CHARTRES CATHEDRAL
FROM EARTH TO HEAVEN - THE ARCHITECTURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Clive Hicks
Chartres Cathedral is one of the great works of humanity. Among buildings, there are a
handful that can be regarded as having this quality - Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) in
Istanbul, the Parthenon, the Alhambra in Granada, the Taj Mahal, and probably some
buildings in India and the Far East and in Mexico. In the end, no one has ever succeeded
in saying why such works have this quality. Anything that is said becomes more or less
peripheral, and one is really saying “I see goodness in this. Go, and you might find the
same.”
At Chartres, an art was changed, transformed, lifted into a new dimension, to be
influential for centuries. This happened because an opportunity coincided with three
supplies - a good economy, a revitalized art of building and a group of leaders with real
insight. The leaders were the churchmen of the School of Chartres, a leading centre for
non-dualist Neo-Platonic Christianity.
PHILOSOPHICAL INSIGHT AT CHARTRES
What does non-dualist Neo-Platonic Christianity mean? Essential truth is always at hand,
to be re-expressed in each age. It may be discovered if necessary without guidance, but
the discovery flourishes best with help from those already on the path, and it gains
strength from historical authority. At Chartres the immediate inspiration was the inspired
vision of Abbot Suger of St Denis, but their preparation arose from the fragments available
from Plato and Socrates, from Boethius and Plotinus a bit later, from Dionysius the
Areopagite, from Erigena, and from the Hermetic wisdom of second century Alexandria.
The philosophy is summed up in the first words of “The Emerald Tablet”, the essence of
the Hermetic teaching - In the One, as above, so below, as below, so above.
There is only the One - if you use the word, God, who is wholly everywhere - there is
nowhere outside God. There is nothing that is separate from God, the ultimate unity. The
non-dual unity is beyond place and time. Where God is, is Heaven. Heaven is here - there
is nowhere else. Heaven is now - there is no other time.
The Cathedral of Chartres, a great temple in the world, was meant as a symbol of the
home of God. We are the pivot point between above and below, and as we look at the
external temple, we have the choice to find within a mirror image, an internal temple. In
fact the internal temple is the real one - the external one is just a mass of stone. The world
is the temple of God, and we are the consciousness of the world.
The human mentality evolves, and in this takes new directions. After the age of the
cathedrals, the growth of humanity in the European tradition turned to the development
of the intellect, reason, logical thought, as distinct from instinct and intuition. We have
gained enormously from this development, and we can see with a clarity previously
impossible, but a combination of ego and rationality has demanded an understanding
which commands its subject. An illusory desire for reason to command all, meeting the
fact that reason cannot command all, produces the concept of secrets, secret knowledge.
There is an essential knowledge, but it is not secret, just difficult to put into practice, so it is
sometimes easier to hold the concept of secret knowledge, not available to me.
There have been many ideas about secret schools preserving knowledge of architecture
across the centuries, and this usually settles upon geometrical systems of proportion and
composition. Harmonious proportions and number symbolism were used, but only as a
part of a repertoire of expressive techniques, and these harmonies are inherent in the
human mind, and emerge naturally when composition is undertaken by a pure mind.
There is no evidence that the cathedrals are the product of a tradition of secret knowledge
- the secrets of the guilds are mostly trade secrets about mortar mixes, the geometry of
structure, how to make glass, how to cut stone, and similar craft matters. It is an illusion
to seek techniques to deliver spiritual transformation if used in unconscious ignorance.
There have been times when knowledge had to be kept secret from oppressive authorities
- time when religious institutions were both decadent and powerful, but even then, the
real knowledge can be expressed in a way that communicates without offence. The
spiritual knowledge needs protection only against trivialization, so access needs to be
proved by resolution, and its home needs protection to provide a secure forum for those
on the way.
Maurice Maeterlinck, author of the play “The Blue Bird”, wrote his book “The Great
Secret” about seventy years ago. He said that the secret had been openly expressed again
and again, and it told who you really are, something quite simple, but entailing in its
acceptance a certain sacrifice, of who you are not, a sacrifice many are unwilling to
entertain, and, consciously or unconsciously, prefer to see the truth as hidden from them,
requiring a profound search. Your search is hindered only by yourself. You have to make
a deliberate choice, which is also a leap in the dark, and you have to make it both once and
many times, every day.
No one tries to explain Mozart’s music in terms of secret knowledge, and to seek it in the
cathedrals is a waste of time. Artists with skill, who are given to realise something of their
deepest nature (and not necessarily within their everyday consciousness), deliver work
that resonates with any of us who are by grace drawn toward the same insight. When this
coincides with a turning point in humanity, and with a community in a suitable condition,
great ages of human endeavour are started. The building of Chartres took place under
such conditions. We today are again at such a turning point. Now is the time for the
wisdom of institutions, the wisdom of communities, and the wisdom of humanity to be
refreshed with a new expression, to nourish the centuries to come.
THE SOCIAL CONTEXT
A condensed historical outline will assist. When Roman civilisation collapsed early in the
Christian era, centuries of chaos ensued, centuries in which the craft of building was all
but lost. After about the first millennium, conditions stabilised in France, partly through
the expansion of monasticism, and gradually building skill was revived, so that by the
middle of the twelfth century, the great Romanesque churches were being built all over
Europe. A new craft tradition had been established in architecture, built upon the Roman
buildings still existing in France. Over this time also the Greek classics were gradually
being introduced into European culture, so that a strand of Neoplatonic idealism was
being blended with Christian contemplative mysticism. Thus there was available a sound
craft tradition and a people who included mystics who did have that insight into their real
nature.
That was the social context, but we need also consider the local context at Chartres. There
are legends about Chartres that go back to before any church was built. At least they
purport to do so, but in fact none of them is recorded at all before about the fourteenth
century, long after the present cathedral was built. Nevertheless, whether or not they have
physical truth, they have now assumed a psychological truth that is in some respects more
real than physical truth.
Chartres was said to have been a centre of Druid worship for centuries before Christ, with
a grotto and holy well where the virgin birth of a divine figure were celebrated. There is
still a well in the crypt, which was also the home of an ancient wooden statue of the
Virgin Mary, which was brought out on ceremonial occasions, clearly symbolic of birth,
and these rites seem to continue pre-Christian ceremonies. The statue was destroyed in
the Revolution. It can be added here that Chartres has no tombs, so that it is, probably
uniquely, a church not of death, but of birth. The next legend is that after the crucifixion,
Joseph of Arimathea came to Chartres, and finding there a centre of worship of a virgin
birth of divinity, sent word back to Mary to ask if he might dedicate a church to her there.
Chartres is thus said, according to this legend, to be the first church dedicated to the
Virgin Mary.
There is another strand in this idea offered by the labyrinth on the floor of the cathedral, as
in many other Medieval churches, a labyrinth similar to types found all over the world,
from all periods. It is a circular path on the floor of the nave, not a confusing maze, but a
single path which follows complex convolutions through eleven circles to the centre. It is
widely held to represent the spiritual life-journey of the aspirant, the journey to the light.
However, until the Revolution, there was in the centre a plate with on it pictures of
Theseus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur. In pre-classical times, King Minos of Crete required
tribute from Athens, and every seven years he demanded seven young men and seven
young women to be put into the labyrinth in which was kept the Minotaur, a monster who
would then kill and eat them. Theseus demanded to be included with the fourteen, and
when he reached Crete, the daughter of Minos, Ariadne, fell in love with him, and gave
him a ball of thread, given her by the builder of the maze, which would not only lead him
to the Minotaur, whom he could thus surprise and kill, but also lead him out.
Why should a major Christian church feature so prominently a pre-Christian legend of a
journey into darkness? Although nothing is known of the church’s use of the maze, it has
been suggested that the relevance was that Theseus was rescued from his trial in the
darkness by the help of the virgin Ariadne, as the church hold all are helped in the trials in
the darkness of life by the Virgin Mary, so Ariadne was seen as a "type" of Mary.
There is a very web of symbolism here, for the labyrinth represents at once an ascent to the
light and a trial in the darkness, and also, in the darkness, the birth of redemption, a gift
from the feminine side of human nature. The journey into the light is the same as the
journey into the dark. The real explanation of the marvels of Chartres will emerge more
from mythological understanding than from rational analysis, which is always trying to
explain the whole from a part. Ideas like this were familiar to the early Gothic builders.
THE BIRTH OF GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE
Chartres Cathedral and the Abbey of St Denis, near Paris, were the two buildings that
transformed architecture. Architecture had collapsed during the Dark Ages, and over the
period of the revival of civilisation and culture, skill was regained, and a new tradition
established. In a flash of inspiration, drawn from his own peak experiences of
consciousness, Abbot Suger of St Denis realized that this tradition could be drawn into
new heights of performance in building a church that not only housed the functions of the
liturgy, but actually inspired people into a deeper spiritual consciousness, and this he put
into practice when the Abbey Church was rebuilt in about 1140. Unusually for the time,
he wrote at length about his experiences, motivation and inspiration. He put this verse
over the door:
Whoever you are, if you seek to fathom the good in this work
Then marvel not at the gold or the cost, but find the aim of the artist.
This noble art has a hidden light that can lift the mind in an inward way
It warms the heart, to turn from daily concern to heaven within,
And opens the door to truth in each of us.
Such art can show how the spirit within can be found in this world:
The dull mind rises to truth through material things,
And seeing this light escapes its former submersion.
Little of Suger’s abbey remains, but there were close connections with Chartres, confirmed
by the way in which Chartres follows many of Suger’s theological themes, such as the
Jesse Tree and the Coronation of the Virgin. Chartres was reconstructed after two fires, in
1154 and 1194, the first destroying the west front and the second all the rest. The work
was inspired by the School of Chartres. The Cathedral had had since 990 a flourishing
cathedral school, which was, first, an ordinary school, educating boys for the church, but
also a meeting place for all the educated men of the cathedral. It was a centre of
Neoplatonism, holding the view that the earthly world was a sign pointing towards the
higher heavenly world, while yet knowing that there is only one. It was also a secure
gathering place for the encouragement and reinforcement of true spiritual knowledge of
the self.
One of the books of the time was the Cosmographia of Bernardus Silvestris, Bernard of
Chartres, subtitled “The All-Encompassing Unity of the World”. This we can now
understand as viewing the world with a different consciousness, in the knowledge of
immanent divinity, nicely put by Jean Hardy in her book “There is another world - and it
is this one”. Another of the books written by a member of the school, Alan of Lille, has the
subtitle “A Saga about the creation of the new man and his struggle for the redemption of
the earth”.
They were following Suger by saying that there is something waiting to be born in each of
us (a new psychological reality, we might say today). This was explicitly put by Meister
Eckhart a hundred years later when he said that we each need to become pure again, to
become once again a virgin, and then there might be born in us the holy child that will be
our redemption. This bring us full circle to the legends of Chartres, to the Cathedral of
birth.
Here were men who knew something of themselves; here was a flourishing new craft
tradition; and here was a need for a new cathedral, and so, carried forward by the
inspiration of Suger’s insight, they built a building with such power to evoke self
revelation, at a place central to the new cult of the Virgin, that it inspired centuries of
supreme architecture. They built a building that affects us: artists who know who they are
create works that remind us who we are, and in becoming unified, we experience a taste of
joy, Ananda in the Vedantic tradition. How does this happen?
THE LADDER TO HEAVEN
The church was a symbol of heaven, in fact a symbol that the ladder to heaven begins right
here, and now, and that heaven is not anywhere else, but right here. At Chartres this is
communicated first by the fact that the building was conceived as an Encyclopedia of
Christian wisdom, of which most survives, so that there are said to be ten thousand figures
in the stone and glass. They created a new art of sculpture, and they created a new art of
stained glass, as well as creating a new art of architecture.
Chartres has three chapters to its book of sculpture. The sculpture of the west front dates
from the second half of the twelfth century, and the sculpture of the north and south
transepts was started fifty or sixty years later. The Royal Portal, the western doors of the
cathedral, contains some of the most sublime of European sculpture.
The west front portrays the second coming of Christ, which is not an event in the future,
but a presence which exists across the whole of time, but specifically right now. Christ
with the signs of the four evangelists is a Christian theme with immense psychological and
spiritual depth. It can teach at every level from the simple peasant to the theologian and
the mystic.
They transformed Romanesque sculpture, and the slender column figures, for which there
is no identification, show for the first time since the sculpture of Olympia in Greece, from
1600 years earlier, the faces of men and women who are conscious of spiritual life.
