The Sainte-Chapelle of Vincennes

The term “Sainte-Chapelle”, French for “holy chapel”, is most often used to refer to one of the most famous Gothic churches in the world, the chapel on the Île de la Cité in Paris which St Louis IX built to house the Lord’s Crown of Thorns. But there are nine other chapels of royal or noble foundation which are also so called, and there were four others which no longer exist. Of these, the best known is the Sainte-Chapelle de Vincennes, the chapel of a castle complex called the Château de Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris, which was often used as the royal residence from the time it was built the 1360s, until it was effectively replaced by Versailles in the late 17th century. 

Construction of the chapel was begun in 1379, ten years after the castle was finished, but not completed until 1552. With the permanent move to Versailles under Louis XIV in 1682, it lost its importance; the castle itself ceased to be an official royal residence in 1754, and the collegiate chapter that officiated in the chapel was suppressed in 1787. The chapel was badly damaged during the Revolution, later to be restored by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (better known for his important work on Notre-Dame de Paris), but many of its decorations, including the spire, the tympanum, almost all the exterior sculptures, many of the stained glass windows, and all of the original furnishings (e.g. the choir stalls) were irreparably lost. Despite this, it remains an impressive example of the style of later phase of Gothic architecture known as the flamboyant. These pictures were taken by Nicola during a recent visit.

The small tower-like structure on the left of the church is the sacristy; the upper story was a treasury to house other relics of the Lord’s Passion. (I have been unable to find a source which says which ones exactly.) 

An especially good shot from a window within the castle.

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The Cathedral of Ss Peter and Paul in Troyes, France

These pictures of the cathedral of Ss Peter and Paul in Troyes, France, about 100 miles to the south south-east of Paris, were taken by a friend during a recent visit. If you are a regular reader of NLM, you know we generally seek to accentuate the positive, and that isn’t going to change. However, this photo set does also include pictures of the comically hideous modern fixtures which have defaced parts of the church’s interior, as a reminder of some of the reasons why the New Pentecost™ turned out a little different from the previous one. They are all grouped together in the lower part of the post under the label “The Ugly Stuff”, so if you don’t want to see them, that’s where you should stop scrolling down. You have been warned...

The current Gothic building is the fourth version of the cathedral, begun in the very last years of the 12th century after a huge fire that destroyed much of the town in 1188. Like many such projects, the construction lasted for centuries; the west front was not completed until 1554, and the north tower, named for St Peter, was only finished in 1634, while the south tower, as you can see, was never even begun.

The chevet has six fairly large chapels radiating out of it, and the buttresses are weighted down with extra spires; these are actually new constructions of the 19th century.

This plaque commemorates St Joan of Arc, who attended Mass here on July 10, 1429, during the period when she was accompanying the Dauphin Charles VII to his coronation at Rheims.

The central nave.

The south nave.

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The Cisterican Abbey of Salem in Southern Germany

Our Ambrosian writer Nicola de’ Grandi recently visited the abbey of Salem in southern Germany, about 18 miles to the west of Ravensberg, half that distance from the city Constance to the south-west. It was founded as a Cistercian house within the lifetime of St Bernard, in the 1130s, and quickly grew to become of the largest and most important abbeys in all of the German Empire; by the end of the 13th century, the community had 300 members. The present Gothic church was begun in 1285, and consecrated in 1414, a simple but imposing structure, and in fact the largest Cistercian church in the world, very much in keeping with the austerity which characterized the order in its early centuries. However, as is the case with many Cistercian churches, the interior was completely redecorated in the much more elaborate Baroque style after the Counter-Reformation, in the 1620s.

The high altar, built in 1773, has a mensa on each side; on Sundays and major feast days, one Mass would be celebrated on the choir side for the monastic community, and another for the lay faithful on the nave side. (In the calendars of Cistercian liturgical books, one of the higher grades of feast is “two Masses.”)

The Gothic Sacrament tower, surrounded by Baroque decorations. 

