Willa Cather’s Romanesque Modernism

Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe

Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) is about the efforts of Bishop Jean Marie Latour and his friend, the priest Joseph Vaillant, to establish a diocese in the Territory of New Mexico, and it culminates with the building of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe. The novel testifies to the power of architecture to orient us on our human journey: buildings aren’t just physical landmarks—they’re spiritual ones as well. Looking around at American churches these days, however, you wouldn’t know this. The situation has not improved much from the 1870s, when Cather’s Father Latour quips: “It would be a shame to make another ugly church on this continent where there are already so many.” This ugliness of our churches—whose forms derive principally from the precincts of entertainment capitalism—represents a great missed opportunity to offer spiritual direction in physical space.

But reacting against the typically American commercial denigration of beauty can lead one into an equal and opposite error of aesthetic traditionalism. Cather recognizes this error and shows us a better way. Death Comes for the Archbishop is both a brief for religious tradition and a polemic against religious traditionalism. In architectural terms, we can think of traditionalism as the merely decorative, rather than essentially structural, deployment of historical forms of thought, worship, and aesthetics. Cather guards against traditionalism by invoking the virtue of plainness, insisting that the beautiful be also functional. When Latour beholds the cache of yellow sandstone out of which he intends to build his Santa Fe cathedral, he declares: “I want a plain church, but I want a good one. I shall certainly never lift my hand to build a clumsy affair of red brick, like an English coach-house. Our own Midi Romanesque is the right style for this country.”

Willa Cather

According to Latour, a proper church ought to be plain, free from excessive ornament. Its form follows its function of worship. A proper church ought also to be good, which I take to signify its lively communication with traditions of sacred building. It ought not to be easily mistaken for a coach-house (or a supermarket); it should look, well, like a church. And a proper church ought to be fitting, built in “the right style for this country.” Latour’s cathedral will partake of the New Mexican landscape, incarnating beauty for its particular environment, much like the cruciform juniper tree he encounters in the book’s opening scene. His definition of beauty aims for the universal, but it doesn’t neglect the particularities of time and place. Latour, then, possesses three criteria for judging the beauty of church architecture: plain, good, and fitting, and the greatest of these, perhaps, is plainness.

As a novelist, Cather took plainness for the most crucial measure of artistic excellence. Her essay “The Novel Démeublé” (1922)—that is, “unfurnished”—advocates for a style of narration that minimizes descriptive detail: “How wonderful it would be if we could throw all the furniture out of the window . . . and leave the room as bare as the stage of a Greek theatre, or as that house into which the glory of Pentacost [sic] descended; leave the scene bare for the play of emotions, great and little.” Both similes reveal a spiritual motive behind Cather’s insistence on plainness. The ancient Greek theater was at once a religious as well as a civic and artistic ritual. The Acts account of Pentecost specifies no architectural detail of the room in which the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples. But Cather couldn’t imagine it any other way than plain. The unfurnished room makes space for the Spirit to fall in fire. Given the value she placed on the virtue of plainness, it makes sense that, out of the traditions of Christian sacred building, Cather was attracted to the grand but austere Romanesque style rather than the oft-valorized Gothic that followed it in architectural history.

Simone Weil

The French mystical philosopher Simone Weil shared this judgment. Weil’s essay “The Romanesque Renaissance” (circa 1941-42), written in the shadow of the Nazi occupation of France, accuses “the Gothic Middle Ages” of “totalitarian spirituality.” Gothic building reached its thirteenth-century peak simultaneous with the Albigensian Crusade, which exterminated the heretical Cathar movement of Southern France—that is, the Midi, Bishop Latour’s home region and the heartland of Romanesque architecture. Weil reads the crusade’s violence into the architecture. The very meticulousness of the porches and arches, florets and flying buttresses, gargoyles and glass, evinces, to Weil, the Gothic’s desire for absolute spiritual control. One must imagine the elaborate spires dipped in blood. Opposed to Gothic “force,” Weil praises Romanesque “balance”: “The Romanesque church is suspended like a balance around its point of equilibrium, a point which is real although there is nothing to show where it is. This is what is needed to enclose that cross on which Christ’s body counter-balanced the universe.”

