Gazing Irreverently, & Praising Instead Of Praying

Emery Neff, The Poetry of History: The Contribution of Literature and Literary Scholarship To the Writing of History since Voltaire (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1947; repr. 1961), 139-140: 

Michelet’s power of resurrection first comes into full play in explaining how the Middle Ages, especially France of the Middle Ages, “expressed in architecture its most intimate thought.” He repeoples the great churches. “Try to imagine the effect of lights in these prodigious monuments, when the clergy, circulating by aerial ramps, animated the dark masses with fantastic processions, passing and repassing along balustrades, on bridges of lacework, in rich costumes, with candles and chants; when lights and voices turned in circle after circle, while from below, in the shadow, the ocean of people responded. That was for this era the true drama, the true mystery play; the representation of the journey of humanity across the three worlds, that sublime initiation which Dante took from transitory reality to fix eternally in his Divine Comedy. This colossal theater of sacred drama has returned, after the long festival of the Middle Ages, to silence and shadow. The feeble voice one hears there, the voice of the priest, is impotent to fill the arches whose amplitude was designed to embrace and contain the thunder of the people’s voice. The church is widowed, empty. Its profound symbolism, which then spoke so loud, is mute; now an object of scientific curiosity, of Alexandrian interpretations. The church is a Gothic museum, visited by the sophisticated. They move about, gaze irreverently, praise instead of praying.” The very stones of these churches illustrated the philosophy of Vico by the sublime anonymity of the masons who shaped them. “To know with what care they toiled, obscure and lost in their guild, with what abnegation, you must go over the most retired, least accessible parts of the cathedrals. Mount to those aerial deserts, to the ultimate points of those spires where the roofer fears to venture. There you will often find, buffeted by eternal wind, some masterpiece of art and sculpture upon which the poor workman lavished his life. He worked for God only, for the cure of his soul.” Tombs told the same story. “In the first Christian ages, in the time of lively faith, sorrows were patient. Death seemed a brief divorce, it separated, but only to reunite. A sign of this belief in the soul, in the reunion of souls, is that, up to the twelfth century, the body, the mortal remains, seems to have less importance. It does not yet ask for magnificent tombs. Hidden in a corner of the church, a simple slab covers it; enough to mark it for the day of resurrection: Hinc surrectura.”