For the second time in the past few months, First Things has featured St. Dunstan’s — this time it was my piece on what schools can learn about architecture and anthropology from beer halls:
“A cynic might argue that the reason for building beautiful beer halls is not community or conviviality or even drinking, but rather avarice. They are made to be places where people will spend money—places that will deepen “brand loyalty,” predisposing consumers positively towards a brand’s message and marketing. Be that as it may, this works precisely because the founders, funders, and architects of beer halls attend to human beings as embodied creatures who need more than ugly “utilitarian” structures. They build, in other words, from a fundamentally true anthropology, even if the brewers are complete atheists.“
These brewers build from a truer anthropology in certain respects than that of churches or schools that build ugly “utilitarian” structures — dry, climate-controlled places in which to convey information to persons-as-information-receptacles — even if the churches in question are theologically conservative, even when the schools are Christian and classical.
Ideally our schools would be at least as beautiful as the beer halls. Indeed they should exceed them. If the cathedral of any given community is its most impressive building, then the cathedrals of Nelson County are cathedrals of alcohol. (Not incidentally, the most striking of these is a timber-framed cider barn nicknamed “The Chapel of Apple.”)
It is by no means a bad thing that the brewers of our county have built beautifully. It is no bad thing that they prompt us to be build more ambitiously — to seek to give students beauty that will teach them to love creation and their Creator. Such beauty will stick with them when they graduate, just as Donne’s poetry has stuck with me for decades, as I note in the piece.
God forbid they should fall away from the faith, it will haunt their attempts to wrest meaning from lesser beauty — or from beauty dedicated to lesser ends.
