By Diaconissimus

In the popular conception, the word “medieval” is bereft of positive connotations. It denotes something ignorant or close-minded, at best; something to be pitied or looked upon with contempt. Perhaps most of all, to call something “medieval” is to say that it is retrograde, backwards, old-fashioned—not fit for the moral or technological standards of our day and age. Labeling a person, idea, or thing “medieval” signifies that it is not worthy of discussion among us, the enlightened postmoderns. Indeed, many people today refer to the medieval era as “the Dark Ages.” The disparaging quality of such remarks stands in marked contrast to what a Christian believer sees—with the eyes of reason in addition to the eyes of faith—when he or she walks into any of the great cathedrals of medieval Europe. In contrast to the stereotype of the Middle Ages as a benighted time, the Gothic cathedrals stand as an enduring testament to what was really an Age of Light. From the depths of time, they testify to a society markedly different from our own in terms of technical prowess and belief system. Every stone of these buildings speaks of a time when the pursuit of God was foremost on people’s minds. Sometimes characterized as arguing about “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin,” an entire philosophical and theological system was carried into being in the construction of these cathedrals. The overarching narrative of human redemption is depicted on their walls, in their stones, on the stained glass. They express a sacramental worldview in which material things can mediate the order of grace to humanity. In short, they stand at the center of a society in which—despite the often terrible sins of human beings—people strained to reach the heavens through the prayer and liturgy of the Church.

The Birth of the Gothic: Saint-Denis in Paris

Art historians have identified the twelfth-century construction of the abbey church of Saint-Denis in Paris as the emergence of the Gothic style of Christian art. The name itself comes from later historians. In the sixteenth century, Italian art critics sneeringly referred to this architectural style as “Gothic”; they alleged that it had been born north of the Alps, among the barbarians, in the domains of the ancient Goths who had sacked Rome in the fifth century. In its own time, though, it was called opus francigenum—“Frenchwork”—or even opus modernum: the modern style. The former title pointed to its origin in the Île-de-France, the region from which the French royalty ruled their lands. But the latter title revealed the popular perception of this aesthetic. It was stunningly innovative; no one had seen anything like it before. More than that, it was an architecture for its own time: an age focused on transcendence, an era which cast its gaze upon God and the things of God, a time when all of humanity’s natural capacity for reason and self-improvement was bent on achieving its telos—eternal beatitude.

Built on the ruins of an early Christian basilica, the seventh-century church of Saint-Denis (see spread) underwent a massive renovation from 1137 to 1144. In planning this renovation, Abbot Suger hoped to transform his Benedictine monastery into the spiritual center of the emerging French nation. A handful of important French kings were already interred in the abbey. Additionally, it also served as shrine for the relics of St. Denis—the Roman missionary and “Apostle of France” martyred by the pagan Parisii tribe in the late third century. To amplify the abbey’s impact at the crux of France’s religious and political power, Suger needed a bigger church than the one his predecessors had maintained for centuries. Even today, the architectural plan of Saint-Denis is still characterized by a sense of heavy mass, rational design (Figure 2), and a choir arrangement allowing pilgrims to carry out processions in the church; these were all characteristics of the older “Romanesque” style of architecture. The genius of Suger and the unknown architects he hired to help with the project was precisely in how they concretized a theological system upon this ancient foundation.

Abbot Suger, like many intellectuals of his time, was passionately fond of the theological writings of an ancient Christian thinker named Dionysius. Known to scholars today as the “Pseudo-Dionysius,” this anonymous Syrian writer of the fifth or sixth century was believed in the Middle Ages to be St. Paul’s disciple, Dionysius the Areopagite (Acts 17:37). To add to the confusion, St. Denis of Paris—who had died in the 250s and was buried in the abbey—was also identified with the biblical Dionysius in many medieval hagiographical writings! Indeed, Pseudo-Dionysius’ writings had been preserved by scribes at St. Denis in Latin translation since at least the eighth century. From there, these writings—known as the Corpus Areopagitum—would spread throughout the medieval world. Dionysius’ influence was immense: St. Thomas Aquinas would cite the Areopagite over one thousand times in his Summa Theologica, more than any other source except the Bible. For the ambitious Abbot Suger, these associations were providential. Drawing on the theology of “divine hierarchies” which appears in the Corpus Areopagitum, Suger elaborated a theology by which grace flowed down from God through the liturgical ceremonies of the Church to sanctify believers—so that, once sanctified, they were carried up with Christ to God the Father.

