The recent reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was in impressive reminder that the great cathedrals are all ever-continuing projects, time machines that connect us via their structures, imagery, and rituals with the Middle Ages, when Christianity graduated from its beginnings during the Roman Empire into a fully-fledged belief system and organization. As medievalism studies reminds us, medieval objects, structures, texts, and practices are not at all historically sealed off from our own present.
Notre Dame of Paris, for example, after the fire of 2019, renovated not only the features dating back to the 12th and 13th centuries, but also rebuilt the spire, even though that spire was actually added as recently as 1859, by the French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. Similarly, the medieval single keyboard organ of the cathedral underwent numerous substantial renovations and replacements, culminating in the current grand organ, which includes computerized elements. Cathedrals really are not only a living memory of the Middle Ages, but also testimony to their numerous modifications, adaptations, and modernizations. They refer to multiple eras simultaneously, even if most visitors believe they encounter a building finalized in the Middle Ages.
Washington (National) Cathedral, one of the many churches meant to transfer the idea and ideals of medieval European Christian faith and architecture into North America, continues the tradition of its medieval models. While it blends the medieval and the modern by virtue of being built much more recently, it also shows numerous elements added and changed since 1907. Such changes include renovations of the original organ and repairs after an earthquake in 2011.
One even more recent adaptation is not very well known: In 1947, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) began plans to memorialize Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the cathedral, leading to the installation of a pair of stained-glass windows depicting the two Southern heroes in various scenes from their lives. The memorial bay with the window was supposed to make sure not only Northern leaders (George Washington, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison) were to be honored in the cathedral. As the UDC leaders proudly stated:
“No boy from either side of the line must ever stand in this great gathering of soldiers and wonder at the absence of a Southern hero. One must be there lest the question be: were the men who wore the Gray really patriots; did they fight for their country to keep it the way their forebears founded it? They were and they did; and, for their sake, their beloved leader must have place where the great spirits of our nation’s history are to be enshrined.”
The necessary private funds were raised, stained-glass artist Wilbur H. Burnham produced the two windows, and none other than President Eisenhower praised the project when he addressed 1700 members at the UDC’s annual convention on November 10, 1953. He stated that “these two men are more influential today than when they led the Confederate armies” (Washington Post, 11 November, 1953).
Stain glass window of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the Washington National Cathedral – Wikimedia Commons
While the depiction of the generals had its critics throughout the decades since 1953, it was only after the massacre at Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, that the voices for the removal of the windows could no longer be ignored. The Dean of the Washington Cathedral, Gary Hall, strongly favored the removal of the windows, and Brent Staples, in a 2017 article for the New York Times, summed up the often irate concerns of visitors to the cathedral: “Southerners who rose to federal office after the Civil War achieved something the Confederate Army had not: They seized control of Washington and bent it to their will.”
In his statement, Staples follows the long tradition of those who challenged how some white Southerners clung to their own selective version of history, refusing to admit that it was founded on a slave economy. As far back as 1883, in Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain had diagnosed Southern medievalism as the intellectual source of U.S. slavery, even accusing Sir Walter Scott’s medievalizing novels (especially the 1819 romance, Ivanhoe) and their “sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society” of starting the Civil War.
Washington National Cathedral – photo by Carol M. Highsmith / Wikimedia Commons
By the beginning of the twentieth century, various organizations, especially the United Daughters of the Confederacy, had managed to rewrite much of the national narrative about the Civil War. Poignant signals of their cultural revisionism included having Lee and Jackson added to the pantheon of U.S. culture in Washington Cathedral in 1953, and commissioning the giant memorial carving depicting Jackson, Lee (and Jefferson Davis) as Southern knights on horseback on Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, Georgia. That memorial, originally proposed by UDC members as early as 1912, was finalized as late as 1972. Over the last 50 years, Stone Mountain became a site of increased controversy as some annually gathered to celebrate white supremacist Southern identity (Stone Mountain is symbolically significant as the founding site for the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915), while others recommended that the carving be sandblasted out of existence.
