How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth CenturiesO'Reilly, Elizabeth Boyle
History
How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
O'Reilly, Elizabeth Boyle
Architecture, Gothic; Cathedrals -- France
No haziness then in their knowledge that the patroness in whose care
they placed their cathedrals was a fellow creature. To the common sense
of the Middle Ages, it would have seemed a muddle-headed way of thinking
to have called Jesus, God, and at the same time to have refused homage
to His Mother, the one whom God chose to honor above all mortals, "she
who didst so ennoble human nature that its own Maker scorned not to
become its making."[81] It was only logical, they thought, that the best
advocate with the son should be the mother. "All of us who fear the
wrath of the Judge, fly to the Judge's mother," wrote Abélard. "_Que
Dieu nous l'octroie par la prière de sa douce mère_," wrote the crusader
Joinville. So, without worrying over future carpers who might murmur
"Mariolatry," the Middle Ages chanted "_Laus Deo et Beatæ Mariæ
laudum_." And the cathedral of Paris dared to dedicate four of its six
doors to the Queen of Heaven.
The door under the southwest tower commemorates St. Anne, the Blessed
Virgin's mother. It is a composite work, carved in Bishop Maurice's
time, between 1160 and 1170, but not set up here till Bishop Eudes de
Sully had undertaken the façade; in its tympanum are representations
both of Louis VII and of Maurice de Sully. St. Anne's door was a link
between the still archaic western doors of Chartres and the clearly
enunciated Gothic portal under the northwest tower of Paris Cathedral.
In the multitudinous folds of the draperies is Byzantine feeling, and
sacerdotal is the Madonna who gravely presents her son to be adored. By
the middle of the XIII century, the Madonna had become a natural mother,
and so she is sculptured at the north entrance to Notre Dame's transept.
Bishop Eudes de Sully, like his predecessor, had many a link with
scholasticism and with other bishop-builders. He had been fellow
student in Paris with the future Innocent III, and that expert in men
when pope called on his aid to find capable occupants for the French
sees. Eudes' own brother Henry was the archbishop of Bourges who
initiated the new cathedral there; and when his brother died, Eudes
assisted in placing in his see the saintly Guillaume, who built the
chevet of Bourges. Through Eudes de Sully, the bishop-builder of Rheims
Cathedral, Albéric de Humbert, was elected, and he also helped to elect
Bishop Hervé, who began the cathedral of Troyes. Able men ever found a
protector in the capable bishop of Paris, whose strict sense of duty was
incorruptible. When Philippe-Auguste, his near kinsman, broke the
marriage law, Bishop Eudes went into exile rather than sanction the
scandal. To him Innocent III sent St. Jean de Matha, that the prelate
might draw up a Rule for the new Order of Trinitarians, established to
redeem captives from Islam. It was Eudes de Sully who founded, in 1204,
the abbey of Port Royal, a name to become of note in French letters.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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