Here’s another win for the YouTube suggestion algorithm, which showed up after the post which I made on September 10th that included a recent documentary about the cathedral of Chartres: namely, a documentary about the cathedral of Chartres from 63 years ago. The approach is, of course, quite different from that of the modern documentary, but very respectful even where it assumes some of the nostra of the modern age about its own progress and achievements.
This film was made as part of an educational series by the Encyclopedia Britannica, of the kind that used to be shown quite often in schools. The on-sight narrator who appears in the town of Chartres in the first minutes, John Canaday, worked for 1959 until 1976 as an art critic for the New York Times, and shall live in blessed memory for beginning his career there by writing that Abstract Expressionism as an artistic movement allows for “exceptional tolerance for incompetence and deception.”
We are now in the midst of an octave that contains three feasts of the Virgin Mary, her Nativity on September 8th, her Holy Name on the 12th, and the Seven Sorrows on the 15th. The historical starting point of this arrangement is of course the first of these, which was imported into the Roman Rite from the Byzantine tradition at the end of the 7th century, along with three other Marian feasts, the Annunciation, the Purification, and the Assumption. Unlike those other three, however, it was slow to catch on, and still not celebrated in many parts of western Europe even by the beginning of the 11th century.
A stained glass window in the south ambulatory of Chartres Cathedral, known as Notre-Dame de la Belle Verrière (Our Lady of the Beautiful Window), or the Blue Virgin. The three large panels in the center were made in the 12th century, and are among the very few pieces of stained glass that were found to be salvageable from the fire of 1194 that destroyed the older church.
To a large degree, the impetus for its general acceptance came from the preaching of a Saint named Fulbert, who became bishop of Chartres in France in 1006, and held the see for 22 years. His city was already an important pilgrimage center because it possessed an object believed to be a garment of the Virgin Mary herself. Fulbert began rebuilding Chartres Cathedral after it was destroyed by a fire in 1020 in a much larger form, to accommodate the great crowds of pilgrims who came to venerate the relic. As is so often the case with such projects, it was not completed until after his death. This new church in turn burned down in 1194, leading to the magnificent Gothic building which stands today, rightly recognized as one of the greatest architectural achievements of the Middle Ages.
Here is a fairly recent documentary about Chartres cathedral which I found quite enjoyable, and which explains a lot of interesting things not just about the building project, but also its relation to the previous structure, the church that St Fulbert would have known.
In keeping with much recent news about the renovations of Notre Dame Cathedral, it’s worth mentioning a beautiful new title just released by the Catholic publisher Wiseblood Books: Death Comes for the Cathedrals.
The heart of this book is a translation of Marcel Proust’s influential 1904 essay in Le Figaro that brilliantly argued from a cultural and philosophical viewpoint against the total secularization of churches in France, and led to less extreme measures being taken by the anticlerical French government. The essay is preceded by an historical introduction from its translator, Dr. John Pepino, and followed by an Afterword that I was invited to contribute, describing my experience of Chartres cathedral and the lessons I learned from it about the primacy of traditionary excellence over the suicidal embrace of modernism.
The text is complemented by full-color images of the glories of Chartres’ architecture, stained glass, and statuary. A gorgeous hardcover book — and, thanks to a generous benefactor who supported the project, priced at $12 from the publisher (or $15 at Amazon).
And how timely is the Proust! Just over a week ago, more than a hundred French cultural figures signed a manifesto (published, of course, in Le Figaro) protesting the proposed vandalization of the interior of Notre Dame — this time not by anticlericals, but by the archdiocese of Paris. Somehow, one is not surprised... since the revolutionaries are now the ones in charge.
Publisher’s Description
“Suppose for a moment that Catholicism had been dead for centuries, that the traditions of its worship had been lost. Only the unspeaking and forlorn cathedrals remain; they have become unintelligible yet remain admirable.”
So begins Marcel Proust’s Death Comes for the Cathedrals (La mort des cathédrales), originally published in Le Figaro (1904). Proust addresses the political and religious debate concerning the “the Briand bill,” a parliamentary proposal which imperiled the fate of French Cathedrals, “the first and most perfect masterpieces” of Gothic architecture. The great author of In Search of Lost Time gives prophetic voice to his own fear that “France would be transformed into a shore where giant chiseled conches seemed to have run aground, emptied of the life that inhabited them and no longer bringing an attentive ear to the distant murmur of the past, simply museum objects, themselves frozen.” As Proust makes plain, though the cathedrals of France and the traditional liturgy of the Roman rite are the spiritual inheritance of the Church, they are part of the patrimony of all humanity and, pending preservation, their loss would leave all the world impoverished.
This Wiseblood Books edition of Death Comes for the Cathedrals includes an introduction by its translator, Dr. John Pepino, and an afterword by Dr. Peter Kwasniewski, who wonders whether life may yet return to the cathedrals. Throughout, beautiful color images of Chartres and its architectural features grace the pages.
HARDCOVER $12 52 pp. | 6 in x 9 in 978-1951319687 December 8, 2021 Link
Wiseblood Books is offering a coupon for December:
