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Church History, June, 2003 by Margaret Jennings, Francis P. Kilcoyne

The Cathedral of St. Etienne at Bourges, which Ribault justly styles "un chef d'oeuvre gothique" (a Gothic masterpiece), (1) did not escape the Huguenot depredations of 1562. Especially vulnerable to the pikes and pry-bars of the Reformers were the choir screen in front of the main altar, the north and south doorways commemorating respectively Mary in Majesty and Christ in Majesty, and several areas of the West facade: the jamb statues (whose subjects are currently unknown (2)), the spandrel sculptures under the dado that celebrated events of the Christian scriptures and of the book of Genesis, and the five extensively carved tympana dedicated from right to left as one faces them:

--to Saint Ursin, who, by local tradition was commissioned by Saint Peter and, with the assistance of Saint Just, brought Christianity to Bourges and erected the first church;

--to Saint Stephen, ordained (Acts 6:1-7) among the first deacons (lintel) whose martyrdom (Acts 7:54-8:1) by stoning (second register) was frequently depicted in medieval art and whose place as patron of the cathedral is secure in light of God's approbation of him (third register);

--to the Last Judgment (center), where souls rise on the lintel level, are judged and separated into the saved and the damned in the second register, and, in the third, reminded of the source of their deliverance: the suffering and triumph of Christ;

--to the conventional portraiture of Mary the Virgin: her death (lintel), her assumption (second register), and her coronation by Christ (third); and

--to scenes from the life of Saint William de Donjon, Archbishop of Bourges (d. 1209), who initiated the construction of the cathedral in 1195 and presided over the Christmas liturgy in its nearly complete choir in 1208. (3)

The physical damage to the immediate environs of the altar and to the West facade bears striking resemblance to the defacement of great churches in Lyon, Angers, Blois, Rouen, Tours, and Orleans (4)--wall cities the Huguenots controlled for some months during the First War of Religion (1562-63). But, at Bourges, the destructive process produced an unusual outcome at the north and south lateral doorways: it hardly touched the latter, but considerably mutilated the former. This situation is unique in the annals of contemporary outbreaks of iconoclasm; more significantly, when assessed in conjunction with the other iconoclastic acts at Bourges, it suggests that neither a simple nor universal cause and effect motivational structure can be assumed.

I. VARYING STANCES OF THE REFORMERS

Identifying motivation(s) is complicated not only by the specific, existential situation of mid-sixteenth-century France but also by the reformist leadership's shifting, sometimes antithetical pronouncements about the function and validity of statues and other ecclesiastical decoration. It is important to recall that during the first stages of Reformation in continental Western Europe (1517-30), iconoclasm--defined as hostility to religious images that results in the public and ostentatious act of their destruction (5)--was rarely the preeminent tool for cleansing places of worship. Image breaking did occur intermittently--even in Wittenburg in 1522 when Andreas Karlstadt's denigration of the externals of divine worship incited it--but even among the radical reformers Zwingli's middle position, characterized by the legally sanctioned and orderly removal of images from Zurich in 1521, was more attractive. (6) It is known that religious objects were sometimes returned to their original donors and that the "cleansing" of churches could be an organized, almost a community affair. (7) In fact, most of those prominent in the secular or ecclesiastical spheres proscribed iconoclastic violence; (8) in this, they demonstrated understanding of the admonitions found in Luther's initial sermons, especially those in which he urged his followers to free themselves spiritually from the alleged power of images. (9)

Possibly as early as 1522, Luther had come to terms with painting and sculpture in churches; his notion that they functioned as the "books of the illiterate" quickly allowed him to adopt a "moderately affirmative approach to ecclesiastical art." (10) In the following decade, he embraced a gradually more protective attitude toward cult objects, prompting Calvin, in the 1536 edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, to begin a discussion of the subject that diverged greatly from the Lutheran. Central to Calvin's thinking was the belief that if any vestiges of superstition were allowed to stand, all other reforms would be useless; citing the actions of Zwingli and even Karlstadt, who had earned the enmity of Luther, he attacked the latter's toleration for and eventual propagation of religiously inspired artistry. (11) Although Calvin did not specifically order iconoclasm, this type of behavior may be viewed as a logical outcome of his utopian system at whose core was the "intensive act of God" with its driving imperative: purify hic et nunc (here and now). (12) The reality of such an outcome has prompted some commentators to distance Calvin from the destruction proximate to the first French War of Religion; they point out that he deplored the rampages that were reported to him in 1561 and 1562. Nevertheless, a legitimate question remains about whether those actions or the disorderly manner in which they were carried out occasioned his distress. (13) Certainly, he wrote indignantly about the Huguenot pastor's foolish encouragement of riot at Sauve, and he fulminated against the illegal appropriation of public property at Lyon; yet, his reasons for so doing seem to stem from a fear of civil unrest. (14)