Worth The Trip

The windows of the
apse in Suger's Abbey
of Saint Denis

One of my favorite churches is the Abbey of Saint Denis in the northern suburbs of Paris.  It’s fame comes from its being the birthplace of Gothic architecture and while that is certainly one of the reasons that draws me there, there is just a wonderful aura of the sacred that fills the place.  There has been a church on the site since the days of Saint Genevieve, the fifth-century nun who is said to have saved Paris from Attila the Hun and who has long been the patron saint of the city.  The church was the burial place of the French Kings from Clovis through the Merovingians down to the French Revolution.  After the Revolution the remains of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were moved from the Cimetière of the Madeleine where they had been buried in unmarked graves and reinterred in the crypt of Saint Denis.  Louis XVIII, the king at the Bourbon Restoration in 1814 is also buried there. 

The royal connections served the abbey well.  In the Middle Ages the Kings of France granted the abbey the right to hold a semi-annual fair and it was one of the largest commercial exchanges in Europe as merchants came from Italy and Spain as well as Scandinavia, Britain, and Ireland to do business.  Saint Denis was neither the largest nor the wealthiest abbey in France but it was among them.  In 1122, Suger, a monk of remarkable talent was named Abbot.    As abbot of the Royal necropolis, Suger was guaranteed a place at Court but Louis VI and Louis VII recognized his particular talents and relied heavily on his participation in the royal administration.  It was only after fifteen years of royal service that the abbot could turn to his monastic duties and one of his ambitions was the rebuilding of the Abbey Church. 

His first project was a new west front to the church, basing his idea loosely on the Arch of Constantine with its three portals.  This replaced the single door of the 9^th century church and made access to the church all the easier for the large crowds Suger hoped to draw.  Above the central portal Suger constructed what is believed to be the first “rose window” in architecture.  Much smaller than the massive walls of glass that would ornament Reims or later catherals, the window nevertheless represents a breakthrough in engineering,  The west front and the interior narthex behind it are a very interesting example of the transition from Romanesque to Gothic.  Finishing the new front, Suger moved to the other end of the church and built a new choir and apse.  It was here that the gothic became most clearly visible.  Suger modeled his design on the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius’ The Heavenly Hexarchies and its nine choirs of angels.  Suger surrounded the altar with an apse of nine bays, each containing a radial chapel.  Each of the traditional three levels—the pavement, the triforum and the clerestory—held massive windows flooding the sanctuary with light.  In order to support the roof—now that the walls were virtually of glass—several new features including external flying buttresses were introduced.  It was a radical innovation that would influence all European architecture for the next four hundred years. 

Today there is no monastic community at Saint Denis but the Abbey Church serves as a cathedral, the seat of a suburban diocese to Paris.  The royal tombs are, for the most part, empty as the royal corpses had been disinterred and thrown into a common grave at the time of the Revolution.  But when you go to Paris Saint Denis is well worth a trip out north of the city.  In some respects it is superior to Notre Dame.  It is certainly not as crowded and much easier to enjoy but I personally think the architecture is far more pure and conducive to both prayer and admiration than Notre Dame.  Notre Dame has somewhat of a squat  and shopworn feeling to it, like someone stepped on it and crushed it just a bit, whereas Saint Denis has that feeling of light pouring down from heaven and the soul soaring upwards that Abbot Suger aimed for in his design.

