Princeton Graduate College: the Dining Hall
Man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for
man. The same ought to be true of
the Quadath, as I shall hereafter denominate the fourth day of the week. I missed publishing a Wednesday blog
because I spent so much of yesterday either getting to Heathrow Airport or
getting from Heathrow home.
Hence, an exceptional Thursday blog. The launching of John Newman’s Kent: North East and East (see “Off to Canterbury”) took place in
fine fashion on Tuesday. Its
perfectly appropriate setting was the medieval undercroft of the East Bridge Hospital in Canterbury. In the
fourteenth century a “hospital” was essentially a youth hostel, and this one
was for Canterbury pilgrims. The
Wife of Bath may well have slept there—though of course they would not advertise
that fact.
But
we were forced to leave next morning, because a little later on this particular
Quadath I have to give a little talk at the opening session of a major
conference being held on the Princeton campus marking the hundredth anniversary
of the building of our Graduate College.
This gives me, personally, the opportunity to celebrate the granting of
my own doctoral degree through that institution, exactly fifty years ago. I know that I am as old as a tree, but
to be half as old as a graduate college is pretty threatening.
I
want to attempt something new here, by trying to think out a little of what to
say in my talk this afternoon in this blog essay. What I shall want to try to explain is how the Princeton
trustees of the first decade of the twentieth century, Presbyterian
pinch-pennies to a man, could authorize and pay for an ambitious and very
costly building program of “collegiate Gothic” designed to leave their
Protestant campus looking something like an oversized Cluny. The subject therefore must be “the
iconography of architectural forms”—a fancy and probably intimidating phrase I
borrow from an eminent art historian of the last generation, Richard
Krautheimer.* What it means is not
actually all that highfalutin.
Certain architectural forms imply an intellectual or spiritual content
quite independent of their actual function.
Consider
for a moment one defining difference between the Romanesque and the
Gothic. The former is
characterized by massive piles of stone pierced when necessary for portals and
lights by semi-circular arches.
The great innovation of the Gothic, the pointed arch and ogive curve
allowed for the transfer of weight in such a fashion as to allow relatively
lighter wall masses which could be pierced by very large window spaces. The “invention” of the Gothic was a
purely technical development in building technique. The Gothic arch had no meaning,
though very soon we find it assigned one in late medieval, early Renaissance
paintings. Very often in such
paintings the biblical city of Jerusalem is presented as a Romanesque
creation. The heavenly Jerusalem
of the Apocalypse, on the other hand, is likely to be Gothic. It seems obvious that the concepts of old and new (as found in such common Pauline dyads as the “old man” and the
“new man,” the “old law” and the “new law”—or simply the “old” and “new”
testaments—were transferred to these architectural forms.
The
origins of American collegiate Gothic, of which the Princeton Graduate College
is an outstanding example, involved a similar intellectual transfer. It is a simple fact that the oldest
American universities had their explicit origins in well defined Christian
traditions. It can be said without
serious exaggeration that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were all founded with
the primary goal of educating young men for Christian ministry. Nor is there any exaggeration in saying
that the secularization of these institutions is now essentially complete. That was a process already underway by
the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. But though the lineaments of explicit
religious doctrines and sectarian affiliations might first fade and then vanish
altogether, the aspirations to Arnoldian plain living and high thinking has
everywhere remained in the American academy. Today’s colleges and universities—sometimes assailed by
conservative critics as hotbeds of moral anarchy and hedonistic excess--are in
fact the heirs of medieval ascetic institutions.
That
is why the nomenclature of academic institutions is so peculiar. There is no Provost of the American
Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, nor a Dean of Sales at General
Motors—though they’d be well advised to get one quick. This is why college professors—whose
normal political profile falls somewhere between that of Emma Goldman and
Karl Kautsky—so love the high Tory haberdashery of their Canterbury caps and
taffeta robes at Commencement time.
That’s why there are gargoyles on Princeton’s crenellated (!) Dillon
Gymnasium, and why the exterior of the dining hall of Princeton’s newest
residential college, Whitman, looks for all the world like a church. It's the iconography of architectural
form.
*
“Introduction to an ‘Iconography of Mediaeval Architecture’,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes, v (1942): 1-31.
