The Gift of a Bigger Picture -Gothic Art and St. John the Divine
For my first Christmas blog post, it seemed good to write about the design and experience of church architecture. The Cathedral of St. John the Divine is a high point of this building style and New York churches. Wishing a Merry Christmas is a light hearted season’s greeting that has an enormous counterpart of celebration found in the form of Gothic cathedrals. They embody sacred art, which is something that defines humanity, and this time of year is a reminder of how the divine is expressed in physical building.
I loved learning about Gothic Cathedrals in graduate school- the way light combined with stone to form these incredible structures, and mathematics turned into enormous, unfolding spaces. As fascinating as it was to learn about them, it was clear that these buildings were meant to be experienced in person. On paper, the cathedral is theory, in photography, it is strange angles and distorted views of a place too large to fit into a camera. Studying from heavy books and projected images was limiting for a building that was created to house sacred objects and experiences. We were fortunate to have St. John the Divine in New York City, so we could see a physical example of this kind of grand cathedral, after the classes.
St. John the Divine is a stunning place where massive stones are whispering that they can fly hundreds of feet in the air in the form of arches. Visitors are dwarfed under a sky of ribbed vaults. It is located in a fairly congested area of New York City, with wide streets that have noise and busyness from city traffic. Stepping into the cathedral from the city’s chaos is a welcome into a shaded, velvet silence of the enormous space. Moments after adjusting to this abrupt change, one becomes aware of distant lights. Windows hover high above in the dark interior. Flecks of light fall through stained glass like snowflakes drifting down throughout the vast space. Instead of white crystals, the lights are gems of pure color, landing on surfaces throughout the interior.
Beacause of it’s size, much of this construction is only partially visible at one time, and what is seen is much more than the original materials. This includes geometry and mathematical relationships. The sections of a vault or numbers of segments and crossings in a naive, the parts that form the whole in a rosette window hint at the brilliance of number relationships. The building houses a timeless, peaceful silence that transforms into a giant voice of powerful sound moving within its own time, when music is played here. Colors move in slow dances, gliding over stone and telling of an outer light entering through the stained glass. Stone that originated in the earth rises from beneath visitors’ feet into a misty space that is high enough to be a midpoint between the heavens and the top of our heads.
The step by step movement toward the altar in this enormous naive is like being a particle drifting toward a final destination. The Cathedral of St. John the Divine is built in two main styles, Romanesque and Gothic. They show the change in style from heavy the mass of Romanesque to light, open space of Gothic. Walking the ambulatory and visiting the side chapels is a view of styles spidering off a central point of the main altar.
The opportunity to have the experience of a cathedral like the great cathedrals of Europe here in New York is a gift from people who began this project 120 years ago. The incredible knowledge of building spaces like these is also a gift from people who lived hundreds of years ago. Time is bridged by this kind of activity. The builders and creators of these spaces are in direct contact with the people experiencing them. The continuity of this traditional art and architecture shows a view of art history that is tied to the earliest forms of art made by humans. It is a view that is also too large to fit into textbooks and classrooms. It is how artmaking is used in different ways throughout our history to open to larger realities.
Important insights from traditions that make art on deeper levels come from people trained in these traditions. My art history textbooks give many details on physical characteristics of Gothic cathedrals, but fall short on the non-physical aspects of the cathedrals. The non-physical aspects are the drivers of the great innovation and achievements of this building activity, and so we are missing important components of the gift of these cathedrals without better understanding of the world, theory, and teaching of the creators. I have enjoyed information related to this period from sites where religious traditions can speak for themselves and also from specialists that bring deeper insight to the material. Reading on subjects, like Neoplatonism can be done to understand scholarship in the Medieval world. There are useful sources for insight that are lighter than deep scholarship. These are some things I’ve found-
Some information I’ve enjoyed from Christians on Christian art of the period are from when I was researching icons:
Icons from the University of Dayton
https://udayton.edu/imri/mary/i/icons.php
Icons of the Mother of God
https://www.oca.org/saints/icons-mother-of-god
OrthodoxWiki
https://orthodoxwiki.org/Main_Page
The video series from Kahn Academy always has good mini lectures in art history:
Birth of the Gothic: Abbot Suger and the ambulatory at St. Denis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EciWH-1ya4
Amiens Cathedral
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsHYPNYmJCs
Sainte-Chapelle, Paris
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vigjJih8Pn4
Architecture: Visiting The Cathedral of St. John the Divine https://www.stjohndivine.org/uploads/pages/Architecture.Visit_.pdf
These lectures from Christopher Page at Gresham College have wonderful insight into the Midieval religious world:
Medieval Music: The Stations of the Breath - Professor Christopher Page
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORd3Behh-lI
Medieval Music: The Mystery of Women - Professor Christopher Page
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WECtyL3SzPE
Medieval Music: Chant as Cure and Miracle - Professor Christopher Page
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj3q8jDqB9o
I planned to write about the Cathedral of St. John the Divine for Christmas a long time before this holiday season. I delayed writing about it until I had a clear mind and time to write, which was pretty late at night several nights ago. The next day, I saw the very sad news about the shooting at the doors of this Cathedral. My heart goes out to the people who were there to see a Christmas concert and the officers that had to shoot this person, who was overwhelmed by his own suffering. I truly wish I did not have to end this blog post with this story, but to leave it out would be an injustice to the event and the people involved.
What I can offer from my own limited understanding about this terrible event is my first thought after hearing about it. I was very sorry that the many resources in the city that could have prevented this did not reach this person. One way forward is to remember there are resources on many levels-social, psychological, spiritual, that do prevent these tragic events. New York City is a center where great things come together, including things that are sustaining
