Light Made Holy

Abbot Suger of the Abbey of Saint-Denis (c. 1140) believed that material beauty could lead the mind toward God. He commissioned stained glass windows that transformed sunlight into colored light flooding the church interior. For Suger, this wasn't decoration — it was theology in action.

The theological concept was anagogical — meaning "leading upward." Suger wrote that the beauty of colored light lifted his mind from the material world to contemplate the immaterial. The windows were designed to produce a specific spiritual experience, not just to look pretty.