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Books Place, word and light
CISTERCIAN EUROPE:
ARCHITECTURE OF CONTEMPLATION by Terryl N. Kinder William B.
Eerdmans/Cistercian Publications, 407 pages, $70
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Reviewed by RICH
HEFFERN
Architecture, said Frank Lloyd Wright, is the
mother of all arts. He added: A doctor can bury his mistakes; an
architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
Terryl Kinders Cistercian Europe offers a lavishly
illustrated tour through Europes wonderful Cistercian abbeys. The coffee
table-sized book demonstrates the truth of Wrights statement. More than
200 full-color and black-and-white photographs of the cloistered walkways,
decorated downspouts and interior details show how the construction of these
buildings brought together artist and artisan, working with stone, glass and
wood to build elaborately beautiful and sturdy shelter for illustrated
manuscripts, hymnals and prayer books, statues, fountains and all the other
necessary accoutrements of communal living and worship for the men and women
who had taken up the contemplative life there.
Kinder is a leading expert in medieval architecture. Her book
aptly illustrates the Christian precept that the divine life is disclosed in
the material world. Besides depicting places where monks prayed and worked, the
exquisite architecture of these buildings reflects the spiritual
transformations to which their residents aspired.
The Cistercian Order was the most important of the new religious
orders that developed in Western Europe in the late 11th century in response to
movements for reform in the church. Cistercians dominated the spread of new
monastic foundations in Europe and spread rapidly from Burgundy, where the
order began, throughout France, Britain and Ireland.
The Cistercian way of life emphasized solitude and isolation;
Cistercian monasteries were thus often built far away from towns and villages.
Driven by an ideal of individual poverty, Cistercian monks had no personal
property and the monks worked the land with their hands to support themselves,
dependent as well on rich benefactors.
Cistercian Europe is not a guidebook to individual
monasteries, writes Kinder. It is, rather, an introduction to a way
of life as it has been lived since the early 12th century, and in many respects
continues to be lived today.
In a forward, Michael Downey, editor of the New Catholic
Dictionary of Spirituality, points out that spirituality is expressed
through an abundance of media, architecture included. The relationship
between Cistercian spirituality and architecture, he writes, hinges
on a central insight: The way in which these men and women have understood God
has influenced how they built their buildings. There is a reciprocal
relationship between their life with God and the kind of environment they
create.
In our fragmented and disoriented world, seeing and absorbing this
kind of integration between the inner and outer can be profoundly healing and
hope-bestowing.
Rich Heffern is NCR opinion editor.
National Catholic Reporter, February 7,
2003
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