Notre Dame or the language of tradition

By Mirta Balea


The devastating fire in the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris caused a wave of twits on aid for reconstruction, which politically correct lovers have begun to criticize because there is a lot of famine in the world and nobody seems to care.And they are right. In comparison with campaigns in favor of aid for children, refugees or Third World nations, which sometimes do not collect everything necessary to alleviate misfortunes, we are faced with a global response and multi-million dollar donations for the reconstruction of the emblematic building.

I think it will not be just for appearing on the front pages of newspapers and magazines or for the public treasury to take them into account, but that they have thought about the impressive work of art that humanity would definitely lose. There are other important ones also in French territory such as Chartres. It seems to me that the immediate response is based in the simbolism within the tradition, present in the majority of such sanctuaries built during the Middle Ages as if responding to a call. 

The very name of cathedral as church-residence of the bishop was decisively imposed between the XII and XIII centuries, period in which the most beautiful and majestic were built. The phenomenon - if we refer to history - appears linked to major changes at that time in Western Europe, among the most important, the demographic explosion, the development of commercial exchanges and the growing diffusion of culture by the increasing domination strong urban centers.

If the feudal economy had been characterized as closed to the outside, the cities were open to trade. So it seems to many that the cathedral is the symbol of the world citizen above the great abbeys, until then provided with huge agricultural land, isolated monasteries living in the autarky to which libraries gave the first of spiritual life , cultural and artistic. They copied and preserved ancient manuscripts, read by only a few privileged.

The difference between the current use of a cathedral and the historical one is that in the past they were meeting places, both for the people and for the arts and crafts corporations, where wheat, cattle, and textiles were sold. everyone's house, the center of public activity. The proverbs sculpted in the stone, the representation of the seasonal cycle of the months, acted as oral teaching. Today they continue to gather people, but only for the official liturgy

I must admit that I am not a mere speaker on the subject of the fire. Actually my goal is to talk about what is not visible, but for me essential, which is tradition as a compendium of principles and laws, a work of civilization, whose language is the symbol. So that we understand each other. Any piece of real knowledge that we have in Western civilization derives from tradition. To cling to it is to return to the deepest roots of our humanity.

The medieval European cathedrals point to the settlement of Gothic architecture and the importance in this of the Trappist priests of the Cistercian Order. They decided not to undo what was inherited from Romanesque, the first architectural form clearly Christian and European with stone as the main material. From the aforementioned urban development, a civil architecture is created, which makes the plastic arts independent. The religious continuity we see it in the same plant of the churches of cruciform character with head in the apse, oriented to the east, and the timeless concept of the own work.

The majority of medieval cathedrals merge and succeed the centuries, knowing their builders and architects that they would not see the work finished, nor perhaps their own children or grandchildren. Here we see the audacity of initiating a technical challenge - and economic, too - that has not been planned how to finish. One of the most tragic moments for Notre-Dame was the damage caused to the mole during the French Revolution.

The radical restorations began after the historic event, fusing centuries of tradition, which served to modify and add other parts such as the needle of the dome, devoured by the recent fire, along with the dome and, according to witnesses, made a deafening noise when it fell . Bear in mind that the cathedral is not only an architectural science of the Ancients and the Moderns, it is also a place of protection, of rest, its profile is that of a mountain, with its peaks represented in the bell towers and the needles, as symbols chosen by man because of his relationship with the sacred.

The portico would be the entrance to that cavern or natural grotto used by primitive man as a sanctuary. Archaeologists define the cathedral as a prehistoric place of worship. The ancients protected them with fearsome figures, monsters, as they appear in Romanesque and Gothic art. Entering this type of sanctuary is like doing it in a danger zone if we are guided by the perception of tribal civilizations, although it is the symbol of the heavenly city as well as the initiatory hut, archetypes of great influence on men. The passage of time adapted them to the new Christian message, away from the symbolism of the mountain and the cave.

There is a will in humans to always reproduce what is present in nature and thus the sacred places are associated with forests, rocks, caves and mountains. For Mayassis, an architect who dedicated his life to the study of origins, the cult of the tree and the stone have the same importance and synchronicity in terms of the appearance of symbolism in the Paleolithic. With the development of construction, the notion of symbol was lost and the style has prevailed over the meaning of what is being built.

The masons who built the cathedrals were illiterate, using a different mode of communication. They dominated the system of forms, proportions and figures necessary for the projection of their works, they were the heirs of a heritage of exact and specific knowledge arrived from a distant time, a source of exceptional learning. If we think about the rupture that took place with the sacred from the humanism of the fifteenth century, we can understand the symbolic value of architecture in the Middle Ages as the union of nature and human intervention. In miniatures dated in the Middle Ages, one can see God as a geometer supplied with the tools needed to design the world. Hence Simons' claim that Master Mason or Adam Magister felt that he imitated the divine Master in his work. The obvious conclusion is that geometry was at this time a way of spiritual edification. The Gothic word is object of diverse interpretations from very old. I will choose that of Fulcanelli, who saw a derivation of the slang of the masons, which acquires meaning in the French language with the fusion of the terms art and gothic and the sonority derived from argotique. This secret language of the builders of the cathedrals was used to prevent access to the knowledge of the uninitiated. We would then find a complex history of knowledge, transmitted only to those capable of understanding its deeper meaning. We could not aspire to know something of the Gothic without knowing that the style began to develop with the push that gave the Cistercian Order (one of the most important of the Middle Ages) the abbot Bernardo de Clairveaux. Descendant of the Celts, he paid more attention to nature than to the study of the sacred books. In his title of Doctor Mellifluus or teacher in the art of the word, the doctor of the Church was added. He was a predominant figure of the time, with the strength and authority necessary to prevail over the bishops and the Pope, he often intervened in councils and witnessed the schisms that tore the Church at that time, preached the crusades and fought against heretics He also created the Order of the Temple, which he endowed with his own Rule.

