Civilisation (1969–1970): Season 1, Episode 2 - The Great Thaw - full transcript
(PLAINSONG)
There have been times
in the history of mankind
when the Earth seems suddenly to have
grown warmer or more radioactive.
Well, I don't put this forward
as a scientific proposition,
but the fact remains that
three or four times in history
man has made a leap forward
that would have been unthinkable
under ordinary evolutionary conditions.
One such time was about the year 3,000 BC
when quite suddenly
civilisation appeared
not only in Egypt and Mesopotamia
but in the Indus Valley.
Another was in the late 6th century BC,
when there was not only
the miracle of Ionia and Greece,
philosophy, science, art, poetry
all reaching a point
that wasn't reached again for 2,000 years,
but also in India
a spiritual enlightenment
that has perhaps never been equalled.
And another was round about the year 1100.
It seems to have affected the whole
world - India, China, Byzantium -
but its strongest and most dramatic
effect was in Western Europe,
where it was most needed.
It was like a Russian spring.
In every branch of life - action,
philosophy, organisation, technology -
there was an extraordinary
outpouring of energy,
an intensification of existence.
Popes, emperors, kings, bishops,
saints, scholars, philosophers,
they were all larger than life,
and the incidents of history
are great heroic dramas
or symbolic acts
that still stir our hearts.
The evidence of this heroic energy,
this confidence,
this strength of will and intellect,
is still visible to us.
From where I'm standing,
the east end of Canterbury
still looks very large and very complex.
In spite of all our mechanical skills and
the inflated scale of modern materialism,
Durham Cathedral remains
a formidable proposition.
These great orderly mountains of stone
rose out of a small cluster
of wooden houses.
Well, everyone with the least historical
imagination has thought of that.
But what people don't always realise
is that all this happened quite suddenly,
in a single lifetime.
Well, of course, these changes imply
a new social and intellectual background.
They imply wealth,
stability, technical skill
and, above all, the confidence necessary
to push through a long-term project.
How had all this suddenly appeared
in Western Europe?
There are many answers.
But one is overwhelmingly
more important than the others -
the triumph of the Church.
It could be convincingly argued
that Western civilisation
was basically the creation of the Church.
In saying that,
I'm not thinking for the moment
as the church as the repository of
Christian truth and spiritual experience.
I'm thinking of her as the 12th century
thought of her, as a power,
Ecclesia, sitting like an empress,
and she was powerful for positive reasons.
Men of intelligence naturally
and normally took holy orders,
and could rise from obscurity
to positions of immense influence.
The church was basically
a democratic institution,
where ability -
administrative, diplomatic,
sheer intellectual ability -
made its way.
And then, the Church was international.
The great churchmen of the 11th and 12th
centuries came from all over Europe.
Anselm came here from Aosta,
via Normandy,
to be Archbishop of Canterbury.
Lanfranc had made the same journey
starting from Pavia.
It couldn't happen in the Church
or in politics today.
One can't imagine two consecutive
Archbishops of Canterbury being Italian.
But it could happen and it does happen
in the field of science,
which shows that where some way of thought
or human activity is really vital to us,
then internationalism
is accepted unhesitatingly.
This internationalism of the 12th century
extended to architecture and sculpture.
The master masons, who were both sculptors
and architects, travelled all over Europe.
Canterbury was built by a Frenchman,
William of Sens.
The extraordinary thing is
that wherever they went
these masters seemed able to
recruit a force of skilled workmen
who carried out technical feats which
seem infinitely beyond all that we know,
or think we know,
of the mechanical skill of the time.
(# STUDIO DER FRÜHEN MUSIK:
Carmina Burana)
They were inspired by the feeling that
beyond all their hoisting and hammering,
there was some great controlling
intelligence based on mathematical laws,
a human reflection
of God "the Great Architect".
This expansion of the human spirit
was first made visible
in the Abbey of Cluny,
about 250 miles
to the south-east of Paris.
It was founded in the 10th century,
but under Hugh of Semur,
who was abbot from 1049 to 1109,
it became the greatest church in Europe.
A huge complex of buildings
with a famous library
in which was made
the first translation of the Koran,
the first attempt to understand the
infidel instead of merely fighting him.
Well, the buildings were destroyed
in the early 19th century,
used as a quarry, like Roman buildings,
and only a part of the south transept
remains, where I am standing now.
But we've many descriptions
of its original splendour.
The Abbey Church alone
was the size of a large cathedral
and on feast days the whole of the walls
were covered with hangings.
The floors were of mosaic with figures,
like a Roman pavement.
Of all its treasures, the most astonishing
was a seven-branched candlestick
of gilt bronze,
of which the shaft alone was 18 feet high,
a formidable piece of casting even today.
Of all this, nothing remains, only a few
candlesticks, later and much smaller.
This is one of them.
It's only about 18 inches high,
but it's so full of detail
that one can imagine it 18 feet.
Although made for
the Cathedral of Gloucester,
it's a perfect example
of Cluniac elaboration.
Well, this first great eruption
of ecclesiastical splendour
was unashamedly extravagant.
Apologists for the Cluniac style
tell us that all the decoration
was subordinated to philosophic ideas.
My general impression
is that the invention,
which boiled over into sculpture
and painting in the early 12th century,
was self-delighting.
As with the similar outbursts
of the Baroque,
one can think up ingenious
interpretations of the subjects,
but the motive force behind them
was simply irrepressible,
irresponsible energy.
The Romanesque carvers
were like a school of dolphins.
All this we know, not from
the mother house of Cluny itself,
but from the dependencies
that spread all over Europe.
There were over 1,200 of them
in France alone,
and I am sitting in the cloisters
of a fairly remote one,
the Abbey of Moissac in Southern France,
which was important because it was
on the pilgrimage route to Compostela.
The carvings have much
that is typical of the Cluny style.
The sharp cutting,
the swirling drapery, the twisting line,
as if the restless impulses
of the wandering craftsmen,
the goldsmiths of the Viking conquerors,
still had to be expressed in stone.
You can see this on the mullion
of the door with its fabulous beasts.
When one considers
that they were once brightly coloured,
because Cluniac ornament
seems all to have been painted,
and the manuscripts show
what kind of colour it was,
they must have looked even more
fiercely Tibetan than they do today,
and I can't imagine
that even the medieval mind,
which was adept at interpreting
everything symbolically,
could have found much in them
of religious meaning.
But what has this column
to do with Christian values,
with compassion or charity or even hope?
It's not at all surprising that the most
influential churchman of his day,
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux,
should have become the bitter and
relentless critic of the Cluniac style.
