How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Elizabeth Boyle O'Reilly
Laon), opposed the communal claims, he and the people went on building their cathedral together. We have precious documents to assure us in what spirit of piety the work was done. All classes and all ages, women as well as men, gave their voluntary labor to the new works, after having confessed and communicated in pious confraternities; sometimes it was for an abbot that they dragged in the stones from the quarry, as at St. Denis and St. Pierre-sur-Dives; sometimes it was to aid a bishop, as at Chartres and Rouen. To offset such irrefutable evidence there is not one contemporary reference to a laic, or communal purpose.
Also, when it is asserted that the bishop helped the cathedrals because they were jealous of the monastic orders, there is not one historical record to confront a host of documents which disprove the idea. Large numbers of the bishop-builders issued from monasteries, founded monasteries, and returned to monasteries to die. While Maurice de Sully was erecting Notre Dame, at Paris, he built four monasteries, in one of which he requested to be buried. The bishop who began Auxerre Cathedral chose Cistercian Pontigny for his tomb. The bishop-builders of Noyon, Laon, Senlis, Soissons, Rheims, Bourges, and Rouen were buried among the monks. That there should occasionally be friction between a bishop and an abbot over legal privileges is only characteristic of human nature in all times. As a class the bishops were not opposed to the monks, nor the Orders to the secular clergy. The monks of St. Remi honored the archbishop of Rheims in their choir windows.
The cloister welcomed the new architecture. Transition Gothic churches were built by the monks of St. Germain-des-Prés and St. Martin-des-Champs at Paris, and one could prolong the list into pages. Where in Burgundy is found the earliest Gothic? In the Cistercian church of Pontigny, and in Benedictine Vézelay. Where in Champagne?—the abbatials of Notre Dame at Châlons-sur-Marne and St. Remi at Rheims. In Normandy? In the Midi?—again the answer is, in abbey churches. Indeed, monastic building energy seemed inexhaustible, for where the prime of Gothic arrived, it was still the monks who produced that masterpiece of the new art, the Merveille of Mont-Saint-Michel.
In the XII century the spread of monastic life took on a phenomenal aspect. Benedictine houses and those of the newly founded Orders of Cîteaux and Prémontré increased, not by hundreds, but by thousands. The monks were in absolute accord with the spirit of their time. Sons of the cloister had inspired the entire XI century: Gregory VII, Abbot William of Dijon, St. Anselm, Lanfranc, St. Hugues of Cluny. A bevy of remarkable men of the cloister led the XII century, the chief being Suger of St. Denis, protector of the serfs, the man of genius who stimulated the bishops of France to remake their cathedrals in emulation of his Gothic abbey church, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, on whose words all Europe hung.
Architecture passed to laic control when the protection of monastic life was no longer needed for artists, and when the science of building required the specialist, the man occupied with it alone. The schools of Cluny had trained the first guildsmen, and many of the names of Gothic architects—Orbais, Honnecourt, Corbic—indicate that they were born in places where monastic building industries flourished. It was in the natural course of events that the art should pass out of the possession of the few into the general national life.
Another natural happening has been distorted by partisans. The burning of monastery archives during the XVI-century religious wars and by the Revolution is accountable for the few names of architects that have come down to us. The scarcity of such names has been cited as an instance of the jealous suppression of the laymen by the clergy forced to employ them. Now precisely the contrary is the truth. What modern architect was ever accorded such prominence as was allowed by the bishops of Amiens and Rheims to their masters-of-works when they inscribe those laymen names in the labyrinth designs of the cathedral pavements? The monks of Marmoutier and of St. Germain-des-Prés were proud to bury in their abbey-churches their architects Étienne de Mortagne and Pierre de Montereau. In Rheims, the architects Hugues Libergier and Robert de Coucy were likewise honored.
