Caveman Part 2 (Draft)

Part 2
Classical Narratives

This is the story of Narrative. So far what we’ve done is attempted to define what narrative is in a general sense. The time has come to look at some actual narratives, some examples of what we’re talking about.
As you read this, keep in mind that modernism and postmodernism are rooted in the narratives of the past. If you don’t have at least a passing understanding of the past narratives, you will have little or no real idea what the mos and pomos are talking about. (For that matter, even if you have phenomenal understanding of the past, you may still have little or no idea what the mos and pomos are talking about, but that’s their fault, not yours.) So bear with this stuff. It may seem pointlessly irrelevant, but it isn’t. You’ll see.

Since what I am writing here is, indeed, a Narrative, meeting all the parameters thereof which I’ve already explained, it is by its nature a selective connecting of dots. I have taken certain perceived objective items and attempted to arrange them in an orderly fashion. By doing this, I not only tell you a bunch of stuff about the items themselves, but, indirectly, a bunch of stuff about myself. Why did I pick these items and not other items? I point this out because, when we get to contemporary theory, the discussion of “why these choices” is as important, if not more important, than the story the choices tell themselves. Keep this in the back of your mind (if you have any desire at all to be a pomo scholar).

Another thing you should keep in mind before we get going is that, while we will occasionally discuss philosophical concepts, we are not discussing philosophy exclusively, and we are not discussing it in much depth. This is because we are going to look at modernism and postmodernism as, primarily, art movements. Which is, arguably, what they are. And which is, arguably, the easiest approach to understanding them. The underlying body of Thought that informs these art movements could indeed directly be Philosophy in some cases, but not all. It can also be politics, science, art itself, or a lot of other things.
We’ll get to that later.
In the meanwhile: “Let me tell you what happened.”

At the dawn of history, back with woolly mammoth guy, we had slow transfer of information. Stories were related by mouth to mouth – “Let me tell you what happened” – or WGM invited you up (actually down) to his place to see his cave paintings. Narratives that are entirely oral are hard-pressed to last very long, and there’s obviously no way someone in Cairo can easily check out the cave paintings in Lascaux. Fortunately, at some point, we became capable of saving information through writing (we also became capable of saving art better than hiding it on subterranean cave walls, but for the moment we’ll concentrate on writing).
The written word, once it was invented, allowed the transmission of Narrative through time and space. Literally, through time. Literally, through space. The written word, on papyrus say, could be carried anywhere. Geography didn’t matter any more. The Narrative could be copied over. It could be saved. It could be read a hundred years after the writer died. It could be read five thousand miles away. So what was written, the Narrative, survived the narrator’s life and traveled through time, and went beyond geography inhabited by the narrator.
Narrative became portable through time and space. Narratives became Texts.
A Narrative is a story. A Text is a permanent version of that Narrative, a permanent version of that story.
We can now evaluate a Text, irrespective of time and space.
Narrative, as Text, takes on a life of its own, beyond the teller.

This concept of Text is a cornerstone of postmodern criticism. You study the Text. The sub-Text. The con-Text. The Text tells you as much about the narrator as it does about the connected dots. (A pomo could never simply study lower-case text, or unhyphenated subtext – that would be tantamount to admitting the whole thing is a French plot.)

So, let’s start looking at narratives. We will start with what I’ll call the Classic Age, beginning with the great ancient civilizations up through the Renaissance (which is simply the nominal rebirth of the Classic Age). It is a busy but fairly straight-line two thousand years.

As we saw before, the original narratives from woolly mammoth guy were pretty basic, and to our eyes, not very accurate. In the Classic Age narratives get more complex for two reasons.
The first reason is because we have more and better information. Our scientific, data-gathering skills have improved, so we’re more knowledgeable about the dots we’re connecting. The dots of perceived objective reality become more objectively real as our perceptions improve, and the connections between them make more sense. If certain aspects of Narrative creation are a search for objective truth, we are now in a better position to attempt that search.
The second reason narratives get more complex is because we can; that is, we learn how to connect the dots better. We become better narrators. What happens is that once we have texts – those narratives that are mobile through time and space – those texts are not independent of each other. They don’t exist in a vacuum. One text builds on the next text. The style of text creation, the how of text creation, becomes better-known, and leads to stylistic developments, i.e., the development of the art of narration.

