Abbot Suger

Suger was born into a family of minor knights c. 1081 (or 1080), landholders at Chennevières-lès-Louvres, a small village surrounding Saint-Denis in northern Paris. Suger was given as an oblate to the abbey of Saint-Denis at age ten in 1091. He claimed humble origins, but may have come from a family of some substance. He trained at the priory of Saint-Denis de L'Estrée for about a decade, where he would have first met the future king Louis VI of France. Suger took up the oblate life relatively easily and showed strong ability including in Latin and a firm grasp of legal matters. This ability led to him being chosen to work in the abbey archives to find documents that could protect the abbey from usurpation by Bouchard II of Montmorency, where historians speculate of his involvement in the appearance of a forged charter—if this was Suger's work, then it is certainly a fitting reflection and early example of his close admiration of the abbey. Suger began a successful career in monastic administration as he went on several missions for his abbey, which held land at several vantage points across the country. Finding favour with Abbot Adam of Saint-Denis, Suger became his secretary in 1106, which helped develop Suger's political career. As a result he was involved in significant events: in the same year, he was at the synod at Poitiers; in the spring of 1107 to attend Pope Paschal II; in 1109, where he met Louis VI again as he sat a dispute between the king and Henry I of England, and; in 1112 at Rome for the second Lateran council. During this time, he held administrative roles that required him to be first at Berneval in Normandy in 1108 as provost, then from mid-1109 to 1111 provost to the more important priory of Toury. The area was suffering as a result of Hugh III of Le Puiset's exploitation of revenues, and a series of disputes and failing alliances gave Suger experience on the battlefield. He appeared to take up this new challenge well and was successful, though would go on to heavily regret his involvement in warfare by his sixties. There is a gap in sources on Suger's whereabouts after he left Toury in 1112, though he was likely advancing his monastic position alongside working on further negotiations. It is from 1118 when the sources start again, where Suger is deeply entrenched in royal affairs. He is chosen as the royal envoy to welcome the fleeing Pope Gelasius II (John of Gaetani) to France and arrange a meeting with Louis VI. Suger was sent to live at the court of Gelasius at Maguelonne, and later at his successor Pope Calixtus II's court in Italy in 1121. It was on his return from in March 1122 that Suger, aged 41, learned of Abbot Adam's death and that the others at the abbey had elected him to be the new abbot. Suger took pride in the fact that this happened in his absence and without his knowledge—whilst Louis was initially enraged at the fact that the decision was made without him being consulted first, he was clearly content with Suger assuming the role, as the two enjoyed a strong working relationship.

Suger served as the friend and counsellor to both Louis VI and Louis VII. Until 1127, he occupied himself at court mainly with the temporal affairs of the kingdom, while during the following decade he devoted himself to the reorganization and reform of St-Denis. In 1137 he accompanied the future Louis VII into Aquitaine for marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine. He bitterly opposed the later divorce, having advised the marriage. Though Suger was openly against Louis VII's intention announced in 1145 to lead a Second Crusade to rescue the Kingdom of Jerusalem, a council in February 1147 elected Suger to be a regent. One of the reasons Suger was opposed to the crusade were the issues present in France at the time: Louis VII wrote shortly after setting out to ensure protection of Gisors, and only six weeks after his expedition, asking for money, asking Suger to use some from his own resources if necessary. He urged the king to destroy the feudal bandits, he was responsible for the royal tactics in dealing with the communal movements, and he endeavoured to regularize the administration of justice. He left his abbey, which possessed considerable property, enriched and embellished by the construction of a new church built in the nascent Gothic style. Suger wrote extensively on the construction of the abbey in Liber de Rebus in Administratione sua Gestis, Libellus Alter de Consecratione Ecclesiae Sancti Dionysii, and Ordinatio. After the regency, Louis VII and his contemporaries still consulted Suger on matters ecclesiastical and political, and he was asked to defend cases at court. At this point, Suger was also being assigned cases to work on lone which would otherwise be given to an episcopal commission to deal with lone. Louis VII gave Suger the task of resolving two episcopal elections, at which point Suger practically continued to hold the same level of control over the church of France as he would have had as regent. Following the failure of the Second Crusade and letters from the Jerusalem and Pope Eugenius, Suger proposed a new crusade at a convention in Laon in 1150, with the support of Louis and St Bernard. The aim was to have a crusade led by Suger and run by the French church to do what the secular powers failed to do. Support for this fell apart from many churchmen, including the pope losing belief in the pursuit and advising the king to remain in France to settle local issues. The matter troubled Suger to his final year of his life, at which point he nominated an unnamed nobleman to take his stead in battle, though it ultimately did not materialise as the idea was likely shelved by that point. Suger's final year continued to be busy for him, as he was instructed by the pope to reform Saint Corneille at Compiègne. Odo of Deuil's appointment as abbot had the backing of Louis VII and Suger, though after the two left, it was met with violent resistance by the canons (as was the case at Sainte-Geneviève). Today, a French street is named after Suger, and two schools bear his name (Lycée Suger in Saint-Denis, and École secondaire Suger in Vaucresson).

