II.3.2
LENGTH OF THE CHURCH
The Church of the Plan of St. Gall is chronologically not
the first monastic church of this order of magnitude but
probably the third or fourth. The earliest was the Abbey
Church of Fulda, in the form which it obtained under
Abbot Ratger between 802-817 (fig. 138). It had a clear
inner length of 98.00 meters (321 modern English feet).[211]
The second was probably, although not demonstrably so,
the monastery church of St. Peter's and St. Mary's in
Cologne (fig. 139), founded by Bishop Hildebold (d. 819),
which measured 91.20 meters internally from apse to apse
(300 Carolingian feet, calculated at 1 foot = 30.04cm.)[212]
The third was the original church of the Plan of St. Gall,
as rendered in figure 140 (prototype plan made in 817;
copy for Abbot Gozbert between 820 and 830). The fourth,
if Groszmann's analysis of this building is correct, was the
Abbey Church of Hersfeld, built between 831 and 850.
Together with its west-work, it measured 102.85 meters
(339 modern English feet).[213]
Abbot Ratger's church at Fulda (fig. 138) was a T-shaped
basilica with a continuous transept. The particulars
of its design leave no doubt that it was modeled after the
Church of Old St. Peter's in Rome (fig. 141). Like that
church, its clerestory walls were supported by two rows of
columns which were surmounted not by arches, but by a
straight entablature; also like St. Peter's, the ends of the
transept arms were separated from the principal body of
the transept hall.
The ideological reasons for this emulation of the design
and size of the great Early Christian proto-basilica of Rome
during the reign of Emperor Charlemagne have been
brilliantly analyzed by Richard Krautheimer.[214]
The design
was an outgrowth of the general process of Romanization
of the Frankish Church and the Frankish kingdom that
started with the anointment of Pepin and his sons by Pope
Stephen II in 753 and culminated in the coronation of
Charlemagne as emperor on Christmas Eve of the year 800.
The ties of the Abbey of Fulda with Rome had been
especially strong. The missionary work of its founder, St.
Boniface (680-754), was closely linked to the papal see.
His successor, Abbot Sturmi (744-769), was an ardent
student of the customs of Monte Cassino on which the
customs of Fulda were based, and Fulda was the first
German abbey to be placed under the direct jurisdiction
of the Roman see.
[215]
There is no doubt that the return to the
design of the great western Roman basilicas of Constantine
the Great and of Pope Sylvester was an expression of the
renovation by Charlemagne of the universal Christian
empire inaugurated by Constantine the Great. One might
justly conclude that the propensity for colossal dimensions,
embodied in the abbey Churches of Fulda, Cologne, and
the Church of the Plan of St. Gall, was an integral part of
this ideology; but to explain the dimensional boldness of
these churches exclusively in such symbolic terms would
be a gross historical simplification. There are other more
functional and more specifically monastic reasons for the
appearance in transalpine Europe of churches of unprecedented
dimensions. One of them was the need to extend
the altar space in order to accommodate, in addition to the
officiating clergy, an entire community of monks celebrating
the divine services jointly in an elaborate ritual
involving chant and counter chant. Another reason was
the transfer of baptismal rites from a separate subsidiary
building to the basilica; in the Church of the Plan this
function claims one third of the entire nave. A third reason
was that the rapidly increasing veneration of saints resulted
in a multiplication of altars, each requiring additional space.
There also developed the desire to accommodate in a single
oratory a variety of cults that in earlier monastic churches
has been distributed over an entire family of buildings.
[216]
But the dimensional enlargement of the church that
these demands generated raised serious economic problems.
Whatever the historical and functional incentives may have
been for building churches of a magnitude of 300 feet and
more, there still remained the question of whether a community
of an average of 100 to 200 monks could afford to
build and maintain such structures. Ratger, the Abbot of
Fulda, thought so. But his monks, who paid for his
ambition with their toil and sweat, were disturbed by his
building program to the point of rebellion. In a formal
petition presented to Charlemagne in 812, they pleaded
that the construction of these "oversized and superfluous
buildings" (aedificia immensa atque superflua) be brought to
a halt or reduced to a normal pace, because it taxed the
brothers beyond endurance, left no time for the lectio
divina, and threatened to exhaust the monastery's economic
resources.[217]
The petitioners returned, defeated, to the
monastery: Charlemagne denied their petition. Hildebold,
then arch-chaplain and one of the emperor's closest
advisors, may have had a voice in the negative decision.
By 817, however, the climate had changed. Louis the
Pious was now emperor; sometime between 816 and 817
he received the same delegation with the same petition,
which this time was received favorably. As a direct result
of the petition, Ratger was deposed in favor of Eigil,
leader of the dissenting monks of Fulda. When Eigil was
installed as the new abbot in 817, he was admonished by
Louis "to stop this superfluous work of erecting structures
of inordinate size and to reduce the monastery's building
program to normal proportions."[218]
It appears that Louis
made use of the words the monks themselves had spoken,
the first time before Charlemagne and the second time
before him.
Overindulgence in costly building activities was not the
only reason for Ratger's fall, and by itself might not have
brought it about. He was also accused of violations of
sanctioned monastic customs,[219]
but the incident shows that
constructing a church 300 feet long was by no means an
easy matter for a monastic polity and could have disturbing
consequences not only for its economic stability but also
for its spiritual health.
The rebellion of the monks of Fulda against the building
activities of their abbot is the strongest historical evidence
to be offered in support of Boeckelmann's theory that the
explanatory title which stipulates a length of 200 feet for
the Church of the Plan is the expression of a programmatic
retrenchment.[220]
This measure might have been
directly related to the struggles of Fulda.
