Nervous Tracery: Modern Analogies between Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism

During the Gothic revivals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Gothic architecture shed the morbid associations attached to it in earlier periods and was admired for the aesthetic and theological vision that shaped its medieval development. The Gothic cathedral came to epitomize the wholeness of the Middle Ages and an impulse toward synthesis in theology as well as the arts. This essay surveys four Gothic revival texts that define a relationship between medieval Gothic architecture and Scholastic theology: John Ruskin's essay ”The Nature of Gothic” in The Stones of Venice (1851-53); Henry Adams' Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904); Wilhelm Worringer's Form in Gothic (Formprobleme der Gotik, 1911); and Erwin Panofsky's Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951). In these widely read works, influential beyond the field of art history, the seemingly arcane analogy between the Gothic and the Scholastic becomes a proving ground for the projects of prominent intellectuals within distinct historical and cultural contexts. For each author, the meaning of the Gothic hangs in a particular balance between its tracery-that is, its naturalistic ornamental detail-and its larger structure: the balance between the concrete and the abstract, between multiplicity and unity, also achieved in Scholastic theology. Because their analogies between the Gothic and the Scholastic isolate distinct lines of force within these complex systems, Ruskin, Adams, Worringer, and Panofsky each identify different values there, revealing as much about the modern mind as about the medieval. The syntheses that their medieval forbears accomplished collectively in service of faith, these interpreters seek independently in service of their own cultural identity, aesthetic values, or intellectual coherence.