The Symbolism of Medieval Churches

An Introduction

Mark Spurrell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429678073
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: World History

The Symbolism of Medieval Churches: An Introduction explores the ways in which the medieval church building and key features of it were used as symbols, particularly to represent different relationships within the Church and the virtues of the Christian life.

This book introduces the reader to the definition, form, and use of medieval symbols, and the significance that they held and still hold for some people, exploring the context in which church symbolism developed, and examining the major influences that shaped it. Among the topics discussed are allegory, typology, moral interpretation, and anagogy. Further chapters also consider the work of key figures, including Hugh and Richard of St Victor and Abbot Suger at St-Denis. Finally, the book contrasts the Eastern world with the Western world, taking a look at the late Middle Ages and what happened to church symbolism once Aristotle had ousted Plato from the schools.

Entering into the medieval mind and placing church symbolism in its context, The Symbolism of Medieval Churches will be of great interest to upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars working on Architectural History, Medieval Art, Church History, and Medieval History more widely.

1

Visual allegories and verbal symbols

WHAT IS A SYMBOL? The medievals had a tag, verbis aut rebus: With words or with things, but also with actions; res has both meanings. There is a tendency for symbols to be things, and for words the tendency again is for the words, the figure of speech, or the interpretation of actions especially liturgical actions, to be called allegory. Allegories are figures of speech, one word standing for another: with symbols one object or action stands for another. A symbol can be described roughly as a visual allegory and an allegory as a verbal symbol. The exception that springs to mind is the ‘allegorical figure,’ carved or painted, but perhaps this should really be called a symbolic figure. It is also difficult to distinguish the interpretation of a visible action – is it a symbol or an allegory? But, does it matter? Symbol and allegory are much the same thing in different contexts.

There is a slight, but I think illusory, problem in that we get to many medieval symbols only through the written word. In any case, symbol and allegory are very tightly bound up together. In practice, they are hardly to be distinguished. In all the permutations of symbol and allegory, an object or an action or a word stands for something other than itself. And it offers, through the eyes or the ears, that other something to the mind of the searcher.

We have to distinguish between different kinds of symbols. The word, symbol, is used of a wide range of phenomena from mathematical plus or minus signs to the sacraments of the Church. The first method of making distinctions is to examine the purpose of the symbols, as they were used in the Middle Ages. The second is to categorise the different forms that symbols took.

There are symbols which can be described as indicators, indicating the subject of the representation. Thus, saints have their symbols or emblems, often referring to the way in which they were martyred, so that they can be identified: Saint Bartholomew his skin over his arm and Saint Paul a sword. The lily in Annunciation scenes probably primarily serves to distinguish the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary from other angelic visitations to other women or to the Virgin herself, though it is also a symbol of her purity. These symbols will not be discussed in this book – they have been described in many books already.¹

There were symbols and allegories which served to make a comparison between something visible and what the speaker or writer wishes to describe. They are similar to a metaphor or a simile. They also make the teaching more vivid and more exciting. They are a device to keep the reader’s or listener’s attention.

There were also symbols which gave the seeker after truth a real insight. His mind is lifted from the ordinary visible things of this world to the invisible, grace-giving things of Heaven. Then it is that symbols are hoists which lift the soul from earthly things to heavenly, from this world to the next, from vague ideas to real truth. There was in them more than an echo of the sacraments and of the Bible.

Symbols came in various forms – our second method of classification. In one sense, the world and everything in it were symbols, the visible pointing to the invisible, the material representing the spiritual, or the earth symbolising heaven.

Tell it out among the heathen that the Lord is King : and that it is he that has made the round world so sure that it cannot be moved ; and that he shall judge the people righteously.

Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad : let the sea make a noise, and all that therein is.

Let the field be joyful, and all that is in it : then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice before the Lord.²

Or as Hugh of St Victor wrote, ‘The whole world is open to our senses as if it were a book written by the finger of God.’³

Images, painted or carved, could be symbols of what or whom they represented, sacramental in their depiction of the saints, delivering or mediating the saint’s presence and power to the beholder. They differed from other symbols, in that they were deliberately created to be symbols, whereas other symbols were objects which existed for some other purpose, but were used as symbols. Features of the church building (the subject of this book) could be allegorised and presented as symbols.

