The Babel Fiasco (Part III: Knocking on Heaven’s Door)

Rheims Cathedral, West Portal. Heaven's door.

We pick up Ariadne’s thread at the West central portal of Rheims cathedral (c. 12410. It is surrounded with a legion of apostles, saints, angels, church fathers and even the Virgin and Christ Himself.
The portal is no longer populated by the pagan demons of the Romanesque, rather it has become a vision of the sacred. The door to the cathedral becomes, in the High Gothic period, the Portal Coeli, the Gate of Heaven. The Gothis Cathedral becomes a fragment of the New Jerusalem – Heaven on Earth – the portal ushers in the pilgrim to this fallen portion of heaven. We see, here, a departure from the biblical, and Augustinian, dichotomy between the “breath of life” and “dust of the ground” as evidenced in Chartres (c.1194).
Erwin Panofsky writes in Gothic Architecture & Scholasticism,

The infinitely more lifelike – though not, as yet, portrait like – High Gothis statues of Rheim and Amiens, Strassburg and Naumberg … proclaim the victory of Aristotlianism. The Human soul, though recognised as immortal, was now held to be the organising and unifying principle of the body itself rather than the substance independent thereof.

There is something of the idea of transubstantiation in this.  The doctrinal concept of the transubstantiation asserts that in the Eucharist,  “…the enire substance of the bread and wine is converted into the entire substance of the Body and Blood of Christ; only the appearances (or accidents) of the bread and wine remain.”  The profane becoming sacred – only the appearence or ‘accidents’ of stone remain, the populace of the portal ceomes alive; the door is the Gate of Heaven.  But the cathedral remains but a piece if the New Jerusalem, remains ‘profane’.  We see this as we begin to explore the cathedrals themselves.

Apostles, saints, angels, and Church fathers

Part IV: Hermeneutic Buttress