How France Built Her Cathedrals Part 28

--Frederic Mistral, at the _Jeux Floraux_ of Toulouse, 1879.[224]

If the influence of both the north and the south is felt at Bordeaux, the unadulterated Midi reigns at Toulouse. It is eminently the capital city of this fertile Languedoc, where art and luxury developed precociously in the earlier periods of the Middle Ages. Here the troubadour still sings in the regional tongue which might to-day be the speech of France (instead of a dialect) had a genius such as Dante written in the _langue d'oc_, the most gracious form of the Romance language. It is spoken in Aragon and Catalonia--lands where the architectural development followed the same trend as that of French Languedoc.

Modern Toulouse is not a handsome city like the Bordeaux of to-day. Its most imposing church is not its cathedral of St. etienne, which is as ungainly outside as it is irregular within. The nave and choir make no pretense of following the same axis line, since they never were intended to form one edifice; were the north wall of the nave extended down through the choir, it would abut on the high altar.

The nave is of enormous span like that of Bordeaux Cathedral. It once had side aisles, but the entire width of the edifice was thrown into one hall when the church was remodeled in 1211. Simon de Montfort (whom Mistral, as a patriotic son of the Midi, refuses even to name in his verses) was besieging the city while the Angevin vaults of its cathedral were building, and Count Raymond VI of Toulouse ordered that the works should continue, war or no war.

The choir of Toulouse Cathedral belongs to the same current of northern Gothic that produced Clermont, Limoges, and Narbonne. Begun in 1275, it was inspired directly by Narbonne Cathedral, whose foundation stone was laid in 1273. The plan is of the north, but the feeling is meridional.

After the death of the wealthy Bishop Bernard de Lille, the founder, the chapter had not sufficient funds to continue building on the same ambitious scale. Only in the XV century was the triforium level reached, and it was not until the XVII century that the masonry roof was added.

Even then it was so skimped that the exterior aspect of the choir is deplorable. At St. etienne there seemed to be a fatality against symmetry. When all hope was given up of replacing the Romanesque nave by one of the same character as the choir, it was decided to make its entrance more important; but instead of setting the new Flamboyant portal in the center of the west facade, it was placed to one side. The window dedicated to two sons of the Midi, St. Roch and St. Sebastian, is attributed to Arnaud de Moles who made the celebrated Creation, prophets, and sibyls of Auch Cathedral. Some of the grisaille in St.

etienne came from the Jacobins.

There are few church interiors in Europe more stately and unique than that of the brick abbatial in Toulouse, called the Jacobins', a name given the Dominicans because their Paris convent was in the rue St.

Jacques. The house of wisdom is founded on seven pillars, Scripture tells us.[225] So the Friars Preachers planted directly down the center of their lofty hall church seven columnar piers that soar to an enormous height. The easternmost one is set in the middle of the apse and on it fall some fourteen ribs. The vault arches of white stone against the red brick infilling are of striking effect. No mediaeval pillars--save those of the late-Gothic church of St. Nicolas-du-Port near Nancy--are higher than the seven giants of Toulouse. In the desecration of the edifice after the Revolution, its pavement was covered with soil, for the stabling of horses, but within the last ten years excavations have exposed the true bases of the piers.

The Jacobins' church was founded in 1229 by a rich citizen and his wife, who had vowed to devote a large portion of their fortune to G.o.d's service, should their only daughter recover from a desperate illness.

The edifice, constructed with an audacious ma.s.siveness, as if for eternity, has been allowed to fall into general decay, and now appears more desolate than would a ruin of stone. Like alien images, gargoyles protrude forlornly from the red brick walls, so inconsistent is brick with the true Gothic spirit. The Midi was too wedded to cla.s.sic traditions to excel in the national art, which it never took completely to its heart. There is little of the ogival style about these narrow loophole windows, these diagonals unbraced by flying b.u.t.tresses. Gothic in the south has an accidental aspect.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Jacobins', or Dominicans', Church at Toulouse_

(_XIII Century_)]

To the greatest of Dominican churches the Avignon pope, Urban V, who covered the Midi with his monuments, gave the body of St. Thomas Aquinas, greatest of Dominican doctors. It was saved when the Jacobins were sacked in 1562, and is now in St. Sernin, whose collection of authentic relics is the richest in France--and some say in Europe.

Toulouse also had a Franciscan brick church, whose wall bordered on the city ramparts, so that pa.s.sages of defense were thrown from b.u.t.tress to b.u.t.tress. That church of the Cordeliers (rich with memories of St.

