The Architecture of Stability

Monasteries and the Importance of Place in a World of

Non-Places
R.D.G. Irvine
University of Cambridge

What are the architectural forms that shape and

contain monastic life? Drawing on historical sources, as
well as the experience of a years ethnographic fieldwork in a Catholic English Benedictine monastery, in
this article I wish to explore the aesthetic and social
qualities of monastic architecture, focussing on the case
study of a particular place: Downside Abbey, in
Somerset, England. I will focus on particular features
and details of the monastery buildings in order to illustrate the significance of stability to the social life of the
monk. Benedictine monks vow stability to their
monastery of profession they promise to commit
their lives to a particular place, and in doing so they
incorporate their own life cycle within a particular set
of buildings. Having explored the monastery buildings
historically and ethnographically, I intend to use this

idea of an architecture of stability as a way of asking

questions about life beyond the cloister walls. Given
the apparent prevalence of non-places, as described by
Aug (1995), how might the Benedictine emphasis on
the importance of place help us to think critically about
the proliferation of an architecture that reflects rapid
movement, decreased social interaction, and detachment from history and identity?
The place that will be described here is a built environment for living a particular kind of life. The Abbey,
one of 13 male Catholic Benedictine monasteries
currently active in England, is home to a community of
30 Catholic men professed as monks and organised
according to the 6th century Rule of St Benedict. Most
of these monks entered the monastery before 1970;
four of the current community entered the monastery

Etnofoor, Architecture, volume 23, issue 1, 2011, pp. 29-49

in the past decade. So, while the age range of the

community is one in which men at all stages of adult
life are present, from monks in their twenties through
to monks in their nineties, the community does have an
aging profile, with the majority over 60 years of age.
Almost all of the monks are from England; when the
monastery receives enquiries from overseas, it generally
suggests that men who feel they have a vocation try
monasteries closer to their home first of all however,
this is offered as advice, not applied as an absolute rule,
and in fact one of the youngest members of the community is from outside of Europe. All monks in the
community have been educated beyond school level,
usually at secular universities in addition to seminaries.
In my experience of fieldwork, I experienced this
built environment not as a member of the community,
but as a guest. I followed the monks timetable, eating,
praying, and working alongside the community
nevertheless my role as guest meant that there were
important elements of separation, many of which were
spatial, as will be described later in this paper when I
speak about the accommodation of the guest in the
monasterys architecture. I was an outsider within the
monastery, although one occupying a space toward
which the community could communicate its values,
and within which I could learn through partial participation. I will begin this account of the monasterys
architecture from this perspective of an outsider
arriving and experiencing the building as a monument.
First, I will consider what we learn about the community and its history from the buildings themselves,
attempting to understand the values expressed by the
architecture. This will provide a basis for exploring the
kind of life that is lived within these buildings.

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The atmosphere of a medieval church?

The monastery is set back from a busy road, the A367.
As the square tower of the Abbey Church comes into
view, buttressed and crowned with pinnacles, the traveller who chooses to turn off from the flow of traffic
continues along a narrow passageway, reaching a sign
pointing to the Visitor Entrance. As the traveller
enters the most accessible part of the monastery the
Abbey Church, where laypeople are able to join the
monks in their daily liturgy what is immediately
striking is the buildings ability to evoke a past. As a
monk of the community wrote in an architectural
history of Downside, It is not a medieval church
And yet to the perceptive stranger visiting it to-day,
there is no doubt that it possesses the atmosphere of a
medieval church ( James 1961: 6). Built in several stages
between 1880 and 1925, it is nevertheless a building
which asserts its own antiquity. It was, from the first,
intended to be imitative of medieval architecture. The
first plan, drawn by Archibald Dunn and Edward
Hansom in the 1870s, drew heavily on the gothic
architecture of French Cathedrals, especially Amiens,
which Dunn had studied ( James 1961: 10); the drawings prepared by Dunn and Hansom, complete with
processions of tonsured monks, demonstrate the medievalist imagination at work. Yet of this plan, only the
mid-part of the church was completed, in addition to
the ambulatory (that is, the walkway around the envisaged east end of the church) and the side chapels radiating from the ambulatory. After Dunns death, the
decision was made to entrust the building work to
Thomas Garner, who drew his own new plans for the
church, which envisaged a square east end, which he

felt was more in keeping with the architecture of

English medieval churches (1961: 47); his design was
largely based on the Perpendicular Gothic style of
English churches in the fifteenth century (1961: 42).
The building work was continued by Giles Gilbert
Scott in 1925, who blended his own work with Garners
scheme, following its proportions. The west end of the
church was not completed, as the community could not
decide whether they wished to extend the nave of the
church further, and so opted to build a temporary plain
west wall so as to delay the decision (1961: 75-76). This
wall still stands.
Starting at the west end of the Abbey Church,
where the visitors entrance is located, we find ourselves
standing between columns that reach upward towards
pointed arches. The very use of the pointed arch, which
is characteristic of the Gothic style of architecture, is of
course a reference to an architectural past, a clear indication that in this building we see the revival of historic
forms. The use of this style of architecture had seriously
declined in England following the 16th century English
Reformation.1 Increasingly, themes from Classical
architecture were incorporated English building styles,
and it was this style that was adopted by architects such
as Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor in
their construction of churches in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. Not only did these architects
move away from the Gothic style towards the Classical
in their use of colonnades, triangular pediments, and
rounded arches, it is also clear that they were disparaging of the Gothic style (Lang 1966: 245-246;
Worsley 1993: 114).
Interior of Downside Abbey, facing eastwards

