I’m very honoured to have received this review of the Illuminated Gospel of St John from the pen of Martin Aurell, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Poitiers and former director of the Centre d’Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale.
“In the beginning was the Word”.
This strongest of assertions opens the prologue of Saint John’s Gospel, one of the monuments of universal literature: God is Word, and even more, in the original version, Logos, knowledge and wisdom.
He reveals himself to mankind through Scripture, meaning the Bible, but also in Latin “things that should be written down.” Jane Sullivan long practised her wonderful task of scribal copyist in Ligugé, the first abbey of the West, founded by Saint Martin in 361. Her Gothic-inspired calligraphy, her illuminated initials and her decorative designs, often recalling the complex interlace of the Irish manuscripts, transfers us to the Middle Ages and its artistic creations.
For many centuries, before the invention of printing, medieval monasteries were the privileged centres for the creation and diffusion of manuscripts. For saint Benedict (480-547), the author of the monastic rule, Legere et meditari (“read and meditate”) were synonymous: the lectio divina elevating the human soul to God. Prayer was constructed on the foundations of the written manuscript.
There was something ascetic in the patient work of the calligrapher. Saint Abbo (940-1040), abbot of Fleury in Loire valley, often visited his brothers in the scriptorium. According to him, when writing, they were “as if praying, fasting, and curing their bad passions.” From the hand to the brain, such a labour detached them from the world of matter and opened their minds to supernatural realities. And far from the cloister, it conveyed the Truth to others.
As abbot of Cluny, the most important monastery of his time, Peter the Venerable (1092-1156), cast further light on the role of the scribe, using the parable of the Sower, whose seed fell indiscriminately in good or bad soil: “In the furrows he makes in the parchment, the copyist will sow the seeds of the divine words”. As pope Benedict XVI put it: “Logos must become ‘apo-logy’, the Word must become a response”.
Re-reading the Gospel of Saint John in such an aesthetic presentation should answer so many questions that torment our modern world.
Martin Aurell
Professor of Medieval History at the University of Poitiers
Former director of Centre d’Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale
