Wonderful illumination of Romanesque architecture.
I always thought Chesterton was criticizing the villain’s improper view of the cathedral rather than Gothic architecture itself. “When they saw it from below, it sprang like a fountain at the stars; and when they saw it, as now, from above, it poured like a cataract into a voiceless pit.”
Gothic architecture is meant to draw you up to heaven and God, but the villain in this story puts himself in the place of God at the top of the tower, destroying the intended purpose of the architecture.
Abbot Suger has some wonderful passages that illuminate the purpose of the Gothic…I love his inscription over the doors at Chartres:
“All you who seek to honor these doors,
Marvel not at the gold and the cost but at the art.
The noble work is bright but being nobly bright, the work
Should brighten minds, allowing them to travel through the lights
To the true light, where Christ is the true door.
The golden door shows how it is immanent in these things.
The dull mind rises to the truth through material things,
And rises from its submersion when it sees the light.”
Thank you for this thoughtful comment! I agree that Chesterton creates some sense of distinction between the church itself and the curate's improper use of it, but the descriptions of the church and its role in the story are so loaded down with negativity that I felt there must be more to it than that. He refers in a general way to the "monstrous foreshortening and disproportion" as "the most terrible aspect of Gothic," and describes (again in general) "the architecture of the Middle Ages" as "like the strong back of some maddened horse." And then there's the fact that he seems to think the church is just too tall for its own good (which strikes me as rather strange because in my experience people like looking up at tall church towers!): he says that because the curate spent too much time praying in those "high and lonely places," "he fancied he was God." In any case, thanks for pondering this with me!
This short essay “The Architect of Spears” may shed some light on his opinion of the Gothic….He does describe it in a fearsome and seemingly negative way but in typical Chestertonian fashion twists this to mean something positive..”The battle beauty of the Gothic,” he calls it.
In the essay he imagine a Gothic cathedral on a March and likens it to the Church militant.
“The truth about Gothic is, first, that it is alive, and second, that it is on the march. It is the Church Militant; it is the only fighting architecture. All its spires are spears at rest; and all its stones are stones asleep in a catapult. In that instant of illusion, I could hear the arches clash like swords as they crossed each other.”
That is a fascinating essay! Thank you for pointing it out to me, I didn't know of its existence. It definitely gives us insight into Chesterton's relationship with Gothic architecture and helps us to interpret the ambivalent attitude he expressed in "The Hammer of God." What a remarkably penetrating mind Chesterton had.
Your description of Romanesque's earthy shapes united with heaven's spheres, and seeing Gregorian chant while hearing it sung, and of how the Middle Ages "saw the earth itself as the most fitting medium for the recreation of beauty" reminds me of how God created Adam in Genesis 2 from the matter of the earth, and filled him with divine breath.
Wow! I've always loved churches for many of the reasons you have written about here. Magnificent architectural expressions. And a great quote: "frozen music." I have never heard that. Love it.
Re. the Father Brown excerpt: Chesterton had a pet topic of perspective.
He speaks in various places, fiction and nonfiction, of having to travel the world so that you can see your own home and its peculiarities of place, of architecture, of adornment etc. with the same eyes of wonder that a foreigner would (or with which you, say a foreigner, would view another's home in other countries). Likewise he talks about the world being turned upside down by God and infers that one can, therefore, only see it rightly by standing on one's head. Elsewhere he mentions at least once the notion of looking through a telescope to see our own world and history as if from a distance, to experience anew just how startling the Incarnation really is or, for that matter, Creation is at all; but perhaps oddly, I'm pretty sure Chesterton also used the image of "looking through the telescope the wrong way" – unless I'm mixing him up with another author. (That image, I think, has also been used elsewhere, whether to indicate things that seem smaller instead of bigger or to indicate having an inverted perspective.)
For a direct comparison, you might check the introductory scenes of "The Ball and The Cross", which open atop a Church's dome and which feature a brief standoff there between a monk and Professor Lucifer. Lucifer, seeking to ascend the heights of Heaven by his cleverness and prideful knowledge, while the humble monk finds himself having to climb down the dome back to safety rather than up.