31

Although an interest in the antiquarian value of the

Gothic meant that by the mid-18th century it was seen
as an appropriate way to alter older houses, particularly
by owners anxious to stress the antiquity of their line,
and as a suitable style for garden buildings intended to
give a frisson of romance (Worsley 1993: 120), it was
the nineteenth century revival of Gothic architecture
for religious purposes that sought to invert the prejudices against this way of building. Augustus Welby
Pugin (1812-1852), whose extensive church-building
activities in the Gothic style were particularly influential for its revival,2 published a work of illustrations
directly comparing nineteenth century buildings with
those of the fifteenth century to demonstrate the
present decay of taste (Pugin 1841a). Elsewhere, in a
set of lectures published under the title The True Principles of Christian or Pointed Architecture, Pugin searches
for perfection: if we view pointed architecture in its
true light as Christian art, as the faith itself is perfect so
are the principles on which it is founded (Pugin 1841b: 9;
italics in the original). In order to demonstrate which
style of architecture reaches towards perfection, he
establishes two great rules for design:
First, that there should be no features about a
building which are not necessary for convenience,
construction or propriety, Second that all ornament
should consist of enrichment of the essential
construction of the building... In pure architecture
the smallest detail should have a meaning or serve a
purpose; and even the construction itself should
vary with the material employed, and the designs
should be adapted to the material in which they are
executed.

32

He goes on to state that strange as it may appear at first

sight, it is in pointed architecture alone that these great
principles have been carried out (Pugin 1841b: 1). In
this way, Pugin makes a claim for the moral superiority
of Gothic architecture. Indeed, Pugin labels Classical
architecture as pagan (notable buildings such as St.
Pauls, London, are described as revived pagan (1841b:
4)), and seeing in Gothic architecture the true Christian way of building he makes clear his distaste for the
adaptation of Classical forms for Christian worship.
What madness, then, while neglecting our own religious and national types of architecture and art, to
worship at the revived shrines of ancient corruption
and profane the temple of a crucified Redeemer by
the architecture and emblems of heathen gods
(1841a: 18).
Of course, such a strident condemnation of postreformation architecture cannot be disconnected from
Pugins own conversion to Catholicism in 1835 his
recognition of pre-reformation architecture as true
architecture reflects his recognition of pre-reformation
religion as the one true faith (Lang 1966: 262). In this
light, a return to the pointed arch is not simply a revival
of past forms, but a restoration of religious truth.

Rebuilding Glastonbury
In the context of Downside Abbey, this understanding
of architecture as a restoration of truth is crucially
important. The community, after all, can be imagined
as a restoration of English monasticism. Monastic life

in England had come to an abrupt halt following the

dissolution of the monasteries between 1536 and 1540
under the reign of Henry VIII. Yet English vocations
to the Benedictine life continued, and Englishmen
entered monasteries on the European continent. The
monastic community of St. Gregory the Great, now
resident at Downside, was founded in Douai in 1606,
then a notable centre for Catholic exiles (Bossy 1975:
12-17), as a house from which to send monks as
missionaries to England. The community remained on
the continent until policies suppressing monastic orders
in France, as well as the events of the French revolution
and the declaration of war against Britain by the French
revolutionary government, made it unsustainable to
continue English Benedictine life there. Forced to leave
Douai in 1794, the community based themselves
temporarily in Acton Burnell, Shropshire, before
settling at their current site in 1814.
So the monastic community which found itself at
Downside was on the one hand an embodiment of
continuity with Catholic life in pre-reformation
England, the return of Benedictine community life. Yet
on the other hand, it was a return after a period of
interregnum; and Benedictine life had not remained
unchanged during this period of interregnum. On the
contrary, it had come to be shaped by the presence of
heterodoxy, and was a missionary endeavour, undertaking missionary work in a Protestant country.
After arriving at Downside, the community built
around the existing house, adding a chapel and further
buildings for school and monastery. They therefore
adapted their space to continue the form of life which
they had lived on the continent: community prayer, the
preparation of monks to work as missionaries in

parishes away from the monastery, and the running of

a small school for the children of Catholics. Yet by the
1870s, bolder plans were being developed, with the aim
of resuscitating the monastic glories of the past.
Laurence Shepherd, a Benedictine monk who gave
a retreat for the Downside community in 1882, gives
voice to these aspirations. His words are saturated in
the rich history of English monasticism, the ten
hundred years history of glory in England prior to the
reformation (Shepherd n.d.: 115). He evokes the
tremendous learning, the hospitality, and above all the
solemn celebration of the Divine Office by those
monks. He looks around him, and finding the community at Downside engaged in the grand work of
Building a House to God (Shepherd n.d.: 121), he
almost comes to imagine in this building a restoration
of the spirit and place of monasticism in England. If I
have talked too much as tho I were dreaming, dreaming
that St. Gregorys of Downside was getting turned
gradually into Glastonbury, it is pardonable (Shepherd
n.d.: 147).
The idea of rebuilding Glastonbury is a potent one.
The construction of the new Church at Downside
began under Aidan Gasquet, then Prior of the community. He himself wrote about Glastonbury Abbey as a
symbol of Englands monastic heritage (Gasquet 1895).
Glastonbury connected the history of monasticism to
the thread of British history. It was the resting place
not only of King Edmund I and King Edmund II, but
also, according to legend, the burial site of King Arthur.
Famously, Glastonbury was said to have been visited by
Joseph of Arimathea, the man who had taken Jesus
down from the cross and entombed him. For Gasquet,
these legends did not need to be verifiable in order to

33

Medieval aspirations demonstrated in the drawing

prepared by Dunn and Hansom, architects, to illustrate their design for the Abbey Church prior to the
commencement of building work in 1880

