Chapter 34 Notre Dame de Paris (2) Volume 5 This will destroy that (6)

This general idea, the truth, resides not only in the interior of all these buildings, but also in their external form.For example, Solomon's Temple is not only the hardcover cover of the book, but also the book itself.From each wall with the same center, the priest can interpret the true meaning it expresses in front of his eyes.In this way the priest interprets the evolution of the truth from one temple to another, until the last shrine, which finally grasps the meaning of the truth through the most concrete form of the embodiment of the truth, which is still the round arch of the building.Thus, the truth resides in the building, but its image is embodied in its shell, just as the image of the dead is painted on the coffin of the mummy.

And not only the form of buildings, but also the locations chosen for them reflect the ideas they are intended to express.According to whether the symbol is elegant or dark, the Greeks built pleasing temples on the top of the mountains, while the Indians split the mountains and carved out of the ground strange towers, carried by rows of giant granite elephants. with. Thus, during the first six thousand years since the beginning of the world, from the oldest pagoda in Hindustan to the cathedral in Cologne, architecture has been the great writing of mankind.It is absolutely true that not only all religious symbols, but all human thought have a page and a monument in the great book of architectural art.

Any civilization begins with theocracy and ends with democracy.The law of first unity and then freedom is also written in the art of architecture.We must emphasize that the view that construction consists only in the ability to build temples, to express mythological and religious symbols, to record in hieroglyphics the mystical diagrams of the law on stone pages is unacceptable.If so, since in any human society the sacred symbols are consumed and obliterated under the onslaught of free thought, the world escapes the clergy, and the endless stream of philosophies and systems corrodes the face of religion like a wart, then the art of architecture is not It may reproduce the new spiritual outlook of human beings. Although each page of it is densely covered with writing, the back may be blank, its creation may be incomplete, and architectural art as a book will be incomplete.Not so.

Let us take the Middle Ages as an example, which is closer to us and can be seen more clearly.In the early Middle Ages, theocracy was creating Europe, and the Vatican was gathering and combining various elements to create a new Rome with the remnants of ancient Rome that had collapsed around the Temple of Jupiter.Christianity was increasingly busy finding social classes in the ruins of former civilizations and using their remnants to rebuild a society of new hierarchies with priesthood as the keystone.It was at this time that the mysterious Romanesque architecture, the sister of Egyptian and Indian theocracy, the eternal emblem of authentic Catholicism, the immutable hieroglyphs of the pope's dominion, first emerged from the chaos, Gradually under the subtle influence of Christianity and through the labor of the barbarians, it emerged from the remnants of the decaying ancient Greek and Roman architectural art.The whole thought at that time was actually reflected in the gloomy Romanesque style.We can feel everywhere authority, unity, mystery, absoluteness, the legacy of Gregory VII; .However, the Crusades took place.It was a mass popular movement, and any mass movement, whatever its cause and purpose, always produces from its final deposits free thought.The innovation movement was born.Thus began the turbulent period of the Jacques, the Prague faction, and the Union.Authority falters, unity crumbles.Feudalism demands an equal share of power with theocracy, and then the people must come suddenly and, as always, take the lion's share for themselves.Because the lion is king.Therefore, the lordship system broke through the monk system, and the village communal system broke through the lordship system.The face of Europe has changed.no!The face of architectural art has also changed.Like civilization, the art of architecture has turned a new page and is always ready to write a new chapter for a new zeitgeist.Architecture was revived with the return of the pointed arch from the Crusades, just as the peoples were revived with the freedom brought back by the Crusades.As a result, with the gradual disintegration of the Roman Empire, the Roman architectural art also gradually declined.Hieroglyphs left the cathedral, and used emblems to decorate the castle tower, adding a little luster to the feudal system.The cathedral itself, such a sanctimonious building in the past, has since been invaded by the citizens, the village community, and freedom, and has escaped the control of the priests and fallen into the hands of the artists.The artist builds as he pleases.All mysteries, myths, and laws are all discarded.Today, it is replaced by whimsy and ingenuity.As long as the priest has a church and an altar, everything will be fine.The four walls of the church belong to the artist.The book of architecture no longer belongs to the monks, the Church, or Rome, but to the imagination, to poetry, to the people.Therefore, this kind of architectural art with a history of only 300 years has produced countless changes rapidly. These changes have occurred after the Romanesque architectural art with a history of 600 or 700 years has been stagnant for a long time. It is really shocking!Meanwhile, art strides forward.What was once done by bishops is now done by a people with genius and originality.Each race, as it passed, wrote its own line on the book, and blotted out the Romanesque hieroglyphs on the facade of the cathedral, so that beneath the new symbols left by the races occasionally traces of the old dogma remained. vaguely discernible.Now that the people have clothed the art of architecture, it is almost impossible to guess the skeleton of its religion.It is unthinkable now that the architects of that time even did so with churches.For example, the capitals of the fireplace hall of the Palace of Justice in Paris are decorated with carvings of monks and female monks shyly having sex; another example is the clear sculpture of Noah's adventure under the high porch of Bourges Cathedral; and the washroom of Bocheville Abbey A drunken monk with donkey ears is painted on the wall, holding a wine glass and laughing at the monks face to face.At that time there existed a privilege in regard to ideas written in stone, quite comparable to our present freedom of the press, and that was the freedom of the art of architecture.

