The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (45 page)

For the Church, music remained a devotional art, and for centuries Church music remained an empire of the Word. Since it made no sense to recite different words simultaneously, Church music remained monophony. This “single-voice” music was a counterpart of Romanesque architecture, the architecture of the basilica, of simple clear lines. And in Gregorian chant, a music of unison, one voice without the resonance of instrumental accompaniment followed the line of the Word.

But the future of Western music lay in polyphony. Without a music of many voices, many simultaneous parts, Bach, Beethoven, or Chopin would have been inconceivable. How did Western music come to this basic revolutionary idea, which we commonly know as harmony? It seems to have emerged
somehow out of the Gregorian chant, and the infant idea must have been nourished by the wealth of Gregorian melody. Perhaps polyphony came naturally when different singers sang the same words simultaneously, each at the level at which he was most at ease. Which would make the origins of polyphony, “many-voiced music,” another example of the Vanguard Word.

The birth of polyphony was recorded in the Carolingian renaissance, about 900, in a book called
Musica enchiriadis
(Handbook of Music), perhaps by Hucbald (840?–930?), a Benedictine monk of northern France. But the polyphony it describes already in use is not yet free composition. Instead a melody is taken from the repertoire of Gregorian chant to which another melody is added. The Gregorian plainchant melody, the cantus firmus, or “fixed song,” would thus remain the basis of the new polyphony for three hundred years. At first it was made polyphonic by having a second singer repeat the melody at the lower fifth or fourth. Others could join by repeating either of these parts at the octave.

“Organum” was the name for this primitive polyphony. Perhaps it came from the Greek, describing the interval for the second voice because the second “voice” was being played on the organ. When Pope John XXII in 1332 forbade polyphony in the Church, he still allowed this simple form called “parallel organum.”
Musica enchiriadis
had already described “converging organum,” in which two singers of parallel organum started and ended in unison. When free organum appeared in the late eleventh century the intervals between the voices varied. Sometimes the parts moved in contrary directions, with the cantus firmus going down, the other voice up. Sometimes the parts crossed, putting the Gregorian melody above or below the other part. Here was an appealing new freedom for musical ingenuity, still not abandoning the basic Gregorian melody of the Word.

When the dreaded millennial year, 1000, had come and gone without the end of the world, Western Christians took heart. More than 160 organa have survived from the eleventh century. And the twelfth century saw the elaboration of polyphonic music in the monastery of St.-Martial at Limoges, in southern France. This St.-Martial style, “melismatic organum,” filigreed the additional part with groups of notes set against a single note of the Gregorian melody. Then the singer of the cantus firmus would have to sustain his note until the other singer had completed his group of notes, sometimes as many as twenty. Having to hold his single note, he became known (from the Latin
tenere
, to hold) as the tenor, the singer of long-held notes. He was also “holding” the Gregorian melody. Enticing variations were opened when the cantus firmus could move from the upper position to the lower, with the upper part developing its own melodies. Though at first improvised, the added voice began to follow rules of its own.

Even before the first Gothic church was built, we have seen the music of
the Word beginning to show a playful Gothic spirit. In polyphony, simultaneous voices were traveling different melodic paths. Like the Gothic architecture, this would first come in northern France. In the richly varied motet of the thirteenth century, it developed at the singing school of Notre-Dame in Paris. Church leaders remained suspicious of polyphony in any form, “disorganized music” corrupting the simple Gregorian line with a lascivious secular spirit. But the Gothic spirit, on the way to rebuilding Western music in melodies of unheard complexity, was destined to rebuild the churches of Christendom.

F
ROM
the ancient Greeks came an architecture of outdoor monuments. From the Romans came an architecture of interior spaces. In the late Middle Ages in western Europe there appeared the first new style in a thousand years. Its special element would be light. Those who first saw it in the early twelfth century at St.-Denis, outside Paris, simply called it modern architecture (
opus modernum
). Then Vasari and other architects of the Renaissance in Italy who were disciples of Vitruvius christened it Gothic after the local workmen who were not Romans and to denote modern in the worst sense. “Gothic” had become a term of contempt for the barbarians who, centuries before, had invaded western Europe and destroyed the great monuments of the Roman Empire. In the great age of Gothic art no one thought of himself as Gothic.