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When Tabernacles Had Wings

Abbot Suger was one of those monumental men whose lives and personalities would seem almost incredible had they not lived in western Europe during the High Middle Ages. Well known today as a pivotal figure in the development of Gothic architecture, he was in fact of such diverse and admirable abilities as to merit a term like “Renaissance man”—which of course raises the question of why this term even exists, when so many to whom it applies predated the Renaissance. Let us say quite simply, then, that Suger was a “medieval man.”

Part of the choir of the abbey of St Denys. Around the year 1135, the abbot Suger began the process of enlarging the original Carolingian church, during which the choir was rebuilt from 1140-44. Suger created the idea of having huge walls of windows which flood the church’s interior with light, the foundation of the architecture style which we now call Gothic, and this choir is the first example of it. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Guilhem Vellut, CC BY 2.0)

Born in 1081 to a relatively humble family, the young Suger showed enough intellectual promise to be sent to the abbey of Saint-Denis for a monastic education. He rose through the ranks, eventually becoming secretary to the abbot and a trusted adviser to the king of France. A devout and cultured but not particularly ascetic man, Suger worked as a successful diplomat, was elected abbot, reformed his monks, wrote prolifically on various subjects, led the king toward victory against the emperor Henry V (who retreated without a fight), collaborated with Bernard of Clairvaux (another one of those monumental “medieval men”), rebuilt the church of Saint-Denis, and as the capstone of an already extraordinary life, ruled France as regent—and very capably—while the king was away on Crusade. A lesser Christian might have felt that ruinous itch for power after two years on the throne, but when the king returned in 1149, Suger handed him the crown and went back to his abbatial life, which ended, after an illness, in 1151.

One thing that Abbot Suger never adequately understood—and in his defense, few understood this until the mid-twentieth century—was the spiritual benefit to be gained by employing pedestrian, mundane, materially impoverished, or aesthetically bizarre vessels in the worship of the Most High God. Indeed, his thoughts on the matter were decidedly pre-modern:

Every costlier or costliest thing should serve, first and foremost, for the administration of the Holy Eucharist. If golden pouring vessels, golden vials, golden little mortars used to serve, by the word of God or the command of the Prophet, to collect the blood of goats or the red heifer, how much more must golden vessels, precious stones, and whatever is most valued among all created things, be laid out, with continual reverence and full devotion, for the reception of the blood of Christ!

He also shows himself woefully ignorant of the immense dignity of man, who ought not kneel or otherwise abase himself—frankly, ought not inconvenience himself in any way—when approaching the sacramental Flesh, and with it the true and infinitely sacred presence, of his divine Savior:

Surely neither we nor our possessions suffice for this service. If, by a new creation, our substance were re-formed from that of the holy Cherubim and Seraphim, it would still offer an insufficient and unworthy service for so great and so ineffable a victim.

It turns out, though, that his society was not completely devoid of the minimalistic, primitivistic impulses that would reach such a vigorous state of fruition eight centuries after his death. Some, apparently, were so concerned that the soul be rich and radiant with virtue as to neglect the gleaming, golden objects whose visible perfections exist so that we might contemplate, through them, the invisible glories of the all-perfect God. To these forerunners of the modern spirit the abbot responded with wisdom that one would have thought perennial in the Church, but which succumbed—for a time—to the unusually harsh winter of a vain and discontented age:

The detractors also object that a saintly mind, a pure heart, a faithful intention ought to suffice for this sacred function; and we, too, explicitly and especially affirm that it is these that principally matter. [But] we profess that we must do homage also through the outward ornaments of sacred vessels, and to nothing in the world in an equal degree as to the service of the Holy Sacrifice, with all inner purity and with all outward splendor. [1]

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Around the time of Abbot Suger’s death, a few days’ ride from the city where he lived, liturgical artisans were crafting some of the most charming and symbolically rich sacred vessels in the history of the western Church. Here is an example:

An object such as this is called a peristerium, from the Greek word for pigeon or dove. The more homegrown name is simply “Eucharistic dove.” This particular specimen, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is made of gilded copper, with the surface engraved and enameled so as to resemble feathers, though visual naturalism was clearly not the guiding principle in the choice of colors. If chains are attached to the plate underneath the dove, as shown here, it can be suspended near or even directly above the altar. As indicated by the letters “IHS,” the dove’s body includes a cavity, covered by a hinged lid, in which the Blessed Sacrament was reserved.

