THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

Page 732
the outer sanctuary to the earth, the courtyard to the ocean, the seven­armed candlestick to the seven lights of heaven. Even Solomon's temple in the continual
numerical details of its proportions and parts recalls the sacred geometry which is familiar from the stepped temple and pyramid and which still recurs in the astralmythic
starry remnants of the heavenly Jerusalem. But all this means as little as the zodiac in the Gothic wheel window or the apparent similarity of the Byzantine dome
to that of heaven; the alien element is still subjugated, the palace of Ptah is converted into the church of the exodus. Even the gnostic emanation of light, which streams
into the later, Gothic architectural symbol, is crucially different from the reflection of the universe, and hence from the Pantheon in any form; since it comes in Christian
gnosis from the ‘second aeon’, from the aeon of a future world. Thus on the whole this much is certain: the architectural dream of a better world has as its riverbed and
mouth, as far as the history of religion is concerned, sun­worship in Egyptian terms, exodus in biblical­prophetic terms — precisely out of the Egypt of the former
world. This cannot be expressed more clearly within this ideology than it was in Maimonides, in a passage on architecture full of historically immanent, and hence
relevant ideology of the matter. Maimonides comments on the legend that Abraham chose the western side for his sanctuary on Mount Moria, and he concludes as
follows: ‘The reason for this is that the faith which prevailed in the world at that time was sun­worship, that the sun was venerated as a god and therefore all people
undoubtedly turned towards the east. That is why Abraham on Mount Moria, namely at the place where his sanctuary was, turned towards the west, so that he turned
his back on the sun’ (Führer der Unschlüssigen III, Meiner, 1924, p. 275). This is a correction made by anti­Egypt, anti­Babylon of the east point in which, even for
Columbus, the world was created and the earthly paradise was supposed to lie. But above all in which astral myth was founded, i.e. the myth which ultimately regarded
the guiding space of architecture as cosmic­geometrical. Whereas within the biblical­Christian architectural ideology, chiefly in its architectural symbolism, that direction
of the world had to be rejected where the external sun rises, but that direction increasingly chosen where it dies and sets together with the existing world order. From
Augustine throughout the Middle Ages and above all in the Gothic period, church architecture is therefore celebrated as a depiction of that other architecture which
sought to bear the inscription not of centred order but federative freedom, here conceived as ‘freedom of the children of God’. The Gothic style lay radically