One last caveat: we are discussing Western civilization henceforth. The narratives of Islamic nations or Hindu nations or Buddhist nations took historically different routes because of differing content. If nothing else, the importance of religion to culture, and the differences among these religions and Christianity, combined with their relative isolation at the time, is enough to have taken them in radically different Narrative directions. Ultimately the modern cross-cultural analyst will attempt to find the similarities of disparate civilizations, but that is beyond the scope and intent of this essay.

“Let me tell you what happened…”

Thought

Thought is going to be one of our areas of Narrative study. This is the area of the intellectual concepts underpinning and driving a culture.
The most important area of Thought to a culture is probably its religion. Religion is an attempt to understand and explain the nature of existence itself. Parse that sentence, and remember what we’ve said so far: Religion is an attempt to [understand and explain] [connect the dots of] [create a narrate about] (pick one) the nature of existence itself.
In religion, the Texts come directly from God. In literate societies there are often human writers possessed of what is called divine inspiration who write the Narrative as if taking dictation from the Almighty, but completed Texts can also be directly handed by a divinity to a human (much as Prometheus gave mankind fire). In less developed, non-literate societies, the word of God is interpreted by shamans who have some direct line to the divine. None of these concepts is particularly different from the others. In all of them, the Texts come from God.
The sacred Texts do two things: they provide a narrative, usually of creation, often also of some otherworldly spiritual existence that cannot be perceived by humans on earth. Belief in this Narrative, since it connects no dots of any perceived objective reality, is not easy. It requires what religions refer to as faith, a leap beyond our instinct to Narrative, since these Narratives do not fall into the normative categories of Narrative, at least as we’ve explained them.
The second thing the sacred Texts do is provide guidelines for living. Laws or rules for proper behavior are laid out directly, or provided indirectly through expert interpretation of the Texts by spiritual/religious leaders/scholars. These laws, like the Narratives of the spiritual world, are given to us by the Divine, and presumably enforced by the Divine.
In religion, the Narrator is God. The importance of the Narrative, therefore, is paramount to not only human but all existence. The nature of the Narrator trumps the nature of the Narration.
These stories are important ones. Intrinsically.

Philosophy is closely related to religion in that it is an attempt, first, to understand the nature of reality (on the secular level rather than the spiritual level) and, second, to provide ethical standards removed from divine imperatives.
In Religion, God tells us stuff. In Philosophy, we try to understand stuff for ourselves. This can include understanding God; philosophy is not atheistic, but it is logical, and it allows no leaps of faith. Premises must be clear and acceptable on face, and conclusions must derive from logic.
Philosophy posits this problem: The universe has a set of rules – what are they? (Although philosophy can go further, and even ask if the universe does indeed have a set of rules, most people, and most philosophers, accept this a priori. It certainly seems as if there are rules, and the more we learn about science, the clearer the rules become. Besides, if there are no rules, then philosophy is a pretty pointless exercise.)

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle are the Big Three of ancient Western philosophy. Feel free to read into them, perhaps starting with Plato’s Republic.
For now, let’s look at a little bit of Plato. His real name was Phil Platowitz, but this was shortened when he was adopted by Greek sailors of the Uninym tribe.
I think of Plato primarily as an ethicist, but he does manage to throw together a good old-fashioned stew of ideas on the nature of existence, most notably his theory of Forms. Let us turn, for a moment, to the Encyclopedia Brittanica:

The theory of Forms has as its foundation the assumption that beyond the world of physical things there is a higher, spiritual realm of Forms, or Ideas, such as the Form of Beauty or Justice. This realm of Forms, moreover, has a hierarchical order, the highest level being that of the Form of the Good. Whereas the physical world, perceived with the senses, is in constant flux and knowledge derived from it restricted and variable, the realm of Forms, apprehensible only by the mind, is eternal and changeless. Each Form is the pattern of a particular category of things in this world; thus there are Forms of man, stone, shape, color, beauty, and justice. Yet the things of this world are only imperfect copies of these perfect Forms.

To Plato, there is an ideal, and reality is the expression of these ideals. There is a Form of a chair in some heavenly spiritual place, while in reality, we have chairs, imperfect copies of the Form of a Chair. There is a Form Beauty, which things on our plane of existence contain some measure of. The Forms are hierarchic, and the highest Form is the Good.
Now I don’t want to burst anyone’s balloon here, folks, but what Plato is saying just isn’t true. It is, however, Plato’s attempt to connect the dots of perceived reality. His idea is that reality is an imperfect copy of some better realm. There is a lot of logic in the idea that a thing may partake of a certain amount of Beauty or Good or Justice, without ever approach total (Platonic) Beauty or Good or Justice. It is clear from this formulation of dot connections that old Phil was definitely in the business of trying to figure out right from wrong.
Plato also writes of ethical concerns quite directly, the rules for organizing and running a government. I’m no great Plato scholar, so I won’t go into much detail, but he was big on, well, Philosopher kings, probably because that would work well for him. (If he had been a plumber, I suppose he would have pushed for Plumber kings.) Phil is a man of his times, and envisions the best society as a hierarchic set of three classes corresponding to the three aspects of humanity. His idea of the individual is a fiction, made up whole cloth (the individual soul breaks down into three parts, reason, appetite, and spirit). If this fiction he really gives no thought to the individual as an individual (or, therefore, to the ethical concerns of individual rights). He wants a nice strictly stratified society, but keep in mind that his contemporary democracy was limited (to fully paid-up males of both sides Athenian descent). No one, not even Plato, lives outside of his own times. He only had the Narrative of his times, and his own dot-connecting abilities, to work with.

Plato’s philosophy (or any philosophy, for that matter) is a search for a better narrative, a better understanding of the perceived objective universe. Regardless of how well their specific ideas hold up today, the Greeks were great thinkers, and they thought about a lot of stuff. And, as the leading culture of the time on their part of the globe, they spoke for the entire western world: It is with the Greeks that the west becomes a unit. Alexander, known to one and all as a Great guy, knitted together a nice military empire that defined, for the first time, Western Civilization. Plato’s (and his compatriots’) ideas were the leading thoughts of the day, and are still read, and still have value, today. And they informed much of the Thought that followed.

The question arises, how religious were the ancient Greeks? And the answer is, it’s hard to pin down. They did indeed believe in a spiritual world, and while the narratives of the myths are not necessarily meant to be taken whole-cloth (many were created by dramatists and readjusted on an ad hoc basis for their own ends), the gods were perceived as real. The fact that the Greeks had no word for religion may or may not be telling…

The Narrative of Philosophy, the connecting of the dots that comprise the nature of the universe, continues for us thus: the religion, such as it was of the ancient Greeks, transmogrified into the religion, such as it was, of the ancient Romans. The Romans inherited the leadership of the western world from the Greeks, borrowed much of their thought and translated it into Latin without much embellishment, and went on from there broadening the scope of Western civilization even further. Zeus becomes Jupiter, Hera becomes Juno, and so forth and so on. Not much changes until the spread of Christianity, and the point at which the Roman Empire becomes, officially, Christian.
And this is an important juncture. Given the nature of the relationship of the Greeks to religion, the Greek philosophers can cogitate on religion rather cavalierly, and separate religion from philosophy. But with the Christians, probably beginning with St. Augustine, religion takes on an intellectual importance that transcends secular thought. This is not to say that prior to Augustine people might not think of religion as all-important, but after Augustine, it’s a done deal.
Augustine’s major work on this subject is City of God. Augie makes the claim that salvation of the soul is the most important thing, i.e., gaining admittance to the City of God. The secular world, government, all that sort of thing, is at a lower remove (and even evil). Saving your soul means living forever with God. In the light of this, earthly existence is pretty small potatoes. If you’ve got any sense in your head, you’ll concentrate on eternal life. Everything temporal pales in comparison to eternal salvation.
And, as far as the development of Thought is concerned on the time line of Western civilization, that is exactly what happens. Religion becomes the driving force of society as the Narrative of salvation. The dots of the perceived reality of salvation are intrinsically more important than any other dots.
Nothing else matters.
Philosophy, for all practical purposes, is dead. That Narrative doesn’t matter any more.
Religion rules.

Art

The history of art is a Narrative that can help explain the development of modern thought. History is the collection of random narratives of what happened; the history of art is the collection of random narratives of what happened among artists.
Why artists? Why art?
Artists, because artists can be the greatest thinkers of their time.
Art, because Art is Narrative. The artist selects from random data, connects some dots, and provides a result. Sounds like a Narrative to me.
Also, when we say Narrative is portable over time and geography, we are really saying that Art is transportable across time and geography. It is Art that contains the Texts of a culture, be those Texts literally words, or be they visual, or aural. You can study Art irrespective of Narrative, but it’s hard to imagine studying Narrative irrespective of Art.
Art is a lot of other things too. We won’t go into those. But you should do so on your own. Pick whichever Art you like. There’s plenty of it to go around.

Just because a Narrative can be saved across time and geography doesn’t mean it will be, or should be. A particular Narrative needs to be valued for some reason in order to make it worthwhile for to someone to bother transporting it. Religious and philosophical Narratives are valued for their content, and therefore survive time and geography. Art is also valued for its content, so it too is able to survive time and geography, but usually only if its content is worth valuing. We don’t save junk, in other words. In Art, we save the good stuff, or what was considered good at the time of its creation, or at some time along the way.

Ancient art is easy for us, because we’re not going to go into it too deeply. Superficial analysis allows us to generalize and dabble and have a little fun without exactly hurting our brains.
Some facts. First, as far as ancient art is concerned, there isn’t all that much of it. Let’s start the Egyptians, which is about as far back as we need to go.
What do the ancient Egyptians have in the way of art? Statues and wall paintings, pretty much, plus some big monuments.
Let’s move on to the ancient Greeks. What do the ancient Greeks have in the way of art? Statues and wall paintings, pretty much, plus some big monuments.
Let’s move on to the ancient Romans. What do the ancient Romans have in the way of art? Statues and wall paintings, pretty much, plus some big monuments.
Well, there’s 2000 years of art history in a nutshell.

There is, in fact, thematic unity among the ancients in terms of content, and great growth in terms of expression. The Narrative remained the same but the Narration improved dramatically.
The Narrative remained the same because all their art was mostly about the same things.
Think of the Egyptians. Their art is about the pharaohs and the gods. If there’s a picture of the average working schlub, he’s working in aid of the pharaohs and the gods. Think about the style of the pictures: flat. No perspective. Even their sculpture is less than realistic. Why? Did they like abstraction? No. It’s just that they didn’t know how to do it any better.
Look at their monuments. The pyramids. These are, indeed, monumental in scope, and rather startling feats of engineering. They are not, however, particularly complicated in terms of structure. The pyramids may have lasted thousands of years, but all they are is a stack of bricks. They’ve lasted because, structurally, a pile of bricks can’t fall down. Their ancient temples are big and thick, lots of walls and columns to hold up the ceiling, so large that you feel dwarfed by them but not particularly elegant. Great feats of engineering but not particularly complicated in terms of structure. Much of these, by the way, have fallen down.
A kid with a load of wooden bricks can build structures as complicated as the ancient Egyptians. And, oh yeah, these structures are also about pharaohs and gods.

Cut to the Greeks. Their art is about kings and gods and heroes (demigods). If there’s a picture of the average working schlub, he’s working in aid of the kings and gods and heroes. Think about the style of the pictures: still flat. Still no perspective. But look at their sculpture. Unlike the Egyptians, classical Greek sculpture, which comes along later on the timeline, is quite realistic. The human anatomy is portrayed correctly. Why? Because the Greeks learned how to do this. Scientifically, they knew more about anatomy than the Egyptians. They had better science. And they had better sculpting techniques as skill in narrating through sculpture improved. (Needless to say, Egyptian sculpture also gets “better” over time, if better is reflected in its realism.)
Greek sculpture is about kings and gods and heroes. The Narrative remained the same, but the Narration improved dramatically.
Look at their monuments. They improved on the Egyptians, and came up with better columns. With the Egyptians, columns are random poles holding up roofs. The Greeks thought out classical forms (I know we’ve heard that word before, Greekwise) and gave us Ionic, Doric, and Corinthian columns.
As with the Egyptians, the point of the columns was to hold up the roofs. Most of the great Greek buildings, like the Egyptian ones, have fallen down. Only the columns remain.
And, oh yeah, those structures are also about kings and gods and heroes.
Let’s face it. If you’re going to build BIG, you need a good reason, and you need money and resources. The chief concerns of a culture, its government and its religion, are the most likely to be able to generate those resources. That’s why big buildings are historically related to government and religion, because government and religion are important dots in the Narrative of a culture.

[Architecture is a fascinating subject for a variety of reasons. First of all, it is a problem of science, to wit, building a structure that does not fall down. (There’s nothing an architect hates more than his building falling down. That takes all the fun out of it.)
Second of all, architecture is big. A house is big. Even a hut is big, compared to other manmade items. But architecture also includes radically big buildings much bigger than huts and houses. Cultures as a whole build a certain number of big buildings that are strongly representative of that culture. A vast, big, complicated structure is going to be rare in the Classic age. It takes money, resources, time, energy, all in vast quantities. Why a culture chooses to build that building says much about that culture. As does how they build that building. A building is, by default, an important Text that we, as Narrative experts, should study closely, regardless of when it is built. Scale changes over time; today we build plenty of big buildings that dwarf the big buildings of the ancient Greeks, but we still build only a handful of mega-buildings that dwarf these big buildings, and they say much about us. As does every building we build.
Architecture is a very talky narrative.]

Let’s move on to your ancient Romans. Their art is about emperors and gods and heroes yet again. Their painting, such as remains to us, is a bit more realistic than painting preceding it, but keep in mind that painting tends to be decorative in these times. That is, you paint pictures on the walls or on the dinner dishes. Someone will have to invent canvases if we want real portability of paintings.
As for their sculpture, not much different from the Greeks. Once you learn anatomy, you’ve learned it. An ab is an ab no matter how you slice it. By the way, don’t think that all this ancient sculpture is as austere as it appears to us,. These guys did have paint, and colored up a lot of these things. Paint doesn’t last on a sculpture for thousands of years, especially if the sculpture is exposed to the elements. Paint on a house doesn’t last all that long, for that matter, which is why housepainters don’t go out of business even today.
Aside from their drains – and there is no question that the Romans did have a knack for moving water, be it to drink or to irrigate or to keep the bathrooms tidy, (and they loved a good bath, too) – what the Romans brought to the building table was the arch.
Finally someone figured out a way to keep the roof on the building.
Better still, finally someone figured out a way to put some space inside the building. When a roof is held up by columns and walls, the bigger the roof, the more columns and walls you need. It gets pretty claustrophobic. With a dome, at its essence, all you need is one set of walls.
What the arch does is push stress down to the sides. That is, if my roof is an arch, all the pressure of the roof goes down through the walls holding up the arch. I can build a much larger expanse of dome, supported only by the walls, than I can of flat ceiling. A flat ceiling pushes weight down evenly across its plane. So a flat ceiling must be either so small that its weight doesn’t overwhelm its supports, as in a small hut, or else a flat ceiling must have a lot of supports. Once you invent the dome, you suddenly have a lot of space.
Space is nice in a building.
(Keep in mind, by the way, that the building materials here are rocks. Stones. Bricks. They weigh a lot. Modern roofs are another story altogether, because of the building materials’ not weighing so much. We’ll get back to that later.)
As with the Greeks and Egyptians, the Romans also used columns to hold up the roofs in some buildings. Most of the great Roman buildings, like the Greek and Egyptian ones, have fallen down. Only the columns remain. Except for the ones with the domes.
The Pantheon still stands in the middle of Rome. It’s about 2000 years old. And it’s in pretty good shape.
And, yeah, those structures are also about emperors and gods and heroes.

As for Narrative, remember fiction? The collection of random narratives of things that didn’t happen, Narrative for Narrative’s sake, to fulfill that innate desire for narration.
“Let me tell you what happened.”
Except it didn’t happen.

In civilized society in the classic age, people can not only create narratives, they can also read and study pre-existing narratives. But literacy, the literal ability to read, is restricted to a small number of people, and texts are hard to reproduce. In a world of few written documents, and few readers, the literate tend to concentrate on the important texts, that is, the handful of texts are the cornerstones of culture, the key narratives documenting Thought. The Bible, for instance.
However, there is a way around this lack of literacy (short of teaching everyone to read) that still allows us to create a permanent version of the narrative. If we want to tell a story that didn’t happen, we create theater. You don’t need to be literate to be in an audience. As a result, Drama is the first great narrative art form, Art as art, Narrative as narrative.
In Drama, there really is a story. There is really is a narrative. Capital N Narrative is finally as easy to comprehend as it will ever be.

Both Plato and Aristotle talked about the value of literature. Plato didn’t think much of it, and that was the end of that. Dinner and a show was not his idea of a fun date. Aristotle, on the other hand, said that Drama was good because it allowed for catharsis.
Catharsis – the purging of the emotions.
EB again – “Through experiencing fear vicariously in a controlled situation, the spectator's own anxieties are directed outward, and, through sympathetic identification with the tragic protagonist, his insight and outlook are enlarged. Tragedy then has a healthful and humanizing effect on the spectator or reader.”
Compare vicarious.
Webster’s – “Experienced or realized through imaginative or sympathetic participation in the experience of another.”
Through Drama, we get our thrills through someone else’s experience. We grow as humans by sharing the emotions of tragic heroes.
Maybe this is one of the reasons why we like a good story, or maybe this somehow helps explain the instinct to Narrative. Narrative outside ourselves has an emotional effect within ourselves. If somebody jumps out at me from behind a tree, I am scared. If somebody jumps out at a movie actor from behind a tree, the actor acts scared, but I’m scared too. Except I have no reason to be scared.
Yet I continue to go to scary movies.
Catharsis.

Ari also delineates the unities, the rules, the classic approach, if you will. There’s more to it than this, but simply put, drama has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A narrative builds up to a climax, which is followed by an anticlimax.
What Ari is doing, in other words, is laying out the form of what is it that makes a good story.
Forms again. Classical forms.
Because we understand the forms, because we understand how drama is supposed to work, we get that much of a better understanding of text creation. That is, if I wish to write a drama, I know from Aristotle not to put the big dramatic climax in the beginning. I need to build up to it. I also need to come down from it.
Writers, creators of narrative, learn from the creators of Thought. They can also use experience. They can read a previous text, and improve on it.
Over time, texts build on one another and, presumably, get better. Just like sculpture got better. Just like architecture got better.

Do I have to say it?
Drama in ancient times is about kings and gods and heroes.
Quelle surprise, as they say in France.

The Middle Ages

The Classical Age is followed by a period we loosely refer to as the Middle Ages. Medieval Times. Or my personal favorite term, the Dark Ages.
What we’re really referring to here is the period between the end of the influence of the Roman Empire over the West, and the beginning of the Renaissance, when the West is “reborn.” Hence “middle.” This view of history concentrates on “great civilizations” as compared to, say, everyday life. There was plenty of everyday life in the West during this period, but not much great civilization. There was no longer a central civic body of organization, i.e., the Roman Empire, which kept everybody loosely federated through military force and alliances, and geographically connected through a network of roads, the ruins of which are still visible through Europe and even England. The great civilization of the moment, Islam, while it did make some inroads into Europe, was primarily somewhere else, based on traditions other than the Greco-Roman.
In Europe, this is a period of small warlords and feudalism, of small civic units evolving into nations. The underlying historical Narrative is diverse, and not germane to our discussion, with the exception of thought and architecture, which we’ll discuss briefly.

