Abbot Suger

French abbot

• Born: 1081
• Birthplace: Saint-Denis, near Paris, France
• Died: January 13, 1151
• Place of death: Saint-Denis, near Paris, France

As abbot of Saint-Denis, Suger rebuilt the abbey church according to principles that make him the founder of the Gothic style. As lover of peace, order, and political harmony, Suger defined and popularized the centralizing and peacekeeping mission of the Capetian monarchy, increasing its prestige and assisting its rise to dominance in medieval France.

Early Life

Suger (sew-zhehr) was born of villein parentage in or near Saint-Denis, just outside the city of Paris. He entered the monastery as a student in 1091; one of his fellow pupils, who became his lifelong friend and patron, was Louis Capet, afterward King Louis VI (Louis the Fat). Suger was an outstanding student, practical and efficient as well as intelligent. He described himself as “small and frail,” but he was also energetic and untiring. He was amiable and discreet, with a talent for peacemaking; he was also an enthusiastic defender of the privileges and prestige of his own monastery. In 1106, he was made secretary to abbot Adam.

Saint-Denis was a royal monastery, and many of the kings of France were buried there. It possessed relics of the Passion of Christ and of Saint Dionysius, the apostle of France, but much of its prestige came from the belief, historically untrue, that this Saint Dionysius was identical with Dionysius the Areopagite, the disciple of Saint Paul mentioned in Acts 17:34. (A further misunderstanding, which was to have important consequences, was the belief that Dionysius was the author of a mystical treatise, now known to be an anonymous composition of the fifth century and referred to as Pseudo-Dionysius, proclaiming the manifestation of God to human beings in the form of light.) The king and his entourage often lodged at the monastery, allowing the abbot and his staff proximity to the center of royal politics.

In 1109, the monastery obtained from the king the right to hold the famous Lendit fair, to which merchants came from great distances; during the event, the monastery displayed its relics to crowds of pilgrims, and the fair became an important religious as well as commercial occasion.

In 1107, Suger was made provost of one of the monastery’s dependent houses in Normandy; there he saw firsthand both Norman experiments in church architecture and the efficient organization of the duchy under Duke Henry Beauclerc (who was also King Henry I of England), the most effective feudal overlord of the time. In 1118, he was sent by King Louis on the first of a series of missions to the Papal court. The Investiture Controversy between the Papacy and Emperor Henry V had turned into open warfare, and the king of France was a strong supporter of the Papacy. Suger was in Rome in 1122 when this conflict was at last resolved by the agreement known as the Concordat of Worms; it was there that he received the news that the monks of Saint-Denis had elected him abbot on the death of Adam, a position he held until his death in 1151. He did not return to France at once but spent several months visiting pilgrimage churches in Italy. Pope Calixtus II summoned him to the papal court again in order to make him a cardinal but died before Suger reached Rome. His future was to lie with the royal rather than the Papal court.

Life’s Work

The first great crisis of Suger’s career came in 1124, when the emperor, seeking vengeance for the French king’s support of the Papacy, invaded France. Louis convened an assembly of clerics and lay magnates at Saint-Denis and there, in an elaborate ceremony organized by Suger, took from the altar the banner of Saint Dionysius and formally declared himself a vassal of the saint. He then appealed to the assembled dignitaries to join him in defense of the Church and the realm. This appeal succeeded even among barons who were the king’s rivals, and the appearance of Louis and his vassals in arms persuaded the emperor, who had anticipated no such united opposition, to depart without giving battle.

In gratitude for the saint’s support during the invasion of 1124, the king gave the monastery entire control of the Lendit fair. Suger hoped to make Saint-Denis a major pilgrimage center during the season of the fair; in this he was successful, and the church rapidly became overburdened by the crowds of pilgrims coming to see the relics. He devised an ambitious program of rebuilding, using the profits from the fair; he also reorganized the estates of the abbey to make them more profitable, replacing customary fixed rents by a percentage of the annual yield and encouraging more intensive agriculture.

