God's Own Language

God's Own Language: Architectural Drawings in the Twelfth Century

by Karl Kinsella

Cambridge: MIT Press, 2023

ISBN: 978-0-262-04774-6

Read by the author in Sept. 2025

"You son of man, describe the house to the House of Israel, that they may be ashamed of their iniquities, and let them measure the plan." (Ezekiel 43:10)

The last quarter of Ezekiel deals primarily with a vision of the future Temple in Jerusalem, and for millenia scholars have struggled to make sense of the difficult description. Some Jewish commentators ended their commentaries on the book before the start of this section, essentially punting on this opaque ekphrastic verses, while others did their best to understand both the technical language and the architectural description. In the twelfth century, Richard of Saint Victor composed a Latin work, In Visionem Ezechielis, which attempted the latter. 

Karl Kinsella's God's Own Language focuses on the history of this book and its implication for the history of architectural drawings. This is a book that dovetails with several papers I've recently written, and was of great interest. It was well written, and the book itself is quite beautiful. 

Kinsella argues that any history of architectural drawings should take plans such as Richard's into account, a similar arguement as that made by Rachel Wischnitzer in her article "Maimonides' Drawings of the Temple." Richard focused on deciphering the Latin translation, rather than the original Hebrew, but, influenced by commentators like Rashi, believed it was important to first understand the sensus litteralis, literal sense, of architectural terms like porta in the Latin translation (p.159), and then try to put the vision together as a coherent plan. 

Kinsella makes an interesting point about Richard's attempt to explain the design of the Temple to his medieval audience. He make use of contemporary architecture that would be anachronistic for Ezekiel's writings: 

"The medieval forms speak to Richard's engagement with the present as much as with the past. Anachronism in medieval objects and images reflects premodern modes of reading the present, where the anachronistic objects act as substitutions for historical objects, embodying their earliest exemplar, and yet still read as intrinsically authentic." (p.163)

It is a different kind of realia, but the goal was to help readers visualize the architecture of Ezekiel in a way they could understand, envision, and identify. Interestingly, Kinsella writes that this is similar to what Rashi does when he uses French words to explain terms in the Bible or Talmud. (p.175)

The greatest innovation in Richard's work was his use of architectural plans and sections as study tools. God's Own Language's color plates duplicate the illustrated pages in the MS Lat. 14516 manuscript of this work, and Kinsella walks us through Richard's walk-through of  Ezekiel's walk-through of the future Temple. The book gives the background of the scholarly atmosphere in Saint Victor at the time, the state of architectural design in the twelfth century, and even includes a chapter on the interactions between Richard and Jewish scholarship (one illustration of his was clearly copied from Rashi's commentary on Ezekiel, see p.177) For example, Kinsella explains how in the Middle Ages architectural practice had largely been degraded. In one interesting quote from Dante, he explains that all people involved in the Tower of Babel had been punished, and that "the more skill required for the type of work, the more rudimentary and barbaric the language they now spoke." Architects, who were central to the Tower, were therefore reduced to an inadequate vocabulary for their work. (p.111) 

As a result of this state of affairs, Kinsella claims that Richard needed to innovate a great deal to create a cogent commentary on these chapters of Ezekiel. Kinsella sees evidence in this both in the diagrams and in the language Richard employs. According to Kinsella, Richard was the first to use the term "plan" in reference to his building diagrams, a claim that I cannot knowledgably fact-check. I can, however, note that Ezekiel himself uses the Hebrew term tochnit which is today the modern Hebrew word for plan and is understood as such by Kimchi and David Altschuler in their classic commentaries. Kinsella also writes that Richards drawings "are the earliest to employ a combination of plans and elevations to illustrate several buildings and their relationship with one another." (p.11) This claim is problematic, as previous examples exist which do just that. Joachim Heisel collected examples of ancient plans and sections in his Antike Bauzeichnungen and these include a plan and section of Ramses IV's tomb from the twelfth century BCE and a combination plan and section of El-Amarna from the 18th dynasty. Heisel does, however, write that the technique was not used much but Romans and not at all by the Greeks. Kinsella himself calls attention to plans with elevations of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, such as that reproduced in Adomnan's On the Holy Places. Richard may well have been unaware of previous drawings with combined projections, but his work was contemporary with Maimonides' commentary on the Mishnah, which included similar plans and sections. Nevertheless, there is no question that Richard was fluent in the geometric diagrams of his time and was able to use this background in his endeavors, perhaps even in a highly influential manner. This point should not take away from the thorough and thought provoking analysis of Richard's plans and sections. 

One small additional point involves the label of templus exterius on a plan of the central sanctuary. Kinsella uses this label to suggest that illustrators misunderstood the plan and thought it was an elevation. In fact, it seems clear to me that this was a way of distinguishing between the Holy and the Holy of Holies. In this case I do not think the author's point holds up. (p.144)