The leadership and congregation of Washington Cathedral, while determined to cease the celebration of generals Lee and Jackson as ‘saintly’ knights in their place of worship, hoped to avoid the kind of public (and sometimes violent) altercations about Confederate monuments at Stone Mountain or at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally surrounding the removal of the Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia. There, various hate groups had hijacked medieval(ist) symbols to celebrate Nazi Germany, the Confederacy, and the Ku Klux Klan.
Since 2015, the dean and chapter of Washington Cathedral had engaged its community in various discussions regarding “racial justice, the legacy of slavery and God’s call to us in the 21st century.” In 2016, in a transitional step, the chapter decided to remove the two glass pieces showing Confederate flags. Then, in a public announcement in 2017, clearly propelled by the shock of the Charlottesville rally, decided to deconsecrate and remove the windows, agreeing that they were not “an appropriate part of the sacred fabric of a spiritual home for the nation.” Their association with “racial oppression, human subjugation and white supremacy,” the chapter argued, should exclude them from the fabric of the more than 200 other stained-glass windows illuminating the building. The announcement stated further:
Whatever their origins, we recognize that these windows are more than benign historical markers. For many of God’s children, they are an obstacle to worship in a sacred space; for some, these and other Confederate memorials serve as lampposts along a path that leads back to racial subjugation and oppression.
A central question we have asked throughout this process is what narratives are shared within the sacred fabric of the Cathedral, and which are yet untold. We have concluded that these windows tell an incomplete and misleading account of our history. We are committed to finding ways to offer a richer, more balanced expression of our nation’s history.
We have asked whether it is possible to contextualize these windows or to augment them with other narratives. The Chapter concluded that there is no way to adequately contextualize these windows while keeping them within the sacred fabric of the Cathedral.
We want to be clear that we are not attempting to remove history, but rather are removing two windows from the sacred fabric of the Cathedral that do not reflect our values. We believe these windows can yet have a second life as an effective teaching tool in a place and context yet to be determined.
The teaching function of the windows has materialized. The Lee window was temporarily loaned to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture for a 2021 exhibition on “Make Good the Promises: Reconstruction and Its Legacies,” where it was showcased next to 175 other artifacts like the hooded sweatshirt worn by 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, an apron worn by Harriet Tubman, and a desk and chair used in the U.S. House of Representatives during Reconstruction. Since then, the Lee window has returned to the Cathedral, and both windows remain in storage there.
The freed-up window spaces were replaced with two so-called “Now and Forever” windows designed by artist and MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient Kerry James Marshall. They mean to depict “the ongoing and daily struggle for justice” in a scene with demonstrators of color carrying signs demanding “Fairness,” “No Foul Play,” and simply “No” as they march across the new windows. In the space under the window is a plaque with a poem by award-winning poet and scholar Elizabeth Alexander. A central line in Alexander’s poem, “American Song,” demands that “We must tell the truth about our history.”
Most contemporary visitors to Notre Dame of Paris expect to enter a space that is all authentically medieval, when in fact they enter a palimpsest of centuries of architecture, art, craft, music, and liturgy that has accrued and transformed over centuries, even including layers of past incarnations of predecessor churches below the ground level. To have this experience and to enter into a personal union with an imagined original medieval past, they are willing to suspend their disbelief about what they know of a renovated organ, Viollet-le-Duc’s nineteenth-century spire, and numerous other signs of various centuries inscribed upon all elements of the building. They collapse a thousand years of temporality into one single sensory experience and faith perception.
Visitors to Washington Cathedral take an additional step. Not only do they suspend disbelief about the existence of a medieval-like building in the New World, but they also accept that the building parses the medieval origins of European Christianity into recognizable national symbols and saintly figures, from the Darth Vader gargoyle and the famed Space Window through the burial places for the likes of Helen Keller (a prominent public figure and activist for the deaf and blind, 1880-1968) or Matthew Shepard (victim of a vicious anti-gay hate crime in 1998). More than Notre Dame’s various ‘updates’ and recent major restoration, Washington Cathedral offers a vision of Christian faith, the nation, and the world that is, in the words of Elizabeth Alexander’s poem under the “Now and Forever” windows, “imperfect, in struggle, contested” and offers a palimpsest of voices instead of “one voice at a time.” Replacing the two confederate generals and their symbols rejects the Confederate version of medievalism still strong in 1953 with a contemporary one in which a modern medieval-like cathedral can be inclusive of all who enter its space.
