Nehemiah 4

Now it came to pass, when Sanballat heard, etc. Clearly, this is the anger of the heretics, these are their words, who vainly call themselves Samaritans, that is, guardians of God's law, when they are in fact greatly opposed to God and His laws, as they have long been separated from the house of David, that is, from the unity of Christ and the Church through heresies or schisms, or wicked deeds; who fear that their own impiety might be attacked and excluded, and therefore dread the building of the walls of faith. This is the derision of all who say they know God but deny Him by their deeds. For the Samaritans served the Lord in such a way that they did not renounce their ancient gods. Today, those who imitate them typologically are those who are Christians in such a way that they also consider their belly as their god, follow greed, which the Apostle clearly calls the service of idols; and being enslaved by the other allurements of the world, they serve the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever. And therefore, such people, like the heretics, do not want the walls of the Church to be renewed, lest, as the state of piety grows, they are forced to abandon their impiety. Such people are accustomed to call the Jews weak, that is, confessors of the faith, and easily vanquished by the nations, while in the daily contest for souls they prefer to embrace vices rather than to obtain the palm of victory through virtue. And because there are some among the heretics who even deny forgiveness to those who repent after falling, it is rightly added in the person of these:

Commentary on Ezra and Nehemiah

"Will the stones be rebuilt?" etc. For the stones were rebuilt, burnt from the heaps of dust, and were placed again in the work of the holy city, when those who had either denied the faith under the fire of persecutions or had lost the purity of conduct under the grips of vice, repented by the mercy of the Lord; so that they both recover the integrity of the catholic faith by steadfast profession, and obtain the ornaments of virtues by amended morals.

Commentary on Ezra and Nehemiah

But also Tobias the Ammonite, his neighbor, said: Let them build, etc. And both the person and words of this Tobias agree with heretics. The person indeed, because his patriarch Ammon was conceived from incest and drunkenness, and at night and in a cave. All of which clearly can be easily applied to any heresiarch; whose entire origin is from carnal pleasure and impurity, from the darkness of errors or crimes, from private gatherings, and not from the public symbol of the holy Church. Indeed, Tobias himself, meaning "good" of the Lord, said not by merit and truth, but by arrogance and pride, that the wall of the holy city could be leaped over by a fox; it is evident that heretics are called foxes. From which is that of the Song of Songs: Catch for us the little foxes that ruin the vineyards (Cant. II); which is to say quite clearly, Catch and bring to light the putrid and deceitful cunning of heretics, by which they strive to corrupt the fruitful minds of the faithful. Therefore, if, he says, a fox climbs up, it will leap over their stone wall. If against their faith's assertion any heretic arises, he immediately becomes proud and will subject all the confidence of their doctrine to his feet, which they boast is fortified like a stone and founded in Christ. But such blasphemers will come to what the sacred writer of this history, in imprecation, adds:

Commentary on Ezra and Nehemiah

Hear, our God, for we have become an object of contempt, etc. Similar to that of the Psalmist about the enemies of the elect, speaking as if under the guise of one wicked person: His trouble will return on his own head, and his violence will descend on his own crown (Psalm VII).

Commentary on Ezra and Nehemiah

And we prayed to our God, etc. This is the only refuge against all the enemies of the Church, namely prayer to God, and the industry of teachers who meditating day and night on his law, fortify the hearts of the faithful against the snares of the devil and his soldiers by preaching, consoling, and exhorting them.

Commentary on Ezra and Nehemiah

But Judas said: The strength of the bearer is weakened, etc. Judas speaks of the tribe of Judah’s sons. However, the question is about not being able to build the wall because an excessive amount of soil was piled up at the place of the wall, which first needed to be removed so that the foundations of the wall could be laid on solid ground. This relates to the parable of the evangelical house, whose builder dug deep; and with the accumulation of earth removed, he laid the foundation on rock that could not be toppled by any force of water or wind (Matthew VII; Luke VI). For first, the soil of earthly desires must be removed from our hearts, and then the firm and impregnable wall of good works must be built upon the foundation of faith; for whoever attempts to erect the edifice of holy action upon the soil and rubble of weak thoughts is deceived, and instead of a house or city, he will soon find, when the storm of temptation strikes, that he has built ruin.

Commentary on Ezra and Nehemiah

And our enemies said: Let them not know and understand, etc. And this is always accustomed to be done in the spiritual building. For the tireless enemy remains with his satellites, namely unclean spirits and wicked men, who, caring less for the works of faith and virtues, strive to hinder and, as much as they can, always to attack, and they seek to kill the mind of the faithful with the sword of wicked suggestion. But we, according to the Apostle, must take up the armor of God against these, so that we may be able to resist on the evil day, and stand perfect in all things (Eph. VI). However, it is well said that he set up people with arms around the wall, so that the builders, surrounded by a line of armed men, might apply themselves to building the wall with a freer and more secure hand. For the degrees of the faithful are divided, and some adorn the Church with good works within; others, armed with the arms of sacred reading, watch over the Church against those heretics attacking it. These comfort their neighbors in the truth of the faith with devout religious fervor, those exercise necessary combat against the darts of the devil or vices, by which they labor to attack the same faith, and repel the insidious wolves from the Lord’s fold with pastoral care.

Commentary on Ezra and Nehemiah

And it came to pass, when our enemies heard that it had been made known to us, God had frustrated their plan, etc. And in the spiritual building, if we have always been clothed with apostolic arms, the plan of the devil and his angels, who desire to defeat us, will be frustrated.