34

be significant: they simply stood as a clear indication of

the link in the popular imagination between monastic
life and Englands history as a Christian country. Here,
and here alone on English soil, he wrote, we are linked
not only to the beginnings of English Christianity, but
to the beginnings of Christianity itself (Gasquet 1895:
4). With the dissolution of the Abbey in 1539, and the
subsequent execution of Richard Whiting, its last
Abbot, for treason, this link was all but severed.
To dream that Downside was getting turned gradually into Glastonbury is therefore to make a claim of
continuity with pre-reformation Christianity and predissolution monasticism. The architecture of Downside
Abbey can only be understood with these claims in
mind. Its claim as heir to the heritage of medieval
monasteries is not only demonstrated in the medieval
idiom deliberately adopted by the architects, but also
clearly indicated in the decoration and furnishings of
the church. The vaulting of one of the largest side
chapels, dedicated to St. Benedict, is bossed with the
Arms of the principal Benedictine monasteries prior to
their dissolution. The choir stalls to which the monks
return throughout the day for the cycle of liturgical
prayer are reproductions3 of the choir stalls at Chester
Cathedral, itself a former Benedictine Abbey, while the
altar around which the community celebrates Mass is
built out of Doulting stone from Glastonbury Abbey.
So the daily life of the monastery is surrounded with
points of connection to the monasticism of a past age.
Hobsbawm (1983), in developing the concept of the
invention of tradition, has recognised the role of
architecture in appealing to traditional authority by
way of establishing continuity with a suitable historical
past. A striking example is the deliberate choice of a

Gothic style for the nineteenth-century rebuilding of

the British parliament [partly designed by A.W. Pugin]
and the equally deliberate decision after World War II
to rebuild the parliamentary chamber on exactly the
same basic plan as before (1983: 1-2). The use of antiquarian forms in architecture can root an institution in
history, offering legitimation of authority by directing
attention away from the present moment in time and
into the past. In a rather different context, Bloch (1968,
1986) has shown how ritual structures are able to give
the impression of transcending the present. The tombs
of the Merina in Madagascar have walls of stone and
cement, with the top usually capped by a huge stone
slab covered in concrete (Bloch 1968: 100), and are
often brightly painted and decorated. Bloch argues that
they demonstrate in material form the victory over
time and also over movement. Tombs are emphatically
placed in a particular highly significant place and they
are there for ever (1986: 169). In doing so, they give
material form to an ideology of descent which remains
still amidst the vicissitudes of time, legitimating the
authority of the ancestors over the present life and its
activities by creating the impression of a group which
is unaffected by day to day events and which continues
to exist as generations come and go (1968: 100).
Returning to the architecture of the monastery, we
see in its insistence of continuity with a medieval past
that the community claims a deeper history than its
seventeenth century origins and its nineteenth century
settlement in England: it asserts itself the persistence
of a monastic way of life that continues to exist as
generations come and go. Indeed, following the manner
in which we saw Pugin present Gothic architecture, the
appeal to the past does not only give a sense of fixity

through time, but is also a rejection of present errors.

To embrace the architecture of a previous age as the
embodiment of an objective truth is to dismiss contemporary deviations from that truth. And, it appears,
when Pugin rejected the architecture which followed
the English reformation, he was also dismissing deviations from the true religion.
We approach the Abbey church, then, with the
recognition that it evokes a particular past and attempts
to bring it into the present. It proclaims the survival of
Catholicism and Benedictine monasticism; and within
a heterodox society in which Catholic Christianity had
formerly been suppressed, to proclaim survival is itself
a missionary act.

The Abbeys tower and its call to prayer

One of the most imposing demonstrations of the
Abbeys claim to a pre-reformation heritage is its tower,
completed in 1938 to a design by Giles Gilbert Scott.
The design of the tower is deliberately imitative of the
pre-reformation church towers of the county. The
Somerset Tower is a recognisable style that consists in
its simplest form of a buttressed square tower, topped
with a parapet and pinnacles at each corner (Wright
1981). Church architecture throughout the county
between the fourteenth and the sixteenth century
shows the development and elaboration of this theme.
Scott, in completing the tower of the Abbey, crowned it
with pinnacles and placed it firmly within this tradition. The tower is therefore integrated within a
Somerset skyline, a visible sign of the continuity of
Catholicism within the landscape. Indeed, one member

35

of the community has published a pamphlet taking the

reader on A journey around the ornate parish church
towers of the Somerset Mendip hills (Lambert 1997),
in which the tower at Downside is presented as a
continuation (and perhaps even a culmination) of the
countys indigenous style of architecture.
The imposing square tower carries a single bell,
named Great Bede.4 Great Bedes call to prayer, a
continuous steady striking sound, rings out five minutes
before each point of prayer in the monks daily liturgical
cycle. It can be heard for miles around, calling the
community from their work to the Abbey Church for
public prayer, and drawing the attention of laypeople in
the surrounding area toward this centre of worship. It
structures the daily activity of the monks and serves as
a witness to the land around, calling people into the
orbit of the monasterys pattern of existence.

Exterior of Downside Abbey, showing the crown of the

Somerset Tower designed by Giles Gilbert Scott

36

The call to prayer is one of the most striking features

of life in the monastery. The day is shaped around the
repeated call to attend the liturgy at set times: the
present liturgical round moves through Vigils at 6am,
Lauds at 7.10am, Community Mass at 8.35am, Midday
Prayer at 12.30pm, Vespers at 5.45pm and Compline at
8pm. Given such a timetable of prayer, the spirit of
scheduling, as Zerubavel (1980) describes it, is clearly
a significant presence within monastic life. He draws
our attention to the significance of monastic punctuality as a means of synchronisation. Through a detailed
reading of the temporal concerns in the Rule of St.
Benedict, Zerubavel notes the strong sense of mechanical solidarity which emerges through the coordination
of times for prayer, meals, work, and so on. Here, he
builds on an association between monastery and timediscipline that has been invoked by Mumford (1934),
who suggested that the presence of order (1934: 12) in
the monastery stood opposed to the erratic fluctuations and pulsations of the worldly life So one is not
straining the facts when one suggests that the monasteries helped to give human enterprise the regular
collective beat and rhythm of the machine (1934:
13-14).5
Throughout conversations about monastic ritual
during my fieldwork, the sense conveyed to me was
that the monasterys liturgical cycle aimed to move
individuals beyond subjective experience. This comes
through most clearly in a conversation with the
monastic choir master, who explained to me:
You might have your own concerns which you have
been struggling with in private prayer, but when you
are called to prayer in the Office, these concerns are

