Suger wrote inscriptions for his abbey windows to make their symbolism clearer. Owing to the vicissitudes of seven hundred years, few of the St. Denis lights have survived. Four are now reset in the central apse chapel and in that to its north. In a medallion at the base of one of these windows Suger himself is represented holding a scroll bearing his name. The medallion figures are of the hieratic Byzantine type. Every window has a closely woven pattern; each losenge has its own border, and a rich jeweled border surrounds the whole lancet. Bracing bars of iron run straight across the pictured story. Slowly, with infinite patience, worked those old XII-century artists, and never has their handicraft been surpassed as sheer splendor of ornamentation.
After three years and three months of passionate work, the choir of St. Denis was finished, and on June 11, 1144, the dedication day, the relics were installed. That date, forever memorable in the annals of architecture, may be called the consecration of the national art. At the ceremony assisted Louis VII with his queen, Aliénor of Aquitaine, whose strange destiny was to make her patroness of that entirely different phase of Gothic called the Plantagenet school. The chief barons were present at the dedication, as well as five archbishops and some fourteen bishops. They looked and wondered, and not a few of them returned home to imitate. The bishops of Noyon and Senlis hastened to rebuild their cathedrals in the new way, and some of Suger’s masons passed into the service of the former prelate. Bishop Geoffrey de Lèves went back to Chartres to build the most beautiful tower in the world, and the sculptors who had made Suger’s western portals (now no longer extant) worked on the three west doors of Chartres.
On the day of St. Denis’ dedication, Abbot Suger, small and frail in person, but towering in personality, was honored on every side. When the abbot of great Cluny, Peter the Venerable, passed from the marvels of the new church to Suger’s narrow cell, he cried out in honest distress: “This man condemns us all. He builds, not for himself, but for God alone!”
Though the last half of Suger’s life was an example of monastic simplicity, not always had he been content with a monk’s cell. Perhaps because of his conversion midway in life, he appeals to us in a more human way. Not that he was converted from evil doings; his purpose always was high. But in his position as St. Denis’ abbot, as a powerful feudal lord, he lived sumptuously, according to the accepted standards of the time. He mixed freely in the world; he directed state affairs for the king to whom he was devoted; he went on embassies; he even led armies. In 1124, when an irate German emperor was marching on Rheims, which he had vowed to destroy, Suger in person led against him some ten thousand of his abbey’s retainers. That was the first time the oriflamme of St. Denis was carried as the national emblem.[32] Suger had grown up in the secular atmosphere of the Royal Abbey, and took its worldliness as a matter of course.
Of peasant parentage himself, he had been brought, a child of ten, to live with the monks, because he already showed exceptional qualities. Among his fellow students in the abbey school was the king’s son, the future Louis VI, and an intimacy began between the two lads destined to continue till death. When Suger became a monk he was sent on notable missions, for he was gifted with tact and good manners, vivacity and charm. Sweetness of disposition, mental energy, courage, and absolute integrity won for him general esteem. Early and often this born lover of things beautiful made the journey into Italy. It was while returning from one of his missions there, in 1122, that he learned of his election as abbot by his fellow monks in St. Denis. Louis VI had come to the throne; henceforth Suger was to lead in all state affairs.
The genius of this son of field workers had pierced to the vital need of the age—unity of government. Only a strong, central administration could cope with the disintegration which was feudalism. For its very existence the feudal system depended on the absence of well-enforced general laws. It was Suger’s strong hand that guided the early steps toward national unity, and king and people worked for it together. Under the king whom Suger served France began her great role of redresser of wrongs. Louis VI was the first to use the title, king of France, not king of the Franks. The ideal of this XII-century statesman was a strong central monarchy, coexistent with a national assembly. His high conception of solidarity was to fructify, within a hundred years, under Philippe-Auguste, the grandson of Suger’s master.
Suger was one of the first in Europe to understand political economy. He laid the base of a sound financial administration. His confirmation of a charter for the townsmen of St. Denis gave security to trade; he relieved the abbey serfs of mainmorte, built a Villeneuve for homeless nomads, and found time to study agriculture scientifically. In his writings we feel the first breath of a national patriotism. A new note in that age of unfettered personal impulse when might meant right, was Suger’s constant reference to “the poor weighed down with taxations,” to “that which has been too long neglected, the care of the surety of laborers, of artisans, and of the poor.” Many a modern politician could well ponder Suger’s censure of the spoils system. “The officers dismissed carry off what they can lay their hands on,” he said, “and those who replace them, fearing to be likewise treated, hasten to steal, to secure their fortune.”
Suger’s pre-eminence in public affairs continued during two reigns. Louis VII, after stumbling some years without guidance, turned to his father’s counselor and, during his absence on the Second Crusade, appointed him regent of France. So masterly was the abbot’s rule that king and people publicly proclaimed him Père de la Patrie. Suger studied the causes of the crusade’s lamentable failure; he felt that forethought and prudence might win success, and, though he was seventy years of age, he began preparations to carry out a crusade at his own expense. Time was not given him again to prove his genius for leadership. When news of his death (1151) reached the court, the king and the Grand Master of the Templars, who was with him, burst into tears. On his grave in the abbey church which he had built they cut the simple inscription, “Here lies Abbot Suger.” No need of panegyric. “The single names are the noblest epitaphs.”
The commanding place held by this monk in the estimation of Europe is vouched for by letters from pope, kings, and many a dignitary. The king of Sicily wrote to beg a line from him; the king of Scotland sent gifts; the bishop of Salisbury made the journey to France expressly to know Suger. By one clear stroke after another—and above all by his own writings—every line of which is of historical value—the picture is filled in of this admirable churchman who was as soundly honest and forceful as the architecture he fostered, and whose delicate, ardent soul accomplished remarkable things with the reasoned orderliness of the art he loved.
Suger’s sudden but thorough conversion is attributed to St. Bernard. Up to middle life he had been a type of those who soar as high as human abilities can reach without super natural aid. Entangled in the mesh of various employments, his soul could not rise to heavenly things. Then the trumpet of Bernard’s reform sounded in Europe. Men’s hearts were set on fire with repentance and aspiration toward the highest. Bernard’s clear eyes read beneath the outer circumstance of Abbot Suger’s life. He saw that here was a good man, capable of becoming a holy one. He wrote fearless words of disapproval. “One would think it was a governor of a province, not of souls,” he wrote, when he saw the abbot of St. Denis ride by with sixty horsemen.