We have seen how the problem of roofing churches in stone caused the evolution from Romanesque to Gothic art. Burgundy’s struggle to achieve a permanent stone roof was bolder than that of other regional schools in France, and perhaps it was overhardy, since her abbatials, in Gothic times, had to be buttressed to keep them standing. Though the Burgundian discarded too early the Romanesque principle of equilibrium by dead load, his temerity was a step forward in the march toward new principles of construction. These monks on Europe’s highway made churches of ample width and height, and, rather than sacrifice their proper lighting, opened windows in the upper walls of the central vessel. However, they must have felt that their clearstory windows were an experiment, for they essayed, occasionally, an embryo flying buttress, keeping it hidden under the lean-to roof of the aisles.
The militant Romanesque school of Burgundy was too well developed for it to bow instantly before the new art. Not here did the generating member of Gothic architecture first come into common usage, but in that region of northern France whose pre-Gothic school was of less importance. The Burgundian clung stubbornly to his early ways of building, and even after other provinces had accepted the ogival style he erected thoroughly Romanesque churches; St. Philibert at Dijon is the contemporary of the cathedrals at Chartres and Paris. Flying buttresses at no time found favor in Burgundy. Groin vaults were persisted in simultaneously with diagonals, and the sexpartite vault used long after the north had dropped it. Firm plain profiles for archivolts and window molds were preferred.
Once the Burgundian frankly accepted the new system, his bold genius led him to push its principles to their limit. Within the confines of the duchy were the quarries of hard Tonnerre stone that permitted audacious experiments in building. He dared traverse his exterior buttresses by circulation passages, he dared catch his heavily weighted diagonals on corbels (carved with original heads), and to poise a mass of material on the slenderest of colonnettes. Often he surmounted his triforium by a passage that passed directly through the active wall shafts, as in cathedrals of Auxerre, Nevers, and Semur. By the middle of the XIII century Dijon achieved a marvel of Gothic technique in its church of Notre Dame. Despite much notable Gothic work one is inclined, none the less, to maintain that Burgundy found her fullest expression in her earlier monastic churches. Alas, that the greatest of them, Cluny, should to-day be but the phantom of its once colossal self!
CLUNY[270]
Time will be ending soon, heaven will be rending soon, fast we and pray we: Comes the most merciful; comes the most terrible; watch we while may we.
—Bernard de Morlaix, “Jerusalem the Golden”[271] (c. 1140).
The “mother abbey of Europe” lies in a fertile valley some fifteen miles off the express route that passes through Mâcon. The property was given to the monks by a duke of Aquitaine, who thus anathematized future despoilers: “I conjure you O holy Apostles Peter and Paul, to cut off from life eternal all robbers, invaders, or sellers of that which I herewith donate with full satisfaction and entire free will.”
When Cluny was founded in 910, the victory of Christianity over the Barbarians still hung in the balance. It was Cluny that weighed down the scale for justice and progress, Cluny that gave to Rome the needed reforming popes. Hers should be a name as honored in humanity’s history as Athens: “We leave college,” wrote Montalembert, “able to cite the list of Jupiter’s mistresses, but ignorant, even to their names, of the founders of the religious Orders that civilized Europe.” And the testimony of the Protestant Leibnitz is: “Without monks we should have no erudition, for it is certain that we owe to monasteries the preservation of letters and books.” Four of the best among the popes came out of Cluny’s cloister: Gregory VII, Urban II, Paschal II, and Urban V.
The modern French school of mediæval archæology, delving into the past, has drawn Cluny from its long oblivion. In 1910 was celebrated with national honors the millennium of the Burgundian “abbey of abbeys,” and to the festival the French Academy sent M. René Bazin as its representative to voice the gratitude of French letters to the “great Order of Cluny which in the France of the Middle Ages exercised in its plenitude the mission of civilizer, apostle of the Gospel, apostle of peace, guardian of the whole field of knowledge, founder then, of all works of charity, initiator of both literary and agricultural progress, creator of an art which she spread over Europe.”