Worlds Without End
Abbott Suger and How to Renew Our World
If you were living in France in the eleventh century, no one could blame you for thinking that the world was ending. Feudalism, once a stable (if highly unequal) political order, was fracturing. Kings struggled to assert control over nobles, many of whom built castles, raised private armies, and essentially became local warlords, terrorizing the countryside. Bandits and thieves roamed free, making travel perilous. The rise of merchants and towns caused massive economic change and dislocation. And the Crusades were underway, leading to depopulation and apocalyptic anxieties.
Extreme weather changes and the resulting crop failures were common. The French monk Adémar de Chabannes wrote about a famine in Limoges: “The corpses of all who are now dying there lie unburied over the land throughout the streets in every place. Many have now become food for the birds of the sky and the beasts of the land, because there is no one to get rid of them.” While food was often in short supply, what was plentiful was fear—fear of starvation, fear of death, and fear of divine judgment.
The Church was hardly a safe haven from anxiety. It was racked by scandals and crises such as simony (the buying and selling of church offices), lay investiture (secular rulers appointing bishops and abbots), and widespread clerical marriage and “concubinage.” Even the clerics not distracted by political ambition or mistresses tended to give homilies that ratcheted up the fear. They emphasized guilt, damnation, and the coming end of days. One of the most common artistic motifs was the hellmouth—a giant gaping jaw lined with monstrous teeth, ready to swallow sinners whole.
Church architecture reflected this angst. Churches were built like fortresses: heavy stone walls, squat profiles, narrow windows that let in only the faintest light. The weight of the stone pressed down on the worshipper like the threat of divine judgment.
One of these Romanesque churches was the abbey of Saint-Denis, just north of Paris. The abbey had been founded in the seventh century by the Frankish king Dagobert in honor of St. Denis, the first Bishop of Paris and the patron saint of France. It became the place where French kings were educated and buried.
In 1081, a boy named Suger was born to peasant parents but quickly revealed unusual intelligence. At age ten he was brought to the abbey of Saint-Denis to be educated (and essentially adopted) by the monks. His closest friend and schoolmate at the abbey was Louis Capet, who became King Louis VI in 1108. King Louis quickly appointed his brilliant friend Suger to be his advisor, and Suger was soon mediating diplomatic conflicts, negotiating alliances, reforming the tax system, and even acting as regent when the king left on the Second Crusade.
But Suger was not just a statesman. He was a dedicated and imaginative Christian disciple and mystic. He was especially enamored by the ideas of a mysterious fifth-century Christian writer known as Dionysius the Areopagite, who described God as pure light—radiant, overflowing, and cascading down the hierarchy of creation. Light, for Dionysius, was the most apt symbol of divine love: It illuminates without exhausting itself, warms without being diminished, and spreads without violence.
In 1122, Suger was appointed abbot of Saint-Denis, inheriting a dark, cramped, and decaying building on the verge of collapse. It was also too small to hold the crowds of pilgrims who attended on feast days. As Suger complained in a letter, “the narrowness of the place forced the women to run toward the altar upon the heads of men as upon a pavement with much anguish and noisy confusion.”
Most leaders in Suger’s position might have merely patched the roof, reinforced the walls, and prayed for stability. Instead, Suger began to dream. He dreamed of a building that could embody Dionysius’s ideas of divine light and renew his nation through beauty.
