Cathedrals: the Inner Sun

Goethe was not mistaken, when he claimed that the builders of the great cathedrals, the theurists of that metaphorical and mysterious 'art noveau' that began to flourish in the West at the end of the twelfth century, the Gothic, 'sought God on high', although he had to have added: and by default, the Light, a term with which he was also identified.

Perhaps for this reason, and rightly so, Einstein affirmed, in his famous Theory of Relativity, that there was nothing faster than light; which would come to suppose, placing ourselves in freely interpreted theological terms, that there is nothing faster than God.

Here ‘Fiat Lux’ or ‘Let there be Light’, from Genesis, also marks, comparatively speaking, that border that separates two antagonistic artistic styles, such as Romanesque and Gothic.

From the shadows and obsolescence of the Romanesque, the Gothic Light emerged. A Light and some origins that are still involved in the most absolute of mysteries, regardless of the most accepted practical theory, insist on affirming that it was a natural solution derived from the problems and obsolescence posed by the Romanesque.

But the cathedrals were brilliant as well - understand the metaphor - because they constituted the repository of surprising knowledge, and in turn, wise and alchemists who sought the hermetic keys of forbidden and forgotten knowledge met.

The cathedrals were, in addition and comparatively speaking, those spaces of compassion, those precursors of the future 'houses of the people', in which hospitals and doctors attended to a badly injured urban offspring, lacking attention by the factual powers of the time and about Everything, in need of care and spiritual cultivation.

It is no exaggeration to say, then, that as a whole, the cathedrals constituted, in all their meanings, the true Light of the West.

NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property.