Theology Today - Vol 38, No. 1 - April 1981 - CRITICSCORNER

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"The Plan of St. Gall"
By Karlfried Froehlich

AFTER PERUSING these three volumes, one is tempted to call their publication an epochal event. Epochal not in the sense of the dawn of a new age but rather of the timely demonstration that, contrary to the impression conveyed by the paperback racks in bookstores and drugstores, modern technology remains capable of producing books as weighty and as beautiful as those of earlier centuries. We need such assurance today when we tend to appreciate books merely as sources of information rather than as works of art and craftsmanship. The University of California Press deserves high praise for making these magnificent tomes available, and this at a price which, while it preserves their appeal as true luxury items, compares favorably with other possible investments in the rare book market.

The project behind the handsome set started with the model of a Carolingian monastery constructed for the famous Age of Charlemagne exhibition in Aachen, Germany, in l965. Walter Horn, an historian of architecture at the University of California at Berkeley. undertook the the task with the help of the designer Ernest Born and other associates. The team was responsible for the impressive model (which may still be admired at Aachen. One would have liked to find an overall view of it or of its artistic rendering somewhere in the volumes. The lovely color drawings of some sections (vol. I, 240 and 308) only whet the appetite. The omission, incidentally, (mis)led Time magazine to print in its review the rendering of somebody else's model which our authors expressly rejected (vol. II, 22).

The reconstruction was based on the great "Plan of St. Gall," one of the manuscript treasures of the monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland. Assembled from five pieces of parchment to form a large sheet of 30 1/2 x 44 inches, the Plan shows the ground projection of a monastery in red line drawing. Since the building complex does not correspond to any known monastery. the major difficulty consisted in translating this

Karlfried Froehlich is Professor of Early and Medieval Church History at Princeton Theological Seminary, and his special interests include medieval art and architecture. He is reviewing here the three-volume work by Walter Horn and Ernest Born, The Plan of St. Gall (Berkeley, Calif., University of California Press, 1979). When first published, The Plan of St. Gall was priced at $325 for the set, and the first printing has already been sold out. Some copies of the special deluxe edition of 150 numbered sets are still available at $ 1,000. The books are bound in leather and buckram with gold stamping on the spine and pages edged in gilt. Enclosed in a slipcase and signed by the authors. each set will also be accompanied by a facsimile of the original ninth century plan. Or, interested purchasers may want to wait for the second printing, which has been promised by the University of California Press.

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ground plan into a three-dimensional reality consistent with the Plan's origin and intention.

Horn's research confirmed that the Plan was a copy made for Abbot Gozbert (816-836) of St. Gall of an original which must have played a role as blueprint of an ideal monastery at two Carolingian reform synods held at Aachen in 816 and 8l7. The reforms passed by the assemblies were aimed at establishing Benedictine monasticism as normative throughout the Empire against the diversity of lifestyles brought to the Continent by monks from Britain and Ireland. They were part of a vigorous effort to create a new political, cultural, and spiritual unity in the Carolingian realm. The original Plan has been lost, but the St. Gall copy, perhaps executed at the famed monastery of Reichenau under the supervision of Bishop Haito of Basle, remains a splendid witness of the achievements of that age.

In these volumes, the discussion of introductory matters (Part I) is followed by a detailed description of the various areas of the building complex moving from the church (Part II) to the monks' quarters (Parts III and IV), and finally to the guest and service structures (Part V). But within the dry outline of this description the entire world of a fascinating historical age comes alive. A Benedictine monastery was intended to be a self-sufficient operation. If possible, it had to be "so constituted as to contain within itself every necessity of life" (Rule, chapter 66:6). For our authors this meant that every facet of life in Carolingian times had to be explored so that the Plan's details could be explained.

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The layout oft he church building called for a consideration of church architecture in its historical development. In this section (vol. I, 127-240) an unforgettable range of prototypes and parallels from the earl), Christian East and ancient Rome down to the great churches of the age of Charlemagne, such as the Aachen Palace Chapel, the old Cathedral of Cologne, and the Abbey Church of Fulda passes review before our eyes. The monks' cloister prompted a thorough investigation of sleeping, eating, heating, studying, worshiping habits. The scriptorium, the inner and outer schools, infirmary, doctors' quarters, and herb garden triggered extensive research into Carolingian literary culture, education, medicine, and botany. The presence on the Plan of such service buildings as granary, mill, bakery, brewery, wine cellar, stables, hen house, and craft shops presented the opportunity for excursions into medieval agriculture, animal and plant husbandry, home economics, technology, and managerial organization.

Time and again Horn points to the advanced state of medieval know-how, admiring the ingenuity and sophistication of "'his" monks. As the Plan reveals, everything in the monastery was carefully designed and efficiently arranged to suit the needs of the community. The absence of heating in the refectory, for instance, was not an oversight but was meant to discourage excessive enjoyment of meals. Such careful planning applied even to the disposal of human waste which required extensive historical treatment simply because of the prominence of

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"privies" on the Plan (vol. II, 300-3 13). Horn found that in the quarters for the 120-150 monks, their guests, and visitors, the ratio of toilet seats to presumable users was better than what modern hygenic codes would prescribe. On the other hand, no facilities were provided for serfs and herders, a fact which Horn explains as a case of social discrimination (vol. II, 3 10).

The reader who follows the wide-ranging argument soon realizes how much the task must have grown under the hands of the authors. What looked like the limited assignment of giving a rationale for pragmatic architectural decisions turned out to be the formidable challenge of comprehending "the whole life of the people for whom these buildings were planned" (vol. II, 2). It seems that the authors' own lives for years revolved around nothing else but the interpretation of the Plan. On his vacation trips, Horn studied the strange Savin bush which graces the center of the monks' cloister (vol. I, 246-48); he investigated millstones, barrel-making, barn-building, he hunted down a modern descendant of the monastery's trip-hammer driven by water power; he pestered his academic colleagues in classics, botany, enology. public hygiene, and field geometry with inquiries about odd details, he used the bread-making

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or sewing expertise of his associates in solving riddles of the Plan, and experimented himself with fresh vellum to test his hypothesis of the original tracing procedure.

This total immersion, though time-consuming, must have been immensely satisfying to the ambitions of a scholar. Intimate living with the challenges of a single subject is bound to make anyone more certain not only of specific decisions in details but also of one's generalizations, one's total view of the historical context. Each small point becomes a piece in a larger puzzle. The eye perceives more boldly than ever how things fit together, and a vision of inner coherence begins to appear. I see this satisfaction as analogous to that of a monk who, after going through all one hundred and fifty psalms every week for some years, starts hearing particular verses with new ears, suddenly realizing how their meaning fits in with the totality of the holy text. A monk might call this experience illumination or inspiration. One of the charms of these volumes is the eagerness of the authors to draw us into their inspiration and to invite us to share the excitement of their intellectual discoveries.

Their vision and enthusiasm proved contagious. Publisher and editorial staff joined the exercise. For anyone who has tried to get a manuscript published in recent years, it all sounds like a dream come true. The authors were allowed, even encouraged, to include in their book whatever they felt would be helpful in making it the most comprehensive treatment of the subject possible. For once, there really are all the necessary footnotes; all the texts, plans, diagrams, and illustrations; all the auxiliary materials that a reader might wish to consult for a full understanding of the text and the subject matter. One feels pampered like a first class passenger traveling in royal comfort. And there is more! Even the production of the books has become part of the total story. Ernest Born's extensive notes on script, printing technology, plates, choice of format and color, layout (particularly in connection with his meticulous catalogue of the Plan's inscriptions), or on his search for the proper lower case "e" to be used in the main text (vol. III, 266f.) amount to a course in typography. They also afford a rare glimpse behind the scene of the complicated team work necessary to produce a masterpiece.

All of this seems very much in tune with the spirit of the subject matter. Monks had time, they had the leisure to go deeper, to reflect, and contemplate. The Latin word for leisure is otium; only its negation, negotium, yields the meaning of our normal pace, "business." Like monks our authors have taken time for the telling of their story. Most of us are not monks and may be a little impatient with such a leisurely method. But let me suggest that these volumes are an invitation to recover something of the monastic otium, to get immersed in seeing and

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thinking, and to appreciate a thoroughgoing argument. Perhaps we have unlearned such basic skills without realizing what we are missing. The amazing thing is that such monkish writing does not make dull reading once we accept the invitation and take our time, too. It becomes simply fascinating. Cicero described the goal of a good author as being threefold: to teach, to delight, to move. I gladly confess that for me the volumes have been successful on all three counts.

III

In any case, I certainly have been taught. Horn's text in combination with the rich visual apparatus has told me much (though not all) I always wanted to know about facts of medieval life but had been afraid to ask. Some of his results are major contributions to medieval studies. He has been able to prove the dependence of the Plan's service structures on the vernacular Germanic house and has documented his proof by a breathtaking survey of recent archeological work in this field from Iceland, Scandinavia, England, Holland, and Germany. The result puts in relief the much neglected barbarian contribution to the Carolingian cultural synthesis.

