How France Built Her Cathedrals Part 32

On the confines of the old kingdom of Burgundy, as the VI century closed, St. Columba.n.u.s founded at Luxeuil, between the sources of the Moselle and the Saone, an abbey which was to mold the religious life of the VII century, most fertile of epochs in the number and fervor of its religious inst.i.tutions. Luxeuil became the popular school of Gaul, the mother house of hundreds of monasteries. Her monks filled the sees of France. The Celtic Rule was harsh, a compound of the Orient, of Lerens, and of Bangor in Ireland; even on feast days fish was a luxury. It was only the personal genius of the impetuous Irish missionary that caused it to be accepted for a few generations; then as the VII century closed, the Benedictine Rule which conformed better to human limitations superseded the Columban. "Where Columba.n.u.s sowed, Benedict reaped."[268]

Three hundred years later there rose in Burgundy the most splendid monastic inst.i.tution that Christendom has ever known, Benedictine Cluny, that stood shoulder to shoulder with the reforming popes in their fight for the purification of the Church.[269] Cluny initiated the Truce of G.o.d, the peace movement of the XI century that permitted the art renaissance which was to culminate in the Gothic cathedrals. Peace meant an unmolested commerce, peace meant city charters and stable laws.

A reformed clergy meant the renewal of the people's love of the altar, and their generous contributions toward the erection of churches. With Cluny as leader there was then formulated the architecture which was a stepping stone to a greater system.

Two hundred years after Cluny's foundation, Burgundy again gave birth to a monastic movement which was to carry to the ends of Europe the Gothic system of building. Citeaux, in the extent of its conquests and its centralized administration, has been compared with the Roman Empire.

Cistercian monks carried Burgundian Gothic to Spain, to Italy, to Greece, to England, Germany, and Scandinavia. Owing to the conditions of society and of the episcopacy, the cloister then was chief patron of art. Simony infected the bishoprics and it is not under unworthy prelates that churches are reared. Gregory VII, Cluny, that supplied him with his army of reformers, and St. Bernard, with his white-cowled brethren, warred unceasingly on simony, concubinage, and invest.i.ture (the tormenting question of layman control of churchmen). And since it was monasteries that fought that battle of regeneration, monastic churches and not cathedrals were the first tangible proof of the ethical rebirth of Europe. _a la peine ... a l'honneur._ When the reform achieved by Cluny and Citeaux had filled the sees with worthy bishops, then were built the great cathedrals.

We have seen how the problem of roofing churches in stone caused the evolution from Romanesque to Gothic art. Burgundy's struggle to achieve a permanent stone roof was bolder than that of other regional schools in France, and perhaps it was overhardy, since her abbatials, in Gothic times, had to be b.u.t.tressed to keep them standing. Though the Burgundian discarded too early the Romanesque principle of equilibrium by dead load, his temerity was a step forward in the march toward new principles of construction. These monks on Europe's highway made churches of ample width and height, and, rather than sacrifice their proper lighting, opened windows in the upper walls of the central vessel. However, they must have felt that their clearstory windows were an experiment, for they essayed, occasionally, an embryo flying b.u.t.tress, keeping it hidden under the lean-to roof of the aisles.

The militant Romanesque school of Burgundy was too well developed for it to bow instantly before the new art. Not here did the generating member of Gothic architecture first come into common usage, but in that region of northern France whose pre-Gothic school was of less importance. The Burgundian clung stubbornly to his early ways of building, and even after other provinces had accepted the ogival style he erected thoroughly Romanesque churches; St. Philibert at Dijon is the contemporary of the cathedrals at Chartres and Paris. Flying b.u.t.tresses at no time found favor in Burgundy. Groin vaults were persisted in simultaneously with diagonals, and the s.e.xpart.i.te vault used long after the north had dropped it. Firm plain profiles for archivolts and window molds were preferred.

