Esoteric Thought, Interfaith Space, and the MIT Chapel: How Architecture Redefined Spirituality and Fostered Cooperation across Religious Traditions

Leaders of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a secular institution founded in Boston in 1861, were grappling with questions of religion as early as 1916.   As they moved to the institution’s newly constructed campus in Cambridge that year, some felt a chapel was needed to accommodate what they termed “the life of the spirit.” Scientific education, they felt, should offer some balancing opportunities, and a chapel accommodating the range of students’ religious perspectives seemed a good solution.  Decades passed, however, before a definite plan to build a chapel emerged in 1950. By then, a new function for the chapel had arisen: acknowledging “spirit” was joined by the accommodation of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, a newly developing interfaith concern that reflected the growing portrayal of America as a tri-faith nation.

The noted Finnish American architects, father and son duo, Eliel and Eero Saarinen, were hired in 1950 to design the building. The resulting chapel, dedicated in 1955, was immediately hailed by architectural critics and religionists alike as an innovative and compelling expression of religious cooperation and spirit.  This success came on the heels of two other well-known but unsuccessful efforts to create interfaith spaces—one in Philadelphia and one at Brandeis University—both of which ran aground on the shoals of religious exclusivism. In contrast, within the first six months of its existence, the MIT Chapel was hosting gatherings for Protestant, Jewish, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Vedanta, and Masonic groups, and offering open meditation times daily.  Letters inquiring about the chapel poured in from other institutions hoping to emulate this success. 

This paper asks why this science-oriented institution was successful in producing what was among the first viable interfaith buildings in the nation. It claims that a crucial factor in the chapel’s success was the influence of Theosophical and Transcendentalist thinking on the architects involved in the project, Eliel and Eero Saarinen. Previous scholarship has demonstrated that partway through the development process, Eero ditched the Protestant/Catholic/Jewish interfaith language initially used to describe the building’s function and adopted instead language pointing to the building’s phenomenological purpose to foster individual “spirituality”—a concern understood to be shared by all people regardless of religious background and which could effectively justify shared, interfaith space. The origins of this universalist view of spirituality have not been examined, however. The paper argues that Eero Saarinen borrowed from his father universalist Theosophical and Transcendental ideas regarding the source of individual spirituality as found in the connection of the human soul with an underlying power suffused throughout nature, and the resulting chapel offered a distinctively organic, nature-expressive space designed to foster contemplation and spiritual reflection and thus connect with this power.  

Eliel Saarinen was one of several architects and artists of his generation who were interested in Theosophy and Transcendentalism. His knowledge of Theosophy derived from connections to artists and architects in Europe, particularly the work of architect/writer/mystic Rudolf Steiner, founder of Anthroposophy. Steiner’s work, along with the earlier writings of Theosophist founder Helene Blavatsky, were widely admired by European artists and architects.  Several founding members of the famed Bauhaus (1919-1933) design institution in Germany were members of the Theosophical Society. Eliel traveled frequently in Europe during the interwar years, and in his capacity as the head of the Cranbook Academy of Art outside of Detroit, an institution nicknamed the Bauhaus of America, he had abundant opportunity to engage with architects and artists working within Theosophical frames.  

Transcendentalism and its abiding interest in the natural environment, also informed the work of several American architects of Eliel’s generation, including  renowned Chicago architect Louis Sullivan and a young Frank Lloyd Wright, who initially worked for Sullivan as a draftsman. Wright studied Transcendental writing and came to advocate for “organic”  architecture that fit comfortably into the natural landscape and used natural forms and materials to enhance the human/nature relationship. Wright visited Cranbrook regularly, developing a long-term friendship with Eliel, and their mutual love of nature very likely included discussion of Transcendental ideas. 

Eliel advanced elements of both of these esoteric perspectives in his theoretical writings and architectural designs.  For instance, his book, Search for Form: A Fundamental Approach to Art (Reinhold 1948), alludes to themes and uses language adopted from Blavatsky and Steiner. He also designed two religious buildings that used form and lighting to reference nature and thus model a new architectural form of “spirituality”: an unrealized design for a chapel at Stephen’s College in Columbia, Missouri, dated 1947, and Christ Church Lutheran in Minneapolis, completed in 1949.  

This paper will briefly survey Eliel’s Theosophical and Transcendental work, and then turn to its influence on Eero and his design for the MIT chapel as he took over the project upon Eliel’s death just before the contracts were finalized. The paper will demonstrate how he deployed Eliel’s thoughts on the universal human/nature relationship to emphasize the “spiritual” character of the chapel and thus succeeded in creating a space welcoming to many religious groups.   

The Saarinens’ work contributed to the redefining of the term “spiritual” as a personal experiential aspect of religion, a process that was slowly gaining traction in the 1950s. Eero’s MIT Chapel and Eliel’s Christ Church Lutheran became iconic as congregations across the U.S. erected buildings emulating their features and thus normalizing the universalist aesthetic of nature-based spirituality embedded in them. By the 1970s, as “spirituality” was being reenvisioned in many domains (literature, music, film, etc.), the architectural profession along with many religious leaders widely adopted the language of “spirituality” to describe religious buildings (supplanting previous emphases on “beauty”), further reifying the nature/spiritual relationship in religious architecture. Thus, this paper, in providing material evidence of the integration of esoteric ideas about a universally shared nature-based spirituality into the American religious landscape, demonstrates the efficacy of religious architecture as a methodological starting point for studying esoteric religion and spirituality.