Some of his attacks
are the usual puritan objections,
as when he speaks of the "lies of poetry”,
words that were to echo
through the centuries
and become favourites
in the new religion of science.
But Saint Bernard had an eye
as well as an eloquent tongue.
"And in the cloisters," he says,
"under the eyes of the brethren
engaged in reading,
"what business have
those ridiculous monstrosities,
"that misshapen shapeliness
and shapely misshapenness?
"Those unclean monkeys, those fierce
lions, those monstrous centaurs,
"those semi-human beings?
"Here you see a quadruped
with the tail of a serpent,
"there a fish with the head of a bird.
"In short, there appears on all sides
so rich and amazing a variety of forms,
"that it was more delightful to read
the marbles than the manuscripts
"and to spend the whole day
in admiring these things piece by piece,
"rather than in meditating
on the divine law."
That last sentence shows, doesn't it,
that Bernard felt the power of art?
And in fact the buildings done under
his influence, in the Cistercian style,
are closer to our ideas of architecture
than anything else of the period.
Alas, most of them are abandoned
and half-ruined
simply because it was
part of Saint Bernard's ideal
that they should be built far from
the worldly distractions of towns.
And so when, after the French Revolution,
town monasteries
were turned into local churches,
the Cistercian monasteries
fell into ruins.
And yet it's there that the spirit
of monasticism has survived.
(CHURCH BELLS RING)
(CHURCH BELLS RING)
...quem ponebant cotidie ad portam templi,
quae dicitur Speciosa,
ut peteret elemosynam ab
introeuntibus in templum.
Is cum vidisset Petrum et Iohannem
incipientes introire in templum,
rogabat ut elemosynam acciperet.
Intuens autem in eum Petrus
cum Iohanne dixit respice in nos.
At ille intendebat in eos sperans
se aliquid accepturum ab eis.
Petrus autem dixit argentum
et aurum non est mihi,
quod autem habeo hoc tibi do...
(PLAINSONG)
These white monks,
in their unchanging habit,
this round of work and prayer which has
continued unbroken since the 12th century,
bring the old building back to life.
- (BELLS TINKLING)
- (MAN MUTTERS)
It's a way of life that is concerned
with an ideal of eternity,
and that is an important part
of civilisation.
But the great "thaw" of the 12th century
was not achieved by contemplation alone -
that can exist at all times -
but by action,
a vigorous, violent sense of movement
both physical and intellectual.
On the physical side, this took the form
of pilgrimages and crusades.
Well, I think they're one of the features
of the Middle Ages
which is hardest for us to understand.
It's no good pretending that pilgrimages
were like cruises or holidays abroad.
For one thing, they took far longer,
sometimes two or three years.
For another, they involved
real hardship and danger.
In spite of efforts
to organise pilgrimages,
and Cluny ran a series of hostels
along the chief routes,
elderly abbots and middle-aged widows
often died on the way to Jerusalem.
Pilgrimages were undertaken
in hope of heavenly rewards.
In fact they were often used
by the Church as a form of penitence,
a spiritualised form of extradition.
The point of a pilgrimage
was to look at relics.
The medieval pilgrim really believed
that by contemplating a reliquary
containing the head
or even the finger of a saint
he could persuade that saint
to intercede on his behalf with God.
Well, how can one hope to
share this belief
which played so great a part
in medieval civilisation?
I am on my way to the town of Conques,
a famous place of pilgrimage
dedicated to the cult of Sainte Foy.
She was a little girl who, in late Roman
times, refused to worship idols.
She was obstinate in the face
of "reasonable persuasion”,
a Christian Antigone,
and so she was martyred.
Her relics began to work miracles,
and in the 10th century
one of them was so famous
that Bernard of Angers
was sent to investigate it
and report to the Bishop of Chartres.
It seemed that a man had had his eyes
gouged out by a jealous priest.
After a year or so, the blind man
went to the shrine of Sainte Foy
and his eyes were restored.
The man was still alive.
He said that at first he had
had terrible headaches,
but now they had passed
and he could see perfectly.
There was a difficulty.
After his eyes had been put out,
witnesses said that
they had been taken up to heaven,
some said by a dove, others by a magpie.
That was the only point of doubt.
The report was favourable,
a fine Romanesque church
was built at Conques,
and in it was placed
this strange Eastern-looking figure
to contain the relics of Sainte Foy,
a golden idol studded with gems.
How ironical that this little girl,
who was put to death
for refusing to worship idols,
should have been turned into one herself,
that the very head should be a gold mask
of a late Roman Emperor.
Well, that's the medieval mind.
They cared passionately
about the truth,
but their sense of evidence
was different from ours.
From our point of view,
nearly all the relics in the world depend
on some completely unhistorical assertion.
And yet they, as much as any factor, led
to that movement and diffusion of ideas
from which Western civilisation
derives part of its momentum.
Of course, the most important place
of pilgrimage was Jerusalem.
After the 10th century,
when a strong Byzantine Empire
made the journey practicable,
pilgrims used to go
in parties of 7,000 at a time.
And this is the background
of that extraordinary episode in history,
the First Crusade.
Because, although other factors
may have determined its course -
Norman restlessness, the ambitions
of younger sons, economic depression,
all the factors that make for
a gold rush - there can be no doubt
that the majority of people joined
the crusade in a spirit of pilgrimage.
Among many things
they brought back from the East
were Persian decorative motifs
which were combined with
the rhythms of northern ornament
to make the Romanesque style.
I see these as two fierce beasts tugging
at the carcass of Graeco-Roman art.
Very often, one can trace a figure
back to a classical original,
but it has been entirely
tugged out of shape,
or perhaps one should say into shape,
by these two new forces.
This feeling of tugging, of pulling
everything to bits and reshaping it,
was characteristic of 12th-century art,
and was somehow complementary to
the massive stability of its architecture.
And I see rather the same situation
in the realm of ideas.
The main structure
of the Christian faith was unshakeable.
But around it was a play of minds,
a tugging and a tension,
that has hardly been seen since,
and was, I think, one of the things
that prevented Western Europe
from growing rigid,
as so many other civilisations have done.
It was an age of
intense intellectual activity.
To read what was going on in Paris
about the year 1130 makes one's head spin.
And at the centre of it all
was the brilliant enigmatic figure
of Peter Abelard,
the invincible arguer,
the magnetic teacher.
Abelard was a star.
Like a great prizefighter,
he expressed contempt for anyone who
met him in the ring of open discussion.
The older medieval philosophers,
like Anselm, had said,
"I must believe
in order that I may understand.”
Abelard took the opposite course.
"I must understand
in order that I may believe."
He said, "By doubting,
we come to questioning,
"and by questioning
we perceive the truth.”
Strange words to have been written
in the year 1122.