Below is another fine example, from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

Here the supporting plate has holes instead of thin extensions, and the shape of the chest and head is particularly dove-like and graceful.

The copper surface of this next piece, also from the Walters, is wonderfully vivid and golden, with etchings that appear simple yet are skillfully wrought and surprisingly reminiscent of a bird’s feathers. The artisan also created lovely and pleasantly subdued coloration on the wing.

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The history of Eucharistic doves is not well understood. They are mentioned in passages from the Liber Pontificalis that date to the sixth or late fifth century [2], and we may presume that they were relatively common, at least in some regions of the western Church, during the early Middle Ages. But certainty here eludes us, because the artifactual record is highly restricted in both time and space: almost all of the surviving Eucharistic doves were produced in Limoges, France, in the first half of the thirteenth century.

More important for our purposes than their history is what they tell us about our Faith, and about the symbolical modes of belief and prayer that informed the entire Christian experience during the Age of Faith. To have a beautiful, golden dove suspended over one’s altar is to signify, with the sophisticated simplicity so characteristic of medieval culture, the presence and action of the Holy Spirit during the divine Sacrifice. It is also to suggest a world cleansed by the waters of the Flood, poured out in overwhelming abundance like the grace of God or like the Blood of Christ: “And the dove came to him in the eventide, and lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf that she had plucked, whereby Noah did know that the waters were abated upon the earth.” It is, furthermore, an allusion to the mystical continuity that joins the liturgical sacrifice of the New Covenant to the animal sacrifices of the Old: “He answered unto [Abram]: Take an heifer of three years old, and a she goat of three years old, and a three year old ram, a turtle dove also, and a young pigeon. He took therefore all these unto him, and divided them in the midst, and laid every piece one against another: but the birds divided he not.” It is even, perhaps, to evoke the Holy Virgin, most blessed and beautiful above all women, and prefigured by the bride of whom Solomon sings in his Song of Songs: “Behold, thou art fair, my love: behold, thou art fair: thine eyes are as doves.”

And finally, when the Body of the Savior was placed within these winged tabernacles of the Middle Ages, symbolic realities converged in an artistic retelling of the Incarnation: the cavity within the dove signified the Virgin’s womb, such that the dove itself signified both the Virgin and her divine Spouse, whose union produced the sacred humanity of Jesus Christ and has now received it, to honor and protect, from the hands of the priest—whose labor at the altar is itself a sacramental incarnation. How profound, the unsounded depths of our Catholic Tradition; how sublime, the holy and poetic rites of our fathers. Behold, thou art fair, my love: behold, thou art fair, O liturgy ever ancient, ever new.            

NOTES

1. These three quotations are from Erwin Panofsky (ed., trans.), Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, Princeton University Press (1946), pp. 65, 67.

2. See the entries for Popes Sylvester (314–335) and Innocent (401–417). 

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For twice-weekly discussions of art, history, language, literature, Christian spirituality, and traditional Western liturgy, all seen through the lens of medieval culture, you can subscribe to my Substack publication: Via Mediaevalis.

The Legend of St Denis

October 9 has traditionally been kept as the feast of Ss Denis (“Dionysius” in Latin) and Companions, who were martyred at Paris in the 3rd century. St John Leonardi, the founder of a small congregation of clerks regular, died on this day in 1609; when he was added to the general calendar in 1940, his feast was placed on top of that of the martyrs, who were thus reduced to a commemoration. In the post-Conciliar reform, however, both feasts have been made optional memorials, which means that the martyrs may now be celebrated more freely in the Novus Ordo than in the Roman Rite. That they should be present at all in the modern liturgy is very surprising, since St Denis is the subject of one of the most famous hagiographical confusions, of exactly the sort that led to the suppression or downgrading of so many other feasts.

A statue of St Denis, from the treasury of the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Paris. One legend tells that St Denis was beheaded on the hill of Montmartre which overlooks Paris, after which he picked up his head and walked about 4 miles to the site where he is buried, the future location of the abbey which bears his name. (Photo courtesy of the Schola Sainte-Cécile.)

