A Dean's Dozen: 12 Years living and working in a World Heritage Cathedral

Just over one hundred years ago, in 1912, a book was published with the title The Story of the Deanery, Durham, 1070-1912. Its author was George Kitchin. He had been dean since 1894. He was the author of works on, among other things, Francis Bacon, John Ruskin, the history of France, and Winchester where he had been dean before Durham. He was a friend of Lewis Carroll who had photographed his daughter. He was the last Dean of Durham to have oversight of the University, and was its first Chancellor.

His book on the Deanery was his last, and he never lived to see it published. It is a striking, large-format volume with many photographs and drawings, an invaluable record of the Deanery as it was in his day. While well researched, it does not pretend to be a work of scholarship. Rather, it is his tribute to a house he loved. In the preface, he describes himself as a passing hermit-crab who must soon leave this shelter he has enjoyed for rather longer than my own decanal 12 years. He says that he wants to ‘express my own thankfulness for being permitted to dwell in this shelter for an old man’s last days. The record of the ancient chambers makes the past live again and will, I hope, be an inspiration for all who may hereafter have the good fortune to live in this Deanery.’[1] So it has proved for this dean. My only regret is that I did not get to revise the book for its centenary in 2012, for there is a great deal about the Deanery that Kitchin did not know about that is now revealed, including the miraculous 15^th century wall painting in the entrance hall, what was once the Prior’s Chapel.

My subject in this lecture is Living and Working in a World Heritage Cathedral. I begin with the Deanery because the ‘living’ part of the title belongs there, as does much of the ‘working’ too. It is a relatively little-known part of the World Heritage Site, so I hope you will allow me to say something about my own experience of living there before I broaden the perspective to take in the more public and visible aspects of my role. In both, I want to try to reflect not on the built heritage itself, wonderful though it is, so much as on its interaction with human buildings, the symbolism and meanings it holds for us. I want to explore how in my experience, heritage functions to enrich and shape not only the lives of the people fortunate enough to inhabit it, but more specifically, the mission of the institution to which this acropolis is home, this Cathedral at the heart of this peninsula.

It is not the first time we have lived in a house that warrants an entry[2] in Pevsner’s Buildings of England. In the 1970s we occupied the medieval Hall of the Vicars Choral in Salisbury Close, so we had some experience of the interface between heritage and human living. Indeed, you get to know a building’s personality in a unique way when you begin to fill it up with children. Here in Durham, with children having long flown the family nest, we share the historic Deanery with student lodgers in the eyrie upstairs, and Godiva the cat. And, it seems, a visitant. This genius loci, whoever he is (and I am reliably informed that it is a ‘he’), makes himself known mostly to women on the north side of the house where it looks out on to the Chapter House. He is benign, but even I have known doors close and lights be switched on or off when I have known for certain that I have been alone in the house. Who is to say what guests these old buildings entertain unawares?

The Deanery was short-listed in a Country Life article in 2003 as part of a quest to find Britain’s oldest continuously inhabited house.[3] It was reluctantly disqualified on the grounds that before the Reformation, the Prior’s Lodging was not strictly speaking a private residence. But the evidence of hundreds of years of continuous occupancy is indeed one of its features. When I show visitors round, I tell them that every century from the 11^th to the 21^st has left its mark on the building. This is not the place to linger on the details which are a lecture in themselves. However, it is worth mentioning the contribution modernity has made to this, one of England’s greatest clergy houses. Dean Waddington had converted the medieval library into a Victorian gentleman’s study complete with fitted bookcases, tall sash windows and his own heraldic achievement above the great fireplace. For centuries deans still slept in a Tudor tester bed in the famous King James Room, so-called because the Scottish monarch had occupied it during his southward progress on acceding to the English throne in 1603. Kitchin’s book has photographs that record the house as it was at the turn of the 20^th century with its heavy over-furnished late Victorian and Edwardian interiors. The biggest transformation to happen after his time was Hensley Henson’s introduction of the colourful Chinese wallpaper that adorns the solarium, the room in the Deanery that everyone remembers, which Dean Spencer Cowper had converted from medieval solar to fashionable salon in the mid-18^th century. The story is that Ella, Henson’s wife, found the prospect of living in this vast and dreary Deanery unsupportable without colour. This the solarium abundantly provided. On sunlit days I doubt there is a more beautiful room in North East England.

The imminent arrival in 1974 of Eric Heaton as Durham’s first modernising Dean launched large-scale alterations to the Deanery. The Priors’ Hall was separated off for use for Cathedral use though it is still legally a part of the house. A new internal staircase halved the time it took to get from one floor to the next. A striking new entrance was created by George Pace with a spiral castellated stairway and a new front door opened up in the west wall of what had once been the Priors’ Chapel where there had once before been a door. The magnificent 15^th century paintings were uncovered on the north wall of the chapel, together with evidence of 13^th and 14^th century decoration and an array of medieval graffiti which continue to be recorded and studied today. The tantalising glimpse of the Virgin Mary’s skirts at the east end of the series tells us that there are more paintings that have yet to be exposed. In this period the interiors were extensively modernised for 20^th century family living. Finally, in 2011, we dedicated the Chapel of the Holy Cross in the 13^th century undercroft, a beautiful space with a Cistercian feel to it, lovingly furnished by local Durham woodworker Colin Wilbourn. Hensley Henson had created a chapel there in his day, and the Cathedral choristers famously slept in it during the war because its stone vault offered the best air-raid shelter in the College.

All this gives you a sense of the Deanery’s art and architecture. But what is it like to live there? You may not think this is worth lingering on: your home is your home, whether it is a medieval building in a Cathedral precinct, a Victorian vicarage, a 1930s detached house or an Edwardian villa in an elegant suburb – to summarise the clergy houses we have lived in for the past 40 years. However, if you are interested in the interaction between the built environment and human life, how we have configured our surroundings and how they to some extent configure us, then it is worth reflecting on the experience of living in such a remarkable house as the Deanery. Furthermore, because the Deanery is attached to the cloister and therefore to the Cathedral itself, living and working in the Deanery is almost an encapsulation, and maybe also a metaphor, of how I have experienced the Cathedral too.
 
The first thing to say is that like George Kitchin, I am not sure that even after 12 years I have fully taken in what it is to live in a house such as the Deanery. The experience of putting on hat and coat by the wall-paintings, answering emails in a grand Victorian library under its mellow 15^th century ceiling, chairing meetings in the King James Room surrounded by portraits of deans from the 16^th to the 19^th centuries, watching TV against the backdrop of 13^th century lancet windows with evidence of Islamic-inspired decoration, walking to evensong along the length of a rococo-gothic corridor created above the space where the original monastic dormitory latrine drains ran, celebrating a family Christmas in front of a big homely fire in the priors’ solar – I could go on and on. The chief thing, I know, is never to take any of this for granted. To occupy such surroundings is to realise the need to be more present to them, pay attention to their artistry, their memory, and indeed their spirituality. You should not live in a house such as this without becoming more of a contemplative, someone who in Thomas Hardy’s words ‘used to notice such things’. This is part of what I call ‘inhabiting’ the house.

I do not want to leave you with the impression that it is always straightforward to occupy a part of the nation’s heritage. It belongs to many more people than simply the family who live there. A deanery or a vicarage is always to some extent not entire your own, but you feel the sense of guardianship when it wears its history so palpably on its sleeve. Then there is the price you pay: the easy conveniences of modern living. In winter, we (and I include Godiva the cat in this) scuttle from one warm space to another along long, unheated corridors. The wifi won’t penetrate the great medieval walls beyond the office. Mobile phone signal is patchy because of the way the bulk of the Cathedral just yards away vastly distorts the aether like a huge star influencing space-time in general relativity theory. If you forget that your freshly laundered pyjamas are in the airing cupboard in the undercroft, it is 53 steps down and up again from the bedroom. If you burn the toast, the ultra-sensitive smoke alarms go off and the fire brigade is outside before you can say mea culpa. When the west wind blows fiercely, bits of sandstone drop off the eroded exterior like meteorites, sometimes outside the front door where people go in and out. I could go on. Life in a medieval deanery is nothing if not eventful.

