"Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college, it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul."
- Louis Kahn
- Louis Kahn
"God is in the houses and God is in my head."
Coldplay, "Cemeteries of London"
Walk into Radcliffe Square in the center of Oxford and look up. Scratching the sky you will find Oxford's dreaming spires and pinnacles.
The pinnacles, fashioned to look like trees, carry a heavy religious symbolism. The idea is that each spire stands for the tree of good and evil from Genesis, and that, in the academic enterprise, we are ever reaching for the fruit of knowledge on its highest branches. Of course, that fruit remains out of our reach in this life, yet we still strive towards it with determination and hope.
At a place like Oxford, one gets the unmistakable sense that the religious and the academic are somehow intertwined; the sight of an entire ancient city striving towards the heaven is simply sublime.
One hears quite often nowadays that religion has been emptied out of Western Europe, and in certain ways nowhere is that more true than in Oxford. As someone put it to me, most people here are intolerant of only two things: intolerance, and religion (to some, I suppose, there's little distinction). In this atmosphere, one gets accustomed to seeing Oxford's religious trappings as a vestige of a distant past, one which we can freely walk among, even appreciate, but to which we can never again have any sort of deep attachment.
Nevertheless, I hope to strike a bit of a contrarian note, and suggest the opposite: that belief in the divine is alive and well at Oxford, just not in the ways we think. We have become too accustomed, I believe, to see religious faith in terms of an inner/outer distinction, as something deep down inside us. As Charles Taylor has argued in A Secular Age, that distinction is largely a modern invention. Up through the Middle Ages, for instance, Christians saw the universe as enchanted, dominated by both evil spirits and holy objects that had everything to do with our salvation. The locus of religious experience was out in the open, in same world we shared with everyone.
We clearly no longer inhabit that world, but my time at Oxford has made consider whether our belief in the divine is still structured by the social spaces we inhabit—by the architecture, the arrangement of space, the sublimity of experience in a Gothic city. If that's the case, then perhaps we all still participate in a kind of latent spirituality regardless of whether we are believers or non-believers. It was this idea, I think, that Louis Kahn, one of the greatest architects of the twentieth century, was motioning at in his quote above.
At least for me, living and learning in Oxford reassures me of the higher purposes of all our striving.
Coldplay, "Cemeteries of London"
Walk into Radcliffe Square in the center of Oxford and look up. Scratching the sky you will find Oxford's dreaming spires and pinnacles.
The pinnacles, fashioned to look like trees, carry a heavy religious symbolism. The idea is that each spire stands for the tree of good and evil from Genesis, and that, in the academic enterprise, we are ever reaching for the fruit of knowledge on its highest branches. Of course, that fruit remains out of our reach in this life, yet we still strive towards it with determination and hope.
At a place like Oxford, one gets the unmistakable sense that the religious and the academic are somehow intertwined; the sight of an entire ancient city striving towards the heaven is simply sublime.
One hears quite often nowadays that religion has been emptied out of Western Europe, and in certain ways nowhere is that more true than in Oxford. As someone put it to me, most people here are intolerant of only two things: intolerance, and religion (to some, I suppose, there's little distinction). In this atmosphere, one gets accustomed to seeing Oxford's religious trappings as a vestige of a distant past, one which we can freely walk among, even appreciate, but to which we can never again have any sort of deep attachment.
Nevertheless, I hope to strike a bit of a contrarian note, and suggest the opposite: that belief in the divine is alive and well at Oxford, just not in the ways we think. We have become too accustomed, I believe, to see religious faith in terms of an inner/outer distinction, as something deep down inside us. As Charles Taylor has argued in A Secular Age, that distinction is largely a modern invention. Up through the Middle Ages, for instance, Christians saw the universe as enchanted, dominated by both evil spirits and holy objects that had everything to do with our salvation. The locus of religious experience was out in the open, in same world we shared with everyone.
We clearly no longer inhabit that world, but my time at Oxford has made consider whether our belief in the divine is still structured by the social spaces we inhabit—by the architecture, the arrangement of space, the sublimity of experience in a Gothic city. If that's the case, then perhaps we all still participate in a kind of latent spirituality regardless of whether we are believers or non-believers. It was this idea, I think, that Louis Kahn, one of the greatest architects of the twentieth century, was motioning at in his quote above.
At least for me, living and learning in Oxford reassures me of the higher purposes of all our striving.
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