Babel
“The gate of God”: “And they said, Go to, let us build us a city, and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven.” The rest of the story is well known, of course. It is a parable of the ambitious pride of mankind and, more specifically, of architects. Using kiln-baked bricks mortared together with tar, the people of Babel built an edifice that rose to an incredible height. But the tower was never finished. Angered by man’s attempt to reach the heavens — to build beyond his assigned station on earth — the Lord confounded the tongues of the builders so that no one could understand anyone else’s speech. Not surprisingly, the ambitious project ended prematurely and unhappily. Modern commentators speculate that the story of the tower of Babel is an attempt by the ancient Hebrews to account for the enormous, half-ruined ziggurats, or stepped pyramids, that had been raised by the Sumerians, the world’s oldest civilization. The story also seeks to account for linguistic diversity, for we learn that after abandoning their tower, the Babelites with their myriad new languages were dispersed across the face of the earth, giving rise to new nations, each with its separate tongue. But the story is likewise another version of the Fall of Man. The attempt to reach the heavens, and therefore to rival God, recalls Adam and Eve’s ambition to gain forbidden knowledge in the Garden of Eden. The great tower — a would-be bridge between man and God — becomes an equivalent of the Tree of Life, which likewise would have erased the difference between the Creator and his creatures. Buildings of large dimensions have always posed moral problems.1 A number of Roman authors disapproved of excessively large edifices either because of their lack of utility or because of the tremendous expenditure involved in their construction. Plutarch, for example, condemned the enormous baths and palaces of the emperor Domitian, and both Pliny and Frontinus vehemently rejected the Seven Wonders of the World, which the former regarded distastefully as a foolish display of wealth on the part of kings. By contrast, the aqueducts maintained by Frontinus, though immense, served the important purpose of bringing fresh water to the citizens of Rome. In the twelfth century, the Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux condemned the vast height of the new Gothic churches that were rising everywhere across France. Such suspicions can also be found in the writings of Leon Battista Alberti, who attacks the pyramids in the same critical vein as Pliny and Frontinus, claiming that the “monstrous” works of the Egyptians were an “insane idea.” In light of this pronouncement, his positive estimation of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore (one of whose virtues, he claims, is its sheer scale) comes quite unexpectedly: What man, however hard of heart or jealous, would not praise Pippo the architect when he sees here such an enormous construction towering above the heavens, vast enough to cover the entire Tuscan population with its shadow, and done without the aid of beams or elaborate wooden supports? The reference to the dome’s all-encompassing shadow may be an allusion to the pyramids of Egypt, which were said to cast shadows as long as a journey of several days.2 Alberti justifies the gigantic dimensions of the dome because they reveal both evidence of man’s God-given power to invent and the superiority of Florentine commerce and culture. Filippo and his masons even appear to have succeeded where the architects of Babel failed, for the dome towers above the heavens, achieving and even surpassing the aspirations of the ill-fated Babelites (King, 2000).