It should be noted that Chesterton was also a fan of irony, of teasing out insight from putting things backwards or at least counterintuitively, habitually alluding to paradox and asserting reversals of popular "wisdom". (For the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men, is it not?) Thing is, Chesterton is himself, in a sense, that character of his own writings who "rebelled into normalcy" and came to truth, irony of ironies, by being unable to help himself being subversive towards a subverted world.
This notion of perspective, of seeing things anew but also of seeing things sort of backwards, is what jumps out at me more than Gothic as such, in the first paragraph of your Father Brown quote. Not that Gothic is per se monstrous or murderous, but that Gothic would appear so if we were to look at it the wrong way around, as in so many other metaphors of his. Usually he's arguing that seeing things the other way around is the way to see them for real for the first time; but then, sometimes he acknowledges that seeking to ascend isn't always holy, and being willing to be turned upside down isn't always foolish. It's very much in keeping with his themes.
Dovetail that consideration with the comments by Father Brown himself, which explicitly allude to the danger of such heights to mortals who do not belong there – perhaps a Tower of Babel reference? – and I think there's a good case for reading this as a way for Chesterton to take his usual fascination with perspective and apply it to, as another commenter says, the problem of putting oneself in God's place where the architecture is meant to point away from us towards Him. In other words, if there's a hidden meaning – of course it wasn't what you'd call hidden, not really – if there's a thematic meaning, I'd propose it's the idea that pride is a problem of perspective that can make even the greatest good into the deadliest.
Superb analysis—thank you for taking the time to write this! My key takeaway from your reflections is that to fully make sense of this part of the story, we need to look at it simultaneously through the lens of perspective and the lens of irony. That is just the sort of trick that a razor-sharp and deeply paradoxical mind like Chesterton's would come up with, because looking through two different lenses at once is disorienting, and that's exactly the problem with the curate's Gothic church—it so thoroughly disorients him that he loses sight of his proper place in the cosmos.
I didn't mention this in the post, but there's another passage earlier in the story that supplies an interpretive clue: "[The curate] seemed to live for nothing but his religion; but there were some who said ... that it was a love of Gothic architecture rather than of God, and that his haunting of the church like a ghost was only another and purer turn of the almost morbid thirst for beauty which sent his brother raging after women and wine."
Wonderful illumination of Romanesque architecture.
I always thought Chesterton was criticizing the villain’s improper view of the cathedral rather than Gothic architecture itself. “When they saw it from below, it sprang like a fountain at the stars; and when they saw it, as now, from above, it poured like a cataract into a voiceless pit.”
Gothic architecture is meant to draw you up to heaven and God, but the villain in this story puts himself in the place of God at the top of the tower, destroying the intended purpose of the architecture.
Abbot Suger has some wonderful passages that illuminate the purpose of the Gothic…I love his inscription over the doors at Chartres:
“All you who seek to honor these doors,
Marvel not at the gold and the cost but at the art.
The noble work is bright but being nobly bright, the work
Should brighten minds, allowing them to travel through the lights
To the true light, where Christ is the true door.
The golden door shows how it is immanent in these things.
The dull mind rises to the truth through material things,
And rises from its submersion when it sees the light.”
Thank you for this thoughtful comment! I agree that Chesterton creates some sense of distinction between the church itself and the curate's improper use of it, but the descriptions of the church and its role in the story are so loaded down with negativity that I felt there must be more to it than that. He refers in a general way to the "monstrous foreshortening and disproportion" as "the most terrible aspect of Gothic," and describes (again in general) "the architecture of the Middle Ages" as "like the strong back of some maddened horse." And then there's the fact that he seems to think the church is just too tall for its own good (which strikes me as rather strange because in my experience people like looking up at tall church towers!): he says that because the curate spent too much time praying in those "high and lonely places," "he fancied he was God." In any case, thanks for pondering this with me!
This short essay “The Architect of Spears” may shed some light on his opinion of the Gothic….He does describe it in a fearsome and seemingly negative way but in typical Chestertonian fashion twists this to mean something positive..”The battle beauty of the Gothic,” he calls it.
In the essay he imagine a Gothic cathedral on a March and likens it to the Church militant.
“The truth about Gothic is, first, that it is alive, and second, that it is on the march. It is the Church Militant; it is the only fighting architecture. All its spires are spears at rest; and all its stones are stones asleep in a catapult. In that instant of illusion, I could hear the arches clash like swords as they crossed each other.”
https://www.online-literature.com/chesterton/2599/
That is a fascinating essay! Thank you for pointing it out to me, I didn't know of its existence. It definitely gives us insight into Chesterton's relationship with Gothic architecture and helps us to interpret the ambivalent attitude he expressed in "The Hammer of God." What a remarkably penetrating mind Chesterton had.
