Chartres

Today we took a train ride out to the lovely town of Chartres, the home of one of the most beautiful cathedrals of the high Gothic. In many ways the Gothic was an anomaly in the history of architecture, which has generally been dominated by Greek and Roman aesthetics. Gothic is a northern European, and especially French, movement, and was created for specific theological purpose.

Abbot Suger of St. Denis was the guiding genius of the style. He purposefully set out to create an architectural form that illustrated the medieval scholastic "theology of light."The idea here is that God is the source of all truth, goodness, and beauty, and that the Holy Spirit illuminates the human mind in the same way that the light of the sun illuminates the day. Suger wanted to take the squat, dark romanesque buildings of the day and open them up, giving them an upward thrust and allowing the light to stream in.

The technological innovation of the Gothic is the intersecting arch. The Romans developed the arch and used it as the basis of their architecture. But there were two problems with the Roman arch. It couldn't extend too high or it would collapse, and cutting big windows into it undermined its integrity. But Suger and his architects solved this by taking two arches and crossing them. Now they supported each other, extending to dizzying heights, and most important, opening up windows that let light stream into the cathedral.

From here on, function determined form. The intersecting arches created a pattern on the ceiling of tall, narrow, pointed ribs, that became a design motif that architects repeated in doors, windows, and patterns, all over the cathedral.

The plethora of windows invited stained-glass art, which like the Spirit illuminating the mind, told the stories of the Bible and the lives of the saints to the largely illiterate congregations who came to the cathedral to worship.







The full name of the cathedral is Notre Dame de Chartres. When we hear Notre Dame, we think of Paris. But Notre Dame simply means "Our Lady," referring to the Virgin Mary, and it's the name of over a hundred cathedrals and churches in France. There have been a number of buildings on the site where Notre Dame de Chartres stands, and all of them have been dedicated to the Virgin. Some even believe that before a Christian church was built here there was a shrine to the Romano-Gallic Mother Goddess, and that the first Christians merely consecrated it to Mary in the same way that a convert was baptized.


Chartres was put on the map, so to speak, in 876 when Charles the Bald, the son of Charlemagne, presented the church with the Sancta Camisa that was believed to be the tunic worn by the Virgin Mary when she gave birth to Christ. By the 12th century the church was an important pilgrimage site.  In 1194 a fire damaged much of the cathedral, and the townspeople were desperate that their treasure had been destroyed. They were so joyful that the Camisa had been preserved that they immediately began work on a new church in the new Gothic style. One remarkable thing about Chartres cathedral is that it was completed in a relatively short time of about 40 years, and this accounts for its stylistic unity.

We visited the cathedral inside and out, then we celebrated by eating at a sidewalk cafe across the square. Some of us had onion soup, some just pastry. J.C. surprised everybody by ordering the duck. Of course we patronized the gift shops with sparkling clean lavatories. Then we took the train back to Paris and ate some more.