It is the only fighting architecture

Reading through G.K. Chesterton's Miscellany of Men I came across this:

The truth about Gothic is, first, that it is alive, and second, that it is on the march.  It is the Church Militant; it is the only fighting architecture.  All its spires are spears at rest; and all its stones are
stones asleep in a catapult. In that instant of illusion, I could hear the arches clash like swords as they crossed each other.  The mighty and numberless columns seemed to go swinging by like the huge feet of imperial elephants.  The graven foliage wreathed and blew like banners going into battle; the silence was deafening with ail the mingled noises of a military march; the great bell shook down, as the organ shook up its thunder.  The thirsty-throated gargoyles shouted like trumpets from all the roofs and pinnacles as they passed; and from the lectern in the core of the cathedral the eagle of the awful evangelist clashed his wings of brass,

And amid all the noises I seemed to hear the voice of a man shouting in the midst like one ordering regiments hither and thither in the fight; the voice of the great half-military master-builder; the architect of spears.  I could almost fancy he wore armour while he made that church; and I knew indeed that, under a scriptural figure, he had borne in either hand the trowel and the sword.

I could imagine for the moment that the whole of that house of life had marched out of the sacred East, alive and interlocked, like an army.  Some Eastern nomad had found it solid and silent in the red circle of the desert.  He had slept by it as by a world-forgotten pyramid; and been woke at midnight by the wings of stone and brass, the tramping of the tall pillars, the trumpets of the waterspouts.  On such a night every snake or sea-beast must have turned and twisted in every crypt or corner of the architecture.  And the fiercely coloured saints marching eternally in the flamboyant windows would have carried their glorioles like torches across dark lands and distant seas; till the whole mountain of music and darkness and lights descended roaring on the lonely Lincoln hill.  So for some hundred and sixty seconds I saw the battle-beauty of the Gothic; then the last furniture-van shifted itself away; and I saw only a church tower in a quiet English town, round which the English birds were floating.

This helps me to see something that I don't like about modern church architecture in that it seems to me to be a surrender or something defensive.  That the Church militant has surrendered to architectural fads that are quite cold and much more like a dead thing than being alive.  The L.A. Cathedral is defensive since it looks much more like a concrete bunker than a church alive and on the move proclaiming Christ.  That with older forms of sacred architecture a church proudly proclaimed itself as a church directed towards the glory of God while some forms of modern style meekly proclaims I am a church, but I might be a bank or an auditorium. 

There is also this nice bit about the need for a creed.

And it is supremely so in the case of religion.  As long as you have a creed, which every one in a certain group believes or is supposed to believe, then that group will consist of the old recurring figures of religious history, who can be appealed to by the creed and judged by it; the saint, the hypocrite, the brawler, the weak brother.  These people do each other good; or they all join together to do the hypocrite good, with heavy and repeated blows.  But once break the bond of doctrine which alone holds these people together and each will gravitate to his own kind outside the group.  The hypocrites will all get together and call each other saints; the saints will get lost in a desert and call themselves weak brethren; the weak brethren will get weaker and weaker in a general atmosphere of imbecility; and the brawler will go off looking for somebody else with whom to brawl.

The problem with Chesterton is that he is too quotable and you go from page to page thinking I got to remember that.