The archivolts, the figures around the arches, depict the seven liberal arts, the four arts of
science - arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music and the three arts of expression -
grammar, rhetoric and dialectic. The liberal arts are themselves a ladder of ascent towards
understanding. The archivolts also include the first of three representations of the zodiac,
but in this they were probably evoking the cycle of time rather than the divination system
now used by some. They shows the signs of the zodiac and the labours of the months.
The transept sculpture is more proficient, but less inspired, although there are some
exceptional figures. The south side, the side of the sun, of light, depicts the New
Testament and Christian history, the coming of the light. These figures show a developing
interest into human personality, the incarnation of the divine spark through a clear being
into the activity of life, in apostles, martyrs, and saints.
The north side, the side of shadow, depicts the Old Testament and those figures whose
lives foretold the coming of Christ, those who pointed to the light. John the Baptist is a
specially expressive figure. He was the last prophet before Christ, and where he is set on
the cathedral, the sun shines on him only for a short while in high summer. There is a
particularly telling Creation cycle, with the Creator on one side and the creation on the
other, including two wonderful images, the first of which is Adam in the mind of God,
Adam’s head seen over God’s shoulder.
The second is God, with a touch of infinite tenderness, waking Adam to consciousness
(which He is doing for all of us all the time, but we ignore Him). This piece, and the last,
are two sublime masterpieces of European sculpture.
STAINED GLASS Chartres is known by many mainly for the overpowering effect of its
full complement of early thirteenth century stained glass, the best of all, with white glass
used only for emphasis, and never as a blinding background. It is rich is deep primary
colours, which are used for telling effect, recessive in one place and assertive in another.
The blue is particularly beautiful, and has been wonderfully restored in recent years.
The drawing is powerful, with a strong economy, like the work of the best of
contemporary cartoonists. The content of the windows is profound, relating Biblical
themes with deep wisdom. The best way to appreciate this is to spend a few days at
Chartres, and to listen to the talks given daily in English by Malcolm Miller.
The windows and the sculpture form one single co-ordinated symphony of Christian
wisdom, and if the sculpture has the more telling images, the windows have the more
powerful overall effect. If the power of the coloured light is remarkable today, when our
nights are made brilliant by electricity, consider the effect this light must have had on
people eight hundred years ago, whose night were lit only by candles and miniscule
lamps.
THE MODEL OF A MAN The church is a symbol of a man, both in its layout and in its
height. Paul said that a man is made in three elements, body, soul and spirit. The church
agonised over this, and at the Council of Constantinople in 869 declared that man is body
and soul only (and today some churches seem to regard man as body only). However, the
perception of humanity as tripartite is central to many traditions, and truth was not
hidden by a church council decision, and the idea was still real to later thinkers, and to the
school of Chartres.
The human symbolism in the cruciform plan is obvious, but it is also there in the height,
with the strong arcade supporting the triforium, and above the illuminating clerestory.
They represent not only body, soul and spirit, but also body, heart and head, head here
signifying intellect in its original meaning, not just reason.
It is interesting that soul and heart are indicated by the two elements in the building, the
crossing and the triforium, that are both dark. There is the strength of the body in the
great pillars, and the light of the intellect in the high windows of the clerestory, but the
qualities of heart and soul call for a different discrimination.
NUMBER SYMBOLISM The cathedral is also full of number symbolism, not the
construction of a rational meaning out of numerical analysis, but from an underlying sense
that every number, and particularly the numbers from 1 to 12 had a transforming
meaning. In the Middle Ages every number could become a ladder from Earth to Heaven.
The whole world was, in effect, a shadow of the heavenly world.
One was the number of original unity, and two the number of the first division. Chartres
has two spires, the older being the southern, and while the much later northern spire is
quite different, there is a unity of composition, and few would consider the cathedral
unbalanced, a resolution of apparent duality into singleness.
One and two were not properly regarded as numbers at all, and three was considered the
first real number. Three was the number of the divine, a place it hold in many traditions,
describing the nature of the first act of creation, the setting of an essential threeness in the
world. Four the number of the world, and five and six were numbers of marriage, the
union of God and Creation.
