The Nature of Norwegian Gothic

Speaker: Michael Harrington, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University

 

This talk takes its title from John Ruskin’s famous chapter on Gothic in The Stones of Venice. Although Ruskin’s concept of Gothic is conditioned by his nineteenth-century presuppositions about the ‘worker’, he does effectively explore how the Gothic church incorporates both the intellectual and the broad and rather slippery category of ‘everyone else’. This latter category, whether we think of it as the ‘great herd’ of Iamblichus or the ‘initiates’ of Dionysius the Areopagite, had long been identified by the Neoplatonists as the reason why sacred places exist at all. The Norwegian stave churches constitute an especially striking example of how the ‘great herd’ finds its place. The stave churches absorb elements of Continental Gothic, with the peace it has already made between ecclesiastical initiators and initiates, but they also incorporate the ornamental tradition of Ruskin’s “barbarous nations on the skirts of the empire.” The characteristics of Gothic identified by Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites remain useful in teasing out this peculiar example of a double incorporation of the ‘great herd’.