Of course they got him into trouble.
Only the strength and wisdom of Cluny
saved him from excommunication.
He ended his days calmly,
in a Cluniac house,
and after his death,
the Abbot of Cluny wrote to Heloise,
saying that she and Abelard
would be reunited,
"where, beyond these voices,
there is peace.”
I am standing in a Cluniac house,
the Abbey of Vézelay.
I'm in the covered portico
where the pilgrims gathered.
Above my head is the relief
on the main door showing Christ in Glory.
He's no longer the Judge,
as at Moissac, but the Redeemer.
Vézelay is full of sculpture,
on the doors, on the capitals, everywhere.
But fascinating as this is,
one forgets about it
when one looks through the door
at the architecture of the interior.
(GREGORIAN CHANT)
It's so harmonious
that surely Saint Bernard,
who preached the Second Crusade here,
must have felt that this was
an expression of the divine law,
and an aid to worship and contemplation.
It certainly has that effect on me.
Indeed, I can think
of no other Romanesque interior
that has this quality of lightness,
this feeling of divine reason.
And it seems inevitable
that the Romanesque should here
merge into a beautiful early Gothic.
(GREGORIAN CHANT)
We don't know the name
of the architect of Vézelay,
nor of the highly individual sculptors
of Moissac and Toulouse,
and this used to be taken as a proof
of Christian humility in the artists,
or, alternatively,
a sign of their low status.
I think it was just an accident,
because in fact we do know the names
of a good many medieval builders,
including the architects of Cluny,
and the form of their inscriptions
doesn't at all suggest excessive modesty.
One of the most famous is
bang in the middle of the main portal
of the Cathedral of Autun.
You can see it under the feet of Christ.
"Gislebertus hoc fecit",
Gislebertus made this.
One of the blessed looks up at the name
of Gislebertus with admiration.
He must have been considered
a very important man
for his name to have been permitted
in such a prominent place.
At a later date, it would not have been
the artist's name, but the patron's.
And in fact
Gislebertus was important to Autun
because he did something unique
in the Middle Ages,
and very rare at any time -
he carried out the whole decoration
of the Cathedral himself.
This extraordinary feat was in keeping
with his character as an artist.
He wasn't an inward-looking
visionary, like the Moissac master.
He was an extrovert.
He loves to tell a story, and his
strength lies in his dramatic force.
Look at the row of the damned
under the feet of their Judge.
They form a crescendo of despair.
They are reduced to essentials
in a way that brings them very close
to the art of our own time.
A likeness terrifyingly confirmed
by these gigantic hands
that carry up the head of a sinner
as if it were a piece of rubble
on a building site.
The capitals also have
this vivid, narrative quality.
They contain rich pieces of ornament.
But in the end,
it's the story that counts.
Look at this charming donkey,
and at the protective way
in which the Virgin holds the Christ Child
on their journey to Egypt.
(PLAINSONG)
Even in this abstract-looking design
of the three kings asleep
under their magnificent counterpane,
what matters is the angel's gesture,
and the delicate way he places one finger
on the hand of a sleeping king.
Like all storytellers,
he had a taste for horrors,
and he went out of his way to depict them.
This really horrifying work
is the suicide of Judas.
However, I must, in fairness,
admit that he also did a figure of Eve
which is the first female
nude since antiquity
to give a sense
of the pleasures of the body.
(# Carmina Burana)
The work of Gislebertus
was finished in about 1135
and by that time, a new force
had appeared in European art -
the Abbey of Saint-Denis.
(GREGORIAN CHANT)
The Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis
had been famous enough in earlier times.
But the part it played
in Western civilisation
was due to the abilities of one
extraordinary individual, the Abbot Suger.
He was one of the first men
of the Middle Ages
whom one can think of in modern,
I might almost say transatlantic terms.
His origins were completely obscure
and he was extremely small,
but his vitality was overwhelming.
It extended to everything
that he undertook -
organisation, building, statesmanship.
He was Regent of France for seven years
and a great patriot.
Indeed, he seems to have been the first
to pronounce those now familiar words,
"The English are destined by moral and
natural law to be subjected to the French
"and not contrariwise."
He loved to talk about himself,
without any false modesty,
and he tells the story
of how his builders assured him
that beams of the length he needed
for a certain roof could never be found
because trees
just weren't as tall as that.
Whereupon he took his carpenters
into the forests,
"they smiled," he says, "and would have
laughed if they had dared,”
and in the course of the day he discovered
12 trees of the necessary size
and he had them felled and brought back.
You see why I used the word transatlantic.
And like several of the pioneers
of the New World,
he had a passionate love of art.
One of the most fascinating documents
of the Middle Ages is the account he wrote
of the works carried out
at Saint-Denis under his administration -
the gold altar, the crosses,
the precious crystals.
There they are, seen through the eyes
of a 15th-century painter,
who has no doubt made his figures
much too large in proportion.
Actually, Suger's great gold cross
was 24 feet high
and it was studded with jewels
and inlaid with enamels
made by one of the finest craftsmen
of the age, Godefroid de Claire.
All destroyed in the Revolution.
All that is left of Suger's treasures
is a few of the sacred vessels
like this Egyptian porphyry jar,
which he tells us he found
forgotten in a cupboard.
Suger's feeling for all these objects
was partly that of a great collector -
love of brightness,
and splendour, and antiquity,
and a love of acquisition.
But he was not merely a collector,
he was a creator.
His work had a philosophic basis that
is very important to Western civilisation.
Suger accepted the belief
that we could only come to understand
the absolute beauty which is God
through the effect of precious
and beautiful things on our senses.
He said, "the dull mind rises to truth
through that which is material."
Well, this was really a revolutionary
concept in the Middle Ages.
It was the intellectual background
of all the sublime works of art
of the next century
and, in fact, has remained the basis
of our belief in the value of art
until today.
In addition to this revolution in theory,
Suger's Saint-Denis was also the beginning
of many new developments in practice -
in architecture,
in sculpture, in painted glass.
But one can still see
that Suger introduced,
perhaps really invented,
the Gothic style of architecture,
not only the pointed arch
but the lightness of high windows,
what we call the clerestory.
"Bright," he says, "is the noble edifice
that is pervaded by new light."
And in these words he anticipates
all the architectural aspirations
of the next 200 years.
Alas, the exterior of Saint-Denis
doesn't look too bright today.
It's been knocked about and restored,
and is now engulfed
in a squalid industrial suburb.
To form any notion of its first effect
on the mind, one must go to Chartres.
In some miraculous way,
Chartres has survived.
Fire and war, revolution and restoration
have attacked it in vain.
One can still climb the hill to
the cathedral in the spirit of a pilgrim.