While the Middle Ages may be a period devoid of central government, it nonetheless does have one extremely important Narrative cultural determinant: Christianity. It is not so much that everyone has suddenly become Christian – the ongoing conversion of the West lasts way beyond the Renaissance – but enough of them do, and religion, as we have seen, is a prime force.
In Thought, there are two main streams. The religious one is Faith. The secular one is Reason. Plato and his cronies used reason to attempt to understand the universe. Augustine and his successors used faith. Not that they didn’t apply reason to their faith, but they knew that reason could only go so far, and their belief in God and their drive for salvation were prioritized above their need to reason things out.
So let’s give this period another name (although the Dark Ages will always be my personal favorite). Let’s call it the Age of Faith.
We will not be the first ones to do that. Too bad, because it’s really catchy.
The Age of Faith.
(Spoiler Alert: Sooner or later we will arrive at the Age of Reason.)

Architecture, as we have said, is a commanding expression of the Narrative of a culture because of its demands on resources. In the Age of Faith, the greatest works of architecture are cathedrals. (The only other major works are castles, which occasionally have great similarities to cathedrals, and often great dissimilarities, but we’ll stick to cathedrals because, for the most part, their story is more interesting.)
Think about Notre Dame de Paris. It was built (on an existing structure) from 1160 to 1250. Almost a hundred years (not to mention another subsequent hundred years of improvements after 1250). No one who designed or planned or worked on the cathedral when it started were alive when it was finished. This was not a work of man, as far as the Narrative is concerned: it was a work for God.
The point of a great church is to provide a public space for communication with the spiritual. A sense of space, of heaven, of the ethereal, makes that communication seem that much closer. The great architects following the Roman Empire learned a few improvements on the dome, and also learned how to prop up walls (and hold up roofs) in other ways. All these buildings are masonry, remember, which means rock heavy. Strong walls are needed, or strong supports for the walls. Propping up the walls meant buttresses holding up the walls to take the stress of the roof away from the walls and divert it even further. So a buttressed wall can be higher, and the roof bigger. Inside the building, there is that much more space, especially UP – where God is. Everything about a medieval church is there to inspire awe. And it still does, even today. Many of the great cathedrals have not (yet) fallen down.
The Narrative of the cathedral is not merely the ephemeral sense of space and spirit. There are the deliberate religious narratives of statuary and stained glass and painted walls. Often the shape of the building itself tells a story. Many a classic cathedral is cruciform: in the shape of a cross. This was not an accident.
Which means that everything about the cathedral – its size and shape and decoration – is part of the Narrative of the Age of Faith.

The Renaissance

Without going too much into cause and effect, the Dark Ages ended, and we have a rebirth of Western civilization, which is called the Rebirth.
Well, actually it’s not. Even though that’s what it was, many scholars found this to be less than mellifluous, so they christened it the Renaissance, which sounds so much nicer because it’s French.
Damned Frenchies!

A couple of key things are happening at this time. Countries are being formed from old tribal groups / warlords / feudalistic arrangements. Vast trade routes have been opened up both on land and sea, and Italy becomes central to Western Civilization again at least partly because of its position on those trade routes. The Pope is probably the strongest monarch of the Age (after going through hell in a hand basket, including a period of feuding multiple papistries). There is a rediscovery of old knowledge – scientific, philosophic, historical – that has been closeted during the Age of Faith (although the Renaissance is the apotheosis of that Age), and classical literature and forms and studies return with a vengeance. Thanks to Gutenberg and movable type, which are much more effective than monks copying by hand in unmovable monasteries, we get easily reproducible books to share the ideas of the time.

In art, we have the culmination of the classical in the sculpture of the time. Think Michelangelo: David. Moses. The Pieta.

We also get painting. Or at least painting that we can still see. Think Michelangelo: the Sistine Chapel. Before long we’ll have paintings on canvases, that we can move from place to place. Painters at this time master such things as perspective, so now there’s a sense of three dimensional depth. They master the craft of paint mixing so that their work lasts and looks realistic. The invent composition, the sense of putting the elements of a painting together in such a way to by (classically) pleasing to the eye.

Of course, all art is still about Gods and Heroes. Sorry about that. But enjoy it while it lasts, because it’s about to come to and end.

The Age of Faith is about to become the Age of Reason.