Gates Of Heaven (1978)

[music] Since history's first day, humankind has tried to grasp the structure of the universe and to discover its own place in that structure. A search for truth, a journey of the spirit manifesting itself even in the stones of earth. Other creatures have built for shelter and utility. But only humans have built for the sake of meaning, imitating God the creator, who shaped the universe out of chaos. >> [music] [music] >> Architecture is a sacred task, a form of prayer, a meeting place of human design with divine order. The conscious arrangement of stones in a field reveals a quest for understanding, a way of expressing hidden [music] realities. An aesthetic structure can be a gate of heaven, a mirror of eternity. [music] Not all architecture [music] aspires so highly. It has been said that a society gets the architecture it deserves. But old stones remain. stones which reached beyond their moment in time to embrace the deepest nature of things. [music] In their aspiration, we rediscover our own spiritual calling. [music] Such a marriage of spirit and design was never more perfectly achieved than in the great Gothic cathedrals of the high middle ages. The early middle ages had been a time of chaos and uncertainty. But the 12th century experienced a springtime of civilization, a sudden blossoming of energy and confidence unknown for centuries. Cities sprang up and universities. Trade and travel accelerated the movement of people and ideas. >> With the creation of new wealth, society became more dynamic. The arts underwent major revolutions and theology forged a new vision of the human enterprise. Emerging from the dark ages, Europe dreamed of unity and the Gothic style was born. >> [music] [music] [music] >> The cathedral was the dominant image of the Middle Ages. At Chart in France, Gothic design [music] found its first mature expression. As a visible summary of the people's faith, [music] it awakened a zeal we can hardly imagine. All classes of society [music] joined their energies for its construction, even harnessing themselves to cartloads of stone which they hauled in prayerful processions to the building site. It was more than [music] a building which mobilized the people. It was the spirit of the age. The confident belief that the world was ruled by God and that the social task was to make the divine visible in the forms of culture. [music] And the supreme symbol of God in their midst was the cathedral which dominated the landscape. Go through Zion, says the psalmist. Walk around her, counting her towers, admiring her walls, that you may tell the next generation that God is here. Here was worshiped a God not of arbitrary whims, but a God of order, the supreme architect who has given all things measure, weight, and number. In basing church design on the circle, the square and the triangle, medieval [music] architects strove to symbolize the underlying structure of being. Thus, the very geometry of [music] the cathedral led the mind upward to contemplation of the eternal [music] harmonies. >> [music] >> Images open the heart and awaken [music] the intellect, wrote an early theologian. And in a marvelous and indescribable manner, engage us to imitate the persons they represent. But the nearly 2,000 sculptures that adorn Chart did more than teach examples. They literally summed up the world in an encyclopedia of stone. Here were images of [music] nature and science, personifications of virtue and learning, depictions of daily life and work, the history of salvation, and the end of the world. Here was all the diversity of existence, the pulsing of life ordered [music] within a total scheme of which Christ was the center and head above all. And as the world's many branches [music] are connected to Christ, the true vine, so have these figures been [music] subordinated to the symbolic architectural scheme. Even [music] the direction of the sun played a part, assigning Old Testament figures to the shadowy north side and the New [music] Testament figures to the brightness of the south side. This was no lifeless dogmatism. We can see vitality in these faces, a confident [music] heroic quality. These were men and women who trusted the divine [music] plan and found their meaning in it. The entrance [music] to the cathedral bore the image of Christ the judge. For indeed the entering of that holy place was an enactment [music] of entry into paradise. [music] Oh grace abounding [music] that had made me fit to fix my eyes on the eternal light until my vision was consumed [music] in it. So spoke the poet Dante expressing the medieval understanding of light as an essentially spiritual substance the divine radiance that creates the world and illuminates [music] the mind. The great [music] windows of Chart, over 22,000 square ft of stained glass, opened the cathedral [music] to the light beyond itself. A constant reminder of the true light of Christ, which is the splendor of God, the source of life. [music] The