Pseudo-Dionysius' Metaphysics of Darkness and Chartres

Cathedral Laurence J. James

    It is a given among art historians that Abbot Suger of St. Denis Abbey, just outside Paris, was a seminal figure for Gothic art and architecture.1 Most would agree with the late Erwin Panofsky that Suger translated the light metaphysics of Pseudo-Dionysius and Johannes Scotus into the abbey church,2 and that the church had many imitators all over France.

    Abbot Suger left us poems by which his intention [to do what Panofsky says he did] can be established.3 However, it seems to have passed notice that what one intends and what one accomplishes are often quite different things. Anyone who has been to St. Denis Abbey church knows that most of the light in the sanctuary is dependent upon the clerestory windows, which were not set in until the 13th century. In other words, if Suger was father to the idea4 which culminates in lantern churches, the idea comes round again, after his death, to produce what his words suggest; but what his words suggest did not exist, could not have existed, in the monument during his lifetime.

    There is a danger in taking any one feature of a given age and attempting to maintain that the feature is characteristic or typical of the whole. There was, after all, a certain light metaphysics in Christian thought since the Gospel according to St. John. And, whatever light's value as a symbol, it is

    Pseudo-Dionysius was introduced to the West in the 6th Century.6 Pope St. Martin honored him at the synod of the Lateran, in 649,7 and his writings came to be venerated as sacred.8 In the course of time, Pseudo-Dionysius was associated with St. Denis, the founder of the Gallic Church.9 Sometime between 830 and 835, Abbot Hilduin of St. Denis caused the Vita Dionysii to be written in such a way as to "prove" that St. Denis and St. Dionysius the Areopagite were the same man.10 It became a crime the equivalent to treason to deny it in France. Dionysius the Areopagite was probably a fifth century Syrian monk whose work is little more than "a superficially Christianized version of Proclus."11

    Despite their great influence, Dionysius' works are few; what he said about aesthetics can be put into even fewer paragraphs. His longest statement is from On the Divine Names, chapter IV, paragraph 7, quoted here in toto:

This Good is described by the Sacred Writers as Beautiful and as Beauty, as Love or Beloved, and by all other Divine titles which befit Its beautifying and gracious fairness. Now there is a distinction between the titles "beautiful" and "Beauty" applied to the all-embracing Cause. For we universally distinguish these two titles as meaning respectively the qualities shared and the objects which share therein. We give the

    Dionysius characteristically speaks as a dedicated, deliberate obscurantist, which leaves what he says open to various interpretations. For example, he speaks of Non-existence as being beautiful and good "when, by the Negation of all Attributes, it is ascribed Super-Essentially to God "and this Non-existence is a higher state than that which is reflected in the light of material things.

    Given the monistic aesthetic system which Dionysius established in the foregoing, it would be difficult to have imitative art, since

    Though the Beautiful/Good is an impersonal principle, we are nevertheless to see Dionysius (who may have been a Monophysite) as "Christian." In his system of thought, the Beautiful/Good can reveal Itself to whomever It will. If, therefore, Dionysius was a Monophysite, it would be strange that he could think of making an image of God-as-Christ; nevertheless, using Dionysian thought, it is possible, whether he did or not, and:

... in sensible images, if the painter looks without interruption at the archetypal form, neither distracted by any other visible thing or splitting his attention toward anything else, then he will, so to speak, duplicate the person painted, and will show the true in the similitude, the archetype in the image, the one in the other, except for their different essences (or natures)."13

    It is this that gives the Byzantine aesthetic system a foundation; such statements as this were gratefully received by the Eastern Church, as a means of bolstering the veneration of icons.

    In the disputed Epistle X, Dionysius says: "... visible things are images of

    It is true that in the Middle Ages various western thinkers held light to be an attribute of God, and a sign of His working, because light, like God, can penetrate substances without breaking them.16 Hence, what is called the lux continua of Gothic architecture is a conscious control of the condition, quality, and distribution of light within Gothic structures, to give interiors a distinctive ethos. However, that "continuous light" does not exist in all Gothic churches.

    Gothic churches in France, with the notable exception of the preaching churches of the Cistercians, were basically the same. They consist of ribbed vaults, stained glass windows, pierced walls so high they require buttressing, and the chevet.17

    The flying buttresses are not mere aesthetic inventions; they may be looked upon as sculptural only in their decorative rib quality; their purpose was to take the stress of walls raised very high to permit huge windows, to admit more and more light. That is why the High Gothic lantern churches are seen as the culmination of the form-class begun by attempting to recreate Dionysian light metaphysics in architectural monuments. In lantern churches the walls are virtually eradicated.

    It should not be supposed that a linked solution to a problem necessarily signifies the same answer. Emile Male, the French art historian, said all French cathedrals, except Chartres, "seemed intended to throw into relief some particular truth or doctrine ... "18 Chartres, he said, is "the whole thought of the Middle Ages made visible."19 There are estimated to be 10,000 statues outside the cathedral. That is all the more remarkable when one sees the interior which is barren, except for the aesthetically out-of-place Baroque altar. And, while some speak of the "brilliance of Chartres,"20 that brilliance resides high up in the clerestories, where pencil-width edges of light-bearing glass sparkle in the gloom. In the nave itself, there is what has been called "a somber twilight."21

    This twilight creates a relative myopia, which lasts for at least an hour after one has come inside. One can make things out, but not distinctly. What light there is, is strained through the famous cobalt blue and red windows, colors which, curiously enough, give the least visual acuity.22

    Like other cathedrals', the windows at Chartres are enormous, and consist of twin lancets surmounted by an elaborate rose. There may be more than one hundred and forty-three windows all told, each forty-feet high;23 and though this form is repeated at Amiens, Paris, Auxerre, Reims, and Ourscamp,24 and though the ground plan at Chartres has no closer proximity to a standard plan than the cathedrals of Paris and Reims,25 the same effects are not obtained in the other

    We know that the schemata for cathedrals was worked out by theologians, and that the majority of Gothic theologians held (with Dionysius the Areopagite) that the Ineffable can be expressed in concrete form. However, at Chartres, there developed a brand of hybrid Platonism which characterized human understanding and truth in such a way that it became difficult to distinguish between a mystical experience and an intellectual perception.27

    If intellectual perceptions and mystical experience become indistinguishable, one can live in the mind, and thereby experience God. Dionysius may also be the source for this. In Mystical Theology II.1, he speaks of rising to that Void, where God is utterly Alone, as

... ascending upwards from particular to universal conceptions, we strip off all qualities in order that we may attain a naked knowledge of the Unknowing ... that we may begin to see that super-essential Darkness which is hidden by the light that is in existent things.28

    There is an interesting reference in one of the sermons of John of Salisbury, bishop of Chartres from 1176 until his death in 1180, in which he speaks against those Scholastics who

    Mystical Theology II.1 begins by saying:

Unto this darkness which is beyond Light, we pray that we may come and may attain unto vision through the loss of sight and knowledge, and that in ceasing thus to see or to know that is beyond all perception and all understanding (for this emptying of our faculties is true sight and true knowledge) and that we may offer Him that which transcends all things the praises of a transcendent hymnody....31

    That is: giving up sight and knowing physical realities, or things of this world, we rise (intellectually? spiritually?) to the plane of Darkness where God is Alone, where subject and object disappear,32 as we become like God:

... in proper truth we do but use the elements and syllables and phrases and written terms and words as an aid to our sense; inasmuch as when our soul is moved by spiritual energies unto spiritual things, our

    What we perceive, even at that level of existence, is not God, Who is similar to Himself and to nothing else, but the greatest possible similitude. And what is the difference between "seeing" the Rays of unapproachable Light, while locked in the blind embraces of the union with them, and being on that plane of super-essential divine Darkness which is hidden by the meritricious gaudiness of the lights of created things? None. One is rendered sightless by both. The two concepts are used complementarily. What we perceive is not God, but His effects: Rays of light in the first instance, and the thick Darkness-Beyond-Being in the second.

