by Jay Weidner
As Durant noted, the year 1000 was a significant one to Western Christendom. As we began to investigate this significance, we came face-to-face with one of the seminal figures in the transition from the Dark Ages to the Middle Ages, Pope Sylvester II. Though pontiff for only four years (999–1003), as noted above, the hermetic pope proved to be the fulcrum in a complex series of events that resulted in effects as wide-ranging as the Crusades, the Templars, the Peace of God movement and its heretical offshoots, the Grail romances, and, eventually, the cathedral-building movement itself.
As we followed the tangled pattern of Sylvester’s career, we found the seeds of our sophisticated international organization in the various chronicling orders established by Sylvester within, and on the edges of, the other monastic orders, the Benedictines, the Cluniacs, and the Cistercians. This fluidity of organization gained a central focus with the establishment of the group of Chroniclers at Jerusalem in 1002. From that point on we can safely speak of an Order of Zion, in Jerusalem, with connections to all three major monastic orders back in Europe.
During the eleventh century, all of these monastic orders began to build in the pre-Gothic style known as Romanesque. Within these monastic communities, groups of specialists developed. These were monks and scholars who knew Greek and mathematics, especially geometry, and were also skilled in building. As these “schools” grew, they were influenced by architecture from many distant places, the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, the Al Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock, in Jerusalem, and the mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo. It is not hard to think that the Order of Zion, with its Byzantine and Fatimid connections, might have been one source of that influence.
After the First Crusade conquered Jerusalem, the Order of Zion became, as we saw in chapter 5, the “rock” upon which the kingdom of Jerusalem was founded. The order used its connections back in Provence to capitalize on the discovery, around 1102, of the alchemical and cosmological secrets of the “Great Mystery” text and, just possibly, a piece of the stone of the wise, the lapsit exillis. A decade later, wealth began flowing back to Europe, mostly to the Cistercians led by Bernard of Clairvaux. By 1130, the Templars had been established, Bernard was the foremost Christian of his day, and Europe was poised on the edge of the cathedral-building mania. Gothic was in the air, but had yet to be given form. For that we have to thank Saint Denis and the abbot Suger.
“BRIGHT IS THE NOBLE WORK . . .”
The Ile-de-France, the heart of the ancient kingdom of the Merovingian Franks, is not a true island, but rather a region surrounded and interconnected by water, the river system of the Seine, the Oise, the Aisne, the Ourcq, and the Marne. The center of that green and fertile region of deep soil, broad meadows, and dense forests connected by wide, slow-flowing rivers grew out of a chance intersection of roadways and waterways.
For millennia, Paleolithic hunters had camped, without leaving much of a trace beyond a few broken spear points and well-cracked elk thighbones, on an island in the broad bend of the Seine where the north–south hunting trail crossed the river. Eventually, the low rise on the eastern end of the boat-shaped island became a sacred site, and a small community grew up around it. By the third century B.C.E., a group of Gallic Celts who called themselves Parisii had built a small but prosperous town on the island. They entered history in 53 B.C.E. when Julius Caesar held an assembly in the town, then called Lutetia. The next year, the people of Lutetia joined Vercingetorix in his revolt against Rome.2
Labienius, Caesar’s lieutenant, crushed them and the island was abandoned for the new Roman city on the left bank, located in what is even now called the Latin Quarter. Roman Lutetia was ravaged in the Germanic invasions of the late third century C.E., and the island once again became a defensive stronghold. By the time the Roman emperor Valentinian visited in 365 C.E., his “dear Lutetia, a small island enclosed within the walls of its ramparts, accessible through two wooden bridges alone,” was becoming known as Paris.3
Paris became a capital in the late sixth century. Clovis I, Merovingian king of the Franks, founded his realm there and established the episcopal seat, or cathedra, of the newly dominant Christian Church. His son, Childebert I, built the first pair of cathedrals on the Ile-de-la-Cité, as the island was now called. These two, Saint-Etienne and the first Notre Dame, barely survived successive disasters. Paris would be rebuilt under the Capetian kings, descendants of its mayor, Hugh the Stout—who successfully defended the island against the Vikings in 885–86—but the rebuilding of its cathedrals would await the inspiration of Saint Denis.