Once the Burgundian frankly accepted the new system, his bold genius led him to push its principles to their limit. Within the confines of the duchy were the quarries of hard Tonnerre stone that permitted audacious experiments in building. He dared traverse his exterior b.u.t.tresses by circulation pa.s.sages, he dared catch his heavily weighted diagonals on corbels (carved with original heads), and to poise a ma.s.s of material on the slenderest of colonnettes. Often he surmounted his triforium by a pa.s.sage that pa.s.sed directly through the active wall shafts, as in cathedrals of Auxerre, Nevers, and Semur. By the middle of the XIII century Dijon achieved a marvel of Gothic technique in its church of Notre Dame. Despite much notable Gothic work one is inclined, none the less, to maintain that Burgundy found her fullest expression in her earlier monastic churches. Alas, that the greatest of them, Cluny, should to-day be but the phantom of its once colossal self!

CLUNY[270]

Time will be ending soon, heaven will be rending soon, fast we and pray we: Comes the most merciful; comes the most terrible; watch we while may we.

--BERNARD DE MORLAIX, "Jerusalem the Golden"[271] (c. 1140).

The "mother abbey of Europe" lies in a fertile valley some fifteen miles off the express route that pa.s.ses through Macon. The property was given to the monks by a duke of Aquitaine, who thus anathematized future despoilers: "I conjure you O holy Apostles Peter and Paul, to cut off from life eternal all robbers, invaders, or sellers of that which I herewith donate with full satisfaction and entire free will."

When Cluny was founded in 910, the victory of Christianity over the Barbarians still hung in the balance. It was Cluny that weighed down the scale for justice and progress, Cluny that gave to Rome the needed reforming popes. Hers should be a name as honored in humanity's history as Athens: "We leave college," wrote Montalembert, "able to cite the list of Jupiter's mistresses, but ignorant, even to their names, of the founders of the religious Orders that civilized Europe." And the testimony of the Protestant Leibnitz is: "Without monks we should have no erudition, for it is certain that we owe to monasteries the preservation of letters and books." Four of the best among the popes came out of Cluny's cloister: Gregory VII, Urban II, Paschal II, and Urban V.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The XI-century Sanctuary of Cluny as It Was until the Revolution_]

The modern French school of mediaeval archaeology, delving into the past, has drawn Cluny from its long oblivion. In 1910 was celebrated with national honors the millennium of the Burgundian "abbey of abbeys," and to the festival the French Academy sent M. Rene Bazin as its representative to voice the grat.i.tude of French letters to the "great Order of Cluny which in the France of the Middle Ages exercised in its plenitude the mission of civilizer, apostle of the Gospel, apostle of peace, guardian of the whole field of knowledge, founder then, of all works of charity, initiator of both literary and agricultural progress, creator of an art which she spread over Europe."

During the Middle Ages the silent Burgundian valley was a busy hive of arts and crafts[272] with goldsmiths' work, illuminating, carving in ivory and in stone, foundering of bells, and the making of stained gla.s.s. All that went toward the adornment of G.o.d's house was fostered in Cluniac schools, but above all was the master art of the builder honored. In bands of twelve the monks carried not only the Gospel, but the arts to every part of Europe, and even farther afield, for there were houses of the Order on Mount Tabor, in Nazareth, and in Bethany. No uniform Cluniac building lore was followed; it was the usual custom for the monks to conform to the local traditions in each different country.[273]

It was natural that the big abbey church at Cluny proper should have been Burgundian Romanesque. Hazelon, a monk of Cluny, was the master-of-works, a learned man who had once occupied a high position in the world; he is said to have himself worked here with trowel and mortar. The tunnel vaulting was braced by transverse ribs that were slightly pointed; clearstory windows were opened in the upper walls. The channeled pilasters were a heritage from the cla.s.sic traditions of the region; near by, in Rome's former capital of Autun, were many monuments of antiquity.

Cluny's abbey church of St. Peter was the largest in the world, and covered an area about equal to that of the present St. Peter's at Rome.

