Christopher Wolfgang John Alexander

Several times in previous columns (e.g. The Noblest of Trades, 09.24.2022) I have tried to express, probably too pompously, that land surveying (and any of the trades) should ideally be practiced with a measure of philosophical and spiritual seriousness in order to do work that is good for the individual land surveyor, for the profession, and for all mankind. And more specifically I have called attention to the late architect Christopher Alexander as an exemplar of this sort of seriousness, and I have even referred to his books as potentially “scripture” for those interested in doing excellent work.

This column is a review of The Luminous Ground, the last book of Alexander’s four-volume The Nature of Order, and his most explicitly spiritual text. Because I see him as an important and authentic teacher of philosophy and spirituality insofar as these pertain to land surveying and infrastructure, I’ll begin with an overview of how Alexander formed his powerful ideas.

An Architect’s Spiritual Evolution

Alexander’s A Pattern Language was published in 1977 by Oxford University Press and quickly became (and remains) the best-selling and most influential architecture book of all time. The book’s 253 patterns emphasize participatory design and functional harmony in construction but avoided overt spiritual or religious language. A Pattern Language has been described as a work of ‘pragmatic humanism’ and its premise—that people should shape their own environments according to their liking—was rooted in empiricism rather than metaphysics.

By the early 2000s, Alexander had begun to reconsider; for example, when I interviewed him in 2001 and asked him how his famous book might be applied to land surveying practice, he replied simply, “… you’re very kind to be thinking about A Pattern Language. My own thinking has moved very, very far from that.”

His astonishingly fine and valuable 2007 essay, The Long Path that Leads from the Making of Our World to God is certainly a spiritual text—Alexander wrote it in support of his nomination for the Templeton prize, an annual award granted to a living person “exploring the deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place and purpose within it.” He says:

I have now come to the view that the sacredness of the physical world – and the potential of the physical world for sacredness – is a powerful, surprising, and sure path to recognizing, and providing small steps towards understanding the existence of God, whatever God may be, as a necessary part of the reality of the universe. (emphasis added)

And he also makes plain that his understanding of God is based on mystic illumination along with insights deriving from real world experience as architect and general contractor:

Only in the last twenty years has my understanding of this certainty taken somewhat explicit form, and it continues to develop every day. It has led me to explicit visions of God, and to understanding of what kind of entity God may be, coupled with a way of talking about these things that allows them to be understood in straightforward terms. (emphasis added)

Though he was raised a Roman Catholic and read widely and deeply in many traditions, Alexander’s ‘conversion’ (I think this is the right word) was not to any particular religion, let alone Christianity—he writes in The Luminous Ground, “I do not say this with any intention to suggest that this state of mind is specifically Christian. It is, as far as I can tell, religious in nature, but quite general in its character.” (emphasis added)

But neither was his conception of God impersonal, and the suspicious rubric ’spiritual but religious’ does not apply; Alexander, throughout the 2000s until his death in 2022 (In Memoriam, American Surveyor 07.11.2022) spoke forthrightly of God as an “entity,” as a “being,” described the building of living structure as the making of ‘gifts for God,’ and of God as “luminous ground” or ever present implicate order of Self with which humans—dwellers in matter—could sometimes be enflamed… and he humbly described his own moments of luminous numinous union. In my reading this is no dry secular philosophy of architecture and construction—this is faith in a living God.

A Cosmology That Includes the Self

This period of Alexander’s spiritual evolution was primarily characterized by the laborious writing effort that produced The Nature of Order, the four-volume set of books that establish him as perhaps the foremost philosopher and spiritual figure of the constructed world. In the first three volumes Alexander introduces such important concepts as life and living structure, the 15 fundamental properties and structure-preserving transformations, the primacy of centers, the fundamental process (which, if followed, creates living structure), unfolding, and many more profundities. Though all these concepts push architectural theory into radically new regions of thought, the first three books of The Nature of Order can be interpreted, if barely, as works of empirical philosophy acceptable to rational materialists. In the Luminous Ground, though, the gloves came off.

Alexander begins—in the first sentence, actually—by acknowledging:

This fourth book presents an aspect of physical reality that is often hidden nowadays—at least in the West—although this was very much a part of humankind’s conception of the world in past times.

And building on this opening statement, in the preface and early chapters of The Luminous Ground, he accomplishes nothing less than the establishment of a new cosmology—an all-compassing picture of the cosmos that, “… brings together the natural sciences, particularly astronomy and physics, in a joint effort to understand the physical universe as a unified whole. —(Britannica, emphasis added)

I will (too briefly) summarize the chief feature of Alexander’s proposed new cosmology as an absolute insistence—with conviction born of a life spent designing and successfully building living structure, and by authentic mystic illuminations yielding gnosis—that the subjective inner experience of self (or ‘Self,’ mind, awareness, the I or I Am, soul, etc.) is as real as the objective outer experience of the universe as measurable, machine-like construct. And so, any cosmology must account for the reality of both subjective and objective experience if it is to be a valid attempt to “…understand the physical universe as a unified whole.”

And that’s it, that in a nutshell is the Alexandrian master key to the Cosmos; ultimately, his life and work led him to accept as inescapable truth that he was real, that I am real… that you are real.