The legend of Denis is obscure, and not much is actually known about him. He appears in history in the work of Gregory of Tours, who simply describes his martyrdom by beheading four hundred years after the fact. The Golden Legend, an early medieval collection of apocryphal stories, gives us more details. After his beheading, Saint Denis raised himself up and, taking his head in his hands, walked five miles west, his severed head singing psalms the whole way, from Montmartre to the river. The place where he finally collapsed and was buried became a shrine.4 Figure 7.1 shows a statue of Saint Denis on Notre Dame.
Located a few miles north of the Ile-de-la-Cité, the abbey of Saint-Denis was built around the tomb of the beheaded saint and his venerable relics. Denis, the patron saint of Paris and by extension France itself, had been recognized first by the Merovingians and then by the heirs of Charlemagne. A small Carolingian church replaced the Merovingian shrine, the family chapel of the dynasty, on the site in the mid-ninth century. Hugh Capet and our old friend Gerbert of Aurillac, archbishop of Rheims, founded the abbey itself in the early 990s. As Saint Remy and Rheims became associated with the founding of the first Merovingian dynasty, Saint Denis and Paris became associated with its Capetian revival.
Figure 7.1. Saint Denis holding his head, from the south porch of Notre-Dame-de-Paris. (Photo by Vincent Bridges)
The future abbot Suger was born in poverty in the village of Saint-Denis. His innate intelligence won him a place in the local monastery school, the Prieuré de l’Estrée, where he became friends with the future king of France Louis VI. The royal family noticed Suger. Philip I encouraged the friendship between his son and the brilliant scholar. In the early 1120s, Suger was sent to Rome several times on diplomatic missions. During his time at the Holy Curia in the early twelfth century, Suger came into contact with all the major intellectual currents of his age, including perhaps what we speculate to be the secret discoveries in the Holy Land.
During the second decade of the twelfth century, Suger served as prime minister of France and was at the center of the struggle between the French state and the Church. Suger naturally sided with his old school chum Louis VI, and his son, Louis VII, against the antipopes of the Holy Roman Empire. He was a man who spent most of his life dealing with the intricacies of medieval power politics, and when he talked, the king of France listened.
In 1123, at the height of his power and influence, Suger became the abbot of Saint-Denis. Perhaps because of his knowledge of the discoveries in Jerusalem and their apparently inexhaustible wealth, Suger pressed for the rebuilding of the old Carolingian church into something that would be the wonder of Europe and the proper venue in which to display the relics of Saint Denis and the regalia of the Capetian kings (see fig. 7.2). Abbot Suger envisioned his church as the center of the new illuminated Christianity that seemed to be overtaking the old politically compromised Roman Church in the early years of the twelfth century.
That Saint-Denis, rather than, say, Rheims, with its much more prominent Merovingian connections, was singled out as the source point for the Gothic transformation depends as much on a misidentification as it does on Abbot Suger’s energy and political savvy. As noted above, not much was known of the historical Denis. The abbey library contained a volume of works attributed to him, but these were actually written by the second-century Gnostic philosopher Dionysius the Areopagite, the Saint Denis of Alexandria whom Fulcanelli lists as one of the early proponent
s of chiliasm. The book, given to one of Charlemagne’s sons by the Byzantine emperor Michael the Stammerer, ended up in the abbey’s library perhaps as the result of Pope Sylvester’s Chroniclers.5
Figure 7.2. The crypt of Saint Denis, burial site for the early Merovingian kings, from an eighteenth-century engraving.
