The Geometry of Love, by Margaret Visser

The Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery and Meaning in an Ordinary Church. By Margaret Visser. North Point Press, 323 pp., $27.00.

Margaret Visser's remarkable book is something to savor and reread. At first glance, it seems simply a guide for serious visitors to the ancient Roman church of St. Agnes Outside the Walls, which has been open to worshipers for 1,350 years. But as René Girard observes, her visit "is the experience that all of us tourists dream about and never achieve." Visser expertly uses the knowledge made available by modern methods of historical research but transfigures it, "bringing tourism back to its lost origins in Christian pilgrimage."

Visser's training as a professor of classics and an anthropologist of everyday things--her two previous books explored the importance of dinner and its rituals--make her an ideal tutor. Like the Henry Adams of Mont St. Michel and Chartres, she never talks down to the reader. After walking us through St. Agnes from narthex to apse and altar, she takes us down to the silver casket in the catacomb into which the church was built, a casket that holds the remains of Agnes, the young martyr buried there in 305. At every step she explains terms without pedantry, and describes the materials, functions and multiple meanings of each object she encounters. Yet, despite Visser's descriptive skills, the publisher must be faulted for failing to include pictures of the church.