Abstract
This paper, indebted to Peter Ellard’s Sacred Cosmos, explores the ramifications of twelfth-century culture on the figure of Pythagoras in the Incarnation Portal of the west façade of Chartres Cathedral. Its goal is to provide a historical perspective on contemporaneous discussions of creative human understanding of the cosmos. The text is a gloss, albeit historical, on the sense of the Pythagoras in light of the pedagogy and scientific attitudes in the School of Chartres and in the light of the criticism of conservative theologians, like Bernard of Clairvaux. References include William of Conches, Thierry of Chartres and their Medieval Neo-Platonism through Boethius and Martianus Capella, lectio divina vs integument as a means of approaching God. An underlying theme is the ontopoietic work of the scholar.
God invented and gave us sight to the end that we might behold the courses of intelligence in the heaven, and apply them to the courses of our own intelligence which are akin to them.
Plato, Timaeus 3:46
Plato, Timaeus 3: 46. The Timaeus, the only Plato known to the Chartrains directly, was an incomplete Latin translation by Calcidius in the fourth century. They were exposed to other works by Plato through, e.g., Augustine, Macrobius and Boethius (Ellard, 9). All Plato quotations are taken from The Dialogues of Plato translated into English with Analyses and Introductions by B. Jowett, M.A. in Five Volumes. 3rd edition revised and corrected. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1892.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
John of Salisbury, Metalogicon: the Twelfth-Century Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium, Gloucester MA: Peter Smith 1971, translation by Daniel McGarry, 167, as cited by Ellard, 5. Bernard of Chartres died in 1124, just 20 years before the sculpture was undertaken.
- 2.
Margot E. Fassler, The Virgin of Chartres: Making History through Liturgy and the Arts, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2010. Fassler dedicates her book to Charnoine Pierre Bizeau (Archiviste diocésain de Chartres, 1959–2007, d. 2008).
- 3.
In 1134, The Chronicle of Robert de Torigny, Abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel, records that “primarily at Chartres, men [and women] began, with their own shoulders, to drag wagons loaded with stone, wood, train and other materials to the workshop of the church . . . through deep swamps.” A letter of Hugh, Archbishop of Rouen, to Theodore, Bishop of Amiens, tells how the workers prepared their souls through confession and penance, if they had been at enmity “put aside their anger and ill-will and met together in harmony and well-founded peace.” See Robert Branner, Chartres Cathedral (New York: Norton, 1969) pp. 93–94.
- 4.
Griffith (West Point 1925) was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for saving the-cathedral; he was killed in action on 16 August 1944 in Léves, 3 km from the cathedral; he is buried in St. James, France. Welborn Bartin Griffith, Jr., “Military Times Hall of Valor.” Military Times.com, as cited in Wikipedia, “Chartres Cathedral.” Leves commemorated his bravery with a sidewalk plaque, see Jay Nordlinger, “A Colonel at Chartres,” National Review Online, 10 May 2011. This paper is dedicated to Colonel Griffith and those who taught him so well.
- 5.
Such a reaction Scheler would consider our most original and primordial relation to the world, that world that “entices us to perceive it and to know it . . . [a world that] is always already given in relief, a world to which we are emotionally attached.” Zachary Davis and Anthony Steinbock, “Max Scheler,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/scheler/>, consulted August 13, 2012.
- 6.
Rethinking the School of Chartres, trans. Claude Paul Desmarais (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), pp. 13–14. http://ariadne.org/centrechartraine whose Christopher Crockett whose witty has been most helpful.
- 7.
Max Scheler’s Von Ewingen im Menschen, vol. 5 in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5, Maria Scheler (ed.), Bern: Francke Verlag, 1954, p. 68, as cited in Davis, Zachary and Steinbock, Anthony, “Max Scheler”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/scheler/>.
- 8.
Edmund Hussell, The Phenomenological Uncovering of the Whole, Unified, Connected Stream of Consciousness, Edmund Husserl Collected Works 12, Dordrecht: Springer, 2008, pp. 67–68.
