All That Stinging Opulence

The Church over the centuries has had a chequered past. In its early years it saw poverty and a share-all community life-style among its members, its only wealth being an overabundance of hungry lions and burning tar. When its fortunes buoyed up, the Church overcompensated; it became infamous for splurging.

The Abbey of St. Denis was in disrepair when Abbot Suger was appointed to office. The building was too small for the masses that crowded inside during feast days, and the walls no longer held their centuries-old glory. Suger decided to rebuild. With great pomp and publication and pride, he tells of his labors in reconstructing. It must have been so difficult for him, all that counting and weighing, remembering––to the very number––just how many marks of gold went into every single panel, counting them out like the loyal lap-dog named Sheriff of Nottingham (similar time period, as well––so perhaps. . . .). Designing it as well must have been a labor on the level of Sysiphus, with the heart-wrenching pain of a saint himself, for he deemed it necessary to write himself into almost every inscription––gold-enameléd, "Great Denis, open the door of Paradise / And protect Suger through thy pious guardianship (Holt, 25)"––as if despite his great work for the kingdom, his dedication to the people so they could see the gold-cast remnants of the saints and collected golden treasures that the monks guarded with wary eyes (as if they were like those wary Greeks he had once met): it was if Suger was afraid for his soul.

Bernard of Clairvaux on the other hand, from the excerpt here included, did not spare a thought to pray for his soul on any ornate monument. In fact, he condemned them. "The church is resplendent in her walls, beggarly in her poor; she clothes her stones in gold, and she leaves her sons naked. . . . The curious find their delight here, the expense of the indigent. [emphasis mine] (20)" The initial intent of gilding had gone awry in the execution. The poor, during the sermons, were distracted from the content by the glitz all around them. Just a pinch of gold-dust could feed them for a winter, and leave just a tiny hole in the fabric of a painting––so why not give it to them, and not slather it on the walls and hang it from the ceilings in lavish candelabras in the first place?

Suger intended his paper trail to be a treatise, a historical account of the rebuilding of the Abbey of St. Denis. Bernard of St. Clairvaux was too polite, too much the monk, to be vituperative, but surely  behind his letter to a comrade, he raged at the injustice. Their conception of their shared religion is also at odds. Suger, when he looks at and ponders his glorious jewels, is transported to some other "region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven (30)." He is either on some sort of drug wafting up from the gold flake brought in by his craftsmen (from one of those many, many far spread regions he keeps mentioning) or will one day exist in Limbo. Bernard of Clairvaux, however, looks everywhere but the jewels, and is not dazzled. He sees the masses as they "spit oftentimes in the Angel's faces; often, again, the countenances of some Saint is ground under the heel of a passer-by (20,21)." There is no effect of jewels on them and the lower monks but of bitterness and bile.

This has been a debate of centuries: opulence or frugality. It continues now, even outside of Catholicism, and religion even. Perhaps, to Bernard's argument, with a vague glint in his eye, Abbot Suger would say, pointing to the clouds: "But we must aim higher, aim to improve them! Excelsior!" And to that, Bernard of Clairvaux would shake his head, point to the poor, and then to Longfellow's poem itself, and say: "That did not end well in the first place."






Holt, Elizabeth Gilmore, A Documentary History of Art, Vol. 1. New Jersey: Princeton. 1981. Print.