For the faith to take root fully in China, and not as an imitation of another civilization – or, worse, of its cultural degeneration in recent times – it seems necessary to me that churches be built in the manner of the Chinese, not aping the buildings of Europe, nor merely putting native-inspired decoration over Occidental bones. But we have no surviving Chinese church buildings from early times. Architecturally, very little if anything survives: there is a pagoda near Xi’an, the Daqin Pagoda 大秦塔, that some have claimed for Christianity, but with no conclusive evidence; in the Beijing municipality, a Cross Monastery 十字寺 was used by Christians during the Yuan dynasty and perhaps earlier during the Tang dynasty, but at other times it was used as a Buddhist monastery. From the latter, we have a large stone with a cross and a vertical Syriac inscription of Psalm 34.5:

ܚܘܪܘ ܠܘܬܗ ܘܣܒܪܘ ܒܗ

We do also have gravestones and steles, serving more as inspiration than as actual models. For church architecture, however, much has to be drawn from the architecture of Chinese mosques and temples in other religious traditions, in order to express the Christian faith well in the same native Chinese architectural idiom.

Pagodas in Their Cultural Context

In this post, I want to focus on how one might use pagodas in Chinese church building complexes. Of necessity, I am speaking of larger, architecturally more articulated churches, not smaller churches compelled to fit within the dimensions of a modest house.

Still, the difference between small and large churches is a difference of articulation, a distinction of degree and not of kind: the same principles govern both. Traditional Chinese houses are built around courtyards, and so likewise are temples. Whether small or large, an ordinary house or a palace – unless it is a small building containing only one room – a house or temple is built around one or more courtyards. The deeper one goes in from the main entrance, the more sacred (or private) the space. This complex of courtyards is the space in which a pagoda would stand in a Chinese church.

In Buddhist architecture, in which pagodas originally appear, the pagoda is an Indian stupa but architecturally nativized in the soil of China. A stupa (Sanskrit stūpa स्तूप, literally  ‘heap’) is a domed hæmisphærical structure that holds several sacred relics of various kinds: images, statues, metals, and remains of Buddhist monks or nuns. In pilgrimage and meditation, devotees walk clockwise around the stupa (prādakṣiṇa प्रदक्षिणा), hoping that they may thereby by purified from their sins committed in their various lives. In a Buddhist pagoda, pilgrims often have access to multiple floors inside, and so they circumambulate inside the building rather than around it; the pagoda’s core, as well as the pagoda itself, is symbolically a buddha body for contemplation and self-purification through devotional rituals.

Obviously, in Christianity, we do not believe such devotional ritual avails for our purification from sin: our trust is in the finished work of Jesus Christ, who (as the Book of Common Prayer states it) made on the Cross, ‘by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world’. This is the teaching of Scripture. In our justification before God, which is effectually declared in baptism, all of our past and future sins are washed away by the merits of Christ’s death and Passion applied to us, and this blessing from God abides with us so long as we claim it by faith in our crucified and risen Lord; in the sanctification of our human character, however, our sins do not fall away from us at once, but as we grow in faith we are conformed to the image of that holy and blameless Son of God who was once given for our sins. Our use of a pagoda, if we use this kind of building, must conform to the truth of the holy gospel and help strengthen Christians in their conviction that this gospel is trustworthy and true.

A Way of Using Pagodas in Christian Architecture

The use I have in mind is octagonal pagodas as baptistries at cathedrals, built without nails and leading people on a spiralling upward narrative journey of theosis from baptism to Christlike sanctity, with a cruciform finial (issuing from a Marian lotus) crowning the whole pagoda outside. Inside, relics of the saint could be displayed as appropriate for the devotional narrative journey, but also wall paintings, scroll paintings, sculpture, and calligraphy, well orchestrated into a compositional unity.