The space occupied by the cathedral, chosen by its builders with extreme care, is one of the most important elements in its symbolism. The apse represents the sky or East and not only the direction of the rising sun, it is the place where the Son of God was manifested for Christians. The cathedrals, however, look to the southeast because for a European the birth of Jesus goes in this direction. In the cathedrals, direction prevails as a qualitative element of space, because it also has a physical influence and intrinsic energies.

With the waves of form, which endow the building with its own life, geometry acts on nature and people. This phenomenon has to do with natural magnetism, present in some places, hence the importance of properly choosing the area to build a cathedral. This wave is projected onto the individual and can affect him or her positively or negatively or not at all, depending on the case. Such monuments were built precisely to influence us as a civilizing work of the initiates, who managed to preserve knowledge through the use of coded signals.
The artisans were periodically in cities and monasteries in times of devastation and absolute ruin and each teacher, then master freemason, established his own journey. Due to the freedom of the traveler, people started talking about free Masons or Freemasons. Modern masonry is attributed to the medieval heritage, but with a less operational form; does not use initiation formulas or build buildings. Nor is it likely that the secrets of medieval masons are better kept. The passage from the square to the circle, known as the quadrature of the circle, obsessing without results to specialists and mathematicians, appears as the most important issue to solve a techno-geometric enigma and achieve a personal illumination that allows to enter the real knowledge of the laws of the cosmos. It is said that the Egyptians knew well the squaring of the circle and hid the secret in the pyramids, and Leonardo da Vinci did the same in the man of Vitruvius.

The secret is still there and it is millennium, nobody has made public the way to solve it because in the age of the cathedrals art for art was unknown, it was only the symbol that was important and should be utilitarian and active. It was Charpentier who said that in the Cathedral of Chartres the great mathematical problem was solved, but there are those who argued that a system of measures of the French period was simply used as the Pie de Rey and the toesa to elaborate the Labyrinth.

The master builder constructs with all the rules and secret measures, works on the matter with the principles of geometry, producing waves of forms, and as a Mason he transforms himself. The cathedrals were all built at the same time and for this they had to have a lot of money, collected in donations from citizens and gentlemen, but it was not enough and here the Templars entered, that if they wanted cathedrals they would do it, as a historian has said .

The use of the Latin cross in the Gothic cathedrals provides the faithful with a route that connects the entrance with the apse, where the main altar is, contrary to the Greek cross used by the Byzantines in their constructions. The facade is the synthesized vision of the meaning of the temple with a vertical axis recognizable as if it were a mountain. The dome on which a cross is erected forms a triangle, as the union between heaven and earth. The dome is the center of the world in the encounter of the ship and the cruise. The simultaneous presence of apse and dome in the vision of the builders allows communication with the divine in all possible ways: God descends to man by the altar in the apse and man goes up to God by the oculus of the dome or solar door . During the recent fire of Notre-Dame, the fall of the needle on the dome resounded with deafening force, according to the witnesses, and this is the huge hole, which from a bird's eye view, is exposed as a reminder of the misfortune that occurred on the building . In Gothic constructions, the narthex or portico becomes the axis itself, the pillar of heaven, symbol of Jacob's ladder, the center of the nave, guarded by monstrous creatures, treasurers of the caverns in medieval legends and crowned by the tower in the steeple of the bell tower. And as in Gothic art more attention is given to the progression in degrees and the naves are covered with the vault, in general ogival, the ribs are the reminiscence of the end of the route.

Charpentier wrote: Primitive Christianity and then Byzantine and Romanesque built on the ground the resonance box, the original cavern, using the dome and the semicircular vault ... static, heavy, without tension, without any vibratory property. This led the Benedictine abbots to give music the earthly action, the Gregorian chant was born ... The difference between the Romanesque and the Gothic lies in the shape of the arches and the vaults and in the high windows and their glasswork, which The eyes of those masons, heirs of an ancestral knowledge, were the inner space of the divine.

The light passes between the stained glass windows, which represent with vivid color images of saints and prophets, symbols or illustrations of sacred history. Abbot Bernardo wanted to provide his visitors with the beauty and attractiveness that Benedictine monasteries lacked in order to attract the faithful to that divine work. The Holy Chapel of Notre-Dame was a jeweler of light and color on the sides of the transept. The cathedral also represented in the Middle Ages the place where a simple man felt that his rights were respected, he was given asylum and medical care, while outside he was trampled on.

It has been said that Gothic is a phenomenon of levitation, an art that exposes itself. The vaults do not weigh on the walls due to their vertical projection, they have less thickness and are the keys so that the structure does not sink, and thanks to the flying buttresses the weight is canceled. The upward momentum is in keeping with the profound charm of the mysticism of the 12th and 13th centuries and all this will be lost if Notre-Dame is not rebuilt.