Beyond the walls of the monks' quarters, the architecture of which owed much to the classical tradition, it was the simple three-aisled hall of the Germanic house with its central open hearth and the louver in the roof, not the mediterranean villa, that dominated the visual scene of the monastery. Equally convincing is Horn's argument for the consistency of the Plan's measurements. Far from being capricious, the strange scale of 1:192 and the apparent inconsistencies in terms of straight decimal measures must be related to the practice of "halving" or "multiplying" basic modules derived from such natural measures as foot and inch-e.g., the 40' x 40' square of the church's crossing as a large standard module, or its fifth subdivision (40-20-10-5), the 2.5' module, as the standard for internal spaces which Horn discovered by a minute analysis of the beds in the monks' dormitory.

Others of his results will provide food for further thought. I mention the claim, beautifully illustrated by Born's diagrams (vol. I, 217), that the Plan documents a general shift from the undivided "globular" spaces of the early Christian basilicas to a new modular divisibility, an aesthetic principle which would sweep to victory in the culture of the high Middle Ages explaining even the new hierarchical vision of the universe in scholastic metaphysics (vol. I, 232). One may hesitate with regard to the suggested links with the spatial organization in Irish illuminated manuscripts, but the phenomena remain.

I also think of the apparent impact of the Plan on later medieval architecture described in Part VI by Horn's student, C. M. Malone. Not only did Abbot Gozbert follow the Plan's principles in rebuilding St. Gall, but the same may be true, with modifications, of Cluny and, through it, of a large number of later monasteries all over Europe.

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There is also a lot to be learned from such unexpected extras as the survey of monastic history with its magnificent map (vol. I, vi and 325), the list of the monasteries' officers (vol. I, p. 326), or the glossary of technical terms (vol. III, 141-166). And who would suspect that the third volume would contain an amazingly detailed "Chronological Table" listing in parallel columns important events and monuments of history, art, and letters from the beginning of the Christian era to 900 A.D. (vol. III, 201-220)?

And I have also been delighted. In this connection, the visual appeal of the volumes must be mentioned again. The combination of exquisite diagrams, drawings, and photographs, all superbly reproduced, at times outdoes the text. Just to examine the collection of maps and views of the city of St. Gall, which illustrate the impact of the Plan locally (vol. II, 314-333), is a feast for the eyes. To glance at the illustrations taken from the Utrecht or Luttrel Psalters in order to show details of medieval life is sheer joy. We are spoiled today by the production of art books using rather sophisticated reproduction techniques. But we rarely meet a plain historical work in which the artistic potential of illustration and of bookmaking itself has been integrated so thoroughly and so delightfully.

Have I been moved" The volumes have not shattered any deep convictions. Nor am I ready to declare them immune to criticism. In a work so perfect in many respects, it is a relief to find some mistakes. More important, however, is the fact that browsing through these volumes has substantiated some of my feelings as a teacher. One of them would be a conviction about the value, or rather the need, of drawing on visual aids when teaching history. Horn could hardly have made certain points convincingly without the judicious use of pictures. I am thinking, for example, of his identification of testu (louver) and toregima (cupboard) on the Plan, or of the contention that Abbot Gozbert's church did in fact follow the Plan (vol. II, 331). It seems that we have to see in order to believe. At least it helps immensely, to see what is said, especially in dealing with history. Our reconstruction and interpretation of history is always dependent on the degree of our empathy, our total empathy. To develop such empathy for situations other than our own and thus to widen our experiential horizon remain major contributions of the study of history.

Another conviction confirmed by this work is the need for an inductive method in history. The concentration on a single document such as the Plan of St. Gall does seem to provide a more effective access to the study of the Carolingian age than any survey. I am not advocating a case study method as the cure-all for our ineffectiveness in teaching history. There are disadvantages even in the present case. An inductive approach needs patience, leisure, and perhaps more time than many of

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us have. I have spent more time with these three volumes than I had originally planned. It was time well spent. It seems to me that the inductive approach, besides teaching us "something," may also help us recover some of the dynamics of inspiration, of insight, and thus to experience the bold vision of a total reality such as the one that grew in the vigorous yet leisurely climate of Carolingian monasticism and has been revived so lovingly by the authors of The Plan of St. Gall.