Even the tourists
have not destroyed its atmosphere,
as they have in so many temples
of the human spirit,
from the Sistine Chapel
to the Todaiji in Japan.
(PLAINSONG)
The south tower
is still more or less as it was
when it was completed in the year 1164.
It's a masterpiece
of harmonious proportion.
Was this harmony
calculated mathematically?
Well, ingenious scholars have produced
a system of proportions
based on measurements,
but it's so complex
that I find it very hard to credit.
However, Chartres was the centre of
a school of philosophy devoted to Plato,
and in particular to his mysterious book
called The Timaeus,
from which it was thought that
the whole universe could be interpreted
as a form of measurable harmony.
So perhaps the proportions of Chartres
reflect a more complex mathematics
than one is inclined to believe.
(PLAINSONG)
Chartres contained the most famous
of all relics of the Virgin,
the actual tunic she had worn
at the time of the Annunciation.
From the first,
this relic had worked miracles,
but it was only in the 12th century
that the cult of the Virgin began to
appeal to the popular imagination.
I suppose that in the earlier centuries
life was simply too rough.
At any rate, if art is any guide, and
in this series I am taking it as my guide,
the Virgin played a very small part
in the minds of men
during the 9th and 10th
and even the 11th centuries.
The Romanesque churches
we have been looking at
were dedicated to saints
whose relics they contained,
Saint Etienne, Saint Lazarus, Saint Denis,
Saint Mary Magdalene,
none of them to the Virgin.
Then after Chartres almost every great
church in France was dedicated to Her -
Paris, Amiens, Rheims, Rouen, Beauvais.
What was the reason
for this sudden change?
Well, I think the cult of the Virgin
must have come from the East,
because all the early representations
of the Virgin as an object of devotion
are in a markedly Byzantine style.
This is a page from a manuscript from
Citeaux, the community of Saint Bernard,
and Saint Bernard was one of the first men
to speak of the Virgin
as an ideal of beauty
and a mediator between man and God.
But certainly a strong influence
in spreading the cult of the Virgin
was the beauty and splendour of Chartres.
The main portal of Chartres
is one of the most beautiful congregations
of carved figures in the world.
The longer you look at it,
the more moving incidents,
the more vivid details you discover.
I suppose the first thing that strikes
anyone is this row of pillar people.
In naturalistic terms,
as bodies, they are impossible,
and the fact that one believes in them
is a triumph of art.
The sculptor was not only a man of genius
but one of great originality.
He must have begun carving
when style was dominated
by the violent, twisting rhythms of Cluny.
And he has created a style
as still and restrained and classical
as the Greek sculptors
of the 6th century BC.
But was it really Greek?
I mean, Greek in derivation.
Were these reed-like draperies,
the thin straight lines,
the fluted folds, the zigzag hems,
and the whole play of texture,
which so obviously recalls
the Greek Archaic figure,
arrived at independently?
Or had the Chartres master seen
some fragments of early Greek sculpture
in the South of France?
Well, for various reasons,
I'm quite certain that he had.
But the most important thing
about the central doorway,
more important even
than its Greek derivation,
is the character of the heads
of the so-called kings and queens.
No-one knows exactly who they are.
These heads seem to me to show a new stage
in the ascent of Western man.
Indeed, I believe that this refinement,
this look of selfless detachment
and spirituality,
is something entirely new in art.
Beside them, the gods and heroes
of ancient Greece look arrogant, soulless,
even slightly brutal.
I fancy that the faces
which look out at us from the past
are perhaps the surest indication
we have of the meaning of an epoch.
And the faces
on the west portal of Chartres
are amongst the most sincere
and the most aristocratic
that Western Europe has ever produced.
From the old chronicles,
we know something about the men
whose states of mind these faces reveal.
In the year 1144, we are told, when the
towers seem to be rising as if by magic,
the faithful harnessed themselves
to carts which were bringing stone
and dragged them from the quarry
to the cathedral.
The enthusiasm spread throughout France.
Men and women came from far away
carrying heavy burdens
of provisions for the workmen -
wine, oil, corn.
Amongst them were lords and ladies,
pulling carts with the rest.
"There was perfect discipline,
and a most profound silence.
"All hearts were united
and each man forgave his enemies."
(GREGORIAN CHANT)
Its very construction
was a kind of miracle.
The old Romanesque church had been
destroyed by a terrible fire in 1197.
Only the towers
and the west front remained,
and the people of Chartres feared
that they had lost their precious relic.
Then, when the debris was cleared away,
it was found intact in the crypt
and the Virgin's intention became clear -
that a new church should be built,
even more splendid than the last.
The building
is in the new architectural style
to which Suger had given the impress
of his authority at Saint-Denis,
what we call Gothic,
only, at Chartres,
the architect was told to follow
the foundations
of the old Romanesque cathedral,
and this has meant
that the Gothic vaulting had to cover
a space far wider than ever before.
It was a formidable problem
of construction,
and in order to solve it,
the architect has used the device
known as "flying buttresses”,
one of those happy strokes
where necessity has led
to an architectural invention
of marvellous and fantastic beauty.
(PLAINSONG)
Since the beginning of settled life,
say, the pyramid of Sakkara,
man had thought of buildings
as a weight on the ground.
He had always found himself limited
by problems of stability and weight.
In the end, it kept him down to the earth.
Now, by the devices of the Gothic style,
the shaft with its cluster of columns
passing without interruption
into the vault,
and the pointed arch,
he could make stone seem weightless,
the weightless expression of the spirit.
By the same means,
he could surround his space with glass.
Suger said that he did this
in order to get more light,
but he found that these areas of glass
could be made into an ideal means
of impressing
and instructing the faithful.
"Man may rise to the contemplation
of the divine through the senses."
Well, nowhere else, I think,
is Suger's favourite saying
so convincingly illustrated
as it is in Chartres Cathedral.
As one looks at the painted windows
which completely surround one,
they seem almost to
set up a vibration in the air.
Chartres is the epitome of the first great
awakening in European civilisation.
It's also the bridge
between Romanesque and Gothic,
between the world of Abelard
and the world of Saint Thomas Aquinas,
the world of restless curiosity
and the world of system and order.
Great things were to be done
in the next centuries of High Gothic,
great feats of construction
both in architecture and in thought.
But they all rested
on the foundations of the 12th century.
That was the age which gave
European civilisation its impetus.
Our intellectual energy,
our contact
with the great minds of Greece,
our ability to move and to change,
our belief that God
may be approached through beauty,
our feeling of compassion,
our sense of the unity of Christendom.
All this and much more appeared
in those 100 marvellous years
between the consecration of Cluny
and the rebuilding of Chartres.