Abbot Suger was greatly influenced by Dionysius’s theology of light. Dionysius believed that “every creature, visible or invisible, is a light brought into being by the Father of Lights,” and celebrated the Divine Light, God’s holy fire, which animated the entire universe.6 This is similar to the basic Gnostic concept of the path of return. Abbot Suger took this theme to heart. In his three books on the building and consecration of the church, we find no fewer than thirteen separate inscriptions celebrating the holy Light. In one of them, in a verse written to celebrate a gilded bronze gate, Suger tells us: “Bright is the noble work, this work shining nobly / Enlightens the mind so that it may travel through the true lights / To the True Light where Christ is the true door.”7
From these ideas, Abbot Suger developed his theory of lux continua, or continuous light. With these two words, Suger announced the birth of the Gothic style and at the same time pointed to its spiritual roots in the Gnostic illuminism of alchemy. From this point on, the walls of sanctity would be shattered to let in the light. The solemn and stifling darkness of the Romanesque would be replaced by the flow of continuous radiance at the heart of the Gothic.
By 1133, Abbot Suger informs us, he had collected artists and craftsmen “from all lands,” including a contingent of Arabic glassmakers. Suger did not invent stained glass; as we saw in chapter 4, the Fatimids had used it in their mosques for over a century. Glassmaking seems to have been a component of the alchemical process. We find it mentioned in the preparations of certain “sands” described in the “Isis the Prophetess” text. The Fatimid scholars and mystics of Cairo used colored glass fashioned in geometrical patterns as a meditation tool, as seen in the remaining stained glass of the Al Azhar Mosque. The good abbot’s idea was to use the stained glass to fill the interior of his church with sparkling jewel-like color.
Bright indeed is the noble work. Abbot Suger approached the building of his new church with all the enthusiasm and attention to detail of the alchemist in pursuit of the philosopher’s stone. To Abbot Suger, perhaps, his new light-filled church was the true philosopher’s stone.
The cathedral (see fig. 7.3) was finished in 1144, and the dedication was attended by a veritable who’s who of the mid-twelfth century. Louis VII attended, with his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine (from whom he would soon be divorced), as did most of the bishops of the Western Church and hundreds of knighted nobles. Even Bernard, who was heard to grumble at the expense of gilding a church, attended.
From its beginnings at Saint-Denis, the new style spread first through central France and then all over Europe, from England to Germany, from Portugal to northern Italy. The collection of artists and craftsmen assembled by Abbot Suger developed into schools and guilds that traveled throughout Europe for the next two centuries or so creating a vast collection of Gothic churches and civic buildings. Twelve years after the good abbot’s death in 1151, his student the bishop of Paris, Maurice de Sully, and his “master mason,” Guillaume de Paris, paid him the compliment of bettering his design.
On an island in the Seine, the new cathedral of Notre-Dame-de-Paris rose slowly into the light-filled sky. Work on the choir and transepts was begun in 1163 and not completed until 1182. By the time the construction of the nave was under way, another change was sweeping through Christendom.
Jerusalem and most of the Holy Land were conquered in 1187 by the forces of the Seljuk sultan Saladin. The West was stunned, and plans began for an immediate crusade, the third according to modern historians. (The Second Crusade had been the unhappy affair undertaken in 1147 by Louis VII, during which Abbot Suger ruled France as regent. Suger, in fact, did do so well with the realm’s finances that Louis’s disastrous crusade hardly made a dent in the royal coffers.) In the midst of this political upheaval occurred the Cutting of the Elm at Gisors, the schism between the Order of Our Lady of Zion and the Knights of the Temple of Solomon and the start of the persecution of the Cathars. For over a decade, Zion had been building a private power base back in Europe, and after the loss of the abbey on Mount Zion, the entire order relocated, as we saw above, to its various holdings in Paris, Bourges, and Troyes.
Figure 7.3. The cathedral of Saint-Denis, in the suburb of Saint-Denis, just north of Paris. (Photo by Darlene)
This shift began in 1152, the year after Abbot Suger’s death, with Louis VII’s gift to the order of the large priory at Orleans of Saint-Samson, another Dark Age saint with Merovingian connections. By 1178, the order was confirmed by the pope in its possession of houses and large tracts of land from the Holy Land to Spain. The Cutting of the Elm at Gisors did more than just split off the Templars from its parent order; it defined the boundary line between the Plantagenets on one side, supported by the Templars, and the Capetians on the other, supported by Zion. This division would eventually produce not just the destruction of the Templars by the French king Philip III and his papal puppet Clement V, but also the catastrophe of the Hundred Years War between France and England.