- 9.
Adolf Katzenellenbogen, The Sculptural Programs of Chartres Cathedral, New York: Norton, 1964 (Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), p. viii.
- 10.
I accept the arguments of Jeauneau about the association of these men with Chartres. For the historiography, see Jeauneau, pp. 17–27.
- 11.
“School of Chartres,” Wikipedia.
- 12.
Fassler, 194: “A small group of influential scholars were in residence (at Chartres) at midcentury, Master Thierry being the most important of them.” Fassler’s thorough historiography of Chartres does not explore the philosophy of the School of Chartres. Ellard’s 2007 study is not included in her bibliography.
- 13.
“Literary Forms of Medieval Philosophy,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward .N. Zalta (ed.), URL http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/medieval-literary/. Consulted 19 July 2012.
- 14.
Fassler, p. 196, citing André Vernet, “Un épitaphe inedited de Thierry de Chartres,” in Receuil de travaux offert à C. Brunel 2, 660–670, Paris: Sociétiè de l’Ecole des Chartres, 1955. Thierry left his books to the library at Chartres, perhaps the greatest in the Middle Ages. The library was destroyed in an allied bombing raid on the evening of May 26, 1944. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3038368.stm.)
- 15.
Lawrence S. Cunningham and Keith J. Egan, Christian spirituality: themes from the tradition, Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1996, 91–92. The www is replete with instructions for the technique. http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Catholic/2000/08/How-To-Practice-Lectio-Divina.aspx
- 16.
Commentary on the First Six Books, cited and translated by Marie-Dominique Chenu, in Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century, edited and translated by Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 110, as cited by Ellard, p. 47.
- 17.
Winthrop Wetherbee, “Philosophy, Cosmology, and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance,” in A History of the Western Twelfth-Century Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 21–53, esp. 37.
- 18.
Thierry of Chartres, Abbreviatio Monacensis, Haring, 448–449 as cited by Ellard, 66. The text is an abridgement of Thierry’s commentaries on Boethius by one of his students.
- 19.
The Book of Suger, Abbot of St.-Denis: On What was Done under his Administration, 22–48 in Elizabeth Holt, A Documentary History of Art, selected and edited by Elizabeth Holt, Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1957, 30: “Thus when – out of my delight in the beauty of the house of God – the loveliness of the many-colored gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial.”
- 20.
As with most medieval buildings, the backstory of the construction of the west facade is literally multi-leveled. The west facade (as completed c. 1155) replaced a vestibule added to Fulbert’s church, c. 1050–1075. This has been damaged during the 1134 fire. To replace that structure a new west front was designed with two large towers and with three portals between. Originally theportals were set between the back of the towers, and sculpture was designed for that expanse. However, at some point it was decided to move the portals to the forward plane. Modifications to the sculpture that was already executed is apparent in the tympana of the side portals. See Branner, 75.
- 21.
Fassler, 258.
- 22.
E. Jeauneau, “Le Prologus in Eptatheucon de Thierry de Chartres,” Medieval Studies XVI (1954), p. 174.
- 23.
Katzenellenbogen, 15, emphasizes the ideographic function of the axial placement.
- 24.
Benedictine historian Guibert of Nogent (c. 1055–1124) wrote “God the Father, like Solomon, built a throne when He prepared a seat for Himself in the Virgin.” This trope is typological, based on the description of the throne of Solomon in Book of Kings 10: 18–20.
- 25.
P. Abrahams, Les oeuvres poe’tiques de Baudri de Bourgueil (1046–1130), Paris: H. Champion, 1926, 196ff., as cited by Katzenellenbogen (p. 15, note 46) who points out that the intent of the grouping can be seen in whole set of relationships in the c. 1100 bedchamber of Adela, Countess of Chartres, where the walls were covered with religious, mythological and historical scenes, the ceiling with the Sky and the floor with the Earth and the bedposts were carved into images of Philosophy and the Liberal Arts. Other examples are found in note 45. Abbot Baudri’s descriptions of the tapestries should not be taken literally, but it does offer a sense that such decorations were known at the time; see Frank Merry Station, Anglo-Saxon England, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971 (third edition), 698. Fassler characterizes Adela (31, 134, 143–146, 181, 191).
