Sacred and profound

The vaulting of Bell Harry Tower at Canterbury Cathedral

Where is England’s spiritual centre? What is its holiest place? These questions may seem not just unanswerable but incorrect. We live in a plural or multicultural society. Druids might reply Stonehenge. For a Buddhist, the response would be any place where mindfulness is engaged. For secular humanists the whole idea of holiness smells fishy: didn’t we go through the Enlightenment to dispel the notion of a privileged sacred realm defined and policed by clergy?

I don’t dismiss such objections but put forward an unfashionably obvious answer to those questions. The official spiritual centre of England, the holiest place of the established church, because it is the seat of the Primate of All England, is Canterbury Cathedral. It is also one of the greatest treasures of European art and civilisation, comparable to Chartres Cathedral and richer in history, an accolade that can be granted by someone who has no particular religious affiliation.

Canterbury Cathedral is only an hour by high-speed train from London, still nestling within its large and ancient precincts in a smallish city in east Kent, the nearest part of England to continental Europe. When Pope Gregory sent Augustine from Rome to reintroduce Christianity to England in AD597, the original plan was to press on to London. But Augustine and his missionary monks were favourably received by King Ethelbert of Kent and London seemed dangerous, so they settled for Canterbury, which by accident rather than design became the centre of Christianity in England.

You can still get a feel for this history, and the happiness of happenstance, by walking through medieval streets from the train station to the sudden view of a Tudor gateway, leading to the precincts. Nothing is quite straight or level in Canterbury, and the view of the great grey stone cathedral with its soaring tower (Bell Harry, 235ft tall, surely England’s finest tower) is at an angle. Canterbury doesn’t overwhelm with single-minded power, like Durham, or massive size and elaborate decoration like York. For all its enormous length and considerable height, it impresses more with a curious lightness and sensitivity and grace. The yellowy-grey Caen stone, which changes astonishingly with the light, passing from one mood to another in minutes, is partly responsible; so is the genius of two French architects or master-masons.

Henri de Yevele built the nave, which is a triumph of Perpendicular Gothic architecture. Stone soars here with an improbable airiness, and the absence of stained glass in the south windows helps with luminosity. De Yevele’s predecessor William of Sens designed the early Gothic quire with its shafts of dark Purbeck marble. Canterbury doesn’t have the unity of design possessed by cathedrals such as Chartres and Durham, which were built in the space of a few decades, but its successive stages add up to something lovely in a way that combines French and English genius. One of my favourite places is the Norman crypt, with its forest of exuberantly carved columns, strangely reminiscent of the Mezquita of Córdoba. Then there is the stained glass, much from the late 12th century and glowing with an intensity unmatched in England.

You can’t walk far in the cathedral before registering that this place of holiness and beauty is also the site of a bloody desecration. A hideous 1970s sculpture marks the spot of Thomas à Becket’s martyrdom in 1170. The elaborate shrine to Becket, which became a magnet for pilgrims immediately afterwards, was removed by Henry VIII in 1538 – a reminder of another inglorious moment in England’s spiritual history, when lust and expediency trumped principle.

But Canterbury survives, or has survived, almost miraculously, through the turbulent centuries. Its hour of greatest peril came in June 1942 when German dive-bombers attacked, in revenge for the Allied bombing of Cologne. Heroic fire guards saved the cathedral by throwing dozens of incendiary bombs off the roof. Now, in a rather wonderful reversal, a brilliant German conservator is in charge of restoring the stained glass that the Luftwaffe failed to smash. Canterbury is an international centre of excellence in glass and stone conservation.

But there is more than one way of destroying a cathedral. Long years of neglect, or underfunding, will do the trick as well as incendiary bombs. A newspaper article in September reported that “bits of the cathedral” were falling down and that “one-fifth of the internal stone pillars were held together with duct tape”. An appeal to raise £50m for essential repairs, launched in 2000, has so far raised nearly £10m; rather slow-going, and time may be short for England’s mother-church, which, like other English cathedrals but unlike French ones, is not supported by public funds.

The £50m total may sound a lot. To put it in perspective, it is less than the cost of a Giacometti sculpture recently sold at Sotheby’s for £65m and a fraction of the value of the bonuses recently paid out by the largely state-owned Royal Bank of Scotland.

www.savecanterburycathedral.com

harry.eyres@ft.com
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