This post is the continuing series of articles about the historic stones in the Cathedral, written by Senior Guide Tom Fedorek.– RM
The Cathedral of St. John the Divine has many details that most visitors either do not notice, or, if they do notice them, do not understand their meaning or significance. Such are the artifacts that are the subject of this article – two remnants of a thirteenth-century cathedral that was nearly destroyed in the First World War, Notre-Dame de Reims.
This article tells you where to find them. But first – why Reims? Of the many historic buildings that were damaged or destroyed in the war, what was exceptional about Reims Cathedral?
Notre-Dame de Reims
Reims is the soul of France embodied in stone. “Reims is the national cathedral. Others are catholic, she alone is French,” writes Emile Mâle in The Gothic Image, using “catholic” in its lower-case sense of “universal.”
For centuries, Reims Cathedral was where the kings of France were crowned. At the climax of the coronation ceremony – the anointment of the new monarch – the Archbishop of Reims, alone among his peers, was invested with the power to administer the chrism (holy oil). This tradition began in 508 when Archbishop Remi anointed Clovis, king of the Franks, at his baptism. In the image below, Remi holds a ewer with the holy water of baptism in his right hand and, in his left, an aspergillum for sprinkling the congregation.
The second element of the baptismal rite is anointment with holy oil. Legend has it that at Clovis’s baptism, a pure white dove descended from the heavens with a vial of chrism in its beak and placed it in Remi’s hands. Ever after, the same vial of chrism was used for coronations. Between 1027 and 1825, thirty out of thirty-two coronations were held in Reims Cathedral and its tenth-century predecessor.
Even after the monarchy ended in the nineteenth century, Reims continued to hold a special place in the hearts and minds of the French, much as Westminster Abbey does for the British, and the Statue of Liberty for Americans.
Ralph Adams Cram, the architect of St. John the Divine’s neo-Gothic western half, venerated Reims above all other cathedrals, writing in his book The Substance of Gothic:
It was the crowning monument, in material form, of Christian civilization; so perfect in all its parts that it was perhaps too perfect, as being more perfect than man should be permitted to attain, an infringement on the creative power of God. Beyond this was nothing greater…
Writing in 1916, Cram used the past tense because two years earlier, Reims had become one of the first of the many architectural casualties of World War I. In September 1914, German forces fired more than 400 shells at the cathedral, which was then serving as a hospital for wounded French soldiers. The bombardment set fire to the roof, gouged buttresses, and mutilated sculpture on the exterior. Shells punctured the vaulting and devastated much of the interior.
Cram grieved the loss of his most beloved cathedral in Heart of Europe, also published in 1916:
All is now gone, the glorious and the insignificant alike overwhelmed in indiscriminating ruin. The glass and the statues that had survived war, revolution, and stupidity are shattered in fragments, the roofs consumed by fire, the vaults burst asunder, the carved stones calcined and flaking hourly in a dreary rain on blood-stained pavements where a hundred kings have trod and into deserted streets that have echoed to the footsteps of threescore generations.
The Allies lost no time in exploiting the assault on Reims for propaganda purposes, including the United States once it abandoned its neutrality and entered the war in 1917. Dozens of posters promoting recruitment and war bonds featured Reims as “the martyred cathedral.” Three examples appear below.
A recruitment poster aimed at French Canadians has Marianne, the French “goddess of liberty,” asking “Are you waiting for ours to burn?”
An armored fist crushes Reims in a merciless grip while the text below encourages Americans to “Buy war bonds with cash and buy them in installments! And do it now!”
In a nightmarish American recruitment poster, an enraged, sex-crazed, and thoroughly dehumanized Prussian wades onto American shores. Across the ocean, Reims stands in ruins.
While the war raged in Europe, St. John the Divine resumed work on the apsidal chapels that had been left unbuilt when construction halted in 1911. The chapels dedicated to St. Martin and St. Ambrose were constructed during the war years and completed in 1918, the year of the Armistice.
It is in these chapels that we find the remnants of Reims.
The Chapel of St. Martin
I read the Chapel of St. Martin as Cram’s elegy for Reims.