In his History of the Franks (I.30), St Gregory of Tours (538-94) lists Denis as one of seven men sent to Gaul as bishops to evangelize various cities during the reign of the Emperor Decius (249-51), and says that sometime after, he was “afflicted with various sufferings for the name of Christ, and ended the present life at the blow of a sword.” In the Martyrology incorrectly attributed to St Jerome, Denis is named on October 9th together with a priest and a deacon, Rusticus and Eleutherius, who are also mentioned in the prayer of their collective feast day. Their bodies were buried at a site a few miles to the north of Paris, and a church built over it, which Gregory of Tours mentions twice, once in connection with a miracle, and again when describing its profanation. Not long after his time, King Dagobert I (603-39) established a monastery under royal patronage at the site, and completely rebuilt the church; it was rebuilt again in the days of Pepin the Short and his son Charlemagne, the latter of whom attended its consecration in 775.

According to the revised Butler’s Lives of the Saints, even before the Carolingian period, St Denis of Paris had already been confused in some quarters with the Biblical figure of the same name (i.e. Dionysius), who was converted by the preaching of St Paul in Athens (Acts 17, 22-34). This preaching took place at the “Areopagus – the hill of Ares”, a large outcropping of the Athenian acropolis which was used as a place of judgment for serious crimes like murder; St Luke calls Dionysius “the Areopagite”, i.e., one of the judges who sat on the court held there. The Church historian Eusebius reports (3.4.11), on the witness of another Dionysius (a very common name in antiquity), bishop of Corinth in the later 2nd century, that the Areopagite was the first bishop of Athens; by the turn of the seventh century, he was believed to have died as a martyr, being burnt alive by the Emperor Domitian.

The Preaching of St Paul at Athens; a preparatory cartoon made by Raphael in the 1510s as part of a series of designs intended to be woven into tapestries; now at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Sometime in the later 5th or early 6th century, an unknown Greek-speaking theologian produced a series of four treatises and ten letters, purporting to be works of Dionysius the Areopagite. This is not a case like those of Ss John Chrysostom or Augustine, among many others, to whom writings were very often mistakenly ascribed in later generations; the author clearly and deliberately intended to pass himself off as the contemporary of St Paul. To this end, he claims to have been present, along with Ss Peter and James, for the Dormition of the Virgin Mary (Div. Nom. 3, 2), and addresses letters to Ss John the Evangelist, Timothy and Polycarp. Scholars generally suppose him to have been a Syrian; the dating of his works depends in part on the obvious influence upon them of the neo-Platonic philosopher Proclus, who died in 485. Further attempts to glean information about the author from his writings remain speculative.

By the first decades of the sixth century, these writings were cited by authors on both sides of the debate over the Monophysite heresy, which the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon had condemned in 451. Most notably, at a council held in Constantinople in 533, the Monophysites cited them in support of their teaching, to which the leader of the Catholic party replied that they were forgeries. Nevertheless, as the controversy continued, and as the heresy evolved into Monotheletism in the 7th century, they came to be gradually accepted as both genuine and orthodox by several important figures, the most significant being St Maximus the Confessor, who cited them at a council held in the Lateran Basilica in Rome in 649, under Pope St Martin I. They were further defended and cited to the same effect at the next two ecumenical councils, Third Constantinople in 680, and Second Nicea in 787. To this day, the Byzantine Rite’s liturgical texts for St Dionysius, “the Holy Martyr and Areopagite”, bishop of Athens, are filled with references to the writings, as for example, this hymn at Vespers: “Having made thy mind equal in honor to that of the Angels through virtue, o all-wise father Dionysius, thou didst write an account in (thy) holy books of the heavenly order of their hierarchy, and according to it, didst organize the orders of the Church’s government, likening them to the ranks of heaven.” (He is also the titular Saint of the Roman Catholic cathedral of Athens.)

An early 11th-century mosaic of St Dionysios the Areopagite, in the monastery of St Luke in Boeotia, Greece. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

In the year 827, the Byzantine Emperor Michael II (820-29) sent a copy of the writings to Charlemagne’s son, King Louis the Pious, along with several other gifts. By coincidence, they happened to reach the king on the evening of October 8th, when he was at the royal abbey of St Denis for the vigil of the titular Saint’s feast day. The abbot, Hilduin, who was very close to the king, had them translated into Latin, although this translation was not very well done, and was replaced by another about 30 years later. At the king’s behest, he also wrote a life of St Denis, which definitively conflated the bishop of Paris with the Areopagite, ascribed his mission in Gaul to Pope St Clement I towards the end of the 1st century, and acknowledged the writings as his. This conflation was henceforth accepted, and remained the common legend of St Denis in western Europe for the next 700 years. The writings became extremely influential in the High Middle Ages; Hugh of St Victor, St Albert the Great, and yet another Denis, the great Carthusian theologian, wrote commentaries on them, and they are cited well over 2000 times in the works of St Thomas Aquinas.

In the Renaissance, when many of the certainties of the medieval tradition were being called into question, the authenticity of the writings, and the identification of the two Denises as the same person, were challenged by two of the most prominent among the great humanist scholars, Lorenzo Valla (1407-57), who also unmasked the forgery known as the Donation of Constantine, and later Erasmus. The question was the subject of much controversy and debate over the following centuries, with learned men, Catholic and Protestant, offering their opinions as both defenders and detractors of the tradition. The neo-Gallican revision of the Parisian liturgical books sided with the detractors by separating Denis into two persons, one of Athens, kept on his Byzantine date, October 3rd, and the other of Paris on the traditional date, without the title “Areopagite”, a change which was later harshly condemned by Dom Prosper Guéranger.

A leaf of a 15th century Missal according to the Use of Paris, with the Epistle of the Mass of St Denis, Acts 17, 22-34. (Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. Latin 859A)

However, this diffidence towards the traditional legend of St Denis was not a novelty of the neo-Gallicans. The pre-Tridentine Roman Breviary devotes only a single lesson of less than 70 words to St Denis and his companions, which makes no mention of the theological treatises. It also says that he was sent to Gaul “by the Roman Pontiff”, without specifying which one, a clear sign of doubt about the legend that it was St Clement.

Much more tellingly, the pre-Tridentine Parisian Breviary also pointedly does not refer to Denis as the author of the Areopagitic corpus, although it does accept him as the Athenian disciple of St Paul and the contemporary of St Clement. The Matins lessons for the feast day and the days of its octave are taken directly from Hilduin’s life of the Saint, but omit the chapters (9-17) which describe the theological writings, nor is there any reference to them in any of the proper antiphons or responsories of the Office, or in the Sequence of the Mass. (The Epistle of the latter is the passage from Acts 17 cited above.)

In point of fact, it was only with the Tridentine revision that the Roman Breviary accepted Hilduin’s conflation of the Athenian and Parisian Denis as the same person. Furthermore, a sentence is added to the effect that “He wrote wondrous and indeed heavenly books, on the divine names, on the celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies, on mystical theology, and certain others.” This is perhaps the only case in the Breviary of St Pius V in which the legend of a Saint moves further away from the more skeptical view, almost certainly due to the influence of Cardinal Baronius, who defended the traditional legend in his notes on the revision of the Martyrology.

As late as 1857, when the Abbé Migne put together his great corpus of Patristic writings, the Patrologia Graeca, which is arranged in chronological order, he put the Areopagitic corpus and associated writings, including several defenses of its authenticity, between the works of St Clement I and those of St Ignatius of Antioch. However, in 1895, two Catholic scholars, Hugo Koch and Josef Stiglmayer, working quite separately from each other, demonstrated the dependence of the writings on the works of Proclus, and the question is now universally regarded as settled in the negative. This also explains what was, of course, the strongest objection to their authenticity all along, namely, the complete absence of any reference to them in the writings of earlier Church Fathers.

Part of the choir of the abbey of St Denys. Around the year 1135, the abbot Suger began the process of enlarging the Carolingian church, during which the choir was rebuilt from 1140-44. Inspired by the Areopagite’s theology of light as an expression and manifestation of God’s presence, Suger created the idea of having huge walls of windows which flood the church’s interior with light; this is the foundation of the architecture style which we now call Gothic, and this choir is the first example of it. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Guilhem Vellut, CC BY 2.0)

As with the many controversies over the authorship of the books of the Bible, the assumption behind this debate was to a large degree that if a work is not genuinely by the author to whom it is attributed, it is therefore a forgery, and hence worthless. And likewise, as with the many controversies over the authorship of the books of the Bible, this assumption has more recently been to a large degree subsumed by an understanding that authenticity is principally an historical question, and one that need not always impinge on the value of a writing as a work of theology. In his series of Wednesday audiences on the Church Fathers, Pope Benedict XVI spoke about the author of these writings (May 14, 2008), and explicitly rejected the idea that he passed himself off as the Areopagite in order to vest his work with the authority of one close to the Apostles, but rather, did so “to make an act of humility; he did not want to glorify his own name, he did not want to build a monument to himself with his work but rather truly to serve the Gospel, to create an ecclesial theology, neither individual nor based on himself.”

The Cathedral of St Bavo in Ghent

On the general calendar, today is the feast of St Remigius, the bishop of Reims who baptized the Frankish king Clovis in 508, a major event for the Christianization of the Franks and the establishment of the French nation. Since he died on January 13, the octave day of the Epiphany, his feast is kept on October 1st, the date of a translation of his relics which took place in 852 A.D. In the Middle Ages, many places kept this feast jointly with various other confessors, one of whom is St Bavo, the patron of the Belgian city of Ghent, where he died ca. 655. (He is also known as Allowin; the Dutch form of his name is Baaf.)

The Conversion of St Bavo, 1624, by Peter Paul Rubens.

Bavo was a nobleman and a soldier, a native of the eastern region of modern Belgium called Hesbaye in French, Haspengouw in Dutch, and Hasbania in Latin; the principality of Liège, formerly a very important ecclesiastical center and state, borders it to the east. He led a very irregular life, but after being left a widower while still young, he was converted by the preaching of a Saint called Amand, gave away all his money, entered a monastery. Amand was a great missionary, and Bavo accompanied him on several of his trips in Flanders and northern France, but after a time, his spiritual father let him go to live as a hermit. A well-known story is told that after his conversion, he met a man whom he had sold into serfdom, and did penance for this by having the man publicly lead him in chains to a prison. Eventually, he returned to the monastery at Ghent and ended his life there.

Ghent ca. 1540. The church in the middle is the abbey of St Bavo, which was destroyed by the Emperor Charles V. The tower of the other St Bavo, not yet a cathedral, is the one on the left among the three right behind it.

Today, his name is certainly best known in reference to the cathedral of Ghent, which is titled to him, since that church is the home of one of the most famous pieces of art ever made, The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, (1425 ca. -32) by Hubert and Jan van Eyck, often more simply called the Ghent Altarpiece. The current Gothic structure was begun in 1274, but not completed until 1569; it was originally a secular canonical church, and only made a cathedral when Ghent became a diocese ten years before its completion. Part of the reason why the Ghent Altarpiece is The Ghent Altarpiece is that the church was raided in 1566 by Calvinists, who, acting as they believed, (which is to say, more like Mohammedans than Christians), smashed up many of its artworks. Of the works later commissioned to replace them, perhaps only the Rubens shown above is really noteworthy, and certainly the only one at all to the taste of our own times.

Ghent is a port city, even though it is 23 miles inland, since it sits at the confluence of two rivers. In 2015, a ship coming into the port collided with and killed a young finback whale nearly 40 feet long, which remained stuck on its bow. The body was brought to the University of Ghent for study, and afterwards, the skeleton was hung up in St Bavo within the ambulatory of the choir as a kind of ex voto, and a reminder of the story of the prophet Jonah; it has been given the name Leo.

A broad view of the nave. (It appears that the modern altar seen here has subsequently been replaced with something much nicer, as seen in the next photograph.) 

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A Rare Example of Modern Venetian Gothic Architecture with a Moorish Flair

Today I will share the final batch of photos from my trip to Louisiana this past July. I have saved these pictures for last because it seemed fitting to talk about a church dedicated to the Immaculate Conception in the week in which we will celebrate the feast of Our Lady’s Nativity.