There is one aspect of life in the Deanery that is almost (not quite) unique in England. This is its physical attachment to the Cathedral itself. When people who don’t know Durham ask me where I live, I often reply that it is in an end-of-terrace or semi on the south-east corner of the cloister. This is architecturally the case, despite the Deanery’s character as a medieval manor house complete with hall, solar, chapel and library all constituting the required piano nobile. This means that the Dean of Durham lives not so much above the shop as in it. This has its convenient aspects: I can be in my stall for matins and evensong in less time than it takes to get to the College gate, let alone to the shops. What is more, I have a dry decanal foul-weather route to prayer while my Chapter colleagues are exposed to wind and rain on the way across the precinct into the cloister. But it also raises questions about where ‘work’ space ends and ‘personal’ space begins; inevitably, the boundaries are porous much of the time. The medieval priors who once occupied the house would not have understood the concept of ‘personal’ or ‘private’: there was no such thing when a Benedictine community lived together under rule. Every parish priest faces the same dilemmas if his or her house is close to the church and perhaps connected to it by means of a dedicated path through the church yard. So the ‘attachment’ of the Deanery to the Cathedral symbolises something that is deeply embedded in the concept of vocation: a dean belongs to his or her cathedral in an inalienable way, tied to it by an inviolable umbilical cord.

And this leads me on to what is perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the ‘living’ dimension of my title ‘living and working in a World Heritage Site’. This umbilical connection to a sacred space, that is, the Cathedral, has affected the way in which I have felt about the Deanery. In a sacred space, behaviours are modified, calibrated to what is appropriate to a place dedicated to encounter with the divine, this mysterium tremendum et fascinans as Rudolph Otto famously called the ‘idea’ of the holy. To be architecturally, psychologically and ethnographically connected to a shrine like Durham Cathedral poses questions about the meanings attached to this house, the symbolism it carries. It speaks to the soul, fertilises the imagination.  But the paradoxes are even sharper than that. For one thing, the north side of the house where benign presences have been felt and reported, stands on or near the site of the place where Cuthbert’s coffin may have been placed from 1093 to 1104 when the new shrine, sanctuary and quire of the Romanesque cathedral were being built. If this is right, then plausibly the house holds a memory of being inhabited for a while by a saint, indeed, for the same length of time – a dozen years – of my own occupancy. In its more recent history, the present hallway and PA’s office occupy what was once what was once Prior Melsonby’s Chapel, as I have mentioned in connection with the wall paintings. It was probably Thomas Comber, the dean installed in 1691 to replace the nonjuring Denis Granville who had been ejected in the Glorious Revolution of 1689, who is said to have ‘improved’ the Deanery and converted the obsolete chapel into living quarters[4].

So the dean and his family live, not adjacent to a sacred space, but to some extent inside one, or the memory of one. Where the chapel once was, family and guests come in and out. My PA works on her computer and manages the Dean. Upstairs, the family entertain, relax, watch TV, enjoy a late night whisky, shower, bathe, dress, undress and sleep. Too much information, you may say. But it raises interesting questions about the interface between sacred and profane, especially when it comes to the functions associated with a bathroom situated in what was once a place of prayer. Sacred memory and secular reality intersect intriguingly. I don’t want to become obsessive about this, but I do believe that an important aspect of heritage is the honouring of memory. How to do this responsibly and well is a question has never been absent from my mind for very long. It’s one dimension of living and working in this World Heritage Site.

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Let me turn now to the Cathedral itself. Here again, as with the Deanery, I want to reflect on the personal experience of ‘living and working’ in Durham Cathedral and how my own persona has been to a great extent shaped during these dozen Durham years.

I have been fortunate in the ecclesiastical buildings I have worked in over four decades of public ministry. I was ordained 40 years ago this June beneath the Romanesque chancel arch of St Andrew’s, Headington in Oxford. Then followed six years in the Close at Salisbury where, in addition to lecturing in Old Testament studies, I was an honorary vicar choral at the peerless 13^th century Cathedral. After this came five years as Vicar of Alnwick in Northumberland, a sturdy late-gothic building near the Castle, complete with ducal emblems on the capitals of the elaborate chancel, and a mini-bastle above the sanctuary, a look-out against Scots raids from the north. I then enjoyed eight years at Coventry Cathedral as Precentor and Vice-Provost, followed by another eight as Dean of Sheffield. Thence to Durham. All fine buildings of many different epochs and styles. If you know your geology you will recognise in this list more than 30 years of sandstone of various hues, from the lovely pink-red of Warwickshire to the blackened millstone grit of South Yorkshire, and the golden but friable sandstones of Northumberland and County Durham. When it comes to cathedrals, I am wholly a sandstone dean. I have a distant memory of finely-wrought limestones in the south. But I am now a habitué of the north of England’s rougher-hewn sandstones: always beautiful to look at, always responsive to the changing seasons and the shifting light, always lovable; but there is no denying the conservation challenges they pose. More of this towards the end.

I first visited Durham in 1966 as a schoolboy applying to read maths here. Out of the recent experience of having been baptised a Christian, I was awed by the Cathedral, even on that bleak November day under the kind of sullen, steely sky the North East does so well. Could I have even entertained the thought that my future lay here? Hardly, given that on that first ever visit, I managed somehow to walk right round the Cathedral without discovering St Cuthbert’s shrine. Perhaps after 12 years here it is time to own up to this extraordinary and shameful omission. But in my defence, there is something ‘apart’ about the feretory, like a little Farne Island set in the great sea that is the 13^th century Chapel of the Nine Altars. In 2003, I asked to be installed on St Cuthbert’s Day, and perhaps this went some way towards saying sorry to our saint.

As we know, the Cathedral, the city, the University would not be here were it not for the travels of Cuthbert’s Saxon community who arrived on this rock in 995 and erected the first shrine to house the relics of their saint. In my book about the Christian heritage of this part of England, I described the Cathedral as the ‘mystic heart’ of the North East.[5] I believe this to be true as a matter both of history and of what I have called sacred geography. On reflection, there is another more personal level of meaning in this phrase in that I have discovered how the Cathedral is the ‘mystic heart’ of my own spirituality and Christian identity.  I don’t mean this to sound like the kind of purple prose clergy resort to in the pulpit. I mean that any great building has the propensity to mould and shape the people whose life and work is intensely focused on it or in it. When the building is a sacred space like a cathedral, church, mosque, temple or synagogue, then its symbolism, history, memory and a great deal else becomes enfolded in those people’s worship and prayer. Some of it is conscious, as in the worthy if undistinguished hymn ‘We love the place O God / wherein thine honour dwells’. Much more, I suspect, is subliminal, unconscious. A lot of it has to do with our psyche, the Jungian ‘soul’ where the archetypes reside and which is the seat of our projections and transferences. A cathedral is heavily freighted with symbolism for everyone in a thousand different ways. When it is Durham Cathedral, and when the core of the job entails being present at the twice-daily prayers in addition to the countless other engagements in and around the building every day brings, you will see why I use this elevated language. And living as I do in a Deanery whose northward, westward and eastward prospects are all dominated by the huge bulk of this immensely powerful presence, it is understandable that it comes to shape the life of the person who is the head of its foundation.

That phrase ‘mystic heart’ focuses on what Christian discourse calls ‘spiritual formation’. In this building that is beyond words when we try to capture what we love about it, this formational dimension of the cathedral is one of its charisms, a gift of grace. It touches all of us for whom it is our place of work. For example, when I sit down as I always do with the cohort of choristers who are leaving us at the end of their time in the choir, I ask them what effect the building has had on them. What comes across is that it has become something extraordinarily precious to them. There is much that is hard for them to leave behind at the summer choir farewell service, but the prospect of losing the easy familiarity with a great building that they have come to feel at home in is one of the aspects of this, and of course it symbolises so much else that this rite of passage represents for them. For me as dean, this ‘mystic heart’ has shaped my practice and language of prayer in the ways that have been prominent in the long spiritual history of Durham: the intense discipline of Saxon Christianity as embodied by Aidan, Cuthbert and Bede; the ordering and patterning of human life according to the Rule of St Benedict that was followed here throughout the monastic centuries; and the catholic Anglicanism of the post-Reformation settlement especially as it was lived out by Durham’s greatest bishop, John Cosin. It is not that these aspects of spiritual ‘character’ were not already present when I came here as dean. But they have all become a lot more explicit, better understood, and I hope more intelligently integrated into this particular person’s life as a Christian and a priest of the 21^st century.

