Strait Gate: Thresholds and Power in Western History - Hardcover

Jütte (Jutte), Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300211082 ISBN 13: 9780300211085

Verlag: YALE UNIV PR, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

A prize-winning scholar offers a sweeping exploration of the role doors have played in history

Exploring a chapter not yet probed in the cultural history of the West, The Strait Gate demonstrates how doors, gates, and related technologies such as the key and the lock have shaped the way we perceive and navigate the domestic and urban spaces that surround us in our everyday lives. J tte reveals how doors have served as sites of power, exclusion, and inclusion--and, by extension, as metaphors for salvation--in the course of Western history.

This book makes it clear that doors, more than any other parts of the house, are the objects onto which we project our ideas of and anxieties about security, privacy, and shelter. Without doors, of course, houses could not exist. But even though we each walk through doorways well over a hundred times a day, we typically pay little attention to the doors we encounter. We regard them simply as a means of entering or leaving a building or room. Yet when our doors stop working as they should--when we find that we cannot lock or open them, for instance--we react with discomfort and anxiety.

Drawing on a wide range of archival, literary, and visual sources, as well as on research literature across various disciplines and languages, J tte pays particular attention to the history of the practices that have developed over the centuries in order to handle and control doors in everyday life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Daniel Jütte is a historian of early modern and modern European history. He is a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows and a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin. He lives in Cambridge, MA.

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The Strait Gate

Thresholds and Power in Western History

By Daniel Jütte

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Yale University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-300-21108-5

Contents

INTRODUCTION, 1, 
CHAPTER ONE. "I Am the Door": Portals of Salvation and Status, 23, 
CHAPTER TWO. The Power of the Keys, 81, 
CHAPTER THREE. "Whence Is That Knocking?": Precarious Passages, 134, 
CHAPTER FOUR. Reading Doors, 175, 
CHAPTER FIVE. The "City's Eyes": Gates and the Urban History of Europe, 209, 
EPILOGUE, 252, 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 259, 
NOTES, 261, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 311, 
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS, 355, 
INDEX, 359, 

CHAPTER 1

"I Am the Door" Portals of Salvation and Status

If we could travel back in time and walk through a premodern city, we would likely find the sensory experience unusual. The ambient smells were often rank compared with those of our modern cities, while the now normal clamor of machines and electronic devices was blissfully absent. Today, we must rely on textual sources to help bring these experiential aspects to life. By contrast, it is far easier to conceive of what a premodern city looked like, because of the historic districts that survive in cities throughout Europe: many churches, palaces, and houses have been preserved over the centuries and look very much like they originally did. However, this does not mean that we look at these cities in the same way that people of premodernity did. Here again, both written and visual sources of the time can help us piece together what people paid attention to when they passed through urban spaces — and it becomes clear that their perceptions were often quite different from ours. Francesco Bocchi's Le bellezze della città di Fiorenza, for instance, which first appeared in 1591, provides an extensive and popular description of the city of Florence. Although it was presented as a travel guide for foreign visitors, it can also be seen as part of the genre of laudatory descriptions of cities that allowed urban citizens to share their pride in their city's noteworthy sights.

Let us spend a moment in sixteenth-century Florence, with Bocchi as our guide. We cannot help but notice the careful attention Bocchi pays, on his various city tours, to the doors of buildings. He presents the "skillfully executed doors" of a certain palazzo as witness to the "exquisite inventiveness" of the architect. Looking at another palazzo, he observes that "the portal is of noble appearance." And of a third he notes that "the very beautiful portal on the façade is made with rich and magnificent ornamentation." Bocchi also devotes attention to the less ornate private homes of ordinary citizens. At times he points to their "beautiful doors"; elsewhere he remarks that a particular "door is designed with much grace." Church doors always merit special attention: the two bronze doors by Donatello in the sacristy of San Lorenzo "are very highly prized by all artists." And of the doors on the right side of the nave at San Lorenzo, attributed to Michelangelo, he writes, "In the simplicity of the parts one recognizes such an elegant and refined understanding that all other work, no matter how exquisite, is surpassed." Yet the most extravagant praise of all is reserved for the famous bronze doors of the Florence Baptistery, designed by Lorenzo Ghiberti (Figure 2). According to Bocchi, they are "executed with such unique and uncommon workmanship that they are regarded as miraculous rather than merely outstanding. Truly, if these two doors by Ghiberti were visible only on occasion, and not at all times, as is the case, there is no doubt that they would rightly be counted among the most valuable wonders of the world."

Bocchi's close attention to doors is a productive but by no means unusual example. Indeed, doors at that time were not simply functional objects, and they carried far more meanings than we associate with them today. Even the doors of average private houses were more than just mechanisms for entering a building. They frequently served as sites for legal proceedings, as backdrops for political ceremonies, and as indicators of social status and honor. Thus the cultural historian cannot focus solely on the door's material appearance: it is also crucial to uncover the roles that doors played within the symbolic world of premodernity and within what Jacques Le Goff has called the premodern "spatialization of thought."

