the School of Chartres gathers several philosophers and intellectuals with 11th and 12th centuries: Fulbert of Chartres (founder), Thierry of Chartres, Bernard of Chartres, Guillaume de Conches, Jean de Salisbury, Bernard Silvestre.

The school of Chartres, or Chartres-native academy, knows its fame as from the 11th century thanks to Fulbert. She will know her apogee at the 12th century, under the impulse of erudite philosophical studies based on Plato carried out mainly by Yves of Chartres, Bernard of Chartres, Gilbert of Porrée, Thierry of Chartres, Guillaume de Conches, Jean de Salisbury (which had studied in Chartres) and Bernard Silvestre.

The sources used at the time to comment on Plato were only indirect (Augustin, Macrobe, Chalcedius, Boèce and Martianus Capella). However they were enough to establish correspondences between Greek philosophy and Christianity. But what retained more the Chartres-native school was the theses pythagoricians of Plato:

• Guillaume de Conches “identifies the monade neopythagorician with creative God of the thought Judeo-Christian”;

• Thierry of Chartres “resorts only to arithmetic, not exactly that which we know, but this science of the number interfered considerations metaphysics, that the Greeks had conceived, and that Boèce transmitted to Latin”.

• Bernard Sylvestre writes Cosmographia, which is a “poetic variation on the topics pythagoricians”. It was recopied by Boccace. To note that one finds in this work, whose completion is estimated about 1148 by Jeauneau, the concept of relationship between macrocosm and microcosm, “the man is a Universe in short cut”, strictly hermetic concept, since it is that of the Table of emerald of Hermes Trismégiste: “All that is in top is as all that is in bottom”

The Residents of Chartres thus will seize the Liberal arts, since sciences of Quadrivium are already known pythagoricians: “We married together Trivium Quadrivium for the increase in the noble race of the philosophers”. As pointed out it M.M. Davy, the great innovation of the century is the bringing together of the School of Chartres with Egyptian science: “It is important to retain the interest which develops at the 12th century with regard to Egypt considered as the mother of the liberal arts. The originality of Bernard Sylvestre is to have supported the attention on the thought philosophy-Egyptian woman… Thanks to the Egyptian hermeneutism Bernard will be able to build his cosmogony…”.

It is on this bottom that the sculptors will engrave on the royal gate the liberal arts during the construction (or rather of the rebuilding) of the Cathédrale of Chartres at the beginning of the 13th century.

This approach of the Liberal arts will end up bursting, the heptateuchon of Thierry of Chartres ends up being abandoned, leaving the step with the Scolastique and its Masters, by the redécouverte of Aristote, the bringing together of the mechanical arts to the liberal arts, and in particular by the introduction of Physics. Jean de Salisbury is today regarded as a predecessor of Albert Large the of share his work “Entheticus of dogmate philosophorum”, where, in addition to the entry of Aristote, it studies there stoicism, the epicureanism and the peripatetism (with inter alia the topic of the fifth gasoline and the eternity of the World). He will have contributed to put forward the platonism of Chartres in a “platonism seen by Chartres”.

See too

On Christian philosophy

• Scholastic