I want to say something about liturgy in Durham Cathedral. As in all great Romanesque cathedrals, you find in Durham a sense of ‘massive enclosure and strong verticality’.[6] Whereas the gothic cathedral, inspired by the Abbé Suger’s vision at Saint Denis and embodied in the Chapel of the Nine Altars, is a casket of light that embodies heaven itself[7], Romanesque suggests the fortress, a place safe from the assaults of demonic principalities and powers. In some places, Romanesque churches provided a safe place where people could gather for protection against threats posed by a human enemy closer at hand: ‘half church of God, half castle ’gainst the Scot’. The ancient right of sanctuary at Durham was an example of this protective function. This ‘defensive’ character of Durham serves to demarcate its sacred space with particular clarity. This is why, I think, the Chapter of Durham has always been careful to protect the church from inappropriate use: the idea of the sacred may be more generously defined now than in the middle ages, but it always carries the danger of violating it, consciously or unconsciously. To the Chapter, charging visitors for admission would imply such a compromise. This is why, in my time, we have not wavered in our resolve to maintain free access to what is not, after all, our space but God’s.

Worship is a kind of theatre, a Wagnerian Gesammtkunstwerk or ‘total art form’ in which dramatic action, words, silence, music, colour, space and audience interact in a way that is always unique to a particular time and place. If you asked people why they worship at the Cathedral, many would speak about the character of the building itself as the setting for liturgy. ‘The place is almost as much the thing as is the play’ says one writer on theatre design. He is wholly correct but for the word ‘almost’[8]. The Cathedral was built by Benedictines whose central vows focused on the words stability, obedience and conversion of life. You would expect their church, constructed when English Romanesque had reached its maturity, to embody those values. So the sense of solid enclosure echoes the change of attitude and aspiration implied by crossing the threshold into the sacred space; the hierarchical structure of the west-east axis from Galilee and font to bishop’s throne, high altar and saint’s shrine speak of obedience; and the huge drum piers and stone vault of stability and permanence. This, at least, is the way I have come to ‘read’ the church not as an architectural masterpiece so much as a building replete with many layers of spiritual value and significance.

It’s impossible for me to do justice to the ways these insights have touched me personally. But here are a few themes. First must come the divine office, celebrated twice daily in the monastic quire every day in the year. We occupy Bishop Cosin’s stalls each weekday morning and evening, just as the Priory monks gathered in the same place during the Benedictine centuries. In the evening the office is sung by the Cathedral choir. I can’t stress enough the significance of this thousand year continuity of prayer. It has been broken only once, when there was no Cathedral foundation during the Commonwealth. People sometimes ask me what I think is the most important thing I do as Dean. My answer is always: the lead the Chapter and community in its rule of daily prayer as the head of the Foundation. And if there is one gift that I can barely contemplate living without after these decades of cathedral ministry in four different places, it is choral evensong.

Daily prayer on weekdays is often an intimate occasion. You may be surprised to think that prayer as an intimate community of laity and clergy is possible in a great cathedral, but it is. And intimacy is a word I use to describe how I have become more familiar with it, even at large-scale acts of worship. For example, I have got to know the 14^th century Neville Screen that separates the sanctuary from the shrine quite well through presiding at the high altar at close proximity. It is likely that the greatest of high medieval architects Henry de Yvele built it: for the Nevilles, only the best would do. There are angels carved into the Caen limestone that were spared the destructiveness of the 16^th and 17^th centuries. One in particular, right in the centre, has a seraphic smile that I have come to love. I love the way the light plays on the nave vaults in midwinter at the Sunday eucharist, and the pillar above the Precentor’s stall that glows with a golden light at matins on sunny solstice days.   I love the symmetries of the Cathedral that are palpable when you stand at the nave altar at the intersection of all three axes in the crossing and sense that you are at the still centre of an extraordinarily dynamic building. I love the great liturgical processions up the central nave aisle, particularly at Advent, Christmas, Epiphany and Easter, or at the Miners’ Gala Service and Matins for the Courts of Justice, when the piers and high vaults suggest a noble avenue of great trees with their canopy spread out above. I love the screens that mark thresholds that we cross on our long march from west to east, the journey that recalls the pilgrimage to the shrine and that speaks of the spiritual journey from our beginnings at the font to the vision of God at the high altar and shrine. I could rhapsodise about stained glass and floors and textiles and sculpture and much else. I think you will get my meaning. 

However, there is a shadow side to everything. When your work is almost wholly bound up in an institution with a high public profile, when its building is emblematic (I do not say iconic) to millions of people across the world, I can experience the Cathedral as demand as well as gift. I think every dean will say the same, but not all deans live in umbilical connection with their cathedral I have talked about, or are faced with its profile rearing massively and sometimes darkly up just outside the kitchen window. I need to analyse what I am and am not saying about how this ‘mystic heart’ exercises a pull on this dean that he does not always welcome. It is to do with its thereness. It never goes away. Its requirements are never ending: it is insatiably greedy in its hunger for money, resources, time, energy, engagement. Your commitment to it has to be all or nothing. I say to myself: this is like Christian discipleship itself. If it is worth giving yourself to it, you don’t hold anything back. It is for life. It is life.

The history of Durham tells us that this mighty Romanesque cathedral was not always welcomed as a benign presence. To the Saxons, it represented the naked power of the invader, erected as it was in the brutal aftermath of the Conquest. Its defensive position next to the Castle reinforced the message of political hegemony, a Northern clash of civilisations. The hitching of St Cuthbert’s ensign to this mighty Norman battleship was a shrewd political move and in time had the desired effect of winning over the Saxons to accept the new regime. But I doubt that the Saxons ever loved it. We can confidently say, given Cuthbert’s reported unwillingness to be buried even on Lindisfarne, that he would have been baffled if not profoundly dismayed at the idea that he would be entombed in the Norman Cathedral. What it later became for the Counts Palatine (as we should call the Prince-Bishops) simply reinforced the distance Christianity in the north had travelled from its simple beginnings on Iona and then Lindisfarne.

To my mind, this history of ambivalence is a necessary corrective to an unduly romanticised notion of Durham Cathedral. Necessary, because we are not true to buildings, including cathedrals, if we do not acknowledge the less endearing features of their history and name their darker aspects. To the Saxons, the Cathedral represented a power and control which there was no negotiating. In the high middle ages and well into the industrial period, the Cathedral’s enormous wealth was perceived as alienating and even corrupting. To the Scottish prisoners incarcerated inside it in the winter of 1650-51, left there by Cromwell’s troops to make do without food, drink, fuel or even rudimentary sanitation, it was a terrible place of hunger, disease and death. I am not saying that these memories should unduly colour our perceptions today. But when William Blake said, famously, that ‘joy and woe are woven fine’, this is as true of places and buildings as it is of human life. There are tears in things as well as joy. And sometimes, the Cathedral can seem to re-exert a more primitive kind of power, a more insistent and uncompromising demand, over us who inhabit it than our millions of visitors and pilgrims perhaps imagine. It is especially important that we who worship and work in cathedrals should not collude with rose-hued fantasies about them. Whatever else it is, Durham Cathedral must be a place of truth. Without personifying it, I believe that only when we are in an entirely honest relationship with it can it perform this heart-work of shaping human and Christian character.

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This experience of living and working in a World Heritage Site has helped to shape my thinking about the place of heritage in today’s world. A dean has to give a great deal of time and effort to his or her Cathedral as part of the nation’s heritage. You have to love your cathedral for its fabric, architecture and art as well as for its community, its liturgy, its music, its outreach and everything else it represents. If you don’t relish this task, if you don’t care for ancient buildings, if you see them as a distraction from the church’s mission, don’t become a dean. Trust me.