Baptists, Cathars, and Dominicans

San Domenico Guzman
–Fresco in Cantarana –
Denise Schenardi, 2007

The Church’s initial response to Catharism was to launch a missionary campaign and Innocent III sent preachers into the Occitan to refute the heretical doctrines.  He also prohibited translations of the scriptures into the vernacular as popular interpretations of the bible were at the root of the heresy’s spreading.  The preaching crusade was not particularly successful due to the support the Cathars had from many of the local nobility who saw that breaking the power of the Church also weakened the power of the French Crown (and thus strengthened their local power of the peasants and the towns) and when one of the coordinators of the papal effort, Pierre de Castelnau, was assassinated, Raymond, the Count of Toulouse, was suspected of ordering the murder.  This led to a change of papal strategy and in 1209 a Crusade was launched to wipe out the heresy by destroying the nobles and the city governments that supported it.
     The failure of Innocent’s  preaching mission was due in great part to a gross miscalculation on the part of the Church as to what would work at rooting out this heresy.  The pope sent Cistercian Abbots as preachers.  Now the Cistercians were a reformed religious order and known for their integrity and austere life, but abbots are abbots and these prelates saw themselves as emissaries of the Pope rather than as preachers of the Gospel.  Huge mistake.  Huge.  The abbots came on horseback with their retinue of chaplains and liveried servants and they stayed in the homes of the rich, the great, and the powerful and they lived well.  This did not impress the converts to Catharism who had been drawn to the sect because of the austerity of the Cathar perfecti or holy ones.  It is a bit like the Tridentine revivalists who think the way to appeal to people today to come back to the Church is for bishops to wear long trains of scarlet silk while conducting elaborate ceremonies in an arcane language.  Duh!  It didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now.  Anyway, back to the Crusade for a moment. 
     Innocent called a crusade and offered any Catholic nobleman who fought the heretics title to the lands of the various Occitan nobles who were protecting the Cathars.  This involved the French Crown who saw this as an opportunity to extend royal power over this region of what is today southwest France but at the time was a collection of independent baronies.  The French King himself, Philip Augustus,  did not become involved but one of his vassals, Simon de Montfort, led the successfully brutal war in which over 20,000 men, women, and children were killed.    
     Let me just make an aside here.  There are some Protestant groups whose poor knowledge of history allows them to trace their supposed roots back to Jesus and the apostles by identifying themselves with any group that the Catholic Church has ever persecuted.  If you were persecuted by the Catholic Church than you must have been a Baptist!  Won’t earn you a degree in history but sure will make those hymn-singin’, lemonade drinkin’,  bible readin’ po’ folk down in Arkansas and Tennessee feel a might more righteous.   Years ago I was at a rural Baptist Church in Texas—Independence Baptist Church where Sam Houston was baptized.    A gentleman there described the history of the Church, giving us what is known as the “Trail of Blood Baptist” history and according to his story anyone who was imprisoned or killed for their faith in those Catholic Centuries had been Baptist.  He talked about the Cathars as Baptists, unaware that not only did they not practice immersion baptism, but they didn’t even use water.  Nor did he know, even more seriously, that they believed in two gods, a god of light and a god of dark, who were locked in this eternal struggle for men’s souls.  But they weren’t “those Catholics” so they must have been “us Baptists.”  Most Baptists take a more historically critical view and recognize that their tradition comes out of the English Radical Reformation of the seventeenth century and can’t be traced historically to apostolic times. 
     Well, the Albigensian Crusade was pretty much of a failure from a religious point of view—Catharism managed to hold on in Languedoc though often under a veneer of Catholic Orthodoxy.  The fighting was over by 1255 though the Inquisition lingered on to ferret out heretics.  The French Crown eventually triumphed over the nobility and brought the area more and more under central control.  When the French wars of religion broke out in the sixteenth century this area was particularly hard hit as a suspicion of Catholicism remained even after Catharism had apparently died out.  Sometimes, in fact often, religiously divisive movements such as Catharism are not so much about proposing new doctrines as they are about opposing old power structures.  Catharism seems to have been much more about rejecting a Catholic faith that had become over-identified with the power and wealth of the movers and shakers than dangerous ideas of dualism and Gnostic revival. 
     A more positive factor that came out of the Cathar movement was the Dominican Order.  Dominic de Guzman was a canon regular in the suite of the Spanish Bishop of Osma who had been sent on a Diplomatic mission by the king of Castile to Denmark.  As they travelled through the south of France Dominic encountered the Cathars and converted a number of their women members whom he organized into a monastery of nuns at Prouille.  The mission to Denmark completed (unsuccessfully as the marriage they were to arrange fell through due to the untimely death of the proposed bride), Dominic and his bishop returned to France on their way home to Castile.  Dominic saw the papal legates in all their pomp after their preaching had failed to stop the Cathar heresy.  He admonished them:  “The Cathars do not win people to their heresy by the show of power and pomp, by trains of servants and caparisoned horses, by their gorgeous robes—but by zealous preaching, by being humble like the apostles, by poor and simple lives, and by genuine and apparent holiness.  Zeal must be matched by zeal, humility by humility, the pretense of holiness by genuine holiness, preaching lies by preaching truth.”  Dominic decided to stay in France and to do precisely that while his bishop returned home.  Dominic gathered several other priests about him to establish a community of preachers of evangelical truth who, like the Cathar perfecti, would live poor and simple lives as a witness to their faith.  Their preaching was not a huge success in winning back people to the faith, but they did make a difference.  In 1217 Dominic would establish his preaching priests as a new religious Order—the Order of Preachers.  We know them today as the Dominicans.  More about them in future blogs. 

Roots of the Reformation XVI: Charlemagne the Usurper

The French Royal Tombs
in the former Abbey Church of Saint Denis  

OK, vacation is over and I need to refocus.   I want to get back to our “Roots of the Reformation series”  and go back—waaaaay back—to Charlmagne and his heritage.  As I had been writing more than a month ago, there is a long history of Reformations.  It does not begin with Martin Luther—far from it.   Some Reformations have happened within the unity of the Church and some have fractured the unity of the Church.  Charlemagne’s Reformation was one of those that happened within the unity of the Church—indeed fortified the unity of the Western Church.  (It would, however, have repercussions that were partially responsible for the schism of 1054 between Rome and Constantinople).

For those who think linearly—and most people interested in history do—I owe an apology regarding my postings on Charlemagne.  In the first place I should have kept them together and not interspersed them among the postings on clericalism that I had been doing before I went to Prague—though I have to say those postings got much more attention than these on Charlemagne.  In the second place, I should have posted them in a different order—and begun with this one which explains how Charlemagne got to  be king (and emperor) in the first place as neither did he nor his father come from the French royal line but where members of a family of hereditary civil servants.  After explaining the ascension of his family to the throne, I should have posted the entry on the Carolingian Reformation: Roots of the Reformation VIII: Reformation or Reformations, and then Roots of the Reformation XI: Crown Control of the Church, but as Pontius Pilate used to say: Quod scripsi, scripsi. 

