School of Chartres

The claim

God made the world through secondary causes that operate regularly and can be studied. To explain a natural event by direct divine action when a natural explanation is available is bad theology as well as bad physics.

What it held

For most of the early Middle Ages the only Plato available in Latin was part of the Timaeus, in Calcidius' translation with his commentary. At Chartres they read it as a physics textbook, and the results were unlike anything else in the twelfth century.

Thierry of Chartres wrote a commentary on the six days of creation that explains them by the natural properties of the four elements — heat rising, water separating — with God supplying the initial act and nature doing the rest. William of Conches attacked those who, when they cannot see how something works, say God did it, and told them they were making God arbitrary rather than glorifying him.

The personification of Nature as a working deputy of God belongs here and passes into the poetry of the next three centuries. So does an unusual confidence about mathematics: Thierry attempts to explain the Trinity through unity and its multiplications, which is either bold or reckless depending on your view.

Whether it was a school at all is now disputed — the evidence for a coherent institution is thinner than nineteenth-century scholarship assumed.

How it argued

Commentary on the Timaeus and on Genesis, treating the two as compatible accounts and using each to interpret the other.

What it was arguing against

Those who explained natural phenomena by direct divine intervention, whom William of Conches attacked in unusually sharp terms.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether there was a School of Chartres in any institutional sense — Southern argued that the figures taught mostly at Paris and the school is largely a modern construction, and the debate has not closed.

Common misconceptions

That naturalism here is a step away from religion. The argument is theological: God made a world that works, and denying that insults the maker. Every figure involved was a churchman.

How it began

The cathedral school at Chartres, and the accident that the one Platonic text available in Latin happened to be a cosmology.

What became of it

Overtaken when the full Aristotle arrived with a far more powerful physics. The Timaeus stopped being the best available account of nature.

Lasting influence

The literary personification of Nature, through Alan of Lille into the Roman de la Rose and Chaucer. And a habit of looking for natural causes that outlived the texts it was based on.

Why it still matters

It is the clearest medieval statement that explaining something naturally is not explaining God away — an argument still worth having.

Put another way

Reading a creation story as a manual and finding it works.

Where to start

Thierry's treatise, in translation with an introduction that sets out how little he had to work with.

The surprising bit

William of Conches wrote that those who say God did it because they do not know the cause are like a peasant asked how his fields grow, and had to retract parts of his work under pressure.

In their own words

Connections

Answers

Latin Patristic Platonism

Influenced

Early Scholasticism

The verdict

A brief episode of natural philosophy done with almost no equipment and one Greek book.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy