CALL TOWERS OR FUNERARY LIGHT TOWERS?
Even more tenuous than the suggestion of an Irish
origin for the towers appears to me a theory recently
advanced by Hans Reinhardt,[9]
who sketches a developmental
line leading to the towers of St. Gall from the
triumphal columns of Rome through the intermediary
forms of the Mohammedan minaret (fig. 86) and certain
funerary light towers (fig. 87), especially well-attested in
twelfth-century western France. Leaving entirely to one
side the question of the very doubtful connection of all these
disparate architectural entities, it must be stressed that
there is nothing in the Plan itself that would suggest that
the two towers of the Church were used either as call
towers, from which the monks sang their daily vigils and
announced the hours of prayer (in the sense in which this
was done in the Mohammedan ritual), or as light towers on
the top of which a lantern was lit at night in commemoration
of the dead. The author of the Plan is very specific.
The purpose of the towers, he tells us, is "to survey the
entire orbit [of the monastery] from above" (ad uniuersa
super inspicienda); this defines them as places of surveillance
—surveillance in the sense of "watch over approaching
danger." The use of the term uniuersa suggests that the
protective function of the towers was meant to extend
beyond the physical plant of the monastery; and the
patronage of the archangels Michael and Gabriel tends to
strengthen this view. Michael, through his defeat of
Lucifer, became the embodiment of the forces of light
prevailing over the powers of darkness; Gabriel was the
announcer of the human incarnation of the Saviour. Both
angels, through these accomplishments, became in a special
sense the protectors and guardians of the Church. All over
the Western world, St. Michael was venerated in sanctuaries
built on high-lying ground, on mountains, in the
upper stories of the western avant-corps of churches, or in
the steeples of towers. From there he pits himself against
the forces of darkness that rush against the House of the
Lord from the west.[10]
On coins and in medieval manuscript
illuminations Rome and Jerusalem, the two terrestrial
counterimages of the City of God, were represented by a
gate flanked by two defending towers.[11]
In like manner, on
the Plan of St. Gall, the Church is defended by its two
protective towers against the evil that rushes against it.
