The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  Later, this spiritual transformation will be called being born again. It is in fact a Christian variant on Plato’s Myth of the Cave. “Once I was blind,” as the hymn says, “but now I see.” It was Saint Bernard’s goal to turn the Catholic Church into an instrument to enable people to see the world and themselves in the true light of God; in the phrase of William Blake, who shares a good deal with Saint Bernard, to see not with but thro’ the eye. Bernard wanted to draw people out of the cave and into the light of God, not by imposing new rules and regulations (although Bernard had no problem with those), but by appealing to human beings’ most basic feelings.

  One way was through sermons. Saint Bernard transformed the art of sermons and elevated their importance in the medieval Church by introducing a rich evocative Latin style that appealed to listeners’ senses and touched their hearts. For those without Latin, Bernard saw the importance of using religious imagery like the cross, and figures like the Virgin Mary, as a way to speak directly to the emotional needs of the listener, even the simplest and least educated. The cross was the only decoration he allowed in his monasteries, as the symbol of God’s willing sacrifice of His only son to save humanity: a sacrifice born of true undying love. “Let no one who loves God doubt that God loves him”—and the sign of the cross is the proof of that promise.17

  He also made the Virgin Mary a powerful symbol of the Church’s role as loving mother and intercessor with God. Thanks to Saint Bernard, the anonymous The Miracles of the Virgin became one of the most popular books of the Middle Ages. One new church after another would be dedicated to her, including two of the most famous: Notre Dame in Paris and Notre Dame in Chartres. Meanwhile, religious painters and sculptors of the age turned to depicting the tender scene of Virgin and Child as a way to reflect the compassionate face of Bernardine Christianity. They succeeded in establishing a genre that would reach its climax in the Renaissance and the paintings of Botticelli and Raphael—all due to the influence of the supposedly misogynist Bernard.18

  Then there was music. Plato had always been aware of the power of music to stir human emotions, both for good and for ill. Pythagoras had also made Plato and the Academy aware of how music expressed the same divine order of number and proportion as in geometry. Plotinus had passed this Platonic fascination with music and number to Saint Augustine, who saw both as reflections of a divine order catastrophically disrupted by Adam’s Fall.19

  Augustine then passed that same fascination to Saint Bernard and his followers. For the Middle Ages, music seemed to offer a new series of proofs of the existence of God, uncovered not through logic, but intuitively through the senses. Oddly, the medieval followers of Neoplatonism saw another of the liberal arts, astronomy, the same way. The phrase they coined for the coordinated precision of the heavenly bodies was “the music of the spheres.” No one in the Middle Ages actually hears the music of the spheres. But they could see and feel it as they watched the starry night move overhead month by month, season by season.

  “Music,” Augustine wrote, “is the science of moving well.”20 Likewise, music was more than just a pleasing sound to Bernard. It was the divinely proportioned audible trace of God’s presence. Bernard was more involved in the creation of liturgical music than any Church Father since the creator of the Gregorian chant, Pope Gregory the Great. Bernard was convinced that the bliss of heaven itself was an eternal concert conducted by choirs of singing angels.21

  Of course, any notion of perfect proportion must also have a visual component. And to see it requires something that Bernard believed also opened the heart to a knowledge of God beyond reason and logic. This was light.

  Augustine and his Neoplatonist mentors had said that the light of nature was a reflection of God’s own radiance. It was what made the world intelligible to reason, “the divine illumination of the mind,” and had deep significance in the theology of Saint Bernard. But the Middle Ages owed its deepest debt for the importance of light in the Neoplatonist universe to an obscure Syrian monk who had lived centuries before—and to a shocking case of forged identity.

  Shocking, because the perpetrator managed to escape detection for nearly one thousand years. Only Peter Abelard came close to guessing the truth. Even today, monks at the remote monastery at Mount Athos in Greece celebrate every October 3 as the forger’s feast day. Amid clouds of incense and the glow of oil lamps, they chant hymns of praise in front of his icon and recite his works aloud in order to understand the divine secrets of the universe.22

  To them, he is still St. Dionysius the Areopagite, the first bishop of Athens, who had been converted by Saint Paul himself. To scholars, however, he is the Pseudo-Dionysius, one of the cleverest fakes of the late Roman Empire and without a doubt the most influential.