We think of the Popes as having governed the Church continuously from Peter down to the present day but history tells us a very different story.  There were times that the popes had great influence over the Church, even times when it did make its power felt beyond Rome and the towns and cities of central Italy and there were times where the bishop of Rome had now power and little influence beyond his own diocese. For example, at the time of Pope St Gregory the Great (590-604) papal influence (“power” is too strong a word for papal authority at the time) was felt in England and much of what is today France as well as throughout Italy.  On the other hand, a century later, that influence was waning and the pope was little more than a name that was mentioned in the prayers of the Mass.  Of course just that mention was not insignificant as he reminded people that Peter’s successor still governed the Church at Rome and Peter’s mystique was strong throughout the Church.  In practical matters however, the Pope was pretty powerless. There were no papal writs authorizing the consecration of bishops; such decisions were entirely local.   Bishops were pretty much supreme in their dioceses except where a strong Archbishop could—usually with royal backing—convince the bishops of his province to conform to his ideas.  Bishops were chosen by the clergy of their dioceses—usually with the confirmation and blessing of the King or the local nobility. 

In the eighth century papal power received an important boost due to a dynastic change in France.  The Kings of the Franks were sacred persons—heirs of the great Clovis who had converted to Christianity in 496 and brought his people with him.  Saint Remi had anointed Clovis with a heaven-sent chrism (or so the story goes) and thus he and his line, the Merovingian Kings of the Franks, were a God-chosen line to govern.  As time passed, however, the Merovingians began to enjoy the kingship too much and allowed their prime ministers, the “Mayors of the Palace” to assume actual power.  This office, like the kingship, became hereditary in the Pippinid family.  The power and esteem of the Pippinds soon matched that of the royal house.  In fact, because they were actually the holders of power, the popularity of the mayors of the palace exceeded that of the kings and when Mayor of the Palace Charles Martel drove the Muslim armies back across the Pyrenees after the Battle of Tours in 732, thus guaranteeing the independence of the French and the survival of the Christian faith, the Mayors of the Palace established themselves as the de facto rulers of France and the populace saw that the Merovingian Kings were redundant. 

This provided too strong a temptation for the Mayors of the Palace and Charles Martel’s son, Pepin the Short.  He was determined to take the crown for himself.  Of course, Pepin needed some legitimacy to take the throne and not be seen as a mere usurper.  Enter the pope.  Pepin petitioned Pope Zachary asking whether a king who had no power was king at all?  The answer came back that the one who held the power, not necessarily the one who had the lineage, was true king.  This is a revolutionary doctrine and has implications for modern politics.  On the pope’s word, Pepin deposed Childeric III, the last of the  Merovingian kings.  Childeric and his son were forced into the monastic life, ending the dynasty.  Zachary’s successor, Stephen II, came to France and anointed and crowed Pepin in the royal necropolis at the Abbey Church of Saint Denis just north of Paris.  Anointing and coronation in the burial church of the Frankish royalty gave Pepin a share in the legitimacy which had heretofore belonged to the Merovingian kings.  Stephen also conferred on Pepin the title “Patrician (a nobleman) of the Romans” giving him a tie to Rome and its imperial heritage. 

Of course the popes had some political motives for sponsoring a change of dynasty.  History will show you that popes act from political expediency far more than from theological purism.  Their own power in Italy was being challenged by the Lombards, a Germanic tribe who had invaded northern Italy and were threatening Rome.  The popes looked to the new dynasty to protect papal power in Italy; Pepin’s son, Charlemagne (Carolus Magnus, Charles the Great) defeated the Lombards in 774 and absorbed them into the empire he was building. 

Charlemagne would not only defend the papacy from the Lombards but would again become involved in defending a pope from the Roman nobility.  The old and noble families of Rome were appalled when in 795 a commoner was chosen pope as Leo III.  The nobility had seen that this office belonged by right to one of them.  The nobility charged the pope with adultery and perjury.  In 799, a gang of thugs, at the behest of the nobility, kidnapped Leo, and when the nobility declared him deposed, attempted to blind him and to cut out his tongue.  He escaped them and fled to Paderborn where Charlemagne met him.  Charlemagne investigated the charges against Leo.  He then returned Leo to Rome for a formal hearing where the pope cleared himself by an oath and Charlemagne reinstated him.  (Today we would never accept a person’s word, even a pope’s, that he was innocent but those were far more generous times. Or may just more naive. )  Two days later, on Christmas day 800, Leo, in turn, then crowned Charlemagne as Emperor of the Romans. 

Charlemagne had a clear understanding of the role of the Pope and the Role of the Emperor.  The Emperor was to protect the Church and manage its external affairs—which in Charlemagne’s eyes also meant to appoint bishops and other prelates.  The Pope’s duty was to define the doctrines that united Christianity and to pray for the Emperor and the army whose task it was to protect the Church.