- 26.
Katzenellenbogen, p. 48.
- 27.
Hugh of St. Victor, The Didascalion, edited and translated by Jerome Taylor, New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, 21. As cited by Ellard, p. 55.
- 28.
Stahl, 115. This is Stahl’s concluding remark, after a thorough discussion of the Capella philology up to 1965.
- 29.
Paul A. Olson, The Journey to Wisdom: Self-Education in Patristic and Medieval Literature, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995, pp. 8–10.
- 30.
Illustrated in Valentine Naboth (1523–1593), Primarum de Coelo et Terra Institutionum quotidianorumque Mundi revolutionem, Venice, 1573, p. 40. Capella worked in the Ptolemaic system with the Sun and the three outer planets circling the earth, but introduces a special epicycle for Mercury and Venus to circle Sun.
- 31.
William H. Stahl, “To a Better Understanding of Martianus Capella,” Speculum 40.1 (January 1965), pp. 102–115, especially 102. The final quotation in the paragraph is his conclusion, after a thorough discussion of the Capella philology up to1965.
- 32.
Thierry of Chartres, Tractatis de sex dierum operibus, Haring, 555: “De septem diebus et sex operum distinctionibus primam Geneseos partem secondum phisicam et ad litteram ego expositurus, in primis de intentione auctris et de libri utilitate pauca premittam. Postea vero ad sensum littere hystorialem exponendum veniam, ut et allegoricam et morale lectionem, que a, sanctis doctoribus aperte execute sunt, ex toto pretermittam” (Ellard, 184, note 56).
- 33.
Eduoard Jeauneau, “Les Maîtres Chartrains,” in Monde Médiéval et Société Chartrain, pp. 109–110, as cited by Ellard, p. 182.
- 34.
The Babylonians knew the “Pythagorean theorem.” Xenocrates’ story that Pythagoras recognized the concords in the sound of hammers striking an anvil gave only general qualities, like the more massive the object the lower the pitch of its sound. Plato met some of Pythagoras’s disciples, used geometrical proofs in one of his dialogues, and later was thought to follow Pythagoras. W. Burkett, Lore and Science in ancient Pythagoreanism, translation E. Minar, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1972, 429 (first German edition 1962). As cited by Carl Huffman, “Pythagoras”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/pythagoras/>. Consulted February 24, 2012. See also Kitty Ferguson, Pythagoras, His Lives and the Legacy of a Rational Universe, London: Icon Books, 2010.
- 35.
J. J. O’Connor and E. F. Robertson, “Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius,” http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Boethius.html. Consulted Feb. 1, 2013.
- 36.
Boethius, The Fundamentals of Music, c. 520. The fact that this is largely a translation and paraphrase from Nicomachus and Ptolemy should not distract us from its import, for as Stephen MCluskey argues, progress is only half the picture of science; the other half is to preserve and promulgate what is already known. In the Middle Ages, alternatives were progress, preservation or decline (Astronomies and Cultures in Early Medieval Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). More study needs to be devoted to the figure of Music at Chartres, as well as the notion of harmony.
- 37.
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, “Possibility, Life’s Ontopoiesis, and the Vindication of the Cosmos,” Phenomenological Inquiry XXXVI (October 2012), pp. 2–3.
- 38.
John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, p. 167: “Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.” Cited by Ellard, p. 5.
- 39.
The reference is more than rhetorical. I identify the mood of the Chartres Pythagoras with the salvific coping strategies of Boethius’ last days.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Trutty-Coohill, P. (2014). Pythagoras in the Sacred Cosmos of Chartres Cathedral. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Phenomenology of Space and Time. Analecta Husserliana, vol 117. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02039-6_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02039-6_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-02038-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-02039-6
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)