The doctrine of light. The recollection of the past is a promise of the future. To the memory of Abbot Suger.
All you who seek to honour these doors,
Marvel not at the gold and expense but at the craftsmanship of the work.
The noble work is bright, but, being nobly bright, the work
Should brighten the minds, allowing them to travel through
the lights
To the true light, where Christ is the true door.
The golden door defines how it is imminent in these things.
The dull mind rises to the truth through material things,
And is resurrected from its former submersion when the
light is seen.
I was eight or nine and sitting next to my sister in a chapel of St Nicholas Church in Tallinn, both of us totally immersed in the organ-playing and uplifting vocals of ‘Ave Maria’ filling the church from every corner. We kept looking up and up; we caught each other’s eye at times, sparkling with excitement and fascination with the alien surroundings. A spiritual uplifting that filled our impressionable hearts was not a familiar concept to us at the time.
This unusual sensation of being uplifted was a true revelation to us for a reason. We were Soviet children from Soviet Baku, Azerbaijan, growing up in the Soviet capital of Moscow. ‘Soviet’ meant atheism and no love for places of worship of any kind; ‘Azerbaijan’ meant our Turkic and Muslim heritage.
To my parents, a trip to Tallinn, Estonia, and to the rest of the Baltic region, was like breaking through to Europe, a tiny sip of freedom away from the main stage of the doctrine of communism. To me and my sister, Tallinn was as exciting as a historical adventure novel or film, filled with cobbled streets, the ratusha (market square), and low-rise European-style houses, which were nothing like our apartment blocks in Moscow.
It was in Tallinn where, for the first time, we witnessed protest demonstrations in the ratusha, more like small gatherings of Soviet descendants making speeches that I could hardly understand the meaning of and holding up a flag that was not red in colour or showing the hammer and sickle. As a child, all I could pick up was that this was somehow important and dear to my parents and that my sister was indeed older and smarter than me and could understand things I could not grasp myself. I had to wait impatiently until we could go to a stamp shop philately at the corner of the ratusha to choose new stamps, with the help of my father and the shopkeeper who already knew us by sight, for my stamp collection I so proudly own even today.
It was not like we were not familiar with home libraries in the Soviet Union — we were indeed the most, or one of the most, bookish nations there was, and every flat was full of bookshelves — yet upon a visit to my father’s Estonian friend, I instantly noticed a difference in the library layout. I concluded pitifully that this country was kept unusually un-Soviet in this way for the purpose of filming adaptations of detective and historical novels.
It was in Tallinn where my sister and I were allowed by our parents to have one hour on our own exploring the old city — something not imaginable these days for parents and children — and it was in one of these hours of exploration that I ended up with my sister in the chapel of St Nicholas.
The light beamed through the tall windows, often stained with the colour of gems and telling stories that we did not know and which were banned to us, the Soviet pioneers. The airiness. The sheerness. The doctrine of light. The same sensational feeling I would experience much later in the Blue Mosque of Istanbul,Chartres Cathedral in France and Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire, England.
Years later I learned that I owed this to one very religious man from the Middle Ages, an innovative creator and one of the first proponents of the Gothic style in France — Abbot Suger, French abbot and adviser to Kings Louis VI and VII, whose supervision of the rebuilding of the abbey church of Saint-Denis was instrumental in the development of the Gothic style of architecture.
A truly religious devotee, fascinated by the connection between the connection of light and God and the spiritual quality of it, Suger propagated new ways of reaching the divine using what was at his disposal in the material world. And THAT was already audacious thinking at the time. Unlike his predecessors in the Early Middle Ages, Suger could not see any harm in merging the material with the spiritual, in fact asking his worshippers to ‘marvel not at the gold and expense but at the craftsmanship of the work’. What we take for granted today when entering Gothic cathedrals and being greeted by tall windows full of colour was a truly revolutionary and daring step for the time. Suger was the first to be ready for a change, ready for a challenge. He clearly did not fancy the traditional thick walls of old Romanesque churches and was in search of ways to elevate the structure of a church building. For Suger, the small, narrow windows of the old churches had to go too. It is no wonder he envisaged big glass panels replacing stone walls to project more light into the cathedral. His craving for more light and colour to ‘brighten the minds’ in the house of God evidently led him to innovate and look for inspiration. It was his life’s mission to give a new meaning to the cathedral and turn it into the right space to elevate the material to the spiritual plane.
Since my first encounter with Suger’s doctrine of light in Tallinn, I have never felt the need to strictly follow a particular religion, but instead, I relish the light and colour that these welcoming places of worship offer us today. I’m attracted to the airiness and the shimmer of turquoise Iznik in the mosques of Istanbul, to the art of stained glass in Gothic cathedrals in Europe, to the openness of the Anglican churches in England where I have exhibited my glasswork on a few occasions, echoing my love for glass and colour.
During his elaborate campaign for a new order of cathedral life after reflecting on the work of his predecessors, Suger concluded that ‘the recollection of the past is a promise of the future’. He treated the past not as an obstacle, not as a continuum to be worshipped either. If we are able to recollect our past with an intention to bring more light into the future, then perhaps we have more chance of succeeding in generating prosperity and peace for all who surround us.
I sometimes wonder if the Abbot Suger of today would agree that someone like me with my background of exhibiting under a church roof could be a reflection of the past and a promise of the future. A peaceful future, free of crusades, free of hatred, free of intolerance and ignorance.
