THE EARLY AND CLASSIC GOTHIC STYLE C. IIS&-C. 1250
on food, sleep, and similar physical needs, on diseases, on sun,
moon, stars and zodiac, on time and its divisions, on matter, fire,
air, water, on the birds of the air, the fishes of the water, the beasts
of the land, on geography, on minerals, trees, colours, tools. Vincent
of Beauvais, who writes about 1250, divides his work into the
Mirrors of Nature, of Doctrine, and of History. And just as the
Mirror of Nature starts from God and Creation, so the Mirror
of History starts from the Fall of Man, and leads up to the Last
Judgment. The cathedral was—besides being a strictly architectural
monument of the spirit of its age—another Summa, another Speculum,
an encyclopaedia carved in stone. The Virgin stood at the centre post
of the centre portals of Rheirns Cathedral (pi. xxvm). Figures were
placed into the jambs of this portal representing such scenes as the
Annunciation, the Visitation, the Presentation. High up in the gables
of the three portals appear the Crucifixion, the Coronation of the
Virgin and die Last Judgment But there are also in the Gothic
cathedrals the lives of Christ, the Virgin and saints told in the
stained glass of the windows, and, spread over the plinths, the jambs,
the voussoirs and, up against the buttresses, saints with their attri-
butes by which they are recognised—St. Peter with the key, St.
Nicholas with the three golden balls, St. Barbara with the tower,
St. Margaret with the dragon—and scenes and figures from the Old
Testament, the Creation of Man, Jonah with the Whale, or Abraham
and Melchisedek, and the Roman Sibyls who had foretold, it was
believed, the coming of Christ, and the Wise and the Foolish Virgins,
and the Seven Liberal Arts, and the months of the year with their
occupations—the grafting of trees, sheep-shearing, harvesting, pig
slaughtering—and the signs of the zodiac, and the elements. The
profane and the sacred—a compendium of knowledge; but every-
thing, as St. Thomas puts it, "ordered towards God'*. For Jonah is
represented, not because he comes into the Old Testament, but
because his three days inside the whale represent the resurrection of
Christ, as Melchisedek offering bread and wine to Abraham re-
presented the Last Supper. To the mediaeval mind everything was'a
symbol. The meaning that mattered lay behind the outward
appearance. The simile of the two swords, the emperor's and the
pope's, was a symbolic expression of political theories. To Gulielmus
Durandus the. cruciform church represented the Cross, and the
weathercock on the spire the preacher who rouses the sleeping from
the night of sin. The mortar, he says, consists of lime, that is love,
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