Last week’s fire in the world’s most famous Gothic cathedral, Notre-Dame de Paris, reminds us of the increasingly awkward political issue posed by the immense achievements of the European past.
In the current year, liberal individualism is falling out of fashion. As our culture becomes more demographically diverse, our assumptions revert back to more atavistic ways of thought. The rising ethnicities who look to comic-book author Ta-Nehisi Coates as their leading intellectual assume that one’s worth is not dependent upon Jeffersonian abstractions about individual dignity, but upon the renown of one’s ancestors. Thus, in today’s Coatesian Age, it looms larger than it did a generation or two ago whether one’s forebears built Notre-Dame or a hut.
In an era when our most influential voices attempt to unite our increasingly diverse and therefore divisive ethnicities around demonizing the forefathers of Europeans, the overwhelming beauty of the cathedrals of the high Middle Ages is, as they say, problematic.
Art: A New History
Best Price: $3.99
Buy New $16.99
(as of 06:40 UTC - Details)
As Paul Johnson wrote in his 2003 book Art: A New History:
The medieval cathedrals of Europe—there are over a hundred of them—are the greatest accomplishments of humanity in the whole theater of art.
After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
Coates has made himself a fortune promoting an antiquarian theory about how whites made themselves rich by the “plunder” of blacks.
Yet the vast wealth devoted to the construction and ornamentation of the Gothic cathedrals of Europe can hardly be attributed to slavery or colonialist exploitation, since they were begun long before the age of exploration. Notre-Dame, for example, was largely constructed between 1163 and 1345.
While occasionally the faithful would volunteer to haul building materials for free, we now know much about the finances of the cathedrals. In summary, they paid out huge sums in market-rate wages to roving artists and to local craftsmen and laborers.
Nor can the technological advances of the Gothic cathedral be said to have been “stolen” from non-Europeans.
Leave aside the absurdist zero-sum thinking that concepts can be stolen that has been returning to fashion in the past few years as dumb Afrocentrist ideas have been encouraged. The Gothic cathedrals were radically new because of their huge advances in making the walls lighter so they could let in more light through their stained-glass windows.
The key breakthroughs that made these achievements possible are well-documented. Rapid progress was made in Northern Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries, especially around Paris, beginning with the Abbot Suger’s Saint-Denis in the 1130s. Interestingly, the rebuilding of Saint-Denis’ north tower, which was torn down for safety’s sake in 1846, is finally supposed to begin this year.
