The Owl at Lyons

Let’s consider, for a few moments, the age-worn owl carved on the otherwise unadorned exterior of the Lyons cathedral.

In the Middle Ages, cathedrals were meant to represent the entire cosmos — all of God’s creation. This owl in Lyons is a lonely little fellow surrounded by bare walls. It has silently and patiently presided over the bustle of the street for nearly nine centuries now.

Tiny owl, huge cathedral. Why did the builders put it there?

Symbolizing Athena, the goddess of wisdom, it’s meant to represent everything that man can know about the universe. The message of those who designed the cathedral was subtle: everything that human beings will ever understand is as nothing compared to the scale and magnificence of creation. Not an uncommon sentiment; but surely an uncommon way of expressing it. It represents a hidden understanding—an inner understanding.

In my writings on Hieronymus Bosch and his use of the owl as a symbol, I've often talked about how his owls are signifiers that a given painting is a wisdom painting, one with special inner significance. Bosch lived in northern Burgundy, and, as an accomplished, sought-after artist, we can presume he definitely would have visited Lyons during his lifetime. Not just Lyons, mind you: also many of the other great Gothic cathedrals in Burgundy. After all, the landscapes in his paintings are forever the rolling hills of Burgundy, not the flatlands of the Flemish countryside. This is the school of practice where he educated himself, visiting the heartland of gothic symbolic expression: Vezelay, Autun, to name just a couple of the utterly astonishing cathedrals in the region—and collecting a vast range of religious symbols, which he then deployed to incredible effect.

Bravo.

At the time, he was seeing these cathedrals only four hundred years or so after they were built. Time has not been kind; in his day, they were undoubtedly in much better states of preservation than they are now. I have little doubt that he drew inspiration from this single owl – unique, so far as I know, on the exterior of any Gothic cathedral — and what it meant when he chose the owl as his signifier for his paintings.

I used to think Bosch was telling us there was a special form of wisdom in a particular painting—spiritual insight, inner knowledge, embedded in the symbols. In pondering this today, I realize that there's an irony in this assumption of mine.

What the owl is actually meant to symbolize is the fact that we don't know anything. It's the equivalent of a “flaw” in each work which reminds us that our understanding is tiny and that we can create nothing perfect –that no matter how beautiful or smart or wise any painting is, it is as nothing compared to creation and to God. The owl serves, among other things, as a symbol of our limitations and a mark of humility.

We don't really know anything. If we reached the absolute limits of everything that it is in fact possible for a human being to know— if we understood dark matter, the secrets of creation – we still would know only a tiny little bit of what creation is. The fundament of its reality is shrouded in a mystery that will never be penetrated by the human mind or its proxies, our technical instruments. If we ponder the situation at any length, we may—as the medieval thinkers who put our owl in place did—begin to realize that the conceits of our sciences and technology are sheer arrogance. For example, we think we know a lot now, but in another two or 300 years, it’s nearly certain that much or even all of what we ”know“ to be true now will appear to the science of the future to be as primitive as the science of the alchemists is to us. Another 300 years after that, the same will take place all over again. Etc. This is an entirely normal course of events.

But why?

Our sciences and our knowledge are exclusively sciences and knowledge of the material—of stuff, of things. Even the psyche—which absolutely cannot be redacted to the realm of things—is expected to succumb to the same stupidness of modern western theory: inanimate matter animating itself by accident. Modern science—mechanistic rationalism— doesn’t want to understand the soul: its wants to exterminate it.

With all these so-called advances we have made (most of which have ultimately served as instruments with which to destroy other creatures and the planet we live on in one way or another, but why dwell on that perspicacious and supremely awkward fact?) there is no real science of the soul, no real science of responsibility. There is no real science of morality. If we studied these things with the zeal with which we study elements and compounds, materials and tensile strengths, perhaps something real would come of it. There’s evidence these subjects were studied in ancient times, but that baby was decisively tossed out with the bathwater during the Age of Enlightenment.
The center of gravity in a culture, in a society, in its Being, can’t be located in material things and our manipulation of them. We need to re-discover an intelligent moral, philosophical, love-based center of gravity. It's true that my generation seized on this idea when we were young and trivialized it by turning it into a hippie event; but the evident mistakes and accidents of youth and stupidity should not be used as an excuse to negate the very real need that they express.

We simply must try to do better than where we are now.

This time that much of the world is spending in self-enforced isolation can be compared to 40 days in the desert: a time to contemplate, a time to draw the center of one's attention back into oneself and discover a feeling for life that’s based around being a human being, not a fragment of flesh whose terms are dictated by the machines we invent.

We can’t know everything—yet we must know something more than nothing. If we are things, we know nothing. If we’re enslaved to things, we know nothing.

Where is our something?

I think it lies not the things we make, but the people we love.

It lies in our hearts, if we but seek it.