By digging in old archives, the modern student is ever adding new names to the nation’s honor roll. Many a gap still remains, but the very anonymousness of such masters of the living stone is stuff for the imagination. One likes to picture the old-time craftsman-artist rejoicing in his insignificance as he chiseled his leaf and vine just as he saw them by the roadside. He served a Master who gave like wages to all who worked in spirit and in truth, to him who, in the hidden corners where no human eye could penetrate, carved his leaf and flower with the same love as did the greater artist working on the stately imaged portals.
The “heretical Gothic-sculpture bogey” has led certain imaginations astray. There are those who find latent heresy in the old carvers’ work; they point, with suggestive smile, to the bishop and monk placed among the damned in the Last Judgments at the cathedral doors. Let them turn to the sermons of the day and they will find precisely the same Christian doctrine of the equality of all men before sin and punishment, preached from the pulpit within the church. Not in all the myriad scenes from Old and New Testaments is a single doctrinal error to be found, says M. Émile Mâle, who is master of the iconography of French churches. The sculptor layman merely carried out the scheme of the trained theologian.
Many a sharp word does M. Viollet-le-Duc give as critic to those who enjoy in a cathedral the superficial beauties of decoration, but are blind to the efficient structure, to the scientific upholding skeleton. Surely it is a still more radical ignorance which perceives in a Gothic church its mechanical perfection, but denies the aspiration to immortality which was its inceptive spirit. To ascribe the origin of cathedrals to the need by the nascent commune of a town hall is to make of those soaring monuments veritable follies of human pride. Restore to them their religious soul, have eyes to see what may be called their spiritual framework, and as up-leaps toward the infinite they are sublimities. Can churches be the creation of rebellion and hate when into their very stones passed the clamorous vibrant faith of those crusading generations? Like hovering prayers their vaults seem to shut one in. The heart, weary of modern sophistry, draws strength from their eternal affirmation. He must have little music in his soul who is deaf to such a Credo. When men built Gothic cathedrals they knelt on both knees to pray, and never have they soared more supremely above themselves. “Deeds of God through the French” are these temples.
A word in regard to the term “Gothic.” It is as unreasonable a misnomer as could have been chosen, but since usage has sanctioned it, it must pass. Primarily put into currency by the Italians of the Renaissance, in the injurious sense of barbarous, the term was adopted by the French neo-classics of the XVII century. Molière’s scathing line on Gothic sculpture is well known—“Ces monstres odieux des siècles ignorants.” He complained that Gothic art “fit à la politesse une mortelle guerre.” When Racine spoke of Chartres Cathedral he made use of the term barbare; even to the churchman Fénelon the cathedrals of the Middle Ages appeared unreasoned and faulty.
The opprobrious term was fixed by the Encyclopædists of the next century, when prejudice against the Middle Ages became militant and organized. With exclusive pedantism they dismissed the most national and civilized of arts as worthy of those rough invaders, the Goths. Voltaire, who, says Guizot, garnered only what was mean and criminal in the Middle Ages, saw in the study of Gothic architecture “a coarse curiosity, lacking good taste.” As late as 1800, a project was abroad to disencumber the soil of France of “these overcharged façades with their multitude of indecent and ridiculous figures.” And still later, the students in the national school of architecture were taught to despise the most reasoned, the most robust, the most logical of arts as a style of confusion and caprice.
The rehabilitation of Gothic architecture in France, if tardy, has been ample. No branch of modern science presents a more able corps of workers. While true to the Latin genius, which unites clarity of style with an exact erudition, they have obeyed a yet deeper race instinct which knows that matter must be vivified by spirit, else learning sinks to a dry-as-dust recording, incapable of its highest flight. The telling of the monumental story of France has been touched by the sacred flame of patriotism. Like paladins, these modern knights are abroad on all the by-paths eager to rescue some hidden treasure of the national art. Future scholarship will look back at the brilliant achievements of the French archæologists of to-day with the same pride that is felt for the Benedictine savants of the XVII century.
The aim of archæology is