In Steiner's karma research, the twelfth-century Platonic school whose masters taught spiritual Christianity in imaginative pictures, prophesied the Age of Michael, and handed the field to the Aristotelian Dominicans.
The School of Chartres in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the twelfth-century cathedral school in France that he described as the last great home of Platonic spiritual Christianity. In Karmic Relationships, Volume VI (GA 240, 1924), Steiner taught that masters such as Bernardus Sylvestris, Alanus ab Insulis, Bernard of Chartres, and John of Salisbury gave their pupils imaginative pictures rather than intellectual proofs: they beheld the goddess Natura, knew the seven Liberal Arts as living beings, and prophesied the Michael Age that would dawn at the end of Kali Yuga in 1899. According to Steiner these Platonists then consciously handed the leadership of European spiritual life to the Aristotelian Dominicans and continued their work from the spiritual world, gathering into Michael's heavenly school. Anthroposophists study the School of Chartres today as a key chapter in the karma of the Anthroposophical Movement.
The School of Chartres occupies a singular place in Steiner's karma research. In the lecture of 18 July 1924 at Arnhem he portrayed its teachers as the final bearers of Platonic clairvoyance within Christendom, men whose words carried a kind of magic and whose pupils received the mysteries of Christianity in pictures. Their agreement with the Aristotelians who followed them shapes, in Steiner's account, the destiny of the Anthroposophical Society itself.
In Steiner's Own Words
In the School of Chartres in France, where stands the magnificent Cathedral, built with such profusion of detail, there was a concentration, a gathering-together, as it were, of knowledge that only shortly before had been widely scattered, though confined to the small circles of which I have spoken. One of the men with whom the School was able to forge a living link was Peter of Compostella. He was able, with inspired understanding, to bring the ancient spiritual Christianity to life again within his own heart and soul. A whole succession of wonderful figures were teachers in Chartres. Truly remarkable voices spoke of Christianity in the School of Chartres in this twelfth century. There, for example, we find Bernard of Chartres, Bernardus Sylvestris, John of Salisbury, but above all the great Alanus ab Insulis. Mighty teachers indeed!
What it Means Today
Steiner's reading of Chartres runs alongside, and ahead of, a century of medieval scholarship. Charles Homer Haskins placed the school at the centre of what he named the renaissance of the twelfth century in 1927, three years after the Arnhem lecture, and later historians such as Richard Southern, Peter Dronke, and Winthrop Wetherbee have debated how organised the School of Chartres really was. The texts themselves are not in dispute: Bernardus Sylvestris wrote the Cosmographia, in which the goddess Natura petitions for the ordering of the cosmos; Alanus ab Insulis answered with the De Planctu Naturae and the Anticlaudianus; John of Salisbury preserved in his Metalogicon the saying of Bernard of Chartres that we are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants. Steiner treated these allegories not as literary ornament but as reports of supersensible perception, the last afterglow of Platonic seership before the intellect took command of Europe.
Thalira synthesis: where academic history sees twelfth-century humanism and Steiner sees a Michael school, the two readings meet in stone, for the Royal Portal of Chartres Cathedral still carries the seven Liberal Arts carved as figures around the Virgin, each paired with its classical master, the same celestial instructors Steiner says the Chartres teachers beheld as living beings. The cathedral is the one witness both traditions can still visit. Its masters were later gathered into the supersensible School of Michael.
Where to Read More