Clothed Upon

On Simon Warrack’s Monumental, by way of Jonathan Buckley’s review “Master mason”.

In San Francisco you get used to a certain kind of preservation: an old front held up on steel braces while the building behind it is carted away, so the street keeps its face and loses its house. Buckley opens his review with the Venetian version, the Fontego dei Turchi, rebuilt so thoroughly in the nineteenth century that it now “has no aura.” Against it I want to set one repair he describes from Monumental. In the church of Bete Mikael at Lalibela, a window mullion has eroded badly. Warrack, working closely with the church’s guardians, doesn’t cut it out and fit a new one. He encloses the old stone in a casing cut from a perfectly matching piece, thereby, as Buckley puts it, “extracting nothing from the building while making good the damage.” We groan, Paul says, “not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life.” My claim is that this small repair holds the whole ethic of the book. A mason’s highest skill lies less in his instruments than in his belonging. Sacred stone belongs to a communion of the living and the dead, and the master proves himself by adding to it without taking anything away, which sometimes means setting his instruments down, and at least once means standing outside a door.

Belonging is something you receive before you can give it. Warrack’s began at Canterbury Cathedral, where he was inducted into the “complete communality” of stonemasonry, as the review has it, which I take to mean a craft where no one’s hand is the point and every hand is in the wall. The first Christians drew one of their great images of the Church from the builder’s world: “ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house.” Even the review’s title carries a second meaning. “Master mason” is the third degree of Freemasonry, whose lodges turned the working mason’s square and plumb into moral emblems, but in the lodge as on the scaffold it is a rank you reach only be being an apprentice first. Decades after Canterbury, Warrack is on the other side of that exchange, spending eight months in Lebanon teaching Lebanese and Syrian trainees the “finding and measuring and cutting” of good stone. For him, Buckley reports, it was a return to the fundamentals of his craft. I’d call it the communion running forward.

At Angkor it runs backward, into the dead. There, Buckley writes, “spirits are believed to inhabit the stones,” and before restoring the statue called Ta Reach, the King of Ancestors, Warrack’s crew consult local spiritual leaders, then negotiate with the minister of culture, the king’s daughter, to reunite the figure with its original head. A conservator could treat the ancestors as a nuisance to be worked around. Warrack treats them as members with a say. In the Laws, Plato has his Athenian say that we honor statues of the gods, lifeless as they are, trusting that the living gods take it kindly, and then that no statue in a house is as powerful as an aged father or mother or grandparent by the hearth (930e-931a). The image and the ancestor belong together, and honoring one teaches you to honor the other. I’m a Christian, not an animist, but I belong to a church that consecrates its altars and remembers its dead at them. I know what it is to believe that stone can be set apart.

The book’s real turn comes at Great Zimbabwe, and it divides Plato against himself. Warrack proposes temporary supports for the dry-stone walls and plumb lines to fix their twenty-degree inward slope. The local masons ignore him, and he defers: “They were right.” On one reading, Plato is on Warrack’s side. In the Philebus, Socrates ranks building as more exact than the crafts that run on practice and guesswork, because of its measures and instruments: the rule, the lathe, the compasses, the builder’s line (56b-c). But in the Statesman, the Stranger names a higher kind of measurement, one that judges things against “the moderate, the fitting, the opportune, the needful” (284e). That measure doesn’t live in a tool. It lives in people who have been formed, and these masons had inherited it: in the review’s words, “a mastery of this specialized art.” The first rule of a Zimbabwean head mason says how such mastery is kept: “Just learn from your elders.” The man who taught in Lebanon is taught here. The plumb line isn’t refuted. It is set down. A master is someone who can still be an apprentice.

Then there is Bete Golgotha, the resting place of King Lalibela, part of which is now so fragile it may collapse, and so holy that only the most senior priests may enter it. “Masons must remain outside.” I can’t tidy this one. The review doesn’t tell us what Warrack things of the ban. And the same tradition that keeps masons out of that inner chapel keeps women out of Bete Golgotha altogether, which I can’t hear as a natural fact, least of all beside the letter to the Hebrews. Hebrews recalls that only the high priest went into the holiest, once a year (9:7), and then announces that we now have “boldness to enter into the holiest… by a new and living way” (10:19-20). I hold both verses, and I won’t pretend the second doesn’t press on the first. And yet a Golgotha saved by outsiders who forced the door would be another Fontego: a structure preserved and a sanctuary lost. My hope, and it is mine, not the book’s, is the Lebanon answer: that the craft passes into the hands of those already allowed inside, until a priest of Lalibela is also its mason.

Emerson, who gave up on his own pulpit, knew what it is to love a sanctuary he would not serve: “I like a church; I like a cowl; / … / Yet not for all his faith can see / Would I that cowled churchman be.” In the same poem he says of the hand that rounded Peter’s dome: “Himself from God he could not free; / He build better than he knew;/ The conscious stone to beauty grew.” The great builders, Emerson thought, were carried past their own intentions. Warrack’s book suggests the restorer’s grace runs the other way: he builds less than he knows, holding his skill back so the whole can keep its life, and his best work is the kind no one notices was done. My city keeps a building’s face and throws away the house. Warrack keeps the house and gives it a new face. That is the picture I want, for buildings and for the soul. In the Phaedo, Socrates hopes for the day the soul is released from the body (67c-d). Paul wanted it not unclothed but clothed upon. On this one point the mullion sides with Paul, and so do I: not swapped out for something cleaner, but kept, and made good.