In this context, the religious symbolism of doors, especially church doors, springs to mind. It is no exaggeration to say that the church door was considered the archetype of all doors in premodern culture, and it frequently became the showplace for a range of religious rituals and ceremonies. In other words, each church door, far from being merely an imposing and interchangeable backdrop, was believed to embody a specific religious meaning.

This metaphysical dimension was closely connected to the contemporary understanding of salvation, a context in which doors and gates played an essential role. Indeed, premodern people were convinced that the decision between every soul's salvation or damnation would someday be played out in front of very real, though not earthly, doorways: the entrances to heaven and hell. Remember those magnificent doors to the Florence Baptistery, which Bocchi called a "wonder of the world" and which the great Michelangelo himself saw — literally — as an anticipation of the "gates of paradise." This designation has lived on in the vernacular, although most of the Baptistery's present-day visitors are probably not familiar with the depth of this religious background. For us, the religious experience of these doors has become a purely aesthetic one.

In premodernity, by contrast, most people firmly believed that heaven and paradise would be reached through gateways or doorways; they also pondered endlessly over who would be permitted to enter, and what they needed to do to ensure their admittance. Over the centuries, responses to this question — a key issue in Christian theology — divided the various currents within Christianity, particularly after the Reformation, but there was consensus on the idea of a gateway to heaven, which was confirmed by the Old Testament. And in the New Testament, it was Jesus himself who, in a famous verse, described heaven's gate as "the strait gate," where "there are last which shall be first, and there are first which shall be last." He advised his disciples, "Strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able." Thus, the celestial door was open only to the righteous, as can also be seen in several other New Testament passages. One of these (Matt 16:13–20) is the source of the belief that the Apostle Peter kept watch over this door and that Christ himself entrusted Peter with the key.

Yet the exact location of this entrance to heaven was a source of much disagreement. The influential doctor of the church Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636) claimed that there must be two doorways, one to the east and one to the west. This issue was further complicated because the Bible does not state definitively whether the porta caeli should be envisioned as a gate or a door. The Latin term porta was ambiguous in any case; in premodern times, it could designate a city gate as well as a house door. Indeed, in Christian iconography we find both options: the entrance to heaven sometimes appears as an imposing city gate, while elsewhere it is a simple wooden door positioned in the firmament between the sun and the moon, as though part of a modest dwelling of that era (Figure 3).

Here, we should also distinguish between the heavenly gates and the gate that stood, according to contemporary thinking, at the entrance to paradise — which here means the garden of Eden. For Christian teaching made a distinction between the earthly paradise and the kingdom of heaven. Certain authors, such as St. Augustine (354–430), pondered whether the two realms might not in fact be one and the same. But by and large, from early Christianity onward, the prevailing belief was "that an intermediate place of happiness or at least of rest, namely 'paradise,' receives the soul of the just until these recover their bodies and make the final ascent to the kingdom of heaven." Well into the early modern period, theologians and travelers sought to locate paradise in various earthly places, primarily the Orient. It was widely presumed that the entrance to the garden of Eden had a gate, which had been locked since the expulsion of Adam and Eve. According to this interpretation, only Jesus could open this gate for humanity: shortly before his death on the cross, he promised the Good Thief, "Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise."

Over the centuries, the Christian imagination built still more doorways on the path to salvation, further strengthening the door's role as one the most important symbolic forms in Christian eschatology. New doors emerged in the Christian economy of salvation as the idea of purgatory gained currency and influence during the Middle Ages. According to this idea, some souls, though not actually barred from the kingdom of heaven, would not be allowed entry until they had served penance for their worldly sins and undergone a process of purification. While some early Christian authorities considered purgatory to be a spiritual state, theologians and believers during the High Middle Ages increasingly thought of it as an actual location. It was a "spacious" place, but also an "enclosed space." This implied that there would have to be an entrance to, as well as an exit from, the realm of purgatory.

In the Divine Comedy, Dante gives a detailed description of his entrance through the gateway of purgatory, where an angel inscribed the letter P (for peccatum, "sin") seven times on his forehead with a sword. The realm of purgatory that lay behind this gate, according to Dante, consisted of a mountain with seven tiers, each representing a specific sin. The poet had to stop at each one in order to cleanse the wound of the corresponding P. Entering purgatory was thus a thorny procedure, yet Dante describes the portal in positive terms, as a "holy gate" (porta sacrata). And indeed, this portal was relatively harmless compared with the one that led to eternal damnation.

It was at those gates of hell that Dante began his journey through the afterlife. In one famous passage he reported that this entrance bore, in dark letters, the fearful inscription:

Through me the way into the suffering city,
Through me the way to the eternal pain,
Through me the way that runs among the Lost....
Abandon every hope, who enter here.