Figure 2. Façade of Saint-Denis.

Importantly, though, Suger departed from the typical treatment of the Areopagite’s theology by describing the Church’s mediation of grace in terms of light. His theory of architecture stipulated that Christ, the true light, shines out through the more limited splendor of the material things which make up a church building and its furnishings. In contrast to the austerity of other forms of Christian architecture, like the earlier Romanesque style or the churches of the more austere Cistercian monks, Suger specialized in utilizing the most precious materials and hiring the most innovative artists. Also unlike the contemporary Cistercians, who in the person of St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) argued that liturgical art would distract from a believer’s meditation on the divine things, Suger insisted that the brilliance of earthly beauty would illuminate the gloom of the human mind and raise it to the splendor of divine truth. He even had his theological convictions inscribed on the doors of the abbey church: “The dull mind rises to the truth through material things/And is resurrected from its former submersion when the light is seen.”¹ Just as the Symbol of Faith refers to Christ as “light from light, true God from true God,” so each believer could come to participate in the divine essence through their contemplation of Christ’s light, which emanated from the works of human hands which adorned the abbey church.

Figure 3. Weight-bearing buttresses allow the replacement of swaths of wall space with windows.

On the basis of this aesthetic theory, the abbey church of Saint-Denis was constructed—and it marks one of the definitive turning points in the history of Western art. In true Catholic fashion, Suger’s architects synthesized many characteristic traits of the Romanesque architecture while also innovating on these foundations. Much as the scholastic theologians of Paris would soon be noted for their innovative synthesis of prior tradition in plumbing the depths of God’s mysteries, so did Suger’s French and Norman architects develop the ideas of earlier generations to express the unchanging revelation of the triune God in new aesthetic terms. The heavy stone columns and rounded arches of the Romanesque were elongated, made slender, and stretched with unseen fingers toward the heavens. Though much thinner, these columns bore the weight of the heavy ceilings because Suger’s architects reinforced the steady groin vaults of Romanesque ceiling with their inventive “rib vaults” (title image). These vaults shifted the weight-bearing functions of the columns to outside buttresses (Figure 3), which allowed Suger to replace large swaths of wall space with windows to allow for a much greater influx of light into the church. The holy gloom of the Romanesque church gave way to a liturgical space grown dense with luminosity. Now when the choir monks and the pilgrims to the relics of Saint-Denis traversed the church, they wandered through avenues of divine illumination, “in some strange region of the universe”—as Suger wrote—“which neither exists entirely in the slime of earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven,” where “by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world.”²

The Gothic Cathedral: A Symbolic Universe

The brilliance of Gothic art lies precisely in this symbiosis of high-voltage theological reflection and artistic genius. This has also happened in other ages of the Church, though. What was typical of the Gothic was how it incarnated the systematic thinking of the medieval theologians into architectural form. As one scholar put it, “The Middle Ages had a passion for order.”³ The genius of Abbot Suger was that he was able to find an artistic form that expressed the profundity of his theology of light. But while Suger merely ushered in the Gothic era—the Age of Light—his basic perception of the things of this world also continued to characterize the worldview of the later medieval mind. Working amidst the stone formations of the great cathedrals, that is, the sculptors of the Gothic rendered the entire divine and earthly hierarchies across the facades of their churches. The figures, noble and solemn and tall like the arches they adorned, allowed the Christian to enter into the world of the saints as they entered the church building. The significance of this was that art served as a vehicle for spiritual realities by means of a “scorn for things of sense, and the profound conviction that reaching out to immaterial through the material man may have fleeting visions of God.”⁴

Figure 4. Christ Pantokrator surrounded by angels and saints.