subsumed, in a way they are objectified, you have

your subjective concerns in life but the business of
the Divine Office is not your concerns, not your
business but the business, the prayer of everyone, of
the whole church as a unity.
Such an approach is reinforced by the way in which the
psalms are understood. Although the psalms as texts
are reflective of the mind of a particular individual
praying to God (some psalms might deal with despair,
some with joy, and so on) the practice of chanting
psalms is said to be objective in that you are not
chanting psalms that are reflective of your own personal
state of mind. Rather, the psalms follow a set order
over a two-week cycle in which the whole Book of
Psalms is recited. One monk, who entered the monastery in the 1990s and often serves as a cantor, explained
that when chanting the psalms, he imagines himself to
be joining with those people who are experiencing the
emotional states set out in the psalm, even (or, he
suggests, especially) if he finds himself in a very
different state of mind. The psalms are the prayers of
an individual, so of course they are ideal as the prayers
of individuals. But were not chanting them individually and we dont necessarily share the mindset of the
psalmist. The monk chants these words with the
understanding that they are the common prayer of the
church, and in doing so we stand alongside and represent those in that state of mind, we stand alongside
them in Christ.
As one of the senior monks explained in a talk
during an April 2006 retreat for young men considering their vocations,

The most powerful thing about the Divine Office is

the idea that you are praying the same prayer as so
many other people. And you will come in at the
same time next day, and the next day, and next week
you will say the same prayers. Sounds tedious, no?
Well, you know what they say, the first 50 years are
the hardest... But no, really, its not tedious when
you think about it as something shared by everyone,
if you imagine that at that moment in time you are
joined in prayer with people the whole world over,
and that you are doing what monks and other
faithful have done for generations.
What is being conveyed here is an understanding that
the monastic ritual which takes place in the Abbey
Church takes the individual beyond his present circumstances, and connects him up to a far greater reality.
This is poetically expressed by Hedley, an English
Benedictine monk and Bishop of the nineteenth and
early twentieth century who wrote a book of meditations for priests on retreat. Joining my poor and
unworthy voice with this grave symphony of worship
and petition, my feeble breath becomes a part of that
which is mighty and divine (Hedley 1894: 160), even a
part and a voice in that grand universal choir in which
Jesus presides (1894: 167). So the Abbeys tower, with
its bell ringing out, not only announces the monasterys
presence and its continuity with the past; it also asserts
the perpetuity of a cycle of prayer which transcends the
here and now. As has been said of the Merina tombs
described by Bloch, the tower is a monument to an
order which, to all appearances, remains still amidst
the vicissitudes of time (Bloch 1986: 169).

37

Stability in a world of movement

So the monastery is presented as an enduring unit. This
is highly significant, as it reflects the monks own
emphasis upon stability, which, alongside obedience
and conversatio morum,6 is one of the vows made by
English Benedictines when they commit themselves to
the monastic life in the ritual of profession. This
commitment to stability is outlined in Chapter 58 of
the Rule of St. Benedict, and is understood in the
personal sense of persevering in the monastic state, but
also intended as a commitment to remain in a particular
community, to bind oneself to it, and not to wander
from it.
It is worth noting that the ideological importance
placed upon stability by contemporary monks emerges
from the particular history of English Benedictine life.
Missionary work in England played an extremely large
role in the life of the post-reformation Congregation,
with life on the mission being the ultimate destination
of the majority of those who entered the monastic life.
The Papal Bull7 Plantata, issued in 1633 by Pope Urban
VIII, ratified the congregations missionary mandate,
confirming that the monks should, when making their
profession, take a Missionary Oath through which they
solemnly accepted the President of the Congregation as
having the sole authority to transfer them to or from
the mission. Even once the community had relocated to
England, this commitment to leave the monasteries in
order to carry out pastoral work continued. In the late
nineteenth century, the function of the monastery as a
training place for priests to work for the conversion of
England was strongly emphasised by many English
Benedictines who had moved on from the monasteries

38

to work in parishes. However, we see that those who

called for reform, and a shift in emphasis from the
mission to the monastery, described stability as a special
essential of the Rule of St. Benedict. Crucially for our
understanding of the architecture of Downside, it was
these reform-minded monks who were responsible for
construction of the present monastery buildings. Aiden
Gasquet, the Prior of the community who commenced
the building work, wrote that stability is the key to the
spirit of monasticism as interpreted in [St. Benedicts]
Rule, for by it the monastery is erected into a family, to
which the monk binds himself forever (Gasquet 1896:
xiv).8 To enter a Benedictine monastery is to become
part of a corporate body, and to share in all aspects of
life with that body, acting only through it, sharing in all
the joys and sorrows of its members, giving and receiving
that help, comfort and strength which come from
mutual counsel (Gasquet 1896:xii).
The buildings of the monastery, then, reflect a
particular aspiration to stability. The entire monastic
life cycle can be passed within the accommodation of
the monastery; those at the early stages of their
monastic development postulants, novices, and
juniors have individual rooms in the novitiate section
of the monastic accommodation, before moving along
the west wing to live in rooms in the main living
quarters with the rest of the solemnly professed monks.
The west wing of the monastery also contains an infirmary, where sick and elderly monks live under the care
of the infirmarian, an official appointed from within
the community specifically to care for those who are ill.
The infirmary has its own direct link to the Abbey
Church, opening out into a gallery, enabling continued
participation in the communitys ritual life.

