Author(s): Philip Ball

Design

In the twelfth century, Christians in Europe began to build a completely new kind of church - not the squat, gloomy buildings we now call Romanesque, but soaring, spacious monuments flooded with light from immense windows. The inception of the age of Gothic architecture in the late twelfth century marked a profound change in the way some prominent Western intellectuals and theologians pictured the Universe and humanity's relationship with it. They began to imagine a God who built the cosmos using logical 'rules', based on geometry, that mankind could deduce using the faculty of reason.This faith in an ordered, rational and harmonious universe was given physical expression in the great cathedrals, and more than any other in Chartres Cathedral, an unparalleled feat of craftsmanship in which all the elements of the new style cohered perfectly for the first time. This change in thinking was by no means universal, and it led to furious debates about how far it was 'proper' to enquire into the nature of the universe. These conflicts mark the beginning of the tensions that are still felt today between faith and reason.