Читать книгу Neomedievalism. Reflections on the Post-Enlightenment Era онлайн

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“It’s quite strange. The most intelligent people don’t need idiots like me to realize such obvious things, no?”

“Negative, sir. Negative.”

After all, Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize of Literature and left his wife for the famous Filipino model Isabel Preysler.

THE REBELLION OF THE READERS, KEY TO OUR CENTURY

Among the most frequented sites for tourists in Europe are the Gothic cathedrals. Gothic spaces, so different from the Romanesque of centuries before, tend to impress us through the subtlety of their aesthetic, something they share with the ancient architecture of the old Arab empire. Perhaps what is most overlooked is the reason for the reliefs on the facades. Although the Bible condemns the custom of representing human figures, these abound on the stones, on the walls and on the stained glass. The reason is, more than aesthetic, symbolic and narrative.

In a culture of illiterates, orality was the mainstay of communication, of history and of social control. Although Christianity was based on the Scriptures, writing was least abundant. Just as in our current culture, social power was constructed on the basis of written culture, while the working classes had to resign themselves to listening. Books were not only rare, almost original pieces, but were jealously guarded by those who administered political power and the politics of God. Writing and reading were nearly exclusively the patrimony of the nobility; listening and obeying was the function of the masses. That is to say, the nobility was always noble because the vulgate was very vulgar. For the same reason, the masses, illiterate, went every Sunday to listen to the priest read and interpret sacred texts at his whim—the official whim—and confirm the truth of these interpretations in another kind of visual interpretation: the icons and relief sculptures that illustrated the sacred history on the walls of stone.