Anthony of Padua) was burned in 1870, and its lovely XV-century cloister now forms part of the Museum that is housed in the former convent of the Augustinians. The graceful octagonal brick tower of the Cordeliers,[226]

saved from the wreckage, was modeled on that of the Jacobins', just as the Jacobins' tower, in lessening stories, was designed probably by the architect who made the top stories of St. Sernin's beacon. Artists have preferred the Jacobins' belfry to its prototype.

The paucity of stone in the province caused the creation of a school of brick architecture of which Toulouse was the center. One may prefer a stone architecture, but one cannot deny the lovely tones of brown and crimson madder acquired in time by these brick monuments of the Midi that seem created especially for resistance and long duration.

Not the cathedral of Toulouse, but its monastic brick church of St.

Sernin, is the supreme religious monument of the city and the grandest Romanesque edifice in France. Its date has been discussed by MM. de Lasteyrie, Corroyer, Saint-Paul, and Jules de Lahondes. In the last quarter of the XI century the monks began the choir of the present church, which combined the characteristics of the Romanesque schools of Burgundy and Auvergne. Those influences had pa.s.sed south by way of Conques, where the abbatial of Ste. Foi had been rebuilt a generation before St. Sernin. In 1083 Cluny monks replaced at St. Sernin the canons regular, and where Cluny reformed, building activities usually followed.

While the Toulouse monastery church was rising, its selfsame plan appeared in the northeast corner of Spain in the cathedral of Santiago Compostela, begun in 1082, too direct a copy to have been done by any but St. Sernin's own architect or his favorite pupil. In Spain the works went faster, so that Santiago Cathedral was completed long before the abbatial at Toulouse, and, being constructed in stone, its interior has not been marred by centuries of whitewashing.

"The entry of Urban II into Toulouse" is pictured by Benjamin Constant in the Museum. In 1096, on his journey through France, preaching the First Crusade, he blessed the unfinished choir and transept of St.

Sernin. The aisles around the transept form the most imposing part of the church. As the XI century closed, the transept was continued and the nave begun under the direction of a monk-builder, St. Raymond Gaynard, a man of wealth before entering the cloister. He conceived the masterly plan of five aisles. The side aisles were covered by a quarter-barrel vaulting that serves the purpose of a continuous flying b.u.t.tress.

Perhaps it was when the original architect of St. Sernin had proceeded to Santiago Compostela that St. Raymond became master-of-works at Toulouse. In 1119, a year after his death, another pontiff, Calixtus II, blessed St. Sernin.

From 1120 to 1140 was made the south portal, which const.i.tutes, with Moissac's[227] portal and cloister, the chief works extant of the Languedoc school of sculpture. That school needs a competent biographer who will do for it what M. Paul Vitry has done for the Region-of-the-Loire school, and MM. de Va.s.selot and Koechlin for the imagery of southern Champagne.[228] The high-water mark of the regions'

sculpture was attained in the Annunciation group at Moissac, whose ethereal elongated figures in clinging draperies rouse the imagination.

The monks of Moissac, being Cluniac and not Cistercian, found imagery profitable to their souls. What were Bernard's thoughts as he gazed at their haunting rendering of the Incarnation?

Puritan Bernard thundered against the bizarre grotesques carved in cloisters. Up to 1140 they were popular, since the untrained stonecutters found it easier to make a caricature than an image true to nature. The invasions of the Barbarians had wiped out the sculptor's art, and the men of the XI century had to rediscover it. While St.

Bernard sojourned in Toulouse he lived in St. Sernin's monastery, a Cluniac house, and it is probable that he paused with the monks at Moissac on the memorable journey he made into Languedoc to combat the fast-spreading dualist heresy of the Catharists. He was accompanied by Bishop Geoffrey de Leves of Chartres, the builder of the most beautiful tower in the world. Surely those enlightened men mused with spiritual benefit before the _Ecce ancilla Domini_ at Moissac? But one very much doubts if Bernard could have approved of four hundred carven capitals in the abbatial at Toulouse.

Slowly the making of St. Sernin's nave advanced. At first it was built story by story, but later the more usual procedure of bay by bay was adopted. In 1217, from the roof of St. Sernin, the stone was thrown that killed Simon de Montfort, who was besieging Toulouse. To the end of time a character such as his will rouse both enthusiasm and detestation. His personal morals were exemplary, his own troops adored him. The leading men of Christendom regarded him as an instrument of Heaven and right progress. The Midi execrated him, and does to this day, even as Ireland execrates Cromwell, whom good Puritans consider a hero, for the religious psychology of those two born leaders was curiously alike. With G.o.d's name on their lips their troops felt righteous in butchering.