In Durham, I have wanted to lead the Chapter and community in asking the question, how can we make much more of the outstanding heritage we have in this cathedral, whether its medieval buildings and spaces, its incomparable library and collections, its music and arts, and, intangibly, its history and significance in the development of Christianity in the North East? During the past 12 years, we have, I believe, added to the ‘legacy’ in ways that I hope will prove not only important but enduring. In terms of the ‘heritage’ you can see, I should highlight the Paula Rego painting of Queen Margaret of Scotland that stands by her altar; the window given by the Friends in memory of Bishop Michael Ramsey, representing the transfiguration of the Lord; the Pietà by Fenwick Lawson which, although it has been in the Cathedral for many years, has now been bought for us, thanks to the Friends; the Lama Sabachthani crucifix in the north quire aisle by Kirill Sokolov, the Deanery Undercoft Chapel of the Holy Cross, the nave choir stalls, the Laus Deo organ and the Lenten and ‘New Creation’ hangings and vestments. All these are motivated by the belief that the church needs to speak to today’s and tomorrow’s generations in the discourse of the present as well as the past.

Meanwhile, conservation of the fabric has continued throughout this time, and will increase significantly in pace as we follow through the latest quinquennial inspection report by the Cathedral architect. As every dean will tell you, it is like painting the Forth Bridge. The job is never done. I could say much about that; and I could also speak about less tangible heritage that has added to the Cathedral’s mission: the girls’ top line in the choir, commissions for new choral music, putting Cuthbert back into the legal title of the Cathedral five and a half centuries after Henry VIII had summarily excised it, the return to the library of medieval manuscripts and early printed books that had been lost at the Dissolution. There has also been a spate of books and writings about the Cathedral culminating in the great volume just published that will be the definitive survey of its heritage for decades, Durham Cathedral: history, fabric and culture.

But one development has dwarfed all the others. It was with the prospect of the Lindisfarne Gospel Book visiting Durham in 2013 that we embarked on the development we have called Open Treasure. The aim has not been simply to open up the marvellous claustral buildings and display some of the best artefacts we have to exhibit. It has been to try to say something significant about what it has meant to be Durham Cathedral in past generations, and in the present. In an era that is increasingly distanced from organised religion, baffled and often alienated by what it represents, and not well informed about even the simplest aspects of Christian belief, we need to present ourselves as more than simply a place of heritage. We could put it this way: the challenge is to identify and interpret the ‘intangible assets’ of this piece of Christian heritage, the values which are to do with the religious character of the Cathedral as a living, working, breathing building: who and what this community of faith has been, and is now, and aspires to be in the future. This, briefly, is Open Treasure. We have already reconfigured the beautiful undercrofts where the restaurant and shop are housed. The monastic dormitory, the great kitchen and a new gallery linking them are being transfigured as we speak into exhibition spaces that will take our guests along a timeline that will present our heritage as best we know how. You will see for yourselves when they open to the public in 2016.

So why this extraordinarily costly investment into heritage? In a perceptive essay, the former Dean of Christ Church Oxford considers the relationship between religious faith and heritage.[9] He warns against three abuses of heritage. First, heritage can be used to tell a story selectively, editing out those aspects of it that are ambiguous or with which contemporary concerns and attitudes are out of sympathy. This has been a particular challenge to us at Durham where we have tried to interpret our remarkable religious heritage intelligently in a secular age and persuade (successfully) the Heritage Lottery Fund and other agencies to support us. Then heritage can obscure the ‘sheer pastness of history’ so as to make it accessible and marketable. It can be presented in a nostalgic way that may reassure the public but which also obscures its truth. What I have learned at Durham is that the past is indeed another country where they do things differently. The Benedictine period, and still more the Saxon era of St Cuthbert, are worlds that it takes a great deal of intellectual effort and spiritual imagination to envisage. We should not cut corners, nor think that in all respects these pasts are to be imitated by us today. Thirdly, Lewis warns against the innate conservatism of attitudes to heritage that require it to be for ever fixed in the form in which we inherited it or imagine it once to have been. The presumption against change, especially in a heritage asset as prominent and universally loved as Durham Cathedral, is a complex matter when the building also represents a faith that is always renewing itself, as the history of the building itself evidences.

A sacred building is of course very much more than a physical edifice. It is a rich cluster of symbols, metaphors, meanings, transferences and projections. It holds value for people who may never worship there or anywhere, yet who are responsive to its complex human, aesthetic and spiritual texture. It is, in the proper use of the word, ‘iconic’, a physical entity that is ‘written’ into not only a particular landscape and cultural environment but on to the hearts and souls of human beings. It is a sacramental quality, a ‘mystery better articulated by poetry than rational argument.’[10]And as John Inge says, this can never be fully described or analysed: ‘places have a “personality” as a result of people’s interaction with them…. As with a human personality, [it] will defy analysis.’

The opportunity, for all of us who care for our spiritual heritage, is to cherish this uniquely precious symbol that is not only extraordinarily beautiful, and not only indispensable to the history of the North East, but is, as I have said, its mystic heart. It is not the building and its environment, but the inhabited entity and the experience of the people who come here that make it a living part of our heritage. It belongs to us all. And when the time comes for me as dean to move on from this hermit-crab’s shell I have occupied for a dozen years, it will not belong to me any less than it does now. If I have learned one thing in my time here, it is that the World Heritage Site is a gift for life to treasure, to honour and to love, and to go on ‘inhabiting’, if not in the way I have been privileged to during these wonderful twelve years, then always, till I die, in memory, imagination and thankfulness.

---

[1] Kitchin, G. W., The Story of the Deanery, Durham, 1070-1912, Durham 1912, 9-11.

[2] Pevsner, N., revised Williamson, E., The Buildings of England: County Durham, London 1985, 206f.

[3] Goodall, John, ‘As Old as the Halls’, Country Life, 28 August 2003, 38ff.

[4] Hussey, Christopher, ‘The Deanery, Durham’, Country Life 26 November 1938, 526ff.

[5] Sadgrove, Michael, Landscapes of Faith: the Christian heritage of North East England, London 2013, 61.

[6] Seasoltz, R. Kevin, A Sense of the Sacred: theological foundations of Christian architecture and art, London 2006, 120.

[7] Male, Émile, The Gothic Image: Religious Art In France Of The Thirteenth Century 1899, ri New York 1958.

[8] MacKintosh, Iain, Architecture, Actor and Audience, London 1993, 4.

[9] Lewis, Christopher, ‘Christianity as Heritage’, Theology CVII/835, 2004, 30ff.

[10] Inge, John, A Christian Theology of Place, Aldershot 2007, 85-6.

The Whole Armour of God

Once upon a time in my teenage years, I was a Crusader. I mean that I attended a Bible class on Sunday afternoons under the auspices of a national organisation called the Crusaders Union. It was founded in 1900 for outreach to young people. Its badge, which I must still have somewhere, consisted of the traditional crusader emblem of a red cross on a shield, with sword, breastplate and helmet. Underneath was the motto in Greek: ‘looking to Jesus’, a quotation from the Letter to the Hebrews. We had fun, made good friends, and learned a lot about the Bible. It all went into the personal mixing-bowl we call ‘formation’, where it lodged with chorister memories, Bach, Thomas Hardy’s novels, an awakening conscience, and my first experiences of girls. It would be years before I knew enough about the medieval crusaders to question the name, but I’m glad to say that they are now called Urban Saints.

You’ll recognise the motifs on the badge from today’s 2^nd lesson. ‘Take up the whole armour of God’ says Ephesians: the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit. The author’s appeal to his readers is vivid and urgent. ‘Be strong in the Lord…so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.’ Combative stuff. But it fits exactly into the world-view of the first and second generations of Christians. They believed themselves to be warriors of light and truth in an alien, hostile universe. And just as Christ in his descent into hell had harrowed it, ransoming his own and rescuing them from the demonic clutch of death and Satan, so now the church was called bravely to battle against evil by witnessing to the gospel’s redeeming power and by turning human lives round from the oppressions of terror and wickedness to the glorious freedom of the children of God.