(PLAINSONG)
There have been times
in the history of mankind
when the Earth seems suddenly to have
grown warmer or more radioactive.
Well, I don't put this forward
as a scientific proposition,
but the fact remains that
three or four times in history
man has made a leap forward
that would have been unthinkable
under ordinary evolutionary conditions.
One such time was about the year 3,000 BC
when quite suddenly
civilisation appeared
not only in Egypt and Mesopotamia
but in the Indus Valley.
Another was in the late 6th century BC,
when there was not only
the miracle of Ionia and Greece,
philosophy, science, art, poetry
all reaching a point
that wasn't reached again for 2,000 years,
but also in India
a spiritual enlightenment
that has perhaps never been equalled.
And another was round about the year 1100.
It seems to have affected the whole
world - India, China, Byzantium -
but its strongest and most dramatic
effect was in Western Europe,
where it was most needed.
It was like a Russian spring.
In every branch of life - action,
philosophy, organisation, technology -
there was an extraordinary
outpouring of energy,
an intensification of existence.
Popes, emperors, kings, bishops,
saints, scholars, philosophers,
they were all larger than life,
and the incidents of history
are great heroic dramas
or symbolic acts
that still stir our hearts.
The evidence of this heroic energy,
this confidence,
this strength of will and intellect,
is still visible to us.
From where I'm standing,
the east end of Canterbury
still looks very large and very complex.
In spite of all our mechanical skills and
the inflated scale of modern materialism,
Durham Cathedral remains
a formidable proposition.
These great orderly mountains of stone
rose out of a small cluster
of wooden houses.
Well, everyone with the least historical
imagination has thought of that.
But what people don't always realise
is that all this happened quite suddenly,
in a single lifetime.
Well, of course, these changes imply
a new social and intellectual background.
They imply wealth,
stability, technical skill
and, above all, the confidence necessary
to push through a long-term project.
How had all this suddenly appeared
in Western Europe?
There are many answers.
But one is overwhelmingly
more important than the others -
the triumph of the Church.
It could be convincingly argued
that Western civilisation
was basically the creation of the Church.
In saying that,
I'm not thinking for the moment
as the church as the repository of
Christian truth and spiritual experience.
I'm thinking of her as the 12th century
thought of her, as a power,
Ecclesia, sitting like an empress,
and she was powerful for positive reasons.
Men of intelligence naturally
and normally took holy orders,
and could rise from obscurity
to positions of immense influence.
The church was basically
a democratic institution,
where ability -
administrative, diplomatic,
sheer intellectual ability -
made its way.
And then, the Church was international.
The great churchmen of the 11th and 12th
centuries came from all over Europe.
Anselm came here from Aosta,
via Normandy,
to be Archbishop of Canterbury.
Lanfranc had made the same journey
starting from Pavia.
It couldn't happen in the Church
or in politics today.
One can't imagine two consecutive
Archbishops of Canterbury being Italian.
But it could happen and it does happen
in the field of science,
which shows that where some way of thought
or human activity is really vital to us,
then internationalism
is accepted unhesitatingly.
This internationalism of the 12th century
extended to architecture and sculpture.
The master masons, who were both sculptors
and architects, travelled all over Europe.
Canterbury was built by a Frenchman,
William of Sens.
The extraordinary thing is
that wherever they went
these masters seemed able to
recruit a force of skilled workmen
who carried out technical feats which
seem infinitely beyond all that we know,
or think we know,
of the mechanical skill of the time.
(# STUDIO DER FRÜHEN MUSIK:
Carmina Burana)
They were inspired by the feeling that
beyond all their hoisting and hammering,
there was some great controlling
intelligence based on mathematical laws,
a human reflection
of God "the Great Architect".
This expansion of the human spirit
was first made visible
in the Abbey of Cluny,
about 250 miles
to the south-east of Paris.
It was founded in the 10th century,
but under Hugh of Semur,
who was abbot from 1049 to 1109,
it became the greatest church in Europe.
A huge complex of buildings
with a famous library
in which was made
the first translation of the Koran,
the first attempt to understand the
infidel instead of merely fighting him.
Well, the buildings were destroyed
in the early 19th century,
used as a quarry, like Roman buildings,
and only a part of the south transept
remains, where I am standing now.
But we've many descriptions
of its original splendour.
The Abbey Church alone
was the size of a large cathedral
and on feast days the whole of the walls
were covered with hangings.
The floors were of mosaic with figures,
like a Roman pavement.
Of all its treasures, the most astonishing
was a seven-branched candlestick
of gilt bronze,
of which the shaft alone was 18 feet high,
a formidable piece of casting even today.
Of all this, nothing remains, only a few
candlesticks, later and much smaller.
This is one of them.
It's only about 18 inches high,
but it's so full of detail
that one can imagine it 18 feet.
Although made for
the Cathedral of Gloucester,
it's a perfect example
of Cluniac elaboration.
Well, this first great eruption
of ecclesiastical splendour
was unashamedly extravagant.
Apologists for the Cluniac style
tell us that all the decoration
was subordinated to philosophic ideas.
My general impression
is that the invention,
which boiled over into sculpture
and painting in the early 12th century,
was self-delighting.
As with the similar outbursts
of the Baroque,
one can think up ingenious
interpretations of the subjects,
but the motive force behind them
was simply irrepressible,
irresponsible energy.
The Romanesque carvers
were like a school of dolphins.
All this we know, not from
the mother house of Cluny itself,
but from the dependencies
that spread all over Europe.
There were over 1,200 of them
in France alone,
and I am sitting in the cloisters
of a fairly remote one,
the Abbey of Moissac in Southern France,
which was important because it was
on the pilgrimage route to Compostela.
The carvings have much
that is typical of the Cluny style.
The sharp cutting,
the swirling drapery, the twisting line,
as if the restless impulses
of the wandering craftsmen,
the goldsmiths of the Viking conquerors,
still had to be expressed in stone.
You can see this on the mullion
of the door with its fabulous beasts.
When one considers
that they were once brightly coloured,
because Cluniac ornament
seems all to have been painted,
and the manuscripts show
what kind of colour it was,
they must have looked even more
fiercely Tibetan than they do today,
and I can't imagine
that even the medieval mind,
which was adept at interpreting
everything symbolically,
could have found much in them
of religious meaning.
But what has this column
to do with Christian values,
with compassion or charity or even hope?
It's not at all surprising that the most
influential churchman of his day,
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux,
should have become the bitter and
relentless critic of the Cluniac style.
Some of his attacks
are the usual puritan objections,
as when he speaks of the "lies of poetry”,
words that were to echo
through the centuries
and become favourites
in the new religion of science.
