Davinci Revival Pro Torrent
Verona Garrott
Ancient Greece and Rome obviously provide the origins of classical architecture. What makes the subject relevant today is the high number of buildings and houses throughout Europe and America that have been designed with the aesthetics that developed in ancient times, and the interpretations that followed. While modern design theory relinquishes precedent for inspiration and formulation, there are still basic principles that great architecture relies upon: Symmetry, hierarchy, repetition and proportion are a few. The fact that classical architecture strictly follows these principles makes it an important architectural discipline to appreciate even today.
First, from about 1770 through 1830, the early classical revival era evolved with the cultural association of democratic Roman ideals as the U.S. was formed. Through the influence of the classical renaissance in Europe and architects like Thomas Jefferson, it gained followers.
Next came the closely related Greek revival phase, which lasted from around 1825 to 1860. A congruence of a desire to understand the roots of Roman classical architecture, which are of course Greek, and the Greek War of Independence propelled the affection for the prominently columned structures of this style.
This 1847 Jackson, Mississippi, early classical revival house is somewhat simplified compared to others of the same era. However, the prominent centered pediment, or gable, rests atop two story-high columns topped with Ionic capitals. Its identity is certain.
This contemporary Greek revival house makes the same robust statement as its ancestors. Of the five classical orders, its columns most closely resemble the Tuscan order. The flattened columns against the walls and at the corners of the building are called pilasters; they match the detail of the four round columns.
The band of detail above the columns to the lip of the eave line is called an entablature. This is divided in equal parts, from below to above, into the architrave, the frieze and the cornice. Details of the entablature vary from one order to the other, as well as from one architect to another, one carpenter to another and so on.
Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite (Ionic and Corinthian combined) are the other four orders in classical architecture. Doric was the established system in Greece, while the Romans favored Corinthian.
You can identify the architrave by the three flat bands just above the capital, topped by a band of molding. The next, much larger, flat band above that is the frieze. After that begins the cornice, with a more complex assimilation of shapes and details.
Notice the numerous individual scrolled elements in the cornice. These are called modillions; they lie in the same position as dentils would on other orders. Some orders have neither, some have one or the other, and some even have both modillions and dentils.
How is this all relevant to the abodes of today? Here you can see a simplified interpretation of classical architecture. There are four very simple square columns, and pilasters against the wall, each with a base and a capital. Two flat bands above the capitals imply an architrave and a frieze, while the trimmed fascia gives us the cornice. The gable face provides the basic pediment.
Typical of classical houses from the mid-1800s, a porch runs the full width of the primary elevation on this historic Texas house. This indelible theme defines more than plantation houses that were built in the U.S. South during that period. Banks, university buildings, hotels and scores of government buildings across the U.S., especially those built during the neoclassical period, have classically detailed colonnades with an imposing presence.
Look closely at the details on this South Carolina house. It has the same type of full-width porch. Though the columns are square, they still have an impression of a base and a capital. A minimally detailed entablature defines the eave and fascia.
And especially delightful are the pediment-adorned dormers. Though minimally scaled, their correct proportions make them especially handsome. Notice the detail above the windows under the porch. They are each capped with their own entablature. Finally, pilasters frame the entrance door and sidelights, and the group is also capped with its own entablature.
THE DA VINCI CODE BY DAN BROWN has sold more than 7 million copies in a little over a year. That sets a record for sales within a one-year period, so that its publisher can claim that the book is the biggest-selling adult novel of all time.
The book is indeed a thriller, hard to put down, with its exciting action, twists and turns, and unfolding puzzles. But this work of fiction puts forward certain ideas as true, and a good number of readers are accepting them as true: Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and their bloodline continues to this day. His true teachings had to do with the worship of "the sacred feminine." The church suppressed His message with its patriarchal institutions and dogmatic theology, twisting the teachings of Jesus into an oppressive, life-denying system of harsh moral rules, the subjugation of women, the repression of sexual freedom, and sinister conspiracies to control society. Traces of the true Christian goddess worship can be found throughout the history of Western art, literature, and architecture, because the true faith has been preserved by an elite secret society.