Move the clock forward by six centuries, and we come to St Cuthbert whom we celebrated last week. There is a so-called ‘Celtic’ perception of our northern saint, and there is the truth. The fantasy is that he was a kind of proto-romantic who took himself off to the Inner Farne for peace, quiet, and plenty of time to contemplate ducks. The more austere truth is that he went to the Farne to fight, Bede says, to ‘seek out a remote battlefield farther away from his fellows’.  For him, to be a hermit was to wrestle with evil, the demons within and those without. This warfare was not, or not principally, a private affair. It was an act of the church whereby the ever-threatening forces of chaos and disorder were kept at bay by those called, so to speak, to front-line service. The consolations of the Farne were, to quote the title of a book about desert spirituality, ‘the solace of fierce landscapes’. There is nothing perfumed or rose-hued about Cuthbert’s struggle for the good, the life-giving and the just. Like all who are valiant for truth, like the prophets and apostles, like the desert fathers and Irish monks, like Jesus himself, it cost him everything. He lived for it, and in the end he died for it.

Scroll on to the 12^th century and to this building we are sitting in. Durham Cathedral, ‘half church of God, half castle ’gainst the Scot’ say Sir Walter Scott's lines on Prebends’ Bridge. Linked to the castle, it is part of a carefully conceived fortification of this peninsula against the threat of invasion. What is more, it makes a tremendous statement about the power of the neo-Norsemen, the descendants of the fiery peoples who had ravaged Cuthbert’s Holy Island, destroyed his monastery and sent its community fleeing inland for safety. The Normans, now the overlords of England, knew how to build in a way that would intimidate the Saxon natives and remind them who now held sway. But this Cathedral is far more than that. It is built as a spiritual fortress as well, for this was what a Romanesque church was. Its huge towers, massive walls pierced only by narrow windows far apart, its cyclopic piers spoke with one voice which said: this place is a bastion against the principalities and powers, those demonic spirits that make constant raids on human souls to suck them into the turbid maelstrom of the devil. Here was a sanctuary, a defended and sacred place of safety from the terrors outside against which hell would not prevail. This is a different understanding of a cathedral from the Gothic vision of later centuries, as we can see in the Chapel of the Nine Altars, where a cathedral was becoming a casket of light whose walls melted away as the radiance of heaven poured through myriad windows reflecting the glory of heaven itself.

I doubt that most of us live each moment with this vivid sense of how evil crouches at the door, as Genesis puts it, though we glimpse it from time to time, the hells human beings create for themselves, not always in places that are far away. Some of us may have looked into the abyss and wondered how we were not engulfed. So we don’t dismiss the power of evil to grip fragile lives and to crush them out of existence: this was how it was experienced for so many of our forebears, and still is for some. And we can read in the pages of the New Testament how the gospel opened the door to an utterly new world, a marvellously life-changing liberation from demonic enslavement. This explains why the spiritual combat between truth and falsehood is so clearly etched in early Christian writings, and how the daily choices between light and dark became elevated into cosmic battles between good and evil where it took angelic powers to deal comprehensively with the devil and all his works.

And now? For all that it is a good and lovely world, it is also a profoundly broken place where tragedy walks hand in hand with beauty. Very many wake up each morning to this reality: they look on evil’s mighty works and despair. And much of it, I say most of it, is our own doing as the human race, and this implicates all of us. ‘A leaf does not turn yellow but with the consent of the whole tree.’ I am not asking about whether you invoke the existence of a hostile spiritual power to explain it. We can read this language metaphorically; yet the fallen-ness of our state is an unarguable fact of our existence, those ‘great refusals’ that we are in thrall to both collectively and personally. We know only too well about our struggle to live out our baptismal promise to reject the devil and all rebellion against God, to renounce the deceit and corruption of evil, to submit to Christ as Lord, to embrace him as our way, our truth and our life. What a theatre of the soul baptism inaugurates, to fight valiantly as Christ’s faithful soldiers and servants: heroic but so hard!

So Lent takes us into the desert where Cuthbert went to follow Jesus in his ordeals. Jesus knew, and Cuthbert knew, that resisting evil’s claims on us involves real battles. They knew about the re-arming Ephesians speaks about to make us strong and very courageous. To do this we must take evil seriously, be rid of the fantasy that things always improve, that human beings can on their own become better people. It is not blind optimism we need but facing the truth and being properly despondent about the human condition, for only then will we ever find real hope in God. And hope there is in abundance during Lent, for we are promised that these fierce landscapes will bring solace, and life will begin to blossom and flower in the springtime of our redemption. Soon it will be Easter when we renew our baptism vows and celebrate the Deliverer whom death and hell could not hold. Until then, in these days of Lent, we travel on with the whole armour of God to defend us, and in this desert we learn to be God’s people once again.

Durham Cathedral, 23 March 2014 (Lent 3)
Joshua 1.1-9, Ephesians 6.10-20

Cathedrals in the 21st Century: learning from past and present

Introduction: the summer of Lindisfarne

Let’s begin with a recent part of Durham’s history. A hundred thousand people streamed through the Lindisfarne Gospels exhibition and the Cathedral during the three months of the Gospels’ residency. They could have gone to the British Library to see the Gospels free.  So why did they pay to see them here?  For some it was an emotional connection with what many call an ‘iconic’ book for North East England. Yet this exhibition, including a magnificent array of manuscripts and artefacts, fourteen of them from our own Cathedral collections, was based on a serious intellectual premise. This was that to ‘read’ the Gospel Book in the medieval context it once belonged in makes all the difference. That context is partly about a physical place - Durham, but not only. It’s principally a theological and spiritual idea, its connection to the relics of St Cuthbert. As we know from the history of Cuthbert’s wandering community, the saint’s relics and his book travelled together. So the proper setting within which to understand the book must always be Cuthbert’s ‘place’. To Cuthbert’s community it would have been unthinkable to separate the saint from the book written in his honour. 

For the Cathedral, this posed important challenges about meanings and significance. What relevance does an early 8^th century manuscript, for all its exquisite beauty, have for people of the 21^st century?  It did not seem enough simply to interpret the book within a particular phase of cultural or artistic history. It was more a matter of celebrating the undiminished ‘power of this masterpiece to draw beholders back into its past, linking them to the vital traditions of spirituality, scholarship and craftsmanship that produced it’.[1] An exhibition that displayed an extraordinary collection of medieval manuscripts and artefacts cried out for some response to the question, what was this all for? And what might it all be for now?  Where is the gospel in the Gospels?

These questions are linked directly to others. Who is the man Cuthbert for us today and why should he still matter? Why should the Cathedral’s ‘brand’ continue to be the shrine of a Saxon saint if it is not just sacred nostalgia? And all this is merely a part of a larger question about the significance of the Cathedral itself and how it speaks into the present day to an admiring but sometimes baffled audience? In my book Landscapes of Faith: the Christian Heritage of North East England which was published to mark the Gospels’ residency, I called Durham Cathedral the ‘mystic heart’ of North East England[2]: because of Cuthbert, all roads in the region lead here. This explains why the Cathedral is symbolic of the North East, linked as it is to the way in which the wanderings of Cuthbert’s community helped to define the ‘idea’ of the north of England.  But it requires a degree of spiritual and historical intelligence, not to say imagination, to speak about this complex past in a way that makes connections for people today.

Cathedrals are among the most visited buildings in the world. Durham, in particular, has in recent years scored exceptionally highly in its reported capacity to enchant and delight. In 2011, it was voted Britain’s favourite building, not for the first time, in a Guardian poll. This year it came top of TripAdvisor’s list of UK landmark attractions on the basis of visitor reviews on their website. What do these clues to its popularity tell us not only about Durham Cathedral but also about cathedrals generally, and what a mostly non-religious public find themselves responding to? And what should the guardians of cathedrals do to exploit all this interest and help make them living entities, and not simply magnificent piles of stone?

 

Six Expressions of Durham Cathedral: learning from the past

Let’s stay in Durham for a little longer. As in so much else, if we are asking questions about the future of cathedrals, we need to understand their past. Every cathedral is unique, but each one can also be a case-study from which we can generalise. So what does Durham’s past suggest about its future?

We need to recognise that there is not one historical ‘Durham Cathedral’ but many. We can divide them into three main eras: Saxon, Benedictine and Modern.  Within these, we can I think identify three distinct expressions that belong to the Saxon era, and two that belong to the Modern. That makes six which we can list as follows.

