'... the sacred building is the image of the Christian community, which represents the body of Christ. However, there is a more obvious similarity between the religious building and the human figure of the Savior when the foundations have the form of a Latin cross, as in the Romanesque abbey churches or the Gothic cathedrals. "The disposition of the church," writes Durand de Mende, "is in the image of the human body: indeed, the choir, or the place where the altar is located, represents the head, the two branches of the transept are like arms and hands , and the ship, directed towards the west, corresponds to the rest of the body ". When the main altar, as it sometimes happens, is placed on the transept, it represents the heart of the Man-God '(1)
Enter a cathedral, regardless of the reasons that encourage us, and independently of the faith or agnosticism that we profess, is like taking a ticket in the time machine and prepare to live an authentic adventure.
An adventure, with enough added elements, to maintain the expectation throughout the journey and reach the end, feeling the agony of not being able to pass, after all, the dark veil that hides an infinity of mysteries, which more elusive and inaprehensible.
Elemental, dear Whatson, I would say the incorruptible character of Conan Doyle. Because if each person is a world, each cathedral, after all, is also one. Or more appropriate, a small galaxy in which stars of different origin and consideration shine within their timeless autonomy.
As already ventured on another occasion, the cathedral of Orense, in terms of dimensions, is not the largest. But just like the others, and as if it were a person - comparatively speaking -, it went through different stages during its development, until it became the adult entity we contemplate today.
Stages, no doubt, that marked his destiny and forged his character. Possibly, the most relevant ones were those that remember their primitive origins; some origins that still conserve, at the end of the millennium, a good part of the genes, allow me the simile, of its mysterious progenitor.
A progenitor, of which hardly any data are known, except for his profession, undoubtedly Magister Muri, and of his name: Matthew, as the evangelist, one of the innumerable characters who was skillfully chiseling to the dictation of his faith, of his imagination and of his heart.
At his hands, possibly, it is also due that mysterious character that seems to come out of the very heart of the stone, in one of the transepts, observing from the corner of the eye towards a place located above, where both dark and enigmatic characters hold, or better In other words, they display in a spiral the stony matter that has to form a small oculus, whose usefulness, precisely there, nevertheless gives rise to thinking.
And even above this, another little person also emerges from the heart of the stone, as if closing that imaginary emblem of the infinite, which possibly the Master and his School left in the exterior blocks as a symbol of stonework representative of a guild that did not believe in the limitations and detail of speculation for future societies, each day more alien to craft work.
Artisanal, on the other hand, is the hexagonal dome that rises, figuratively speaking, on the solar plexus of that symbolic body of Christ that is the plant, below the head, where the altar supplies, also symbolically speaking, that place scorned by Science, where almost all the cultures of Antiquity coincided in situating the soul.
There, undaunted in his passion, the miraculous Christ transcends in silence kingdoms that are not of this world, in the company of venerable saints of the roads, on the verge of the most symbolic and enigmatic of all: the venerable San Roque and San Antón. Those who let themselves be seen by the surrounding chapels, in the company of no less venerated saints, such as Santolaya -from Mérida- patron saint, perhaps because of the merit and grace of the immemorial transhumance, of a good part of the Cantabrian Cornice.
But undoubtedly, the most representative figure, is at the end of the ship, where, as an imitation of the Compostela glory, the Master and his School left an authentic wonder called, with justice, Puerta del Paraíso. And in the center, majestic and hieratic in its hexagonal base throne also, like the cimborrio, the figure of Santiago forgets his infamous nickname of Matamoros, changing the use of his sword in the ordination of new knights.
Knights of the Spirit, ordained in a place where precisely this one, the Spirit, strongly encourages, even sprouting from the beauty also chiselled in some sarcophagi that extend on both sides of the nave, giving testimonies of some inhabitants whose relevance was well worth them. ticket for glory.
Echoes that resonate in the labyrinthine frameworks of a sacred precinct, which look like Chinese shadows when light and shadow are reconciled to dance an ancient waltz. The creaking of the doors closing and the uncertain feeling of having glimpsed only a negligible part of the great mysteries that lie there in silence.
Notes and Bibliography:
(1) Titus Burckhasrdt: 'Chartres and the birth of the cathedral', José J. de Olañeta, Editor, 2011, page 27.
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