As the walls of Notre-Dame-de-Paris rose, the foundations of the new illuminated Christendom began to crumble. The loss of Jerusalem, and eventually the rest of Outremer, made the universal nature of the Church questionable. An alternative form of Christianity, whose imagery would appear in the decorations of Chartres, Notre-Dame-de-Paris, and the cathedral at Amiens, attempted an end run around the power of the Roman Church by appealing directly to the nobility’s chivalric sense of destiny with the Grail romances and to the common people’s unrepentant paganism with an emphasis on Mary as the Mother of God and Queen of Heaven. With the failure of the Third Crusade and the subsequent strife among its leaders, this grand plan began to falter.
The orthodox Roman Church fought back in the so-called Crusades against Christians. First, almost by accident, Constantinople was conquered in 1203 by the Fourth Crusade. This empowered Pope Innocent III to go after the heretics in southern France in 1208. Fifty years later, with southern France and its culture destroyed, the hope of a new kind of Christianity, once so promising, had been lost. The esoteric stream that surfaced briefly to create this Gothic renaissance went underground once again.
THE GOTHIC CATHEDRALS OF OUR LADY
The flowering of the new Gothic architecture and the renewed sense of spirituality that went along with it can be attributed to the conjunction of two powerful intellects, Saint Bernard and Abbot Suger, and a vast source of wealth, technology, and international organization. The only possible sources of such wealth and sophistication were the Order of Zion and the military orders, the Templars, and, to a lesser degree, the Hospitallers, which the Order of Zion controlled or supported. Evidence to prove the connection between the Templars and the overall construction of the cathedrals is scanty to nonexistent, but what little we do have suggests that the Templars regularly paid for the major decorations on the facades of the cathedrals, while more local sources of financing, including the Cistercians in some cases, paid for the major work on the structural elements of the cathedral building.
This suggests that the Templars were more interested in the images and stories the cathedrals presented to the public than they were in the actual design and construction of the buildings. Yet this is possibly misleading, because as the Templars lost their hold on Outremer in the late 1100s, the master masons and architects who built such Templar masterpieces in Palestine as the Krak de Chevaliers were freed for work in Europe. The sudden twenty-six-year rebuilding of the cathedral at Chartres has been attributed to an influx of workers and masons from Acre and other sites in Outremer. And at Chartres, the Gothic architectural techniques reached their pinnacle. The work on Notre-Dame-de-Paris was changed in mid-project, around 1230, to accommodate these advanc
es in flying buttresses and ogival supports.
While there is no evidence of Templar involvement or financing with Notre-Dame-de-Paris, such involvement is not unlikely. Guillaume de Paris, the master mason who designed the building and most of its exterior decoration, is an enigma without much of a history. Maurice de Sully was a student of Abbot Suger’s, and his sudden rise to bishop of Paris in 1160 was certainly accomplished with help from powerful connections. Some of those connections, through Saint Bernard and the Cistercians, did in all likelihood include the Templars. Robert de Sable, first grand master of the Temple after the fall of Jerusalem, was reported to have paid for the decorations on the Portal of Saint Anne around 1195, but the evidence is somewhat contradictory. It is also likely that some Templar masons worked at Notre Dame after the completion of Chartres cathedral in 1220, but again, no direct evidence remains.
What we do have is a pattern of interconnectedness that combines the Capetian and Merovingian royal families and their supporters with the Order of Zion and its fronts and cover organizations, such as the Templars and the Cistercians, and centers on the unparalleled wealth and influence needed to create the Gothic cathedrals. The Templars were not overtly involved in creating the cathedrals of Our Lady; it was the organization behind them, the Order of Our Lady of Mount Zion, and its new power centers in the Church, which was responsible for the explosion of cathedral building that followed Saint-Denis. They of course worked behind the scenes and used prominent spokesmen such as Bernard to push their agenda of reform.