Cathedral of Amier was one of the most harmonious and classic statements of the Gothic ideal. It is the largest cathedral in France, [music] 141 ft from floor to ceiling with an interior volume of 260,000 cubic yards. Yet a sense of lightness pervades this immensity. A denial of gravity made possible by the Gothic structural system. Outside the buttresses take the stress off the walls permitting large areas of glass. Inside [music] the peers, arches and ribs distribute the load from part to part. The lines of the interior [music] becoming a diagram of the forces at work. [music] Though Amy was a brilliant technical achievement, [music] its purpose was not to be an engineering tour to force. It was rather to be an image of heaven, not in the sense of a stage set, a trick of illusion, but an image of heaven in a symbolic sense. Because its geometry, its iconography, its light had the effect [music] of leading the mind upward to contemplation of ultimate reality. [music] Awesome is this place, ran the ancient hymn of consecration. Truly, this is the house of God and the gate [music] of heaven, and it will be called the court of the Lord. >> [music] [music] >> This gate of [music] heaven also admitted its measure of darkness expressed in the grotesque creatures perched on its walls. The inclusion of dark symbols [music] in the design signified the ultimate submission of evil to God's rule. [bell] But the energy of their twisted faces suggests that they have not [music] submitted willingly. >> [music] >> Heat. [music] Heat. [bell] [music] >> [music] [bell] [music] >> Unlike the logically coherent [music] French structures, England's Canterbury Cathedral was less the product of a unified aesthetic ideal than of the turbulence of history. It has endured [music] the ravages of fires, wars, angry kings, and iconoclastic Puritans. It has suffered the indifference of the [music] 18th century and the tasteless restorations of the 19th century. The result is a building of considerable complexity. Even in the 12th century, a monk exclaimed, "Who could write all the turnings and windings and appendages of such and so great a [music] church as this [music] as the symbolic focus and the largest interior space in the community. The cathedral was inevitably the major center of medieval life. It was a place of worship and pilgrimage, of course, but it was also a stage, an art gallery, a museum, a civic center, a hall of justice, a marketplace, and a school like the,400year-old King School at Canterbury. All things together under one roof, one society under God the King. It was a noble vision of common destiny. But the world was [music] changing. Medieval culture had not spoken the final word about the human journey. New voices arose and [music] the cathedral fell silent. Suddenly too complete in an incomplete world. Cathedrals are still places of worship today. But no longer do they symbolize and summarize the universe. Like every [music] human dream, they had to be broken that God's new purposes might emerge. [music] >> [music] [music] >> The Gothic giants are still with us, scattered across the Western world. Like the graceful cathedral at Salsbury, they are impressive, inspiring, >> [singing] >> Yet robbed of their old glory, they seem lost in time, strangers in our strange land. The age of reason called them barbarous, unrefined, monsters of ignorant times. The Romantics found in their obscurity an exotic alternative to industrial society. But to the men and women who built and used them, cathedrals were not irrational, nor were they an escape from reality. They were a systematic attempt to understand and express [music] the deepest nature of the universe. The power that raised up these structures was the faith that existence has meaning and that every [music] person may understand and share in that meaning through the grace of God. The cathedral in essence signified that each man and woman is a living stone in the building of creation. As we are told in Ephesians, you are part of a building that has [music] the apostles and prophets for its foundations and Christ Jesus himself for its cornerstone. In him the whole building is bonded together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord. Centuries have passed since the Gothic age shaped its ideas into tangible forms. But the human race continues to seek understanding of its destiny and communion with its creator. We still struggle to mold the forms of the world into expressions of underlying reality. The failure of the Gothic dream to last reminds us that God's judgment falls on every human achievement and the kingdom is always more than we can grasp. [music] Yet the continuing power of cathedrals to move us is proof of the calling we share with the very earliest of our race to reach beyond ourselves to the one who made us and redeems us. Moving in our hearts to draw the earth together and make us one. >> [music] >> Oh no. We are [music and singing] >> [music]