Suger’s intention to rebuild the church took shape soon after 1124, but actual work did not begin until 1137. Two factors, in addition to his close attendance on the king, seem to have been responsible for the delay. One was a reaffirmation of his own sense of religious mission. Suger had long been an admirer of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and had come under increasing pressure from Bernard to reform Saint-Denis on Cistercian principles. The monastery’s wealth and the crowds of courtiers and pilgrims had eroded much of its discipline and made the traditional monastic life almost impossible. There is a famous letter of Bernard’s in which he sneers at an unnamed abbot whom he had seen riding in state with sixty horsemen attending him; this is usually taken as a denunciation of Suger, intended to shame him into reform, but it may well have been aimed instead at his predecessor Adam, whose sense of religious vocation seems to have been less intense than Suger’. In 1127, Suger undertook the reform of the monastery, reaffirming the Benedictine rule but stopping short of imposing the full rigors of Cistercian discipline. This task occupied much of his time for the next several years.

In 1137, Louis VI died and was succeeded by his son Louis VII, a young man of hotter temperament, who wanted independence from his father’s policies and advisers. Suger lost his influence at court until harsh experience proved that he was indispensable. In the meantime, he began the building campaign that was to revolutionize medieval architecture.

After centuries of decay, destruction, and restoration, disappointingly little of Suger’s building remains today; what does remain, however, as interpreted from his own writings, allows one to understand the magnitude of his achievement. The western front of Saint-Denis, the first part of the work to be undertaken, is still Norman in appearance; there is an unprecedented rose window, however, flooding the interior with light, and the architectural elements are arranged to emphasize the central doorway, identified by an inscription as the gate of Heaven. The church, built according to rule in harmonious proportion, is a model of the kingdom of heaven. Church architecture was said to have an anagogical purpose, guiding the beholder by visible signs to the perception of divine reality. This purpose becomes more explicit in the choir at the east end of the church, a theological treatise in architecture putting into practice the mystical vision of Pseudo-Dionysius. The cross-ribbed vault and pointed arch, both of which had been known to the Normans but not combined by them, are employed together for the first time to allow a maximum of height with a minimum of masonry, dissolving the walls and filling the space with stained glass; the interior columns radiate from a central point to avoid obstructing the light entering through the windows.

The divine light, according to Pseudo-Dionysius, does not appear directly to human beings; rather, it shines “through a veil” of created objects. Suger therefore made his windows translucent, not transparent. Some are plain gray (grisaille); others are brightly colored “sermons in glass” illustrating biblical passages important to Dionysian theology.

Suger then decided to rebuild the nave in the same style as the choir, but the pace of construction slowed in 1147 when Louis VII decided to take part in the Second Crusade . Suger attempted to dissuade him, arguing that his absence would be used by the barons as an opportunity for violence and plunder. He could not, however, change the king’s mind. Instead, Louis appointed him regent, and Suger was effectively ruler of France for two years during the king’s absence. He governed firmly, suppressing a baronial revolt aimed at deposing the absent king. When Louis returned in 1149, his crusade a humiliating failure, he gave Suger the title “father of his country” in recognition of his services. Though approaching seventy, Suger determined to renew the Crusade himself, financing it out of the revenues of Saint-Denis, but he died before he could embark for the East.

Significance

Suger wrote four books, which are the principal sources for the knowledge of his career and policies. His biographies of Louis VI and Louis VII (the latter unfinished) are masterpieces of medieval biography, but there is no complete English translation of either. Two others, De rebus in administratione sua gestis (the accomplishments of his administration) and De liber alter de consecratione ecclesiae Sancti Dionysii (Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St. Denis and Its Art Treasures, 1946), are accounts of his career as abbot and of the rebuilding of the church. Although he shows considerable modesty in writing about himself, one would occasionally like to see him through someone else’s eyes. There is no doubt, however, that he is one of the founding fathers of the medieval French monarchy. The kings might on their own have pursued some of the policies that he advocated; there is no evidence, however, that they had considered them, perceived them clearly, or would have followed them systematically. Suger encouraged the kings to take seriously the promise of their coronation oath to protect the poor and the helpless and to do justice; he urged them to invite the barons themselves to seek justice at the king’s court in return for accepting the obligations of vassalage. He saw in the ties of lord and vassal an orderly framework within which disputes could be resolved by conciliation rather than violence: An ordered hierarchical society was the earthly image of the kingdom of heaven.

