Why Gothic Churches Make You Look Up

[00:00:00]On my first trip to Italy, one of the things that amazed me most was the churches.

[00:00:06]Of course, I had seen pictures of the famous ones.

[00:00:09]I knew they were beautiful.

[00:00:12]But there really is no substitute for stepping inside one.

[00:00:16]The scale, the silence, the way the light moves through the building.

[00:00:23]It is an entirely different experience.

[00:00:27]And we all have our preferences.

[00:00:29]It is like food.

[00:00:31]Some people love Italian food. Some people love Chinese food.

[00:00:36]Architecture is the same way.

[00:00:39]There are so many extraordinary styles to choose from.

[00:00:43]Romanesque, Renaissance, Baroque, Gothic.

[00:00:47]But if I had to choose my favorite kind of church architecture, it would be Gothic.

[00:00:54]Why?

[00:00:55]I think the simplest answer is this.

[00:00:58]Gothic architecture makes you look up.

[00:01:02]You do not have to understand anything about architecture.

[00:01:06]You do not need to know the vocabulary.

[00:01:09]The building begins directing your attention the moment you enter it.

[00:01:13]The columns rise.

[00:01:16]The arches converge above you.

[00:01:19]Even the smallest details seem to participate in this upward movement.

[00:01:25]And what makes that remarkable is that these buildings are made from stone.

[00:01:30]They are immensely heavy.

[00:01:33]But Gothic builders discovered how to make all that weight seem to disappear.

[00:01:38]Pointed arches carried the pressure downward.

[00:01:42]Ribbed vaults created a kind of stone skeleton.

[00:01:46]Flying buttresses moved the remaining force outside the walls.

[00:01:52]The engineering is extraordinary.

[00:01:54]But But purpose was not simply to show that it could be done.

[00:01:58]It allowed a massive stone building to feel as though it were reaching upward.

[00:02:05]Those structural innovations also meant that the walls no longer had to remain solid.

[00:02:11]They could be opened and filled with glass.

[00:02:15]And the sunlight did not merely illuminate the church.

[00:02:19]It passed through images of Christ, scripture, and the saints.

[00:02:25]Ordinary light entered the building and became color, story, and symbol.

[00:02:31]The church seemed to be saying that the material world could carry something more than itself.

[00:02:37]And if you slow down and look at the details, the whole created world seems to be there.

[00:02:44]Saints and kings, angels and animals, flowers, vines, craftsmen, ordinary men and women.

[00:02:55]Even the strange gargoyles outside have their place.

[00:02:59]A cathedral was not only a room for worship.

[00:03:03]It was a picture of an ordered universe, crowded with meaning, with God at its center.

[00:03:11]There is also something humbling about a Gothic cathedral.

[00:03:15]It makes you feel small.

[00:03:18]Today, that can sound negative.

[00:03:21]We are constantly encouraged to make ourselves the center of everything.

[00:03:25]But feeling small is not the same thing as feeling worthless.

[00:03:30]Inside a cathedral, you feel that you have entered something larger than yourself.

[00:03:36]Something that began before you arrived and will continue after you leave.

[00:03:42]But Gothic churches were not built merely to create an impressive experience.

[00:03:47]They were not museums, monuments, or medieval tourist attractions.

[00:03:53]All of this movement, the columns, the arches, the windows, the long central aisle, ultimately leads somewhere.

[00:04:03]It leads toward the altar.

[00:04:06]The beauty of the building surrounds the place where heaven and earth meet in the mass.

[00:04:12]And I think that is why Gothic remains my favorite.

[00:04:16]It does not reject the physical world.

[00:04:19]It takes stone, glass, sunlight, mathematics, and human craftsmanship and turns them toward God.

[00:04:28]Stone becomes prayer.

[00:04:31]Glass becomes scripture.

[00:04:33]And the building teaches the person inside it to look beyond himself.

[00:04:39]Maybe that is why when we enter a Gothic church, so many of us instinctively do the same thing.

[00:04:46]We look up.