But Saint Bernard had an eye
as well as an eloquent tongue.
"And in the cloisters," he says,
"under the eyes of the brethren
engaged in reading,
"what business have
those ridiculous monstrosities,
"that misshapen shapeliness
and shapely misshapenness?
"Those unclean monkeys, those fierce
lions, those monstrous centaurs,
"those semi-human beings?
"Here you see a quadruped
with the tail of a serpent,
"there a fish with the head of a bird.
"In short, there appears on all sides
so rich and amazing a variety of forms,
"that it was more delightful to read
the marbles than the manuscripts
"and to spend the whole day
in admiring these things piece by piece,
"rather than in meditating
on the divine law."
That last sentence shows, doesn't it,
that Bernard felt the power of art?
And in fact the buildings done under
his influence, in the Cistercian style,
are closer to our ideas of architecture
than anything else of the period.
Alas, most of them are abandoned
and half-ruined
simply because it was
part of Saint Bernard's ideal
that they should be built far from
the worldly distractions of towns.
And so when, after the French Revolution,
town monasteries
were turned into local churches,
the Cistercian monasteries
fell into ruins.
And yet it's there that the spirit
of monasticism has survived.
(CHURCH BELLS RING)
(CHURCH BELLS RING)
...quem ponebant cotidie ad portam templi,
quae dicitur Speciosa,
ut peteret elemosynam ab
introeuntibus in templum.
Is cum vidisset Petrum et Iohannem
incipientes introire in templum,
rogabat ut elemosynam acciperet.
Intuens autem in eum Petrus
cum Iohanne dixit respice in nos.
At ille intendebat in eos sperans
se aliquid accepturum ab eis.
Petrus autem dixit argentum
et aurum non est mihi,
quod autem habeo hoc tibi do...
(PLAINSONG)
These white monks,
in their unchanging habit,
this round of work and prayer which has
continued unbroken since the 12th century,
bring the old building back to life.
- (BELLS TINKLING)
- (MAN MUTTERS)
It's a way of life that is concerned
with an ideal of eternity,
and that is an important part
of civilisation.
But the great "thaw" of the 12th century
was not achieved by contemplation alone -
that can exist at all times -
but by action,
a vigorous, violent sense of movement
both physical and intellectual.
On the physical side, this took the form
of pilgrimages and crusades.
Well, I think they're one of the features
of the Middle Ages
which is hardest for us to understand.
It's no good pretending that pilgrimages
were like cruises or holidays abroad.
For one thing, they took far longer,
sometimes two or three years.
For another, they involved
real hardship and danger.
In spite of efforts
to organise pilgrimages,
and Cluny ran a series of hostels
along the chief routes,
elderly abbots and middle-aged widows
often died on the way to Jerusalem.
Pilgrimages were undertaken
in hope of heavenly rewards.
In fact they were often used
by the Church as a form of penitence,
a spiritualised form of extradition.
The point of a pilgrimage
was to look at relics.
The medieval pilgrim really believed
that by contemplating a reliquary
containing the head
or even the finger of a saint
he could persuade that saint
to intercede on his behalf with God.
Well, how can one hope to
share this belief
which played so great a part
in medieval civilisation?
I am on my way to the town of Conques,
a famous place of pilgrimage
dedicated to the cult of Sainte Foy.
She was a little girl who, in late Roman
times, refused to worship idols.
She was obstinate in the face
of "reasonable persuasion”,
a Christian Antigone,
and so she was martyred.
Her relics began to work miracles,
and in the 10th century
one of them was so famous
that Bernard of Angers
was sent to investigate it
and report to the Bishop of Chartres.
It seemed that a man had had his eyes
gouged out by a jealous priest.
After a year or so, the blind man
went to the shrine of Sainte Foy
and his eyes were restored.
The man was still alive.
He said that at first he had
had terrible headaches,
but now they had passed
and he could see perfectly.
There was a difficulty.
After his eyes had been put out,
witnesses said that
they had been taken up to heaven,
some said by a dove, others by a magpie.
That was the only point of doubt.
The report was favourable,
a fine Romanesque church
was built at Conques,
and in it was placed
this strange Eastern-looking figure
to contain the relics of Sainte Foy,
a golden idol studded with gems.
How ironical that this little girl,
who was put to death
for refusing to worship idols,
should have been turned into one herself,
that the very head should be a gold mask
of a late Roman Emperor.
Well, that's the medieval mind.
They cared passionately
about the truth,
but their sense of evidence
was different from ours.
From our point of view,
nearly all the relics in the world depend
on some completely unhistorical assertion.
And yet they, as much as any factor, led
to that movement and diffusion of ideas
from which Western civilisation
derives part of its momentum.
Of course, the most important place
of pilgrimage was Jerusalem.
After the 10th century,
when a strong Byzantine Empire
made the journey practicable,
pilgrims used to go
in parties of 7,000 at a time.
And this is the background
of that extraordinary episode in history,
the First Crusade.
Because, although other factors
may have determined its course -
Norman restlessness, the ambitions
of younger sons, economic depression,
all the factors that make for
a gold rush - there can be no doubt
that the majority of people joined
the crusade in a spirit of pilgrimage.
Among many things
they brought back from the East
were Persian decorative motifs
which were combined with
the rhythms of northern ornament
to make the Romanesque style.
I see these as two fierce beasts tugging
at the carcass of Graeco-Roman art.
Very often, one can trace a figure
back to a classical original,
but it has been entirely
tugged out of shape,
or perhaps one should say into shape,
by these two new forces.
This feeling of tugging, of pulling
everything to bits and reshaping it,
was characteristic of 12th-century art,
and was somehow complementary to
the massive stability of its architecture.
And I see rather the same situation
in the realm of ideas.
The main structure
of the Christian faith was unshakeable.
But around it was a play of minds,
a tugging and a tension,
that has hardly been seen since,
and was, I think, one of the things
that prevented Western Europe
from growing rigid,
as so many other civilisations have done.
It was an age of
intense intellectual activity.
To read what was going on in Paris
about the year 1130 makes one's head spin.
And at the centre of it all
was the brilliant enigmatic figure
of Peter Abelard,
the invincible arguer,
the magnetic teacher.
Abelard was a star.
Like a great prizefighter,
he expressed contempt for anyone who
met him in the ring of open discussion.
The older medieval philosophers,
like Anselm, had said,
"I must believe
in order that I may understand.”
Abelard took the opposite course.
"I must understand
in order that I may believe."
He said, "By doubting,
we come to questioning,
"and by questioning
we perceive the truth.”
Strange words to have been written
in the year 1122.
Of course they got him into trouble.