ERA 1: SAXON                    1st expression: the Cathedral on Lindisfarne (635-875)

                                              2nd expression: the Migrating Cathedral (875-995)

                                              3rd expression: the Cathedral at Durham (995-1083)

ERA 2: BENEDICTINE      4th expression: the Monastic Cathedral (1083-1540)

ERA 3: MODERN                5th expression: the Reformation Cathedral (1540-1649)

                                              6th expression: the Restoration Cathedral (1660-present)

Like geological eras or French republics, this schema risks oversimplifying history, but I think there is something to commend it because of the distinctiveness of the Cathedral’s life during each period. What I want to demonstrate is the versatility of the Cathedral in adapting itself to different contexts and re-inventing itself according to the needs of the day. This ability to change while remaining true to its essential character seems to me to offer clues about the development of the Cathedral in the present and future.

THE FIRST ERA: THE SAXON CATHEDRAL

First (Saxon) Expression. The foundation that bequeathed to it its Saxon saints and the Lindisfarne Gospels is the ur-Durham, the Cathedral’s first embodiment. This oldest ‘layer’ of the Cathedral’s existence that has Cuthbert’s community, his Haliwerfolk, arrived on the peninsula, is intensely Cuthbert-focused. It is this era that connects the Cathedral back through the wanderings of his community to Lindisfarne and the foundation of the first convent there by St Aidan in 635. Crockford’s Clerical Directory is right to head its list of Durham bishops with Aidan, Finan, Colman, Tuda, Eata and Cuthbert, for Durham has always seen itself as simply the last and permanent expression of a church, bishop and cathedral that began on Lindisfarne. The fact that Holy Island is now in a different diocese does not alter the fact that Durham Cathedral, and by extension its diocese) is not simply the lineal descendant of that ancient community but, in a theological and spiritual sense, the same community. What this means for the identity of Durham Cathedral is of profound significance.

Second (Saxon) Expression. As we know, the Lindisfarne community left the island with its saints’ relics and its Gospel Book, it was said because of Viking raids, though the reasons may be more complex than that. The places where the community stayed were either the sites of existing churches or places where new churches were built, often dedicated to St Mary and St Cuthbert. And where Cuthbert’s rested with its bishop and community, there, for now, was the cathedral. From Norham to Chester-le-Street, this was the theological identity of that wandering community. So Durham’s second incarnation was that of a mobile cathedral, a Saxon ‘fresh expression’: where the bishop went, the cathedral went too.[3] This is a powerful idea especially in an age that mistrusts permanence. Like the people of Israel, the settled community never forgot its semi-nomadic origins, and indeed was commanded to embed that memory into its creedal story. So it is with Durham. We must always remember that we were once a cathedral on the move.

Third (Saxon) Expression. The Lindisfarne community’s arrival at Durham did not, in one sense, change anything. It installed itself on this peninsula, just one more site in a long chain of places across the north. The earliest churches the Saxons built here were not in principle different from those they had built anywhere else: like them they were dedicated to St Mary and St Cuthbert. Yet the conviction was dawning that Durham was not just one more stopping place. It was more like Chester-le-Street than Norham, a site where the community could plausibly expect to stay, for (as later medieval writers told the story), here was where their saint wished to be. The seeds of permanence were already being planted on this rocky peninsula.

This First Saxon Era can seem beguiling for its simplicity, its devotion, its closeness to the created world and its evangelistic energy, all symbolised by saints like Aidan and Cuthbert. It is tempting, especially for romantically-inclined people seduced by the current love-affair with ‘Celtic Christianity’, to regard it as defining for all time and to want to call the church back to a quasi-apostolic age. And of course going back to our origins, ad fontes, is always an important starting-point in the quest for meaning. However, it is not clear that post-Conquest generations spoke of Durham in that way. The following two eras show how very different the Cathedral came to be in the centuries that followed its arrival at Durham.

THE SECOND ERA: THE BENEDICTINE CATHEDRAL

The Second Era, equivalent to the Fourth (Benedictine) Expression of the Cathedral, is the easiest to define. It coincides with the Benedictine centuries, from 1083 when, as all over England in the generation after the Norman Conquest, French bishops displaced Saxon communities and installed the more disciplined monastic orders that had been founded across Europe in the early middle ages. As far as cathedrals were concerned, this overwhelmingly meant the Benedictine order. In Durham, Benedictine brothers were brought from the re-founded monastery at Wearmouth-Jarrow where Bede had been a monk.

The Norman Benedictines’ appropriation of Cuthbert is an important example of the reinvention of Durham. At the same time as constructing a building next to a castle that would symbolise the Normans’ coersive power over the Saxons, they also adopted and invigorated the cult of a Saxon saint - Cuthbert. This was an astute move in the febrile post-Conquest world. It placed him in a setting that was entirely different from his Saxon origins, with its sophisticated power-world of Palatine earls and Cathedral priors.[4] It aligned him at once with the new, and to the Saxons deeply unwelcome, Norman hegemony. So 1083 was a true watershed, nothing less than Durham’s Norman Conquest. It led to a complete re-engineering of monastic life on the peninsula as thorough as the 16^th century Reformation would prove to be displacing one community in favour of another whose values were distinctively at odds with those it supplanted. Its tangible result was the present Romanesque Cathedral and its monastic buildings. Cuthbert’s shrine was now at the heart of the heavily fortified peninsula complex of castle and Cathedral. The Cathedral priory with its advanced organisation, its wealth and its trading relationships across the north[5] was as far removed from the isolation of the Inner Farne and the simplicity of Holy Island as it was possible to be.

But we must also see how the Normans brought about a new spiritual vision and energy in Durham. The new Romanesque cathedral was of course the visible symbol of this, especially if we read it as a building whose architectural masses, spaces, rhythms and proportions represent in stone of the values of the Benedictine Rule. The ideal of stability, being firmly rooted in one place, is strongly expressed in a building that stands securely on its bedrock surrounded by an ever-flowing river. Among the insights of the Benedictine rule is the ordering and shaping of human communities and individuals so that they come to reflect the well-ordered state the gospel calls the kingdom of God. The rediscovery of the rule as a source of inspiration and wisdom for lay people in ordinary life is a welcome development in recent years. So it is not surprising that the Benedictine influence remains strong in a place whose very buildings, the monastic dormitory, refectory, kitchen, treasury, Prior’s lodging and chapter house organised around the cloister survive as an intact visible memory of the monastic era.

Indeed, part of the ‘universal value’ of the Durham World Heritage Site which the Cathedral and University share is that all its ‘heritage’ structures continue to be populated, working buildings. In the case of the Cathedral and its conventual spaces, they function in the same, or similar, ways as were envisaged when they were constructed in monastic times. This human ‘texture’ is one of the most valuable tangible assets of Durham where more of its monastic past survives intact in both its buildings and its library and treasures than anywhere else in England.

THE THIRD ERA: THE MODERN CATHEDRAL

The Fifth (Modern) Expression launched the Third and final Era, for the Reformation of the 16^th century introduced, dramatically, yet another layer to the Cathedral’s complex identity. As in 1083 when the Benedictines displaced the Saxon community, they in turn were to find themselves suppressed by the dissolution of the Cathedral Priory in 1539.[6] This was another great watershed in the Cathedral’s history, and as we all know, the Reformation left a permanent visible mark in the church with the stripping of its altars and the removal of almost all the marks of medieval religion. As a foundation, the Cathedral was secularised, given new statutes (hence a ‘New Foundation’) and became a cathedral of the reformed Church of England. It remained the seat (or cathedra) of the bishops of Durham, but in a way different from the middle ages where spiritual and temporal power belonged within a single jurisdiction (though vestiges of ‘prince-bishop’ temporal power survived as far as the early 19^th century). The well-documented conflicts between the (sometimes violently extreme) protestantism that wreaked such havoc on the building’s fabric in the century after the Reformation, and those like John Cosin who as a canon was inclined to what were perceived as ‘catholicising’ tendencies reveal a cathedral in search of its own identity. This conflict over the soul of the church was of course enacted in every part of England, although in Durham’s case this did not involve the significant loss of the built heritage that was among the costs of reform in other places.

