The Gothic style presents an interesting case of how the Middle Ages have persisted in Western history through the backward glances, sometimes leery, sometimes wistful, of subsequent periods. First arising in the seventeenth century as a derogatory term for the anti-classical, "barbarous" style adopted by European cathedral builders beginning in the twelfth century, the word "Gothic" became attached in the eighteenth century to a type of sensational narrative set in infelicitous buildings. During the Gothic revivals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Gothic architecture shed its morbid associations and was admired both for its aesthetic form and for the integral relationship of that form to a theological vision. Symbolizing, as Arthur Symons wrote in 1899, "the very soul of the Middle Ages," the Gothic cathedral came to epitomize the medieval impulse toward synthesis in theology as well as the arts. Indeed, St. Thomas Aquinas' colossal reconstruction of Christian theology on Aristotelian principles in the Summa Theological—architectural in its form and ambition—mirrored the synthesis between faith and reason, transcendence and empiricism, at work in the Gothic style. Although the concept of synthesis was a commonplace of medieval thought— evident in Dante's Commedia as in summas and cathedrals—it became the mission of latter-day interpreters to detect oblique unities among these distinct medieval enterprises.
This essay will trace a path through four texts from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries that define a relationship between medieval Gothic architecture and Scholastic theology: John Ruskin's essay "The Nature of Gothic" in The Stones of Venice (1851-53); Henry Adams' Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904); Wilhelm Worringer's Form in Gothic (Formprobleme der Gothic, 1911); and Erwin Panofsky's Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951).1 In these widely read works, influential beyond the field of art history, the seemingly arcane analogy between the Gothic and the Scholastic becomes a proving ground for the projects of prominent intellectuals within distinct historical and cultural contexts. For each author, the meaning of the Gothic hangs in a particular balance between its tracery—that is, its naturalistic ornamental detail—and its architectural structure: the balance between the concrete and the abstract, between multiplicity and unity, that is also achieved in Scholastic theology. Because their analogies between the Gothic and the Scholastic isolate distinct lines of force within these complex systems, these writers each identify different values there, revealing as much about the modern mind as about the medieval. The syntheses that their medieval forbears accomplished collectively in service of faith, these interpreters seek independently in service of their own cultural identity, aesthetic values, or intellectual coherence.
John Ruskin's essay "The Nature of Gothic" is the most eloquent expression of the English Gothic revival, even as Barry and Pugin's Houses of Parliament (1840-60) are its most iconic. In order to clarify the transition between Venetian Byzantine and Gothic forms, Ruskin posits an idealized Gothic style that is recognizably Northern, unfettered by the Arab influences that colored its flowering in Venice beginning in the thirteenth century. He identifies six "characteristic or moral elements" in Gothic architecture, in order of importance: Savageness, Changefulness, Naturalism, Grotesqueness, Rigidity, and Redundancy, corresponding with six characteristics of Gothic builders: Savageness or Rudeness, Love of Change, Love of Nature, Disturbed Imagination, Obstinacy, and Generosity (141). For Ruskin the Gothic is not only an architectural style but a Northern cast of mind shared by his Anglo-Saxon audience, to whose "Gothic spirit" he appeals (139). This spirit takes the external form of "Foliated Architecture, which uses the pointed arch for the roof proper, and the gable for the roof-mask" (204; italics original). Ruskin associates the gable with the savageness of Northern weather it being the best roof for casting off snow and rain while the pointed arch is a function of Changefulness because, unlike the rounded arch, it is open to endless formal variation. Foliation, the architectural "adaptation of the forms of leafage" (200), is the feature that expresses the greatest breadth of Gothic spirit: Naturalism, of course, as well as the Savageness and Changefulness (variety) of the wilderness. Foliation also embodies Rigidity, which Ruskin defines as "the peculiar energy which gives tension to movement, and stiffness to resistance" (186). In "Gothic vaults and traceries," he writes, "there is a stiffness analogous to that of the bones of a limb, or fibers of a tree; an elastic tension and communication of force from part to part, and also a studious expression of this throughout every visible line of the building" (186). "Gothic ornament," he observes, "stands out in prickly independence,... here starting up into a monster, there germinating into a blossom; anon knitting itself into a branch, alternately thorny, bossy, and bristly, or writhed into every form of nervous entanglement" (186). Redundancy is, finally, also a characteristic of foliation, which accumulates until "the cathedral front [is] at last lost in the tapestry of its traceries, like a rock among the thickets and herbage of spring" (190).
Ruskin locates the religious meaning of Gothic architecture not in its vertical aspiration but in its foliated detail. In contrast to ancient Greek architecture, where standardized ornamentation evinces the subservience of worker to master designer, Gothic architecture expresses the imaginations of individual, rough-and-ready artisans. "It is, perhaps, the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture," he writes, "that they thus receive the results of the labor of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfection, and betraying that imperfection in every touch, indulgently raise up a stately and unaccusable whole" (146). Here Ruskin identifies the Christian principle that every soul is at once imperfect and uniquely valuable, "tending, in the end, to God's greater glory" (146). Although Ruskin does not mention him explicitly, this analysis certainly rests on Aquinas' belief that the variety and imperfection of creation glorifies God. Aquinas writes in the Summa Contra Gentiles:
Since every created substance must fall short of the perfection of divine goodness, in order that the likeness of divine goodness might be more perfectly communicated to things, it was necessary for there to be a diversity of things, so that what could not be perfectly represented by one thing might be, in more perfect fashion, represented by a variety of things in different ways.
For Ruskin, the Gothic cathedral dramatizes this fundamental Scholastic operation, from which he moves to a condemnation of copying and exact finish in English manufacturing, to the aesthetic claim that "the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art" (156; italics original). Thus Ruskin appeals to the Northern identity of his English readers ultimately to upbraid them for abandoning their ancestral aesthetic and social values.