Inside, then, we might consider an iconographic scheme in comparison with the Timber Pagoda of Yingxian 佛宮寺釋迦塔, Shanxi, which dates to the Liao 遼 empire:

Each story features an elaborate set of the iconic group on a raised, octagonal platform located at the center, together providing five different emanations of the Buddha in an interconnected series as either the Vairocana or Śākyamuni Buddha (fig. 25b). On the first level, sitting on a throne of lotus petals, is an oversized Śākyamuni Buddha, although its identity has been debated, an issue to which I will return. The second level features the Śākyamuni Buddha attended by four bodhisattvas. The third level is the hall for the Buddhas of the Four Directions. The fourth level has a set of seven statues with the Śākyamuni Buddha at the center. At the fifth level, the Vairocana Buddha is surrounded by the Eight Great Bodhisattvas. The interpretation of the iconography in the pagoda has been a point of discussion.

With the walls adorned by a clockwise narrative of the patron saint’s sanctification toward the image of Christ, in pictures and words, our iconographic programme at the building’s core could be something like this:

First Level. This level is the feet of the pagoda’s ‘body’, which is iconographically the body of Christ. On this ground floor belongs the baptismal font, where the journey of sanctification by the Holy Ghost begins. Yet the whole journey is also encompassed in meaning and in saving effect by Holy Baptism, where a sinner ‘[is] washed, [is] sanctified, [is] justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God’ (1 Corinthians 6.11). What is promised in Holy Baptism comes to pass in the life of the saint, because the resurrection of Christ is itself a new creation, an eighth day after the Sabbath that closed the week. For this reason, too, are the font and the pagoda itself octagonal, pointing to an eighth day beyond the world of seven days.

Second Level. This level has an ecce homo (or Christ the Bridegroom) image of Christ, seated, wearing the Crown of Thorns, and attended by four virtues dressed in the garb of the Uyghurs (humanity 仁), the Mongols (justice 義), the Chinese (propriety 禮), and the Tibetans (wisdom 智). Patronal relics would be held inside the image of Christ.

Third Level. This level is the heart of the pagoda’s ‘body’. Instead of four buddhas around an empty space, four winged creatures stand for the Four Evangelists, with the faces of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle. All four Gospels reveal a Christ in the centre who is not depicted.

Fourth Level. This level has the risen Christ flanked by the Twelve Apostles, two corresponding to each of the six walls not on the south and the north. Patronal relics would be inside the image of Christ.

Fifth Level. This level is the head of the pagoda’s ‘body’. Here, the risen and ascended Christ would appear in the glory of heaven, surrounded by flames of the Holy Spirit except on one side. On patronal feasts, processions could go up all the way to the top in imitation of the saint’s journey to Christian holiness, stopping here for a ‘votive antiphon’ (an antiphon, a versicle, and a collect), before returning to the main worship hall.

The Outside. Also in the Holy Baptism Court is space for instructing catechumens in the faith, arrayed around the baptistry where people are, in Christ, ritually buried with their sins and raised to new life; these classrooms also serve as a Christian school on weekdays. This Holy Baptism Court is adjacent to two other courtyards, one before and another behind it. The Entrance Courtyard, entered through a three-portalled shanmen 山門 (‘山-shaped gate’), has commemorative steles and offices, and from this Outer Court one enters into the Holy Baptism Court through an Archangel Hall guarded by figures of the archangels Michael and Gabriel in Tang-style armour; behind the pagoda, when one passes through a Rood Hall, is the Holy Communion Court, which is dominated by the Holy Communion Hall and also has some side chapels, a library, and perhaps a seminary the size of Wycliffe College, Toronto.