Richard Utz is Interim Dean and Professor in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Institute of Technology
By Richard Utz
The recent reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was in impressive reminder that the great cathedrals are all ever-continuing projects, time machines that connect us via their structures, imagery, and rituals with the Middle Ages, when Christianity graduated from its beginnings during the Roman Empire into a fully-fledged belief system and organization. As medievalism studies reminds us, medieval objects, structures, texts, and practices are not at all historically sealed off from our own present.
Notre Dame of Paris, for example, after the fire of 2019, renovated not only the features dating back to the 12th and 13th centuries, but also rebuilt the spire, even though that spire was actually added as recently as 1859, by the French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. Similarly, the medieval single keyboard organ of the cathedral underwent numerous substantial renovations and replacements, culminating in the current grand organ, which includes computerized elements. Cathedrals really are not only a living memory of the Middle Ages, but also testimony to their numerous modifications, adaptations, and modernizations. They refer to multiple eras simultaneously, even if most visitors believe they encounter a building finalized in the Middle Ages.
Washington (National) Cathedral, one of the many churches meant to transfer the idea and ideals of medieval European Christian faith and architecture into North America, continues the tradition of its medieval models. While it blends the medieval and the modern by virtue of being built much more recently, it also shows numerous elements added and changed since 1907. Such changes include renovations of the original organ and repairs after an earthquake in 2011.
One even more recent adaptation is not very well known: In 1947, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) began plans to memorialize Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the cathedral, leading to the installation of a pair of stained-glass windows depicting the two Southern heroes in various scenes from their lives. The memorial bay with the window was supposed to make sure not only Northern leaders (George Washington, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison) were to be honored in the cathedral. As the UDC leaders proudly stated:
“No boy from either side of the line must ever stand in this great gathering of soldiers and wonder at the absence of a Southern hero. One must be there lest the question be: were the men who wore the Gray really patriots; did they fight for their country to keep it the way their forebears founded it? They were and they did; and, for their sake, their beloved leader must have place where the great spirits of our nation’s history are to be enshrined.”
The necessary private funds were raised, stained-glass artist Wilbur H. Burnham produced the two windows, and none other than President Eisenhower praised the project when he addressed 1700 members at the UDC’s annual convention on November 10, 1953. He stated that “these two men are more influential today than when they led the Confederate armies” (Washington Post, 11 November, 1953).
While the depiction of the generals had its critics throughout the decades since 1953, it was only after the massacre at Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, that the voices for the removal of the windows could no longer be ignored. The Dean of the Washington Cathedral, Gary Hall, strongly favored the removal of the windows, and Brent Staples, in a 2017 article for the New York Times, summed up the often irate concerns of visitors to the cathedral: “Southerners who rose to federal office after the Civil War achieved something the Confederate Army had not: They seized control of Washington and bent it to their will.”
In his statement, Staples follows the long tradition of those who challenged how some white Southerners clung to their own selective version of history, refusing to admit that it was founded on a slave economy. As far back as 1883, in Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain had diagnosed Southern medievalism as the intellectual source of U.S. slavery, even accusing Sir Walter Scott’s medievalizing novels (especially the 1819 romance, Ivanhoe) and their “sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society” of starting the Civil War.
Carol M. Highsmith / Wikimedia Commons
By the beginning of the twentieth century, various organizations, especially the United Daughters of the Confederacy, had managed to rewrite much of the national narrative about the Civil War. Poignant signals of their cultural revisionism included having Lee and Jackson added to the pantheon of U.S. culture in Washington Cathedral in 1953, and commissioning the giant memorial carving depicting Jackson, Lee (and Jefferson Davis) as Southern knights on horseback on Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, Georgia. That memorial, originally proposed by UDC members as early as 1912, was finalized as late as 1972. Over the last 50 years, Stone Mountain became a site of increased controversy as some annually gathered to celebrate white supremacist Southern identity (Stone Mountain is symbolically significant as the founding site for the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915), while others recommended that the carving be sandblasted out of existence.
