, as a firmly composed and limited order. This starts already during the Gothic period, after all, with the dissolution of walls, the striving for airy heights, the disappearance of the encompassing volume. Down below, however, where people stand or walk, the experience of space as spatium is preserved by the columns’ bulkiness and the thickness of the stone blocks. In Baroque churches, by comparison, space in the sense of spatium disappears behind plaster, together with stone. In its stead, stucco and imagery take over, and a Baroque church, it has been correctly observed, can no longer be discussed purely as architecture:
What seems to be structural may be manufactured in stucco. Distinctions between the elements of the building, so important to the Renaissance architect, are deliberately confused, so that walls undulate and spaces flow into one another; putti fly out from capitals and pediments to lead lives of their own; frescoes continue the architecture into fictitious depths; painted figures emerge into three dimensions; angels hover without apparent support. (Norman, 1990: 196)
When it remains visible, though, stone exudes volume and radiates firmness and calm. This character is reinforced by well-composed blocks, the kit-set style of the Romanesque, and the load of columns and vaults remains sensible and understandable. This is particularly the case in crypts, where the load character of vaults can become almost pressing. By contrast, in the Gothic style one has to say the management of lines with their movement suggestions withdraw the loads (which vaults also imply, of course) from direct perception. On the other hand, in both the Gothic and Romanesque styles, floors form a unity with walls and columns. In this way, stone becomes a totality of spatial experience. In ruins, one can observe how particularly the dissolution of the floor, sometimes more than the lack of a roof, makes the feeling of being inside a building vanish. In an era when sealing is regarded as inferior, it is difficult to articulate adequately the degree to which the creation of solid floors is constitutive of the organization of human spaces. However, walking through Dubrovnik or North Italian cities, one can comprehend this understanding of building empathetically. Stone produces the sense of urbanity, the feeling of being in a completely humanly ordered place: these cities are entirely encompassed by stone floors and walls. In such spaces, one is seized by a kind of primitive human pride, that is, not only by a feeling of security and order, but also by one of rising above nature.
Strangely, the term oikodome 
edification) figured quite early, already in biblical texts, not so much in the sense of individual uplifting but in the sense of community formation (1 Corinthians 14:26). Even though the original community’s meeting place did not matter for community formation as such, the secure house nevertheless became in this way a metaphor for church, a term in which both, the house of God and the community, have today become indistinguishable. Church spaces, in which an austere fit-out makes architecture appear in rough stone, in particular, church order remains preserved as a spatial order. By way of boundaries and thresholds, through hiding and revealing, by means of orientations and hierarchies of places in space, as well as through distance and bulk, stone creates space in the sense of spatium. These church spaces, more than others, therefore hold so much fascination for profane use.
Genius loci
Today, profane use makes it necessary, but also possible, to speak of the atmosphere of church spaces. However important atmospheres might have been in the building and fit out of churches and their liturgical use, they were treated as something marginal to the situation, whose acknowledgement was prevented by something almost like a taboo. Even if we can thematize the atmospheres of church spaces today by tracing the relationships between environmental qualities and dispositions, without touching on taboo zones, an element has so far nevertheless been missing which makes the theme appear delicate from yet another angle: church spaces remain church spaces, after all, even without liturgical use. Profanization will in most cases remain incomplete. What is it that makes their genius loci stay on in church spaces,2 even in profane use?
It seems to me that phenomenology is able to render account of this fact without recourse to mystical and animist instances. That is because there are, among the generators which determine the characters of atmospheres, not only synaesthesia and movement suggestions but indeed also conventional elements such as signs and symbols. Again, the comparison with the art of scenography is instructive here. Not only will holy twilight be deployed in the staging of a church space in the theatre, but a crucifix will also be mounted somewhere and, for example, hints of Gothic arches and the sound of organ music will be provided in the background.
The crucifix, of course, is clearly a religious symbol and is likely, just like other inscriptions and images with Christian content that are left in church spaces, to convey a church-like atmosphere to them. More interesting, perhaps, are Gothic arches and the organ music. A. W. N. Pugin’s opinion, that the Gothic architectural style is the Christian style as such, may be excessive, yet the Gothic is nevertheless primarily regarded as the style of churches – to the extent even that something church-like seems to adhere to profane buildings in the Gothic style as well. In that sense, certain architectural elements of style do shape the character of atmospheres. A similar convention has developed for organ music. Originally, the organ may well have also been a profane instrument (Brathe, 1906: 182f), yet today it is almost impossible to avoid a church-like character in the profane use of organ music.
In summary, church spaces retain the historical conditioning stemming from liturgical use even when they become profane. Certain insignia, like religious symbols, stylistic features, frescoes and inscriptions, continue to shape the character of these spaces as church-like. Profane use has to take this into account, and that is actually what organizers of art exhibitions, concerts, and lectures do. They anticipate, for instance, that visitors will enter these spaces with a certain awe, a readiness for contemplation and, if I can put it that way, an expectation of transcendence. The latter arises above all because church spaces retain their seclusion from worldly activities: they are used and experienced as special places. As venues for cultural events, particularly for concerts, but also, regrettably, for lectures, they become places of art in the form of secular religion. Church spaces even have a particular attraction for the visual arts – due, of course, to the fact that visual artists can relate their works to an already existing atmosphere, with which they can then play through contrast, augmentation or modification. In this way, they may regain the very aura they lost with modernism. If, according to Benjamin’s analysis (2008), this loss occurred in the transition from cult value to exhibition value, then at least a whiff of cult value may be re-imparted to the works of visual art when they participate in the atmosphere of church spaces.
1See Böhme (1999b), particularly the chapter ‘Pyramids and Mountains’ (Pyramiden und Berge).
2Christian Norberg-Schulz (1979) reintroduced the term genius loci into architecture. Robert Joseph Kozljanic (2004) then provided a comprehensive history of this concept.