1. The restored classical pronunciation. This is a pronunciation more or less reliably reconstructed as having been current in the years when Cicero, Cæsar, Vergil, and Ovid were writing. In this pronunciation, Cæsar sounds like kye-sar to the English earl; both geminate consonants and long vowels are pronounced double in length. This pronunciation is virtually never used in English, except to quote ancient authors or imitate their way of speaking.
2. The Modern English or Westminster pronunciation. In this pronunciation, Cæsar sounds like seize-er (or perhaps seize-are) to the English ear; both geminate consonants and long vowels are pronounced as if single. This is the pronunciation most native to English, by which generally one pronounces Latin words in an English sentence, as when the word cranium appears in a discussion of anatomy and is articulated as crane-ee-um; the word quasi sounds like quaze-eye.
3. The Middle English or modified English pronunciation, which (in order to converge toward the pronunciations of Continental Europe) goes back before the Great Vowel Shift that took place between Middle English and Modern English. In this pronunciation, Cæsar sounds like sase-are to the English ear, and both geminate consonants and long vowels are pronounced double in length. In practice, both geminate consonants and long vowels are usually pronounced as if single. The word quasi sounds like quah-see, using the vowel qualities dating back before the Great Vowel Shift in English. Occasionally this pronunciation is approximated in daily English conversation, as in the phrase per se, pronounced per say rather than per see.
4. The Italianate pronunciation, mistakenly called ‘the’ ecclesiastical pronunciation. In this pronunciation, Cæsar sounds like chase-are to the English ear, because the ‘soft c’ before e or i sounds as it does in the Italian word cello. As in actual Italian, geminate consonants are pronounced double in length, but long vowels are treated the same as short. This is the pronunciation of most English-speaking choir traditions today, but one would usually be laughed out of court using it beyond church and choir contexts, except (oddly) for the quotation Veni, vidi, vici.

Of these four pronunciations, it does not appear to me that any can be eliminated, though the Italianate pronunciation might be restricted to choral works by Italian composers, and the modified English pronunciation to other choral works. Conversely, in the interest of the English tradition of Latin, one might abandon restored classical pronunciation in favour of the modified English pronunciation, and retain a knowledge of it mainly (1) to read out an ancient passage as it might have sounded originally and (2) to understand people using that pronunciation.

And now for a bit of fun with two pronunciations of Latin:

Some Charlotte Mason proponents, I know, deny that Charlotte Mason was a classical teacher. I think, however, that this evaluation relies too much on contrast with the last four decades’ stream of teachers and publishers like Dorothy Sayers, Doug Wilson, and Susan Wise Bauer, and on the premise (at least somewhat true) that Charlotte Mason herself considered her ideas revolutionary and not merely a repristination of, say, Plato. The improvement can indeed be judged revolutionary, in comparison with both a Plato without the Bible and the increasingly apostate institutions of late Victorian England. But the values of a Charlotte Mason education, and those of a flourishing Christendom that was an heir to the intellectual and spiritual heritage of ancient Greece and Rome, are recognizably of the same tradition; the content, too, is of that Christian civilization’s inherited wisdom, not of a vision hostile to that civilization and seeking to replace it. For this reason, to turn toward the ideas of Charlotte Mason may be revolutionary in effect, but classical in spirit.

In our cultural moment, Charlotte Mason’s way of classical education also answers well to Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry’s accurate assessment that a retvrn to, say, the conventional French education of the 1950s (for all its virtues) is not the way. Unlike PEG, I do not think Maria Montessori’s ‘scientific’ philosophy of education is the way to foster in children the growth of the divine seed of human character; Charlotte Mason’s humane philosophy, I think, is the better answer. Charlotte Mason herself, aware of Dr Montessori’s work and ideas, was critical of its deficiencies. Those who are looking to guide children in the way of the human virtues, against the way of the bugman, would find Miss Mason’s criticisms useful to consider. (I will also mention that some of the life-affirming artists I met in person at The Exhibition in London last week, which by the way was a wonderful art exhibition, seemed to regard favourably the kind of education I was describing to them.) For those of us who seek to throw off the shackles of HR clown world and guide the next generation into the way of life and health and peace, Charlotte Mason’s way of classical education is well worth considering.

The right response is not to reject the classical Protestant understanding of sola Scriptura, but to hear Scripture’s own voice and heed the witness of our forefathers on what Scripture actually says, especially when we might not wish to hear Scripture against our desires.

This is where I dissent from the typical East Asian expectation of high-stakes testing for students from late primary school to the end of university, or sometimes even beyond. Undoubtedly it yielded some kinds of results in China, but those fruits have not always been good. It was not the way of Confucius, and it has, over a millennium, instead made the Chinese ready to subject themselves to the lives of bugmen, entombed alive, slaves to dead machines and not to the living Christ. In comparison, the tangping 躺平 (‘lying flat’) movement, in which people check out of the rat race and do only the bare minimum they are required to do, problematic as this movement may be, is actually a sensible response to the insanity of the current system.

