Georges Duby, The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society, 980-1420, University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Georges Duby, a professor at the College de France, traces the origins of the gothic to the striving of monks and scholars of the 11th century to “grasp the concealed order of the universe.” According to Duby, members of the Benedictine and Cistercian orders sought to comprehend the interaction between the invisible and the visible realms. They longed to understand the divinity they could sense but not see or touch. Abbot Hugh of Cluny urged his friars to cultivate religious art and architecture as “a sort of diagram of the divine mystery.” Art “had one primary purpose: to make the harmonic structures of the world visible.” Joined with liturgical music and spiritual devotion, the power of sacred structures could enable those within to transcend the merely physical.
Abbot Sugar of St. Denis believed light was the purest manifestation of God into the tangible world. According to Sugar, “God is light.” Between 1140 and 1144, Sugar constructed at St. Denis linked chapels that were one of the first expressions of the new translucent gothic design. Sugar’s goal was for his entire edifice to be suffused and overflowing with divine effulgence that would express the wonder and mystery of creation. He discovered, Duby writes, that what he had created could transport those who entered and prayed there into dimensions beyond the ordinary world. As Sugar described it:
When the enchanting beauty of the house of God has overwhelmed me, when the charm of the multicolored gems has led me to transpose material things to immaterial things and reflect on the diversity of the sacred virtues, then it seems to me that I can see myself, as if in reality, residing in some strange region of the universe which had no previous existence either in the clay of this earth or in the purity of the heavens, and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported mystically from life on this earth to the higher realm.
The sciences of the Islamic world and the wisdom of ancient Greece were important foundations for the achievements of the gothic era. Duby writes that:
“The West gradually assimilated intellectual processes that it derived from the science of the Moslem world and, through it, that of ancient Greece- cultural areas. Hardly was Christianity victorious over Islam than it began to pillage Islam’s intellectual riches. In the reconquered city of Toledo, teams of Latin clerics and Jews had immediately begun to translate the Arab books and the versions they contained of Greek texts. Since the armies that forced the infidels to retreat little by little were made up chiefly of French knights, it was the French who were the first to turn military victories to intellectual use.”
Duby sets out as well the battles over heresy that became increasingly heated in the late 12th century, as the construction of the gothic cathedrals was reaching its height. The 12th century was a millennial time and the wondrous new cathedrals expressed those aspirations. A new kind of society infused with God was widely perceived to be dawning. The growing wealth of the Church, nobility, and merchant class was seen, however, as directly opposed to more egalitarian ideals based on the teachings of Jesus and the way of life of the first Christians. Many longed instead for some kind of Christian commonwealth.
To the Church hierarchy and royal authorities, however, such visionaries were heretics. Beginning in the early 13th century, heretical movements began to be ferociously suppressed. Some Christian scholars, however, continued to search for the true reality that underlay the superficial appearances of the physical world. In 1209, Pope Innocent III and King Philip Augustus of France launched their long and bloody crusade against the Albigensian heretics of southwestern France. In 1252, Pope Innocent IV authorized torture as an instrument of the Inquisition. During the 13th century, Duby writes, “a dense grid of anti-heretical surveillance was imposed on all of Christianity.” The radiant spiritual dawn embodied in the gothic masterpieces and School of Chartres was coming to a close.
Next: The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order