The Plan of St. Gall
Leder, Dennis
Carolingian Utopia TIE PLAN OF ST. CALL Walter Horn and Ernest Born Univ. of California, $325, 3 Vols. Dennis Leder DEBATE once engaged late medieval theologians, it is said, as to how many...
...Mo/iasticism, fashioned by Irish monks and built on earlier prototypes from Egypt and Syria, was characterized by individual selfdiscipline or at best loosely grouped communities...
...This may be why an ancient parchment which miraculously survived nearly 700 years of oblivion was finally resurrected in the fifteenth century, and continues to generate great interest half a millennium later...
...The plan gives us a scaleddown density which a modern citydweller would understand...
...What Charlemagne envisioned shortly after his coronation in 800 A.D...
...Their investigations are so precise that a thorough reconstruction of the monastery could accurately be achieved, allowing even for such necessities as heating, lighting, ventilation, baking and cooking...
...Gall...
...Volume two looks at the guest and service buildings of this theoretical plan from the perspective of the earliest known examples of such buildings in transalpine Europe...
...The fact that a sheet of vellum 3OV4" x 44'' could generate three volumes of factual information is proof indeed of the plan's compression...
...Among the ample glossary and bibliography at the conclusion of the volume is a chronological table from 55 B.C...
...On that single sheet is contained a condensed "image of the whole of Carolingian life...
...JOHN DRUSKA is a director of the St...
...architecture for the holy reflected a separatist spirituality...
...Among the amazing details of this set of books, which has been two decades in the making, is its visual presence...
...The second half of the first volume is given over to a fascinating study of the monastery church, the cloisters, and the Abbot's house, ending with a breakdown of the political organization of a typical Benedictine monastery...
...In the hands of art historian Walter Horn, and architect Ernest Born, this ninth century plan has been given exhaustive examination, and loving treatment which makes their resulting three-volume collaborative effort a treasure in book publishing, as the plan itself is a national treasure of Switzerland...
...It was a product of its time, when cultural unity was the highest priority, and when its availability in a unified language (Latin), religion (Christianity), and authority (pope and emperor) allowed the notion of a Utopian society to be within human grasp...
...But regardless of the form it takes, the issue of compression seems to exert on us a special fascination...
...But the amazing thing is that the scale is human (one might even say divine: Many "Sacred numbers" appear in the proportions of major building sites and in the dimensions of individual buildings...
...What emerged in 1461 from the library Commonweal: 472 shelves of the monastery of St...
...deceased monks, for example, shared space with the monastery orchard...
...Where meaning emerges at all it is in the aftermath of colliding opposites...
...We seem as far from Utopia as we are from the ninth century and its plan of St...
...Dennis Leder DEBATE once engaged late medieval theologians, it is said, as to how many angels could dance on the head of a pin...
...of 29 August 1980: 473 a need for the sacred in our secular lives...
...FATHER DENNIS LEDER, S.J., worked far a year and a half at an experimental art center and participated in an independent study program at the Whitney Museum...
...Here was the REVIEWERS FATHER Gerard reedy, s.J., is an associate professor of English at Fordham University...
...As their remains fostered the growth of the fruit trees, together they provided a rich visual symbol of the promise of new life...
...It wasn't until the early seventeenth century that the written notations on the plan side of the sheet were correctly linked, to Abbot Gozbert, spiritual leader of St...
...Gall in Switzerland was a large sheet of sewn vellum folded to approximate the dimensions of a book...
...The integrity between scale and purpose in the plan is as timely an architectural concept as the modernists' "form follows function...
...Dating back to between 820 and 830 A.D...
...Gall may be a reminder that capsulizing information is not an achievement reserved to computer technology...
...What then is the fascination with this diagrammatic plan...
...But the plan of St...
...All is done with impeccable care, from multicolored end papers, to little pages of great nobility...
...this is a feat of compression in its own right, covering such topics as important events, significant structures and technology, and printed matter (including art and manuscripts) over nearly 1.000 years...
...Gall offers a model of order and clarity, with care for the most mundane issues of life as well as the most exalted...
...He did this through two synods held at the royal palace of Aachen in 816 and 817, which respectively provided directives for canons and canonesses and rules controlling monastic life...
...of a need for evenly distributed and humanly scaled space...