However, the interior of the Cathedral as we see it today is largely the legacy not of the Fifth but the Sixth (Modern) and Final Expression which dates from the 17^th century. The Civil War precipitated yet another crisis in cathedrals which were suppressed for the duration of the Commonwealth. So there is a gap in the timeline of more than a decade: there was no such entity as Durham Cathedral under the Commonwealth. All its worship, all its common life, all governance were suppressed. The building stood as an empty shell, and we should not call it ‘Durham Cathedral’ except as a way of identifying the structure. The Scottish prisoners, stabled here in the winter of 1650-51 and left to fend for themselves in terrible conditions of cold, hunger and disease speaks volumes about Cromwell’s contempt for cathedrals. With the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 came the task of reconstruction. It was daunting to contemplate refurbishing the entire Cathedral, but luckily for Durham, a man who was equal to the task was appointed Bishop of Durham, John Cosin. 

In this, it is a quintessentially Anglican cathedral that despite subsequent alterations still retains in its layout and furnishings the ethos that Bishop Cosin conceived for the worship, spirituality and theology of the Church of England. His refurbishment of the Cathedral, as of other churches in his diocese, imagined The Book of Common Prayer expressed in sacred space. His gothic-revival (survival?) screens and stalls echo the Neville Screen as if to state pointedly that his cathedral stood firmly within the Benedictine tradition in the same way as the 1662 Prayer Book drew on the medieval offices in creating forms of prayer appropriate for a secular (i.e. non-monastic) era. Insofar as the identity of the Cathedral is largely a consequence of how it is ‘inhabited’ spiritually and liturgically, Cosin’s legacy remains influential in the present day. Whether the language of services is traditional or contemporary, the liturgical style is still as Cosin would have wanted it: beautiful, dignified ceremonial fit for a noble space, yet understated, restrained, comprehensible and, in the spirit of the renaissance, humane.

Six expressions of ‘cathedral’ in three distinct eras: Durham has been extraordinarily versatile in adapting to change and sometimes leading it. What is true here is true in every other cathedral in England. The ‘identity’ of a cathedral, and its understanding of its vocation, is so much shaped by its distinctive ‘story’.  But there are also many themes in common.  So we need to broaden the discussion to ask more generically what a cathedral is called to be and do in the 21^st century when we know that we are set in a world where the pace of change is increasing with every year that passes.

 

Cathedrals and Spiritual Capital: learning from the present

The ‘secularisation’ of this Cathedral and the other cathedral priories means merely that at the dissolution it ceased to function as the church of a monastic community living under vows.  They had to learn a new identity as ‘secular’ cathedrals, reinvent themselves as institutions with a monastic past and an entirely different present. But secularisation is also a metaphor of how the Cathedral tries to respond to the challenges of modernity. By this I mean that cathedrals have had to re-think their role as signs of faith in a modernising post-enlightenment world where Christianity is no longer a presumption shared by all. In such a diverse world of many meanings, where visitors are sometimes surprised, even irritated, that services are still held in cathedrals and are preventing them from walking round, the task of interpreting sacred space become ever more demanding.

A truly ‘secular’ cathedral is not afraid of the challenges of modernity.  On the contrary, it wants to make the most of the increasing opportunities it is given to reach out to its localities and regions which, whatever their perception of organised religion nevertheless look to cathedrals as symbols of inspiration and hope. That Britain’s best-loved building should  be a sacred space that continues to be a prominent sign of ‘public faith’ perhaps tells us something important about the public’s wish to continue to be engaged with religion, even at a distance and in what we might call a ‘liminal’ way.[7]

An important study of cathedrals published last year has helped clarify why they seem so successful in bucking the national trend when it comes to public interest in religion. Produced jointly by two research organisations, the Grubb Institute and Theos, it is called Spiritual Capital: the Present and Future of English Cathedrals. The report is based on evidence gathered across England, including questionnaires asking members of the public about their attitudes to cathedrals whether as visitor attractions, heritage sites, pilgrim destinations or places of worship. These were completed by 1700 people. In addition, six cathedrals were chosen as case-studies: Canterbury, Lichfield, Leicester, Manchester, Wells and Durham; nearly 2000 people were surveyed about their relationship to their particular cathedral, and over 250 of them were interviewed at depth. Many of these were civic leaders and others involved in different sectors in the locality; only some would describe themselves as practising Christians or indeed observant members of any other faith. The focus was on the life of each cathedral, and its relations with its city, diocese, county and region.

The statistics make interesting reading. Over one quarter of adults have visited a cathedral in the past year. This makes them serious players in the tourism stakes. Two thirds of the national sample saw cathedrals as both places of interest and of heritage, and in the local survey a remarkable 95% felt that their cathedral was ‘a space where people can get in touch with the spiritual and the sacred’; an equally remarkable 88% saw it as ‘a place of sanctuary, irrespective of what you believe’. Half the national survey believed that cathedrals welcome those of all faiths or none. All this says that the widespread perception is of cathedrals as sacred places which offer an experience of God even to those who do not believe, and that they reach out to the public in an inclusive way. Cathedral music as well as architecture featured strongly in this.

When it comes to their significance in the wider community, three quarters of the local sample believed that their cathedral was relevant to daily life. The same high proportion of the national sample thought that cathedrals contributed to the community and even more spoke positively about their importance to their cities. Locally, 87% thought that their cathedral was a symbol of local identity; 83% that it belonged to the whole community, not just the Church of England; 93% that it was a venue for important public occasions in the life of the city or county.

The report draws three important conclusions to which I attach three words: evangelism, engagement and embodiment.

First, it identifies that cathedrals have a particular capacity to connect spiritually with those who are on or beyond the Christian periphery. We can call this the imperative for evangelism. Of the 11 million or more people who visit cathedrals, the majority are not observant Christians yet tell us that they have an instinct for the spiritual, and experience cathedrals as places where they touch it. These are the many whom Grace Davie, a sociologist of religion, famously describes as those who practice ‘believing not belonging’, where we should speak of emergent faith rather than fully articulated belief. This calls for a more sophisticated understanding of how cathedrals interact with visitors than we may realise. It begins with welcome and hospitality, Benedictine values with which we are familiar here in Durham. Then comes explanation: helping guests learn what a cathedral is, what any sacred space is. And finally the all-important task of interpretation, drawing visitors into recognising its meaning and significance, the Christian faith a cathedral bears witness to. How this is done well has to be worked out in each cathedral in each generation.  What we cannot do is dodge the clear mandate to give an answer for the hope that is within us.

Secondly, the report suggests that cathedrals have an important role in providing what is called ‘bridging social capital’, ‘establishing and fostering the relationships between different groups within a community’. This is bound up with the idea of a cathedral symbolically carrying a community’s sense of common history and identity: here in Durham, we inhabit a city and a region that is defined by the saints and the places associated with them. This makes a cathedral a symbolic container for the meanings and aspirations members of a locality project on to it. We can call this the mandate for social engagement. No cathedral will want to disown this important role. But here again, the religious character of a cathedral makes it more than a rather grand civic space where public ceremonies can be enacted. Because it is ‘sacred’ space, it is charged with the meaning of God, and inevitably puts back to the community the implicit question, where do you sense that God is in the life of this region, county or city, in both its public institutions and its local communities? This opening up of a conversation about God is what we mean by ‘public faith’: not simply conversing about faith with individual people, but doing so on the bigger platform in the public square. In this way cathedrals have great potential to contribute to a thriving civil society. 

Thirdly, cathedrals are recognised for the way in which they not only convey the history and heritage of the Christian presence within the region but also incarnate and articulate local and regional identity. This emerged very strongly in all the national and local samples, not only among people sympathetic to faith, but also those most hostile to it. It is perhaps more difficult to describe this role than the first two, yet I believe we who inhabit cathedrals understand it when we see it.  I mean the capacity to live symbolically at the heart of a community, to bless and consecrate all that we see to be of God in it, and to critique those aspects that we believe to fall short of what makes for the healthy, flourishing society that God wants for our life together. This is the function of embodiment. It is what makes a cathedral distinctive within its geography, enables it to speak with the local accent, stand in solidarity with a community in both celebration and lament.

