The national train worker’s strike has been going on since I arrived in France and for that reason I have so far been hesitant to travel. The news is full of horror stories of congested train stations, stuck passengers, and women giving birth on Paris train platforms. This strike is the most drastic since 1995 but since there appears no end in sight I decided if I waited until the situation returned to normal I might never leave town until I leave for good. So I took my chances and traveled to Beauvais over the weekend, and as it turned out I had no problems. There were fewer trains to choose from and it took 4 hours to travel 40 miles on the way back due to a long layover, but what trains are running seem to be running on time. Also it probably helped that I didn’t go anywhere near Paris.

My goal was to see Beauvais Cathedral, which after Amiens is the cathedral I most wanted to see next. Beauvais has the distinction of having the tallest vaulted ceiling of any cathedral in the world, it also has the distinction of never having been finished.

In the 3rd century Pope Fabian reportedly sent six missionary bishops to convert the Gauls in what is now northern France, among these was Denis (now the famous St. Denis) and others, including one Lucien, a Roman convert to Christianity. This Lucien settled in what is now the town of Beauvais and reportedly effected a large number of conversions as a result of his preaching.

He also had the misfortune of living during the reign of the emperor Diocletian, who oversaw the most far-reaching, but also final official Roman persecution against Christianity. Gaul was at that time a Roman province and ultimately Lucien, Denis, and many others were beheaded by soldiers sent from Rome for that purpose. Denis was beheaded on the highest hill in Paris, the now famous Montmartre. Lucien was beheaded in approximately 290 on a small hill north of Beauvais called Montmille, which is not famous although there is still to this day a chapel there.

Of course as history also records the Roman empire took a drastic turn only shortly after when Constantine declared in the Edict of Milan (313) that henceforth Christianity would be treated benevolently, and not long after it became the state religion.

Various Roman Catholic churches have therefore existed in Beauvais since the fourth century, but construction of the present-day cathedral was started in 1225, just 5 years after work started in Amiens. The builders had an ambitious goal to surpass all prior Gothic construction in scale and they nearly, or partly, succeeded.

The choir was built first and completed in approximately 1260. At 48 meters (158 feet) tall, its vaulted ceiling remains the highest ever achieved for any cathedral to this day (Amiens has the second tallest ceiling at 42 meter/140 feet).

In fact the builders purposefully mimicked some of the ratios described for New Jerusalem in the book of Revelations, the height of the ceiling is equal to its width which was measured by the builders of the day at 144 “royal” feet (see Revelations 21:16, note also that 144 is the square of 12, another important Biblical number).

The medieval church builders did not apparently have a formal knowledge of structural dynamics but rather acquired their skill and techniques through trial and error over the generations. At that time in church construction there were two competing engineering goals, on the one hand to build ever-taller vaults, and on the other to use ever less stone in order to provide room for more glass and therefore, more light. These opposing directives seem to have finally crossed each other at Beauvais when in 1284 portions of the vault collapsed. Repairs and fortifications were costly and time-consuming and the choir was not restored until 1347.

By this time the various ravages of bubonic plague had begun to affect Europe, and the Hundred Years War had kicked off in 1337. Over 150 years passed before construction resumed on the transept in 1499, which itself took another 50 years.

At this point another unfortunate decision was made, to focus funds and efforts in erecting a massive spire over the crossing of the transept, rather than to immediately start work on the nave. These large spires were common features of medieval cathedrals and served to make them easy to see from great distances across the countryside. Completed in 1569, the tower brought the height of the Beauvais cathedral to over 500 feet and thus made it the tallest structure in human history at that time. Unfortunately it only held the record for four years until the spire also collapsed.

The cost of rebuilding the damaged transept vaults meant there were no more funds to erect a new tower, and certainly not to complete the nave. This essentially marked the end of major construction on the cathedral, and it remains unfinished to this day.

In fact the structure remained in a fragile state, and the lack of the nave for support has only made matters worse. Various reinforcement and buttressing regimes have been carried out at different times, today iron rods on the outside of the building and massive wooden supports on the inside mar the aesthetic beauty.

As does of course the massive blank wall on the western side of the transept, which in appearance reminds me a bit of the sarcophagus built to enclose Chernobyl.

Nevertheless I found it still to be a beautiful church and when you stand inside the height of the stone blocks suspended over your head is hard to comprehend even as you look at them with your own eyes. Even harder to comprehend is the audacity of the human men who suspended them.

Inside the church are also two clocks. The first is from the 14th century and is one of or possibly the oldest still functioning clock in the world, complete with working quarter-hour chimes.

The second is a highly complicated astronomical clock dating from the 1860s. It has 90,000 moving steel and brass parts and over 50 dials that in addition to the time also gives the rising and setting times of the sun and moon, the position of the planets, the tides, and complicated things I don’t understand like the “epact” and golden number used to calculate the date of Easter each year since it is apparently based on a lunar calendar and not the solar calendar. Over 60 moving figures play out scenes, at the top of the hour Christ signals the angels to play trumpets and a scene of Virtue being led to heaven by an angel is presented while Vice is pushed into hell by a demon. Frankly I don’t think my iPhone can even do all that.

I leave you with a few more pictures of the cathedral.