This is why the great monuments of Gothic architecture, the churches that crowd like so many inlaid jewels over the European continent, are rife with sculptures of every size and form. The cycle of time appears in stone, and not just the time expressed by the primitive calendars of the day. Time, that is, eternity: time, encompassing the plan of God from beginning to end of the human story; time, even outside and beyond the human story. Across the façade of the true Gothic cathedral walk the great patriarchs and prophets: Abel, Melchizedek, and Abraham of the Roman liturgy; Isaiah and Ezekiel, who beheld the glory of God descend upon the Jerusalem temple; Jeremiah and Daniel, the prophets who called for the people of God to turn to the Lord and repent of their sins. The whole narrative is there, from Adam and Eve who sinned first and lost paradise for us all, to Our Lord Jesus Christ who destroyed death in his flesh and brought life to us all. Indeed, above the portals of every Gothic cathedral—not merely the western doors but those to the north and south as well—stands the figure of Christ, often Christ the Judge. If the medievals were fearful of the judgment, and their gargoyles which clung to the ledges and crags of their edifices reminded them that the delights of sin would give way to an eternity of fire, they also entered the Mass each day by traversing the watchful space beneath Christ—judge, yes, but also protector and savior.

Every cathedral renders this cycle of time, God’s time, in its own unique pattern. But as the Gothic age progressed, the style of this art gradually developed. After the brute and emotionless Christ of the Romanesque, the statues of the Gothic greet the world as though blood flowed through their limbs. They stand out from the surfaces on which they rest, not inscribed in the stone but flowing out from it from like rays of light. This mode of sculpting, known as relief—and called “high” or “low” depending on how strongly the figures leapt out of the rock—intuitively accepted the naturalism with which the medieval sculptors wished to endow their figures. They had living form, they were not cartoons; their faces may not always have expressed the deep emotion of the Baroque, but they betray a smirk here and there, a smile to temper their solemnity, and so the viewer would be drawn into the sequence of time and eternity depicted on the faces of the saints. Through this material, stone brought to life by the workman’s chisel, Christians could catch a glimpse of their own eternal destiny. They did so by gazing upon the ranks of angels gathered around Christ Pantokrator who sits judging the universe (Figure 4). But they also did so by encountering the scenes of war and sin and terror which leap out of the stone facades, as they leap off the pages of scripture and from the book of the human heart. These stones, then, were sacraments—sacramenta, μυστήρια, “mysteries”—by which the human spirit transcended its earthy chains and met the workings of God in history and in the eternity of now.

Figure 5. A common way that scholars used to explain the art of the Gothic was by calling it “The Bible of the Poor.”

The Biblia Pauperum

A common way that scholars used to explain the art of the Gothic was by calling it biblia pauperum, or “The Bible of the Poor.” The contention here is that because literacy rates were so low during the Middle Ages, the visual art in a Gothic cathedral was the only encounter with the sacred scriptures that the average medieval Christian would ever have. Although historians have since established that many medievals did have some level of literacy, there is still probably some truth to the claim. A Gothic cathedral presents a veritable cosmos of graphic art in all its forms: sculpture, stained glass, even painting. The symbolic universe of the Gothic church raised the human soul to the heavenly realms by contemplation, but that contemplation only came through the subjects depicted there. The medieval artists typically did not work with abstract form the way the painters and sculptors of modernity and post-modernity do. Their work was realist, as was the philosophy taught in universities across the continent. As intellectuals sought to probe the depths of reality and ascertain what is, so the artists sought to render real figures, real people, to call attention to the goodness of the creation of God. The vast majority of their work depicts biblical events and the lives of the saints. Through contemplation of these forms, the medieval Christian came to know the whole story of human redemption—not just as it appeared in the books of the Old and New Testaments, but also as it came to life in story of the Church, guided now after Pentecost by the Holy Spirit.

The cathedral of Chartres, outside of Paris, is the perfect illustration of this idea. While Gothic cathedrals typically took centuries to fully complete, the construction at Chartres was largely completed between 1194 and 1220. The building itself is typical of the great churches of the time: tall and slender, with twin spires above the western portal which seem—on a clear day—to scrape at the vaultings of the French sky. Chartres cathedral is also a stunning example of the innovative Gothic buttress, first noticed at Saint-Denis but which here inch around the church, up every façade, like thin, eager fingers. They sustain the high walls; these were largely vacated to make room for stained glass windows. And it is the stained glass which is the greatest contribution of the Chartres architects to Christendom. Even though the three facades of Chartres (north, south, and west) depict the typical narrative of biblical images covering all of human redemption—a biblia pauperum in stone—the stained glass incarnate the same narratives. But the medium of the stained glass is light, rather than stone.

The genius of medieval epistemology is such that, unlike the modern, it takes account of all the human senses. The medievals had great faith in reason—they considered philosophy the “handmaiden” of theology, after all—but none ever believed that humans achieve knowledge through their discursive reasonings alone. The medievals were rational, but not rationalists; they did not believe that human beings are disembodied brains, as the Cartesian heresy insinuates, but that they draw in the truth of reality through all their senses. They had stunning faith in the human ability to sense and perceive. And, by extension, they had stunning faith in the human capacity to reach the truth through those perceptions. Indeed, the scholastic definition of beauty depends inexorably upon this faith in the senses. For many medieval philosophers, beauty (pulchritudo) was defined “being shining forth through form.” The judgment that a thing is beautiful means that a person has perceived the very truth of reality shining out through its physical contours. That is, by the sense perception of a thing—whether a sculpture, an image in glass, a human face, even a sunset or landscape,—the human mind can catch a glimpse, even if a small glimpse, of the depths of all reality. The transcendental Beauty, part of the reality of God, enters a person’s mind through his or her senses and illuminates it.

Figure 6. A rose window of Chartres Cathedral.

This vision of the beautiful is not found only in the notebooks and classrooms of the philosophers. This philosophical definition of beauty finds it complement in Abbot Suger’s theology of the arts, he who claimed that the mind can be raised to God through the perception of beautiful things. That is, these intellectual visions become incarnate in the grand schemes of stained glass that adorn the great Gothic cathedrals like Chartres. When beauty illuminates the mind, the mind is lifted to the heavenly realms. This is true of all art, all created beauty; but when the narratives of human redemption are depicted in artistic form, something even greater happens. The dense luminosity of the Gothic cathedral, through which believers walk in prayer and supplication, is actually light which is filtered through images from the sacred scriptures. Every story in scripture, every image and narrative, reflects the eternal Word, Jesus Christ, and some aspect of His work for our salvation. This means that when walking through a Gothic cathedral on a sunny day, the believer strolls through the light which has been filtered through the eternal Word of the eternal Father. A Gothic cathedral is quite literally illuminated by the God-Word, as St. Athanasius of Alexandria referred to the Son of God. In a Gothic church illuminated by stained glass windows, the Word which was made flesh in Nazareth is made image.

Figure 7. The cruciform pattern of the floor plan.

This Catholic view of things corresponded to the various groupings of images arranged along the walls of the Chartres cathedral. The different scenes in each window are read together, and if one “reads” the windows from top to bottom, one encounters a broad narrative of salvation history. The lower level of images corresponds to the lives of the Blessed Mother and Our Lord, as well as with Old Testament prophecies that they fulfill; the upper level aligns with the lives of saints and major Old Testament prophets, intending to show how the story of ancient Israel was fulfilled in the life of the Church. This depiction of the history of salvation is complemented by another way of “reading” the windows. This reading is eschatological. It begins with the scenes in the eastern windows of creation and the fall of humanity in Genesis 1, pitted against scenes of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection in the western “rose window” (Figure 6). The second coming and last judgment play an important role in this western rose window. Finally, on the north-south axis, windows depicting the Madonna and Child (with scenes from the infancy narrative) and the second coming from the Book of Revelation also complement the Christological narrative of the other windows. The north-south and east-west axes fill in the cruciform pattern of the cathedral’s floor plan with a theological interpretation encompassing all the great mysteries of the Christian dispensation (Figure 7). While glimpsing a fragment of salvation here and there in individual images, the believer who allows him- or herself to enter the narrative appropriates a holistic vision of salvation: their mind is illuminated by the beauty shining forth through color and glass, and their mind raised to God by the glory of the salvation wrought for them in Christ Jesus.