Still the name has stuck indelibly for the arts of western and northern Europe from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. And now it paradoxically reminds us of a creative liberating spirit. But it obscures the dramatic uses that the new style made of its special element, light. “Gothic” conjures up images of gloomy darkness that would make it the name for a literature of forbidding mystery. To understand the uniqueness of the architecture that broke the European mold and opened a new era in Western architecture we must see what its creators thought and made of light. And why and how they chose this elusive unsubstantial element for their architecture.

What could be more obvious than that light is the source of all visual
beauty? Dionysius the Areopagite, whom Saint Paul himself had converted, and who was the founder of the church of St.-Denis, had elaborated this obvious fact into a principle of theology. In his
Celestial Hierarchy
Dionysius had described God as absolute light and light as the creative force in the universe. And Dante would put him at the summit of his “Paradiso” because in that book Dionysius had shown the way of rising to God. Theologians called this the anagogic (upward-leading) approach. The beauties of a church, then, should be mere aids “from the material to the immaterial,” transparencies between us and God the “Father of the lights” and Christ “the first radiance” revealing the Father to the world.

The Gothic architecture of light would leave its mark on modern public architecture of the West—on our palaces and parliaments and universities. We can trace the first great work in the architecture of light to the shaping imagination of the French statesman-architect Suger (1081?–1151), abbot of St.-Denis. He would embody the “upward-leading” theology of Dionysius in a building. And he would reveal the opportunities in the Church for men of splendid talents to rise from humble station to shine across Western Christendom.

Born to a peasant family near Paris, at the age of ten Suger was deposited by his parents as an oblate, to be dedicated to the monastic life, in the nearby monastery of St.-Denis. In due course he became a monk, then was elected the abbot in 1122. The abbey remained his home until he died in 1151. He seems to have thought of the king of France as his father and he frequently called the abbey of St.-Denis his mother. He gloried in his lowly origins, “I, the beggar, whom the strong hand of the Lord has lifted up from the dunghill.” The adopted child of St.-Denis, he felt that as he belonged to the Church, so the Church belonged to him. This helps explain, too, his unabashed taste for the gorgeous and the ornate in his church in an age of militant ascetics. His noticeably short stature, like that of Erasmus, Mozart, and Napoleon, was said to reinforce his ambition. As a friend noted in Suger’s epitaph:

Luckily, his classmate at the school of St.-Denis was Louis Capet, who became King Louis VI. Suger remained this king’s confidant, and his patriotic devotion to the French monarchy was warmed by personal affection.

Saint Denis had brought Christianity to France in the third century and become the first bishop of Paris. Reputedly martyred, he was buried in the place that later became the suburb of Paris named after him. Charlemagne attended the dedication of a new church there in 775, and as Saint Denis
became recognized as the patron saint of the French monarchy, the abbey acquired the profitable privilege of holding fairs under the saint’s protecting name. On a legendary journey to the Holy Land, Charlemagne had acquired the sacred relics that were finally deposited at St.-Denis. By the eleventh century the Benedictine monastery there was preeminent in France and perhaps in all Europe.

Meanwhile the Capetian dynasty, founded in 987 by the ambitious Hugh Capet (940–996), laid the basis of the modern French monarchy with institutions that lasted until 1789. Hugh the Great was buried in the abbey church and it remained the burial place of French monarchs, the sanctuary of the monarchy. Only three French kings—Philip I, Louis VII, and Louis XI—would be buried elsewhere. The abbey church became a symbol of divine sanction for French kings, and of continuing royal support for the Church. After it became a “royal” abbey, it was exempt from feudal dues and subject only to the king.