There were some special reasons for disquietude in those who feared to diverge a hand-breadth from the established rule. Although since the Restoration, the Church of England was undoubtedly popular, and had acquired, out of the very troubles through which she had passed, a venerable and well-tried aspect, there was, in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, a wide-spread feeling of instability both in ecclesiastical and political matters, to an extent no longer easy to be realised. No one felt sure what Romish and Jacobite machinations might not yet effect. For if the Stuarts remounted the throne, Rome might yet recover ascendancy. The Protestantism of the country was not yet absolutely secure. And therefore many Churchmen who, if they consulted their feelings only, would have been thoroughly in accord with the Laudean divines in their love of a more ornate ritual, were content to stand fast by such simple ceremonies as were everywhere acknowledged to be the rule. However much they might have a right to claim as their legitimate due usages which their rubrics seemed to authorise, and which were scarcely unfrequent even in the days of Heylyn and Cosin, they were not disposed to insist upon what would in their day be considered as innovations in the direction of Rome. Better to widen that breach rather than in any way to lessen it.

Abbey and Overton later note that high churchmen of the time were fully aware that the Ornaments Rubric was still legally valid, despite its disuse in practice:

John Johnson, writing in 1709, said he was by no means single in his belief that this order was still legally enjoined. Archbishop Sharp appears to have been of the same opinion, and used to say that he preferred the Communion office as it was in King Edward’s Book. Nicholls, in his edition (1710) of Bishop Cosin’s annotated Prayer-book, insisted upon the continuous legality of the vestments prescribed in the old rubric, which was ‘the existing law’, he said, ‘still in force at this day’. Bishop Gibson, the learned author of the ‘Codex Juris Ecclesiastici’ (1711), although he marked the rubric as practically obsolete, steadily maintained that legally the ornaments of ministers in performing Divine Service were the same as they had been in the earlier Liturgy.

I also note, in passing, that some Anglicans today seem to be in the same fear of a takeover by Rome as Englishmen were in the 18th century, when there existed an actual geopolitical threat of a return of popery under the auspices of the ousted Stuart dynasty. It ought to be obvious today that the chief antichrist in the Church today is not the Bishop of Rome, execrable as his doctrines and policies may be. St Gregory the Great, Bishop of Rome in his own time, was right to say that anyone claiming to be universal bishop (as the office of the papacy does today) breathed the spirit of Antichrist. Nevertheless, if we constantly turn our eyes to a Romish threat abroad, which we then imagine to be in our own churches, we blind ourselves to the threat actually within our doors. The poison is in Rome, but also in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and in many of our own Anglican churches.

This week, two of my essays have been published, one with (Christian and non-Christian) American revisionists and the other with Anglicans:

1. at The American Sun, ‘Oil in Your Lamp to Keep Your Literary Flame Burning’, an article about keeping the flame of your culture burning in the face of effectively genocidal policy enacted by church and state;
2. at The North American Anglican, ‘Ash Wednesday and the Day of Atonement’, reading Ash Wednesday and the Anglican service of Commination through the lens of the ancient Israelite observance called the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur).

May the Lord bless you with faith and lead your heart to repentance as we enter the fasting of Lent to reflect on our need for the Saviour who came to be crucified for our sins and on the third day was raised for our justification.

In the civilizational ‘great space’ that in English we call China, the anti-Qing movement of Sun Yat-sen was at first a Han ethnic-national movement against Manchu rule; upon the Qing empire’s collapse, however, it became clear to Sun and the rest of the movement that Han ethnonationalism could not hold the territory of the former Qing empire (1644–1912), nor even hold together the various Han peoples inhabiting mostly the territories that had made up the Ming empire (1368–1644). As soon as the anti-Qing revolution had succeeded in destroying Qing rule, it found that classical nationalism was a nonstarter in its own cultural and political context: it could not be the foundation of a Chinese state.

