The great church buildings of medieval Europe are spectacular symbols of changing class relations, writes Sean Ledwith

Some people might be surprised to learn that Leon Trotsky took an interest in the ecclesiastical architecture of the Middle Ages. Those more familiar with the remarkable intellectual breadth of the great Russian revolutionary will be aware that very few aspects of human experience escaped his omnivorous curiosity. On more than one occasion in his writings, Trotsky felt it could be instructive for Marxists to consider aspects of the great programme of cathedral construction that occurred across medieval Europe in order to understand the role that culture plays in the rise and decline of different social formations.

Techniques of the epoch

Aside from historical insights to be gained here, these passages also reflect the remarkably creative and dynamic intellect of one of the two guiding figures of the October Revolution who felt such a discussion was worthwhile even in the midst of the raging civil war in Russia of the early 1920s. Trotsky wrote in 1923 about how the emergence of a new architectural style towards the end of the eleventh century CE was symptomatic of evolving class relations: 

‘The Gothic churches were not built suddenly, under the impulse of a religious inspiration. The construction of the Cologne cathedral, its architecture and its sculpture, sum up the architectural experience of mankind from the time of the cave and combine the elements of this experience in a new style which expresses the culture of its own epoch which is, in the final analysis, the social structure and technique of this epoch. The old pre-bourgeoisie of the guilds was the factual builder of the Gothic. When it grew and waxed strong, that is, when it became richer, the bourgeoisie passed through the Gothic stage consciously and actively and created its own architectural style, not for the church, however, but for its own palaces.’

Also at the same time as leading the Red Army into battle, Trotsky somehow found time to discuss a wider question of how consideration of cathedral design can illuminate aspects of the Marxist approach to cultural history: 

‘The architectural scheme of the Cologne cathedral can be established by measuring the base and the height of its arches, by determining the three dimensions of its naves, the dimensions and the placement of the columns, etc. But without knowing what a medieval city was like, what a guild was, or what was the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages, the Cologne cathedral will never be understood.’

Most of the millions of visitors today to the spectacular cathedrals of England and France, in particular, probably do not share Trotsky’s distinctive interpretation of their significance, but that would be because we still live in a class-ridden society that encourages us to view them as transcendentally awe-inspiring products of some mystical power, as opposed to transcendentally awe-inspiring products of human labour as we should do. As with all major artefacts of human civilisation, the great medieval cathedrals such as Canterbury and Salisbury in England, and Chartres and Notre Dame St Denis in France, are more comprehensible if placed in their unique social and economic context.

Such a perspective does not lessen their aesthetic impact in any way and can also explain why a viewer today who does not share the religious values of the original designers and builders can still share their pleasure at such wondrous constructions. There is no reason why a religious sceptic should necessarily disagree with the view of historian Henry Adams that the wave of Gothic cathedrals which lasted from about 1140 to 1280 was ‘the best that architecture had to tell, for it typified the aspirations of man at the moment when man’s aspirations were highest.’

Interestingly, Trotsky is not the only Marxist theoretician who has found such a discussion instructive. Arnold Hauser was a twentieth-century historian of art and associate of the great Hungarian Marxist, Georg Lukács. He was a refugee from the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938 and spent a significant part of his exile teaching art history at the University of Leeds. In his four-volume Social History of Art, published in 1951, Hauser sets out to provide a comprehensive materialist analysis of the key trends in human artistic development, from Palaeolithic cave paintings to Picasso.

Inevitably in a work of such breadth and scope, some of Hauser’s aesthetic judgments can be questioned, but at all times he seeks to situate human creativity across the epochs in the context of social production and to demystify art as ruling classes like to present it to us as a realm detached from other aspects of human activity. In his words: ‘We try in art, as we do in normal practice and in the individual sciences, to discover the nature of the world with which we have to deal and how we may best survive in it. Works of art are deposits of experiences and are directed, like all cultural achievements, towards practical ends.’

Romanesque and early feudalism

In his discussion of ecclesiastical architecture in the Middle Ages in Volume 1, Hauser analyses the transition from the Romanesque style to the Gothic which took place round about the turn of the twelfth century. The former aesthetic took its inspiration from the eponymous empire that had dominated Europe and the Mediterranean up to the late 400s. The conversion of the Roman state to Christianity in the preceding century had permitted the church to re-purpose the civil buildings known as basilicas in order to conduct services and ceremonies.

Characterised by large rectangular halls, flanked by colonnaded aisles and with timber roofs, the basilica plan could house large numbers of worshippers and suited the agenda of the church which sought to position itself as the inheritor of the ideological hegemony of the Empire, even as the political apparatus of that same Empire slid into oblivion once the geographical boundaries of its expansion were reached and the consequent limits of the slave mode of production were exposed.

The use of stone vaulting and the relatively simple, symmetrical layouts of Romanesque buildings reflect the technological and material limitations of the time, as well as the control over labour and resources by the emerging feudal elite. In this early medieval period, there were few church buildings on the grand scale that would characterise the later phase of Gothic. Beauvais Cathedral in northern France exemplifies the contrast between the two eras as its nave, or central space, constructed about 1000 CE is anomalously dwarfed by the choir that was added over two centuries later. 