Immaculate Conception Church, completed and dedicated in 1930, is located in the downtown of New Orleans, at 130 Baronne Street, and run by the Society of Jesus. Immediately from the façade, one can tell that its style is different from those one usually encounters; its Wikipedia article describes it as the Neo-Venetian style of Gothic Revival architecture, with Moorish Revival and Byzantine Revival elements.

Yet the façade, as unusual as it is, does not prepare the visitor for the impact made by the height of the nave, which is all the more unexpected in a church sandwiched between (and somewhat dwarfed by) high-rises.

Note the small decorated columns of the middle level.

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The Abbey of Chaise-Dieu (Part 1)

A friend of mine recently visited the abbey of Chaise-Dieu in south central France, about 75 miles southwest of Lyon, and kindly allowed us to share his pictures. Founded in 1043 by St Robert de Turlande, it was magnificently rebuilt in the mid-14th century at the behest of Pope Clement VI (born 1291, reigned 1342-52), who had begun his life as a Benedictine monk there when he was only nine years old; his tomb is in the church. From the time of its foundation, it became an austere rival to Cluny as the mother-house to many abbeys and priories, until the sixteenth century, when the Kings of France kept it “in commendam”, and it began to wither; the famous (or infamous) Cardinal Richelieu was its nominated abbot from 1629. (Giving an abbey “in commendam” means the deleterious practice of giving the title and salary of the abbot to an external patron.) A second part of this article will show a famous series of early 16th century tapestries in the abbey museum.

The cloister and conventual buildings, which were extensively rebuilt when the abbey was taken over by the reform-minded Congregation of St Maur in the 17th century.

The church’s rood screen survives, which is fairly rare in France where they were in any event less common than in northern countries. The right arm of the rood is shorter than the left as it was cut short to enable the rood to be hidden from the revolutionaries flat on top of the screen!

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Princeton University Architecture: the Good, the Beautiful and the Ugly

On a recent trip to the northeast, I spent some time at Princeton University; I show here some examples of the buildings in and around the campus. First, the neo-Gothic buildings, which were inspired by those of Oxford and Cambridge, and built in the first part of the 20th century.

Like the other college buildings, the university chapel was built in the Gothic style, complete with large stained glass windows. The beauty and grandeur, it seems, persuaded the Presbyterians to include such images in a building style not normally associated with low Calvinist worship and stripped-down artistic sensibilities.

The neo-Gothic style began in England as a movement to rejuvenate church architecture, make it more obviously Christian, and linked to the liturgy. The architect who led this transformation was AW Pugin, a Catholic convert who, in reaction against the neo-Classical style that dominated at the time, established an architectural company which designed many of the new Catholic cathedrals and churches being built in England. He wrote several books, perhaps the most famous being The True Principles of the Pointed, or Christian, Architecture, which was published in 1841, when he was just 29 years old. This set out the basis for the successful reestablishment of a tradition that quickly spread across much of the globe, due to the great influence that Britain had at the time. I see it not as an imitation of an earlier time, but rather as an authentic re-establishment and development of the original Gothic tradition.

The new style not only worked in harmony with the liturgy being celebrated in the new Catholic churches, but also with that of the Anglican Church, which was reestablishing a traditional approach to the liturgy under the influence of the Oxford Movement, among others. As with all authentic liturgical traditions, its style began gradually to influence the broader culture, and soon grand civic buildings, universities, hotels, and railway stations were being erected in styles derived from this kind of church architecture. The tower that houses Big Ben at the new Houses of Parliament was designed by Pugin, for example.

In the United States, many of the wealthy sought to build in the new style, and attracted the leading architects from England, many of whom trained students to design neo-Gothic buildings. Many churches were built and again, this led in time to other buildings. The universities, especially those of the Ivy League, wished to present themselves as the American equivalents of schools like Oxford and Cambridge, and for several decades, it became fashionable to build neo-Gothic quadrangles with porter’s lodges, chapels, libraries, and dining halls, in emulation of the old Oxbridge colleges.

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