It was over five hundred and fifty feet long; the cathedral at Paris is not four hundred feet in length. There were double aisles and double transepts. St. Hugues of Cluny, the sixth abbot, "a man of G.o.d greatest among the great," "the pupil of the papacy's eye," ruled the Burgundian mother house during the sixty years that Cluny guided Christendom (1049 to 1109). No flattery, no subtlety could turn him from pure justice.

Under him were trained Hildebrand, the future Gregory VII, who led the forces of church reform. "The giving up of justice is the s.h.i.+pwreck of the soul," said Gregory VII. Abbot Hugues trained also Urban II, who preached the First Crusade. Among the houses he founded were St.

Martin-des-Champs at Paris, and St. Pancras at Lewes; in England there were thirty-five Cluniac establishments in the time of Henry VIII.

Twice St. Hugues went into Spain, where his niece was the Queen of Castile, engaged in subst.i.tuting the liturgy of the Church universal for the Mozarabic rite. To the town of Cluny he granted a commune, and he built two of its parish churches, Notre Dame and St. Marcel.[274] When he felt death approaching, he had himself carried before the altar of St. Marcel, there to breathe his last on a bed of ashes, and a few days earlier than the Easter Tuesday of 1109 on which he pa.s.sed away, his dear friend and frequent visitor at Cluny, St. Anselm of Canterbury, died, being privileged, he said, to go to meet his Saviour in time for the blessed Easter feast. Those two great men of the cloister by their ethical and intellectual leaders.h.i.+p laid the basis for the Gothic cathedrals.

The choir of St. Peter's, at Cluny, was blessed by Urban II, in 1095, when he came into France to preach the First Crusade. He pa.s.sed a week in his old home, after which he and his beloved master, St. Hugues, proceeded to the historic gathering at Clermont. The nave of St. Peter's was carried forward by succeeding abbots of Cluny, and many a pope was to watch the edifice rising. Paschal II pa.s.sed the winter of 1106-07 in Cluny, and his successor, Gelasius II, died there in 1119; he had recently consecrated the new Romanesque cathedral of Pisa.[275] On the site of the wing of the cloister where he lodged now stands a XIV-century building called by his name. On his death the cardinals at Cluny held conclave, electing as pope a member of the ducal house of Burgundy, the bishop of Vienne, who took the name Calixtus II; in Cluny church he canonized the great Abbot Hugues.

St. Hugues' successor, Pons de Melgueil, after an estimable career, was led by pride to a downfall. On his resignation, Pierre de Montboissier, an Auvergne n.o.ble, known in history as Peter the Venerable, became the ninth abbot (1122-56). At that time he was but thirty years of age. Pons returned, seized Cluny abbey, and in the ensuing disorders the vaulting of the new nave collapsed. Abbot Peter restored the stone roof, and Innocent II dedicated the completed church in 1131.

The capitals then carved are to be seen in the town's Museum. Some of them personified the eight tones of liturgical music, for Cluny excelled in song, and every twenty-four hours her vast basilica echoed to the chanting of the entire book of Psalms; never, says the old chronicle, was there pause in the _saintes clameurs_, the _laus perennis_ started by Irish Columba.n.u.s in the valleys of Burgundy. Some of the capitals from the abbatial are contemporaries of the statuary at Vezelay, where Peter the Venerable had been prior, and where his brother, Pons de Montboissier, was abbot. Vezelay was a pilgrimage church, so that its imagery was made of more popular character than that of Cluny, where wors.h.i.+ped an intellectual elite.

Cluny began the carving of the Bible for the Poor. The Burgundians were the first to develop the imaged portal which the Gothic cathedrals were to elaborate into their sumptuous triple entrances. While Cluny was building, a monk in the monastery composed a poem of some thousand lines, opening with a vision of the heavenly Jerusalem. Bernard of Morlaix must have found inspiration in his own Burgundian basilica, which we know to have contained over three hundred windows of translucent mosaic. He dedicated his poem to his beloved abbot, Pierre de Montboissier.