    Extramission, Plato's theory of optics,34 is the source of Dionysian light metaphysics; but the light of physical things hides God from us, as we have seen. By shedding that light, we can rise to that Darkness where God is Alone.

    If the theologians at Chartres were attracted to the notion that there is no difference between mystical experience and intellectual perception, does it not seem likely that they would have tried to find a way to make that mystical experience and the material world of their cathedral merge? Since they chose to use glass which gives the least visual acuity, and since they could have had clear

    It could be analogous to the stripping away of the senses that Dionysius discusses. However, there is another possibility, which is to be found in examining the windows themselves, the only source of what little light is admitted into the cathedral at Chartres.

    Of the sixteen twin lancet formations, eight rosettes show an image of Christ, blessing. He appears in two of the windows in exactly identical form.35 Since the rosettes themselves are symbolic of the Virgin Mary, does it not seem possible that Christ is to be seen as literally within His Mother's symbol; or to put it another way: Christ is symbolically present within His mother, not yet born.

    The cathedral itself has nine doors, three on the west, three on the north, and three on the south, or three times three, a mystical number signifying perfection. Hence, what one enters at Chartres is an earthly example of the Heavenly Jerusalem. From the time of Fulbert, in the llth century, scholars of Chartres identified the Heavenly Jerusalem as the Bride of Christ, whom they regarded as the Virgin Mary.36

    Therefore, it is possible to interpret the interior of Chartres' cathedral as the interior of the Virgin herself, the womb of the Mother of God. The light which falls into that space,

    Millard Meiss, in discussing paintings of the Northern Renaissance painter Jan van Eyck, gives a similar interpretation.37 He describes van Eyck's painting The Virgin in the Church as the first document we possess other than the buildings themselves, by which we can demonstrate "the actual appearance of a Gothic cathedral."38 The difficulty, of course, was to show the coloristic darkness as well as the elements of the architecture. How could one have the darkness, and show the building?

    In The Virgin in the Church, there is no stained glass. However, the nave of the church is in unrelieved gloom. The Virgin is shown as a hieratic form; the infant Jesus is shown as an embryonic figure, ill-formed. Behind the Virgin, there are two pools of light. Meiss has demonstrated that those two pools of light are intended to be symbolical references to the two natures of Christ, God and Man. In 1499 a copyist "corrected" Van Eyck, by painting in stained glass windows, to give a reason for the gloom, but he did away with the two pools of light. Jan Gossart made a copy. He also removed the light pools, but he shows two lighted candles at the entrance to the rood screen; thus, while he may not have understood the meaning of the two lights, he restored the symbols.

    Van Eyck created a conscious retardaire, a copy of something from another age; in it, he creates an archeologically correct version of a thirteenth century statue of the Virgin.39

    Can we conclusively demonstrate that what Van Eyck saw and what you are being asked to see at Chartres are the same thing? Unfortunately, we cannot. We can only raise possibilities, not probabilities. However, res ipsa loquitur is a principle recognized in law. That neither the paintings nor the cathedral have a continuous light, that the light in the paintings is a demonstration of the theological Principles of the artist and the same is true at the cathedral, that the darkness in the paintings is intentional and is doubtless so at the cathedral, since it has been possible to make changes to allow more light to enter at any time since the 13th century40 since both the paintings and the cathedral are barren, except for the light which is shining in darkness, there are enough similarities to gain a conviction, if only on circumstantial evidence.

    Appearance is not to be dismissed as subjective. Whatever the cathedral's symbolic reference, since one cannot distinctly see anything within the cathedral at Chartres for the length of a mass, and apparently one is not intended to see clearly, the scholastics at

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