Below the infirmary and the rooms of the monks

(sometimes referred to as cells) is the chapter house,
where the monks meet together for chapters (meetings
of all solemnly professed monks of the community)
and conferences from the abbot. There is also the calefactory,9 a kind of common room with chairs and newspapers where the monks spend periods of recreation,
and gather together after supper. These rooms, which
form the ground floor of the west wing of the monastery, are linked to the east wing of the monastery by a
cloister (passageway) which runs alongside the abbey
church. The east wing of the monastery contains the
guest accommodation and the refectory, and leads to
the library. Within the refectory the monks gather
together, seated as a community, eating in silence,
listening while a reader reads to the whole community
from a book chosen by the Abbot. On the walls of the
refectory are portraits of past abbots and other historically significant members of the household; ancestors
whose contributions to the ongoing history of the
community still loom large, whose writings are still
studied and referred to, whose personalities are still
subjects of conversation. The presence of these ancestors endures, and here in the refectory we see them as
ongoing participants, long after their death.
The library contains 150,000 volumes, intended to
provide for the needs of not only the current community, but also future generations of monks. In this way,
the library is also associated with stability in that it
exists independently of the lifespan of individual
monks; monks come and go, but the books stay. As the
then librarian explained to me during my fieldwork,
when you are dealing with a living collection, you have
to think beyond the present day, beyond the lifespan of

the current monks, and towards the needs of future

members of the community, as well as visitors and
researchers who might use the collection. The librarian
continued to order books for the library from his bed in
the infirmary in the days leading up to his death from
cancer in January 2007 a fitting demonstration of his
commitment to the community beyond the lifespan of
its constituent members.
So the monastery makes visible the commitment to
stability by connecting the different elements of the
monks daily life within the same complex: the sleeping
quarters, the place for prayer, for study, for eating, for
relaxation. Although monks regularly go beyond the
boundaries of the monastery, especially for purposes of
work in parishes elsewhere, the buildings aspire to
provide all of the monks material, spiritual, intellectual and working needs: all that is required for the
monk to remain within his house of profession. And
so, the monk incorporates his own life cycle into a
monastic complex which is designed to be an enduring
unit over and beyond the individual life cycle. This
endurance is made visible in the monastic cemetery.
The monks are buried in the grounds of the monastery, where row after row of black cast iron crosses
form a massed community of the deceased. Even in
death, the monks bodies remain within the boundaries
of the monastic household. Stability within the
community continues even when the life of the individual monk is at an end.
It is important to clarify that stability does not mean
complete containment within the space. Monks may
spend up to 30 nights in the year away from the monastery, with permission, and many monks use this allowance to spend time with their natal families. Monks

39

Well, you have to ask the question, is that Benedictine life?

Monastic cemetery in the grounds of the Abbey Church.

also spend time away giving lectures and talks, acting as

spiritual directors, and so on. In addition, the work of
monks as priests serving Catholics in parishes beyond
the boundaries of the monastery can present a particular challenge to stability, as was made clear by one
member of the community:
So you have your parish, then you need a car to get
to your parish. And then you need access to a bank
account to manage your parishs finances. And then
you... you can see what Im saying? And youre not
able to be at Midday office or Vespers because youre
away saying Mass or visiting the sick, or Of course,
none of these things are bad things, theyre all good
things. Visiting the sick, saying Masses, this is all
part of the responsibility of being a priest, of course
theyre good things to do. But if youre not able to be
at office, or eat with the rest of the community

40

What is significant about this quotation is that it does

not deny the good done by priests serving in society,
but highlights the difficulties presented by that service.
The need for cars for travel to move around beyond the
monastery, the need to be away at times when the
community prays or eats together, are problematic for
the ideology of stability, even while they represent what
is understood as a very real and important service to the
modern world.
So stability is certainly not without its challenges.
Yet it remains at the heart of the self-identity of many
of the monks. During a conversation with one member
of the community, who had been speaking of his
vocation to community, he expressed the issue (while
hinting at the pressures) in strident terms:
If you dont have a call to stability, then what on
earth are you doing here? There are so many other
orders that can send you back and forth to this place
and that. You can become a missionary. You can join
a travelling circus for that matter. But the vocation
here, its about living in community and staying put.
If youre not committed to that, then its a real puzzle
what brought you here.
The continuing importance of the ideology of stability
was made clear to me in the words of a teacher in the
school run by the monastery:
I think what we demonstrate is the value of staying
put. Modern society is so full of people rushing from

one place to the next, one job to the next, even one
family to the next. But were able to stay put, and I
think theres something thats attractive about that
because so many people are rootless.
In this way, he highlighted what was termed the
witness value of stability by a 1970s Commission of
monks and nuns from throughout the Congregation:
Through the vow of stability Benedictines bear
witness, in a torn and individualistic world, to
Christian unity which knows how to overcome
barriers. To live in community is to make the
approach to Christ more clearly visible In an
unstable world where life is characterized by
mobility and fragmentation, a Benedictine community can be a centre where life is deeply experienced
and where others come not only to share in silence
and prayer, but also to discuss the social realities of
the present time Stable monastic life confronts
the fleeting character of human experience, so
evident today, and seeks an understanding of the
meaning of life itself (Rees et al. 1978: 142-143).
Such values may appear counter-cultural. Wittel (2001)
has suggested that our society has seen the rise of a
network sociality. He illustrates what this sociality
might look like through ethnographic descriptions of
networking activities: parties where interactions are
fleeting, where the effort is made to talk to as many
people as you can within a short space of time, and to
gather these people as contacts who may be potentially
useful to you in your future career. In this context, social
relationships are commodified (2001: 56), and each