The idea of hell as a city with barred gates can be found in numerous ancient religions, but Christianity visualized it in particularly gruesome detail, and Dante's grim description fits the nightmarish depictions of hell that were emerging from the eschatological imaginations of his contemporaries. Furthermore, the entrance to hell, unlike that of purgatory, is explicitly mentioned in the Bible: the Gospel of Matthew (16:18) affirms, "The gates of hell shall not prevail against [the church]." While Matthew did not specify precisely what awaited the damned beyond these gates, other books in the Bible, particularly the Book of Revelation, offered premodern believers a vivid portrait of the horrors associated with entering the realm of hell. Later contributions from clerics and poets, Dante among them, expanded on these horrors. In the fifth century, Bishop Caesarius of Arles offered a particularly terrifying vision of hell, which he imagined as a vertical pit with doors at the top: "No breathing space will be left, no breath of air will be available when the doors press from above. Those who say farewell to the things of nature will be cast down there; since they have refused to know God, they will no longer be recognized by Him." The entryway in particular was often described in lively detail, and some authors even claimed to know that the doors were burning hot to the touch or that they creaked. Protestants, too, embraced this vivid imagery. Indeed, Luther sharply criticized contemporary skeptics who argued that hell could not possibly have a wooden door; they reasoned that such a door would have burned down long ago. And while Luther acknowledged that humans cannot know whether the gates of hell (and their chains) are made of wood or iron, he did not reject the imagery associated with the entrance to the underworld, for "we have to visualize the things that we do not know or understand, irrespective of whether, in reality, they look the way they are commonly depicted."

Indeed, Christian art offers numerous visualizations of the gates of hell. Particularly impressive is the psalter of Henry of Blois from the twelfth century, which portrays an angel locking away Satan and his ilk with an imposing key, as described in Revelation 20 (Figure 4). Pictures of the gates of hell also figure frequently in the rather different context of Christ's "Harrowing of Hell." The New Testament only hints at this episode, but it was fleshed out and popularized through the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus and was in line with theological thinking of the time, according to which souls who had been condemned to hell could not possibly escape the underworld by their own powers. Yet one group of souls could still hope for redemption: those found in limbo, a place located around the edges of hell (the Latin word limbo means "boundary"). These were the souls of pagans who led righteous lives before the coming of Christ, as well as the souls of infants who had died unbaptized. Christ himself was believed to have appeared at the gates of hell after his death and to have opened them for the souls in limbo. Although the church never elevated the idea of limbo to the status of a doctrine, and theologians disagreed upon the extent to which Christ's appearance there could offer those souls true salvation, the episode remained a favorite subject in premodern Christian art.

The visual depiction of this scene was highly standardized. Typically, the entrance to hell is situated in a barren landscape, and the liberated souls gaze out in awe at their savior, who has just defeated the guardians of the underworld and unlocked the gates. Christ is often shown standing triumphant on the broken door, which has been torn from its hinges and thrown to the ground. Incidentally, historians are indebted to these paintings: they are among the most detailed extant depictions of premodern doors, including the hinges on the ground and the nails from the doorframe (Figure 5). This precision of detail was no coincidence but a part of the message: the viewer should have no doubt about the all-conquering power manifest in Christ's breaking open the doors. It was also in line with the image from the Gospels in which Christ appeared to the apostles after his resurrection, and in so doing vanquished the locked doors (John 20:19), a miracle that premodern theologians regarded as further proof of his "not only natural, but also divine qualities." By the same token, depictions of the Harrowing of Hell made it painfully clear that the damned would never be able to open the gate to the underworld from the inside. According to Nicodemus, after Christ appeared, he closed the gate of hell until the end of time, locking it from the outside with seven seals — or in words that in the Middle Ages were attributed to St. Peter Damian, a doctor of the church, "For those who are in hell prayer is useless, because the gates of mercy are closed to them and the hope of salvation forbidden."

If faithful Christians wished to ensure their salvation and gain admittance directly to the kingdom of heaven, they were thus well advised to work toward it throughout their lifetimes. Indeed, according to the church, believers could have a glimmer of the divine feeling of passing through heaven's gate whenever they passed through a church door, the church being God's house on earth. In a statement attributed to St. Augustine, "There are two doors: the door of paradise and the door of the church: it is through the door of the church that we enter paradise." This analogy between the two was a recurring theme in visual representations (Figure 6), and it influenced the architectural design of churches. In fact, this was one of the reasons why premodern church portals were so frequently magnificent and highly ornate.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Strait Gate by Daniel Jütte. Copyright © 2015 Yale University. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: YALE UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0300211082
• ISBN 13: 9780300211085
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Sprache: Englisch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 386
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar