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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Kenneth Clark's Civilisation
Chapter 2
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There have been times in the history of man when the earth seems suddenly to have grown warmer or more radioactive . . . I don't put that forward as a scientific proposition, but the fact remains that three or four times in history man has made a leap forward that would have been unthinkable under ordinary evolutionary conditions.
One such time was about the year 3000 BC, when quite suddenly civilisation appeared, not only in Egypt and Mesopotamia but in the Indus valley; another was in the late sixth century BC, when there was not only the miracle of Ionia and Greece -- philosophy, science, art, poetry, all reaching a point that wasn't reached again for 2000 years -- but also in India a spiritual enlightment that has perhaps never been equalled.
Another was round about the year 1100. It seems to have affected the whole world; but its strongest and most dramatic effect was in Western Europe -- where it was most needed.
In every branch of life -- action, philosophy, organisation, technology -- there was an extraordinary outpouring of energy, an intensification of existence.
Popes, emperors, kings, bishops, saints, scholars, philosophers were all larger than life, and the incidents of history -- Henry II at Canossa, Pope Urban announcing the First Crusade, Heloise and Abelard, the martyrdom of St Thomas a Becket -- are great heroic dramas, or symbolic acts, that still stir our hearts.
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The evidence of this heroic energy, this confidence, this strength of will and intellect, is still visible to us.
In spite of all our mechanical aids and the inflated scale of modern materialism, Durham Cathedral remains a formidable construction, and the east end of Canterbury still looks very large and very complex. And these great orderly mountains of stone at first rose out of a small cluster of wooden houses; everyone with the least historical imagination has thought of that.
An even more astonishing change took place in sculpture. Tournus is one of the very few churches of any size to have survived from before the dreaded year 1000, and the architecture is rather grand in a primitive way. But its sculpture is miserably crude, without even the vitality of barbarism.
Only fifty years later sculpture has the style and rhythmic assurance of the greatest epochs of art. The skill and dramatic invention that had been confined to small portable objects -- goldsmith work or ivory carving -- suddenly appear on a monumental scale.
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These changes imply a new social and intellectual background. They imply wealth, stability, technical skill and, above all, the confidence necessary to push through a long-term project.
How had all this suddenly appeared in Western Europe?
It could be argued that western civilisation was basically the creation of the Church. In saying that I am not thinking, for the moment, of the Church as the repository of Christian truth and spiritual experience -- I am thinking of her as the twelfth century thought of her, as a power Ecclesia -- sitting like an empress.
The Church was powerful for all kinds of negative reasons: she didn't suffer many of the inconveniences of feudalism; there was no question of divided inheritances. For these reasons she could conserve and expand her properties.
And she was powerful for positive reasons. Men of intelligence naturally and normally took holy orders, and could rise from obscurity to positions of immense influence. In spite of the number of bishops and abbots from royal or princely families,
And then the Church was international. It was, to a large extent, a monastic institution following the Benedictine rule and owing no territorial allegiance.
The great churchmen of the eleventh and twelfth centuries came from all over Europe. Anselm came from Aosta, via Normandy, to be Archbishop of Canterbury; Lanfranc had made the same journey, starting from Pavia. The list could be extended to almost every great teacher of the early Middle Ages.
It couldn't happen in the Church, or politics, today: one can't imagine two consecutive archbishops of Canterbury being Italian. But it could happen -- does happen -- in the field of science; which shows that
In so far as the intellectual and emotional lives of men and women of the twelfth century rose above mere necessity, they were inspired and directed by the Church. I suppose that they led narrow and monotonous lives, given rhythm only by the occupations of the months. Much of the year was spent in darkness, in very cramped conditions. What must have been the emotional impact of the inconceivable splendour, so much richer than anything that has come down to us today, which overwhelmed them when they entered the great monasteries or cathedrals.
This expansion of the human spirit was first made visible in the Abbey of Cluny. It was founded... 1049 to 1109 -- it became the greatest church in Europe, not only a huge complex of buildings, but a great organisation...
But the great thaw of the twelfth century was not achieved by contemplation (which can exist at all times) but by action -- a vigorous, violent sense of movement, both physical and intellectual.
On the physical side this took the form of pilgrimages and crusades. I think they are among the features of the Middle Ages which it is hardest for us to understand. No good pretending that they were like cruises or holidays abroad. For one thing, they lasted far longer, sometimes two or three years. For another, they involved real hardship and danger. In spite of efforts to organise pilgrimages -- Cluny ran a series of hostels along the chief routes -- elderly abbots and middle-aged widows often died on the way to Jerusalem...
[Concerning the Chartres cathedral...]
