How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Elizabeth Boyle O'Reilly
more to the imagination. It is possible that the severe dignity of Paris may even chill at first. But what clarity of plan! Four strong buttresses accentuate the big square parallelogram. Excess of ornamentation has been avoided in order that the whole may stand forth. Lest the two towers might appear to rise abruptly from the massive, some master hand made there the graceful open colonnade.[74]
The façade of Notre Dame is true to its epoch in its appeal to the intellect rather than to the emotions. It was built in the golden age of scholasticism, when religion and philosophy went hand in hand, when the teachers in the schools of Paris, the cité lettré, the œil du monde, thought that Faith and Reason could give mutual aid one to the other, that the truths of Revelations could coincide with the natural judgment.
Scholasticism has been belittled by the modern sophists from the time of the XVIII-century Encyclopædist to the XIX-century superman. Yet scholasticism was an important factor in the formation of the French intellect, which, in its virile youth, it put through a course of useful mental gymnastics. Precisely the race, whose ancestors sharpened their wits in the Sic-et-Non debates of the mediæval schools of Paris, is to-day pre-eminent in precision of language and freedom from fogginess of thought. Easy enough for the modern mind to ridicule the quarrel of generations over nominalism and realism, pursued with the personal heat of a modern political campaign.[75] Certainly the abuse of the scholastic system led to hair-splitting disputes, for the deductive method, when carried to excess, ends in thin subtlety. But why judge a system by its extremes? Because XIV-century architecture grew rigid with set formulas and the abuse of its own laws, does that discredit the virile period to which it succeeded?
The bishops who built Notre Dame were notable scholastics. The generations who built cathedrals were impregnated with the certainty that what was Christian was rational. Scholasticism produced St. Thomas Aquinas, whose philosophy has outlived a dozen systems, whose Summa was placed on the assembly table of the Council of Trent, the sole companion of the Scriptures, Aquinas, whose sanity of ethics and doctrine was held up by Leo XIII as the best guide amid current errors.
With Aquinas, who taught the inextricable union of Faith and Reason, Christian philosophy reached its zenith.[76] Too long has it been the fashion to look on orthodoxy as a sign of mental inferiority. Professors still dismiss the Summa with a scathing line. They have never opened its pages, perhaps, but second-hand knowledge to vast regions of human thought is no impediment to a chair in the modern university. “Abstractions as repulsive as they are frivolous,” is the dictum of a group of present-day French scholars who seem to think that to belittle things mediæval is proof of patriotism.
We have looked on at the rehabilitation of certain mediæval saints. It was not so long ago that the poor man of Assisi was patronized as an ignorant fanatic. The appeal of St. Francis is to the emotions, while that of St. Thomas Aquinas is to the intellect, so, perhaps, it is expecting too much to hope that some day the average man may appreciate this thinker who set sane boundaries round the human mind. Too long have the prime sanities of reason been flouted by hazy abstract thinking in the void; too long has man shut his eyes to the fact that a crime of the intellect is of more consequence to mankind than a crime against the civil law; too long has applause been given to philosophers who obliterated the distinctions between right and wrong—like Hegel, teaching the identity of Being and non-Being—so that the very soul of the peoples grew perverted and appalling cataclysms threatened civilization.
What the older centuries thought of Aquinas, the painter as well as the poet tells us. In the Louvre hangs Benozzo Gozzoli’s picture of the doctor angelicus sitting in luminous repose amid pope, doctors, saints, and the sages of antiquity, and the inscription runs: “Vere hic est lumen ecclesiæ.” And in Milan hangs Piero della Francesca’s profound study of the saint. “I place Plato high,” wrote a sound French thinker, “but as I see Aquinas he is as superior to Plato, and even more, than is our knowledge of the physical world to that of the Greeks. … He embraces St. Augustine, Aristotle, and Plato.”