The Romanesque was often portrayed as a mere way-station on the climb to the glories of the Gothic by modern medievalists such as Henry Adams, Ralph Adams Cram, and Jacques Maritain. Espousing what Alan Jacobs calls “the neo-Thomist account of modernity”—a “declinist narrative” portraying the Reformation as a trauma severing Western culture from its greatest achievements and prompting a long slide into spiritual and political chaos—such pro-Gothic intellectuals offered an important rebuke to a facile progressivism stemming from the Enlightenment. But it came at a cost. The neo-Gothic backward glance, so effective at exposing the inhumanity of industrial modernity, was weighed down by intellectual inertia that resisted conversion into a workable vision of a just future. By advocating for the Romanesque as an artistic achievement in its own right, Cather and Weil carried on a clandestine argument with their pro-Gothic contemporaries.

Cather and Weil’s visions were just as deeply traditional as the neo-Gothic, yet more flexibly modern. Their praise of Romanesque plainness rhymed with the critique of ornament pursued by modernist architects from Le Corbusier to Adolf Loos to Louis Sullivan (who coined the maxim “form follows function”). The manifesto of the German Bauhaus school of modernist design, published as a pamphlet in 1919, sported a woodcut illustration of a cathedral by Lyonel Feininger on its cover, “the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith.” While the Bauhaus cathedral may have included modernized flying buttresses on its wings, its clean lines and pyramidal spires owe more to the Romanesque. Cather and Weil, unlike more militantly futuristic modernists, argued for plain beauty by appealing to historical example, not by exploding the supposed shackles of tradition. If Alasdair MacIntyre is right that a tradition is a socially embodied argument extended through time, then Cather and Weil’s quarrel with the boosters of the Gothic exemplifies faithfulness to the traditions of Christian sacred architecture.

Cather and Weil would warn us not to confuse such faithfulness with pining for the lost glories of Christendom. For contemporary traditionalists—the would-be twenty-first century Catholic Integralists, for example—the Gothic remains a powerful shorthand for an imagined past: a unified Christian Europe that never fully existed, and that was only ever partially realized by violence. Moreover, a backward glance singularly fixated on the Gothic as the culmination of Christian civilization only repeats the progressivist error such traditionalism is supposed to counteract; it just places the apex of progress in the past rather than the present or future. For Weil in the 1940s, “a return to the Gothic Middle Ages,” with its universal predominance of sacred values, was “entirely chimerical, since ... we have been brought up in an environment almost exclusively composed of profane values”—a judgment that resonates even more in our present pluralistic moment.

Together with the American poet James Russell Lowell, we may be tempted to say: “This is no age to get cathedrals built.” It was 1870 when he published these words, just a few years after the Civil War, and other matters of building—like Reconstruction—felt more exigent to him. But just a few months before Lowell’s poem appeared in print, Bishop Latour’s real-life counterpart, Jean-Baptiste Lamy, laid the first yellow stone of the Santa Fe Basilica.

Iglesia de Mancarrón, Departamento de Río San Juan - Nicaragua

Who will build the cathedral befitting our brave new world? Perhaps it already exists: Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família in Barcelona; Mark Rothko’s abstract expressionist chapel in Houston, Texas; Robert H. Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral, now seat of the Roman Catholic Bishop of Orange, California; or even Kanye West’s Sunday Service, that moveable gospel feast. For my part, I’d offer not a cathedral, but the parish church of the poet-priest Ernesto Cardenal and the peasants of Solentiname in Nicaragua as the nearest approach I’ve seen. The cathedral suited to our times awaits builders with the ambition—and the humility—to make it plain, but good.

Jonathan McGregor is the author of the forthcoming book Communion of Radicals: The Literary Christian Left in Twentieth-Century America. He teaches in the Writing and Reasoning Program at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX.