“There is no time in this Cathedral; there is eternity”. Auguste Rodin, The Cathedral is Dying
In December last year, I was fortunate to enough to visit Notre-Dame a week after its official re-opening, following the devastating fire five years earlier. Despite the freezing temperatures, it was a tremendous experience standing in the square, witnessing the splendor of the full moon above the cathedral’s two towers, listening to the cacophonous bells as the evening congregation – and hundreds of tourists – flowed out of the lower portals of the western façade. As my gaze moved slowly beyond the portals, and over the gallery of kings, it settled upon the rose window above the balustrade.
As I attempted to focus on the detail of the window, this became increasingly difficult, as now the bells gathered a savagely sublime momentum, an exhilaratingly captivating speed of sound. The bells dissonantly clashed one moment, melding into a sonic symbiosis of overtones the next; with each attack they seemed to gain greater consciousness of one another, dancing in playful conversation. I could now witness subtle shifts in colour in the rose window; it had now become a synesthetic, kaleidoscopic mandala, a spinning gyre within which sound and vision had become one, dissolving each micro-phase of time in on itself, every temporal shift promising a glimpse into the eternal. Although I was very much swept up by the emotional intensity of this experience, I also took time in this moment to allow myself to sink into a deeper reverie and enjoy fondly thinking about the times I had been to this cathedral before, staring up at this magnificent creation.
It was only as I reflected later on my experience of Notre-Dame, that I began to think about the animistic nature of the way I had related to the cathedral, where I had become attuned to the bells as living, breathing subjects, and this, in turn had animated the rose window with its unforeseen colours. The artist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun deeply understood the importance of this animistic relationship to one’s environment, and the way this becomes a means of connecting with one’s ancestors and the deepness of time.
“Stones that whisper, stones that dance, that play on pipe and fiddle, that tremble at cockcrow, that eat and drink, stones that march as an army - these unseen slabs of granite hold the secret of the country’s inner life”. (Colquhoun, p.64)
It is now clear to me that a profound relationship to the sacred cannot occur without this animistic regard for the subject of its gaze - in Colquhoun’s case here - the neolithic monuments of Cornwall. It is no accident then that Colquhoun and the artist Auguste Rodin appear to have independently used the term “living stones” to describe the vitality and deep reverence that they held towards the sacred creations of history, whether they were neolithic, as in Colquhoun’s Cornish study, or Romanesque/Gothic for Rodin. In Rodin’s essay The Cathedral is Dying the whole cathedral becomes an animate structure comprised of living stones, and experiencing it in its fullness enables one to experience its essence:
“For all holds together, the least element of truth evokes the truth as a whole, and the beautiful is not distinct from the useful, no matter what the ignorant may believe” (Rodin, p.19).
Rodin attributes this essential convergence of beauty and utility to Gothic genius and the architects’ capacity to imbue their towering constructions with the spirits of nature. Rodin, like Colquhoun, Swedenborg, Baudelaire, and many an occultist, understood the importance of observing correspondences in nature in order to access a particular kind of spiritual essence and thus find a means of appreciating its mysteries: “the jubilant uncoils into ornaments like a snake in the sun” as he so beautifully put it.
“Both flower and fruit were models for the Gothics. One learns much by studying sequences, correspondences and analogies – for the same law governs moral and emotional life – providing one already has an understanding of this general law.” (Rodin, 2020, p.27).
It is by understanding “the law” of correspondences which therefore deepens one’s spiritual and emotional connection to the world, and whatever may lie beyond it. However pompously authoritarian it may sound, Rodin does not intend “the law” to mean that we must learn “rules” from a didactic manual, rather that we would enrich our experience of life by practicing a particularly Bergsonian form of intuitive engagement, which would allow the imagination and the intellect to work together, leading us to appreciate “the harmony of oppositions”.
For Rodin, it is by studying correspondences in nature that we gain a greater understanding of the essence of an object and its analogous relationship to other objects in its environment: through this attitudinal shift object (it) becomes subject - thou in Martin Buber’s terms. Rodin laments the absence of this form of relating in a world that fails to appreciate the spiritual treasures of the cathedral, or its profound connection to nature; “these rose windows whose magnificence was inspired by the setting sun or the dawn” (Rodin, p.33).
For Rodin, this respect for correspondences also applies to one’s relationship to time as it enables us to forge a deeper bond with the creations of the past and what it might have felt like to have lived at that time. I an aware that these “how we used to live” type exercises can become quite puerile if they are only done in a historical way, so it is therefore important to allow oneself to imagine, using the trusted tools of reverie and day-dreaming.
When Rodin visits a cathedral, he is “imbued with past centuries, the venerable centuries that produced these marvels” (p.39). For Colquhoun, it concerns what she refers to as “the psychic life of the land” (p.57).
granite, serpentine, slate, sandstone, limestone, chalk and the rest have each their special personality dependent on the age in which they were laid down, each being co-existent with a special phase of the earth-spirit’s manifestation”(ibid).
Colquhoun underscores the individuality of each age of creation and its concordance with spirit and matter: art, religion, magickal ritual, and walking in nature are all potential ways of coming into contact with the many different “personalities” of the past. For Rodin, it is the cathedral’s bells which become the unifying voice through which bygone ages speak to us.
“They are not dead! They speak in the voice of the bells! These three strokes for Angelus that sweetly strike against the sky know no obstacle or limit either in space or time; they come to us out of the depths of the past, they rejoin our Chinese brothers and the deep vibration of the gong” (Rodin, p.39).
Rodin believes that it is our dislocation from the past - to which the deep vibration of the bells unites us - which is the cause of our alienation. I would argue that this alienation is driven by our preoccupation with the future, leading to anxiety and fear as we lose touch with the whole that we may call God, or perhaps instead, the infinite, Ātman, The Real, The Dao, and so on and on. Fear and anxiety are connected with a fragmented, mechanized, reality that we have created which has become almost entirely disconnected from the unifying whole of correspondences and the natural world where the forests of the mind connect with those of the cathedral, or whichever sacred place we are visiting.
Sacred instruments such as the bell, gong, or tanpura therefore help us to find the sound of eternity within, where each tone becomes an Aeon, and its corresponding overtones phenomenologically create a continuity of experience across those Aeons. Paradoxically, although the overtones fill the space between the notes, it is they which, through the embodied nature of the experience and its trance like nature, allow space to open up to us in the fullness of our minds and bodies.
References
Colquhoun, I. (1957). The Living Stones: Cornwall. Peter Owen
Rodin, A. (2020). The Cathedral Is Dying: Auguste Rodin (Ekphrasis). David Zwirner Bookss