With the death of Simon de Montfort the Albigensian wars changed in character. Simon's son, Amaury de Montfort, was incapable of retaining the princ.i.p.ality won by his father's sword, so he sensibly pa.s.sed over his claims to the king of France. The struggle henceforth was purely political. Blanche of Castile's wise head solved the Midi tangle when she married her son Alphonse of Poitiers to the heiress of the Count of Toulouse, with the understanding that, should the young people die childless, Languedoc fell to the French Crown. Alphonse gave the Midi, says Molinier, the first intelligent administration it had received since the better times of the Roman Empire. When he and his wife died, returning from St. Louis' fatal crusade of 1270, the great southern land became a part of France.

The Albigensian wars--for with reluctance one calls those years of bitter strife a crusade--delayed the completion of St. Sernin, whose main facade is gaunt and bare, and whose westernmost windows lack stone cas.e.m.e.nts. When the Midi came under French rule the monks attained sufficient prosperity to erect the octagonal tower in five stories--each of lesser dimensions than the one below it. The upper stories used the miter arch so suited to brick. M. Enlart has called attention to the affinity of the _clochers Toulousans_ and the Lombard steeples. At present the underpinning of the tower obstructs the transept-crossing, but propping is better than demolition, which is what M. Viollet-le-Duc proposed in his blind enthusiasm for unity of style. The townspeople indignantly protested and the supreme beacon of this patroness city of art was saved.

A proud boast of Toulouse is that the first Dominican monastery was established there, and by Dominic himself, the saint whom Dante called "the messenger and familiar of Christ."[229] The Friars Preachers, like the Franciscans (who, because of a new appreciation of their founder's character, are found sympathetic by many who still call a Dominican a "b.l.o.o.d.y sort of monk"), were agents for the quickening of the religious fervor of the XIII century. Both Orders were protests against abuses such as luxury, love of gold, and selfish privilege, which feudalism had helped to foster in the clergy.

Dominic de Guzman was a Castilian gentleman, a trained scholar, a man whose luminous face won instant affection and respect. In the first years of the XIII century he came north with the bishop of Osma on a diplomatic mission relating to a royal marriage. As those two good men journeyed through Languedoc amid the fearful havoc wrought by heresy, the vocation of the younger priest took shape. Returning from Italy in 1206, he and the bishop of Osma laid aside pomp and comforts to evangelize according to primitive Christianity. Only too clear was it to them that heresy was fed by the unworthy priesthood of the Midi that had lost the people's esteem. Two generations earlier St. Bernard had lamented over the same evil. Innocent III rebuked the worldling prelate of Bordeaux, and asked the bishop of Narbonne if he had a purse in place of a heart. After ten years' heroic missionizing both before and during the Albigensian Crusade, Dominic won papal sanction for his new Order in 1216. He was then a man of forty-seven. When he died, at Bologna in 1221, he left flourishing houses all over Christendom.

The function of his Friars was to teach again Christian doctrine in its purity; hence it was only natural, when the Inquisition[230] was founded, after the death of Dominic, that it should be intrusted to such trained theologians. They were to be a kind of jury to ascertain whether a case was heretical; if it was so decided, then the civic authorities stepped in and took action, since heresy was a state offense.

The best minds of that day held the theory that the decline of religion was a menace to law and order. The violent repression of heresy to prevent the dissolution of society seemed then as necessary as the repression of anarchy seems to-day. It had not always been so. "Slay error, but always love the man who errs," was St. Augustine's maxim. St.

Ambrose and St. Hilary reprobated physical violence toward heretics.

Gregory VII had protested against the "impious cruelty" which had burned a man of Cambrai for heresy. "Heretics are to be taken by force of arguments, not by force of arms," said the vehement St. Bernard himself on one occasion. Gradually a different outlook had taken possession of men's minds, a change of view that was to cost the Church dear. Crusades against the infidel were on every side, in the Orient, in the Balkans, in Spain. When heresy took on so alien and perverse an aspect as the Catharist errors, which were at root the negation of Christian standards and a veritable antisocial menace, it needed but an incident to start a crusade against heretics in France.