All of these assertions are just false. They are ably refuted in works like Cracking the Da Vinci Code by James L. Garlon and Peter Jones and Breaking the Da Vinci Code by Darrell L. Bock. Even secular historians know these claims are nonsense. (No, Jesus did not get married; His bride is the Church. No, there were not 80 other gospels written earlier than those that made it into the New Testament. No, the Emperor Constantine did not compile the Bible. No, the Priory of Zion is not an ancient society; it was started in the 1800s. You can say a confident "No" to just about every claim made by Mr. Brown.)
The Da Vinci Code draws on mythology that has been current in occult and New Age circles for years, but they all draw on the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. As Mr. Garlon and Mr. Jones show in their expos of the novel, The Da Vinci Code draws very specifically on Gnostic texts found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt.
Gnostic myths reject the objective, created order in favor of an inner-directed secret knowledge. Since the creation is evil, so is the Creator, so the Gnostics turn the Old Testament upside down: God is attacked as a cruel, oppressive deity, while the serpent in the garden and Satan himself are seen as the good guys. Christ is not God in the flesh who died on the Cross but a mystical avatar who gives knowledge to the spiritual elite. Since the physical body doesn't matter, sexual immorality is not problematic, and gender distinctions are illusions.
Today, feminist theologians are trying to bring back Gnosticism, thinking that it makes possible a higher view of women. In doing so, they are putting out seemingly scholarly works that repeat the howlers of Dan Brown's fiction. According to Elaine Pagels, a theologian at Princeton University, the Gnostics were an authentic expression of early Christianity. They were suppressed by the early church because of their enlightened treatment of women, and the church fathers constructed the creeds of orthodoxy in order to silence the Gnostics and keep women in line. Like Mr. Brown, Ms. Pagels believes Christianity is simply a construction to keep a patriarchal, oppressive system in power, and they both advocate a revival of Gnosticism to take Christianity's place.
Another contemporary apologist for Gnosticism, the literary critic Harold Bloom, says that Gnosticism has already taken Christianity's place. Mr. Bloom wrote a book titled The American Religion. That religion, according to him, is not Christianity but Gnosticism. He makes the point that the religions and denominations that grew up on American soil tend to be experiential, nondoctrinal, and highly individualistic -- marks, he says, of Gnosticism. In his historical survey of American religious figures, he finds other specific marks of Gnostic mythology. The heroes of his book, those who are most Gnostic according to his analysis, are Mormons and liberal Southern Baptists.
Whether or not Mr. Bloom is right, it is certainly true that we are experiencing a Gnostic revival today. The current postmodernist worldview, which rejects objective truth in favor of the notion that truth is nothing more than a construction of the mind, is itself intrinsically Gnostic. This ideology lies behind Ms. Pagels's scholarship: Historic Christianity, she assumes, is a construction. Following the tenets of feminist post-Marxism, she further believes that such constructions and their imposition on others are what they are simply to give power to one group (such as white, heterosexual males) and to keep other groups (such as minorities, women, and homosexuals) under their control.
These ideas are also explicitly maintained in The Da Vinci Code, which also explains why Mr. Brown and Ms. Pagels feel so free to make things up, in defiance of all objective evidence. If you are a Gnostic who does not believe the objective world really exists and that all truths are mere constructions, you can construct "truths" of your own to advance your power agenda. There really is no difference between fact and fiction. It is all fiction.
And if Christians have unwittingly succumbed to the Gnostic heresy, it is more urgent than ever that they learn what the biblical worldview really is and the difference that worldview makes as Christians live in the world.
Christians have been learning to attend to "worldviews" -- both the non-Christian ones that surround them (lest their thinking be distorted by the culture), and the Christian one (so they can apply biblical truth to all of life and be a positive influence on that culture). Exactly what this entails, though, and how to apply worldview thinking in practical terms have not always been clear. Total Truth makes this clear. On one level, this book is a lucid, easy-to-understand manual for worldview thinking. But it also breaks new ground in worldview analysis.
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