Churches.

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Good cross-post potential with the Spengler thread. I love all that stuff about romanesque, gothic and baroque churches aspiring (a-spire-ing?) to the Infinite in their great height, their emphasis on verticality, in contrast to the great World-Dome forming the primary structure of the synagogue, the mosque and the churches of the early, Eastern branches of Christianity.
 

catalog

Well-known member
has anyone been champing? It's like glamping, but in Churches. You ring them up and go in stay in them, usually to rub the brass. Not done it myself. But got a mate who's well into it.
 

catalog

Well-known member
yeah, that would be a good idea. you do still have to pay i think, and it's a similar cost to an airbnb i think. probably take a bit of organising. i've stayed in a few gurudwaras before. very unique atmosphere. late night and early doors singing, that's usually pretty good. fervent vibes outside.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Perfect timing for me to read this thread, my girlfriend is just in Cologne (and Dusseldorf) for this book launch thing and people are talking about the cathedral on facebook. I said

The cathredal is a truly terrifying building. It always strikes me as a perfect monument to a vengeful and jealous god, designed purely to strike fear into puny humans for miles around.
It dominates Cologne in a way that I've never seen a cathedral dominate another city. Then again I have never been to Lincoln which I think had the biggest cathedral for years and which presumably seems especially huge in a relatively small town.
In general I have often thought about what you talk about at the start, when did villages start throwing up these buildings, not just cathedrals but churches I mean? How much did they spend on them relative to their own dwellings? Did they go hungry to build them? Why?
 

craner

Beast of Burden
I went up the tower at Cologne and it gave me vertigo.

Chartres is amazing and has a very good book written about it by Joris-Karl Huysmans. I read the book years before visiting the cathedral, but was pleased to find it being sold in the shop. You can see the bulding for miles away when you are driving to the town because the landscape is so flat there. It's like a gigantic spastic bat stuck on the horizon.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
Cologne cathedral looks as though it has been stained with evil. Or at least the stern Protestantism has seeped into the walls and festered away over the years.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Cologne cathedral looks as though it has been stained with evil. Or at least the stern Protestantism has seeped into the walls and festered away over the years.

It is a malevolent-looking pile. It has the same feel as the cathedral in the first Tim Burton Batman film.
 

sufi

lala
My neighbour works in Westminster Abbey, he got me in one day, its like a huge drafty dump of all monarchistic and otherwise defunct icons
 

luka

Well-known member
I was in Westminster's catholic cathedral last week. I'd never noticed how like a mosque it is before.
 

luka

Well-known member
Blake counterposed Westminster Abbey with St Pauls. St. Pauls was worldly, profane. Westminster Abbey, sacred, the divine imagination.
 

sufi

lala
the cosmati pavement is :cool: tho
cosmati-pavement-2010-photomosaic.jpg
In the year of Christ one thousand two hundred and twelve plus sixty minus four, the third King Henry, the city, Odoricus and the abbot put these porphyry stones together.
If the reader wisely considers all that is laid down, he will find here the end of the primum mobile; a hedge (lives for) three years, add dogs and horses and men, stags and ravens, eagles, enormous whales, the world: each one following triples the years of the one before.
The spherical globe here shows the archetypal macrocosm.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I was in Westminster's catholic cathedral last week. I'd never noticed how like a mosque it is before.
I always think that Orthodox churches in Russia look very much like mosqes

Ort4hodoxChurch.jpg

I've got a friend who used to work painting icons for Georgian churches which seems crazy.

edit: I dunno if that particular church is in Russia, just googled for an Orthodox Church so could be anywhere I guess.
 

luka

Well-known member
On the Winchester thread I was talking about how the medieval era was a time of perpetual drunkeness. Ruddy cheeked Friars with distended bellies, Chaucer making fart jokes, and churches are full of little details like that. The bawdy. It's very human, very warm. Falstaff.
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
what's the story behind that firefinga?

reminds me of this:

The sacred knows how to cope with the profane and deconsecrated game: witness the irreverent and obscene carvings in cathedrals. Without concealing them, the Church embraced cynical laughter, biting fantasy and nihilistic scorn. Under its mantle the demonic game was safe. Bourgeois power, on the contrary, puts play in quarantine, isolates it in a special ward, as if it wanted to stop it infecting other human activities. Art is this privileged and despised area set apart from commerce. And it will stay that way until economic imperialism refits it in its turn as a spiritual supermarket. Then, hunted down everywhere, play will burst out everywhere.
 
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