On the Power of Beauty in Church and Liturgy

On the Power of Beauty in Church and Liturgy

By Dr. Wiebke-Marie Stock, University of Bonn, Germany/University of Notre Dame, USA

The beautiful can attract and enchant us, it can uplift us, but it can also distract. It is, therefore, by no means clear whether the beautiful should play a role within the realm of the divine. Is beauty in a church a foresight of heaven? Does it uplift the souls to the divine? Or does it distract the souls from what is truly important? Is Abbot Suger of Denis right to praise the splendid beauty of the windows and precious objects in the Abbey of St.-Denis? Or Bernard of Clairvaux who castigates those who allow distractions by beautiful objects and fail to focus on what truly counts?

The power of beauty is already ambiguous in Plato. At times, the beautiful is merely listed as one of the ideas (cf. Phaedo 100b-d), and the similes of the Republic focus on the ‘Good’ as the highest form of all (cf. Republic 506d-509d, 514a-518d). Plato’s reflections on beauty in the Phaedrus and the Symposium, however, underline the great power of beauty. Love is said to be a madness which arises from the contemplation of visible images of beauty (Phaedrus 249d-250c). Plato clearly has in mind visible beauty in the here and now – sight is the ‘brightest of our senses’ (250d) –, and this visible beauty can uplift the soul and lead it back to the recollection of beauty itself. And yet both the Phaedrus and the Symposium show that visible beauty can also attract the beholder without leading him (in Plato’s examples the viewer is always a man) towards the beauty of soul or even to beauty itself; beauty can be distracting. Can we find higher beauty in or through visible beauty? Or do we have to turn our backs to visible beauty and ‘flee’ towards true beauty as the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus (205-270CE) suggests in his treatise On Beauty (I 6 [1] 8, 6-8. Cf. also VI 9 [9] 11, 16-19)?

Suger of St. Denis, the famous abbot who oversaw the reconstruction of St. Denis as the first Gothic church, firmly believed in the uplifting power of beauty. He enlarged the church for liturgical purposes, especially to accommodate larger groups of pilgrims and thus had a very practical aim. But he also made the church brighter (an advantage of the Gothic architecture was to let in more light through larger windows) and filled it with precious objects.

Fig. 1: Light shining through the rose window on the north end of transept arm, St. Denis Cathedral, St. Denis, France

His pride in acquiring these precious objects was palpable, but he did not only want to show off the wealth of his abbey. The beautiful objects clearly affected and uplifted him:

Delight for the beautiful house of God and the splendour of the many coloured gems sometimes made me forget my worldly cares; and devout meditation moved me to reflect on the differences among the holy virtues by directing my attention away from material to immaterial things. I seemed to see myself as if I were dwelling in some strange region of the earth, partly in the filth of the earth, and partly in the purity of heaven, and that I was capable of being transferred, by the gift of God, from this lower realm to a higher one by the anagogical method. (Suger, De administratione, XXXIII, p. 106)

The precious stones he contemplates seem to put Suger into a state of trance and lift him into a vision of an upper realm, between heaven and earth. He is led, as he writes, from the material to the immaterial, and speaks of ‘anagogy’, i.e., of the uplifting power of material beauty.

Figure 2: Interior of the Saint-Denis basilica (north transept)

Suger thus does not see any danger in decorating the church with an abundance of beautiful and precious objects. His main opponent in his times was of course Bernard of Clairvaux who saw beautiful decorations in churches – and especially monasteries – as a pernicious distraction (Apologia ad Guillelmum XII, 915D-916A).

These two positions seem irreconcilable, and every single debate about the decorations of the church, about the usage of images and about display of wealth – and about the usage of music – goes back, in one way or the other, to this central issue: Can beauty guide the beholder to the divine or is it a distraction that should therefore be avoided?

