The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (26 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

BOOK: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides)
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The monks retained a healthy respect for hierarchy and law. Imagine what it might be like to build an economic hot spot where nothing but black firs and mosquitoes had been,
without
a clear and effective chain of command. At the same time, they inherited the Christian revelation that Christ came for all men, not only for the rulers. Their model of hierarchy and equality, or equality expressed by obedience and Christ-like service, exerted a powerful influence upon the villages that grew up around the monasteries, and then upon medieval life generally. For Christ Himself was obedient, even unto death upon a cross, and therefore, says Paul, every knee shall bend to Him, in heaven, on earth, and under the earth. So despite wickedness and selfishness, which we will always have with us, the people of the Middle Ages knew that the soul of a peasant was no less worth saving than was the soul of a duke. That meant that, as harsh as serfdom could be, the continent could never quite slide back into slavery. The irrepressible movement in the Middle Ages is towards freedom.
 
Then, around 1000, the weather warmed up,
1
and the Vikings began to settle down to civilized life. What happened afterwards does not disappoint.
 
Ruggedly alive
 
We probably wouldn’t enjoy living in a medieval town. We’d have animals everywhere, chickens, pigs, goats, dogs, cows, and all that they eat, and all that what they eat becomes. Not until the nineteenth century did Europeans build sewer systems to match those of ancient Rome. People were crowded within the town walls, many of them living in houses with packed earth floors, and rushes laid upon them to catch droppings from the table and from other places. People ate with their fingers, though the food was saucy and spicy. Chaucer gently satirizes his Prioress in
The Canterbury Tales
by praising her daintiness at table: she never let the grease fall on her lap. If you caught a disease, you couldn’t expect much from a medieval physician, particularly in northern Europe. People lost most of their teeth (from eating a lot of starchy food; meat was for the rich, and for holidays), so you might find them chewing licorice before a tryst to hide their bad breath, as Chaucer’s Absolom does in “The Miller’s Tale.”
 
 
 
A Medieval Feminist
 
Had all the world no other authority,
 
Experience is quite enough for me
 
To speak of all the woe that marriage brings. (“The Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” 1–3)
 
 
The Wife of Bath has sure had that experience. She’s been widowed five times, driving at least four of her beloved husbands to their graves. Her garrulous prologue and tale are racy flings of ignorance, misinterpretation, excuse-making, and unwitting self-revelation. Feminist critics hail her as a heroine for woman’s expressive freedom. Chaucer shows us otherwise: the Wife of Bath is a loud, sexy, silly woman who is rapidly reaching the age when she’ll have to go begging to find anyone to warm the bed with her. And unless she repents of her ways, she may one day get more heat than she’s bargained for.
 
 
But one thing it was impossible to be, if the art of the time is any indication: you couldn’t be lonely. Granted, it’s hard to base an argument upon an omission, but the lack of any mention of loneliness in medieval literature really is striking. You were busy. You worked alongside your fellow villagers. You slept three or four in a bed. You might belong to a guild. You stood alongside everyone else as you crowded the church for celebration.
 
Your life was also not drab. For the first time since the heyday of the Roman empire, people of the West, if they were not as poor as church-mice, enjoyed bright clothing, spices from the East, sweet wine from the Mediterranean (Chaucer’s Pardoner is a connoisseur of the heady port wines from Spain), not to mention music and dancing and folk poetry ranging from the delicate and genteel to the coarse and randy. So we have songs of awakening love in the springtime, for the Lord of Easter:
 
When I see the blossoms spring,
 
And I hear the small birds sing,
 
A sweet love-longing
 
Pierces all my heart.
 
 
 
And we have merry peddlers eyeing the girls and crowing up their finest jewels: I have a pocket for the nonce,
 
 
And in it are two precious stones:
 
Damsel, if you had tried them once,
 
You’d be right ready to go with me!
2
 
We would shy away from the Middle Ages not because of its drabness, but because its vitality would fray our weak nerves. We’d have to rub our eyes to get used to the light.
 
The Bright Ages: Life in the cathedrals
 
Where shall we look first for this light? Why not in those stone symphonies, the Gothic cathedrals?
 
Let’s be clear about this. The men of the Middle Ages did not build their cathedrals to be squat, dark, ghoulish structures manifesting their fear and ignorance. We have to scrub from the church walls the smoke of the later Industrial Revolution, and from our minds the smoke of Victorian Draculas. Nor had they progressed as far as modern man, who aspires to work in a steel cage or a cardboard box. No, the medieval master builders wanted light, because their faith taught them to want it, for “the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not” (Jn. 1:5).
 
