The Beautiful Necessity | Page 6

all who interfere with them.
The fall of Rome marked the end of the ancient Pagan world. Above its

ruin Christian civilization in the course of time arose. Gothic
architecture is an expression of the Christian spirit; in it is manifest the
reaction from licentiousness to asceticism. Man's spiritual nature,
awakening in a body worn and weakened by debaucheries, longs
ardently and tries vainly to escape. Of some such mood a Gothic
cathedral is the expression: its vaulting, marvelously supported upon
slender shafts by reason of a nicely adjusted equilibrium of forces; its
restless, upward-reaching pinnacles and spires; its ornament, intricate
and enigmatic--all these suggest the over-strained organism of an
ascetic; while its vast shadowy interior lit by marvelously traceried and
jeweled windows, which hold the eyes in a hypnotic thrall, is like his
soul: filled with world sadness, dead to the bright brief joys of sense,
seeing only heavenly visions, knowing none but mystic raptures.
Thus it is that the history of architecture illustrates and enforces the
theosophical teaching that everything of man's creating is made in his
own image. Architecture mirrors the life of the individual and of the
race, which is the life of the individual written large in time and space.
The terrors of childhood; the keen interests and appetites of youth; the
strong stern joy of conflict which comes with manhood; the lust, the
greed, the cruelty of a materialized old age--all these serve but as a
preparation for the life of the spirit, in which the man becomes again as
a little child, going over the whole round, but on a higher arc of the
spiral.
The final, or fourth state being only in some sort a repetition of the first,
it would be reasonable to look for a certain correspondence between
Egyptian and Gothic architecture, and such a correspondence there is,
though it is more easily divined than demonstrated. In both there is the
same deeply religious spirit; both convey, in some obscure yet potent
manner, a sense of the soul being near the surface of life. There is the
same love of mystery and of symbolism; and in both may be observed
the tendency to create strange composite figures to typify
transcendental ideas, the sphinx seeming a blood-brother to the
gargoyle. The conditions under which each architecture flourished were
not dissimilar, for each was formulated and controlled by small
well-organized bodies of sincerely religious and highly enlightened
men--the priesthood in the one case, the masonic guilds in the
other--working together toward the consummation of great

undertakings amid a populace for the most part oblivious of the
profound and subtle meanings of which their work was full. In
Mediæval Europe, as in ancient Egypt, fragments of the Ancient
Wisdom--transmitted in the symbols and secrets of the cathedral
builders--determined much of Gothic architecture.
The architecture of the Renaissance period, which succeeded the
Gothic, corresponds again, in the spirit which animates it, to Greek
architecture, which succeeded the Egyptian, for the Renaissance as the
name implies was nothing other than an attempt to revive Classical
antiquity. Scholars writing in what they conceived to be a Classical
style, sculptors modeling Pagan deities, and architects building
according to their understanding of Vitruvian methods succeeded in
producing works like, yet different from the originals they
followed--different because, animated by a spirit unknown to the
ancients, they embodied a new ideal.
In all the productions of the early Renaissance, "that first transcendent
springtide of the modern world," there is the evanescent grace and
beauty of youth which was seen to have pervaded Greek art, but it is a
grace and beauty of a different sort. The Greek artist sought to attain to
a certain abstract perfection of type; to build a temple which should
combine all the excellencies of every similar temple, to carve a figure,
impersonal in the highest sense, which should embody every beauty.
The artist of the Renaissance on the other hand delighted not so much
in the type as in the variation from it. Preoccupied with the unique
mystery of the individual soul--a sense of which was Christianity's gift
to Christendom--he endeavored to portray that wherein a particular
person is unique and singular. Acutely conscious also of his own
individuality, instead of effacing it he made his work the vehicle and
expression of that individuality. The history of Renaissance
architecture, as Symonds has pointed out, is the history of a few
eminent individuals, each one moulding and modifying the style in a
manner peculiar to himself alone. In the hands of Brunelleschi it was
stern and powerful; Bramante made it chaste, elegant and graceful;
Palladio made it formal, cold, symmetrical; while with Sansovino and
Sammichele it became sumptuous and bombastic.
As the Renaissance ripened to decay its architecture assumed more and
more the characteristics which distinguished that