As an example of these three functions of a cathedral at work, let me take a familiar example. The Durham Miners’ service is held on the day of the ‘Big Meeting’ or Gala in Durham City each July. Probably no-one who has not attended this service fully understands what the Cathedral means to the communities and people of County Durham. Once upon a time, no Labour politician could expect a future without being seen at this vast public demonstration of solidarity among those living and working on the Durham Coalfield. In the days when coal was king, the Gala Service was an occasion of pride in the achievements of working people and of confidence in their future. It was also an occasion to memorialise the human cost of mining when banners of collieries that had experienced pit disasters were processed into the Cathedral wreathed in black crepe.

With the pits gone, what still brings huge numbers of people from mining communities into the city of Durham each year, proudly processing their banners behind their colliery bands? It is tempting to say that it is nostalgia for a lost part of Durham’s industrial heritage. Perhaps it is for some. However, the event is much more than this. It is an act of corporate remembering wedded to the celebration of how an industry once touched the life of every community and individual in the county, bound them together with a sense of common purpose and gave them identity. ‘It’s all about pride in our heritage’ says George Robson who organises the Gala each year.[8] The Cathedral with its memorial to men killed in county’s mines, and with its colliery banner permanently hanging in the south transept, seems to be regarded as the emblem that gathers up scores of local stories and by giving them meaning within a larger context, validates and honours them. The service is an example of how Durham Cathedral reflects and responds to the particularities of life in North East England.

Mapping our three priority tasks on to this event, I think we can say straight away that the Cathedral is seen as a place of embodiment where the working communities of the North East feel not only welcomed but understood. In an important way, the Cathedral is not simply being hospitable to thousands of incomers, but is acting out a vital understanding that people have on this day, that they are not in fact incomers: the Cathedral is their natural home. Equally, we can see how, by bringing together many different communities under one sacred canopy, it provides a way towards real engagement where each one sees itself as part of a bigger whole, and not just a communal whole but an ecclesial one: for this hour, they are not simply working people but worshippers, a congregation before God. And this, finally, gives the opportunity to help bring faith to a clearer articulation through a ceremony that provides a language in which to speak about God in words most of those present would not easily be able to express for themselves. So the task of the preacher is to interpret to the gathering where he or she perceives God to be present in what is happening, and because Christian proclamation is always pointing to the kingdom of God, it is genuinely an act of evangelism, telling the good news, which preaching must always be. 

There is a final point I need to mention. It is to do with the definition of ‘cathedral’ which means ‘the seat (or see) of the bishop’. Where does the idea of the bishop’s church (and by extension that of the diocese) fit into what we have said so far?

The Spiritual Capital report has a chapter on this topic. It is tempting to see this as rather different from the issues raised in the rest of the report, though my reading of it is that the diocesan role of cathedrals is simply a special case of the three we have already explored. That is to say, as the bishop’s seat, it is a centre of mission (part of its legal definition in the Cathedrals Measure), and the mission of the Cathedral ought to be aligned to, indeed be an expression of, the mission of the diocese. So as a focus for the proclamation of the gospel, the evangelistic task of the cathedral belongs to the bishop’s calling as chief missioner: the cathedral is his symbolic platform from which he teaches the faith. The same is true of his engagement with the wider community of the diocese, for here too the cathedral provides a place in which he is given visibility as the chief pastor of the diocese, who by his presence gathers up the diverse and disparate church communities of the diocese into a single whole. The bishop always inhabits the same symbol-system as the cathedral: as we saw with Cuthbert, where the bishop goes, the cathedral goes and vice-versa. But his presence in the cathedral gives special force to his ministry as a ‘focus of unity’, and this represents the third aspect of embodiment that we looked at earlier.

Cathedrals are often said to be among the church’s success stories of the present day. As I have said, their worshipping communities largely buck the national (indeed, western European) trend in the decline in religious observance. I put this down to a chemistry particular to cathedrals and greater churches: beautiful liturgy and music in a noble architectural setting, faith intelligently presented through thoughtful preaching, a form of community life that has space for many different ways of belonging and participating. You could say that cathedrals do organised religion very well, and not only in a traditional way. They are places of experiment and discovery, ‘laboratories of the spirit’. Meanwhile, visitor numbers, especially where there is no admission charge, are on the increase. There seems no limit to the numbers of men, women and children who want to volunteer in them or participate in arts, cultural and educational events in these wonderful spaces. How to respond well to this huge public interest in cathedrals, and enlarge the ‘public benefit’ they bring is a major priority.

I have tried to show how ‘Durham Cathedral’ is an idea that has taken different forms in the eras of its history: Saxon, Benedictine and Modern.  I have talked about the way cathedrals hold the identity of local communities, but we have seen from their complex histories that the ‘identity’ of cathedrals themselves is a more elusive idea than we might have thought. They have so many layers, so many gifts to offer, and so many demands on them. In the today’s world, a Cathedral is often a battle-ground for competing claims as to its purpose. It can be regarded, especially by those not sensitised to its religious purpose, principally as ‘heritage’ or as a venue for culture and the arts. This in turn raises sharp issues about the kinds of expectation people bring to a cathedral and the transactions appropriate to it. Does an entrance fee pull the visitor into experiencing a Cathedral as a heritage site or museum rather than as a place of spirituality and pilgrimage? At Durham, the Chapter suspects that this is the case, which is why it has consistently resisted charging for entry. But this ‘public benefit’ comes at an enormous cost, while staff still need to be paid and buildings maintained. When major events take place in and around the Cathedral, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels exhibition and ‘Lumière’, both hugely successful, how far should the daily Benedictine rhythms of prayer, study and work ‘bend’ to accommodate an influx of thousands of people in the space of a few weeks or days? Questions such as these have led the Chapter to devise a purpose statement for the Cathedral that tries to recognise its many roles but captures the central priorities that belong to it as a sacred space.

Asking these difficult questions may help us to look with self-awareness and self-criticism at what our cathedrals can be as both institutions and communities. In an important essay, a previous Dean of Salisbury reflects on the importance of a cathedral’s daimon or ‘spirit of the place’ being ‘tuned…to the purposes of love and holiness’.[9] ‘I want to suggest’, he concludes, that it is possible that from such a platform the Christian Gospel can challenge and address the demonic aspects of the systems of our society in the name of God.’ The aspiration written into the stones and saints of a Cathedral, its lived experience of liturgy, its cherished memories and traditions, need constantly to be applied to the judgment and renewal of its own life if its ‘soul’ is to be a vital, living reality. As a privileged place with a rich history, generous resources and large reservoirs of good will both within its own community and across the region, our cathedral should not have too easy a conscience in an age uncertain about religion and suspicious of triumphalism. Durham’s history and heritage can teach it to be both humble and humane in the spirit of its founding saints and those who followed them. And because it all comes down to being faithful disciples of Christ called to live together in community, to worship God and to bear witness to the promise of a kingdom yet to come, what is true for Durham is true for every cathedral in the land.

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[1] Gameson, Richard, From Holy Island to Durham: the Contexts and Meanings of the Lindisfarne Gospels, London 2013, 142.

[2] Sadgrove, Michael, Landscapes of Faith: the Christian Heritage of the North East, London 2013, 61ff.

[3] Bonner, G., Rollason, D. and Stancliffe, C., eds., St Cuthbert, his cult and his community to A.D. 1200, Woodbridge 1989.

[4] Rollason, D., Harvey, M. and Prestwich, M., eds., Anglo-Norman Durham 1093-1193, Woodbridge 1994; Aird, William M., St Cuthbert and the Normans: the Church at Durham, 1071-1153, Woodbridge 1998

[5] Threlfall-Holmes, Miranda, Monks and Markets: Durham Cathedral Priory 1460-1520, Oxford 2005

[6] Moorhouse, Geoffrey, The Last Office: 1539 and the Dissolution of a Monastery, London 2008.

[7] Lewis, Christopher, ‘Glory and Pride: the Church and its Cathedrals’ in Platten, S. and Lewis, C., eds., Dreaming Spires? Cathedrals in a New Age, London 2006, 60.

[8] Crookston, Peter, The Pitmen’s Requiem, Newcastle upon Tyne 2010, 65ff.

[9] Dickinson, Hugh, ‘Cathedrals and Christian Imagination’ in MacKenzie, Iain M., ed., Cathedrals Now: their Use and Place in Society, Norwich 1996, 61.

Durham, 23 October 2013
A lecture given to the Friends of Durham Cathedral