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Comment by whatthejesus | Hacker News Reader

The proportions, materials, overall design is quite beautiful. How is that not an expression to God? Having a few hundred people die falling off of scaffolding and taking 50 years to build is not helping anyone today.

Perhaps a few dead bodies and a couple hundred years of recitations will do the trick?

Put another way, if monks in the year 1k had a CNC router like this, they wouldn’t have peasants take 50 years to arrive at their expression to God.

It’s the architecture and the design that reflects the Lord almighty. The peasants doing it are a means to an end: so the church stands tall, so they can massacre the non-believers, burn witches, infidels, and imprison astronomers. All in the comfort of a beautiful cathedral.

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If the monks in the year 1k had CNC machines, they’d have built bigger and more elaborate cathedrals. The act was the message. The gothic cathedral was impossible by medieval standards, and that was part of the act of building it.

And, to your point, yes, if the monks followed the construction with a hundred years of prayer and sacrifice to consecrate the building, indeed the building would carry a more powerful emotional resonance than it does now. The sacrifice is the point, the effort is the point. It’s an act of devotion, not just one of construction.

Remember that this is a Catholic church, the church the monks worship in. Its primary role is to be a house for the Holy Eucharist and a place for the worship of God. The devotion in its creation is part of that; the beauty it embodies is in aid of that. For the monks, the emotional resonance stems from all of that, but is not in fact the point.

I realize most folks here have a different world view; but in the end, this building has no point whatsoever apart from how the monks see it.

For these monks and their church that may not be the point, for medieval churches it very much was. God was not something that a small group of people in the church believed in, God was a fact to those living in those places at those times. You’re right that folks here have a different world view, but you can’t understand the cathedral without understanding the world view of those who built it.

And - “this building has no point whatsoever apart from how the monks see it” is true for everything and every viewpoint.

It’s hard to say because the church was the job creator. In effect it was like working for the government. So who knows. I’d imagine like any society, you had a few “men of God” and then the rest of the people helped build the church then went to a brothel afterwards.

It’s far too easy to romanticize the past, which was categorically rife with hypocrisy just like today.

It’s pretty easy to understand monks though: they are getting meaning out of life through their work on something bigger than themselves.

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