Prehistoric Europe

Drawing Notre Dame Interior - Paris France





Photograph of Notre Dame at Night - Paris, France




Lascaux Cave Painting - Dordogne, France





Lascaux Cave Painting - Dordogne, France





Sometime around 1994, I had the pleasure of traveling to Paris for business. At the time, I worked for a now extinct computer manufacturer. I was assigned to a small, strategic division which had staff in Europe, Australia and Asia. The executives would meet quarterly to share vision and to create goals and objectives. We were in the process of rapidly growing our business and completely reshaping our division’s structure to meet the fast changing global economy. To inspire and lift us to the next level, a leading leadership and organizational design team was hired: Dr. Leonard Sayles and Dr. Cynthia Smith.

Dr. Sayles has his doctorate in Industrial Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was then a professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Business. He has written several books and advised NASA on management methods. Dr. Smith is an anthropologist. She has coauthored a book, and she lectures at Ohio State University (I think currently – unfortunately, I haven’t stayed in touch with either of them).

While I had successes in business, I was not formally educated beyond high school. Rather, I studied electronics at a trade school and started in the computer business installing and repairing mainframe computers. I attribute my rise in business to hard work, great mentors and lucky opportunities.
This background is only meaningful for the context of my experiences in Paris with these two highly educated and quite lovely people.

I had occasions to meet and interact with Leonard and Cynthia prior to traveling to Paris. While in Paris, we spent some leisure time together dining and touring the area around Notre Dame. We got along quite well. I really liked them. I felt the fond feelings were mutual. I don’t recall if we were able to go inside Notre Dame on this particular trip. I do remember walking around the huge cathedral and marveling at its architecture and embellishments (I can’t think of the term for exterior stuff right now).

After looking at Notre Dame, and while meandering through an adjoining neighborhood, Leonard commented how fortunate we are as a society to have moved beyond the simplistic and absolute belief of God, good and evil toward a more enlightened, mythological understanding of the representation of the idea of God (I don’t remember his exact words. However, I believe I have represented his sentiments correctly). There I was the primitive one amongst the modern intellectuals, the uneducated amongst the educated, and the believer amongst the non-believers. To top off this sense of social and intellectual inferiority, at that time the only thing I was secure about was my own enormous list of insecurities!

I simply told them both that I have a testimony of the life of Jesus Christ and a belief that he is the Son of a living God. They graciously accepted my position and comments, and we went about enjoying the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures of Paris on an expense account.

How does this relate to the paintings in the caves of Lascaux? I think there can be a tendency to assume that someone who is uneducated in the traditional sense cannot experience the world intelligently, and that this traditionally uneducated person is somehow unable to relate their experiences back to society in a meaningful way.

Indeed, reflecting back upon my experience at Notre Dame, I connected spiritually with these “primitive” humans in that I felt my beliefs were viewed by other, more educated people as primitive and simple-minded. This week, when I first thought of primitive men and women, I thought of simple-minded people; people who were animal-based, who relied upon their instincts and who I regarded as being low-level thinking humans. The art from the cave changed my arrogant view.

Indeed, I am amazed at the soulful and awe-inspiring paintings of the large animals depicted in the cave paintings. I am also amazed at the technical use of the natural form of the caves in creating the experience of movement. When I initially saw the picture of the cave paintings, I thought of a hymn we sing at church. The hymn begins, “O Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder, consider all the worlds thy hands have made. . . Then sings my soul….” This song usually comes into my mind when I climb a mountain and take in a vista. I associate the hymn with the sense of looking upon large expanses. I find that both the cave painting and the interior of Notre Dame give me similar feelings, in that both give me the sense of beholding a beautiful, expansive vista full of wonderful creations by artists and craftsmen from vastly different time periods.

The art depicted in both cathedrals seem to require more than one person and one generation to complete. How does an artist begin an artwork knowing that they will not see the final creation? I think these artists did not have a choice. I think it was something deep within them that beckoned them as if by a calling from a higher power to express their world through their art, regardless of how educated or intellectual they may have been according to our modern standards. Perhaps if they derived satisfaction, it was by honoring that call by participating in a work greater than them.