Henry Adams, in his Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, expressed the sentiments of the American Gothic revival as passionately as Ruskin did the English. The grandson and great-grandson of Presidents John Quincy Adams and John Adams, and an authority on both American and medieval history, Henry Adams was uniquely situated to explain medieval culture to American readers. Writing after 1900 as an informed observer of breakthroughs in physics and engineering, Adams shifts attention away from Gothic fretwork and toward its mechanistic superstructure. For him, the cathedral is more the product of master architects than naive craftsmen. His book culminates in an extended analogy, point for point, between the vertical lines of the Gothic cathedral and Aquinas' account of the free will's ascent toward God. In Aquinas' Church Intellectual, the vaulting is the tour de force:
He swept away the horizontal lines altogether, leaving them barely as a part of the decoration. The whole weight of his arches fell as in the latest Gothic, where the eye sees nothing to break the sheer spring of the nervures [ribs of the groined vault], from the rosette on the keystone a hundred feet above, down to the church-floor. In Thomas's creation nothing intervened between God and his world; secondary causes become ornaments; only two forces, God and Man, stood in the church. (Adams, Mont Saint Michel 334)
The stability of this structure depended on Aquinas' success, through "architectural obstinacy," in establishing man as "an energy independent of God" (343, 345), first by asserting that "souls were not created before bodies" (337); and second, by teasing out a concept of free will within a universe generated in a single "instantaneous act, for all time" (336). Man's free will, Aquinas argues, is a reflex action of God's original free act of creation. And grace, defined by Aquinas as "a motion which the Prime Motor, as a supernatural cause, produces in the soul, perfecting free will" (qtd. in Adams, Mont Saint Michel 352), becomes in Adams' more mechanistic gloss, "a reserved energy, which comes to aid and reinforce the normal energy of the [human] battery" (352). Turning to the Gothic cathedral, he analogizes the reserved energy of grace to the apparently effortless rising of the fleches of Chartres and Laon:
The square foundation-tower, the expression of God's power in act,—his Creation,—rose to the level of the church fa?ade as a part of the normal unity of God's energy; and then, suddenly, without show of effort, without break, without logical violence, became a many-sided, voluntary, vanishing human soul.... (356)
Adams compares the Summa Theological to Beauvais, the tallest Gothic cathedral, as "excessively modern, scientific, and technical, marking the extreme points reached by Europe on the lines of scholastic science." The "despotic central idea" of both is "that of organic unity ... in the thought and the building" (356-57).
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, Adams' paean to "Thirteenth-Century Unity," must be understood in the context of his subsequent autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (1907), which he called "a Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity" (Education 435). For Adams, the doctrine of unity is what distinguishes the medieval period from the modern, when science and art abandoned unity for "complexity, multiplicity, variety, and even contradiction" (Mont Saint Michel 357). However, he finds continuity between the modern and medieval periods in their confrontations with overwhelming power. Describing a visit to the 1900 Paris Exposition in the Education, Adams famously pairs the electric dynamo, on the one hand, and the Virgin and the Cross, on the other, as symbols of infinity exerting comparable "attractions on thought" (383). The emotional tone of his Gothic cathedral is therefore colored by a modern anxiety about its fragility as well as an attraction to its familiar power. Adams expresses this ambivalence best when he describes the ribs of the groined vault, the nervures:
Of all the elaborate symbolism which has been suggested for the gothic Cathedral, the most vital and most perfect may be that the slender nervure, the springing motion of the broken arch, the leap downwards of the flying buttress,—the visible effort to throw off a visible strain, never let us forget that Faith alone supports it, and that, if Faith fails, Heaven is lost. (359)
Nervures and flying buttresses are the nervous byproducts of divine grace, conducting anxiety into the earth as the spire rises effortlessly toward the sky. The Gothic cathedral, Adams concludes, is "the cry of human suffering" (359).
In Form in Gothic, the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer compares the Gothic and the Scholastic by striking a middle course between Ruskin's focus on ornament and Adams' on structure. For Worringer, "[t]he Gothic cathedral is the most powerful and comprehensive presentation of mediaeval feeling" because it unites the "organically sensuous" and the "abstractly mechanical" (163). This unity is achieved subtly through the communication between the distinct energies of the cathedral's interior and exterior. Inside, sensuous ornamental details achieve a super-sensuous, abstract energy through their combined upward motion. Outside, these vertical forces attain freer and more legible expression: unconstrained by the competing horizontal push toward the altar on the interior (a throwback to the basilica form), and assisted by flying buttresses, the upward thrust shoots untrammeled into the towers. For Worringer, "the Gothic will to form" is characterized by "exalted hysteria" for "strongly expressive activity" which, moving upward, "dematerializ[es] the body of the building" and transcends its stone substance (79, 156-57; italics original). Gothic architecture induces "intoxication of the senses" through "pathos of space," in contrast to the "sensuous clarification" of classical buildings (159; italics original). Worringer identifies the Gothic will with "Northern," Germanic man, in contrast to "Classical" man, whose "felicitous state of spiritual equilibrium" produces balanced, rational forms (33). His terms, contrasting Northern and Classical, are thus remarkably similar to Ruskin's, but he reaches almost opposite conclusions. While Ruskin traces particular Gothic ornament back to rude Northern craftsfolk, each unique, Worringer perceives there the undifferentiated abstract motion characterizing Northern tribes in general. Ruskin highlights the naturalism, peculiarity, and independence of ornaments, but Worringer surveys them abstractly.
Murphy / Nervous Tracery
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