relationship, or potential relationship, becomes instrumental to achieving particular ends. Such networking
events are characterised by their promiscuity, as one
informant tells him: Everybodys eyes are wandering
all the time. Nobody wants to miss out (2001: 57).
Wittel contrasts this approach to social networking
with community. Community entails stability, coherence, embeddedness and belonging. It involves strong
and long-lasting ties, proximity and a common history
or narrative of the collective (2001: 51). By contrast,
networking is about short-term ties as vehicles for
individual aims. It is connected with the rise of the
importance of short-term projects, and implies a people
who are nomadic in their biographies, moving from
one point of connection to another. People are not
members of a community; they are freelancers. Longterm stability and the endurance of ties of responsibility
and care to other individuals recede into the distance.
The impact of such networking on all aspects of life is
well illustrated by Wittels description of the phenomenon of speed-dating (2001: 66), through which we see
short-term interactions becoming the mode even in
our private lives: the adoption of a networking approach
to finding a mate.
What forms of architecture form the backdrop to
this social life of fleeting interactions? Aug (1995: 78)
describes such a field thus:
A world where people are born in the clinic and die
in the hospital, where transit points and temporary
abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman
conditions (hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs
and refugee camps, shanty towns threatened with
demolition or doomed to festering longevity); where

41

a dense network of means of transport which are

also inhabited spaces is developing a world thus
surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting,
the temporary and ephemeral, offers the anthropologist (and others) a new object.
He describes such spaces as non-places: If a place can
be defined as relational, historical and concerned with
identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be
a non-place (1995: 77-78). The architecture of these
non-places is concerned with movement on the way to
somewhere else; Aug begins his account with a description of a travellers passage through an airport terminal,
these crowded places where thousands of individual
itineraries converged for a moment, unaware of one
another (1995: 3). Supermarkets, hotels, and motorways, which replicate in predictable forms with little or
no reference to local history or geography, are likewise
treated as non-places, through which individuals pass
as isolated individuals with minimal social interaction.
I will return to Augs concept of the non-place
later; at this stage, however, I simply wish to indicate
that the architecture of the monastery stands in
conscious opposition to the architecture of the nonplace. In contrast to a network sociality of individualised movement and fleeting interaction in identityless
spaces, the monastery witnesses to stability, and to the
value of a commitment to place. It presents itself as a
space with an historic identity, in which individuals are
brought together and incorporated within an enduring
community.

42

The cloister and the management of

connection and disconnection
This process of bringing together is mediated by the
cloister, the passageway which serves as the key element
of connection in the architecture of the monastery. The
cloister is a space of movement which facilitates
frequent interpersonal encounter, as the monks pass
through it regularly to reach the common areas of
Abbey Church (where they attend six communal
services a day), refectory (where they join together in
silence to eat three meals a day), chapter house and
calefactory. Clearly, this is an architectural arrangement
which stresses life shared in common, not a life of
isolated individuals. Horn (1973) has outlined the
historic development of the cloister, drawing on the
presence of the cloister in the architectural arrangement of the ninth century Plan of St. Gall, which Horn
has suggested is a statement of policy of the leading
bishops and abbots prepared for reform synods held in
Aachen in 816 and 817. Horn describes the plan as
paradigmatic for monastic architecture. The development of cloistered monasteries of this type is dependent
on the rejection of hermit-like forms of living and the
acceptance of a communal model based on shared and
coordinated activity, such as that outlined in the Rule of
St. Benedict. He traces the development away from
scattered individual dwellings for monks, as in fifth
century Egypt10 and seventh to eighth century Ireland
and towards increasing connection. So the cloister, for
Horn, is a clear indication of a move away from a
monastic architecture in which individual monks cells
were separated and in which the primary concern is the
maintenance of individual space, and toward a way of

living which focuses on social interaction and leads to

the creation of public space.
Nevertheless, the public nature of monastic space
cannot be without regulation. This is made clear, for
example, in the spatial management of visitors to the
Abbey. Guests are built into the structure of the monastery. The guesthouse, providing room for around ten
guests, occupies a floor above the monastic refectory.
Yet although the guest wing is included within the
structure of the community, we can also see that it is
held separate from the monks accommodation. The
simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of outsiders is
outlined in the Constitutions of the English Benedictine Congregation, which instruct that there should be
a central area, including the monks sleeping quarters,
which no outsiders should enter without the specific
permission of the Abbot. A wider area is then defined,
including the refectory, library and guest accommodation, into which outsiders can be admitted, but in
conformance with norms established by the Abbot. So
there are layers within layers of enclosure, and different
layers of contact between monks and outsiders. So the
Abbey Church, guest accommodation and library are
easily accessible from the exterior (the Abbey Church
is the most accessible of the three, as permission is
required to use the guest accommodation or library, but
the Church itself is open to all); however, additional
layers of access (through locked doors, one of which is
marked with a sign demanding SILENCE) are required
to enter the cloister and reach the refectory; and to pass
through to the west wing of the monastery requires the
visitor to walk the full length of the north side of the
cloister, something they would not ordinarily do, except
on rare occasions when they might be invited to the

common area of the calefactory. Beyond this, up the

stairs of the west wing, the private rooms of the monks
are the most inaccessible part of the complex.
So the outsider in the monastery, such as myself, is
an ambivalent presence (Seasoltz 1974: 446). The
arrival of a guest is can be understood as an encounter
with Christ: At the last judgement, Jesus will reveal to
everyone the mystery of this hospitality. Through and
in the visitor, Christ himself is welcomed or sent away,
recognized or unrecognized, just as when he came unto
his own people (Seasoltz 1974: 441). In addition, the
offering of hospitality provides an opportunity to
communicate the monasterys values to the society
beyond the cloister yet the guest carries with him a
risk of disruption which could undermine those very
values. It is for this reason that we see the simultaneous
inclusion and exclusion of the outsider. He is granted
access, but this access is limited. He is invited to participate in the life of the community, yet he is spatially
separated from the monastic community in the Abbey
church, in the refectory and in his sleeping quarters.
It is not only in managing interactions with guests
that the monks seek to maintain private space; while
the monastery is a site of frequent interpersonal
encounter, the importance of solitude is also structured
into the timetable through the commitment to twicedaily private prayer, as well as the summum silentium
(complete silence, sometimes referred to as the great
silence) at the end of the day. This silence, which
stretches from Compline, the last daily point of prayer,
through to Lauds the next day (during most of which,
of course, the monk will be asleep) restricts interaction
and gives the monk opportunity to be alone.
One of the members of the community, with whom