His design, pure thirteenth-century Gothic, accomplishes something remarkable. Cram succeeds in creating a space that is not only intimate but also, in its own small way, majestic. He does this by adding a triforium with lancet windows above. A triforium – a walkway between the upper and lower ranks of windows – is something one ordinarily sees in the nave of a cathedral. The chapel’s triforium and clerestory windows transform it into a miniature cathedral.
The windows that Charles Connick created for the chapel narrate the lives of three French saints – Martin, Louis, and Joan of Arc – along with heraldry signifying the cathedral cities associated with them. Four of the seven windows refer to Reims:
Clockwise from upper left: Coronation of Charles VII in Reims, Joan of Arc on right; coronation of Louis IX; Arms of the City of Reims; Arms of the Archdiocese of Reims. Charles Connick, stained glass, 1922
Behind the chapel’s altar stands a blind arcade of four three-lobed arches. Five small trefoils (three-lobed circles) appear within the spandrels (the spaces between the curve of each arch and the border above). Above the altar and inside the middle trefoil, there appears to be a pebble. The pebble is a fragment of Reims dislodged by the bombardment. It sits directly above the midpoint of the altar where the sacrament is celebrated as if it were a relic of a saint – or a martyr .
Left – Chapel of St. Martin. The red arrow indicates the location of the Reims fragment. Right – Close-up of Reims fragment. Photos: Tom Fedorek.
The 1965 guidebook to St. John the Divine explains how the fragment came to New York: “Cardinal Mercier procured [the fragment] from his colleague of Rheims and brought it as a gift to Bishop Manning.”
The cardinal was Désiré-Joseph Mercier (1851-1926), Archbishop of Mechelen and primate of the Roman Catholic Church in Belgium. While the Germans were shelling Reims in 1914, they were also wreaking havoc in Belgium. At Christmas 1914, Mercier issued a pastoral letter, “Patriotism and Endurance,” that enraged the German occupation regime. Of the letter’s impact, his biographer, Jan de Volder, writes: “With one shot, it made the cardinal the symbol of the resilience of the Belgian people within the country and outside.” For some of the war, the occupying regime kept the Cardinal under house arrest.
Mercier became a cause célèbre for the Allies. According to de Volder: “In the eyes of many Americans, [Mercier] uniquely personified the pride with which the Belgians had not succumbed to the oppressor, and his persona – and the propaganda about him – had helped to win public opinion for the Allied cause and, ultimately, to declare war on Germany.”
William Thomas Manning, then the rector of Trinity Church, was an outspoken admirer of Mercier and published several appreciations of him.
In December 1916, Manning headlined a rally that packed Carnegie Hall to call upon the U.S. government to protest the forced labor imposed on Belgian citizens by their German occupiers. In his address, Manning acclaimed Mercier as a man:
… who has shown us the sublime power of moral witness, who at the risk of his own life and liberty has lifted up a voice that has been heard in every land, and that has made his oppressors tremble, the great Cardinal Mercier, whose name is an honor to Belgium, an honor to the Roman Catholic Church, an honor to Christianity throughout the world, and an honor to mankind.
Mercier visited the United States in the fall of 1919. He was honored as a hero in every city he visited on his six-week tour and was awarded sixteen honorary degrees. He met Manning at least twice — at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, where Mercier gave an address, and at a small dinner in New York where Manning joined a committee to raise funds for the restoration of another architectural casualty of the war, the fifteenth-century library of the University of Louvain.
Aside from the reference in the 1965 guidebook, my research did not discover a record or report of Mercier giving the fragment to Manning. It goes unmentioned in the editions of Edward Hagaman Hall’s guidebook that were published from 1920 to 1950. It is a curious omission, given Mr. Hall’s meticulous attention to the Cathedral’s smallest details.
It is quite plausible that Mercier would have expressed his gratitude for Manning’s support with a tangible token of appreciation. I suggest that Manning probably kept the stone among his personal effects during his lifetime and that it was not installed in the chapel until after his death in 1949. This would explain its absence from the early editions of the guidebook and its sudden appearance in the 1965 edition.
