The Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery and Meaning in an Ordinary Church

Stephen Fai is an assistant professor in the School of Architecture at
Carleton University.

Margaret Visser is the author of The Rituals of Dinner (2000), a popular
and award-winning book on the rituals of food and dining. In that book,
she reveals the inextricable paths of history, language, myth, and
contemporary culture that lead us to the dinner table. In The Geometry
of Love, Visser focuses her considerable insight into the human
condition on the Church of S. Agnese fuori le mura in Rome. Critical of
the common reduction of architectural experience to a matrix of dates
and styles, she sets out to unpack the layers of signification that give
meaning to space and place.

The book is organized around 10 themes that are linked to the
architecture of the S. Agnese complex. The specific architectural
features of the church serve as a conceptual thread that guides the
reader through Visser’s cross-disciplinary analysis and personal
reflections on the myriad phenomena that constitute her experience of
this particular place. She draws on history, archeology, architecture,
theology, hagiology, iconology, and, perhaps most significantly, her own
faith to construct an interpretation that is at once singular and
universal.

For the nonspecialist, reading this book is akin to visiting a shop
full of curiosa: lusty emperors, naked virgins, ink-black tombs, and
mystical light. Visser seduces us with history by appealing to those
foibles that make us “all too human.” Which is not to say the book
is some lowbrow romp through the history of Christianity. The author
clearly loves her subject and knows that it will withstand all scrutiny;
her Christianity, its labyrinthian history inscribed in architecture, is
both human and divine.

While the book makes use of an extensive bibliography, it will have
limited appeal for the specialist; students and scholars of the history
and theory of architecture, Early Christianity, and Judaic studies may
find some of the material dated and marred by overgeneralization.