Correction appended.
Though Princeton's enlightened Protestant founders disdained medieval Catholicism, they shared with it an ineradicable habit of scriptural exegesis called "typology." This was the science of finding in the "types" of the Hebrew Scriptures the corresponding Christian "anti-types" of the Greek New Testament. Thus Jesus Christ was the "new Adam" (I Cor. 15), and with the convenient help of the palindromes Eva/Ave, the Virgin Mary the new Eve. Though even the Trustees may be amazed by the news, the ancient habit is permanently enshrined in the seal of the University with its Old and New Testaments wired in series.
I naturally thought of all this some months ago when I saw three very strong men, aided by machines, carrying off the huge wrought-iron panels of the FitzRandolph Gate on front campus. President Tilghman, who happened by at the same moment, assuaged my alarm with the promise that they would be back. I wasn't too sure. The only other gate-hauler known to me was the biblical Samson. When the citizens of Gaza threatened to spoil his sex-tour of their city by capturing and killing him, he simply "took the doors of the gate of the city, and the two posts, and went away with them, bar and all, and put them on his shoulders, and carried them up to the top of an hill that is before Hebron."
That image serves frequently in medieval art as a type of the Resurrection of Christ: two heroes bursting forth from the confines of Death, one victory foreshadowing a second and greater one. My favorite example of the icon is in the magnificent enamel-work altarpiece of Nicholas of Verdun, dated 1181, at Klosterneuberg in Austria. We are adaptable creatures, and I soon grew accustomed to the central gaping emptiness and toothless appearance of the Nassau Street fronting. Yet since the FitzRandolph Gate itself has a powerful if secular iconic significance on our campus, my typological musings returned with delight this week when I saw renovated iron being put back in place. There were three artisans in two trucks. These stalwarts of the Hawks Mountain Ironworks in North Springfield, Vt., were very old-fashioned Vermont-type guys in real Vermont-type trucks, meaning that both the vehicles and guys bore visible evidence of having done a fair amount of heavy lifting, while suggesting the capacity to do a good deal more. It was quite clear that for these guys a day's work was not a protracted coffee break punctuated by occasional moments of industry.
Jeff Crosby, one of the blacksmiths who had performed the work, told me that restoring the gates involved major surgery. Though he saved as much as he could, sections of the original iron were so decayed as to require replacing. Creative scavenging went some way toward solving the problem, but our Secretary of Commerce should note that a single foundry in England is the sole source of new metal for such purposes. This accomplished craftsman had melded old and new in a seamless unity. But the reinstallation was also tricky, involving the reconfiguring and re-welding of the iron pinions encased in lead within the deep sockets of the sustaining stone columns.
By the time my own column appears, the FitzRandolph Gate will be back where it belongs. Undergraduates who treasure tradition can once again walk out of their way to avoid it. For you do know, of course, that the first time a Princeton student should actually walk through the gates is on Commencement Day. Medieval exegetes had a memorable phrase about their biblical types: Significata magis significante placent. "The things signified are yet more pleasing than the sign that signifies them." That ought to be true, too, of the marvelously restored FitzRandolph Gate. It is certainly a stunning work of art. But the magnificent artifact is also a sign that points to things yet more magnificent — an original Princeton type if ever there was one. It is in the first place an emblem of rare human invention and skill. It was in 1905 the gift of one Augustus van Wickle, memorializing the yet more magnificent gift of his ancestor Nathaniel FitzRandolph, the donor of the land on which Nassau Hall was built. It is thus the perfect sign of the never-failing generations of benefactors, friends and alumni, who have enabled Princeton's greatness in the past and must remain its bright hope for the future.
John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. His column appears on Mondays. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.
Correction:
The original version of this article misspelled the name of Augustus van Wickle.Read More
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