This will Kill That

This will Kill That is Claude Frollo’s prophecy that the printed book will displace the monumental authority of the church and, more broadly, architecture’s role as humanity’s great record. The phrase gathers two related claims into one image of succession: printing threatens an institution built on religious authority, and a new medium of expression is replacing the “book of stone” with the book on paper. Its force lies in joining a political change to a transformation in how human thought is preserved and shared.

The Archdeacon’s Gesture

The saying takes shape in Claude Frollo’s cell, where the archdeacon turns from a printed volume to Notre-Dame Cathedral. He opens the window and points toward the church, whose two towers and massive stone form appear against the night sky. On the table lies a folio printed in Nuremberg in 1474, a work on the Epistles of Saint Paul. Claude extends one hand toward the book and the other toward the cathedral, then looks sadly from one to the other. The gesture gives the formula its visible structure: one object is set against another, and the movement between them makes the coming replacement seem already present.

Jacques Coictier, who has approached the volume, objects that its contents are not new. It is a work by the Master of Sentences, he notes, and asks whether the concern is simply that it has been printed. Claude’s reply confirms that the medium, rather than the text’s subject, is the point. The old learning has acquired a new form, and that change is enough to provoke alarm. The book’s ordinary appearance sharpens the contrast: a printed folio, a church visible through a window, and the archdeacon’s mournful gesture become the concrete terms of a historical argument.

Two Meanings of “This” and “That”

The narrator explains that Claude’s enigmatic words have two faces. In their first, priestly sense, they express fear that the printing press will weaken the Church’s authority. The movement from manuscript and pulpit to printed word threatens the sanctuary’s control over belief and interpretation. The narrator presents the saying as a prediction that intelligence will challenge faith, opinion will displace belief, and humanity will begin to shake off Rome. In this reading, the book is dangerous because it carries thought beyond the institutions that once governed its transmission.

The second meaning shifts from religious power to artistic and historical expression. Architecture, the narrator argues, had been humanity’s principal medium: the great book through which successive stages of human force and intelligence made themselves legible. Claude’s phrase therefore anticipates not only a struggle between the press and the Church, but a change in the material through which a society gives enduring form to its ideas. “The press will kill the church” names the institutional prospect; “Printing will kill architecture” names the cultural one. The two propositions are connected, but not identical: one concerns the fate of religious authority, the other the succession of media.

Architecture and the Printed Word

The narrator places the transformation across a long history. Before the fifteenth century, architecture served as a durable public record. When speech could no longer reliably carry the growing mass of human memory, people fixed traditions in the landscape beneath monuments. Buildings thus functioned as a collective form of writing: visible, lasting, and rooted in a particular place. Their scale and permanence enabled a generation to embody its dominant ideas in stone.

In the fifteenth century, this relation changes. The printed word is described as simpler and easier to reproduce, yet also more durable and resistant than architecture. Gutenberg’s lead letters are set against the stone letters associated with Orpheus: one medium yields to another, and the book is about to kill the edifice. The opposition is not merely between fragile paper and solid masonry. In the narrator’s account, printed thought becomes volatile, irresistible, and indestructible because it can disperse through the air and occupy many places at once. Architecture gathers meaning into a monument, a century, and a location; print releases it from that concentrated form.

Succession, Not Simple Destruction

The image of killing makes the transition sound absolute, but the narrator describes a change of expression rather than the disappearance of human thought. The content persists while its medium changes: humanity strips off one form and assumes another. The book’s victory is therefore also a redistribution. Ideas once given monumental shape in a church or other building can circulate in printed form beyond the single place that housed them. The contrast between concentrated stone and dispersed print explains why the new medium is presented as a force capable of reshaping both cultural authority and historical memory.

Claude speaks in a brief, cryptic formula; the narrator then unfolds it into a theory of institutional and artistic succession. The scene at the window gives that theory its emblem: the archdeacon’s hands point simultaneously toward the threatened past and the emerging medium. The phrase’s decisive significance is its double scale. It forecasts a contest over who can shape belief, while also marking a turning point in the history of human expression, when the book of paper begins to take over the work once performed by the book of stone.