nknowable its nourishment. From these epics heights... the piety of [the Gothic] brings us back to the paths of the Gospel; in God-made-man, it cherished humanity; it loved and respected God's creatures as He loved them; it accepted the benefit which He brought to men of good will... and extended it to include even death, which was no more than a sleep in the Lord (Focillon, Gothic 71-72).
Within this context, then, in both the Romanesque and Gothic periods the cathedral in medieval France was the ultimate metaphor for the monotheistic God/Man-centered universe as defined by the Roman Catholic Church (Focillon, Gothic 77). This was not a conservative, backward-looking metaphor, as might be suspected of creations subsidized by a "universal" institution such as the Church was in Europe at that time. Secure in its position, the Church harbored the most forward-looking slipstreams of thought and artistic talent in the era. In creating the entity of the French cathedral, those talents developed a working understanding of the fact that metaphorical thinking creates new dimensions of feeling and understanding (Clay & Krempel 21). The Renaissance view of its predecessors' cathedrals missed this point. (The term "Gothic" was a Renaissance invention, an abusive description inferring "barbarian" characteristics upon the buildings they inherited (Kidson 10).) Renaissance man rejected the apparently hodge-podge jumble of statuary and decoration, flying buttresses and multi-colored windows of kaleidoscopic intensity that the greatest French cathedrals exhibited. Trying to "rediscover" the standards of their classical Greek and Roman ancestors, Renaissance artists and architects viewed the great Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals with the contempt of familiarity. They failed to recognize the metaphorical unity of those cathedrals. It was an organic metaphor, true, developed more from the spirit of the times than from a planned symbolism. ...