The impact of his other great achievement, the architecture of Saint-Denis, was even more widely felt than his political artistry. The Gothic style spread rapidly from Saint-Denis to Paris, inspiring the larger-scale use and refinement of its techniques in the great Cathedral of Notre Dame and then around the Île de France (at Chartres, for example) and elsewhere, sometimes as the official style of the French monarchy, sometimes as an advance messenger glorifying French culture by its own intrinsic merits. Suger was buried in Saint-Denis, but his tomb was desecrated during the French Revolution. In one sense, however, every Gothic cathedral is his monument, and his work makes him the medieval figure whose influence is most widely felt and most highly visible today.

Bibliography

Burckhardt, Titus. Chartres and the Birth of the Cathedral. Translated by William Stoddart. Bloomington, Ind.: World Wisdom Books, 1996. A look into the architectural history of the Gothic cathedral of Chartres. Includes illustrations, plans, a bibliography, and an index.

Crosby, Sumner McKnight. The Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis: From Its Beginnings to the Death of Suger, 475-1151. Edited by Pamela Z. Blum. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987. Discusses the construction history of Saint-Denis, including Suger’s building campaigns, as revealed by archaeological investigation. Indispensable for tracing the fate of Suger’s work through centuries of neglect, vandalism, and overenthusiastic restoration.

Gelernter, Mark. Sources of Architectural Form: A Critical History of Western Design Theory. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Surveys architectural form in the history of design, including a chapter discussing scholasticism as well as the “shift from the secular to the divine” in medieval architecture theory.

Grant, Lindy. Abbot Suger of St-Denis: Church and State in Early Twelfth-Century France. New York: Longman, 1998. Discusses the state of the Church and government in the time of Suger. Includes illustrations, maps, plans, a bibliography, and an index.

Hallam, Elizabeth M., and Judith Everard. Capetian France, 987-1328. 2d ed. New York: Longman, 2001. A study of the Capetian Dynasty in medieval France. Includes an extensive bibliography and an index.

Kessler, Herbert L. Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Discusses the mysterious power of particular images, in this case the images of medieval art. Provides a chapter that looks at Suger’s stained-glass windows at Saint-Denis.

Male, Émile. Religious Art in France, the Thirteenth Century: A Study of Medieval Iconography and Its Sources. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984. Still one of the great classics of art history, this volume, originally published in 1902, initiated the modern study of Gothic art as theologically programmed visual sermons. Analyzes the themes of Saint-Denis’s sculpture and stained glass in relation to those of other Gothic churches.

Panofsky, Erwin. Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis and Its Art Treasures. 2d ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979. A translation of Suger’s account of his building campaigns, with a long introduction considered the starting point for the study of Gothic architecture as an expression of religious symbolism.

Panofsky, Erwin. Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism. New York: Meridian Books, 1957. An elaboration and expansion of the ideas contained in the author’s earlier work, relating Suger’s intellectual and religious objective at Saint-Denis to the planning and execution of other Gothic buildings. Makes clear the systematic and deliberate connection between Scholastic philosophy and Gothic architecture as logical, ordered intellectual systems.

Petit-Dutaillis, Charles. The Feudal Monarchy in France and England from the Tenth to the Thirteenth Century. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1936. A comparative study of the two major feudal monarchies and the influence of Norman feudalism on both. There is considerable attention to the lessons Suger drew from his Norman experience, which he urged the king of France to apply within his own territories.

Von Simson, Otto. The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order. 3d ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988. Provides two long chapters on Suger, one on his career and one on the rebuilding of Saint-Denis. Emphasizes the intellectual consistency between Suger the statesman and Suger the builder. The definitive work on Suger’s church as an embodiment of the ideas of Pseudo-Dionysius, and on the influence of Saint-Denis on other major French Gothic buildings.