The Spire (1964) is a fascinating short novel in which William Golding examined the intersection of things about whose connections I have always wondered: cathedral building, medieval Christianity, insanity, and sexuality. The remarkable thing about the book is that Golding delved mercilessly into these connections without ever being disrespectful to Christianity. The story follows the inner thoughts of one man, Dean Jocelyn, as he struggles to add a 400-foot-tall spire to his cathedral. It is a mad thing to do, everyone tells him; but he saw the spire in a vision, and, as he says, when did God ever command us to do anything reasonable?
I have long been fascinated by the way the behavior of certain medieval saints appears holy from one angle but insane from others. I tried to write such a scene into
The Raven and the Crown, an anchoress whose life story can be read equally as the dawning of faith or the loss of her mind. I don't know that I succeeded, but anyway I understand the impulse that drove Golding to write this book. People say that he could see Sarum Cathedral (above) out the windows of the school where he taught for years, and he must have pondered what a crazy thing it was for people so poor in our terms to invest so much in those gigantic piles of stone.
Did it make any sense? Oh, one could offer justifications – civic and national pride, the medieval church's commitment to magnificence, the need for a place that would be the spiritual and physical center of the city – but really not. We would look at the cost and say, no thanks, much better to spend the money helping the poor or improving education or what have you.
And yet, they are wonderful.
Are the mad? And if they are, what does it mean that the most glorious creations of a whole age are insane? Have we lost anything by choosing to invest in health care and preK rather that mad explosions of beauty? Is a rational world missing something vital that medieval people had abundantly?
Have our vast wealth and long lives failed to make us happy because we devote ourselves too much to comfort and not enough to doing the pointlessly extraordinary?
Have we lost anything by choosing to invest in health care and preK rather that mad explosions of beauty? Is a rational world missing something vital that medieval people had abundantly?
ReplyDeleteWell, we've lost about 300 to 500 infant deaths per 1000 live births...
We've lost the stupefying numbers of victims (usually children, traditionally) of measles, mumps, rubella, haemophilus influenzae type-B, diptheria, whooping cough, pertussis, polio, rotavirus, et cetera...
We've lost routine cholera outbreaks from contaminated water sources, chronic pellagra from vitamin deficiencies, simple malnutrition being commonplace, and even smallpox has been lost entirely to total eradication efforts...
We've lost serfdom, and debtor's prisons, and chattel slavery. We've lost witch burnings, and inquisitions, and crusades. We've lost child labor, and child soldiers, and child brides.
We've lost so very many horrific things - things which were extremely frequently mortal, meaning their victims would be unable to appreciate the beauty of an unnecessarily tall church spire regardless of whether it got built or not - that I can't imagine any sane person genuinely feeling bad about the trade at the end of the day.
To broadly borrow a sentiment from the poet W. H. Auden: "Thousands have lived without love, none without water."
I love Golding and I looved this book. I think even more than lord of flies. Only the one about the writer and the scholar who pursued him was better.
ReplyDeletePosing this as an “either/or” equation makes no sense.
ReplyDeleteI would agree with Katya as well. My experience of medieval sources is that 1) they often talk surprisingly little about cathedrals and 2) their attitude toward issues like insanity and extravagance can be quite ambivalent, even conflicted. On #2, the sources I look at tend to regard "good sense" as an unambiguously positive term--and they tend to include in it things like caution (especially with money), thinking before acting, and not claiming things like visions. "Fool" is the deprecatory opposite. One gets the impression that people who said extravagant things in public, including pious ones, were often made fun of.
ReplyDeleteAt the same time, of course, people like Francis ended up as saints, some (like Francis) with huge followings. And there was apocalyptic preaching, setting off on crusades, and building cathedrals. And at the same time as all that, familial or other establishment resistance to sainthood was also a trope (in Francis' case, most notably, and following him in typical mendicant vitae, e.g. Catherine of Siena; Elizabeth of Hungary's vassals protest that she is wasting her inheritance on religious giving and basically take away her rights; etc.).
On yet another hand, there is also a trope involving the church's taming of the mendicants and similar movements by adopting them, subjecting them to rules (more good sense), and (most relevantly here) burying their saints under cathedrals and warehousing their followers in beautiful convents. The marvelous Robert Brentano has a lovely passage about how Francis was sort of held down, as by a vast weight, by the huge church built to house his remains.
I'm not convinced modernity is really so much less receptive to extravagance or wild gestures. Not for nothing did Eric Hobsbawm call his volume on the twentieth century "The Age of Extremes." We don't tend to put our extremism into beautiful buildings. I don't know why. But, for example, we've wrapped up plenty of boldness, vision, extreme ambition, extravagance, and insanity up in computers, the internet, AI, and so forth. In a now-famous conversation with Elon Musk, Larry Page casually predicted that the AI he was investing in would replace human beings, and rejected any worries about this as "speciesism." I don't see modesty or concern for comfort holding him back. (Whether he's right or not is irrelevant here; it's the extravagance and, in the sense you're using the term, insanity of the thing that matters.)
Ours is the age that built enough hydrogen bombs to destroy the world many times over, and then avoided using them (at least so far, and may it be forever, please God). What does one make of that?
Actually, The Raven and the Crown embodies this ambiguity nicely. There's the anchoress, but there's also all the jolly, practically-minded royal bureaucrats we meet.
ReplyDeleteThe Middle Ages invented Gothic cathedrals *and* accounting.
Thinking further, what I wrote above is all well and good, but it's "history"--it has its place, but here it's kind of beside the point, and not really what John is writing about, which seems to be more a reflection on contemporary discontent, the lack of great art he perceives in our world, and his discomfort with comfort, if one may call it that, with the Middle Ages as a kind of created symbol or referent. I would add, of course, due caveats--this is only if I am interpreting him correctly, etc. etc.
ReplyDelete@David
ReplyDeleteI feel like John is projecting, somewhat, his own personal discomfort onto the entirety of the modern age. There are a very great many of us who are not at all suffering "discomfort with comfort", and do not feel the modern world is lacking some nebulous greatness that the past is imagined to have had.
At the same time, I feel like John is vastly overestimating any supposed "comfort with discomfort" that people of the Medieval Period had, and would posit that the average person then was not somehow happier with their lot in life than the average person today (or in the rest of the modern age). I would think the two would actually compare pretty similarly - people's lives were materially much worse, but their expectations of what was even possible were also much lower. (And as has been noted above, they had an earnest belief in an afterlife.)
Moreover, people don't really change much over time. All the discontent of the modern day can be found almost exactly mirrored in writings from Roman Antiquity, for crying out loud. Since the dawn of time, people have bemoaned the supposed "decline of man" and "decline of civilization", imagining that some arbitrary previous age was somehow better, and that humanity had lost some great, vital quality of life (which can never be clearly defined, curiously) through the cruel passage of time. It's a stock trope of myth, even - the diminished world - one that's ironically so ancient it stretches back further than written history itself.
Methinks there's largely nothing wrong with society today that wasn't wrong with it 2000 years ago (aside from a few uniquely modern dangers like the existence of nuclear weapons), and quite a lot less wrong with it in comparison. Methinks, also, that modern anxiety is not at all modern, but is in fact a continuation of ancient anxiety, and thus it tells us nothing special about the modern age, rather than about all of human existence.