But grand traditions of crown and scepter could not themselves create a new style in architecture. This required an inspired builder. Fortunately for the arts in the West the talented Abbot Suger was such a person and the church to which he was called needed to be rebuilt and expanded. Lucky for us too that, in an age of bitter theological controversy, Suger steered a prudent middle course between the mystic and the rationalist. These diverging paths remain vividly defined for us by his two famous contemporaries Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) and Peter Abelard (1079–1142). For Saint Bernard, fervent mystic and “purifier” of monasteries, known as the Thaumaturgus of the West, a church bedizened by gold and silver and stained glass was a Synagogue of Satan. The clergy, he said, should be models of charity and simplicity, avoiding the path of “scandalous curiosity.” Which was the very direction of Bernard’s archenemy, Abelard, prophet of rationalism and a founder of scholastic theology. Yet Abelard’s path would also lead him to St.-Denis, where he attracted scores of students, among them Héloïse. The love affair of Abelard and Héloïse produced a son, after whose arrival they secretly married. Her outraged protector wreaked revenge by hiring ruffians to castrate Abelard. After this public humiliation, Abelard retired to the Benedictine monastery of St.-Denis, where he compiled his book entitled
Yes and No
(
Sic et Non
). Following his risky maxim “By doubting we come to questioning, and by questioning we learn truth,” he answered the 158 key questions in Christian theology.

Abelard’s next work,
Theologia
, on the doctrine of the Trinity, was burned as heretical, for he rashly debunked the most sacred tradition of the abbey. He sought to prove that, contrary to common belief, the patron saint of the abbey and of all France was not the biblical Denis of Athens (or Dionysius the Areopagite) who had been converted by Saint Paul. The
monks of St.-Denis were so outraged that Suger, newly elected abbot of St.-Denis, gave Abelard the unusual permission to leave the abbey—on condition that he not become a monk of any other house.

Even as a young man in his twenties Suger had impressed his superiors at St.-Denis with his practical talents. His abbot and his friend King Louis VI sent him on sensitive diplomatic missions. Then in 1122 he was elected to succeed the abbot, whose lax administration was under attack. Suger boasted that he had reformed the life of the abbey “peacefully, without scandal and disorder among the brothers, although they were not accustomed to it.” He set the example of moderation by eating meat only when he was ill, by drinking wine always diluted with water, and by choosing food that was “neither too coarse nor too refined.”

But when Suger turned his thoughts to the disintegrating building of the abbey church he was anything but moderate. Must not the House of God, he asked, be an “image of heaven”? He demanded that “golden vessels, precious stones, and whatever is most valued
among
all created things, be laid out, with continual reverence and full devotion, for the reception of the blood of Christ.” The Great Cross in St.-Denis could never have enough gems and pearls. Suger then rose from the beauty of beauty to the beauty of light, without which there was no beauty. He was captivated by the aspiring theology of Dionysius, the reputed founder of St.-Denis, who described God as absolute light, and light as the creative force in the universe.

We must see what Suger created not from the perspective of our late-twentieth-century glass-walled, light-drenched architecture, but from Suger’s twelfth-century solid-walled, heavy-columned, barrel-vaulted Romanesque. While Suger’s Gothic did not flood church interiors with daylight, it produced unique and melodramatic new lighting effects.

St.-Denis offered Suger his providential opportunity. In 1124, only two years after he became abbot, the abbey attained a new symbolic eminence. King Louis VI, threatened by invasion from the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V and King Henry I of England, had hastened to St.-Denis to invoke his patron saint. There he received the banner of St.-Denis, the “oriflame” in the shape of orange points of flame, which became the royal standard. By feudal custom this made the king the vassal of the abbot, who represented the saint and incidentally made the abbey, in Louis’s own words, “the capital of the realm.” Louis deposited there the crown of his father, Philip I, which he said had rightfully belonged to the saint. Thenceforth St.-Denis would remain the tomb of French kings, the traditional depository of the crown of France, and the abbot was empowered to consecrate future kings. Incidentally, Louis granted the abbey the right to hold a new
fair in honor of Saint Denis, which became one of the most lucrative in the Middle Ages.