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Proust, Marcel - Extract from the Death of Cathedrals
Identifier
019780
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Extract from THE DEATH OF CATHEDRALS - Marcel Proust Le Figaro August 16, 1904
full translation for Rorate by John Pepino, PhD
Suppose for a moment that Catholicism had been dead for centuries, that the traditions of its worship had been lost. Only the unspeaking and forlorn cathedrals remain; they have become unintelligible yet remain admirable.
Then suppose that one day scholars manage, on the basis of documentary evidence, to reconstitute the ceremonies that used to be celebrated in them, for which men had built them, which were their proper meaning and life, and without which they were now no more than a dead letter; and suppose that for one hour artists, beguiled by the dream of briefly giving back life to those great and now silent vessels, wished to restore the mysterious drama that once took place there amid chants and scents—in a word, that they were undertaking to do what the Félibres have done for ancient tragedies in the theatre of Orange.[1]
Is there any government with the slightest concern for France’s artistic past that would not liberally subsidize so magnificent an undertaking? Do you not think that it would do what it did in the case of Roman ruins for these cathedrals, which are probably the highest, and unquestionably the most original expression of French genius? After all, one may well prefer the literature of other peoples to ours, prefer their music to ours, their painting and sculpture to ours, but it is in France that Gothic architecture created its first and most perfect masterpieces. All other countries have done is to imitate our religious architecture without ever matching it.
And so, to return to my hypothesis, here come scholars who have been able to rediscover the cathedrals’ lost meaning. Sculptures and stained-glass windows recover their significance, a mysterious odour once again wafts in the temple, a sacred drama is performed, and the cathedral starts to sing once more. When the government underwrites this resurrection, it is more in the right than when it underwrites the performances in the theaters of Orange, of the Opéra-Comique, and of the Opéra, for Catholic ceremonies have an historical, social, artistic, and musical interest whose beauty alone surpasses all that any artist has ever dreamed, and which Wagner alone was ever able to come close to, in Parsifal—and that by imitation.
The source of the experience
Proust, MarcelConcepts, symbols and science items
Concepts
ForgivenessSymbols
Science Items
Activities and commonsteps
Activities
Overloads
Extreme emotionListening to sound and music
Suppressions
Beauty, art and musicCreating a sacred geography
Dietary moderation
Enacting ritual and ceremony
Listening to music
Reverse REM
Singing and humming
Squash the big I am
Suppressing memory
Suppressing obligations
Suppression of learning
Commonsteps
Asking for forgivenessChanting, mantra and prayer
Expunging demons
Forgiveness
Listening to cathedral organs
Using bells and gongs
Using Naturally Reverberant acoustic space