Catholicpunk / A (Semi) Final Draft (#6)
Chapter Two / A Medieval State of Mind
I’ve already published much of Chapter Two, which concerns itself with the medieval state of mind that has — quite uninvited — catapulted itself into our world as if launched from a trebuchet out of time. You can read other portions of the chapter here, here, here, here, here, and here.
What I’m including below is pretty fun and interesting stuff about the radicalism of Thomas Aquinas and the relationship between Catholic natural law and gothic architecture.
What I’m leaving out for now is some of the more technical philosophical stuff about hylomorphism, which concerns the relationships between the forms and substances of the world.
My imperative for this book contract is to keep it all “family friendly.” Not in the sense that I avoid sex. To the contrary. But in the sense that I avoid abstractions and overly academic analysis to the extent possible. Which is of course difficult for me to do. But I do understand it’s a conversation-killer.
The final thing I’ll say is that I’ve been struggling myself to find the proper form for my own substance — probably for myself personally, but certainly for this book.
We have the recent ascendance of Pope Bob. We also have the general histrionics surrounding the plague of Catholics suddenly busying themselves with our lives “Plague of Catholics” is the term comparable to how we label other collectives, such as “gaggle, skein, or wedge of geese” and “murder of crows". The term is of course also faithful to the disease-ridden medieval origins of the Church, with an emphasis on the dis-ease we all feel today.
And all of a sudden, everyone and their mother is publishing books and articles about right-wing Catholics. Which is a good thing. The more, the merrier. But also a bit anxiety-inducing. As in, my own moment in the sun may have passed before it’s even arrived.
And so I am working to differentiate myself and my ideas — in terms honoring both Warren Buffett and my medieval instincts, to build a protective moat around the castle.
In practice, I am thinking more about my understanding of “what it all means” in terms of the sort of mental edifice I want to construct to manage the story form my book will take. And what’s in my mind at the moment is a gothic cathedral.
Heads up: This is pretty long (about 3,000 words), but like I said, I think a fun read.
The Radicalism of Thomas Aquinas
Medieval scholastics liked chains of causation and the one they probably liked best is this one.
Rationality => Morality => Common Good => Flourishing
This stepped path tells us that through reason we can identify and act in accordance with moral truths and rules of conduct that promote the common good. The common good is that which enables humans to flourish, which means realizing their full capacities for knowledge, experience, growth, and development.
This straightforward notion assumes individual agency and free will, that our rational faculties allow us to surface moral foundations of action from observations of our nature as humans that are self-evident, eternal and (mostly) absolute.
In other words, we are not merely creatures of instinct and desire. We have a meta-capacity (a God-like capacity) to observe ourselves and hold ourselves to standards that exist outside of ourselves. And we can assume that those among us who do not agree with or at least struggle to align their behavior with these truths have made conscious decisions to rebel against God’s order and to work against the common good.
Human (or positive) law represents the specific voice the Natural Law within particular communities, establishing both standards and rules for action and the consequences that fall on those who refuse to conform to or obey these standards and rules. The positive law exists both to instruct and to discipline. Where the balance lies will depend.
But what happens when in this simple formula we substitute creativity for morality? What is the outcome – or end or purpose – of rationality in combination with creativity? Certainly not the common good. Let’s take another look at Catholic natural law moral philosophy. Then let’s try to complicate it.
Rationality => Imagination => Creativity => Transformation
The idea that humans are created in the image of God is of course the central premise of Catholic natural law. The primary focus of this philosophy, certainly in its Thomist forms, has been on human reason, a logical capacity, as a mirror of God. However, contemporary natural law philosophers such as Robby George at Princeton also have exalted the creative capacities of humans – the uses of their imaginations to transform the world – as a reflection of God’s creative power.
Within the framework of Catholic natural law, the common good is generally understood to be a fixed terminus or destination. We know ahead of time what our goals or ends are because God has already inscribed these destinies in our natures. In its purest form, the rationality-morality-common good-flourishing formula is backward-looking, referencing a creation moment that happened in the past, one authored by God, that forever establishes our natures as creatures, as passive products of God’s creative acts.