It is tempting, especially from a Chinese ethnocentric perspective, to speak of the former Ming territories as the core of the Qing empire, but even this is a mistake. As de Benoist says of the Holy Roman Empire, ‘L’empire romain germanique ne répond déjà plus à sa vocation quand on tente, en Italie comme en Allemagne, de le lier à un territoire privilégié.’ That is, the Germanic Roman empire no longer answered to its imperial vocation when it tried, as well in Italy as in Germany, to link it to a privileged territory. This idea, de Benoist invites us to note, ‘is still absent in the thought of Dante, for whom the emperor is neither Germanic nor Italic, but “Roman” in the spiritual sense, that is to say, a successor of Cæsar and Augustus’. De Benoist explains about the logic of empire,

L’empire au sens vrai ne peut se transformer sans déchoir en « grande nation », pour la simple raison que, selon le principe qui l’anime, aucune nation ne peut assumer et exercer une fonction supérieure si elle ne s’élève pas aussi au-dessus de ses allégeances et de ses intérêts particuliers. « L’empire, au sens vrai, conclut Evola, ne peut exister que s’il est animé par une ferveur spirituelle […] Si cela fait défaut, on n’aura jamais qu’une création forgée par la violence – l’impérialisme –, simple superstructure mécanique et sans âme ».

In other words, the empire cannot transform itself into a ‘great nation’ without collapsing because, in terms of the principle which animates it, no nation can assume and exercise a superior ruling function if it does not rise above its allegiances and its particular interests. ‘The empire in the true sense’, Evola concludes, ‘can only exist it animated by a spiritual fervor […] If this is lacking, one will only have a creation forged by violence – imperialism – a simple mechanical superstructure without a soul.’

The Qing empire was neither a Han régime nor a Manchu régime, but a unity above both. The most important official documents of the empire were produced in three languages: ‘the Qing language’ (Manchu), Chinese, and Mongolian. In the Forbidden City, the names of buildings were written out in both Manchu and Chinese, and sometimes Mongolian. Within the former Ming lands, Qing ruled in a ‘Chinese’ way, with substantially the same system of provincial governors and mandarins as the Ming empire it had succeeded; in Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet, and Turkestan, with military governors and vassal rulers.

This is also why, though generally supportive of nationalists in the West in opposition to the common enemy of globalism, I sit lightly on the label for myself. Nation-states are not the only way, and in the case of China with its imperial history – remaining an empire even today, though defectively – I expect the nation-state model will never work.

While I’m not going to be any civilization’s next Horace or Vergil, it’s important to me that every generation write new poems and not just read the greats of times past. As German composer Gustav Mahler said, ‘Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.’ For Christians, to honour the saints in ritual and in words is nothing unless we imitate and strive to surpass their deeds by the Holy Spirit we share with them; likewise, to pay homage to long-dead poets by reading them, even with our tongues and voices and not just with our eyes, is merely looking at something past unless we partake of the same human spirit that drove them to create after the works of God. We live in a world made very grey, full of drab and androgynous fashions; the least we can do, I feel, is to find anew the beauty of the world God has made, over which he intends for us to rule wisely as his vicegerents.

Open the pages of the Atlantic, and what you find is boring drivel, more concerned with ideological conformity and a thousand contrived ‘identities’ than with spirit and skillful wordsmithing that stirs the hearts of ordinary people. Elsewhere, in Asia, I have seen a line that says, ‘We are in a deadlocked situation.’ That is not the poetry my heart, and my ear, longs to hear. I think you too are looking for something else. Perhaps your heart is listening for what Arthur Powell, editor of Atop the Cliffs and judge of the current Passage Prize, is listening for: truly good and worthy poetry. If so, I hope you will find my poems to be real contributions, moving your heart and adding something real to the tradition.

Arthur Powell is working to make good new poetry to happen, at Atop the Cliffs and elsewhere, and I want to be part of it. Check it out, and see if you want to help by sharing poems and buying a good book of them. And if the poetry bug has bit you, maybe write some, too.