Only the strength and wisdom of Cluny
saved him from excommunication.
He ended his days calmly,
in a Cluniac house,
and after his death,
the Abbot of Cluny wrote to Heloise,
saying that she and Abelard
would be reunited,
"where, beyond these voices,
there is peace.”
I am standing in a Cluniac house,
the Abbey of Vézelay.
I'm in the covered portico
where the pilgrims gathered.
Above my head is the relief
on the main door showing Christ in Glory.
He's no longer the Judge,
as at Moissac, but the Redeemer.
Vézelay is full of sculpture,
on the doors, on the capitals, everywhere.
But fascinating as this is,
one forgets about it
when one looks through the door
at the architecture of the interior.
(GREGORIAN CHANT)
It's so harmonious
that surely Saint Bernard,
who preached the Second Crusade here,
must have felt that this was
an expression of the divine law,
and an aid to worship and contemplation.
It certainly has that effect on me.
Indeed, I can think
of no other Romanesque interior
that has this quality of lightness,
this feeling of divine reason.
And it seems inevitable
that the Romanesque should here
merge into a beautiful early Gothic.
(GREGORIAN CHANT)
We don't know the name
of the architect of Vézelay,
nor of the highly individual sculptors
of Moissac and Toulouse,
and this used to be taken as a proof
of Christian humility in the artists,
or, alternatively,
a sign of their low status.
I think it was just an accident,
because in fact we do know the names
of a good many medieval builders,
including the architects of Cluny,
and the form of their inscriptions
doesn't at all suggest excessive modesty.
One of the most famous is
bang in the middle of the main portal
of the Cathedral of Autun.
You can see it under the feet of Christ.
"Gislebertus hoc fecit",
Gislebertus made this.
One of the blessed looks up at the name
of Gislebertus with admiration.
He must have been considered
a very important man
for his name to have been permitted
in such a prominent place.
At a later date, it would not have been
the artist's name, but the patron's.
And in fact
Gislebertus was important to Autun
because he did something unique
in the Middle Ages,
and very rare at any time -
he carried out the whole decoration
of the Cathedral himself.
This extraordinary feat was in keeping
with his character as an artist.
He wasn't an inward-looking
visionary, like the Moissac master.
He was an extrovert.
He loves to tell a story, and his
strength lies in his dramatic force.
Look at the row of the damned
under the feet of their Judge.
They form a crescendo of despair.
They are reduced to essentials
in a way that brings them very close
to the art of our own time.
A likeness terrifyingly confirmed
by these gigantic hands
that carry up the head of a sinner
as if it were a piece of rubble
on a building site.
The capitals also have
this vivid, narrative quality.
They contain rich pieces of ornament.
But in the end,
it's the story that counts.
Look at this charming donkey,
and at the protective way
in which the Virgin holds the Christ Child
on their journey to Egypt.
(PLAINSONG)
Even in this abstract-looking design
of the three kings asleep
under their magnificent counterpane,
what matters is the angel's gesture,
and the delicate way he places one finger
on the hand of a sleeping king.
Like all storytellers,
he had a taste for horrors,
and he went out of his way to depict them.
This really horrifying work
is the suicide of Judas.
However, I must, in fairness,
admit that he also did a figure of Eve
which is the first female
nude since antiquity
to give a sense
of the pleasures of the body.
(# Carmina Burana)
The work of Gislebertus
was finished in about 1135
and by that time, a new force
had appeared in European art -
the Abbey of Saint-Denis.
(GREGORIAN CHANT)
The Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis
had been famous enough in earlier times.
But the part it played
in Western civilisation
was due to the abilities of one
extraordinary individual, the Abbot Suger.
He was one of the first men
of the Middle Ages
whom one can think of in modern,
I might almost say transatlantic terms.
His origins were completely obscure
and he was extremely small,
but his vitality was overwhelming.
It extended to everything
that he undertook -
organisation, building, statesmanship.
He was Regent of France for seven years
and a great patriot.
Indeed, he seems to have been the first
to pronounce those now familiar words,
"The English are destined by moral and
natural law to be subjected to the French
"and not contrariwise."
He loved to talk about himself,
without any false modesty,
and he tells the story
of how his builders assured him
that beams of the length he needed
for a certain roof could never be found
because trees
just weren't as tall as that.
Whereupon he took his carpenters
into the forests,
"they smiled," he says, "and would have
laughed if they had dared,”
and in the course of the day he discovered
12 trees of the necessary size
and he had them felled and brought back.
You see why I used the word transatlantic.
And like several of the pioneers
of the New World,
he had a passionate love of art.
One of the most fascinating documents
of the Middle Ages is the account he wrote
of the works carried out
at Saint-Denis under his administration -
the gold altar, the crosses,
the precious crystals.
There they are, seen through the eyes
of a 15th-century painter,
who has no doubt made his figures
much too large in proportion.
Actually, Suger's great gold cross
was 24 feet high
and it was studded with jewels
and inlaid with enamels
made by one of the finest craftsmen
of the age, Godefroid de Claire.
All destroyed in the Revolution.
All that is left of Suger's treasures
is a few of the sacred vessels
like this Egyptian porphyry jar,
which he tells us he found
forgotten in a cupboard.
Suger's feeling for all these objects
was partly that of a great collector -
love of brightness,
and splendour, and antiquity,
and a love of acquisition.
But he was not merely a collector,
he was a creator.
His work had a philosophic basis that
is very important to Western civilisation.
Suger accepted the belief
that we could only come to understand
the absolute beauty which is God
through the effect of precious
and beautiful things on our senses.
He said, "the dull mind rises to truth
through that which is material."
Well, this was really a revolutionary
concept in the Middle Ages.
It was the intellectual background
of all the sublime works of art
of the next century
and, in fact, has remained the basis
of our belief in the value of art
until today.
In addition to this revolution in theory,
Suger's Saint-Denis was also the beginning
of many new developments in practice -
in architecture,
in sculpture, in painted glass.
But one can still see
that Suger introduced,
perhaps really invented,
the Gothic style of architecture,
not only the pointed arch
but the lightness of high windows,
what we call the clerestory.
"Bright," he says, "is the noble edifice
that is pervaded by new light."
And in these words he anticipates
all the architectural aspirations
of the next 200 years.
Alas, the exterior of Saint-Denis
doesn't look too bright today.
It's been knocked about and restored,
and is now engulfed
in a squalid industrial suburb.
To form any notion of its first effect
on the mind, one must go to Chartres.
In some miraculous way,
Chartres has survived.
Fire and war, revolution and restoration
have attacked it in vain.
One can still climb the hill to
the cathedral in the spirit of a pilgrim.