Seven, another number of ancient and widespread holiness, the sum of three and four,
represented both the divine in the world, and the steps or completed cycle from earth to
heaven. The next number, eight, signified the next step - rebirth and new life - and was
used on most baptismal fonts, signifying birth into the spirit. Twelve, the product of three
and four, God and the world, was all also important and much used.
Chartres is full of threes and sevens. Apart from the threes inherent in the layout and
height of the building, the transepts and the choir each have three bays, there are three
portals, each with three doors. and three storeys to each tower. Every three signifies the
same truth, the underlying presence of the Divine Nature.
At Chartres, there are seven bays to the nave, seven bays between the crossing and the east
window, and seven bays to the apse and ambulatory. The pilgrimage to Chartres, from
the secular to the sacred, and the pilgrimage through Chartres, through the sacred to
rebirth, can be seen as journeys of seven steps, with, like the chapels of the ambulatory,
three principal aspects. Seven is also the number of the gifts of the body and the gifts of
the soul, shown in both transepts. Every seven signifies the same process, the passage
from Earth to Heaven
Chartres expresses a unifying and transforming symbolism in the very fabric of its
architectural design. It was the first high cathedral with only three storeys, the model for
all later cathedrals. Internally and externally, height is a principal attribute, and not only
height, but verticality.
The whole design is expressed in terms of vertical lines. This is an enormously heavy
stone building, which could have been expressed as stable and earthbound, but with all
the stone masses expressed as bundles of vertical shafts, and with pointed arches formed
like arrows to heaven, the emphasis is upward: gravity is transformed and the building
leads the eye upward, an upward emphasis that is read psychologically as a spiritual
ascent.
PROPORTION In visual composition it has been known for centuries that there are
shapes and relationships that are seen by the mind as more harmonious. There are a
number of systems and possibilities, and it is probable that any system consistently
applied will give the design an inherent harmony that will appeal, but of all of them there
is one that given pre-eminence, the Golden Section, the ratio of nature, by which plant and
animal growth takes place, and which is also inherent in the human body, and almost
certainly, mind. It can be generated arithmetically and geometrically, and is in itself a
subject of enormous interest. It is roughly equivalent of a ratio of 1:1.618. It was certainly
used at Chartres in several places.
There have been several attempts to show that Chartres was generated from a complex
geometrical pattern, but since the several attempts differ from each other, the issue remain
unproven. However, the Golden Section, and other ratios, have been found at Chartres,
although this does not mean that they were knowingly used - our analysis might just be
the product of our assessment of something that was built with an inherent harmony.
PERCEPTION Already the science of perception has revealed some of the visual qualities
that affect us most deeply. Without explicit knowledge of the science of perception, the
masons and theologians of Chartres combined insight and skill to meet the need, and we,
with the benefit of four hundred years of the development of analytical mind, can see how
they built to evoke profound perceptual responses in the brain, responses that integrate
mental activity, unifying the mind, reducing mental fragmentation, enhancing our
participation in consciousness
The brain is divided, both laterally into two halves and vertically into layers, and the
elements have different functions. For some centuries our mental development has been
in the centres for logical thought and reasoning, in the left half of the brain, and has
become very dominant in our mentality.
However, spatial awareness, music, and the perception of wholes, is appreciated by the
centre for spatial awareness in the right half of the brain, the more feminine side of our
mentality. The architecture of these cathedrals is spatially very rich, and this appeals to
the right half of the brain with an effect both stilling and satisfying, since it brings the brain
into a natural harmony.
The brain is also layered, and beneath the cortex is the limbic centre, which acts on basic
perception far faster than the thinking mind, and colours our reactions before we
experience them. This architecture is rich in characteristics that evoke a limbic response -
images of power, richness, order, brilliance, and colour, and by offering this stimulus it
broadens the base of our consciousness.
LIGHT They created an architecture which satisfies basic conditions of the human mind
in many ways, but there is one which is of supreme importance, and that is their use of
light. Medieval light symbolism was highly developed, and their ideas about light were
sophisticated. At its simplest, light was a symbol of God, a sign of God in the world.
Chartres is above all the Cathedral of Light.
It is light that gives us our overwhelming first impression on entering the cathedral, with
windows like great jewels hanging in the black space on every side. Not only do we see
light in the darkness, but we see light coming from above, much of it from high above.
