Gothic Churches
One could not enter a Gothic church without experiencing a sort of shiver and a vague sense of the Divine. Suddenly, one would be transported back to those times when cenobites, after meditating in the woods of their monasteries, would come to prostrate themselves at the altar and sing the praises of the Lord in the calm and silence of the night. Ancient France seemed to come alive again: one could imagine those peculiar costumes, that people so different from what it is today; one would recall both the revolutions of this people, and their labours and arts. The more distant those times were from us, the more magical they seemed, the more they filled us with those thoughts that always culminate in a reflection on the futility of man and the fleetingness of life.
The Gothic order, amid its barbaric proportions, possesses a beauty all its own.
Forests were the first temples of the Divine, and men took from the forests their first idea of architecture. This art thus had to vary according to the climate. The Greeks fashioned the elegant Corinthian column with its leaf-covered capital after the model of the palm tree. The enormous pillars of the ancient Egyptian style represent the sycamore, the oriental fig tree, the banana tree, and most of the giant trees of Africa and Asia.
The forests of Gaul, in their turn, passed into the temples of our ancestors, and our oak woods thus retained their sacred origin. These vaults chiselled in foliage, these jambs that support the walls and abruptly end like broken trunks, the coolness of the vaults, the darkness of the sanctuary, the obscure wings, the secret passages, the lowered doors—all recall the labyrinths of the woods in the Gothic church, all make one feel the religious awe, the mysteries of the Divine. The two lofty towers planted at the entrance of the edifice rise above the elms and yews of the cemetery, creating a picturesque effect against the azure sky. At times, the rising sun illuminates their twin tops; at other times, they appear crowned with a cap of clouds or enlarged in a misty atmosphere. Even the birds seem deceived by them and adopt them as the trees of their forests: crows flutter around their summits and perch on their galleries. But suddenly, confused murmurs escape from the tops of these towers and scare away the frightened birds. The Christian architect, not content with building forests, wanted, so to speak, to imitate their murmurs, and by means of the organ and suspended bronze, he attached to the Gothic temple even the sounds of winds and thunder, which roll through the depths of the woods. The centuries, evoked by these sacred sounds, draw forth their ancient voice from within the bosom of the stones and sigh within the vast basilica: the sanctuary roars like the cave of the ancient Sibyl, and while the bronze bell swings with a crash above your head, the vaulted subterrains of death remain deeply silent beneath your feet.
* Reprinted from Selected Writings: François-René de Chateaubriand, Imperium Press, 2024, pp. 31-33
