The Silent Witness Of Europe’s Medieval Past

By JAMES MONTI

“The men of Nineveh will arise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it” (Matt. 12:41). Our Lord’s haunting words to the people of first-century Israel were by no means meant for them alone; these words echo across the centuries as a challenge to every age of unbelief, and most especially, it would certainly seem, to our own.
But it will not only be the men of Nineveh to condemn our time. Our generation will also be answerable to the medieval citizens of Chartres, Reims, Amiens, Paris, York, Canterbury, and Salisbury. For at the preaching of Christ they built from stone imperishable monuments of faith, Gothic cathedrals, still standing centuries later amid a modern wasteland of unbelief.
As our secular culture turns its back in scornful silence to God, these “very stones” cry out, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!” (Luke 19:38, 40).
Described as the “skyscrapers” of their age, Gothic cathedrals were the tallest, loftiest structures on the landscape of medieval Europe. Visible from afar, they were a constant reminder even to those working in the fields miles away of man’s eternal destiny, standing as a veritable “Jacob’s Ladder” in the midst of everyday life. Even today, for a traveler approaching the destination of Chartres, the city’s great cathedral seems to rise like a vision over the farmland of the French countryside.
And such churches were built to inspire awe. An architectural wonder like the Sainte Chapelle of Paris, erected by a saint, King Louis IX of France, overwhelms the senses of those who behold it.
A contemporary of England’s King Henry I recounts that when during the consecration of the newly completed choir of Canterbury Cathedral in 1130, the monarch beheld it for the first time, shimmering with lights, as all the church bells pealed and the antiphon was sung, “Awesome is this place” (Terribilis est locus iste), he exclaimed with astonishment that it was awesome indeed (Annals of Osney, AD 1130, in H.R. Luard, editor, Annales Monastici, volume 4, London, Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1869, p. 19).
Cathedrals were built first and foremost for the purpose of celebrating the sacred liturgy, a fact largely lost upon modern man. The famed twentieth-century scholar of medieval liturgy Msgr. Michel Andrieu observed:
“Many have written, and learnedly, upon the architecture of our cathedrals and our old churches, but rarely has it been asked what took place in the interior of these edifices, and why our ancestors had built at such great expense. [The cathedral] has been considered only a frame of stone, as if, having in itself its reason to be, it was always a simple void” (Msgr. Michel Andrieu, editor, Les Ordines Romani du Haut Moyen Age, volume 2, Louvain, “Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense” Administration, 1948, p. xii).
The lavish splendor of these churches echoes the lavish splendor of the liturgical rites for which they were built. The walls, vaults, and windows mirror what took place within their confines centuries ago. For the Gothic cathedral is first and foremost an expression of what the Holy Mass is to us as Catholics — the most important action, the supreme event, that takes place on the face of the Earth each day.
Even though the setting for most Masses is within the far more modest setting of a parish church, the cathedral stands as a sort of exemplum, a Temple of Solomon, a heavenly Jerusalem on Earth par excellence.
The work of an artist, an architect, or a musician can become a genuine form of prayer, as was so often the case with those who designed and built the Gothic cathedrals. An abbot’s firsthand account of what went on during the twelfth-century construction of Chartres illustrates this well:
“Who has heard tell, in times past, that powerful princes of the world, that men brought up in honour and in wealth, that nobles, men and women, have bent their proud and haughty necks to the harness of carts, and that, like beasts of burden, they have dragged to the abode of Christ these wagons. . .? But while they draw these burdens, there is one thing admirable to observe; it is that often when a thousand persons and more are attached to the chariots, — so great is the difficulty, — yet they march in such silence that not a murmur is heard….
“When they halt on the road, nothing is heard but the confession of sins, and pure and suppliant prayer to God to obtain pardon” (quoted in Henry Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1913, p. 104).
While it is well known that Gothic cathedrals were indeed intended to represent the Heavenly City of Jerusalem, and evoked as well the memory of the Temple of Solomon as a forerunner to the Celestial City, what is seldom realized is that even the architectural “technology” of these churches, the practical methodology of their design, was intended as an expression of faith. The geometric forms, order, and proportionality of Gothic cathedral architecture were consciously intended to mirror the harmony of “the things that are above” (Col. 3:1). The historian Otto von Simson explains:
“True beauty, according to Augustine, is anchored in metaphysical reality. Visible and audible harmonies are actually intimations of that ultimate harmony which the blessed will enjoy in the world to come…the contemplation of such harmonies can actually lead the soul to the experience of God….” (Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 24).
Parenthetically, this association of order and form with beauty and the glories of Heaven provides a lesson as well as to why the celebration of the sacred liturgy needs to be governed by well-ordered rubrics. For a liturgy celebrated with careful precision in words and actions testifies far more to the eternal realities than the formless disorder of any improvised, spontaneous, “come as you are, say what you want, leave as you wish” liturgy.
In Gothic cathedral architecture there is a particularly close and harmonious cohesion between form and function. Thus the structures necessary to its architectural soundness, its pointed arches and ribbed vaults, its soaring piers and flying buttresses, are at one and the same time supremely aesthetic, eminently capable of wordlessly embodying and communicating man’s most sublime aspirations.
Medieval man believed that in structuring churches according to the laws of geometry he was imitating the structure of the physical universe as fashioned by God, who was seen as the supreme architect. It was believed that by building in this manner the physical stability of the universe could be imparted to the manmade cathedral.
And judging from the amazing degree of structural integrity and longevity that these cathedrals have shown across a span of up to eight centuries when compared to the crumbling infrastructure of twentieth-century construction, it certainly looks like our forefathers succeeded.
Gothic cathedrals are likewise wonders of unparalleled luminosity. The significance and symbolism of light in Christianity is so axiomatic that it scarcely needs an explanation. What Gothic architecture uniquely achieved in this regard was to push the envelope of stonework engineering to its outermost limits to inundate the sanctuary with a stunning spectrum of transfigured, colored light.

