Today, spiritual materialism and the invention of
Gothic cathedrals. The University of Houston's
College of Engineering presents this series about
the machines that make our civilization run, and
the people whose ingenuity created them.
The Gothic cathedral has
held our imagination for 850 years now. One
question we seldom ask is, "How was such a thing
invented?" Oddly enough, that question has a
By AD 1100 European life was changing very fast.
The new power sources, the horse and water wheels,
had freed our hands and lifted us out of a darker
age. The weather had begun warming. Civilization
was taking root, and with it came new architecture.
Around AD 1050 the buildings of the great French
abbey at Cluny began rising. Pilgrimages to the
Holy Land were bringing back Eastern ideas about
art. Cluny leavened the stern architecture of Rome
with oriental exotica.
Enter now two people: The aristocratic St. Bernard
left the world to became a monk. He led Church
reform. For him, the Byzantine elegance of Cluny
was a distraction from God. The other was Suger,
born poor and given to a monastery by his father.
Monastic life was Suger's path into the world, not
away from it.
Bernard became the leading theologian of his time.
Suger became the politically powerful Abbot of the
St-Denis monastery. Suger made monastic reforms
that satisfied Bernard, but the two were far apart
in spirit. Artistic and architectural elegance
didn't distract Suger from God, it led him to God.
He was quite explicit about that. He said we could
come to understand absolute beauty, which is God,
only through the effect of beautiful things on our
senses. He said, "The dull mind rises to truth
through that which is material."
So, late in life, he set in motion the construction
of a new kind of church building with ribbed
vaults, pointed arches, and exterior buttresses --
with spires, stained glass windows, and interior
light. In 1137 his people began reshaping the
church of St-Denis into the first full-blown Gothic
It was less flagrantly ornate than Cluny -- less
massive in appearance. In the very lightness of its
being it summoned up some vestige of the clean
austerity Bernard wanted. Yet it was also the
grandest single step forward architecture has ever
For Suger it was also a theological statement.
Geometrical harmony, he said, is the source of all
beauty because it exemplifies the laws by which
divine reason made the universe itself.
Suger fit no mold. He was not in the least modest,
but neither was he particularly arrogant. He may
never actually have designed anything himself. But
he was a magnificent arbiter of design. And you
need only walk through one of those remarkable
Gothic cathedrals to believe, with him, that
material beauty really is a glimpse of the face of
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
Clark, K., Civilisation: A Personal View, New
York. Harper & Row, Publishers, 1969,
Chapter 2, The Great Thaw.
Crosby, S.M., and Blum, P.Z., The Royal Abbey
of Saint-Denis: from Its Beginnings to the Death of
Suger. New Haven: Yale University Press,
Gerson. P.L. (ed.), Abbot Suger and
Saint-Denis: a Symposium. New York, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986.
Panofsky, E. (ed. and tr.), Abbot Suger on
the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art
Treasures. 2nd ed. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1979.
Evans, G.R., The Mind of St. Bernard of
Clairvaux. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.
Merton, T., The Last of the Fathers: Saint
Bernard of Clarivaux and the Encyclical Letter
Doctor Mellifluus. New York: Harcourt, Brace
and Company, 1954.
Gardiner, H., Art Through the Ages.
9th ed. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich,
1991, pp. 381-385.
Janson, H.W., History of Art: A Survey of the
Major Visual Arts from the Dawn of History.
3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969,
Chapter 4, Gothic Art, pp. 300-304.
See also entries on Suger and St. Bernard in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica and the
New Catholic Encyclopedia.
I am grateful to Margaret Culbertson, UH Art and
Architecture Library, for suggesting this topic and
providing much of the reference material; and to
Rennie Goyert, UH College of Architecture, for his
For more on Gothic cathedrals see Episodes 97, 228,
528, 942, 958,
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
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