Apsed Catholics
Echlin, Edward P.
(Continued from page 29) timidating black voters, doctoring absentee ballot applications in Seneca and Martin Counties, the reckless purging of voter rolls to reduce the number of black...
...Indeed, one remarkable window portrays the four evangelists on the shoulders of the great prophets...
...Does such instruction apply today...
...We Christians, in theological, familial, and ecological recession, are in need of ancestral shoulders...
...This method contemplates the sources of the faith, especially the most intense moments of the living tradition's expression of them, bringing their light to bear on the present time...
...At Chartres, the two Scriptures flow into one Bible, one salvation history...
...What about creation itself, redeemed through God's son, and the appalling destruction of our earth today...
...What about today's troubled families...
...Both are made responsible by their Creator for his garden...
...These tactics are very effective, but they also damage the fabric of our system...
...Look to Chartres: There we find the magisterial, pre-Abrahamic figures Noah and Melchizedek...
...Look to the ecological theology found in the stone and glass of Chartres: God's rainbow and the lush profusion of plants and animals...
...The theology that gave us Vatican II was known as ressourcement...
...In a distinctly medieval way, ressourcement was also the method of the theologians, canonists, and craftsmen at Chartres...
...Not all who read this will recall the work of Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, Jean Danielou, Karl Rahner, C.H...
...Enthroned above them are Christ—"the true light that enlightens every man" (John 1:9)—and Mary, who bridges the Old and New Testaments...
...Chartres is a massive profession of faith of a medieval people, and of their descendants, who preserved it...
...For our part, we dwell in what the Jesuit editor of Theological Studies recently called a "theological recession...
...It boasted, among others, Ivo the canonist, Bernard, Thierry, and John of Salisbury...
...don swift Erie, Pa...
...In a world of globalized commerce and cross-cultural migration, is wisdom to be encountered in the other world religions...
...For theologians there is yet more...
...In the "Good Samaritan" window, donated by the shoemakers, find Adam, fashioned by God from brown soil, and Eve from his rib...
...For the artists, artisans, and scholars of Chartres grounded their work in a living theological tradition, one that flowed from their ancestors, upon whose shoulders they dared to stand...
...Thus the cathedral's most famous window, "The Root of Jesse" in the northern lancet in the west front, depicts the lineage of David and the Jewish kings, culminating in Mary and Jesus...
...Dodd, or Raymond Brown...
...The cathedral itself is a theological masterpiece which incorporates the learning of the medieval schools in its resplendent glass and stone...
...Continued from page 29) timidating black voters, doctoring absentee ballot applications in Seneca and Martin Counties, the reckless purging of voter rolls to reduce the number of black voters, and the stonewalling of the Florida secretary of state's office...
...Even before the promise sworn to Abraham, they encounter and disclose the divine...
...He noted that it was anger that finally brought the party control of the presidency and both houses of Congress...
...It is not a repetitive trolling of the receded past, but rather a rediscovery of our ancestral voices: their methods, faith, imagination, and ways of heeding God's disclosure...
...These words reflect a theological method from which we can learn today...
...After Bush became president-elect, Rush Limbaugh angrily dismissed suggestions that Republicans should turn away from an "orgy of hate" to seek conciliation and pursue moderation...
...In cultural warfare, the stakes seem that great and call for extraordinary exertion that sometimes crosses the bounds of civility and lawfulness...
...We are as dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants," wrote Bernard of Chartres, "and can see further than our great predecessors...
...30 APSED CATHOLICS Edward P. Echlin The Cathedral of Our Lady at Chartres rises like a crown at the edge of the plain of Beauce...
...Bishop Fulbert, who built an earlier church—whose west front still dazzles pilgrims today—founded the famous Chartres School...
...At Chartres, note the Nativity, Nazareth, and public-life scenes: they are all about family...
...The latter testify to medieval devotion to Mary and to her son, to faith in the God incarnate...
...Without it there would be no childhood of God incarnate, no lessons, learned from relatives, about nature which appear later in Jesus' unforgettable parables...
...And, of course, there is the sheer numinosity of the place, from a distance but especially within, its colored glass changing with the sun and the seasons...
...Chartres teaches us something we need to relearn...
...Below lie suburban sprawl, motorways, and the remaining wheat fields of the lie de France, the golden granary of Paris...
...Henri de Lubac wrote that medieval exegesis "found expression not only in literature but in art, evincing a marvelous power and fecundity...
...When Chartres rose, a great episcopal school existed in its precincts...
...The GOP chairperson of one Florida county told the New York Times that "our lives" were at stake...
...The cathedral is known for its influence on High Gothic, its flying buttresses, ribbed vaults, and multiple towers...
...Ressourcement points us to them, to the peaks of theological artistry and poetry that can raise us beyond recession...
...Chartres, standing like a crown on its plateau, is one such shining peak...
...for glass and carvings that pray and teach down the centuries...
...And in the central west front portal, where pilgrims are still drawn to the king of the universe, find enthroned the one who creates and continues to sustain all...
...31...
Vol. 128 • January 2001 • No. 2