Peter the Venerable was no Puritan in art, as was his friend St.

Bernard, with whom he had many a skirmish, owing to their temperamental differences and the rivals.h.i.+p of their respective Orders. The abbot of Cluny never wavered in his reverence for the "fellow citizen of angels,"

as he called the abbot of Clairvaux, and Bernard saw in Peter, man of the world though he was, "a vessel of election full of truth and grace."

Like Abbot Suger, Pierre de Montboissier was the type of the liberal culture of the Benedictine, and he was to live again in the XVII-century scholars of the St. Maur reform, even as Bernard's uncompromising spirit reappeared then in De Rancy and his Trappists, a reform of Citeaux. Like Suger, Peter the Venerable was a quoter of the cla.s.sics, and a literary man. "To write was for an abbot of Cluny a hereditary tradition," said a XII-century historian. He had Arabic taught at Cluny for mission purposes. Journeying in Spain, he was the first to have the Koran translated for Europe; he held it to be Islam's best refutation. Very modern appears this old-time abbot in the zest with which he set out to travel, to inspect the houses of his Order. When he died in 1156, he was ruling over two thousand establishments, in every part of Christendom.

In person Peter was distinguished, and in character most generous, humane, and free from narrowness. He was wisely moderate always, and simple and direct. The letters of his which still exist make him a living personality. Though as keen a theologian as his friend Bernard, Abbot Peter kept the defeated Abelard with him at Cluny until his irritated spirit was soothed, and when the great schoolman died in 1142, Abbot Peter wrote to Helose, in her nunnery of the Paraclete, in Troyes diocese, to arrange that Abelard's body be brought there for burial, and he himself went to preach the funeral sermon.[276] In his letter to Helose he said that never had he seen truer humility and retirement than Maitre Pierre's; "after which," as M. Rene Bazin remarks, "none of us need despair."

Cluny's abbatial of St. Peter was enlarged in the XIII century by a forechurch of several bays, with double aisles. An antechurch or narthex was a frequent addition to the Burgundian basilica; sometimes it was open as at Autun and Beaune, sometimes wholly inclosed as at Vezelay.

Although Cluny's narthex was built as late as 1220, groin vaulting was used for the aisles.

In 1245 Innocent IV paused for a month at Cluny, having in his train a dozen cardinals and their suites, and Louis IX came for a fortnight's conference with the pope, accompanied by the queen mother, his brothers, and courtiers. The emperor of Constantinople and the heirs both of Castile and Aragon were guests at that same time, and yet so immense was the establishment, that all were accommodated without the monks quitting their usual quarters. In 1248 St. Louis paused again in Cluny before his first crusade.

With material success came spiritual decline. The tale runs the same in most of man's organizations. As a reformer Cluny was succeeded first by the Cistercians, whose fervor lasted for a century, when were needed the two mendicant Orders of Francis and Dominic. The system that allowed the king to appoint abbots, initiated by the Concordat of 1516, proved fatal, and there is truth in the saying that the court prelates paved the way for the religious wars. Three times in those bitter years of strife was Cluny sacked, its famous library ravaged, and its art treasures burned.

The Revolution completed the ruin. The first mob that marched out from Macon to wreck the abbey was dispersed with firearms by the townspeople.

The munic.i.p.ality of Cluny wrote to the National a.s.sembly to tell of the constant benefits it had derived from the monks--so the rationalist Taine relates in his _Ancien Regime_--but the impious wrecking of the great monastery went on. Day after day cartloads of rare books were brought to feed the bonfires in the square. All through 1793 bands of looters came out from Macon to break windows and destroy images. The indignant townspeople looked on impotently at the vandalism that spelled their own material decline. At Napoleon's advent they sent pet.i.tion after pet.i.tion to try to save the big church, but the Macon merchant who had purchased it proceeded to open a road right up its nave and sold the stones as building materials. First the narthex was blown up with gunpowder; then a transept arm. When the huge central tower fell with stupefying noise the people s.h.i.+vered with a nameless fear. The history of France was being obliterated before their eyes.

