By Tom Piatak (Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture)
The great Gothic cathedrals are, incontestably, the greatest buildings conceived and built by man. Indeed, it scarcely seems credible that they were built by men at all, considering when and how they were built. They began showing up in the 12th century. Their construction required the transport, refinement, and proper placement of huge pieces of stone and wood by a workforce that could not read or write and that defied death each day simply by using the best tools available, under the direction of the best master builders in the world. Danger and death accompanied construction work from the beginning.
But by using the pointed arch, ribbed vaulting, and the flying buttress, each of which he invented, medieval man was able to do what no one had done before or even thought could be done. He built walls of brightly colored glass reaching to the sky, filling, when conditions were right, edifices as large as any that had yet been built with torrents of sunlight tumbling through that intricately patterned glass, creating peerless interiors saturated with light and filled with gorgeously painted art of all kinds. This art, including the stained glass, conveyed the Truth with unmistakable clarity and authority. Anyone dismissing the era that created these marvels as “the Dark Ages” is a Know-Nothing, pure and simple.
A 13th century peasant, seeing Notre-Dame de Paris, Notre-Dame de Chartres, Sainte-Chappelle, or any similar Gothic church for the first time, can easily be forgiven if he wondered whether he had just stumbled into Heaven upon walking into one of these many Gothic marvels. A few years ago, my wife and I watched an Asian tourist gasp as she emerged from the drab lower story of Sainte-Chappelle and saw the wonders waiting for her in that exquisite upper story. Intellectually at least she knew what was waiting for her, but actually seeing the intended home of the Crown of Thorns took her breath away,
By contrast, nothing in the experience of that 13th century peasant could have prepared him for the magnificence of buildings whose walls bore light, not weight. His own world was one of muddy floors, roads, and fields; houses full of livestock and lit only by candles and fireplaces that produced as much smoke as light.