In this sense, fulfilling the imperatives of natural law understood in terms of morality – choosing good over evil – is a recursive formula, operating within a closed environment. If one accepts its premises, there is no escape from it.
By contrast, the outcome of rationality in combination with creativity is by definition not fixed. The entire purpose of this combination is to make or achieve something that has not been foreordained. Its purpose is transformation, which requires imagination. It aligns us with God, not merely as creatures, but as creators in our own right.
In its purest form, the rationality-imagination-creativity-transformation formula is forward-looking, referencing a creation yet to happen, one authored by humans, that never establishes our natures as creatures. It is by definition anti-foundational. It is an occursive formula (a meeting, striking together, clash, or collision, leading to emergent, unpredictable, generative, or disruptive outcomes), operating within an open environment. The only premises are those to which one refuses to be bound, catalyzing radical innovation and transformation.
Thomas Aquinas himself recognized and appreciated this duality and its ambiguities. Aquinas would never have regarded himself as a radical, but and one might argue that his notions of natural law are both fulfilled and subverted by what he concedes to the imagination and its creative powers, both in the substance of his own writings and in the significant historical impacts of the systematizing intellectual methodologies he adopted and refined. One might without exaggeration give credence to the idea that with the systematic framing of his ideas he helped to unleash a genie that launched the arc of western civilization.
In the 12th century, Abbot Suger of the abbey St. Denis outside Paris – a confidant of the French King Louis VII – transformed the history of medieval architecture with the revolutionary Gothic innovations he introduced to the abbey church of St. Denis. The Gothic – as idea, as style, as force – originated in the mind of Abbot Suger.
The renovation of the abbey church at St. Denis included pointed arches, ribbed vaults, and flying buttresses that allowed for taller building and larger windows, drawing the eye upward toward heaven. Stained glass windows brightened and illuminated interiors with celestial light. Patronage relationships with the French monarchy established enduring funding precedents for ambitious architectural visions. Through these innovations, Abbot Suger directly implicated the built environment and earthly powers in the progress of other-worldly spiritual missions.
Abbot Suger faced significant engineering obstacles at St. Denis. Greater heights produced heavier loads, requiring thicker walls and piers and structural designs such as flying buttresses that diverted weight. Planted on unstable marshy soil, the massive church required extra deep foundations. Builders needed to precisely cut stones and supports to remove risk of structural collapse. The peaks of the tall structure need to account for heavy winds. Large windows exposed the glazing to weathering, requiring constant maintenance.
Suger introduced various design, engineering, and technological innovations to address these challenges. He conceptualized and deduced the design as a coherent whole with interrelated parts. The renovations to the church conformed to a structural logic in which columns, vaults, and buttresses mutually reinforced and supported each other.
Suger assumed the role of architect rather than leaving design and engineering decisions to the master masons. Suger was also possibly the first architectural designer to make use of architectural plans to communicate his vision to builders. He created a builders lodge to establish continuity in construction and repairs. A modular design sensibility employed repetition of standardized geometric units to achieve visual harmony. The design was symbolically meaningful. The structure was the symbol.
The 12th-century church renovations at Abbey St. Denis were an extraordinary achievement. In this instance – a century before Thomas Aquinas postulated ideas about the relationship between reason, creativity, and morality – Abbot Suger harnessed his creative genius to both rational foundations and to moral aspirations. But to be clear, the relationship between these three elements was precarious and, even in this instance, fragile.
For reasons outlined above, creativity supercharged by rationality will invariably release energy that threatens the foundations of tradition and morality, within any religion and any culture. In his own time, Suger met enormous resistance from traditionalists within the Church – notably the founder of the Cistercian monastic order, Bernard of Clairvaux – who did not perceive what good of any sort, much less the common good, the ambitious renovations, the opulence and the vanity they communicated, would bring to fruition.
What Abbot Suger bequeathed to the Western world at St. Denis was perhaps the first instance of scaling complexity, a leap of the imagination that transformed how people thought about architecture, engineering, finance, politics, and religion. The relationship of creativity to morality in this process was almost incidental and, perhaps even for Abbot Suger, largely beside the point.
The outcome of rationality in combination with creativity is, by definition, not fixed. Nature itself – the known relationships between the forms and content of the created world – is not perdurable. In the history of the West, the advantage went to those able to combine rationality and creativity to develop scaling technologies and systems that undermined nature, that fractured the relationship between nature’s forms and its contents.
Gothic Architectures of Assumptions
In the 12th and 13th centuries, through the influence of theologians, canonists, decretalists, and monks, Catholic natural law – a systematic set of ideas about how humans should live within the world under the gaze of their God – extended its influence and shaped developments in nearly every aspect of medieval society, becoming part of the woodwork and stonework of daily life. Natural law abstractions became material.
The argument that ideas matter in history rests upon the reality of assumption architectures in every aspect of our lives (these are the “self-evident truths” to which Natural Law philosophers will often refer). The things we can assume without questioning are those that pervade our material and built realities. In his book, Before Church and State, the (medievally minded) medieval historian, Andrew Willard Jones refers to the architecture of assumptions that define an age as the “complete act”—the entire scope of existence in a particular place and at a specific moment in time—understood from within its confines.
Let’s then construct and then deconstruct the architecture of assumptions associated with the medieval Gothic aesthetic. The influence of Natural Law within medieval Gothic cathedral architecture and cathedral music was both formal and aspirational. The ascendant verticality of the Gothic style allowed humans to reach toward God. Here’s how the art historian William Fleming describes the significance of Gothic architecture.
The loftiest expression of the medieval period is seen in these miracles of soaring stone—the crystallized expressions of community effort , religious exaltation, and emotional and intellectual forces of the people who created them. Gothic architecture, moreover, is a struggling, striving, dynamic urge that reaches upward to embrace infinity. Though the building process often spanned several centuries, there are no finished Gothic cathedrals.
At the same time, as we’ll see, the Gothic aesthetic also illustrates Natural Law’s self-subverting instinct to bifurcate the world, to cleave it between light and dark, with darkness the representation of man’s alienation from himself and from God. In this narrative, which we experience in Gothic literature, the irrational downward pull of Nature around man opposes the upward arc of the rational nature within man.
The relationship between Gothic architecture and Gothic literature communicates the tensions between that which is exalted and pure and beautiful as against that which decays and putrefies and is hideous, between that which experiences grace and that which touches sin. It represents the present haunted by the past, the anchor of memory sinking our aspirations for the future.
Constructed over centuries to immortalize the powerful and the wealthy and to instruct, entrance, awe, and terrify the illiterate masses, the Gothic cathedral contains multitudes — a profusion of sculptures and statues, endless stories told in stained glass, pealing carillon bells, and winding crypts and catacombs.
Consider the painted and illuminated statuary in the portals at Amiens; the statue-columns of Old Testament figures and the remarkable details in the stained-glass at Chartres; the three-ton carillon bells at Notre Dame; and the menacing carved capital of a column in the Carolingian crypt at Saint-Denis.
Within the resplendence of a great Gothic cathedral, one enters and explores the maze of the medieval mind. There we experience how the Gothic aesthetic — embodying the Scholastic vision of Natural Law moral philosophy — surfaced, uplifted, and sustained the Christian faith and righteous zeal of medieval peasants, burgers, priests and lords.
At the same time, from all that soars and illuminates and resounds within the Gothic cathedral, we can also deduce all that remains hidden, suppressed, twisted, and half-formed. We encounter that other half of the Gothic aesthetic, that other half of the Natural Law, that which lies beneath.
Here is where we meet Quasimodo, the switched-at-birth, grotesquely deformed child abandoned on Quasimodo Sunday (the Sunday following Easter) in the Victor Hugo Gothic novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Let’s listen in to the chatter of those observing for the first time this chaliced, unnatural personification of those whom God has forgotten.
