or sinful according to the intention which lay behind them, and delighted in indicating the contradictions between different statements in the Bible. This went too far for some of his contemporaries, and he was twice condemned, in 1121 and 1140, ending his days as a monk of Cluny. Despite this his teaching influenced many of his less provocative colleagues and successors. The works of Aristotle were becoming better known through the work of translators in Toledo and Sicily, and the possibility that there might be a natural order of things in which God did not intervene directly was already being taken seriously. How this might be without limiting the omnipotence of God was yet to be resolved but was already being debated.
An equivalent development can be seen in the art and architecture of the period, again more noticeably in France than elsewhere. Its characteristics were a trend towards more realistic depiction on the one hand, attempting to indicate character through features rather than allegory, and on the other the adoption of a style of church architecture intended to give maximum play to light, symbolizing the influence of God himself. The technical means adopted here broke away from Roman precedent, above all in the use of rib-vaulting, but the process of evolution was gradual rather than sudden. Two of its most pronounced features were to be seen in a church which was traditional in everything save its vast size, that built at Cluny from the end of the eleventh century. One was the circuit of chapels around the apse, each dedicated to a particular saint and offering fresh sources of light to the east end of the church; the other, introduced when the roof proved to be inadequately supported, was the flying buttress, equalizing lateral and vertical structures and so making the provision of larger windows possible. The possibilities inherent in these innovations were consciously employed in the rebuilding of the abbey church of Saint-Denis ( Paris) in the 1140s, and then in a whole sequence of French Gothic cathedrals during the next generation. Laon and Notre Dame were the first-fruit of this movement, followed by Chartres at the end of the twelfth century; after this lead the style
-136-