...Whether diagram, photograph, or architectural elevation, the graphics are of an extraordinary precision and beauty, and they charge the text on almost every page...
...Here, in fact, is a viable community plan arranged so that 110 monks could go about their spiritual duties in close proximity but unimpeded by 150 lay workers...
...Rather, there seems to be something quite contemporary about Abbot Gozbert' s plan, not the least being its ingenious draftsmanship (stressing essentials while leaving non-essentials to individual interpretation...
...Though some postmodernist architects might take the stance that any design goes, such an attitude seems to be the result of losing grip on careful planning, and capitulating to those inevitable opposites which beset us in other spheres...
...Gall was drawn up to be the prototypical Benedictine monastery...
...Gall from its supposed architect, Bishop Hatio of Basel, to Abbot Gozbert, who presumably ordered it for some extensive renovation for his monastery—the plan itself was never fully realized...
...Gall from 816 to 836...
...Contemporary also is the conservation implied in the plan...
...Just as the atmosphere which fostered compression in Charlemagne's time was one of unity and logic, so the compression to which we are subjected today in a complex and changing world is an unending flow of facts, which we learn to store rather than digest...
...uniform standards of conduct for secular and monastic clergy had yet to be established...
...To attain this the emperor knew that a unity of the church was indispensable for the unity of the kingdom...
...Thereupon, history was reacquainted with one of its most remarkable feats of compression, a ninth century model for the ideal monastic community...
...Authors Horn and Born trace the plan to early Roman prototypes (camps, cities, and medieval forts...
...Surely nostalgia could not be enough to claim the ongoing attention of artists, and architects, cityplanners, and students of religion...
...These directives were composed by Abbot Adalhard (754-826), blood cousin of Charlemagne, for the smooth management of his monastery's economy...
...The highly organized community plan of Saint Benedict's Rule, therefore, was what Charlemagne promulgated to consolidate Western monasticism...
...Volume one opens with a lineage of the place of St...
...Storage and accommodations served specific needs, avoided excess and were never arbitrary...
...Thanks to Walter Horn and Ernest Born we have a permanent reminder of that fact in three volumes which, like their subject, are treasures of timeliness, compression, and beauty...
...TOM CORNELL is executive secretary of The Catholic peace Fellowship...
...Politics, economy, even spirituality, are laced with anxiety...
...More importantly, though, it is a model (admittedly on a simpler scale) for human environments and communal cooperation...
...was a Holy Roman Empire known for its cohesive political, administrative, economic and spiritual life...
...When paging through the volumes one gets the impression of observing a lost era in book production...
...On one side of the sheet a twelfth century monk had inscribed a life of Saint Martin of Tours...
...to 900 A.D...
...Francis College Academic Opportunity Center in Fort Wayne...
...A second appendix is a translation of the Customs of Corbie...
...of a need for conservation and simplicity...
...and the scriptorium of the islandabbey of Reichenau, the plan of St...
...Today the question might be posed in terms of computer technology and the storage of facts in tiny silicon chips...
...And it does so in a fashion that helps us think more clearly: of a need for collaboration in tasks and talents as opposed to an isolating individualism...
...Volume three is given over to appendices...
...storeroom for Western civilization, where books could be written, the young schooled, the sick cared for, the underprivileged ministered to...
...Noteworthy is Walter Horn's precise and informative catalogue of 340 explanatory titles written in brown ink on the plan itself...
...STEPHEN TOULMIN is a philosopher and historian of' science whose books include Wittgenstein's Vienna (with Allen Janik...
...1,000 illustrations appear in some form of color, or color-augmented line...
...The Plan of St...
...The hands of two scribes are seen in the annotations...
...The architectural plan on the parchment's reverse side was thought to relate to Saint Martin's monastery...
...The plan's effect on later monastic planning is the topic of the concluding part of this volume...
...Commonweal: 474...
...Even the emperor himself with a lavish retinue could be lodged...
...working collaboratively these scribes pointed out the purpose of each building in a brief verse, while employing an abbreviated prose to show equipment and furnishings, and the function of individual rooms...
...Gall achieves in visual form, and therefore make a fitting supplement to a study of the Carolingian monastic system...
...They achieve in words what the plan of St...
Vol. 107 • August 1980 • No. 15
