Maurice de Sully

Maurice de Sully came from a poor family at Sully sur Loire, was educated in the schools of Paris, and became bishop of that city in 1160. Contemporaries remarked on the origin, which tells you it was unusual: a twelfth century bishopric normally went to a man with land and relatives. What made another route possible was the schools themselves. Paris in that generation had become the place where theology was studied at the highest level, teaching drew students from across Latin Europe, and a reputation made in the classroom could be converted into office. The university that grew out of those schools was still decades away from a formal existence.

His most widely copied work was not a building. He composed a cycle of model sermons in French, one for each Sunday and feast, short and plain, written to be used by parish priests who had neither the Latin nor the training to compose their own. Manuscripts of them survive in large numbers and in more than one language. That is a serious act of religious policy: it accepts that the ordinary clergy will preach badly or not at all unless someone supplies the words, and it puts the effort into the vernacular where the congregation is.

The model sermons also tell you what was assumed about a congregation. They are short, they retell the gospel of the day and then draw a plain moral, and they do not argue. Preaching of that kind was the main channel by which doctrine reached people who could not read, so a bishop who wrote the scripts was making a decision about what the ordinary Christian of his diocese would and would not be told.

The cathedral already standing on the island could have been repaired or extended. The decision taken around 1160 was to replace it, and building began in 1163 on a scale that required clearing structures, laying out a new approach street and committing resources far beyond one lifetime. What went up is early Gothic: rib vaults carrying the load onto piers rather than onto continuous wall, and buttressing carried outside the building so that the wall between the supports could be opened for glass.

The usual account connects that engineering to a theology of light, associated with Abbot Suger at Saint-Denis a generation earlier and with the tradition running from the writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, in which material light is a way toward the uncreated. Some historians now hold that Suger own motives were less philosophical than that account allows, and the atlas notes the qualification. What is not in dispute is that the buildings were understood by those who commissioned them as arguments and not merely as shelters. Maurice de Sully died in 1196 with the work well advanced and unfinished, which was the normal condition of a great church. The fire of 2019 and the reconstruction that followed are the latest chapter of a fabric that has never stopped being rebuilt.

Sources Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art TreasuresErwin Panofsky (editor and translator); revised by Gerda Panofsky-Soergel with Panofsky, Suger and St DenisPeter Kidson