The symbolism is plain, and its actual perceptual effect on each of us is also plain. Light is
not an intellectual symbol, which requires knowledge and learning. Light is a real symbol,
acting directly on our psychology, to call us from the symbolic light to the true light.
Every sunset is calling us in this way, and this cathedral of light calls us most strongly
through this medium.
The building is rich in intellectual symbolism which appeals to the active mind, and in
form symbolism that reaches the senses directly, and it is built to lift the eye, the soul, and
the spirit, and in qualities that integrate and unify the mind into its most true condition, so
that we can be given an insight into the reality that lies behind the appearance, the heaven
that is here on earth, just a mental shift away from us now. It lifts us from the restricted
consciousness of our everyday preoccupations into a clearer consciousness, into who we
really are.
CONCLUSION The builders of Chartres inherited a tradition of knowledge that
combined the Christian and the Classical, that extended back through teachers like Erigena
and Dionysius to the Greek Platonists; they were there at a place and time to participate in
the renewal of respect for the feminine in society and the individual, through the cult of
the Virgin Mary to which Chartres was so important; they had available to them to
splendid new craft of building technique, and they were inspired to action by the insight
of Abbot Suger of St Denis.
From this they lifted the architecture into a new dimension of expression that inspired the
next four centuries, so that great new churches were built from Ireland to Czechoslovakia,
churches that can still inspire us now. While at Chartres we are at the source, there are in
almost any English parish church resources to lift us out of our everyday self absorption.
There is no need to wait for a visit to Chartres!
A VISIT TO CHARTRES I will offer advice if you do visit Chartres. Read your
guidebook before you visit, and return to the guidebook later, after you have been given
your first impression. You will need it to understand the themes of the glass and
sculpture. But do not bother with the guidebook as you appreciate the building: it will just
preoccupy you with words when you will benefit more from experiencing the space and
light.
Park at the bottom of the hill, and walk up to the Cathedral. The walk up the hill is a
pilgrimage that will prepare you for your visit. Walk in silence if possible. Observe the
town that surrounds the cathedral: it is not an isolated monument. Watch for views and
glimpses of the cathedral in the town, the divine presence on Earth.
Try to appreciate the scale and overall whole of the building. Leave the details of the
sculpture and the transepts for later. Keep your vision wide and feel for the wholeness of
the building, its shape, its extent, its texture.
Go to the west front. The towers are not symmetrical, but they have been built in such
harmony, centuries apart, that this does not seem to matter. The southern left-hand, tower
is widely regarded as being a particularly balanced. This was the first time an octagonal
spire was blended into a square tower, and it became a model for all later spires. The
northern tower is superficially different, but closely related in its proportions.
The sculpture of the western portal, the Royal Portal, is a high point in European
sculpture. The outer portals depict Christ incarnate on Earth and ascending from Earth to
heaven, but in the centre, the eternal present. There is not only profound meaning, but
transforming, and creative, skill.
It is rich in symbolic meaning, but first go and see the figures nearest the centre. These
figures have never been identified. This is real architectural sculpture, not figures which
happen to be standing in front of a building, but architecture becoming sculpture. They do
not act. They just exist.
These are the first spiritualized carved faces in European sculpture since the sculpture of
Olympia and the Parthenon. These men and women, with their peaceful faces, seem to
know who they really are. They are not images of historical personalities. Their faces look
at us, brothers and sisters.
The face of Christ is one of the great works of all art. It is human, and yet not an
individual. It is human and more than human, at once individual and universal. This face
looks through us to who we really are.
Inside, try to see rather than to look. Try to keep your vision wide rather than particular.
See your whole field of vision. In particular, be aware of the changing perspective as you
walk through the cathedral, the way the vistas change and shift as you move. Become
aware of the quality of the light.
Notice the building stretching upward, to curve through the vaulting and meet high
above. Feel the light coming from above. Sit down and try to be aware of your
perceptions without thinking about them. Be silent. Try not to talk. Just observe. Do not
analyse.
Preoccupying inner chatter rarely permits the pure observation that can convey
understanding, an understanding which is not the gaining of an intellectual command, a
“standing over”, but a “standing under”. An open, innocent vision might bring the grace
of real perception, of an inspiring insight into the real nature of what is before you . . . . .
and within you. But not if you talk!
