APSED CATHOLICS.

The Cathedral of Our Lady at Chartres rises like a crown at the edge of the plain of Beauce. Below lie suburban sprawl, motorways, and the remaining wheat fields of the Ile de France, the golden granary of Paris. Chartres is a massive profession of faith of a medieval people, and of their descendants, who preserved it. The cathedral is known for its influence on High Gothic, its flying buttresses, ribbed vaults, and multiple towers; for glass and carvings that pray and teach down the centuries. The latter testify to medieval devotion to Mary and to her son, to faith in the God incarnate. 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.

For theologians there is yet more. 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. Bishop Fulbert, who built an earlier church--whose west front still dazzles pilgrims today--founded the famous Chartres School. It boasted, among others, Ivo the canonist, Bernard, Thierry, and John of Salisbury. The cathedral itself is a theological masterpiece which incorporates the learning of the medieval schools in its resplendent glass and stone. "We are as dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants," wrote Bernard of Chartres, "and can see further than our great predecessors."

These words reflect a theological method from which we can learn today. 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.

For our part, we dwell in what the Jesuit editor of Theological Studies recently called a "theological recession." Not all who read this will recall the work of Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, Jean Danielou, Karl Rahner, C.H. Dodd, or Raymond Brown. Chartres teaches us something we need to relearn.

The theology that gave us Vatican II was known as ressourcement. 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. 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.

In a distinctly medieval way, ressourcement was also the method of the theologians, canonists, and craftsmen at Chartres. Indeed, one remarkable window portrays the four evangelists on the shoulders of the great prophets. Enthroned above them are Christ--"the true light that enlightens every man" (John 1:9)--and Mary, who bridges the Old and New Testaments. At Chartres, the two Scriptures flow into one Bible, one salvation history.

Does such instruction apply today? In a world of globalized commerce and cross-cultural migration, is wisdom to be encountered in the other world religions? Look to Chartres: There we find the magisterial, pre-Abrahamic figures Noah and Melchizedek. Even before the promise sworn to Abraham, they encounter and disclose the divine. What about today's troubled families? At Chartres, note the Nativity, Nazareth, and public-life scenes: they are all about family. Without it there would be no childhood of God incarnate, no lessons, learned from relatives, about nature which appear later in Jesus' unforgettable parables.

What about creation itself, redeemed through God's son, and the appalling destruction of our earth today? Look to the ecological theology found in the stone and glass of Chartres: God's rainbow and the lush profusion of plants and animals. In the "Good Samaritan" window, donated by the shoemakers, find Adam, fashioned by God from brown soil, and Eve from his rib. Both are made responsible by their Creator for his garden. 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.

We Christians, in theological, familial, and ecological recession, are in need of ancestral shoulders. 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.

Edward P. Echlin is the author of Earth Spirituality, Jesus at the Center (Arthur James, 1999).