>pardon my density, but how, specifically, do you mean "Chartres and
>Gothic cathedrals play with this image..." ?
>
>best from the horticulturally challenged,
>
>christopher
Christopher, and others interested,
It was you who replied to my question about psalm imagery in Christian art
with an anecdote about being in Chartes at twilight when the stained glass
windows appeared to be trellises with glowing images woven into their
living fabric.
And you have company in this vision. In Gothic architecture, the church is
visibly Paradise. See in the building the Garden with vines and flowers
carved above capitals and fiddlehead ferns lined up above arches, and
budding finials, and trefoil-carved wooden tracery, and, of course, the
Rose window, the most graceful flower blooming in the garden.
But doesn't all this architectural imagery grow out of the medieval
Benedictine monks' understanding of what they were about? They were
creating a new Eden, a heavenly Jerusalem--and the wall around Eden is the
wall around the heavenly city, I suspect. This playfulness flowers with
their busy leisure, and will be vulnerable to puritan sensibilities.
So, it's outside of Eden that the soil is hard, the work ethic prevails,
and gardening means toil. In Eden, as in the church, one eats the bread of
angels, not of the sweat of one's brow, and the water of life flows from
the rock, not from the pump which needs priming. Isn't that what Chartes
says to you?
peace,
from Susan who loves flowers, not dirt under her fingernails
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