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The Cathedral Code
by Janet Brennan
FATE :: December 2006

Don’t you love the feeling you get when you go to the movies? Sitting quietly in a dark place; leaving your thoughts and cares behind as you are transported to another era, maybe even another world; sharing a silent camaraderie with the other audience members —it’s a magical experience.

Movie theaters have been a part of our culture for a hundred years. But if we go back in time almost 1,000 years, we’d findhundreds of places where people were having that same otherworldly experience: in Europe’s Gothic cathedrals. Stepping away from the chaos of the city into a place that’s dark, cool, quiet, perfumed with incense, and spangled with colored light, the peasant must have felt he had entered Paradise.

 Since the dawn of time people have gathered together to worship a deity, and even in prehistoric times they constructed elegant temples for that purpose. But many people feel temple-building reached its peak of perfection in the 12th and 13th centuries, when Christian mysticism combined with pagan memories and architectural innovations to produce soaring monuments that still stun us with their beauty and residual spiritual power.

During the first thousand years of Christianity, the larger churches were generally built in Romanesque style. Their high domes and colorful frescoes and mosaics dazzle the eye, but their squat, sturdy frames, massive and utilitarian, are uninspiring. Church style would change in the next millennium, thanks—ironically—to war. During the first half of the 12th century, European Crusaders got a first-hand look at Islamic architecture, with its pointed arches and intricate decorations. The Crusaders, most notably those great church-builders the Knights Templar, brought this new style back home, along with mystical symbolism of the Jewish Kabbalah and Muslim Koran. The pointed arch, combined with new architectural developments like the ribbed vault and flying buttress, enabled the construction of churches that were much taller and more slender than was previously possible, and that allowed for vast expanses of windows. Thus Gothic architecture was born.

In France, home of the founders of the Knights Templar, all the major churches built after 1150 were Gothic, and the style quickly spread throughout Europe and the British Isles. It became the West’s quintessential religious architecture, and remains so today.

The reason for its enduring popularity is twofold: The architecture creates a vast interior space that is beautiful, but more importantly, the combination of physical beauty and symbolic elements speaks to the soul. For medieval people the church was more than a building; it was quite literally the dwelling place of God. It incorporated the spirit of God because every aspect of the structure carried a spiritual meaning. And in the Middle Ages, there was no difference between the symbolic and the real; people recognized the sacred reality that lies within physical reality. The divine presence lives in nature, in space and in light, and the cathedrals brought these elements together in such a magnificent way that even today modern man, so cut off from his own divine nature, can still feel them.

Unfortunately, while we can feel the building’s spiritual power, in many cases we no longer understand it. The cathedrals are often referred to as “sermons in stone,” because their sculptures and window-pictures were used to illustrate Bible stories for illiterate peasants who could not read the Bible themselves. But now it is we who are the illiterates, for we have lost the knowledge of symbols that was known and understood by everyone when the churches were built. So we visit the cathedrals as tourists and wander around in a daze, gawking without understanding what it is we are looking it, having the feeling that there’s something hidden beneath the surface, but not knowing what it is ...

Read the rest of this article in the December 2006 issue of FATE

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