“Love is Greater Than Taste”: The Moral Architecture of John Betjeman and John Piper

Abstract

Poet John Betjeman and painter John Piper shared an emphasis on visual attentiveness to place, which in its moral and aesthetic valuation, challenged contemporary standards of taste, especially those modern ones that excluded ornament and the picturesque. With regard to English Christianity, as I argue, both pursued forms of neo-Romantic, moral architectural praise and analysis, engaging the socio-cultural debate, not in terms of a set of frozen critical laws, but within a flexible practice of personal engagements that, nonetheless, set forth strong positions on sentiment, tradition, and sacrament. In doing so, both men reemphasized rootedness and love.