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Nervous Tracery: Modern Analogies Between Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism

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Nervous Tracery: Modern Analogies Between Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 33.1 March 2007: 75-85 Nervous Tracery: Modern Analogies between Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism Joseph C. Murphy Fu Jen Catholic University Abstract During the Gothic revivals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Gothic architecture shed the morbid associations attached to it in earlier periods and was admired for the aesthetic and theological vision that shaped its medieval development. The Gothic cathedral came to epitomize the wholeness of the Middle Ages and an impulse toward synthesis in theology as well as the arts. This essay surveys four Gothic revival texts 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 Gotik, 1911); and Erwin Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951). 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 larger structure: the balance between the concrete and the abstract, between multiplicity and unity, also achieved in Scholastic theology. Because their analogies between the Gothic and the Scholastic isolate distinct lines of force within these complex systems, Ruskin, Adams, Worringer, and Panofsky 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. Keywords Gothic architecture, Scholasticism, John Ruskin, Henry Adams, Wilhelm Worringer, Erwin Panofsky, Thomas Aquinas 76 Concentric 33.1 March 2007 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 Theologica—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 Gotik, 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 1 An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Seventh Annual Fu Jen Medieval Conference: The Human Person and Nature in Medieval Literature, Fu Jen Catholic University, April 22, 2006. Murphy 77 Nervous Tracery 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 Redundance, corre- sponding with six characteristics of Gothic builders: Savageness or Rudeness, Love of Change, Love of Nature, Disturbed Imagination, Obstinacy, and Generosity (141).2 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 fibres 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). Redundance 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). 2 Kirchhoff’s trenchant gloss of these elements (53-57) has assisted my summary here. 78 Concentric 33.1 March 2007 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. “[I]t is, perhaps, the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture,” he writes, “that they thus receive the results of the labour 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: [S]ince 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. (66) 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
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