A new approach to Gothic architecture

A new PhD thesis examines the old question of the traditional significance of the cathedral, using both Traditionalist and non-Traditionalist sources. This is Lindy Weston, “Gothic Architecture and the Liturgy in Construction,” PhD thesis, University of Kent, 2018, available here.

Weston’s thesis is an “attempt to establish a common medieval metaphysic, and detail its implications for Gothic architecture.” It uses both Traditionalist (principally Guénon and Eliade) and other sources, notably Louis Dupré and Lindsay Jones. Dupré, author of Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (1993) and The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (2004), is a Roman Catholic scholar who was T. Lawrason Riggs Professor in the Philosophy of Religion at Yale 1973-98 and who investigated the question of tradition and modernity without any obvious connection to Traditionalism. Jones, author of The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison (2000) is a scholar of religion who taught at Ohio State University and was a student of Eliade’s at the University of Chicago. Beyond this connection, however, he too seems to have no obvious connection to Traditionalism.

Weston’s thesis is interesting, then, not only as a new and fresh treatment of an old question, but also as a work that integrates Traditionalist and non-Traditionalist treatments of tradition, metaphysics, and modernity. In the end it seems to rely more on Traditionalism for inspiration and its general frame than for its detailed analysis, as although Guénon and Eliade are discussed positively in the review of literature, they are then little used thereafter. Titus Burckhardt, author of the Traditionalist classic Chartres and the Birth of the Cathedral (1962) and Ananda Coomaraswamy are present in the bibliography, but not in the main text (save for a brief discussion of a reference to Burckhardt by Jones).