  Who was he, really? No one has a clue. It is possible he bore the same first name as the man mentioned in Acts 17:34: “Certain men came to believe [Paul the Apostle] and came to him, among them Dionysius the Areopagite.” All his works were penned under that name. Yet all the evidence suggests he lived at least four hundred years later. Some suspect he was a Syrian, but no one knows for certain. He was certainly a monk, one heavily immersed in the Eastern traditions of Neoplatonism with its ideal of monastic life (passed down by a fourth-century admirer of Origen named Evagrius) as a single-minded contemplation of the divine.

  Maybe he thought the pen name Dionysius the Areopagite would give his startling synthesis of Christian and Neoplatonist ideas more authority and credibility. He may even have believed that his words really were the kind of grand vision Saint Paul and the other early apostles had shared but never bothered to write down.23

  Whatever his motivation, working day by day, year after year, quietly in his cell, the Pseudo-Dionysius wrote some of the most compelling and evocative treatises on theology ever written and fobbed them off as works by Saint Paul’s most famous disciple. Even after his act of forgery was discovered, his insights proved too valuable to be discarded. In fact, no one who enters a church today or visits a museum, no one who gazes at a landscape or buys a picture to hang on his living room wall, is entirely free from the influence of the Syrian monk and the startling new twist he gave to Plato’s influence on Western thought.

  The Pseudo-Dionysius begins with a seeming paradox. We see God nowhere, and yet God is everywhere. The skeptic and atheist get stuck at the first obvious truth; they fail to push on to the second. The secret is that God’s presence is made visible to us not directly but symbolically, in a material world that bears the faint but still perceptible trace of a higher intelligible and spiritual realm.

  The Pseudo-Dionysius’s God makes His impression on matter as (to borrow a metaphor from the author’s later admirers) a signet ring presses into a blob of hot wax. The signet lifts away and moves on; only the wax seal is left. Yet the impression that gives the seal shape and meaning still carries the trace of its original maker. That trace is a symbol, not because it stands for another thing, but because it is that thing in a different form—just as the world reveals God’s handiwork in a material form rather than His (and Plato’s) immaterial Forms.

  In fact, at the deepest level of contemplation, the Neoplatonist Dionysius argues that we will no longer see the wax seal at all. Instead, what contemplation of the material world finally reveals to us is what made the impression in the first place: the hand of God Himself.24

  Of course, moving from looking at a wax seal to looking at God is not so simple. As any good Neoplatonist knew, God’s presence in the world proceeds downward through a series of spiritual emanations, from the realm beyond Being and Non-Being to the perfect and intelligible, to finally the material and imperfect. Likewise, man’s knowledge proceeds upward along the same track, the Great Chain of Being.*

  What the Pseudo-Dionysius did in his cell was work out the entire map of the universe of spirit in detail, from the top all the way down. He laid out the Great Chain of Being in an exquisitely defined series of gradations for which he coined a new term, the Cel
estial Hierarchy.

  Like the Jacob’s Ladder in the Bible, Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy is a spiritual elevator that human beings can catch going both up and down. The hierarchy runs down by regular stages from God through His angels to intelligible realms like the Forms; then through the rational soul to the world of material bodies, including our own. It also carries us upward by the same gradations toward a mystical union with God, drawing us irresistibly stage by stage toward the One. “The aim of hierarchy is the greatest possible assimilation to and union with God … to become like Him, so far as is permitted, by contemplating intently His most Divine Beauty.”25

  However, we can never get to that final mystical union entirely by ourselves. Our consciousness must be coaxed along, drawn in a great procession stage by stage from matter to mind to spirit, by the mediating presence of higher beings like angels, who bear the impression of God’s truth more immediately than we do.