The Story Of Salvation

At a general audience in 2009, Pope Benedict XVI offered a superlative tribute to what Gothic cathedral architecture achieved:
“Gothic cathedrals show a synthesis of faith and art harmoniously expressed in the fascinating universal language of beauty which still elicits wonder today. By the introduction of vaults with pointed arches supported by robust pillars, it was possible to increase their height considerably. The upward thrust was intended as an invitation to prayer and at the same time was itself a prayer.
“Thus the Gothic cathedral intended to express in its architectural lines the soul’s longing for God. . . . A cascade of light poured through the stained-glass upon the faithful to tell them the story of salvation and to involve them in this story” (Pope Benedict XVI, general audience, November 18, 2009 — © Libreria Editrice Vaticana — online text).
From the architecture of the early Christian basilicas to that of the Romanesque churches, which in turn gave way to the advent of the Gothic cathedrals, with the latter succeeded in due course by the splendors of Baroque architecture, there is a harmonious progression, a truly organic development. By contrast, much of what passes for “contemporary” church architecture constitutes a renunciation of all that preceded it, an angry and arrogant rejection of light, height, and glory.
It conveys instead a message of alienation — alienation from God, alienation from the splendors of God’s creation, and, despite a lot of blather about creating and celebrating a heightened sense of “community,” alienation from one’s fellowman, for it is a blatant repudiation of beauty. Many of our modern churches are built like windowless mausoleums where the bright sunlight and fresh air of God’s creation are shut out as if they were unwanted intruders.
But Gothic cathedrals stand ready to speak to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, imparted with a matchless beauty given to them long ago by men of faith. The good or evil that a man does in his life has ramifications well beyond his own life.
The holy life of a saint, often a largely hidden one, ultimately becomes a source of inspiration to Catholics, and to non-Catholics an invitation to conversion, for centuries afterward, leading countless others across the vast expanse of time toward the Heavenly Jerusalem.
So too, these massive medieval churches built for the glory of God, these “Creeds in stone,” built stone upon stone by men whose names are largely known only to God, have endured as lasting testaments to their faith, ever summoning the soul of man to climb toward Heaven.