The Chapel of St. Ambrose
The Chapel of St. Ambrose, next door to St. Martin’s, is dedicated to the people of Italy and the fourth-century bishop of Milan. Its Italian Renaissance design, by Thomas Hastings of Carrère & Hastings, diverges from the neighboring Gothic and Romanesque chapels. It has plaster barrel vault, Corinthian columns, an alabaster altar topped by an ornate gilded reredos, and more marble than one finds in the whole rest of the Cathedral.
The chapel is the only place where natural light enters the Cathedral’s interior without the intermediation of pot-metal glass. The central window combines transparent glass with lightly-tinted panes. The pale tones of Henry Wynd Young’s flanking windows are a dramatic contrast to the vivid primary colors that dominate the Cathedral’s other windows.
The second fragment of Reims can be found in the window to the right of the altar. A pane in the window’s center contains a small fragment of brown glass approximately two inches square, reputedly from one of Reims’s shattered windows. The 1928 edition of Edward Hagaman Hall’s guidebook reports that the fragment is marked with an “R,” though this detail is difficult to see. I have not been able to determine how the artist acquired the fragment.
Left – West window, Chapel of St. Ambrose. The red arrow indicates the location of the Reims fragment. Right – Close-up of Reims fragment. Photos: Tom Fedorek
The shard of glass appears alongside a pomegranate. “The pomegranate is a symbol of eternity and fertility, because of its many seeds,” writes Gertrude Grace Sill in her handbook of Christian symbolism. Pomegranates abound in the window because the name Ambrose derives from the Greek ambrosios,“immortal.” When the fruit is depicted bursting open with its seeds visible, as it is in the window, “it becomes analogous to the Resurrection, the opening of the tomb, an allegory of hope.”
Reims Cathedral experienced a resurrection of its own in the postwar years. In her excellent article, “The Martyred Cathedral,” art historian Elizabeth Emery observes that “the publicity given the martyred cathedral expanded American knowledge of, and interest in, medieval art.” This in turn worked to the benefit of the postwar campaign to restore Reims to its prewar majesty.
A sizable portion of the restoration’s funding came from Americans, with major donations from John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The restored cathedral was consecrated in 1938, one year before war broke out again. The cathedral made it through World War II unscathed. On May 7, 1945, it was the site of Germany’s formal surrender to the Allies. No longer a martyr, Notre-Dame de Reims became once again the embodiment of the indomitable spirit of the French nation and people.
Next in this series on the Cathedral’s historic stones – another seldom-noticed detail, the Ephesus Tile.
Sincere thanks to Wayne Kempton, diocesan archivist, for his kind assistance. Special thanks to Kathryn Hurwitz, archivist of Trinity Church, for conducting a search for material relating to Bishop Manning and Cardinal Mercier, and to Rob Hudson of the Rose Museum and Archives at Carnegie Hall for material relating to Manning’s rally at Carnegie Hall.
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Sources
Bloch, R. Howard. Paris and Her Cathedrals (New York: Liveright, 2022) ● Cram, Ralph Adams. “Reims Cathedral” in Yale Review, October 1918 ● Cram, Ralph Adams. “The Medieval Synthesis” in The Substance of Gothic: Six Lectures (Boston: Marshall & Jones, 1925) ● Cram, Ralph Adams. Heart of Europe (London: Macmillan, 1916) ● Emery, Elizabeth. “The Martyred Cathedral: American Interpretations of Notre-Dame de Reims in the First World War” in Medieval Art & Architecture After the Middle Ages (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) ● Hall, Edward Hagaman. A Guide to the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine (New York: The Laymen’s Club, multiple editions 1920-1950, 1965) ● Mâle, Emile. The Gothic Image (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) ● Manning, William Thomas. “The Enslavement of Belgians: A Protest.” (Privately printed pamphlet, 1916) ● Sill, Gertrude Grace. A Handbook of Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Collier Books, 1975) ● Stoddard, Whitney. Art & Architecture in Medieval France (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) ● Volder, Jan de. Cardinal Mercier in the First World War (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2018).