It should not be forgotten that had the Albigensians won the victory, the south of France would have been placed outside the pale of western civilization as effectively as was southern Spain under Moslem rule. Had the Midi wars been conducted by civil authority many a partisan of to-day would not hold them up as exceptional horrors, but, since all the thinking of the Middle Ages was expressed in religious form, unfortunately the term "crusade" was used for the embittered struggle in the south.

THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE[231]

La verite n'est point a nous, nous n'en sommes que les temoins, les defenseurs, et les depositaires.--Ma.s.sILLON.

So interwoven is the architectural story of Languedoc with the Albigensian Crusade that to find the underlying significance of the southern monuments it is needful to comprehend the trend of thought of the Midi people. We have the unbroken testimony of five hundred years as to what were the tenets of Catharism, the final form taken by the Manichean heresy. They held that two principles, one good and one evil, ruled the universe. In the third century Manes in Persia had woven a curious tissue of beliefs, largely Zoroastrian with a tinge of Buddhism, and had coated it all with a thin veneer of Christianity of the gnostic type. The dualist idea and a complete rejection of the Old Testament were leading Manichean doctrines. Manes was put to death in Persia, but his teachings lingered on in the Orient, and after seven centuries crept into Europe by way of the Slav countries of the Balkans. Without a doubt, the intercourse of Europe with the Orient, through the crusades, fostered the gnostic superst.i.tions. The dualist heresy cropped out in the north of France, but after the XII century was confined more or less to Languedoc, where the Visigoths' Arian beliefs had prepared the soil.

From the XI to the XIII century these neo-Manicheans were called Catharists. The local name Albigensian came into usage because in the region round Albi, though not especially in that city itself, the new ideas flourished. Toulouse was the heretic's stronghold.

It has always seemed illogical that many Protestants who revere the Bible should be sympathetic toward the Midi heretics who reprobated the Jehovah of the Old Testament as a vindictive a.s.sa.s.sin, the creator of this the visible world, which is h.e.l.l. Life is a nightmare, they taught, and suicide a virtue. Moses was sorcerer and thief (and the Ten Commandments?). John the Baptist was a strong incarnation of the Devil sent to combat the coming Christ. Baptism by water was reprehensible. On this muddle of the Old Law was grafted some neo-Christian spiritism.

Christ was the G.o.d of good who created the invisible world of spirits.

He was a phantom being who never really lived on earth or suffered or died. The Albigensian denied His human nature. Man's body, living or dead, was Satan's (Jehovah's) creation and to be annihilated; respectful burial of the dead was frowned on; marriage was sinful, since to engender was to capture souls and imprison them in the material world or h.e.l.l. Libertinage was preferable to marriage, since it did not pose as virtuous. We find in an official recantation of his Albigensian beliefs by a Midi lord that he promises to accept the Church's tenet that marriage is not sinful, as was taught by his sect.

The Albigensian heresy was an anti-social peril. It is sophistry to say, as has Molinier, that we do not know what they taught, or to call their movement a step in freeing the human mind, as do certain modern rationalists. They had two moralities, one for the people, or Hearers, and a stricter code for the elect, or the Perfect. If a Perfect relapsed, he had, after death, to pa.s.s through another existence, or h.e.l.l, in another body.

This current of anti-Christian thought, flowing in from the East, brought with it the over-rigid asceticism of the Orient, but in the Midi few lived up to ascetic practices. There were minor divergencies in the tenets according to the different regions, but always, East or West, the heretics were one in their detestation of the Jehovah of the Old Testament, and of the Church and her sacraments, especially that of Holy Eucharist. The Church was held to be a prolongation of the abhorred synagogue, and, like it, an incarnation of Satan.

No one can deny the crying need of reform in the Midi church. But the Albigensians d.a.m.ned one half of the Creator's work--the visible world--and the perfection which they preached was race suicide. When, more recently, Mormonism struck at the root of the social fabric, the United States government took immediate action. Had the Mormons resisted, had they, for instance, murdered an amba.s.sador from Washington and war resulted, would we not think that the use of force by the Federal government was legitimate?

