"If we're talking about symbolism," says conservation engineer Chris Southgate, "Michael wouldn't just go to the catalogue; he's not that kind of guy." Not that kind of bishop, in fact, for Dr Michael Jackson, after four-and-a-half years as Dean of Cork, is to be consecrated in Armagh as Bishop of Clogher on March 6th.
Chris Southgate is talking about the Dean's episcopal ring, a gift from the Cork diocese, which is based on a design by William Burges, architect of St Fin Barre's Cathedral. The use of the design, by silversmith Julian Fretter, seems typical of Michael Jackson, a cleric who is uniquely inclined to interpret the links between the spiritual and temporal inheritance of the Church of Ireland.
The ring connects Burges, the epitome of the Victorian passion for Gothic revival, with St Finbarr, 7th-century originator of the cathedral and possibly of Cork itself. Their fusion is symbolised also by the Dean's choice of design for his pectoral cross, in which the earthed simplicity of bog oak is heightened with silver and gold to mark the points of the sacred passion, uniting the antique and the immediate in a symmetry of symbolism. It is as if the evangelist of Gougane Barra - believed to be Finbarr's first foundation in Co Cork - had ignited the imagination of Burges, whose last gift to the city was the golden angel on the roof of the cathedral, blowing not one but two flaring trumpets towards the east.
Working relationship
The potency of that angel and its trumpet-blast was given new force when, during renovations to the cathedral roof, the figure was re-installed by the hands of Dr Jackson and his Catholic colleague Bishop John Buckley, shakily aloft together on the scaffolding. There was nothing shaky, however, in the working relationship between these two men; in his sermon at the farewell choral evensong at the cathedral on February 3rd, Dean Jackson described Bishop Buckley as "Cork's own darling bishop", and as a man who had played a pivotal role in strengthening Jackson's conviction that active involvement in the total community of the diocese would be his own mission in Cork.
One aspect of that involvement was the reassertion of the cathedral itself as the signature of Cork's Christian history. Jackson insists that even the pursuit of wisdom and the practice of worship must have their component of fun, but there must have been few enough laughs in the campaign he launched for that reinstatement, St Fin Barre's Beyond 2000. This €6 million project is nothing less than the exposition of the history of the city and its people centred in the renewal of the cathedral buildings. Jackson was endorsed in the massive undertaking by the donation of €85,000 raised in a special collection organised by Bishop Buckley. As Pamilla Kelleher, campaign programme manager, describes it, the focus is on the reconciliation of memories at the site that still lies at the emotional heart of the city.
Pastoral work
Ordained priest in 1987, Michael Jackson served first at Zion Parish in Dublin. At the time of his appointment to Cork in 1997 he was the first chaplain in the history of Christ Church College, Oxford, to be elected to a fellowship by virtue of his pastoral work. A son of the rectory - his late father was Archdeacon R.S. Jackson of the Clogher diocese --his academic career is illuminated by star-bursts of awards, from his B.A. and M.A. at Trinity College Dublin to his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from St. John's College, Cambridge, with gold medals, firsts, and foundation scholarships punctuating his progress. It seemed appropriate that the diocesan and civic farewell to the Dean, his wife Dr Inez Jackson and their daughter Camilla took place at choral evensong: the sumptuous choral heritage of the cathedral sustained by organist and choirmaster Colin Nicholls is one of the enduring characteristics of St Fin Barre's, where Jackson re-introduced choral matins as part of the monthly liturgy.
Somehow, for all his theological authority, the new Bishop of Clogher has never lost his sense of the visionary moment. His scriptural resources are vivid and animated and were brought to the service of the events he organised at, for and under the auspices of the cathedral. "The middle ground," he said at his farewell evensong, "is frightened by the spiritual imagination, by colour and light, by the fantastical and the effervescent. . ."
Flowing with colour and light, St Fin Barre's Cathedral has no middle ground. William Burges - whose last visitors as he lay dying in London were Oscar Wilde and James MacNeill Whistler - loved the fantastical. Although it was not until 1863 that he obtained his first major commission - nothing less than the first cathedral to be built in the British Isles since Wren worked on St Paul's in London - he has been described, with Pugin, as the greatest art-architect of the Gothic Revival.
"A Gothic dream"
As his costs in Cork rose to £100,000, Burges was lucky that the man controlling the diocese was Bishop John Gregg, an energetic preacher who stirred the parishes and their merchant nobility to unprecedented generosity. As J. Mordaunt Crook puts it, ( in William Burges and the High Victorian Dream, 1981) Burges offered Cork "a Gothic dream, a fully-fledged 13-century French cathedral complete with aisles, towers, spires and sculpture." That dream, exemplified in Burges, enshrined medievalism as an instrument of salvation: the bear, the angels, the eagle of the lectern, the towers, the pictures netted in mosaic floors were all intended to teach us how to be good.
Pugin, says Mordaunt Crook, "conceived that dream, but never lived to see it; Rossetti and Burne-Jones painted it; Tennyson sang its glories; Ruskin and Morris formulated its philosophy; but only Burges built it." And he built it in Cork, to such effect that the new Bishop of Clogher carries Burges, as well as St Finbarr, with him as part of the symbolic legacy of the city which he has enriched with his ministry.