“I’m not learned in the matter of children,” resumed Agnes, “but it must be a sin to look at this one.”
“’Tis not a child, Agnes.” “’Tis an abortion of a monkey,” remarked Gauchère.
“This pretended foundling is a real monster of abomination,” resumed Jehanne.
“I imagine,” said Agnes la Herme, “that it is a beast, an animal— the fruit of— a Jew and a sow; something not Christian, in short, which ought to be thrown into the fire or into the water.”
Ecclesiastical Gothic inhabits the built world of the 13th century, literary Gothic the printed page of the 19th century. Victor Hugo himself writes ex tempore on this topic in Hunchback, telling us how “down to the time of Gutenberg, architecture is the principal writing, the universal writing.” Architecture is “thought making a mountain of itself.” And how the book, a mode of expression by comparison so timid and fragile, “is about to kill the edifice.”
It is no accident that Hugo sets Hunchback in 1483, some 60 years following the invention of the Gutenberg press. Printed pages since Gutenberg, in the age of mechanical reproduction, are to Hugo like flocks of birds, mingled with the air, “volatile, irresistible, indestructible.”
One can demolish a mass; bow can one extirpate ubiquity? If a flood comes, the mountains will have long disappeared beneath the waves, while the birds will still be flying about; and if a single ark floats on the surface of the cataclysm, they will alight upon it, will float with it, will be present with it at the ebbing of the waters; and the new world which emerges from this chaos will behold, on its awakening, the thought of the world which has been submerged soaring above it, winged and living.
What phenomenon is Victor Hugo identifying? The printed page releases emotions and passions that are controlled, managed, and stifled in stone, wood, and iron. Themes of Gothic literature are those of Gothic architecture inverted. In Gothic literature, the material realities of deformity, decay, death, and putrefaction shadow and ultimately overwhelm the aspirational dogmas of reason, transcendence, and enlightenment captured within the classical Gothic aesthetic of the High Middle Ages.
This may seem odd to us. The 18th-century Enlightenment itself was supposed to have been about the triumph of a different form of reason, a detached scientific sensibility. However, Victor Hugo — whose encyclopedic knowledge of the history of architecture suffuses Hunchback (and also Les Miserables) — tells us that the Gothic aesthetic of the High Middle Ages itself represented a bridge between “theocratic masonry” associated with Romanesque architecture, rigid with dogma, always about “the priest, never the man; everywhere caste, never the people,” and a “popular masonry” animated with ideals of “progress, originality, opulence, perpetual movement.”
One can argue that Natural Law itself — to the degree it philosophically informs and shapes the Gothic spirit — also serves in similar fashion as a bridge. Indeed, one cannot escape the affinities (and asperities) of the relationship between the reasons and the rationalities (and the rationalizations) that inform both medieval Natural Law and Enlightenment Laws of Nature.
But if theocratic masonry bends “all of forms of men and nature to the incomprehensible caprices of the symbol,” popular masonry itself liberates the “incomprehensible caprices” of the passions. The Gothic as an aesthetic of the printed page cannot escape probing and playing with the passions as ultimately a desperate dance with death that discloses ultimate doubts about the existence of any God — except perhaps a cruel and “capricious” God — and the hope of any life beyond the one we live in this moment.
The 1996 Disney animated film, Hunchback of Notre Dame, achieved renown — and fulfilled its literary gothic pedigree — as perhaps the first Disney movie to consort with the themes of love and lust for its young audiences. This delectation earned Hunchback the sobriquet Hunchback of Naughty Dame for its busty depiction of Esmeralda and the throbbing passions she inspires in pretty much every male in the story. This eruption of sex is of course de rigeur in literary Gothic — in the movie approaching the commonplace tropes of the bodice-ripper, but also confirming the genre’s mission to disclose the sexually confused and repressive instincts of Catholic dogma that pervade so much of traditional Church culture.