Published in The Republican Herald, March 31, 2013
This year, Notre Dame de Paris is celebrating its 850th birthday and millions of visitors are expected to drop by to pay their respects, though there is nothing unusual about that. Every year the cathedral receives more than 14 million visitors, making it one of the most visited monuments in the world. Also, though France is a country where many Catholics have deserted the Church, you would never know it at Notre Dame. When it’s time for mass, whether it be on Sundays or weekdays, the rows and rows of straw-seated chairs are always filled with worshippers.
Other churches in France, though equally beautiful, are not so lucky. Many are deserted, some open for the occasional mass, others are being destroyed. Still others, though their doors are always open, attract few visitors inside.
In the town where I work, there is such a church. Its façade is a bit shabby and its sanctuary is often deserted. That may be why, after teaching, I like to go there to sit, resting my mind, restoring my soul. Contemplating the play of colored light against stone, I’m convinced I am sitting in one of the most beautiful churches of France (the photo following the title illustrates the church's interior).
The church is the basilica of Saint-Denis, named after the patron saint of the French monarchy. He also gave his name to the town and his story is inseparable from its origins.
In the third century A.D., Saint Denis was named the first bishop of Paris. At that time, the city was still a Roman colony, with public baths and an arena, a miniature version of the Coliseum in Rome. The Romans also imposed their gods on their subjects and forbade the worship of the Christian god. Saint Denis, whose true identity remains a mystery, brought many to the Christian faith and for this, on the Mount of Martyrs, also known as Montmartre, he had his head chopped off.
That might be the end of his story, but it is not. After his beheading, he simply bent down, picked up his head and, holding it firmly in his hands, began walking north. After travelling about two miles, he collapsed, died and was buried in a small settlement that became the town of Saint-Denis.
Two hundred years later, a chapel was erected on the spot. Saint Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, wished to honor the martyr who had saved so many souls in the city she saved from physical destruction. In 451, joined by other women who rallied to her call, she stopped the advance of Attila the Hun, not with weapons, but with prayer.
Today, in 2013, the chapel she ordered built is the core and the heart of the basilica of Saint-Denis. It is located beneath the present-day altar, enclosed within not one, but four different churches. Archaeologists have excavated the foundations of that first church and there they discovered the bones of a man who was indeed beheaded. No one can ascertain that these bones belong to Saint Denis. But there is no doubt that, at one time, an axe came down on the neck of the person buried there.
In those early days of Christian France, it was an honor to be buried near a saint and soon the chapel became too small for the kings and queens who desired to rest near Saint Denis. In the sixth century and then again in the eighth, the church was enlarged. Today, the painted walls of the eighth-century basilica surround the altar and tombs of the earlier chapels.
I often visit that basilica with my students. They find it strange and mysterious to stand within that church within a church, with its thick walls and its tiny windows, both considered architectural marvels at the time it was built. The Emperor Charlemagne visited that church and walked on its stone and marble floor, decorated with porphyry, brought all the way from Egypt.
Further enlargements and additions came in the following centuries but in 1135, nearly thirty years before the first stone of Notre Dame was laid, construction began on a totally new church, built atop the others. The basilica was under the care of an adjoining Benedictine abbey and its abbot, a man named Suger, had some very big ideas about how he wanted to transform “his church.” His plan was to build the nave higher and open the basilica to light, making the “light of the world” visible through the use of stained glass.
Using intersecting arches and flying buttresses, he was able to elevate the ceiling of the church and open the walls of the sanctuary, creating space for immense stained-glass windows. For the western wall, Suger designed a rose window, the first in architectural history. He calculated that at sunset, the sun’s rays would flood the altar with the colors of the rainbow, renewing God’s covenant with the earth.
Suger’s church was one of the wonders of his age and he made sure he would be remembered for it. In a stained-glass window, today at the Louvre, we can see him, at the foot of the Virgin Mary in a scene of the Annunciation. He is also present in the Church’s main bronze door, where we find him kneeling among the disciples at Emmaus.
In his lifetime, Abbot Suger did everything he could to assure the glory of his church, but in 1789, with the French Revolution, the basilica of Saint Denis came upon very hard times. For centuries, it had been the official burial ground of the kings of France and for that reason, the tombs were sacked and the church vandalized. Legend has it that children in the town used the bones of kings to play jacks, called “osselets” in French, a word that has its root in “os,” bone.
Today a large part of the church is a national monument, a museum of funerary art, where visitors can admire the refurbished tombs of the French monarchy. That visit also includes the earlier churches hidden beneath the Gothic cathedral.
Certainly, Notre Dame de Paris is more imposing and its façade, far more beautiful, but on a sunny, spring-time afternoon, I’d rather be sitting in the basilica of Saint-Denis. There I watch the dance of colored light, the work of Abbot Suger, who, nine centuries ago, strove to abolish the boundaries between earth and sky.
