Abbot Suger of St-Denis

Church and State in Early Twelfth-Century France

Lindy Grant, David Bates

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317899686
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Based on a fresh reading of primary sources, Lindy Grant's comprehensive biography of Abbot Suger (1081-1151) provides a reassessment of a key figure of the twelfth century. Active in secular and religious affairs alike - Suger was Regent of France and also abbot of one of the most important abbeys in Europe during the time of the Gregorian reforms. But he is primarily remembered as a great artistic patron whose commissions included buildings in the new Gothic style. Lindy Grant reviews him in all these roles - and offers a corrective to the current tendency to exaggerate his role as architect of both French royal power and the new gothic form.

PART I

SETTING THE SCENE

Chapter 1

INTERPRETING SUGER

. . .
SUGER AND THE HISTORIANS

Abbot Suger of St-Denis was painfully conscious of the ‘memory of posterity’ and the judgement of history. He recorded his own deeds as abbot of St-Denis, and revealed much of his own long political career in his histories of the kings he served. He had images of himself as suppliant donor applied liberally to the abbey church of St-Denis, which he rebuilt, and to the liturgical ornaments within it that he had made.¹ He would be gratified at the attention that twentieth-century historians and art historians have paid to him.

He has interested historians for two reasons. His writings, his histories and letters, are a key source for what was happening in Capetian France in the first half of the twelfth century: they underpin Luchaire’s magisterial study of Louis the Fat, for instance.² However, most historians have concentrated on mining the writings to extract Suger’s political ideas. Ever since Lemarignier’s pioneering work on early Capetian government, Suger has been regarded as the first person to recognise, describe and analyse the socio-political structure of Capetian France as a feudal hierarchy, a pyramid of tenure with the king at its apex.³ It is assumed that he owed this vision of society to his readings of the Celestial Hierarchy, a mystical tract by a fifth-century theologian known to us as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, but believed by Suger and his contemporaries to be St Denis himself. He is commonly seen as an influential royal ideologist, a man whose driving force, in every aspect of his life, was the glorification of the Capetian monarchy. By extension, he is often cast as the creator of the idea of France as a kingdom.

But the bulk of Sugerian studies have been art historical. It is easy to see why. Suger provides a unique example of a twelfth-century patron who wrote extensively about his own patronage, the objects of which have, to a quite remarkable extent, survived. Because of his writings, we know about those which did not survive, and can often date with remarkable precision those which did. Time and again, Suger’s artistic commissions provide the chronological benchmark against which art historians have measured twelfth-century sculpture and architecture, iconography and metalwork. Everything he commissioned is of the highest quality, and much of it has been seen as the first of its kind. The abbey church of St-Denis has long been considered the building in which the Gothic style, in all its manifestations, is forged from the base metal of the Romanesque. It holds, as such, a seminal position in the art-historical canon, as much in the populist tradition of Gombrich’s Story of Art or Lord Clark’s Civilisation, as in the scholarly overviews of Bony and Wilson.⁴

Just as Lemarignier established Suger as a political thinker, so, in 1946, did Erwin Panofsky, in his introduction to his translation of Suger’s accounts of his artistic patronage,⁵ present Suger as an original thinker, a theoretician, in the areas of theology and aesthetic. Panofsky argued that Suger used the neo-platonic writings of the Pseudo-Dionysius to refute criticism of his ambitious building schemes, emanating from the circle of the Cistercian St Bernard of Clairvaux. Suger is seen as the heir to a Cluniac vision of the church interior as properly a material reflection of the Heavenly Jerusalem, in direct and conscious opposition to a Bernardine ascetic aesthetic of simplicity and purity. The implication of Panofsky’s work is that Suger’s neo-platonic aesthetic theology (or theological aesthetic) lies behind the crystallisation of the new Gothic taste.

Panofsky’s seductive interpretation of Suger and his writings has been immensely influential: it would probably be true to say that all subsequent art-historical discussion of Suger has been driven by reactions to Panofsky. These have taken two directions. Many scholars have accepted and elaborated upon the image of Suger as neo-platonic theologian and by implication, founder of both a new Gothic imagery and a new Gothic architecture, and have pointed to evidence for this in the complicated religious iconography with which the abbey of St-Denis was encrusted, and the architectural sophistications of its new choir.⁶ Others have been unable to see Suger as a credible neo-platonic intellectual. They have ascribed what might be called the intellectual input in the building and decorating of St-Denis to others. Kidson, for instance, sees the design of the choir as essentially the work of the architect; Rudolph assigns the iconographic complexities to Hugh of St-Victor. Kidson has questioned whether the Pseudo-Dionysius had any influence at all.⁷ The implication in all this is to play down Suger’s traditional role as begetter of the Gothic style. All art historians have, however, found the historians’ concept of Suger as theoretician and propagandist of the French monarchy irresistible.