To save what remained the town offered in exchange its communal lands and market halls. In vain; the grandest monastic church in the world was demolished piecemeal after the nineteenth century opened. Some seven or eight towers had crowned St. Peter's. In 1811 the one over the choir was destroyed. Gunpowder blew up the stately pillars of Pentelic marble and Italian cipolin set around his sanctuary by St. Hugues seven hundred years before. They destroyed the frescoes of the apse, which were so fresh that one who then sketched them said that they seemed to have come straight from the artist's brush.

To-day little of the abbey church is standing. There are vestiges of the choir, a small tower, and the south arm of the main transept with a big tower over it. There also remains the Flamboyant Gothic chapel built by Abbot Jean de Bourbon (1456-81), out of the smaller transept. In the town street are evidences of where the western doors of the abbatial once stood. The entrance arches to the abbey grounds are intact, and some few of the towers of the inclosure walls. The museum is now housed in the monastery's guest quarters built by Jean de Bourbon. His successor, Abbot Jacques d'Amboise (1481-1514), erected the pavilion which now serves as Town Hall. Both of those art-loving prelates constructed at Paris the Hotel Cluny as town residence for the abbot of the Burgundian mother house.

THE ROMANESQUE ABBATIAL OF PARAY-LE-MONIAL[277]

The world is very evil, The times are waxing late, Be sober and keep vigil, The Judge is at the gate!

The Judge that comes in mercy, The Judge that comes with might, To terminate the evil To diadem the right.

--BERNARD DE MORLAIX, "Jerusalem the Golden."[278]

Not far from Cluny lies Paray-le-Monial, "a town very dear to heaven,"

said Leo XIII's brief of 1896. The monastery was founded by the second abbot of Cluny, St. Majolus, who was instrumental in bringing to France William of Volpiano, the leading spirit in the renaissance of architecture after the year 1000. The present abbatial resembles on a very small scale that of Cluny. Its barrel vaulting is braced by pointed arches and there are the channeled pilasters of Rome's tradition in the region. The exterior of the apse and the carven doorway are gems of pre-Gothic art. Towers and porch date from the end of the XI century, and the remainder about 1130. At present the monastery church (which is abominably marred with whitewash) is dedicated to the Sacre Coeur, a devotion that was initiated by the Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque, who died in the Visitation convent of this town in 1690. Paray-le-Monial has become one of the pilgrimages of modern France.

St. Odilo, who governed Cluny for the half century preceding the sixty-year rule of Abbot Hugues, loved especially the priory of Paray-le-Monial. He inspired and organized the Truce of G.o.d, the _Treuga Dei_, by which war was prohibited on certain days and in certain holy seasons. The monk, Raoul Glaber, to whom Odilo was patron, has described in a chronicle covering the period from 900 to 1047 (an invaluable doc.u.ment for the sources of the Capetian line) how the war-wrecked populace flocked to the church councils that were their only hope, their hands uplifted, with the beseeching cry, "Peace! Peace! Peace!" In the rebirth of hope and energy that succeeded to the terrors of the year 1000, Glaber has told us how the earth reclothed herself in a white mantle of churches. He had been spurred on to write his history by the chief builder of the age, William of Volpiano. The great monastic churchmen of Burgundy were leaders in the movement that was to culminate, within four generations, in Gothic cathedrals. To Abbot Odilo is attributed, also, the founding of the feast of All Souls, which he set on the day following All Saints, as if to place the suffering ones in the care of the elect. From the observance of this feast in Cluny houses it spread to the entire Church.