Ceremonies were symbols, sometimes allegorically and to some extent arbitrarily, or realistically in that they conveyed what they represented. The pouring of water, or dipping in water represented baptism, and indeed was baptism. Alternatively, the ceremonies of the Mass could be allegorised and the whole Mass presented arbitrarily as a representation of the life and passion of Christ. Sacramental ceremonies were symbols of very powerful kind; the very performance of the ceremony guaranteed the delivery of the gift or res of the sacrament, ex opere operato – just because it was done – as the tag went.

For some people symbols were magic. A sight of the image of St Christopher guaranteed immunity from sudden death or illness that day.⁴ Making the sign of the cross delivered protection from evil or acquired a blessing. For others symbols offered an effective way of teaching or inspiring. For yet others, such as Suger and Marjory Kempe, they were springboards for mystical experiences.

A symbol then, when it is being used in the highest way, is a tool, a means, a device to lift up the mind to things heavenly. It is a machina, a hoist. Symbol should be coupled to anagogy, the upward driving – symbolice et anagogice, to quote the pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite.⁵ If we are to understand symbolism, it should always be seen in its context. Neo-Platonism and sacramental theology must not be neglected. The methods by which symbols were created and understood need have their place.

Most people, however, encountered symbolism in a simplistic way. The church porch symbolises this, and the door symbolises that, and so on through the church. This is the sort of symbolism which was preached on the annual Feast of the Dedication of the church. It lacks the ambitions and expectations that symbols could evoke. This symbolism is described in a short chapter on simplistic symbols, with a long quotation from Sicardus’ Mitralis and a summary of a passage from Durandus’ Rationale. The Icelandic sermon in Appendix 4 also contains simplistic symbolism, as does Pelbartus’ sermon (Appendix 10). I have supplied a specialist index of the parts of the church and what they symbolised. Simplistic symbolism was, after all, the way in which most medieval people encountered symbols. Buildings, however, will not be treated as texts which can be decoded from the symbols within them. Outside the sermons preached on the Feast of Dedication, there is very little in medieval sermons about the church building or its, so we are told, didactic embellishments. This is true of sermons today too.

It is easy to exaggerate the importance of symbols. They were very much the province of the educated – a larger class maybe than we sometimes think, but by far larger was the class which was uneducated and illiterate. If the illiterate agricultural labourers of South Lindsey in the nineteenth century are anything to go by, it is likely that the ceremonies and events initiated by the literate were reinterpreted by the medieval illiterate population to suit their own ideas and needs.⁶ How far their reinterpretation represented a relic of pre-Christian paganism is anybody’s guess; it may be that reinterpretation is something that the illiterate always do, and that the forms which the reinterpretation (or misunderstanding) takes change a little from generation to generation.

In this volume, I want to present symbolism primarily, not so much as an academic subject which was of no real religious relevance to medieval people, but rather, as some of them (probably not very many) found it, a living way to religious experience. The use of symbols at its best had a purpose. I am reminded of a passage in C. S. Lewis’s autobiographical Surprised by Joy.⁷ Two students, Barfield and Griffiths, later Dom Bede Griffiths, were lunching with him in his rooms in Magdalen.

I happened to refer to philosophy as ‘a subject.’ ‘It wasn’t a subject to Plato,’ said Barfield, ‘it was a way.’ The quiet but fervent agreement of Griffiths and the quick glance of understanding between these two, revealed to me my own frivolity.

Symbols in the Middle Ages could be, perhaps not frivolous, but certainly often, if not usually, unrelated to any thought or purpose, but at their best symbols were a way: a way for the mystic, for the church reformer, for the theologian, and a way for the seeker after God.

