Heaven in Our Midst

By Harry Eyres

I bet you have never heard of John Thornton. You may know someone else of that name but the John Thornton I mean was a 15th-century glazier from Coventry in England. Between 1405 and 1408 he worked on his masterpiece, which still stands in situ. It is the Great East Window of York Minster, the largest medieval stained glass window in existence, and one of the finest. Perhaps if it wasn’t part of a cathedral, but had been removed, say, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, this window, and John Thornton, would be better appreciated for what they are: one of the supreme works of art, and one of the supreme artist-craftsmen, the British Isles have produced.

Cathedrals are the beached whales of our (Christian) culture; undeniably huge and impressive, but washed up, by Matthew Arnold’s ebbing tide of faith, on the shore of unbelief and multiculturalism. They are magnificent but what, now, is their purpose? When I asked a Canadian friend in Barcelona if he felt like visiting the Gothic cathedral, La Seu, he said: “Oh, not another of those old bunkers.” I know what my friend meant but something over the years has kept drawing me back to the great Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals of Europe. Travelling up by train to York the other day, to see the restoration work on the East Front (which leans an alarming 3ft away from true) and the Great East Window, I passed through Peterborough and admired the length of that cathedral with its porticoed, three-arched front. I thought of Ely with its great lantern rising above the fens 15 miles to the east.

These cathedrals, even to an old lapsed Catholic and unbeliever like me, are the heart of England and Europe, the queen bees of the continent. We may take them for granted but just imagine what holes they would leave if they went. What would Paris be without Notre Dame, or the wheat fields of the Ile de France without the asymmetrical towers and the rose windows of Chartres, what would Durham be on its rocky bluff above the Wear – “grand, venerable and sweet, all at once”, according to Nathaniel Hawthorne – without the strongest Norman arches and vault in England?

The prospect of losing something is the best antidote to taking it for granted. York Minster, like most cathedrals, has suffered a sequence of disasters in its history: the central tower collapsed soon after it was built. Then there have been the fires, most recently the one in 1984, which destroyed the south transept roof. Now the focus for York Minster Revealed, a £23m five year-project with a £10m grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, is the East Front and John Thornton’s great window, restored and repaired many times in its history but now needing urgent work on both stone tracery and glass.

I knew the window was big but had no real idea of the scale until I donned my hard hat and crawled through the scaffolding on to the conservators’ lift, and lurched the equivalent of five or six floors above ground level. Here you are high above most of the roofs of medieval York, and still not at the apex of the Great Window where God in his glory sits enthroned. Thornton’s masterwork is an immense illustration of the Book of Revelation, whose visions are interpreted with a startling earthiness and emotional directness. “I find Thornton’s faces immensely moving,” said the composer Richard Shephard, who heads the fund-raising for York Minster Revealed.

As I looked at the work close-up, not just the restoring of John Thornton’s original glass, much of which is jumbled and damaged, but also at the carving of stone grotesques and finials, all being done with the most infectious enthusiasm, I began to formulate an answer to the question of what cathedrals are for. Cathedrals were always works in progress: Chartres may have been completed in 26 years but that astonishing feat was the exception. York Minster took 250 years to build, and the building work has never finished.

Cathedrals are an ongoing, never-ending crafting of a hymn of praise to the Creator. The medieval cathedral, as Philip Ball reminds us in his marvellous new book on Chartres, Universe of Stone, was conceived as an image of heaven on earth: “a set of symbols and relationships that mapped out the universe itself”, a universe imbued with divine beauty. Their extraordinary marriage of craft and philosophy, or theology, is what gives them their combination of physical and spiritual uplift.

It is tempting to think that we no longer live in a time of intense theological dispute; and that we no longer value crafts and apprenticeships. Perhaps for those reasons we struggle to see our world as one of divine beauty.

York Minster Revealed is not just about restoring the cathedral, but training a new generation of skilled young stonemasons and glaziers.

The project still needs funds: I cannot think of a better way for us all to rediscover the heaven in our midst.