Your description of Romanesque's earthy shapes united with heaven's spheres, and seeing Gregorian chant while hearing it sung, and of how the Middle Ages "saw the earth itself as the most fitting medium for the recreation of beauty" reminds me of how God created Adam in Genesis 2 from the matter of the earth, and filled him with divine breath.
This is a lovely reflection, thank you for reading and commenting.
Wow! I've always loved churches for many of the reasons you have written about here. Magnificent architectural expressions. And a great quote: "frozen music." I have never heard that. Love it.
Love this post!
Re. the Father Brown excerpt: Chesterton had a pet topic of perspective.
He speaks in various places, fiction and nonfiction, of having to travel the world so that you can see your own home and its peculiarities of place, of architecture, of adornment etc. with the same eyes of wonder that a foreigner would (or with which you, say a foreigner, would view another's home in other countries). Likewise he talks about the world being turned upside down by God and infers that one can, therefore, only see it rightly by standing on one's head. Elsewhere he mentions at least once the notion of looking through a telescope to see our own world and history as if from a distance, to experience anew just how startling the Incarnation really is or, for that matter, Creation is at all; but perhaps oddly, I'm pretty sure Chesterton also used the image of "looking through the telescope the wrong way" – unless I'm mixing him up with another author. (That image, I think, has also been used elsewhere, whether to indicate things that seem smaller instead of bigger or to indicate having an inverted perspective.)
For a direct comparison, you might check the introductory scenes of "The Ball and The Cross", which open atop a Church's dome and which feature a brief standoff there between a monk and Professor Lucifer. Lucifer, seeking to ascend the heights of Heaven by his cleverness and prideful knowledge, while the humble monk finds himself having to climb down the dome back to safety rather than up.
It should be noted that Chesterton was also a fan of irony, of teasing out insight from putting things backwards or at least counterintuitively, habitually alluding to paradox and asserting reversals of popular "wisdom". (For the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men, is it not?) Thing is, Chesterton is himself, in a sense, that character of his own writings who "rebelled into normalcy" and came to truth, irony of ironies, by being unable to help himself being subversive towards a subverted world.
This notion of perspective, of seeing things anew but also of seeing things sort of backwards, is what jumps out at me more than Gothic as such, in the first paragraph of your Father Brown quote. Not that Gothic is per se monstrous or murderous, but that Gothic would appear so if we were to look at it the wrong way around, as in so many other metaphors of his. Usually he's arguing that seeing things the other way around is the way to see them for real for the first time; but then, sometimes he acknowledges that seeking to ascend isn't always holy, and being willing to be turned upside down isn't always foolish. It's very much in keeping with his themes.
Dovetail that consideration with the comments by Father Brown himself, which explicitly allude to the danger of such heights to mortals who do not belong there – perhaps a Tower of Babel reference? – and I think there's a good case for reading this as a way for Chesterton to take his usual fascination with perspective and apply it to, as another commenter says, the problem of putting oneself in God's place where the architecture is meant to point away from us towards Him. In other words, if there's a hidden meaning – of course it wasn't what you'd call hidden, not really – if there's a thematic meaning, I'd propose it's the idea that pride is a problem of perspective that can make even the greatest good into the deadliest.
Superb analysis—thank you for taking the time to write this! My key takeaway from your reflections is that to fully make sense of this part of the story, we need to look at it simultaneously through the lens of perspective and the lens of irony. That is just the sort of trick that a razor-sharp and deeply paradoxical mind like Chesterton's would come up with, because looking through two different lenses at once is disorienting, and that's exactly the problem with the curate's Gothic church—it so thoroughly disorients him that he loses sight of his proper place in the cosmos.
I didn't mention this in the post, but there's another passage earlier in the story that supplies an interpretive clue: "[The curate] seemed to live for nothing but his religion; but there were some who said ... that it was a love of Gothic architecture rather than of God, and that his haunting of the church like a ghost was only another and purer turn of the almost morbid thirst for beauty which sent his brother raging after women and wine."
Deo gratias!