FAITH & WORKS

Chartres Cathedral is a 700-year-old witness to the truth that faith can work miracles. Christ, who was born in a stable, has no more beautiful home on earth.

These ten reproductions of Chartres' matchless stained-glass windows tell the story of His coming. Each panel is a chapter: the annunciation to the Virgin that she is to be the mother of Jesus, the birth in the manger, the glad tidings to the shepherds, the star-guided Magi's visit to King Herod, the presentation of Jesus at the temple, Joseph's dream-warning of Herod's murderous plan, the flight into Egypt, and Herod's massacre of the newborn innocents.

It is an old, familiar story, known even to unbelievers. Yet each Christmas the hearts of Christendom open to it anew, and find it more magical than winter's first snowfall.

The Cathedral

Chartres Cathedral, standing high above a windswept plain, 55 miles southwest of Paris, was built by farming folk. From the 4th Century, Chartres had been their spiritual center. When their Christian church, on the site of a Druid shrine, was destroyed by pagan Normans in 858, the people built a better one. Three times in the next three centuries, the church was swept by ruinous fires. Each time they made it more splendid than before.

Between 1194 and 1260, the community slowly raised the great cathedral that now stands at Chartres. An abbot, who watched the dedicated builders dragging great stone blocks five miles from the quarry, wrote with pride and amazement:

"Who has ever heard tell, in times past, that powerful princes . . . that nobles, men and women, have bent their proud and haughty necks to the harness of carts, and that, like beasts of burden, they have dragged to the abode of Christ these wagons? . . . Often a thousand persons are attached to the chariots--so great is the difficulty--yet they march in such silence that not a murmur is heard . . . When they halt on the road, nothing is heard but the confession of sins, and pure and suppliant prayer to God . . ."

The Windows

Chartres' windows have made the cathedral world-famed. Among the earliest surviving examples of Gothic stained glass, they are also the best. Yet the men who created them were amateurs, who may have had some knowledge of enameling but had little or none of glass. They learned as they worked. Each tiny fragment of glass, averaging an eighth of an inch thick, was chipped with the care and precision that jewels require. Laid flat on a full-scale drawing of the window, the fragments were inserted into the grooves of malleable lead bars that formed the panels. Only after the completed panels were fastened to iron crossbars in the 38-ft. windows themselves could the glaziers judge the full brilliance of their art.

Blue and red, like mingled ice and fire, rule the windows. The blue, in scores of subtle hues, admits arrows of sapphin light. The red spills a hail of rubies into the cathedral's dimness. Diamondlike borders of white dots keep the chief col ors from crowding each other. Subsidiary greens, purples and golds help create an effect richer and more various than New England's autumn foliage.

It is also a one-dimensional effect; the first Gothic glaziers had neither the inclination nor the techniques for achieving a pictorial illusion of space. And, seen close-to, the drawing is childishly crude. The figures are as bodiless as shadows stopped upon a screen; they gesture with puppetlike stiffness. For all that, they look wonderfully alive, shining through the blaze of color like prophets in a fiery furnace.

Later glaziers, who made the 172 windows on the side aisles and chapels of Chartres, achieved greater realism but no such magnificent color. To the anonymous makers of the earlier windows, color was everything. They used it with all the brilliance and daring that modern scientists apply to atomic particles. With God's help they created a vast yet perfectly ordered implosion of light.

Henry Adams, in his eloquent book about Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, called these windows "the most splendid color decoration the world ever saw, since no other material, neither silk nor gold, and no opaque color laid on with a brush, can compare with translucent glass, and even the Ravenna mosaics or Chinese porcelains are darkness beside them."

The greatest works of secular art are darkness beside what faith and art, working together, can accomplish. Faith shines through the Chartres windows as serenely as sunlight. To see them is to give thanks that faith, like sunlight, forever returns to mankind.

The photographs reproduced here are the result of the first systematic color study ever made of two of Chartres' greatest (west portal) windows. They were taken by James R. Johnson, a Columbia University art instructor, who used a 70-ft. scaffold to get close-ups of every panel.

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