In 2015, I visited England with a group of family and friends. One of my favorite places we visited was Canterbury Cathedral, a place with a rich spiritual, historical, and intellectual history. What stood out to me the most, however, was the absolutely stunning stained glass that filled almost every wall of the cathedral. I spent several hours staring at the astonishingly beautiful windows, created across centuries and depicting scenes from the Bible and the church’s history. When I returned two years later on a trip with my high school, I had the same experience — I could not look away from the beautiful, colorful windows. One of the teachers chaperoning the trip is fully colorblind and when I remembered this, I became teary at the idea that he could not experience the immense beauty of the colorful light that had me in such awe. These windows — each individually spectacular and a piece of art on their own — gathered together in one space created a true sense of wonder and speechless contemplation in me that has rarely been replicated since, though the beauty remains quite alive in my memory.
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s three criteria of beauty provide some insight into what makes Canterbury Cathedral’s stained glass so magnificent. The stained glass, both individual windows and as a whole, clearly meets all of Gadamer’s criteria: playful, symbolic, and festive.
When Gadamer describes beauty as play, he explains that art is intended play, meaning self-movement with a goal (25), a concept clearly understood in mediums like dance or sports. Furthermore, he explains “there is always some reflective and intellectual accomplishment involved…the challenge of the work brings the constructive accomplishment of the intellect into play” (28). The stained glass of Canterbury Cathedral has a goal — depicting stories — but requires the intellectual accomplishments of piecing together glass to enable light and color to tell those stories. Furthermore, the stained glass invites the viewer into its play, as the viewer’s eye is drawn into the movement of the stories that come to life in the windows, and also through the awe-inspiring collection of the windows themselves.
This experience of the viewer reveals the windows nature as symbols, Gadamer’s second criterium of beauty. When explaining his use of the word “symbol” Gadamer calls upon a definition stemming from ancient Greek culture, in which a symbol is “something in and through which we recognize something already known to us” (31), a small thing that reminds us of a much deeper, bigger thing. Again, the windows fit this perfectly — both through what they depict and how they depict it. As mentioned before, the windows tell stories; they are literal reminders of something the viewers may already know: the tales of the Bible, Jesus’s sacrifice, and the history of the cathedral itself. However, taken altogether, the windows also remind us of something far greater. Man’s ability to create such beauty reminds us of God’s original creativity. The way the light shines through the colorful shards of glass reminds us of the Light that descended so that we might be made new, clean and beautiful. And ultimately, the windows themselves remind us that the space we have entered is more than just a building — it is made to the glory of God, a place where people have gathered for centuries to worship him utilizing the creative gifts he has bestowed on them.
Entering in to this sacred, timeless space that the art inspires is Gadamer’s third criterium for beauty, one which Josef Pieper discusses at length: festivity. For Gadamer, festivity includes both community (39) and a slowing of time, pulling us outside of our normal obsession with “clock time” (42). Pieper takes his further, explaining that art itself is a manifestation of the nature of the festive, saying, “the effect of festivity, the stepping out of time and the refreshment that penetrates to the depths of the soul, reaches the celebrant in the form of a message couched int he language of the arts (53). It is in this way that one can “get lost” in art, become enraptured by a thing that is deeper than its mere substance. In Canterbury Cathedral, the stained glass windows create this effect for the whole space — the viewer enters, in a way, a deeper, more soul-touching space through the wonder they experience. The windows creates timelessness, drawing its viewers in to a time beyond the minutes they inhabit and into community with generations of those who have shared their awe in the same place, those who have been impacted by truths in the stories depicted, and ultimately, with God, to whom the windows, and the whole cathedral, ultimately point.
The stained glass windows in Canterbury Cathedral point to something beyond themselves. They draw their viewers into a timeless, soulful wonder that reflects their innate festivity. As the viewer’s eyes move along the stories told in colorful light, the windows reveal both the movement and intellectual accomplishment that undergird their playful nature. Ultimately, the windows point to something far greater than their material substance, and draw their viewers in to that deeper meaning and community with both God and man — a true act of worship.