  Once we start the journey in earnest, Dionysius pointed out, we realize that the world around us is not some darkened cave devoid of meaning, as followers of Plato liked to claim.26 It offers a rich pageant of sights and sounds, a forest of symbols that constantly trigger new insights and urge us along toward a higher reality. And “every divine [movement] of radiance from the Father, while constantly flowing bounteously to us, fills us anew with a unifying power, recalling us to things above, and leading us to the unity of the Shepherding Father and to the Divine One.”27

  The most important mediating force for the Pseudo-Dionysius was the Church. To the Syrian monk, the clergy, the liturgy, the sacraments, and even the Bible itself were nothing more than symbols to coax and guide us to that highest knowledge, the knowledge of God Himself. However, his more potent point was that everything in life is a mediating power to one degree or another. Nothing is entirely devoid of God’s spiritual beauty: “As the true Word says, all things are beautiful.” Indeed, without the presence of material things, especially beautiful things, the mind will never get started on its upward spiritual journey.

  What opens the door for the journey and makes it possible? The answer is light: nothing more or less than the radiance of God’s presence in the world. Neoplatonists had always been fascinated by Plato’s remark in the Republic that the Good in Itself was the source of all light in the material realm.28 The Pseudo-Dionysius made creation of the visible world itself an act of illumination. His followers pointed out that we would not exist without light. In their eyes, all men are “lights” in that their existence bears witness to that one unifying Divine Light bathing them in the same penetrating radiance. In the final analysis, it is the presence of physical light that God uses to draw His creation toward Him—but above all, man.29

  The Pseudo-Dionysius’s works were a triumph of the Neoplatonist imagination. In an age of science like our own, they seem wildly fanciful. The lists of seraphim, cherubim, thrones, powers, and the other grades of angelic beings seem like an elaborate fantasy game. However, in an age of faith like the early Middle Ages, with monastic imaginations starved for new stimuli, they were a stunning revelation. The first Latin translation of Celestial Hierarchy appeared at the court of Charles the Bald. It quickly became a Christian classic, along with the learned commentary provided by its Irish translator.† Readers were compulsively fascinated by the book’s elaborate angelology, but also by its budding theology of light. This struck a deep harmonious chord with followers of Saint Augustine, including Saint Bernard.30

  All the same, the Pseudo-Dionysius’s promise of a knowledge of God achieved through the senses rather than the mind and reason found its most lasting home in the realm of stone rather than words and parchment. It is still visible today in the Gothic churches at Saint Denis and at Chartres.

  In a purely technical sense, Sens Cathedral is probably the first Gothic church. When Abelard and Bernard met there in the spring of 1140, they probably did not notice that an architectural revolution was taking place over their heads. Its builders pioneered many of the characteristic elements of the Gothic style, from ribbed interior vaults and a three-part elevation, to the famous pointed Gothic arch for its windows.31

  The pointed arch came from the East, from Islamic builders. Its rival the standard semicircular arch was the product of Aristotelian and Roman engineering. The pointed arch, by contrast, is the product of Platonic geometry. It results from the intersection of two arcs drawn on the same straight line—for French builders like the ones who built Sens and Saint Denis, essentially two quick swipes of a compass. Any builder worth his pay could then use a set of calipers to reproduce a series of those same arcs within the regular rectangle of the church’s outside wall, or crisscross a pair of pointed vaults inside a series of perfect squares in the interior, enabling him to prop up the roof with far less stress than the old barrel vault of the Romans.

  In truth, a good master mason could build an entire Gothic cathedral with just a compass and a T square, a device he borrowed from Greek mathematicians for lining up perfect vertical and horizontal lines. This dazzling command of practical geometry made the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages truly independent businessmen. By the fourteenth century, they were already calling themselves free masons.‡ Some would claim their knowledge reached back to the Pyramids. In fact, the Pyramids employed a far cruder geometry than the Gothic cathedrals.32 The latter’s real designers were Plato and Pythagoras, via Euclid and Boethius. And certainly no Freemason would have been allowed near a church site if his practical geometry had not measured up to the sacred geometry of the twelfth century’s Platonic revival.