That association of divinity with light was as old as Genesis. The first creature God made was not mud, not a habitation for himself, not a consort to rut with, but
light.
Christ, too, in John’s gospel, is called the light that comes into the world, and his disciples are to let their light shine before men. The Church fathers, taking their cue from Scripture and from Plato, saw light as the noblest thing in creation: not simply the brilliant light of sun and moon and stars, but the light of the intellect, whose first and final dwelling place is the mind of God. The contemplative Syriac monk who called himself Dionysius (naming himself after the man Saint Paul had converted on the Athenian mount) developed a grand theology of light, and the thinkers and the artists of the Middle Ages paid heed.
3
 
One man who took it to heart was a powerful abbot in Paris, named Suger. He wanted to help unite the squabbling dukedoms of France under the authority of the anointed king; and to that end he would build a chapel worthy of the patron saint of France, Saint Denis, or Saint Dionysius. What better way than to take the architectural innovations of the last two centuries—vaulted ceilings, pointed arches—and put them together to pour light into a sanctuary such as no one had seen before? That would fashion a gem for the king’s capital and would honor God—for “God is light” (1 Jn. 1:5).
 
They did not have reinforced steel then, or fiberglass, or super-light mixtures of concrete. The problem for Suger, and for builders generally over the next two or three centuries, was how to build high, span broad interior spaces, and remove stone from walls and replace it with glass, without having the roof cave in or the walls buckle.
 
Here we discover ingenious engineering solutions, both practical and beautiful. No doubt you’ve seen some of them. There are the flying buttresses, spindles of stone thrust out from the exterior walls like the spokes of a wheel, “nailed” in place by decorative caps of statuary. Or the rope-like interior ribs of marble, perfectly hewn, often alternating white and green or white and pink or white and gray, reaching up along pillars to the roof in slender curves, the blocks not mortared but set in place by the magic of balance and gravity. Or the lacework of stone tracery, setting off the windows stained in deep blue and red and green and gold—rose windows of mathematical complexity, a kaleidoscopic glance into paradise.
 
But more interesting than
how
these masons, carpenters, smiths, and glaziers built what I believe are the most splendid architectural works to grace the earth, is
why
they built them so. Let the Abbot speak for himself, in the verses he engraved upon the doors of Saint Denis:
 
All you who seek to honor these doors,
 
Marvel not at the gold and expense but at the craftsmanship of the work.
 
The noble work is bright, but, being nobly bright, the work Should brighten the minds, allowing them to travel through the lights
 
To the true light, where Christ is the true door.
 
The golden door defines how it is immanent in these things.
 
The dull mind rises to the truth through material things,
 
And is resurrected from its former submersion when the light is seen.
4
 
 
Here, from the pen of the man who more than any other deserves the honor of having invented the Gothic style, we find the medieval reveling in both the bright and beautiful things of the world, and the infinitely brighter and more beautiful things of heaven. The beauty of the world is not rejected but ordered towards the beauty of heaven. Deep calls unto deep, and light unto light.
 
That is the theological meaning of color: the one inaccessible light of God, made manifest, incarnate, in the objects of our sight. So the stained glass windows are meant to reveal a trace of that luminous feast in paradise. Here Dante describes it:
[Then] a new power of vision burst aflame—nor is there light too radiant and pristine for sight so strong. And I beheld a stream,
 
A river of flashing light that flowed between two shores the spring had touched with wondrous hues, dappled with glimmerings of a golden sheen.
 
And from that river living glints arose to settle on the banks with stippling blooms like rubies in a rounding ring of gold. (
Paradiso
30.58–66)
 
 
 
But these glories were confined to the church, yes? Or to precious manuscripts touched with indigo and emerald and scarlet? What of the common life of the people?
 
Forget that the church was the heart of that common life, and that the people dwelt in the shadow and the reflected gleam of these places of beauty. Neglect to imagine what it was to “own,” with the rest of your townsmen, a structure that pierced the skies with its grandeur, yet that also welcomed you in; and that stood an eloquent witness when you were born, when you married, when you had children, and when you died. What is still astonishing, what we find hard to fathom now, is that those common people were the ones
who built the churches.
We’re not talking about huge indistinguishable blocks of stone hauled up the side of a pyramid by sledge and slave to commemorate a dead pharaoh. We’re not talking even about the Athenian Parthenon, with master sculptors hammering at the pediment and frieze, while slaves haul the stone from the quarry and dress it.
 
We are talking about free men, troops of them moving from place to place, paid pretty well, masters of their crafts, with local laborers for the less skilled work. We don’t know the names of most of these, and that too is telling. For the work is not designed and mandated by potentates far away. It is true folk art, maybe the most muscular and bodacious folk art the world has known.
 
The whole of a Gothic cathedral, wrote John Ruskin, is scrawled over with the spirit of playfulness.
5
Maybe over here a gangly boy named Wat, not yet a master, chisels the leer of a dragon whose mouth will gush rainwater and keep the roof from leaking. Over there a carpenter works at a coffered wooden ceiling, gouging out for decoration—and for affirming the goodness of all God’s creatures—the flowers and animals of his native land. If he’s an Italian, look for lemons and pinecones. Back toward the sanctuary a priest may be asking the glaziers for a rose window in the east based on the number eight, since the eighth day is Easter, the day beyond all days, the day of resurrection. The townsfolk, who have contributed much to the building, will also gain from it. People will come to see the church, and people need food and drink and lodging. For the church is also an expression of town pride and love, and if it takes fifty or sixty years to build (or more) the people bequeath the project to their children. It is their great artistic and economic triumph.

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