Giotto and the Glory of the Word

The majesty of being which shines forth through the Chartres windows finds its counterpoint in the frescoes of the great Italian master, Giotto di Bondone (1267-1333). Giotto is considered by art historians as one of the forerunners of the Italian Renaissance. The naturalism and emotion of his figures, when coupled with the rational perspective with which he laid out his paintings, heralded a return to classical proportion that had not been seen since the paintings of Roman antiquity. The art historians of the Renaissance, in fact, had claimed Giotto as one of their own. Unlike many artists of his time, who remain shrouded in the mists of history, Giotto’s life has been handed on to us through the oral traditions recorded by Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) in his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Artists. One of the stories recorded by Vasari shows the level of genius that Giotto’s contemporaries saw in him. As the legend goes, the great Italian painter Cimabue (1240-1302) was traveling in the hills outside of Florence when he stumbled upon a shepherd boy who was sketching pictures of his sheep on a rock. The pictures were so realistic, and drawn with such feeling, that Cimabue insisted on taking the boy on as his apprentice then and there. Cimabue, himself noted for the realism of his work in a time when painters were still bound to the emotionless forms of Byzantine iconography, brought out the full potential of the boy Giotto, who would spend his life rendering the incarnate Word in images both glorious and luminous.

Figure 8. Giotto, The Stigmatization of St. Francis.
Figure 9. Giotto, The Crucifixion.

It is important to underscore that despite the claims of later painters like Vasari, Giotto was thoroughly a man of his time. Some of his greatest masterworks show forth his own participation in the medieval mind. For instance, the frescoes he painted in the basilica of St. Francis in Assisi are characterized by the same narrative mindset which emerges from the stained glass of Chartres. In the frescoes of Assisi’s Upper Church, images from the life of St. Francis are paired with images from the life of Our Lord. They demonstrate the medieval conviction that Francis was the greatest exemplar of the life of Christ to date; Giotto used these pairings to emphasize how the life of the Poverello mirrored that of Jesus, even to the point of receiving the wounds of the crucifixion in a vision from one of the seraphim (Figure 8).

Much as the windows in Chartres highlight how the history of the Church’s fidelity to Christ’s message fulfills the prophecies of ancient Israel, the life of St. Francis shows how every baptized Christian can “put on Christ” (Gal. 3:27) and become the “new man” (Eph. 4:24) and conform themselves entirely to our Lord. The frescoes are today in a moderate state of ruin due to age, water damage, and an earthquake in 1997. But despite the trials of time, these frescoes and those of Assisi’s Lower Church show forth Giotto’s deeply medieval piety. The grief which surges forth in the mourners at the Cross (Figure 9), the devotion on the face of the penitent Magdalene, and the shock of St. Francis’ confrere as he preaches to the birds—all of these crystallize the contemplative practice of the medieval Christian, so focused on entering the mystery of Christ’s humanity, into the plaster and pigment of frescoes.

Figure 10. Giotto, Scenes from the ministry and passion of Our Lord.

A similar perspective manifests in Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. This chapel was designed by a nobleman of the Scrovegni banking family, who commissioned it as an act of penance for his public sins of usury. Giotto’s program traced the entire history of the lives of Christ and of Mary—the upper register depicting all the apocryphal stories of her parents, Joachim and Anne, and her own experience of Annunciation and Nativity, the lower registers showing the entire cycle of Christ’s life. In Giotto’s scheme, he juxtaposed the mysteries of Christ’s earthly ministry with the great events of His passion (Figure 10). One particularly moving coupling is the juxtaposition of Christ’s resurrection with His raising of Lazarus, showing how the eternal Word, in His words and deeds, is never bound even by the chains of death. And in his pairing of the Last Supper with the Crucifixion, Giotto profoundly articulated the Church’s unchanging liturgical theology, which views the Mass as a re-presentation of Christ’s last Passover meal and an efficacious memorial of His death for our salvation. But Giotto’s sacramental art also has an eschatological bent, focused on the Last Things. On the eastern wall of the Scrovegni Chapel, the Last Judgment is depicted with frightful intensity. The choirs of the Church Militant surround Christ the Judge, and the worshiper is also given a view of those who have entered the eternal fires of hell. But the effect of the scene is such that as they exit the church, the gaze of all worshipers is drawn to the majestic Savior, standing in sovereign power over eternity and cosmos. Leaving after having communed at the holy Sacrifice, the members of the Scrovegni family would be brought into the eternal drama of the glory of the Word, who renders to each as his deeds deserve.

