Thoughts on Gothic, Part 1

(Note: This is something I wrote for a book project several years ago. I ran across it in my files and thought it worthy of a reprint, with a few modifications. Also, see this previous post taken from my unpublished devotional using encounters with Gothic cathedrals as an allegory for life.)

Among the few remaining cultural glories of the Age of Christendom are medieval Gothic cathedrals. Having had the opportunity over the years to visit dozens of cathedrals all over the globe, I recall those magnificent structures, with their spires, windows, statues and gargoyles, and have concluded that a Gothic cathedral is a vivid expression of resisting the tyranny of the urgent. Towering above the city skylines, cathedrals are a testament to the slow, deliberate, long-range thinking of the medieval mind. Built with painstaking precision and incredibly complex detail, their edifices rose at a painstakingly protracted pace, generation after generation.

Standing almost a thousand year after they began to appear, it is safe to say that they are the antithesis to our fast-food, disposable culture – they took forever to build, and when finished, they were impossible to get rid of. Because of the awful physics of the project, the cathedral builders had to be equally mindful of both the means and the end. Any shortcut would eventually have catastrophic consequences, possibly costing many lives and undoing hundreds of years of work. Patience and safety were the order every single day.

But there is more than the mechanics and science of it all. There is the psychology of cathedral-building. Every successful cathedral project, including the modern-day Gothic revival churches, required astonishing leadership ability. It took remarkable people skills to build ongoing support in a community to initiate and sustain a project that the original participants, their children, their children’s children, and several generations after that would never see to completion. The organizer of the project, whether it was a bishop, an abbot, or an architect, had to be spiritual leader, project manager, financier, cheerleader, and intergenerational visionary all rolled up into one. They had to make such a dramatic impact in their time to propel the project into the future with such a force that successive generations would pick up the ball and run. The cathedral-builders had to not only cast a vision, they had to literally build the foundations for it. The talent, time and resources necessary for building a cathedral meant that many who tried, failed.

Motivating these leaders was a worldview that wanted to proclaim an inspiring vision of God and an understanding of man’s role in the universe. They wanted to display eternal truths, beauty and art. They sought to make a powerful statement about their ideas and understanding of human existence. These medieval visionaries believed that these radical buildings were symbolic representations of an ordered reality. Furthermore, the cathedral-builders intended their work to be a monumental protest against the prevalent ideas of that time.

The appearance of the cathedrals was a revolt against the Romanesque style that dominated Europe. Rather than being places to display art, such as mosaics and tapestries, the cathedral itself was the art. It was also a massive insubordinate statement of the metaphysical views of the day. The high, upward thrust of the walls was intended to defy gravity, allowing the worshipper to transcend earthly existence to heavenly reality. The walls of glass represented the power of the spiritual world to penetrate the material. Light, seen as absolute truth, was not intended to shine on objects to merely illuminate them; instead, the light of truth would penetrate the walls of our hearts from all directions, to transform and change it. The truth was not subject to our judgments of how it was to shine in our lives; rather, it passed through us regardless and leaves its reflection in a multitude of colors.

As Jean Gimpel notes in his book, The Cathedral Builders, more stone was quarried in France during the 13th Century for cathedrals than for all the pyramid-building at Giza. The architecture of the cathedral, much like the enormity of the pyramids or the extravagant grandeur of Versailles, was intended as propaganda. But the cathedral-builders contradicted the spirit of the Egyptian pharaohs and the French Sun King, because they were marketing, not the vanity and brilliance of man, but the glory of God and His perfect and proportionate attributes reflected in the created order. And they determined to fashion the building with God’s own materials – stone and light.

The medieval visionaries wanted to put our lives in perspective to the divine. Anyone who has walked into Notre Dame de Paris, Cologne, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s, or the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. understands that they are entering sacred space. They created a clear-cut distinction between our everyday lives and entering into eternity. Cathedrals are a backhanded statement about our mortality. We all have a beginning and an end, with the tombs and crypts of previous generations in the cathedral itself serving as an unmistakable witness to that fact. The world we live in is bigger than any of us. But there is a role for us in the eternal order of things if we would only look up and realize our place and come to terms with the purpose of our lives. It is an experience only comparable to viewing the staggering geography of the Grand Canyon; or gazing at the supreme heights of the Rocky Mountains; or watching the powerful shaping energy of the waves of the Pacific Ocean. That was the intent – to take your breath away and to place you into eternal perspective.

Cathedrals are also a profound statement about the medievalist view of the future. And at best, the project would take a lifetime to complete (Salisbury Cathedral being one of the few completed within one lifetime). The more ambitious the program, the further it extended plans into the future and grew more distant from the planners themselves. The commitment and time frames involved are unparalleled in the field of human endeavors. Thus, it required tremendous assurances in the ability to train and pass off the project to their progeny. In glaring contrast to our era of just-in-time delivery, the construction of a cathedral took incredible foresight and dedication on the planners and builders. As the German poet, Heinrich Heine, noted: “In the Middle Ages, they had convictions, whereas we moderns today only have opinions; and it takes more than opinions to build a Gothic cathedral.”

The Gothic cathedral is an excellent allegory for leadership. At the very beginning, you must have a plan. Failing to develop a strategy inevitably leads to little being accomplished. Then you need solid foundations sufficient to bear the weight of the building. If you are not grounded in your first principles, what you are attempting to build will begin to sink and become unstable. And as the walls grew higher, there had to be buttresses to support the downward pressures that would otherwise crush the structure. Remove the supports of family, friends and faith from a leader, and the gravity of circumstances will merely do its job and bring things crashing down.

And finally, you need time. Any attempt to rush the project of your life is flirting with disaster. If you want to build something that will really last, you can’t be constantly consumed with the here-and-now. As a leader, you must always have an eye on the future while simultaneously working in the present. You have to be both visionary and strategist. You have to know where you are going and how you intend to get there. And you have to take the time to find suitable ground to do your work. Anything less will mean that you will end your life with a pile of rubble. But getting the mixture right will mean that you have an incredible legacy that will serve as an example for future generations.