But from the point of view of civilisation, the most important thing about the central doorway ... is the character of the heads of the so-called kings and queens -- no one knows exactly who they are.
Think of the people we encountered in the ninth and tenth centuries -- vigorous, passionate, earnestly striving towards some kind of intellectual light, but
Do not
Indeed I believe that the refinement, the look of selfless detachment and the spirituality of these heads is something entirely new in art.
Beside them the gods and heroes of ancient Greece look arrogant, soulless and even slightly brutal.
I fancy that
Of course something depends on the insight of the artist who portrays them. If you pass from the heads of the master-mason to those of his more old-fashioned colleagues you are back in the slightly woozy world of Moissac.
But good faces evoke good artists -- and conversely a decline of portraiture usually means a decline of the face, a theory which can now be illustrated by photographs in the daily papers.
We know from the old chronicles something about the men whose state of mind these faces reveal.
In the year 1144, they say, when the towers seemed to be rising as if by magic,
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the faithful harnessed themselves to the carts which were bringing stone, and dragged them from the quarry to the cathedral. The enthusiasm spread throughout France. Men and women came from far away carrying heavy burdens of provisions for the workmen -- wine, oil, corn. Amongst them were lords and ladies, pulling carts with the rest. There was perfect discipline, and a most profound silence. All hearts were united and each man forgave his enemies.
This feeling of dedication to a great civilising ideal is even more overwhelming when we pass through the portal into the interior. This is not only one of the two most beautiful covered spaces in the world (the other is St. Sophia in Constantinople), but it is one that has a peculiar effect on the mind; and the men who built it would have said that this was because it was the favourite earthly abode of the Virgin Mary.
... only in the twelfth century did the cult of the Virgin appeal to the popular imagination. I suppose that in earlier centuries life was simply too rough. At any rate, if art is any guide, and in this series I am taking it as my guide, the Virgin played a very small part in the minds of men during the ninth and tenth centuries.
She appears, of course, in incidents like the Annunciation and the Adoration of the Magi, but representations of the Virgin and Child as objects of special devotion are extremely rare in Ottonian art.
The earliest cult figure of the Virgin and Child of any size is a painted wooden statue in St Denis which must date from about 1130. The great Romanesque churches were dedicated to the saints whose relics they contained -- St Sernin, St Etienne, St Lazarus, St Denis, St Mary Magdalene -- none of them to the Virgin.
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Then, after Chartres the greatest churches in France were dedicated to her -- Paris, Amiens, Laon, Rouen, Rheims.
What was the reason for this sudden change?
I used to think that it must have been a result of the crusades: that the returning warriors brought back an admiration for the womanly virtues of gentleness and compassion, as opposed to the male virtues of courage and physical strength which they themselves represented.
I am not so sure about this now; but it does seem to be confirmed by the fact that the first representations of the Virgin as an object of devotion are in a markedly Byzantine style, for example on a page of a manuscript from Citeaux, the community of St Bernard.
St Bernard was one of the first men to speak of the Virgin as an ideal of beauty and a mediator between man and God. Dante was right to put into his mouth at the close of the Paradiso a hymn to the Virgin which I think one of the most beautiful pieces of poetry ever written.
But whatever the effect of St Bernard, a strong influence in spreading the cult of the Virgin was certainly the beauty and splendour of Chartres Cathedral...
So much has been written about the Gothic style that one feels inclined to take it for granted. But it remains one of the most remarkable of human achievements.
He had accepted their material nature and although he had tried to make them transcend it by means of proportion or by the colour of precious marbles, he had always found himself limited by problems of stability and weight. In the end it kept him down to the earth.
By the same means he could surround his space with glass. Suger said that he did this in order to get more light, but he found that these areas of glass could be made into an ideal means of impressing and instructing the faithful -- far better than wall-painting because with a resonance, an effect on the senses, that the matt surface of a wall-painting could never have.
Man may rise to the contemplation of the divine through the senses. Well, nowhere else, I think, is this saying of the old pseudo-St Denis so wonderfully illustrated as it is in Chartres Cathedral.
As one looks at the painted glass which completely surrounds one it seems almost to set up a vibration in the air. It is primarily a sensuous-emotional impact...
It is also the bridge between Romanesque and Gothic, between the world of Abelard and the world of St Thomas Aquinas, the world of restless curiosity and the world of system and order.
Great things were to be done in the next centuries of high Gothic, great feats of construction, both in architecture and in thought. But they all rested on the foundations of the twelfth century.
Our intellectual energy, our contact with the great minds of Greece, our ability to move and change, our belief that God may be approached through beauty, our feeling of compassion, our sense of the unity of Christendom -- all this, and much more, appeared in those hundred marvellous years between the consecration of Cluny and the rebuilding of Chartres.
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