Often has it been said that a Gothic cathedral is the Summa translated into stone, logical, ordered, interlinked, leaving nothing to chance, a sound skeleton on a sound base, so securely balanced that great windows could be opened on the sky, like flashes of intuitive genius lifting the soul to the infinite. Many were the points by which St. Thomas touched Gothic art in its heyday. He was a student in Cologne when its mighty cathedral was begun. He was in Paris during the years when the transept of Notre Dame was building, and the Sainte-Chapelle and St. Denis’ abbatial. By blood he was related to St. Louis, and often was his guest at table, where talk must have turned on that keen interest of the hour—the making of Gothic churches.[77] He was to die (1274) in Cistercian Fossanuova, the first Gothic monument of Italy. And his great work, like many a cathedral, was left unfinished.
Never was aspiration toward the infinite more passionate than in that scholastic disputing, commune-winning, cathedral-building, crusading age. The absorbing interest for old and young, for bishop and layman, for king and poor student, was to know God, to know their own souls, to learn how to make life more worthy of God. “In the entire length of France,” wrote the archbishop of Sens to the pope, in 1140, “in towns and even in villages, in the schools and outside them, all, even simple people and children, are disputing on the Holy Trinity.” Paris became the center of the seething new interest in theology and philosophy. In 1109 Guillaume de Champeaux opened a school of logic on the slopes of St. Geneviève’s hill (where to this day reigns Paris University), and soon all Christendom frequented it.[78] His pupil, and later his opponent, was Abélard, brilliant, restless knight-errant of dialectics, whom the modern orthodox student finds to be a forerunner of the new method of biblical criticism rather than a rationalist.
In the abbey of St. Victor, whose free classes were founded by Guillaume de Champeaux when harried by Abélard, there gathered a group of mystic scholars and poets: Hugues de St. Victor, the Augustine of his day (d. 1141), whose work on the sacraments was an interlinked system of theology. Lucid in intellect, tender in sentiment, was this friend of St. Bernard, whom Dante places in Paradise with St. Anselm and St. Bonaventure (Par., xii: 30); and Hugues’ disciple, Richard de St. Victor (d. 1173), ranked in Paradise as the companion of the Venerable Bede and St. Isidore of Seville, “Richard, who in contemplation was more than man” (Par., x: 132); and Adam de St. Victor, one of the best poets of the XII century, whose sequences and rimed proses fill the liturgy. Another pupil of the learned Hugues was Pierre Lombard, who died bishop of Paris in 1160; his Book of Sentences became a textbook in European universities for centuries to come.
From the cathedral school and the mount of St. Geneviève and St. Victor’s cloister[79] evolved the University of Paris, “elder daughter of France,” whose title first appears in 1215, the oldest university in Europe with that of Bologna—one the high priestess of theology, the other the leader in canon and civil law. In the XII-century schools of Paris, John of Salisbury met Thomas Becket and Nicholas Breakspear (the English pope, Adrian IV), and there the future Innocent III became the friend of Stephen Langton.
By the XIII century over thirty thousand students thronged the colleges in Paris. Aquinas taught in the Dominicans’ branch of the university, in which same convent, called the Jacobins, lived the reader of Louis IX, Vincent de Beauvais, whose four Mirrors were depicted in the imagery of the great cathedrals. No age was ever more enamored of encyclopædias. To overclassify was a characteristic of the times which even the great Aquinas could not escape. They say that over five hundred monks, under the guidance of the Dominican cardinal, Hugues de Saint-Cher, were busy in the rue St. Jacques preparing the first concordance of Scriptures. The entire Bible was translated into French in the XIII century. In the Franciscans’ branch of the University St. Bonaventure taught. The king’s chaplain, Robert de Sorbon, founded a house where poor students could live in common. Canterbury’s archbishop, St. Edmund Rich, was a pupil in Paris, then a teacher. Roger Bacon, first to grasp the importance of experimental science, studied there, and so did Robert Grosseteste, builder of Lincoln Cathedral, whom Bacon said excelled all other masters in his range of useful knowledge.
The smelting pot of modern society those fecund formative years of the XII and XIII centuries have been called. A life-time’s study it would be to draw adequately the picture of