René M. Querido, The Golden Age of Chartres: The Teachings of a Mystery School and the Eternal Feminine, Floris Books, Edinburgh, 1987.
Making use of the wisdom of ancient Greece, inherited in turn from even earlier civilizations, Querido writes that the builders of Chartres strove for their cathedral to be “a gateway to cross the threshold into the spiritual world.” Bernard of Chartres attributed the understandings embraced there to a rich heritage from preceeding times. Bernard declared, regarding these predecessors, that:
“If we see further than they, it is not by virtue of our stronger sight, but because we are lifted up by them and carried to a great height. We are dwarfs carried on the shoulders of giants.”
Building on this legacy, the Chartres masters sought to realize the birth of the eternal self from out of the shell of the mortal human form. They were eager to deeply comprehend the divine architecture of the universe and embody it in their own cathedral. The true origin and home of the human soul, they taught, was in the spiritual realm.
Alanus ab Insulis was regarded among the most learned men of his time and was one of the last great heads of the School of Chartres toward the close of the 12th century. He was called “Doctor Universalis” and described as “a master teacher who knows everything one can know including all cosmology, both microcosm and macrocosm, and the arts and sciences of both the ancients and moderns.” Alanus titled his most famous work, The Creation of the New Man and his Struggle for the Redemption of the Earth. Birth of the “new human being”, Alanus believed, was the true goal of those who sought to carry on the work of Christ. Such new human beings could, in turn, transform the earth into the New Jerusalem. Following Alanus’ death in 1203, according to Querido, “it was as if a great curtain began to fall over the School of Chartres, shrouding the Platonic stream that had been its life.”
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