Conclusion: Liturgy at the Heart of Things

The majesty of Giotto’s synthesis of art and theology is hardly unique to the great master. It would be false to think that the architects of the Gothic were interested only in designing pretty buildings. These were houses of worship. They were built for the specific and only purpose of housing the Sacred Liturgy of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. At the place where the transept (north-south axis) and the nave (east-west axis) of every Gothic cathedral meets, there stands a high altar. This altar marks the center of the cruciform design of the Gothic church. The beating heart of the Gothic church is thus the Eucharistic sacrifice. As a symbol rendered in architectural form, the fiery life of the Eucharistic Lord extends from the centralized altar, through the arms of the cross, to the entire world. The Gothic Eucharist, however, is not only a horizontal reality. It is also vertical. Almost every Gothic altar is covered in a canopy which signifies its location as the holy of holies, the place where the Most High descends to earth in the Canon of the Mass. Often, the canopy was rendered in a similar architectural form as the wider cathedral, with tall slender arches pointing at the heavens and signifying that, through the contemplation of the rites and prayers of the Mass and the reception of communion, the Christian believer would be drawn into the heavenly realms. Indeed, it was during the Gothic era that priests began raising the Eucharistic species high above their heads during the consecration, a practice that continues in the classical Roman liturgy even today. This was done so that the Christian worshipers might gaze in adoration upon the Body and Blood of Christ, offered always on the Church’s altars for their salvation. In this way, the theology of Pseudo-Dionysius and Abbot Suger continued to define the medieval approach to liturgy: even the ritual forms of the Mass itself transmitted an experience of divine beauty to those who attended it by hearing and seeing.

Indeed, medieval society was largely constructed around the common celebration of the liturgy. Cathedrals often stood at the center of the social geography of a town or city. The cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, for instance, stood at the center of the royal district of the city; all roads led to it on the tiny island in the middle of the river Seine. Not only for Mass, but also for the canonical hours of the Divine Office, people would flock to the cathedral to offer worship to the eternal Father, in Christ Jesus His Son, in the power of the Spirit. The liturgical life of the city cathedral thus played a central experience in constructing the religious consciousness of the citizenry. As any Catholic knows, the Mass is a tapestry woven of various sensible experiences: sight, sound, color, texture, gesture, word, image, and music. From the beauty of the vestments (Figure 11), to the majesty of the music, to the glory of the Word transmitted through stained glass and painting and sculpture, the Catholic genius of liturgy took on its most enduring forms. They were part of Catholic worship before the Gothic era, of course, but gained a particular resonance and poignancy during this time, and have been handed on as part and parcel of traditional Catholic worship ever since.

Figure 11. The Mass of St. Giles by the painter dubbed “Master of Saint Giles.”

On this basis, it is almost a sacrilege to refer to the Middle Ages as the “Dark Ages,” as so many postmodern people still do. In the early morning on any day of the week, a person could walk into the ambulatory of a Gothic cathedral, behind the high altar, and adore the Eucharist in its consecration at any of a dozen simultaneous Masses. Light would be streaming in through the high windows from the sunrise in the East. It would render those Masses fecund in the glorious color of the Word, brought incarnate once again as light filtered through the images of stained glass. Hearing the whispers of a dozen priests bent low over their altars, or the chants of the canons gathered in song at the Divine Office, a medieval worshiper would be brought very close to the “music of what happens” in the eternal Godhead. Because if the Eucharist is a foretaste of heaven, as Thomas Aquinas said, and the Mass is a glimpse of the communion of the Blessed Trinity, then the timeless splendor of these temples of God passes on to us still, in our own benighted age, something of the glory that will someday console us in God’s eternal temple in heaven.

Endnotes

¹ This translation by David Burr from Abbot Suger’s De Administratione appears on the Internet Medieval Sourcebook, a resource of the Fordham University History Department: “XXVII. Concerning the Cast and Gilded Doors.” See .

² Abbot Suger, “De Administratione,” in Abbot Suger: On the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis and Its Art Treasures (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979), 63-64.

³ Emile Mâle, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century, trans. Dora Nussey (New York: Harper, 1958), 1.

⁴ Mâle, The Gothic Image, 20.