①From the fable poem by the French writer La Fontaine, the lion is the king of beasts, and he always keeps the best and the biggest for himself. ②The Jacques Group refers to the uprising of French peasants against the feudal nobles in 1358; the Braque faction refers to the rebellion of the French nobles against military reform in 1440; played a key role in the war. ③ The original text is Latin. This freedom spreads far and wide, sometimes a porch, a facade, an entire church, with a certain symbolic meaning, which is completely incompatible with religious worship, and even incompatible with the church.As early as Guillaume in Paris in the thirteenth century, Nicolas Flamel in the fifteenth century, both wrote such rebellious pages.St. James the Slaughterhouse is a complete apostate church.

At that time, thought was free only in this way, so it had to be written all in those books called buildings.If it had not taken the form of a building, but had dared to write it in a book, it would have been burned in public by the executioner; suffered.Since there is only construction technology as the way out, ideas are quickly gathered to construction technology from all directions if they want to see the light of day.There arose a multitude of cathedrals, spread over the whole of Europe, an astonishing number which, even when checked, is beyond belief.All the material forces and all the spiritual forces of society converge on one point: the art of architecture.Thus, under the guise of building churches to God, the art of architecture developed on a grand scale.

Anyone who is born a poet, then, becomes an architect.Genius scattered among the masses, under the feudal system, as if under the shell of a bronze shield, was suppressed on all sides, and found its way only in the art of architecture, through which they sprang up, and so Its "Iliad" adopted the form of the cathedral.All other arts followed suit, and were governed as offshoots by the art of architecture.Architects, poets, and masters all combine sculpture, painting, and bell music: they personally carved the facade of the great work of the cathedral, stained the window panes of the cathedral, struck the bell and played the organ for it.Even the poor poetry itself, which insists on surviving in manuscript, had to be incorporated, in hymn or prose, into the building of the church if it was to be useful.In short, this plays the same role as the performance of the tragedy of Aeschylus on the Greek god festival and the performance of "Genesis" in the temple of Solomon.

① The original text is Latin. ② Aeschylus (about 525 BC-456 BC), a famous tragedy writer in ancient Greece. Therefore, until Gutenberg invented printing, architectural art has been the main form of writing, the universal form of writing.This granite book began in the East, was inherited by ancient Greece and Rome, and the Middle Ages wrote its last page.Again, we have seen before that a popular architecture replaced that of a caste in the Middle Ages, as has occurred in other great ages of history with a similar development of the human intellect.A general law, therefore, is here briefly outlined, which would have required many gigantic volumes to be expounded upon.In the Old Orient, the cradle of primitive times, Indian architecture was followed by Phoenician architecture, the mother of the full-bodied Arabian architecture; Variations of it—Greek architecture after that, and later Romanesque only an extension, with lots and lots of Carthaginian domes; in modern times, Romanesque architecture was followed by Gothic architecture.If these three series are divided into two halves, the same symbols can be found in the three sisters of Indian architecture, Egyptian architecture, and Roman architecture, namely, theocracy, hierarchy, unity, dogma, myth, God; The three sisters, Greek architecture and Gothic architecture, no matter how varied the forms of their essence are, their meanings are the same, that is, freedom, people, and people.