Commentary on Ezra and Nehemiah

The other day, in the town of Lincoln, I suffered an optical illusion which accidentally revealed to me the strange greatness of the Gothic architecture. Its secret is not, I think, satisfactorily explained in most of the discussions on the subject. It is said that the Gothic eclipses the classical by a certain richness and complexity, at once lively and mysterious. This is true; but Oriental decoration is equally rich and complex, yet it awakens a widely different sentiment. No man ever got out of a Turkey carpet the emotions that he got from a cathedral tower. Over all the exquisite ornament of Arabia and India there is the presence of something stiff and heartless, of something tortured and silent. Dwarfed trees and crooked serpents, heavy flowers and hunchbacked birds accentuate by the very splendour and contrast of their colour the servility and monotony of their shapes. It is like the vision of a sneering sage, who sees the whole universe as a pattern. Certainly no one ever felt like this about Gothic, even if he happens to dislike it. Or, again, some will say that it is the liberty of the Middle Ages in the use of the comic or even the coarse that makes the Gothic more interesting than the Greek. There is more truth in this; indeed, there is real truth in it. Few of the old Christian cathedrals would have passed the Censor of Plays. We talk of the inimitable grandeur of the old cathedrals; but indeed it is rather their gaiety that we do not dare to imitate. We should be rather surprised if a chorister suddenly began singing “Bill Bailey” in church. Yet that would be only doing in music what the mediævals did in sculpture. They put into a Miserere seat the very scenes that we put into a music hall song: comic domestic scenes similar to the spilling of the beer and the hanging out of the washing. But though the gaiety of Gothic is one of its features, it also is not the secret of its unique effect. We see a domestic topsy-turvydom in many Japanese sketches. But delightful as these are, with their fairy tree-tops, paper houses, and toddling, infantile inhabitants, the pleasure they give is of a kind quite different from the joy and energy of the gargoyles. Some have even been so shallow and illiterate as to maintain that our pleasure in medieval building is a mere pleasure in what is barbaric, in what is rough, shapeless, or crumbling like the rocks. This can be dismissed after the same fashion; South Sea idols, with painted eyes and radiating bristles, are a delight to the eye; but they do not affect it in at all the same way as Westminster Abbey. Some again (going to another and almost equally foolish extreme) ignore the coarse and comic in mediævalism; and praise the pointed arch only for its utter purity and simplicity, as of a saint with his hands joined in prayer. Here, again, the uniqueness is missed. There are Renaissance things (such as the ethereal silvery drawings of Raphael), there are even pagan things (such as the Praying Boy) which express as fresh and austere a piety. None of these explanations explain. And I never saw what was the real point about Gothic till I came into the town of Lincoln, and saw it behind a row of furniture-vans.

I did not know they were furniture-vans; at the first glance and in the smoky distance I thought they were a row of cottages. A low stone wall cut off the wheels, and the vans were somewhat of the same colour as the yellowish clay or stone of the buildings around them. I had come across that interminable Eastern plain which is like the open sea, and all the more so because the one small hill and tower of Lincoln stands up in it like a light-house. I had climbed the sharp, crooked streets up to this ecclesiastical citadel; just in front of me was a flourishing and richly coloured kitchen garden; beyond that was the low stone wall; beyond that the row of vans that looked like houses; and beyond and above that, straight and swift and dark, light as a flight of birds, and terrible as the Tower of Babel, Lincoln Cathedral seemed to rise out of human sight.

As I looked at it I asked myself the questions that I have asked here; what was the soul in all those stones? They were varied, but it was not variety; they were solemn, but it was not solemnity; they were farcical, but it was not farce. What is it in them that thrills and soothes a man of our blood and history, that is not there in an Egyptian pyramid or an Indian temple or a Chinese pagoda? All of a sudden the vans I had mistaken for cottages began to move away to the left. In the start this gave to my eye and mind I really fancied that the Cathedral was moving towards the right. The two huge towers seemed to start striding across the plain like the two legs of some giant whose body was covered with the clouds. Then I saw what it was.

The truth about Gothic is, first, that it is alive, and second, that it is on the march. It is the Church Militant; it is the only fighting architecture. All its spires are spears at rest; and all its stones are stones asleep in a catapult. In that instant of illusion, I could hear the arches clash like swords as they crossed each other. The mighty and numberless columns seemed to go swinging by like the huge feet of imperial elephants. The graven foliage wreathed and blew like banners going into battle; the silence was deafening with all the mingled noises of a military march; the great bell shook down, as the organ shook up its thunder. The thirsty-throated gargoyles shouted like trumpets from all the roofs and pinnacles as they passed; and from the lectern in the core of the cathedral the eagle of the awful evangelist clashed his wings of brass.

And amid all the noises I seemed to hear the voice of a man shouting in the midst like one ordering regiments hither and thither in the fight; the voice of the great half-military master-builder; the architect of spears. I could almost fancy he wore armour while he made that church; and I knew indeed that, under a scriptural figure, he had borne in either hand the trowel and the sword.

I could imagine for the moment that the whole of that house of life had marched out of the sacred East, alive and interlocked, like an army. Some Eastern nomad had found it solid and silent in the red circle of the desert. He had slept by it as by a world-forgotten pyramid; and been woke at midnight by the wings of stone and brass, the tramping of the tall pillars, the trumpets of the waterspouts. On such a night every snake or sea-beast must have turned and twisted in every crypt or corner of the architecture. And the fiercely coloured saints marching eternally in the flamboyant windows would have carried their glorioles like torches across dark lands and distant seas; till the whole mountain of music and darkness and lights descended roaring on the lonely Lincoln hill. So for some hundred and sixty seconds I saw the battle-beauty of the Gothic; then the last furniture-van shifted itself away; and I saw only a church tower in a quiet English town, round which the English birds were floating.

A Miscellany of Men, The Architect of Spears (1912)