The late antique Christian Neoplatonist Dionysius the Areopagite (early 6^th century CE) certainly believed in the anagogical power of beauty, but his ideas on the uplifting power of beauty differ quite considerably from Suger’s. The thesis, suggested by Otto von Simson (1968) or Erwin Panofsky (1946), that Suger invented the Gothic after having read Dionysius’ metaphysics of light has been rejected by a number of scholars (especially Kidson 1987; Markschies 1995; Speer 1993; Speer 1998). There is some agreement between the two on the uplifting power of beauty, but these ideas can be attributed to common beliefs and are not specific enough to prove direct influence. Furthermore, it is unlikely that Dionysius would approve of Suger’s precious church decorations. The beauty he is interested in is of a very different kind, especially when we do not merely take into account his reflections on beauty in On Divine Names, but the role of beauty in liturgy. The beauty that uplifts does not reside in pictures and precious objects, but in the rites themselves (cf. for instance On Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 64, 4-6; 372B. Cf. Stock 2008, 210-215). Dionysius assumes that the rites themselves are beautiful, and their beauty allows all the members to participate according to their level of initiation and understanding. The participation in the liturgy thus addresses the understanding (on the various levels) and all the senses, and not merely sight and hearing. A common understanding attributes beauty to objects of sight and hearing, but why should we only find beauty in what presents itself to these senses? The liturgy addresses touch – in the form of unctions (ritual application of oil) –, taste (the eating of the bread), and smell (especially the smell of the odorous oil myron). Dionysius thus takes human beings not merely as rational beings, but as embodied beings who have access to the world through more than just the higher senses.

The rite of the myron, which Dionysius discusses in chapter IV of On Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, underlines the importance of the beautiful smell and its effect. The myron is placed upon the altar in a vessel, and it thus becomes a hidden, well-smelling beauty. The contemplation of this hidden beauty, which at the same time is a smelling of it, is meant to have a profound transformative effect on the participants of the rite who in turn form themselves and their own souls in the image of the divine beauty (cf. On Ecclesiastical Hierarchy IV, 95, 23-96,11; 473BC). Smell is a complement to human, limited sight. Sight sees the vessel, but not the myron itself whereas smell has access to the myron in that the radiation of the myron comes to everyone present in the church. The one contemplating the vessel on the altar – symbolising the hidden beauty of God – is then encouraged to act like a painter who attempts to make a good copy of an original. The contemplation of the ‘well-smelling and hidden beauty’ will produce then this beautiful picture, i.e. the similarity and beauty of the soul. The focused and intense participation in the rite has a transformative effect on the participants. Liturgy is seen as effective, and its first workings are very much of this world and within the church.

The effect of beauty Abbot Suger aims for is different. He focuses not on the beauty of the rites themselves, but on decorative objects, on precious stones, gems, and the light of the windows. He shares with the Neoplatonic tradition the understanding of beauty as anagogic, but he has none of the reservations of that tradition so forcefully expressed by his contemporary and opponent Bernard of Clairvaux who thought that visible beauty would distract the viewer and hinder the focus on virtue and God himself.

Bibliography

  Sources

Armstrong, A. Hilary (ed.), Plotinus, Enneads (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press and Heinemann, 1966–1988).

Bernard of Clairvaux, Apologia ad Guillelmum XII, in Patrologia Latina 182.

Cusimano, Richard and Eric Whitmore (eds), Selected Works of Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2018).

Hamilton, Edith and Huntington Cairns (eds), Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961).

Heil, Günter and Adolf Martin Ritter (eds), Corpus Dionysiacum II. De coelesti hierarchia (CH), De ecclesiastica hierarchia, De mystica theologia, Epistulae (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991).

Luibheid, Colm (ed.), Pseudo-Dionysius. 1987. The Complete Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1987).

Suchla, Beate (ed.), Corpus Dionysiacum I. De Divinis Nominibus (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1990).

  Secondary Literature

Kidson, Peter, ‘Panofsky, Suger and St Denis’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 50, 1987, 1–17.

Markschies, Christoph, Gibt es eine “Theologie der gotischen Kathedrale”? (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1995).

Panofsky, Erwin, Abbot Suger: On the Abbey Church of St. Denis and its Art Treasures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946).

Speer, Andreas, ‘Vom Verstehen mittelalterlicher Kunst’, Mittelalterliches Kunsterleben nach Quellen des 11.-13. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Andreas Speer and Günther Binding (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1993), 13–52.

Speer, Andreas, ‘Art as Liturgy: Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis and the Question of Medieval Aesthetics’, Roma, magistra mundi. Itineraria culturae medievalis. Mélanges offerts au Père L. E. Boyle à l’occasion de son 75e anniversaire, ed. by Jacqueline Hamesse (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), 855–875.

Stock, Wiebke-Marie, Theurgisches Denken. Zur Kirchlichen Hierarchie des Dionysius Areopagita (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008).

von Simson, Otto, Die gotische Kathedrale (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968).