The author Franz Funck-Brentano relates the accomplishments of an organic Christian Society by relating the superhuman and flexible efforts involved in the building of cathedrals. He writes:
“For the rest, not a single one of our great churches was finished according to the plan on which it was conceived. The prodigious impulse which caused them to spring from the ground is included almost entirely in the reign of Philip Augustus – forty years – which one might extend perhaps up to the year 1240 – sixty years in all. And the effort produced in this short space of time might seem superhuman. Nothing even remotely comparable to it 
has since been seen, just as nothing has appeared since comparable to the wonderful flowering of the epic poems, contemporary with the cathedrals, which furnish for them so magnificent an echo.” (Franz Funck-Brentano, The Middle Ages, William Heinmann, London, 1922, p. 236-237.)