Let’s back up for a moment to establish that Alexander’s journey to this realization of self did not begin as a spiritual aspirant, but as a top-flight intellect engaged in mathematics, the most objective of sciences. From his Wikipedia bio:

“In 1954, he was awarded the top open scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, in chemistry and physics, and went on to read mathematics. He earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture and a master’s degree in mathematics. He took his doctorate at Harvard (the first PhD in Architecture ever awarded at Harvard University).” (emphasis added)

Alexander was not the first brilliant objective scientist to examine this cosmological imperative, and he wasn’t even the first Cambridge-trained mathematician to do so. He writes:

“Alfred North Whitehead, writing about 1920, was one of the first philosophers to draw attention to this modern problem, which he called the bifurcation of nature. Whitehead believed that we will not have a proper grasp of the universe and our place in it, until the self which we experience in ourselves, and the machinelike character of matter we see outside ourselves, can be united in a single picture.”

This “bifurcation” of inner and outer experience, so bedeviling to the materialist worldview, has been, for decades, a matter of heated debate in modern science, particularly among subatomic physicists. Gigantic intellects including Bohm, Heisenberg, Pauli, Schrodinger, Einstein, etc., have concluded that, when it comes to the way reality works, any strictly objective cosmology will always be found wanting in explanatory value. Put another way, it is a mistake to assume that modern science is a monolith of objective materialism reflexively denying the presence of Self, Mind, or Spirit.

When he insists that the awareness of Self that is present in all humans (and presumably in all beings) is a real, though intangible, thing—like gravity—Alexander is not treading new intellectual ground. What he does do that is new in cosmology is to heal the bifurcation of nature by applying lessons learned empirically during his life’s work designing and building tangible buildings and artifacts, thus extending the insights gained from subatomic physics into the daily life of matter and, well, infrastructure.

In a sense then, the first three books of The Nature of Order—The Phenomenon of Life, The Process of Creating Life, and A Vision of a Living World (all reviewed previously)—though of course valuable in themselves, can be considered as ‘merely’ the objective, empirical framework supporting the cosmology introduced in The Luminous Ground. Important conclusions suggested by this new cosmology include:

• The quality of being he calls life is a real and measurable aspect of structure, and living structure better supports civilization and the thriving of individual humans.
• The modern era’s bifurcation of inner and outer experience did not exist for much of history, and that nearly all of the building work now revered as great—Chartres, Borobudur, the Potala, Fallingwater, ancient Rome, the Parthenon, etc.—was produced in eras in which the reality of self was not questioned, or by collectives or individuals who did not operate within an objective materialist world view.
• That in our time, living structure can again be routinely produced by (re)introduction of wholeness to cosmology and by individual application of the fundamental process. Note that this conclusion implicitly calls for the spiritual renewal of civilization.

I have probably made Alexander sound grandiose and that comes down to my failings as a writer. He himself was modest, even diffident, when writing about these ideas. In the concluding sentences of The Luminous Ground he says, almost in anguish:

The trained scientist in me, with the prejudices of an earlier era, cannot quite believe it. But as a hard-bitten scientist who goes where the evidence goes, I believe it must be true. And my instinct—lying deeper perhaps than logic and nourished by years of skepticism—also says that it is true.

It is something like this that I hang onto. I want to believe it. I cannot believe it. But I believe it must be true. (emphasis added)

Praxis

The Luminous Ground, like all of Alexander’s work, is difficult to excerpt; he writes with a rolling, comprehensive majesty that is at the same time pithy, precise, and often lyrical and poetic. The temptation for reviewers—this one anyway—is to simply quote him at length, encourage readers to investigate his work for themselves, and hope for the best.

I’m trying to find a middle ground in this column. I hope I’ve established that Alexander’s thoughts on cosmology and the nature of reality are grounded in empiricism and useful in everyday life and work, while also rising to profound spiritual heights… that are also useful in everyday life and work. And I hope that some of you will investigate his work for yourselves… if only to confirm that I am a lunatic religious freak.

But I won’t go into detail about the ‘non-cosmological’ aspects of The Luminous Ground except to say that in sections like The Existence of an “I”, The Practical Matter of Forging a Living Center, Pleasing Yourself, Clues From the History of Art, and The Face of God Alexander humbly, beautifully, and authoritatively presents necessary and sufficient evidence to inspire acceptance of his insights into the nature of reality.

I’ll close with a passage from The Luminous Ground describing an Alexandrian praxis, an orientation to life and work that is acceptable within any philosophical or religious framework, and that will, to the extent it is adopted by Man, make of Earth a paradise:

“If a person dedicates himself to making the field of centers, to making things whole, the more he or she does it, the more whole he or she becomes within him- or herself. Even one act of making this field of centers, a few minutes or an afternoon done honestly and in full pursuit of the real thing, changes a person and brings a level of calmness, quietness, and peaceableness which is quite unusual into that person.”

And if that doesn’t strike you as scripture, I don’t know what will.

Angus Stocking is a former licensed land surveyor who has been writing about infrastructure since 2002.