43

I worked regularly in the carpentry workshop, drew a

deliberate parallel between the time of private prayer
and bedtime, the other time of the day in which he
could truly be alone with God. The link which he
made was based on two analogies. Firstly, he likened
the summum silentium, total silence in the monastery
during the hours of night time, to the total silence of
contemplation, which was the prayer of inner quiet.
Secondly, at bedtime one goes to ones cell to be alone;
and this was much like entering into the cell of
contemplative prayer. He pointed out that the monks
put up their hoods during the time of private prayer,
and also after Compline, during the summum silentium
as they make their way to bed. At both times, Im
creating a place of solitude for myself, and putting up
the hood (hence covering the ears and closing off part
of the peripheral vision, thus being less inclined to
distraction from other people and things around you)
was a marker of this solitude. In the architecture of the
monastery this need for solitude, and for a time of
turning away from the community, is reflected in the
restricted private space of the cell.
The management of the relationship between public
and private space was one of the aspects of monastic
architecture that particularly impressed the Modernist
architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965). Early studies of
the Carthusian monastery of Ema, near Florence, and
of Greek Orthodox monasteries on Mount Athos, left
a lasting impression on the architect as a relatively
young man (Brooks 1997), and he returned to themes
taken from his observations of monasteries throughout
his life. Reflecting on the inspiration taken from the
Carthusian monastery, Serenyi (1967: 278) has written:
There is indeed an interplay between the cells, symbol-

44

ising privacy and individuality, and the building as a

whole, symbolising collective order. This interplay is
reflected in Le Corbusiers own architectural designs
for both religious and non-religious use. In 1953, he
was able to apply these principles to a monastery of his
own design, the Dominican Priory of Sainte Marie de
La Tourette near Lyon, France. The integration of
church, library, refectory, and work and recreation space
shows his awareness of the importance of public space
and the connection of different elements of activity, yet
he also places emphasis on monastic solitude, with each
monastic cell acoustically isolated and with its own
balcony view out onto the countryside; in this way the
public space of the landscape becomes appropriated for
individual contemplation.
The lessons learned from monastic architecture
were also put to secular use; his Immeubles Villas,
plans for a new urban architecture, show housing built
around a central courtyard, and connected with
communal facilities such as dining halls, stores and
common rooms (Serenyi 1967: 283). Yet such communality, for Le Courbusier, could not be at the expense of
the human requirement for solitude, as expressed in the
monastic cell.
The cell as an ideal solution to individual needs can
be found not only in Le Corbusiers own monastery
at La Tourette, but also in the childrens bedrooms
of the Unit dHabitation at Marseilles, and in the
Hotel for adults and guests at Unit. The possibility
of total privacy and withdrawal always appears as
the first priority In fact, the inner life of the individual is at the heart of Le Corbusiers architecture.
In each of his public buildings that called for inter-

action of individual with community, or interaction

among members of the same family, Le Corbusier
tried to allow for the right of segregation (Zaknic
1990: 31).
The monastery therefore provides a blueprint for social
connection, for integration of social activities, but also
maintains the space for individual retreat or solitude;
and it is in this balance that Le Corbusier took inspiration for his architecture for modern living. It is worth
noting, however, that his prototypes of monasticism
stress the private over the public to a far greater extent
than the Benedictine monastery which is my subject of
study. The Carthusian cell, from which Le Corbusier
drew inspiration, facilitates a life of far greater isolation
than the Benedictine cell: Carthusian monks join
together in prayer for only some of the liturgy, they do
not generally dine together, usually eating meals passed
into their cell through a hatch, and their only community recreation is a weekly walk. The cell is therefore
the place where the Carthusian monk spends most of
his time, alone. So in Le Corbusiers thinking, it is
interesting to note the particular stress placed upon
solitude, separation and silence. As we saw above, it is
privacy and withdrawal which is the first priority; this
balance shifts somewhat in the context of Benedictine
monastic architecture, in which individual contemplative space only makes sense where private life is
connected to the life of the community it is through
social interaction, joining together with others, that the
individual grows in holiness.

Thinking about monasteries in a world of

non-places
In this paper I have sought to describe the ways in
which the buildings at Downside Abbey demonstrate
an architecture of stability. The monastery indicates
historical stability, appealing to the past in order to
stress continuity with pre-reformation and pre-dissolution Catholic monasticism. Its style suggests a persistence of monasticism through time, presenting a social
order which transcends present circumstances. This is
made particularly evident in the Abbey tower, which
announces the perpetual cycle of monastic prayer,
connected with the prayer of the church throughout
history, in a style which expresses continuity with other
church towers in the county.
The individual life cycle of the monk is incorporated
within this stable social order, and this is reflected in an
architecture which connects all aspects of daily activity.
The monastery is a place for the individual monk to
live, work, eat, grow through prayer and social interaction, and die. This stability, this sense of commitment
to place, is part of a monastic self-identity built on a
contrast to rapid movement, fleeting interaction and
detachment. Just as Pugins contrasts between the
moral truth of Catholic architecture and what were, for
him, debased architectural forms enabled him to illustrate the failings of the post-reformation world (Pugin
1841a, 1841b), here once again we see the architecture
of stability contrasting itself with a world of non-places
(Aug 1995) in order to assert the moral value of a
particular Christian way of living.
But is the monastery simply at cross-purposes to the
form of society which gives rise to Augs non-places?

