Paris, the new Jerusalem : the liturgy of the Sainte-Chapelle

Yossi Maurey is invited by the Assembly of the Collège de France, at the suggestion of Professor Thomas Römer.

Abstract

From the outset, Jerusalem has been of immense importance in medieval Christian liturgy. The heavenly city plays a central role in Christian eschatology. Jerusalem is a city admired, imagined, commented on and nourished by the Scriptures. Patristic exegesis and medieval theologians ensured synthesis and continuity between the Jerusalem of the Old Testament and that of the New, giving the former a new Christian significance. And yet, the celebration of the heavenly Jerusalem in the liturgy did not call into question the need to seize the earthly Jerusalem, as the whole crusading enterprise clearly demonstrated. Spiritual kinship went hand in hand with material kinship, and Jerusalem's relics became objects of devotion and cornerstones of churches and cities. During my lecture, I will examine the ways in which medieval liturgy and music shaped and concretized the notion of the heavenly Jerusalem, providing an essential element to the ideological projects and physical constructions hailed as the " New Jerusalem ".

This lecture will focus on how one of the major relics of Christianity, the Crown of Thorns, became an object of personal and national devotion in France, despite its universal value and the interest it held for the faithful in other countries. From its place of origin in Jerusalem, and after two centuries in the Byzantine palace of Constantinople, the Crown was transferred to France in 1239. OnAugust11 , the young king Louis IX (r. 1226-70) and his retinue collected it at Villeneuve-l'Archevesque, not far from the town of Sens. Louis paraded barefoot and clad in a tunic through the streets of the town, wearing the crown he had recently acquired. France laid claim to the latter in the ^mid-13th century, as part of a campaign that involved building a magnificent chapel and devising new liturgies to draw attention to it. As a result, the Sainte-Chapelle was designed specifically to display her and other relics. Located within the walls of the royal palace on the Île de la Cité, it was a private church which, as we shall see, reinforced Paris' status as a religious center. While France was not the first country to possess the Crown of Thorns, it was the first to exploit its potential value as a relic - it has, in a way, "activated ". The transfer of the Crown and other relics to Paris marked the beginning of a new era for France, and for King Louis in particular. Liturgists, composers and royalty were quick to grasp the importance of the newly-acquired attributes of Christ's Passion, and set about integrating them into a narrative that showcased and idealized France, Paris and its king.

Thanks to poets, composers, liturgists and copyists driven by the desire to make political and theological mileage out of an extraordinary relic, the Crown was " activated " by words and music, and made, as it were, speaking. Through their work, the idea that God had chosen the French in preference to other nations to receive the Crown, and reserved a special role for Paris in the plan of salvation, was able to shine through.

The liturgy of the Sainte-Chapelle shows that, for Louis IX, possession of the Crown guaranteed him and France a place in eternity. Nevertheless, once the building was completed, he was determined to extend his quest for spiritual salvation with an earthly undertaking, which he certainly believed would complement the previous one. This was his first crusade. Having affirmed in words and music the spiritual affinity between Paris and Jerusalem, Louis was determined to add another link to the chain linking the Franks to the Byzantines and then to the Old Testament characters in a continuous narrative. In this sense, we might interpret the liturgy of the Crown and relics as the foreshadowing of a physical trajectory from the new Holy Land to the old, and vice versa.