Houses

Pacifica’s Houses are named after the Four Evangelists–Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John–the chief witnesses through time and space of the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord. The four gospels and the person to whom they testify have fundamentally altered the world’s history, and their civilizational impact on the West is incalculable. From art to architecture, hospitals to human rights, the transformative message of the gospels has become the decisive inspiration for the very best of Western Culture. Yet too often, even in Christian institutions, the focus often drifts from the centrality of the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Christ. If we are honest, the graeco-roman political, artistic, and philosophical traditions often carry with them a greater sense of sophistication and import: we more readily turn to Athens than Jerusalem to advertise our educational bona fides. In fact, it has always been thus. In his Confessions, Augustine describes his embarrassment at reading the gospels because they seemed in his youth to be more barbaric and lowly in their language, metaphysics, and narrative shape than the philosophical theories of Plato or the literature of Vergil. Augustine confesses this to his later shame, as a sign of his immaturity, and yet Christian educational institutions often rehearse this bias, perhaps without meaning to. Pacifica desires to challenge this by re-centering our focus and imagination on the Four Evangelists–their words, their witness, and the King and Savior to whom they point all of humanity. The ground of all truth, beauty, and goodness is Jesus Christ as he has been revealed to us in the scriptures, especially through the testimonies of St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke, and St. John. 

The Four Evangelists infused the imagination and artistic expression of the Christian West from the earliest days in the catacombs beneath Rome, to the illuminated manuscripts at Lindisfarne, to the architecture of the great cathedrals of medieval Europe, to the paintings of the renaissance. Pacifica seeks to re-engage and reimagine this rich symbolic system and history of Christian art and architecture by using the traditional creatures and symbols associated with each of the four evangelists–the winged man for St. Matthew’s gospel, the lion for St. Mark’s gospel, the ox for St. Luke’s gospel, and the eagle for St. John’s gospel. Often the four gospels are represented in a single image called the tetramorph, with wings wrapping around each creature, on some occasions with an icon of Christ at the center.