Prior to Suger's abbacy, the Abbey of Saint-Denis was a significant site, with a long tradition of royal burials dating back to the 6th century. Thus, when Suger was appointed to be its abbot, the tie between monarchy and church became even closer. Ideas to renovate the small and aging abbey arose as early as 1124, when he began to take in funds for the project—but work on the full rebuild as did not begin until 1137. The idea of a full rebuild and what it should look like was a gradual development over time. Early ideas were sporadic and undeveloped, with Suger mostly preoccupied with state affairs. Ground was first broken in 1130 to rebuild the old nave, with ideas of importing in classical columns from Rome, though this was an act rendered moot by the eventual decision for a full rebuild. The rebuild was not something Suger could have given much of his time to until the and ascension of Louis VII, who wished to have his own set of advisors alongside his father's. Suger began with the west front, reconstructing the original Carolingian façade with its single door. He designed the façade to be an echo of the Roman Arch of Constantine with its three-part division and three large portals to ease the problem of congestion. The rose window above the west portal is the earliest-known such example, although Romanesque circular windows preceded it in general form. At the completion of the west front in 1140, Suger moved on to the reconstruction of the eastern end, leaving the Carolingian nave in use. He designed a choir (chancel) that would be suffused with light. To achieve his aims, his masons drew on the several new features which evolved or had been introduced to Romanesque architecture, the pointed arch, the ribbed vault, the ambulatory with radiating chapels, the clustered columns supporting ribs springing in different directions and the flying buttresses which enabled the insertion of large clerestory windows. The structure was finished and dedicated on 11 June 1144, in the presence of the king. The Abbey of Saint-Denis thus became the prototype for further building in the royal domain of northern France. It is often cited as the first building in the Gothic style. A hundred years later, the old nave of Saint-Denis was rebuilt in the Gothic style, gaining in its transepts two spectacular rose windows.

Suger wrote several works, which are regarded for their accuracy and detail. Of these, two record his activities as abbot of St-Denis. The Libellus Alter de Consecratione Ecclesiae Sancti Dionysii (Other Little Book on the Consecration of Saint-Denis) is a short treatise on the building and consecration of the abbey church. The Liber De Rebus in Administratione sua Gestis (Book on Events under his Administration) is an unfinished account of his administration of the abbey, which he started on request of his monks in 1145. In these texts, he treats of the improvements he had made to Saint-Denis, describes the treasure of the church, and gives an account of the rebuilding. Unlike other medieval texts recording the deeds of religious figures, Suger's are written by him. Of his histories, Vie de Louis le Gros (Life of Louis the Fat) is his most substantial and widely circulated. It is a panegyric chronological narrative of King Louis VI, primarily concerned with warfare but also his dependence on the abbey of Saint-Denis. Historia gloriosi regis Ludovici (The Illustrious King Louis) is the other demonstrably unfinished work of Suger, accounting for the first year of Louis VII's reign. Written in Suger's final years, it (like his other history) covers in great detail events where Suger was present or involved. Suger's secretary William produced two works on Suger: the first, a letter shortly after his death announcing the death; the other a short biography (Sugerii Vita; The Life of Suger) authored between 1152 and 1154. A collection of Suger's letters exist in Saint-Denis, mostly from near the end of his life, though its provenance is unknown. Suger's works served to imbue the monks of Saint-Denis with a taste for history and called forth a long series of quasi-official chronicles.

Suger is considered the forerunner of (French) Gothic architecture; his work is placed in the Early Gothic (Gothique primitif) period concentrated in the Île-de-France region of France. This genre is seen as the progression of Romanesque architecture, though few of the key elements that define the Gothic tradition were particularly new as they were inspired by these very Romanesque elements, especially those of Normandy and Burgundy. The key element that sets aside Gothic architecture from its predecessor is "the novelty of the spiritual message that was to be conveyed" using its "novel and anti-Romanesque" elements. Scholars tend to attribute Suger's influences on his ideas of symbolism and manner of symbolic thought to interpretations of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and the derivates of John Scotus Eriugena, as well as those from the school of Chartres. Where 19th-century art historian Erwin Panofsky claims that the theology of Pseudo-Dionysius influenced the architectural style of the abbey of Saint-Denis, later scholars argue against such a simplistic link between philosophy and architectural form. Though Suger did not leave any explicitly theological writings, his work on Saint-Denis was inspired by his own set of religious ideas influenced by a range of new or renewed theological themes in the wider context of 12th-century France. The influence of the cosmology of the Chartres school, which resulted from interpretations of Plato and the Bible, created a speculative system which emphasised mathematics, particularly geometry, and the aesthetic outcomes that arise from the convergence of the two. Art historians paint Gothic architecture as Suger's own creation, though some question this. The assumption by 19th-century French authors that Suger was the "designer" of Saint-Denis (and hence the "inventor" of Gothic architecture) has been discounted by recent scholars. Instead he is generally seen as having been a bold and imaginative patron who encouraged the work of an innovative (but now unknown) master mason. It is difficult to contextualise Saint-Denis using other buildings of the time and place, because many churches in Capetian France between 1080 and 1160 were destroyed and/or rebuilt later, combined with the fact that no other building of this period enjoyed the level of precision and detail of Suger's accounts of Saint-Denis. Thus, the Gothic style can be seen as a multiplicity of trends in the architecture of this period, some occasionally intersecting with others: Jean Bony describes it as "a happy accident of history; it would have been infinitely more normal if the Gothic had never appeared."