45

Aug describes the experience of the non-place

through passages of ethnographic fiction in which a
character named Pierre Dupont makes his way along
the highway, to the airport, where he checks in, waits
and then boards an aeroplane. What is striking about
these passages is the sense of pleasure the character
gains from his interaction with the non-place.
Whatever the dangers of fragmentation and rootlessness alluded to in the Benedictine witness to stability,
for Pierre Dupont, it is a space of liberation:
He was enjoying the feeling of freedom imparted by
having got rid of his luggage and at the same time,
more intimately, by the certainty that, now that he
was sorted out, his identity registered, his boarding
pass in his pocket, he had nothing to do but wait for
the sequence of events (Aug 1995: 2-3).
On the plane, he flicks through his in-flight magazine,
and reads an advert expressing in clear language the
desire answered by the non-place: The irresistible
wish for a space of our own (1995: 4). Outside of social
interaction, moving in a space where geographical
specificities are distant, he is able to relax:
He adjusted his earphones, selected Channel 5 and
allowed himself to be invaded by the adagio of
Joseph Haydns Concerto No. 1 in E major. For a
few hours (the time it would take to fly over the
Mediterranean, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of
Bengal), he would be alone at last (1995: 6).
The non-place may be alienating; but here, the traveller
finds peace within this alienation.

46

Given this retreat into the self, Aug suggests that

there may already be a need for an ethnology of solitude
(1995: 120). While this project takes Aug toward
non-places like airports, I would suggest that this it
finds its prologue in Le Corbusiers turn towards the
architecture of the monastery. Le Corbusier saw in
monastic life a social order capable of allowing for
solitude, and he sought ways to translate this into the
architecture of the twentieth century. Yet monastic
solitude does not come at the expense of social connection; private life is integrated within a setting that
generates ongoing communal activity, as exemplified in
the architecture of monasteries such as Downside
Abbey. The architecture of stability stands not only as a
monument to community and commitment to place
against a backdrop of continual movement and
dispersed social relationships; it also helps us to think
toward a harmonisation of social interaction and individual solitude, made possible by the managed relationship between public and private space.
E-mail: rdgi2@cam.ac.uk

Notes
1 While it is worth noting the use of Gothic styles of architecture did not cease entirely (Lang 1966: 245), particularly in the
cases of work to add to existing Gothic buildings, what is
important here is that its fashionability and use seriously declined in England in the period between the reformation and the
nineteenth century.
2 A.W. Pugin had, in fact, been commissioned to draw plans for
monastic buildings at Downside, and made several drawings

for this work between 1839 and 1842 (ODonnell 1981).

However, a lack of funds meant that it was only later in the
century that building work could begin on a new church and
monastery complex, by which time new plans had been drawn
up by Dunn and Hansom.
In 1930, scale drawings and photographs of the Chester stalls
were sent to Ortisei in Northern Italy, where they were reproduced in the workshop of Ferdinand Stuflesser ( James 1961:
87-88). The stalls were completed in 1933.
The bell is named as a memorial to Bede Vaughan (18341883), a monk of the community who was appointed Archbishop of Sydney.
Mumford and Zerubavel are perhaps guilty of overstating the
role of abstract time-reckoning in the Rule of St. Benedict.
Dohrn-van Rossum (1996: 33), for example, argues that
Mumfords mechanistic image is erroneous, pointing out that
the required punctuality was not related to abstract points in
time, but to points in the sequence of the rhythm of collective
conduct in other words, that monastic time-keeping in the
Rule and the centuries afterward was not rigid and depersonalised. While this point is important for an understanding of
Benedictine history, I believe that Mumford and Zerubavels
approach to punctuality remains helpful for our understanding
of contemporary monastic experience; whatever the timekeeping basis of monks at the time of the Rule, Downsides
reading of the Rule is shaped by a more recent imagination. If
the monastic horarium of the sixth century is understood and
restored through the lens of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, then it should be no surprise that monastic timetabling is infused with a mechanised time-discipline.
This term resists translation; it is often described as a vow of
conversion (see Rees et al. 1978: 148-149 for a English Benedictine perspective based on this understanding), committing
the monk to the work of reforming himself, renouncing sin and

accepting new values of monastic life. However, Christopher

Jamison, the former Abbot of another English Benedictine
monastery, offers a broader definition of conversatio morum
which is more in keeping with the varied ways the monks
explained the vow to me: If you look up the word conversation
in some dictionaries, you find a clue to the meaning of conversatio. There you discover that the first now obsolete meaning of
conversation is living with somebody So this Benedictine
vow is a resolution to live with others, specifically with other
monks, and hence to live the monastic way of life ( Jamison
2006: 116).
7 A Papal Bull is an official decree issued by the Pope.
8 With regard to Gasquets authorship of these words, it is worth
noting that Knowles (1963: 252) writes that It seems certain
that [Gasquets introduction to] Monks of the West was
almost entirely the work of two ghosts, Edmund Bishop and
Dom Elphege Cody; in addition to this, we see very similar
words in pamphlets authored by others. It could be argued that
this demonstrates the extent to which such views were held
and agreed as the collective opinion of a group of monks in the
community at this time.
9 From the Latin calefacere, to warm; the name is retained from
that traditionally given in Benedictine monasteries to the room
with the fire where the monks would have gone to warm themselves.
10 Aravecchia (2001) in a spatial analysis of hermitages of the
fifth to the seventh centuries in the Kellia, a monastic site in
Lower Egypt, has noted that later hermitages show greater
ease of access from the outside, while the development of halls
for shared eating and prayer in later constructions, as well as
the absence of kitchens specifically accessed from particular
apartments, implies an increasing emphasis on communal life,
with monks having a higher level of access to one another.

47

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