The leadership and congregation of Washington Cathedral, while determined to cease the celebration of generals Lee and Jackson as ‘saintly’ knights in their place of worship, hoped to avoid the kind of public (and sometimes violent) altercations about Confederate monuments at Stone Mountain or at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally surrounding the removal of the Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia. There, various hate groups had hijacked medieval(ist) symbols to celebrate Nazi Germany, the Confederacy, and the Ku Klux Klan.
Since 2015, the dean and chapter of Washington Cathedral had engaged its community in various discussions regarding “racial justice, the legacy of slavery and God’s call to us in the 21st century.” In 2016, in a transitional step, the chapter decided to remove the two glass pieces showing Confederate flags. Then, in a public announcement in 2017, clearly propelled by the shock of the Charlottesville rally, decided to deconsecrate and remove the windows, agreeing that they were not “an appropriate part of the sacred fabric of a spiritual home for the nation.” Their association with “racial oppression, human subjugation and white supremacy,” the chapter argued, should exclude them from the fabric of the more than 200 other stained-glass windows illuminating the building. The announcement stated further:
The teaching function of the windows has materialized. The Lee window was temporarily loaned to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture for a 2021 exhibition on “Make Good the Promises: Reconstruction and Its Legacies,” where it was showcased next to 175 other artifacts like the hooded sweatshirt worn by 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, an apron worn by Harriet Tubman, and a desk and chair used in the U.S. House of Representatives during Reconstruction. Since then, the Lee window has returned to the Cathedral, and both windows remain in storage there.
The freed-up window spaces were replaced with two so-called “Now and Forever” windows designed by artist and MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient Kerry James Marshall. They mean to depict “the ongoing and daily struggle for justice” in a scene with demonstrators of color carrying signs demanding “Fairness,” “No Foul Play,” and simply “No” as they march across the new windows. In the space under the window is a plaque with a poem by award-winning poet and scholar Elizabeth Alexander. A central line in Alexander’s poem, “American Song,” demands that “We must tell the truth about our history.”
Most contemporary visitors to Notre Dame of Paris expect to enter a space that is all authentically medieval, when in fact they enter a palimpsest of centuries of architecture, art, craft, music, and liturgy that has accrued and transformed over centuries, even including layers of past incarnations of predecessor churches below the ground level. To have this experience and to enter into a personal union with an imagined original medieval past, they are willing to suspend their disbelief about what they know of a renovated organ, Viollet-le-Duc’s nineteenth-century spire, and numerous other signs of various centuries inscribed upon all elements of the building. They collapse a thousand years of temporality into one single sensory experience and faith perception.
Visitors to Washington Cathedral take an additional step. Not only do they suspend disbelief about the existence of a medieval-like building in the New World, but they also accept that the building parses the medieval origins of European Christianity into recognizable national symbols and saintly figures, from the Darth Vader gargoyle and the famed Space Window through the burial places for the likes of Helen Keller (a prominent public figure and activist for the deaf and blind, 1880-1968) or Matthew Shepard (victim of a vicious anti-gay hate crime in 1998). More than Notre Dame’s various ‘updates’ and recent major restoration, Washington Cathedral offers a vision of Christian faith, the nation, and the world that is, in the words of Elizabeth Alexander’s poem under the “Now and Forever” windows, “imperfect, in struggle, contested” and offers a palimpsest of voices instead of “one voice at a time.” Replacing the two confederate generals and their symbols rejects the Confederate version of medievalism still strong in 1953 with a contemporary one in which a modern medieval-like cathedral can be inclusive of all who enter its space.
Richard Utz is Interim Dean and Professor in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Institute of Technology
Top Image: Photo by Geoff Livingston / Flickr
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