Flowers from MediAEval History :: Mystics as Builders

Mystics as Builders

We order the temples still standing destroyed that in their exact place may be raised the sign of the Christian religion. Decree of Valentinian III.

In the tribunal of history the Christian iconoclasts have been dealt with somewhat in the manner of defendants in damage suits. If a cow is killed by a railroad, is it not naturally assumed to have been a Durham? If a statue was destroyed by a fanatic why not put in a claim for a Phidias? As a matter of fact, by the time the early Christians came into power the art of the day of Pericles had been copied for over seven hundred years. Of art, what worse could be said!

Grecian art neither rose nor fell in a generation nor was it childless; original, though minor schools, Hellenic to the core, sprang up in the Grecian colonies and to the end the art and artists of Rome were Greeks. But during the later Roman Empire the degenerate Grecian artist commissioned by the degenerate Roman patron was simply cumbering the earth. Oh, yes, in those luxurious days they patronized art as rich men should, as rich men do. The houses of Herculaneum and Pompeii teemed with articles of virtu. It was not statues the world of art needed, it was ideals.

In art, it is the individual point of view that counts even if it be only that of the destroyer. Since art reflects life and life means change, the iconoclast has his place. A race, or more often the meeting of two races, may develop a school of art; it reaches its perfection in the work of a few genii of its golden age; to them it is given to embody the highest and best that was in the myriad of artists who have taught them and their teachers. Spellbound by its own perfection, this art can move no farther. The multitude seek to preserve it, for its value has been interpreted to them in quotations of the exchange. Artists are satisfied to copy it, and thereby artists they gradually cease to be. The destroyer comes,—fire, fanatic, whirlwind, victor or worm—the bulk and body of that art perishes, but the ideal, being a fruit of the spirit, lives. The final ruling of Grecian architecture is still proclaimed from the Parthenon, while headless and armless the lone “Winged Victory” might immortalize the action of Grecian sculpture, the poetry of Grecian thought.

Since architecture is the most national of the arts, its movements are the easiest to trace. Sometimes we actually detect the designer following in the footsteps of the iconoclast. Indeed, the most successful patron architecture has known, the Catholic Church, commenced as a destroyer.

In the south of France ecclesiastical architecture remained essentially classic until the Renaissance. This was largely due to one great sixth century bishop, Patiens de Lyons, who repaired the old temples and rebuilt anew on their lines so successfully that the people proudly said they could not tell the new from the old; but in the north of Gaul, where Martin of Tours and his followers had made a clean sweep of the pagan temples and their old influence, architectural and spiritual, an absolutely new style of church building developed. It is there that to this day we turn for the purest Gothic.

Of this Martin we have some little history, hazy though it be. He was a rude barbarian of the Roman legion, under the Emperor Julian, who embraced Christianity and brought the glad tidings to Tours. With a soldier’s idea of conquest he demolished the temples of false gods, like other superstitious converts; but he contended that to make the victory complete, at least an altar to the true God should mark the very spot; and he is credited with six religious foundations, one having been a church for the laity in the town of Tours. The present age might canonize Martin for a deed overlooked by his most ardent, early eulogists. He and Saint Ambrose protested against the “new heresy” of two Spanish bishops who put a gnostic to death for his heretical opinions.

Hagiology, however, abounds in records of Saint Martin, for he became the best beloved saint of old Gaul.

It is natural that those who read the Roman Catholic breviary literally should doubt it somewhat. They fail to realize that the history of a saint lies entirely between the lines of the account. The sacred lesson taught by this life reËchoes in his antiphones, responses, versicles and lessons, until he stands before his followers as a type of certain virtues. Thus Saint Sebastian stands for Christian courage; though his body is pierced with arrows and his hands are tied, he is always represented looking bravely up to Heaven: torture is immaterial to him: he is sustained by faith. Saint Gregory, gentlest of pastors, greatest of popes, is represented with the emblem of the Holy Ghost, the dove, perched upon his shoulder; Saint Jerome, who translated the Scriptures, with the Book in his hand; he generally has an angel near-by him.

Two little pictures stand out in Saint Martin’s iconography. In one, Saint Martin cuts his cloak in half with his sword to divide it with a beggar and beholds the Savior abundantly clad in half of it; and in the other, Saint Martin evokes the spectre of a pretended martyr worshiped in Tours, who comes to life and admits that he was hanged for crime, wherefore Saint Martin demolishes his shrine.

To the early Church the relic was everything. Of course it should be pure and holy. In it there was inspiration. Above the grave of some dear saint or, perhaps, only to his memory, a shrine would arise, and from these shrines, like flowers from seed, churches grew. A crypt might be made to hold some hallowed dust, where services might be held. This was reminiscent of the Roman catacombs where the first Christians, believing literally in the resurrection of the body, had laid their dead, and where, unseen by the unsympathetic world, they had met for holy communion. The crypts of the early Church were the mortal resting-places of friendly immortals at the great court above who, in their robes of light, might plead acceptably for those who would so reverently approach the heavenly throne through spirits purer than their own. Of course, these pleaders must be very pure to turn their shrines to altars. What spiritual value had a pretty, paltry tomb honoring an unholy spirit?

Roman civilization was materialistic, but not so this new religion of Jesus of Nazareth. Now, if things holy could pervade and hallow a building, why should not things unholy defile it?

We may trace this idea carried out so literally, so picturesquely, so almost logically in the legends of Martin of Tours, that we actually sympathize with the destructive old bishop. Blindly defending the dream that was in him, he actually stands first in that long line of ecclesiastical builders who, in the fulness of time, jointly brought forth Gothic architecture.

Saint Martin Dividing His Coat,
from an Old Antiphone.

When Saint Martin put his rude followers to work building houses for their new faith he must have established a certain amount of unity and order among them. Could there have been a better way to attach his crude converts to their Church than to induce them to work upon it?

While Saint Martin was building at Tours, the Dark Ages were setting in, when men of action became marauders, preying upon others; men of thought became monks, praying for themselves; humanity went backwards, and history ceased from very shame. But through it all there were a few perplexed old bishops who, whatever their failings may have been, tried to do something for their fellows. However, in that lawless day, they had to defend rather than expand Christianity, and even protect its churches, for pagans, too, might be honest iconoclasts!

The best thing the Dark Ages did for civilization was to learn the builders’ trade and teach it to a great many people. It was a general service, for to make a people industrious is, sooner or later, to make them skilful and law-abiding. It is curious that Saint Martin who, even while he was a bishop, lodged in a hut covered with boughs, should head the great line of builders who jointly and severally developed French Gothic. In standing for the integrity of the relic, which was literally the seed of early Christian art, Saint Martin gave a new and a higher impetus to life, and with it, very indirectly, to art. Seventy years after Martin’s death, to his blessed memory Saint Perpetuas built “the most beautiful church in existence,” at least so Gregory of Tours affirms. We will not inquire on what lines, for this was at the beginning of the Dark Ages, when nothing beautiful was made.

A supreme recognition of the bold old iconoclast comes to us from devotees of the classic; from certain artists and connoisseurs of the Renaissance. This unexpected tribute to iconoclasm is published upon a monument far removed from old Gaul in time and place, in ideal and execution.

From the Certosa of Pavia.
One of the Most Elaborate Monuments
of Catholicism.

In a monastery dowered with the gold of two reigning dynasties of tyrants, dowered by the genius of two reigning dynasties of painters and sculptors, amid surroundings perhaps the richest in the world, where fifty monks might dream away their lives in silence, in that lordly and exclusive playhouse for the soul of the Renaissance, wherein the exuberance of the Gothic takes on the maturity of the Renaissance in an elaboration which for once does not cloy,—in the Certosa di Pavia we find a tribute to crude, old Saint Martin, the iconoclast.

On a mural of one of the side chapels of this Certosa behold him represented in the garb of a fifteenth century monk, with his sanctity emphasized by a large, glittering nimbus, to which the aerial perspective of the otherwise maturely realistic painting is deliberately sacrificed, calmly superintending a gilded youth of the Renaissance while he smashes a fine Grecian statue! How did this rude act find endorsement in a temple of art? How did the coarsest of the saints win a place in the heart of the Renaissance? Was it because in him they saw a reflection of the subtlest honesty of Art, that god of the Renaissance? Was it because, above all else, Saint Martin especially stood for the integrity of the ideal?

Though this little scene on the chapel wall may have been simply historic in its import, nothing is plainer than that the picture is intended to honor an uncompromising bishop of the early Church.

Through the confusion that disintegrated empire, Saint Martin was a rude standard-bearer of two ideals broad enough to rebuild nations—Sincerity and Brotherhood. “First he wrought and after that he taught”—and first the spirit of his teaching was put into rude pictures, because in Gaul so few people could read and still fewer could condense an idea into forceful words.

It was long, long after an angel had appeared and carried Saint Martin’s soul in the form of a child straight to God, as a gentle old writer attests, that a modern geologist voiced the fundamental idea of the best beloved saint of old Gaul, “An honest god is the noblest work of man.”

The Last Resting Place of
the Great Poet of MediÆvalism—Tomb
of Dante, Ravenna.

But the past, as well as the present, has its peculiar eloquence wherewith to honor the dead. Over one of the oldest Christian altars spared to us by time, in solemn, enduring mosaic, big and simple, stands Saint Martin leading a line of saints to Christ. And this great hieratic on the wall of an old church of old Ravenna describes, as no language of the present may, an early builder of the great mystic Church which “rests upon the brawny trunks of heroes ... whose spans and arches are the joined hands of comrades ... and whose heights and spaces are inscribed by the numberless musings of all the dreamers of the world.”

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