THE ROMANESQUE CATHEDRAL OF AUTUN[279]

Et c'est ainsi que Dieu travaille quand il veut nous chatier sans nous perdre, quand il ne veut pas que la guerre finisse, par le feu, le sang, la desolation generale, la ruine entiere et le changement d'un etat. _Il separe les gens de bien_: il faut que les uns se mettent avec choix au parti qu'ils estiment le plus juste, et que les autres se trouvent dans le parti qu'ils approuvent quelquefois le moins.--LE PReSIDENT JEANNIN (1540-1622; born in Autun).

Autun's chief church, one of the few cathedrals in France which is Romanesque, was begun in 1120 and consecrated in 1132 by Innocent II. In that same year he blessed Cluny's nave and Vezelay's narthex. A friend of St. Bernard, Bishop etienne de Bauge (1112-36), was its chief benefactor, as he was, also, of the Burgundian abbey of Saulieu.[280]

The Last Judgment over Autun's west door, signed by one Gislebertus, dates from that period. Its strange, elongated figures are not the culmination of an old art, but a first effort in a development that was to produce the imaged portals of Gothic cathedrals. Autun's curious tympanum was saved from the iconoclasts of the Revolution because the _gens de got_ of the XVIII century had covered it over with the neo-cla.s.sic plaster ornamentation they preferred. The graceful trumeau images of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary are restorations. Before the western door an open narthex for the use of lepers was added about 1178.

In the first part of the XII century, the cathedral school was directed, during thirty years, by Honore d'Autun, whose popular book, _The Mirror of the Church_, introduced the use of animal symbolism into the iconography of cathedrals. M. Male discovered that the New Alliance window in Lyons Cathedral copied his book verbatim. In the learned Honore's day Autun Cathedral had not yet laid claim to the relics of the risen Lazarus. Originally the church was consecrated to St. Nazaire, which name was changed to Lazare after the Burgundian abbey of Vezelay had spread the story that Mary Magdalene had died in Provence. No one knew how Autun obtained the relics said to be those of Lazarus of Bethany. They were first exposed for veneration in the cathedral in 1147. Monseigneur d.u.c.h.esne has thought that the legend grew by unconscious fabrications. It certainly did the Burgundian towns little harm to honor those whom the Lord had cherished. Through long centuries Burgundy delighted to call her sons Lazare.

The cathedral of Autun has a barrel vault undergirded by pointed arches.

Channeled pilasters,[281] great and small, abound; they are on all four sides of the piers. In Autun stand gateways of Rome's empire to serve as cla.s.sic models. The acanthus leaves of the cathedral's triforium can compare with those of the Porte d'Arroux. Autun was a Roman capital in Gaul, founded by Augustus. It covered then twice its present area.

Agrippa, son-in-law of Augustus, built the great military road that ran from Lyons to Autun, Autun to Auxerre, Auxerre to Troyes, Troyes to Chalons-sur-Marne, Chalons to Rheims, Rheims to Soissons, Soissons to Senlis, Senlis to Beauvais, Beauvais to Amiens, and thence to Boulogne-sur-Mer.

The graceful central tower of the cathedral was added in the Flamboyant Gothic day by Cardinal Rolin (d. 1483), son of the builder of Beaune Hospital, Nicolas Rolin (a native of Autun), the self-seeking but able chancellor of Duke Philippe le Bon. Another son of Autun was Pierre Jeannin, president of the parliament of Burgundy and minister of Henry IV. His father, a tanner, was a man of civic importance in the town.

President Jeannin's kneeling statue and that of his wife, Anne Gueniot, are now in the cathedral choir, being all that remained, after the Revolution, of his tomb made by Nicolas Guillan of Paris. No man ever had a truer pa.s.sion for the public weal than this Burgundian magistrate who saved Burgundy from the stain of blood on St. Bartholomew's day in 1572. Word came from the king to kill, but the Catholic Jeannin on the governor's council at Dijon urged delay, saying that when a king's orders were given in anger, the wisest course was procrastination. He was to live long enough to aid Henry IV in drawing up the Edict of Nantes in 1598.