  The man most active in bringing together these twin forces for divine order and proportion was Abbot Suger, head of the famous abbey of Saint Denis near Paris. Saint Denis had been the burial place of French kings since the early sixth century. It was one of the historic treasures of France. Although he had been tonsured and trained as a monk, Suger was more politician than churchman. He had served as the king’s ambassador at the papal court and handled secular affairs for his boyhood friend Louis VI for years.

  Then, beginning in the 1130s, he launched a thoroughgoing reform of the Saint Denis abbey inspired by Saint Bernard’s Cistercian principles.33 With his single-minded drive and energy, Suger also supervised the rebuilding of the abbey church. The result was a startling new approach to church design both inside and out. Later ages would call it the Gothic. Suger himself called it simply “the new style” or, more precisely, “the style of continuous light.”

  Once again, Saint Bernard was his inspiration. The great reformer had bitterly criticized the kind of twisting sculptural forms and garbled ornamentation that cluttered up Romanesque churches. He wanted his Cistercian abbeys to be as clean and pure to the eye as they were for the spirit. “There must be no decoration,” he said, “only proportion.”34

  There were to be no painted frescoes or floor mosaics, no elaborate hangings. Instead, everything would reveal a clear geometric simplicity, using pure forms (the square, cube, rectangle, and that most potently Pythagorean of all geometric figures, the pentagon) to emphasize the principle of harmonious proportion. Suger would do the same with his plan for Saint Denis.

  Its floor plan closely resembles the geometric simplicity of Bernard’s Cistercian churches.35 Painting and figurative sculpture disappeared from the church’s interior. The human figures carved on the outside, especially around and above the church’s entrance or portal, achieved a new monumental stillness, which is also strongly present in the west portal at Chartres.36 The Gothic sculptor and mason concentrated on cutting stone with clean precise lines and blank smooth surfaces. As for Saint Denis’s interior, it reveals a harmonious structure built entirely around bare walls and open bays. If architecture is frozen music, then Saint Denis is a visual hymn to divine perfection.§

  The Neoplatonist theology of light was crucial for Suger. Here patriotic reasons played their part as well. In French, Saint Dionysius was Saint Denis. Since the first bishop of Paris and founder
of the abbey c. 300 had been named Denis, it was all too easy to believe he had been the same Dionysius who had been Saint Paul’s disciple, as well as the author of the Celestial Hierarchy. In fact, Abelard’s problems with the monks at Saint Denis began when he dared to cast doubt on this triple misidentification. How likely was it, he pointed out, that a Latin-speaking saint living in France would write his most important theological tracts in Greek?37

  The monks were outraged and drove Abelard out of the abbey. The assertion that the Celestial Hierarchy had been written by a Frenchman and the founder of Saint Denis became a matter of national dogma, one might almost say national theology. “Among ecclesiastical writers” in France, enthused one late-twelfth-century author, “Dionysius is believed to hold the first rank after the Apostles.”38 Abbot Suger turned his church into a radiant tribute to the abbey’s famous founder and to his celebration of light as the radiance of God.

  Suger installed windows everywhere, great pointed arch windows lining the aisles appearing along the church’s upper floor, literally the “clear story,” or clerestory. He also put the first Gothic rose windows over the west portal and at the rear of the church, over the sanctuary. Stained glass had been used in churches before, but for Suger it became a fascination, almost an obsession. The Church of Saint Denis glowed with great kaleidoscope mosaics of colored glass showing scenes from the Bible and church history. There was even a stained glass portrait of Abbot Suger himself, kneeling at the feet of Bernard of Clairvaux’s favorite saint, the Virgin Mary.

  The result was dazzling. When the sunlight poured in through Saint Denis’s windows, it would cast glowing patterns of blue, red, green, and amber gold set bright against the black of their lead frames. Transformed into rainbows of color, the light streamed and shimmered across the stone floor. If a church’s interior should be an image of heaven for the faithful, then entering the Church of Saint Denis meant entering a heaven of light and color and a radiant, eternal divine proportion.39