Can one construct a history of the symbolism of church buildings? What questions can one profitably ask? What are the criteria for saying that symbolism at one period was better (or worse) than at another period? Some criteria perhaps can be put forward tentatively. When symbolism is seen to have a purpose – to forward an argument or to describe a truth – then it is ‘better’ to my mind than when it has no purpose and no use. Second, when one can see something of the expectations which people had of symbolism, perhaps the greater the expectations the ‘better’ the symbolism. The first criterion is shared fully by allegory; the second much less so. It is symbols rather than allegories that are close to sacraments, which are effective symbols, carrying the greatest expectations. These, however, are very rough and rude criteria.

Or is one thinking about some intrinsic quality? The appropriateness of the symbol in that it resembles what is symbolised more or less? That there is, as Professor Freeman demanded in the nineteenth century, some philosophical connection between the symbol and what is symbolised?⁸ Or is it that one is looking for some sort of authority for the symbol: long and widespread usage, a vision, or the Bible?

Is one also asking how important symbols were to people? How much did they think about them? How much were they at the centre of their meditations? How influential in their decision-making? Concerning their design decisions in building a church, were they more, or less, influenced by a recognised necessity to create symbols? Was there a theology in a church which was symbolised in the design? If there was, could one ask how effectively was this done, that the symbolism may be assessed as better or worse? But I am sure that Neale and Webb were right when they wrote that ‘no architect ever sat down with an analyzed scheme of doctrines which he resolved to embody in his future building.’⁹

There are certain broad movements and changes which can be identified and used for a history of symbolism. Symbolism and allegory were not invented and developed by the Church. They were received fully fledged from the Platonic Greek tradition and from the Hellenised Jewish tradition of the exegesis and interpretation of the Scriptures. The history is that of how the Christian theologians used the tradition which they had inherited.

The early fathers such as Origen were largely inspired by the Jewish historian, Josephus, and by the rabbi, Philo, who discussed the Temple in terms of it being either a microcosm of the universe or a metaphor for the soul. Later, Bede examined the Biblical descriptions of the Tabernacle and the Temple. He was looking there in the Old Testament for the foreshadowing of Christ, and he found it largely in the numbers used, the dimensions which were noted there. He only discussed scriptural buildings and constructions. Later writers moved on to contemporary buildings, often as a prologue to the allegorical interpretation of the liturgy. The church building was very much a symbol of the Church itself, and the parts of the church were used as symbols to promote the writers’ ideas of what the Church should be.

It is with the Victorines in the twelfth century, the Augustinians canons of St Victor in Paris, that symbolism seems to reach its climax. They were perhaps the most Platonist of the writers about symbolism, and they expected the most from it. It was for them a way towards God, a way into the Truth. After them J. M. Neale claimed that symbolism declined, starting with Robertus Paululus (fl.c.1175), Pierre de Celle (died 1187), and Anthony of Padua (died 1213). Of the last named he wrote:¹⁰

He is one of the earliest writers in whom we find a sensible decline of the symbolic principle: not indeed in the absence of mystical exposition, but in its strained and violent character; a suffic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Visual allegories and verbal symbols
• 2 Recent symbolism
• 3 Symbol and meaning
• 4 Allegory
• 5 Typology
• 6 The moral interpretation
• 7 Anagogy
• 8 Hugh and Richard of St Victor
• 9 Simplified symbols
• 10 Buildings as symbols
• 11 Numbers as symbols
• 12 Suger and Saint-Denis: a case study
• 13 The East
• 14 The triumph of literalism
• 15 Images
• 16 In conclusion
• Appendix 1: A poem contemplating the new church in Edessa
• Appendix 2: The dedication of Churches in the East
• Appendix 3: A hymn for the Feast of Dedication in the West
• Appendix 4: Icelandic homily for the festival of the dedication of a church
• Appendix 5: Anon, Speculum de mysteriis ecclesiae
• Appendix 6: Honorius Augustodunensis: Gemma animae
• Appendix 7: Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, a sermon
• Appendix 8: From Sicardus’ Mitralis
• Appendix 9: Augustinus de Dacia, Rotulus pugillaris
• Appendix 10: Pelbartus, Sermon 104
• Appendix 11: Claritas: light and dark churches
• Bibliography
• Index of symbols
• Index