The Romanesque became hegemonic in church building from the 800s onwards as the feudal mode of production began to entrench itself within the agricultural economies of Western Europe. In England, this took the form of the Norman Conquest from 1066 in which William of Normandy’s mounted cavalry, triumphant at Hastings, became the core of a new ruling class and which utilised cathedral building, especially at Canterbury, Durham and Westminster, as a high-profile form of asserting ideological control. Hauser comments on how the contours of the Romanesque reflected the requirements of a new clerical and political elite seeking to subdue resistance from potentially recalcitrant populations:

‘These Romanesque churches are, in accordance with the influential position of their builders, imposing expressions of unrestricted power and unlimited resources. They have been called fortresses of God and they are, in fact, as large, solid and massive as the strongholds and castles of the period – far too large in relation to the size of the congregations. But they were erected not merely to serve the faithful but to the greater glory of God and, like the sacred buildings of the Ancient Orient and unlike any architecture of later ages to the same extent, they served as symbols of supreme power and authority.’

Abstraction

The interior features of Romanesque churches also reflected the ideological agenda of a ruling class consolidating its hold over the population with decoration and sculpture moving away from the realism that had characterised Roman conventions and towards a more abstract conception that dematerialised the human form and the earthly environment. The Gero Cross from Cologne Cathedral, commissioned about 970 CE, depicts the body of Christ not in the realistic manner of a human body in such a situation, but as an abstract and expressive depiction of suffering, encouraging worshippers to submit to the authority of the church as the only vehicle through which salvation can be attained. Arnold Hauser observes how this avoidance of realism served the interests of an elite which predictably preferred its subjects to focus on other-worldly concerns:

‘Compared with the art of classical antiquity, which is restricted to what is physically beautiful and which avoids in general all reference to psychological and intellectual characteristics, the Romanesque style appears as an art concerned solely with the expression of the spiritual, the laws of which conform not to the logic of sense experience, but to that of the inner vision. The special character of late Romanesque art is to be found in this visionary quality and here is to be found the explanation of the shadowy lengths, the forced poses, the marionette-like motions of its figures.’

Gothic and later feudalism

The turning point in terms of the Romanesque style evolving into the Gothic is usually identified as the work commissioned by Abbot Sugar to restore the abbey church of Notre Dame St Denis near Paris in 1122. As Trotsky notes above, the new style overlapped with the embryonic beginnings of a new class of urban merchants and traders who would ultimately form the core of the bourgeoisie in centuries to come. New complex forms of economic organisation including the growth of towns, the expansion of trade and the increasing importance of money were aspects of what would mark the incremental transition from feudalism to capitalism across Western Europe. As a transitional epoch, the two modes of production overlapped, so although the seeds of capitalism can be detected at this time, it also witnessed the peak of the power of the feudal elites who deployed the visual power of monumental cathedrals such as Amiens and Chartres to legitimise their elevated status.

Sugar was closely aligned with the Capetian dynasty of French monarchs and pioneered the use of pointed arches, ribbed vaults and flying buttresses that facilitated the creation of taller, more luminous structures, with larger windows and more intricate decoration. The stunning use of stained glass, in particular, exemplified the desire to overwhelm the viewer with a preview of the heavenly realm; again, which could only be reached through the portal of the church, according to the hegemonic ideology of the era. Suger inscribed on the doors of his protype cathedral: ‘The dull mind rises to the truth through material things and is resurrected when the light is seen.’

 As Trotsky also notes, the development of Gothic architecture can be seen as a reflection of the changing organisation of labour and the increasing importance of skilled workers in the economy. The rise of guilds, which played a key role in the cathedral-building industry, can be seen as an expression of the growing influence and sophistication of urban craftsmen. Hauser discusses how these socio-economic developments were manifested in a transformed architectural dynamic: 

‘The art of the Gothic cathedrals is an urban, bourgeois art, in contrast to the monastic and aristocratic Romanesque; urban and bourgeois in the sense that laymen took an ever-increasing part in the building of the great cathedrals, while the artistic influence of the clergy correspondingly diminished; urban and bourgeois because the erection of these churches is inconceivable apart from the wealth of the towns, their cost going far beyond the means of any individual prelate. The influence of the bourgeois is most strikingly shown in the secularization of culture. Art is no longer the private language of a thin stratum of initiates, but a mode of expression that is understood almost universally.’

The new artistic impulse visible in the macro structure of medieval cathedrals, again, is apparent through the smaller details of decoration and sculpture. The highly regarded figures of Old Testament prophets and French kings on the north portal at Chartres display an individuality and fluidity that distinguishes them from the heavier and more symbolic features of their earlier counterparts. This renewed realism and desire to give form to human aspirations and hopes would ultimately blossom into the Renaissance that first dawned in the 1300s as the feudal era faded in the face of the rising forces of capitalism, initially in the city-states of Italy. As spectacular monuments, therefore, to the ingenuity and skill of multiple generations of medieval craftsmen and labourers, the great cathedrals of Europe will surely provide aesthetic pleasure to societies in the future that have banished forever the hierarchical values that were manifested in these spires, stones and stained glass.