Even the tourists
have not destroyed its atmosphere,
as they have in so many temples
of the human spirit,
from the Sistine Chapel
to the Todaiji in Japan.
(PLAINSONG)
The south tower
is still more or less as it was
when it was completed in the year 1164.
It's a masterpiece
of harmonious proportion.
Was this harmony
calculated mathematically?
Well, ingenious scholars have produced
a system of proportions
based on measurements,
but it's so complex
that I find it very hard to credit.
However, Chartres was the centre of
a school of philosophy devoted to Plato,
and in particular to his mysterious book
called The Timaeus,
from which it was thought that
the whole universe could be interpreted
as a form of measurable harmony.
So perhaps the proportions of Chartres
reflect a more complex mathematics
than one is inclined to believe.
(PLAINSONG)
Chartres contained the most famous
of all relics of the Virgin,
the actual tunic she had worn
at the time of the Annunciation.
From the first,
this relic had worked miracles,
but it was only in the 12th century
that the cult of the Virgin began to
appeal to the popular imagination.
I suppose that in the earlier centuries
life was simply too rough.
At any rate, if art is any guide, and
in this series I am taking it as my guide,
the Virgin played a very small part
in the minds of men
during the 9th and 10th
and even the 11th centuries.
The Romanesque churches
we have been looking at
were dedicated to saints
whose relics they contained,
Saint Etienne, Saint Lazarus, Saint Denis,
Saint Mary Magdalene,
none of them to the Virgin.
Then after Chartres almost every great
church in France was dedicated to Her -
Paris, Amiens, Rheims, Rouen, Beauvais.
What was the reason
for this sudden change?
Well, I think the cult of the Virgin
must have come from the East,
because all the early representations
of the Virgin as an object of devotion
are in a markedly Byzantine style.
This is a page from a manuscript from
Citeaux, the community of Saint Bernard,
and Saint Bernard was one of the first men
to speak of the Virgin
as an ideal of beauty
and a mediator between man and God.
But certainly a strong influence
in spreading the cult of the Virgin
was the beauty and splendour of Chartres.
The main portal of Chartres
is one of the most beautiful congregations
of carved figures in the world.
The longer you look at it,
the more moving incidents,
the more vivid details you discover.
I suppose the first thing that strikes
anyone is this row of pillar people.
In naturalistic terms,
as bodies, they are impossible,
and the fact that one believes in them
is a triumph of art.
The sculptor was not only a man of genius
but one of great originality.
He must have begun carving
when style was dominated
by the violent, twisting rhythms of Cluny.
And he has created a style
as still and restrained and classical
as the Greek sculptors
of the 6th century BC.
But was it really Greek?
I mean, Greek in derivation.
Were these reed-like draperies,
the thin straight lines,
the fluted folds, the zigzag hems,
and the whole play of texture,
which so obviously recalls
the Greek Archaic figure,
arrived at independently?
Or had the Chartres master seen
some fragments of early Greek sculpture
in the South of France?
Well, for various reasons,
I'm quite certain that he had.
But the most important thing
about the central doorway,
more important even
than its Greek derivation,
is the character of the heads
of the so-called kings and queens.
No-one knows exactly who they are.
These heads seem to me to show a new stage
in the ascent of Western man.
Indeed, I believe that this refinement,
this look of selfless detachment
and spirituality,
is something entirely new in art.
Beside them, the gods and heroes
of ancient Greece look arrogant, soulless,
even slightly brutal.
I fancy that the faces
which look out at us from the past
are perhaps the surest indication
we have of the meaning of an epoch.
And the faces
on the west portal of Chartres
are amongst the most sincere
and the most aristocratic
that Western Europe has ever produced.
From the old chronicles,
we know something about the men
whose states of mind these faces reveal.
In the year 1144, we are told, when the
towers seem to be rising as if by magic,
the faithful harnessed themselves
to carts which were bringing stone
and dragged them from the quarry
to the cathedral.
The enthusiasm spread throughout France.
Men and women came from far away
carrying heavy burdens
of provisions for the workmen -
wine, oil, corn.
Amongst them were lords and ladies,
pulling carts with the rest.
"There was perfect discipline,
and a most profound silence.
"All hearts were united
and each man forgave his enemies."
(GREGORIAN CHANT)
Its very construction
was a kind of miracle.
The old Romanesque church had been
destroyed by a terrible fire in 1197.
Only the towers
and the west front remained,
and the people of Chartres feared
that they had lost their precious relic.
Then, when the debris was cleared away,
it was found intact in the crypt
and the Virgin's intention became clear -
that a new church should be built,
even more splendid than the last.
The building
is in the new architectural style
to which Suger had given the impress
of his authority at Saint-Denis,
what we call Gothic,
only, at Chartres,
the architect was told to follow
the foundations
of the old Romanesque cathedral,
and this has meant
that the Gothic vaulting had to cover
a space far wider than ever before.
It was a formidable problem
of construction,
and in order to solve it,
the architect has used the device
known as "flying buttresses”,
one of those happy strokes
where necessity has led
to an architectural invention
of marvellous and fantastic beauty.
(PLAINSONG)
Since the beginning of settled life,
say, the pyramid of Sakkara,
man had thought of buildings
as a weight on the ground.
He had always found himself limited
by problems of stability and weight.
In the end, it kept him down to the earth.
Now, by the devices of the Gothic style,
the shaft with its cluster of columns
passing without interruption
into the vault,
and the pointed arch,
he could make stone seem weightless,
the weightless expression of the spirit.
By the same means,
he could surround his space with glass.
Suger said that he did this
in order to get more light,
but he found that these areas of glass
could be made into an ideal means
of impressing
and instructing the faithful.
"Man may rise to the contemplation
of the divine through the senses."
Well, nowhere else, I think,
is Suger's favourite saying
so convincingly illustrated
as it is in Chartres Cathedral.
As one looks at the painted windows
which completely surround one,
they seem almost to
set up a vibration in the air.
Chartres is the epitome of the first great
awakening in European civilisation.
It's also the bridge
between Romanesque and Gothic,
between the world of Abelard
and the world of Saint Thomas Aquinas,
the world of restless curiosity
and the world of system and order.
Great things were to be done
in the next centuries of High Gothic,
great feats of construction
both in architecture and in thought.
But they all rested
on the foundations of the 12th century.
That was the age which gave
European civilisation its impetus.
Our intellectual energy,
our contact
with the great minds of Greece,
our ability to move and to change,
our belief that God
may be approached through beauty,
our feeling of compassion,
our sense of the unity of Christendom.
All this and much more appeared
in those 100 marvellous years
between the consecration of Cluny
and the rebuilding of Chartres.
(PLAINSONG)