From 1100 to 1208 Rome had sent one peaceful amba.s.sador after another into Languedoc. St. Bernard, who was loved all over Europe, was stoned in the Midi streets. The Albigenses were aggressive wherever they outnumbered the orthodox, and as most of the Midi lords held the new tenets, it was the believer who was persecuted in Languedoc. Churches were attacked and bishops flung into prison. Because the Count of Beziers accepted a local council which had censured the heretics, he was murdered by the people of Beziers in the very church and on the very day where they themselves, forty years later, were ma.s.sacred by the northerners. "On all sides is the image of death," wrote the visiting bishop of Tournai, in 1182, "villages are in ashes, churches in ruin, and the inhabitants living like beasts." Long before the crusaders arrived in Languedoc life there was a b.l.o.o.d.y feud, and like ravening wolves the heretic lords warred one on another; their repeated divorces were a flaunted scandal.

The Albigensian Crusade is no isolated page in the annals of the Midi.

Read of the anarchy in the south, previous to 1208, and then pa.s.s from the XIII century to the gigantic duel between France and England in the Hundred Years' War. You will feel no sense of dislocation. The crusade methods were hideous, but not exceptional. In the later debacle, Froissart relates as a matter of course the pleasant little jaunt of the Black Prince, _fleur de toute chevalerie_, into Languedoc, in 1355,[232]

when he burned some seven thousand houses in the faubourgs of Toulouse, when Carca.s.sonne was twice sacked and burned, Narbonne wrecked, treasure seized, and all ages and s.e.xes butchered "till a line of fire and blood stretched from Toulouse to the sea." And the Black Prince was succeeded by avowed freebooters who gnawed France to the bone, the Grandes Compagnies who, as said the hara.s.sed pontiff at Avignon, _mettaient tout la Crestiente a combustion_. It was in the dire times of the XIV century that the Midi churches fortified themselves.

War slackens architectural work in any period. A radical decay of builders' energy in the Midi was not the result of the Albigensian Crusade, since Languedoc erected its chief Gothic churches between those wars and the Hundred Years' War, a period, moreover, that was controlled by the newly functioning Inquisition. To generations torn by anarchy, the methods of that tribunal, hateful though they appear to us, were an advance in jurisprudence. Every leader of the day accepted them as a progress. The civil courts were not to be able, for centuries to come, to offer even such guaranty for justice. No balanced mind can read the lives of such chief inquisitors as, for instance, St. Raymond of Penafort,[233] and fail to comprehend that past history is not to be read in the light of modern prejudices.

Rome had carried on a hundred years' diplomatic negotiation with the Midi heretics. Finally, in 1208, the pope's legate was murdered by a henchman of the Count of Toulouse and hostilities were precipitated.

Innocent III proclaimed a crusade. Later he regretted its excesses just as he had cause to deplore the divergence of the Fourth Crusade to filibustering purposes, but he was too entirely a man of his own epoch to regret the Albigensian Crusade itself. By 1209 the northern barons had invaded Languedoc and many a building-bishop was in their ranks.

The spirit of crusading was at first strong enough to prevent their attacking the rich trading city of Montpellier which lay in their path but which was singularly free of heresy. Yet their very next step was a sacrilege. The orthodox population of Beziers, when called on to deliver up their heretic citizens, answered they would sooner see themselves sunk in the deep sea. It would seem that from the first hour many Catholics of the Midi looked on the crusade as a war of conquest on the part of the barons of the north. Between north and south was deep-rooted antipathy. The more cultivated but more corrupted Midi scorned the rougher peoples beyond their confines, who in their turn despised the southerners. Inevitable was it that a clash between those opposite civilizations should acquire the character of racial hate.

Simon de Montfort, chosen leader of the crusaders after the sack of Beziers, soon overran the heretical region, whereupon many barons of the north, deeming that the ethical purpose of the Midi excursion was accomplished, returned to their homes. Henceforth the racial and political aspects of the struggle were accentuated. Cruelty and perfidy marked both sides. The Midi lords boasted that no crusader escaped them with eyes, fists, or feet, and they cut into little pieces the nephew of Alberic de Humbert, archbishop-builder of Rheims Cathedral. In retaliation Simon de Montfort cut off heretics' ears and noses.

By 1212 word was sent to Innocent III that hate and cupidity, as much as zeal for the Faith, actuated the invaders, whereupon the pope roundly ordered them to pa.s.s into Spain to fight Islam. It was too late to stem the tide. In 1215, at the Fourth Lateran Council, in which every power in Christendom, lay and ecclesiastic, had a voice, Simon de Montfort's retention of his Midi conquests was sanctioned. Simon's death, in 1218, led young Raymond VII of Toulouse to rise in arms and the wars that followed were frankly political. In 1229 peace was signed under the portal of Paris Cathedral and the only daughter of Raymond VII affianced to the brother of the king of France.