Everybody has accepted Panofsky’s analysis of Suger’s personality. Panofsky was rather shocked by the extent to which Suger, in his writings on the abbey church, its fitments and fittings, concentrated on all that glittered within it, on the gilded and gem-encrusted liturgical toys, often telling us how much they cost and how much gold they contained. For the patrician Panofsky, this could only reveal the soul of an unsophisticated parvenu. With this as his base, Panofsky built a rather touching picture of Suger as one of nature’s Cluniacs, a lax abbot, a genial raconteur.

Suger has generated a literature both immense and fragmented. Most studies deal with discrete aspects of his career, patronage, writings or thoughts, and much important work has been published in article rather than book form. There are only three previous biographies, in the sense of a full picture of the man and his works: by Cartellieri, Aubert, and recently, Michel Bur.⁸ More surprisingly, many of Suger’s writings are still not available in good modern editions, and one is forced back to the venerable Oeuvres Complètes by Lecoy de la Marche.⁹

Fragmentation is to an extent integral to the subject. Throughout his life, Suger had to balance his monastic and his political careers, at a period when there was growing pressure on monks to stay enclosed in their cloisters. Once he became abbot, the dual facets of his existence became more sharply etched, into a public role as abbot of one of the most important abbeys in Capetian France, and a private role as pastor of his flock. This dictates the structure of much of the second, biographical, part of this book.

The first part of the book establishes the context for the second. In this first chapter, I shall outline my own interpretation of Suger, an interpretation which is very different from traditional views of him. The next chapter discusses Suger’s own writings, and the other important sources for his life, especially the works of his secretary and biographer, the monk William. Some key observations about these writings lie at the heart of my reinterpretation of Suger. The final chapter of the first part of the book paints a broad picture of the world in which Suger grew to adulthood: of Capetian government and society and the French church around 1100; and of the small but prestigious world of the abbey of St-Denis itself. At the very end of the book, I pick up these themes again, to look at the world in which Suger died, half a century later. It is important to recognise that our vision of that world is largely formed through the prism of Suger’s writings.

. . .
A PRELATE IN POLITICS

Suger has often been characterised as the prototypical great ecclesiastic who is also the ‘minister of the king of France’ in the manner of Richelieu. The wraith of the great seventeenth-century éminence grise has always clouded studies of Suger’s political career.¹⁰ The determination to see Suger as a minister of the king has led, curiously, to both overestimation, and underestimation of his political role.

Older historians, noticing that the future Louis VI was brought up at St-Denis, assumed that he and Suger, who were much of an age, were educated together at the abbey school, and assumed that prince and pauper grew up, united by boyhood friendship, into king and minister.¹¹ More recent historians have reacted against this, and have stressed that Suger only became ‘minister’ of the king in 1128/9, after the fall of Louis’ previous favourite and chancellor, Stephen de Garlande.¹² Suger is then seen as dominating the royal household until pushed from power by a new favourite and chancellor, Cadurc, in 1140. At this point, it is assumed, Suger retired from court, and devoted himself to building his abbey church at St-Denis and writing his biography of Louis VI, only returning to court in the mid-1140s. At the council of Étampes in 1147, he was chosen to be regent of France while Louis VII went on crusade. As regent at least, his position at court was unequivocal. When the king returned, he owed his ex-regent so much that he continued to let him dominate court and household as his principal minister, until Suger died in January 1151. Thus the current consensus on Suger’s political career and his relationship with the kings of France. But both the exact nature of Suger’s relationship with the kings of France, and its chronology, stand in need of reconsideration.

It wou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Genealogical Tables
• List of Maps
• Editor’s Preface
• Author’s Preface
• Abbreviations
• Part I: Setting the Scene
• Part II: Active Life
• Part III: The Abbot’s Life
• Part IV: Drawing the Curtain
• Generalogical Tables
• Maps and Plans
• Index