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Rosslyn Chapel Revealed

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Rosslyn Chapel Revealed by Michael T.R.B.Turnbull (The History Press, 2009)

If nothing else the hysteria, both misguided belief and fear, attaching itself to The Da Vinci Code has brought one of Scotland's most special places to wide international prominence. One trusts that the renewed influx of tourists, an annual increase in 2006 from 38,000 previously to 160,000, is helping the expensive upkeep of the architectural cornucopia that is Rosslyn Chapel. One hopes also that for its visitors some appreciation is engendered that marvellous spiritual expression is not the preserve of weird, subterranean, non-mainstream sensibilities, but is more often the hallmark of `conventional' Christianity. Michael Turnbull has produced a fascinating book that reinstates the religious history of Rosslyn, both church and area, through its various inflections, Catholic, Episcopalian and Presbyterian. He very succinctly summarises the credulity of those who insist on seeing Rosslyn as an alternative culture loadstar after previously detailing some 800 years plus of local history, and so that the reader is left wondering why there is any need for conspiracy theory in the face of Rosslyn's orthodox Christian exuberance and its cheek by jowl existence with everyday industrial and agricultural reality that is here charted so well. What is perhaps most generally striking about Turnbull's book is that the aesthetic and spiritual plenitude of Rosslyn, as with the breath-taking natural beauty that surrounds it, is inhabited so easily by ordinary human beings rather than by mystical cognoscenti. The great manoeuvre of The Da Vinci Code (and the `non-fiction' works in the same vein that preceded it) was to pretend to a kind of populism, letting hoi polloi see that organised Christianity was all a massive establishment hoodwink, while the book itself, with its cast of special illuminati, was actually an elitist-flavoured confidence trick. Also, as G.K. Chesterton might almost have said, in a post-modern age where no stories are allowed to represent over-arching truth, you can make up any `great tale' so long as it is iconoclastic enough and there will be a queue (especially formed from the most cynical, which these days are most of us) to buy it.

Michael Turnbull's tale is a nuanced historical one that does much to explain the pre-Reformation function of Rosslyn chapel's design and ornamentation. The building is soaked in the sacramental vision of the old faith and, as elsewhere the work of Eamon Duffy has shown us, pre-Reformation churches at their most decorative provide in their imagery a repository of spiritual wisdom for the pre-literate age. Clearly, Rosslyn functions in this way; among a wealth of very nicely produced photographs, we find attention to the sculpting, for instance, of `The Corporal Works of Mercy' and of The Sins. Angels, dragons and other such iconography speak not so much of a great code to be cracked, but of a universal vision of spiritual good and evil that the modern age so often wants simply to unravel into a story of man's alternating `Jekyll and Hyde' motivations (the Manichean heresy has been surprisingly enduring and now provides the bedrock of much `modern' psychology). Turnbull restores sanity in summing up the connection (or lack of it) between Rosslyn and the Knights Templar. His comments on comparative architecture between Rosslyn and other edifices demonstrate how natural, if still exceptional, the church is in its conception. He re-evaluates, perhaps rehabilitates, the contribution of Fr Augustine Hay (1661-1736/7) to the recording of the history of Rosslyn in a way that will clearly attract subsequent scholarly interest. The inspiration taken by writers such as Burns and Scott from the environs features, as does the remarkable phenomenon that was the Community of the Transfiguration, brainchild of Brother John Halsey (Anglican) and Roland Walls (Anglican chaplain at Rosslyn and latterly Catholic priest). These are only a few features of a visually hugely attractive book, appropriately enough, the narrative of which spins out to connections spanning `ordinary' social and cultural history and the creative and spiritual wellsprings of human beings in a way much more richly layered than anything The Da Vinci Code is capable of envisioning. Like Rosslyn itself, this book is rather delicious and I would urge anyone with an interest in the Scottish religious sensibility to read it.

Gerard Carruthers (University of Glasgow)