The Mercy, logic, the model digitized, the glass, the music survives
[ by Charles Cameron — logic, the arts, and technology offer an Easter, resurrection corrective, philosophically speaking, to the ruin of the cathedral of Notre Dame ]
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For the terrible fire that consumed so much of Notre Dame de Paris this week, grief is great. Here, I wish to recall some of the ways in which the essence of the great cathedral has been saved.
Above, Piero della Francesca‘s Madonna della Misericordia. Our Lady of Mercy, for whom the cathedral was named, continues to shelter us all..
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Perhaps the most extraordinary, as well as the most abstract, form of Notre Dame to survive fire, war, and the French Revolutionary idea — to replace Mary with the goddess Reason enthroned in her place — is the logic embedded in the theology that accompanied its building and — lex orandi, lex credendi — the worship within it, for which purpose it was designed and built
The American philosopher CS Peirce was among the first to propose a kinship between Gothic architecture and the logic of the Paris schoolmen:
Art felt the spirit of a new age, and there could hardly be a greater change than from the highly ornate round-arched architecture of the twelfth century to the comparatively simple Gothic of the thirteenth. Indeed, if any one wishes to know what a scholastic commentary is like, and what the tone of thought in it is, he has only to contemplate a Gothic cathedral. The first quality of either is a religious devotion, truly heroic. One feels that the men who did these works did really believe in religion as we believe in nothing. We cannot easily understand how Thomas Aquinas can speculate so much on the nature of angels, and whether ten thousand of them could dance on a needle’s point. But it was simply because he held them for real. If they are real, why are they not more interesting than the bewildering varieties of insects which naturalists study; or why should the orbits of double stars attract more attention than spiritual intelligences?
Erwin Panofsky‘s work, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, is the central presentation of the parallels. Pierre Bourdieu, who translated Panofsky into French, characterizes the work:
The parallelism between the development of Gothic art and the development of scholastic thought in the period between about 1130–1140 and about 1270 cannot be brought out unless one “brackets off phenomenal appearances” and seeks the hidden analogies between the principles of logical organization of Scholasticism and the principles of construction of Gothic architecture. This methodological choice is dictated by the intention of establishing more than a vague “parallelism” or discontinuous, fragmentary “influences”. Renouncing the semblances of proof which satisfy intuitionists or the reassuring but reductive circumstantial proofs which delight positivists, Panofsky is led to identify the historical convergence which provides the object of his research with a hidden principle, a habitus or “habit-forming force”.
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Rachel Donadio, Witnessing the Fall of Notre-Dame for the Atlantic, depicts the ruin of the cathedral with incredulityn–
How could Notre-Dame be burning? How could Notre-Dame, which had survived for eight centuries—survived plague and wars of religion, survived the French Revolution, survived the Nazis—be falling? Notre-Dame, the heart of Paris, not only a Catholic site but the preeminent symbol of European cultural consciousness, the heart of France, the kilometer zero from which all its farthest villages are measured—how could this majestic structure collapse so fast
— Oh, ruin, from the Latin ruere, meaning to fall.. John Milton, Paradise Lost:
Hell saw
Heaven ruining from Heaven, and would have fled
Affrighted
Viollet-le-Duc‘s 19th century spire, in this archaic sense of the word, ruined.
Resurrection:
The competition is already afoot to rebuild it.
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Fortunately, a few years back the entire structure was mapped with ferocious accuracy by Vassar professor Andrew Tallon, using advanced laser photography to capture detail — wear and tear included, to an accuracy of a tenth of an inch:
Vassar College/AFP Photo / Andrew TALLON
Alexis Madrigal, in the Atlantic:
Now, with the building having sustained untold but very substantial damage, the data that Tallon and Blaer created could be an invaluable aid to whoever is charged with rebuilding the structure. Ochsendorf described the data as “essential for capturing [the structure] as built geometry.” (He added, however, that the cathedral, no matter what happens now, “is irreplaceable, of course.”)
Tallon and Blaer’s laser data consist of 1 billion data points, structured as “point clouds,” which software can render into images of the three-dimensional space. Stitch them together, inside and out, map the photographs onto the precise 3-D models, and you have a full digital re-creation of incredible detail and resolution.
Professor Tallon died less than six months ago, in November 2018, age 49. If you’re looking for another Easter parallel, Tallon may be metaphysically resurrected with the promised rebuilding of the cathedral he so loved and diligently studied.
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It appears that the great Rosace Nord (north rose window) survived the fire —
As Incunabula commented:
By far the greatest blessing – a miracle – is that the Rosace Nord has survived. The South and West windows were very extensively restored in the 18th and 19th century, but the North Rose Window has stood basically unchanged for 800 years, the glass is the 13th century original.
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To close with a blaze..
In January of this year, Olivier Latry, titular organist of Notre Dame, made what is very likely the final recordings of music on the cathedral’s great organ, for a recording which was released in March, just weeks before the terrible fire. The organ, as built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll in the nineteenth century, houses some 8,000 pipes; it seems the fire has left it largely intact, though with damage to its electrical systems and wind-chest.
Olivier Latry plays Johann Sebastian Bach‘s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565 on the Cavaillé-Coll organ of Notre-Dame de Paris::
April 22nd, 2019 at 10:01 pm
Whoa, whoa, whoa!
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From Charles Pierce:
Compare any Romanesque church (say that at Fontevraud, Eleanor of Acquitaine’s abbey) with a Gothic church like Notre Dame. The modifiers in that quote (highly ornate, comparatively simple) should be reversed.
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I agree that Gothic architecture can be seen as scholasticism embodied – elaborate, largely useless, fussy.
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I would argue that the great expense and labor requirement of Gothic architecture was a feature that the Church wanted after the heresies of the late 12th and early 13th centuries, in addition to overwhelming parishoners and illustrating to them that their place was to be very humble indeed.
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It’s a viewpoint not held by many, but you might find “The Living Theatre of Medieval Art,” by Henry Kraus, useful in laying out this argument.
April 23rd, 2019 at 5:57 pm
Hi Cheryl:
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I think CS Peirce’s contribution — just a couple of sentences, really — was to make the imaginative leap between the logic of the schools and the architecture of cathedrals — perhaps comparable to the leap Ada Lovelace made between the Jacquard loom and Babbage’s engine?
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As to the detailing vs simplicity of Romanesque vs Gothic, it has been decades since I was in any Gothic cathedral (apart from the very recent National Cathedral in DC), but I recall an austere loftiness to Soissons, and the Cistercians would doubtless have been less inclined to detail than, say, the Benedictines, each according to their respective spiritualities.
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It sounds as though I should definitely take a look at the Kraus book you mention, and I wish I still had access to my (beloved and well worn) paperback of Panofsky, to see what he actually manages to say about the comparison.
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Eleanor of Aquitaine — now there’s a name to conjure with!