building houses, granges, and courts, establishing new churches, and converting cash
rents into payments in kind.
Suger also learned from the monastery’s history that it had been a frequent beneficiary
of royal munificence. Lands, money, and precious objects had been given to Saint-Denis
by kings of France from Dagobert on. He knew, too, that it was in times of peace and
harmony that Saint-Denis had prospered most. An opportunity to recreate that special
harmony between king and abbot arose from the fact that Louis VI, once a pupil at the
abbey, had a particular devotion to the martyrs and confidence in Suger. Although Suger
was to become regent while Louis VII was on crusade, and it was then that he acted as a
royal “minister” of the king, it was really during the reign of Louis VI (d. 1137) that
troublesome enemies of both king and abbey, like the lords of Le Puiset, were brought to
heel. The ancient relationship between regnum and monasterium was not only enhanced
but refashioned when Louis VI returned the crown of his father, Philip I, to Saint-Denis;
took the royal standard from the abbey’s altar as he left for war in 1124, declaring that if
he were not king he would do homage to the abbey; granted the fair of the Lendit what
amounted to an immunity from royal justice; and declared that the kings of France should
be buried at Saint-Denis.
The more rigorous administration of the monastic lands and the creation of symbols
that emphasized Saint Denis’s special importance for the French were antecedent to
Suger’s intention to tear down the old church and replace it with a larger one with more
splendid hangings, stained glass, altars, crosses, and other objects. Though this must have
long been planned for, Suger tells in his De consecratione ecclesie sancti Dionisii that
once construction started the work proceeded quickly, the western narthex and towers
being consecrated in 1140, and the translation of the saints to their new reliquaries and
the construction of the eastern end with the new ambulatory and stained-glass windows
completed in 1144. If stylistically the chevet anticipates many features of the Gothic
churches of the Île-de-France, the church also incorporates many of Suger’s major
concerns: the preservation of the past, a harmonious adaptation of the old to the new, an
emphasis on the liturgy, and most of all the exaltation of the saints.
Suger was inventive and eclectic. He reshaped and adorned objects that had been in
the church; if he was not given the precious stones he needed, he bought them. So, too, he
found the sources for his conception of the church in writings as diverse as saints’ lives,
liturgical texts, biblical commentaries, chronicles, and the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius
the Areopagite, as well as in buildings he had seen.
Suger was a small man and an assertive one, and on behalf of his church he considered
any means legitimate. In his last years, as regent, he had had to spend much of his time
away from Saint-Denis, and money that had been intended for the rebuilding of the nave
he used for the king’s needs. He died at Saint-Denis in 1151.
Thomas G.Waldman
[See also: ARGENTEUIL; DENIS; GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE; GOTHIC ART;
LOUIS VI THE FAT; LOUIS VII; SAINT-DENIS]
Suger. Vie de Louis VI le Gros (Vita Ludovici VI), ed. and trans. Henri Waquet. Paris: Les Belles
Lettres, 1929.
——. Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis and Its Art Treasures, ed. and trans. Erwin
Panofsky. 2nd ed. Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1979. [Liber de rebus in
administratione sua gestis, chs. xxiv–xxxiv; Libellus de consecratione Sancti Dionysii;
Ordinatio.]
The Encyclopedia 1699