Clues and evidence of historical events are everywhere. Sometimes we forget that history isn’t confined to textbooks; its influences and repercussions are all around us, from the floor plans of our homes, to the roads we drive on, to the stores we shop in. Time and space are a continuum, mutually shaping each other as reality expands and unfolds, and this dynamic interconnection runs through the smallest things in this universe to the greatest.
Perhaps this may sound a little far-fetched, so let us put it to the test: Can we learn something about the history of the Catholic Church by studying the ancient board game of chess? Or can we show how the development of the Church’s doctrine and culture over time is symbolized by thirty-two carved pieces moving about on sixty-four squares? Many historians think so, and some teachers even recommend integrating the game and its history into school curriculums to help students better understand medieval European society.1
Chess is a game of war. Right away, we are confronted by a board-view that aligns itself with the Judeo-Christian worldview. “The life of man upon earth is a warfare,” says Job (7:1), and Christ warns his disciples not to think he has come to bring peace on earth; rather, he has brought a sword (Matt 10: 34). Chess is a concrete visualization and application of two minds engaged in the combat of an otherwise invisible world of ideas, and thus it perfectly represents the spiritual struggle taking place on the battleground of physical creation.
Is reality shaped by fate, chance, or the free will of intelligent beings? Unlike dice or cards, chess comes down firmly on the side of free will, as does the Catholic Church. Christians also recognize that the world in which free will operates is intelligible and governed by laws, since God has “ordered all things by measure, number, and weight” (Wis 11:21). As Thomas E. Woods observes, this vision of the rationality of the universe was the catalyst that launched modern scientific inquiry, a quantitative method for unlocking the mysteries of the universe.2 Already we see that the world of a game is in congruence with a game of the worlds, a small epiphany of the cosmic war (Gen 3:15).
The period from the Middle Ages to the early Renaissance, in particular, demonstrates how Church history shaped chess—and how chess influenced the thought of Christians and the deeds and institutions of the time. During the long campaigns of the Crusades, there was a massive transfer of knowledge and customs between Muslim and Christian soldiers, scholars, and religious and political leaders. Historian Richard Eales has noted that “it is a paradoxical but well-established fact that even in the period of the Crusades more new learning came to the West from the Muslim ‘enemy’ than through eastern Christian civilization. This was true not only of science and mathematics, some of which, like chess, originated in India, but also of classical literature.”3 Thus, in this battlefield meeting of East and West, chess made its grand entrance into Christian culture.
Eventually, the game became a kind of Scholastic thought tool, a mirror for individuals to understand morality and their societal roles in medieval feudalism. This was chiefly brought about by a 13th-century Dominican friar, Jacobus de Cessolis, who wrote The Book of the Morals of Men and the Duties of Nobles and Commoners, on the Game of Chess. That treatise was copied and translated more than any other work of the Middle Ages, and its popularity almost rivalled the Bible itself during that time. In it, de Cessolis describes the different social rankings and peasant professions of the time, assigning each one to a piece of the board and outlining the virtues, rights, and responsibilities proper to each (the importance held by the Church in this system is signified by the bishops who stand on either side of the king and queen, two pieces that were originally elephants in the Indian version). The friar also included instructions on how to play the game, encouraging his readers to experience “the symbolism in action.”4
Chess was now woven into the tapestry of Christendom and, as it grew and expanded, so did chess. One example of this was the changing attitudes towards women and the emerging ideal of chivalry and courtly love. Church historian Fr. John Vidmar, O.P., singles this out as a notable development that emerged from the Crusaders’ exposure to the greater respect given to women in the east, which also contributed to a correlative increase in devotion to the Virgin Mother of Christ during this time.5 This set the stage for the rise and power of certain women religious, nobility, and queens in the 14th and 15th centuries, such as Bridget of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, and Isabella of Spain. While it was probably sometime during the 10th century that the piece known as the king’s minister was renamed the queen (inspired by Queen Adelaide, wife of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I), it was the inspiration of the indomitable Spanish Queen Isabella that endowed the chess queen with the superior powers she exercises on the board today.6
From the cosmic spiritual warfare between good and evil, to the scientific and cultural discoveries during the Crusades, to the Scholastic developments in morality and sociology, society has shaped chess and chess has shaped society. This includes the human and divine society of the Church, which has also had a reciprocal historical relationship with this noble game. Eloquently expressing this fascinating reality, Paula Rivera of the National Catholic Register writes:
The Catholic Church has always used symbols and art to capture the spiritual battles for our souls as seen in our cathedrals with the help of Michelangelo and Dante, and the game of chess carries on that tradition. Jesus was and is the king with the Blessed Virgin Mary, the queen, at his side and the center of the game. Each chess piece bestows some moral attributes to the game and portrays a visual display of the Church’s majesty on a game board.7
As noted, the historical ideas and actions of humankind through time both shape and are shaped by the spaces we create, even down to something as mundane as a floor plan. When you enter historic Catholic churches throughout the world, you will discover that many of them have floors tiled with a checkered pattern. While it can be argued that for some of such floors this was merely the result of an aesthetic choice, and its relationship to chess is at most implicit or coincidental, there is at least one that is more explicit: a 12th-century basilica, San Savino in Piacenza, Italy, actually has a floor mosaic of a chess game. This is at least one concrete proof, argues David Shenk, “of how thoroughly chess became woven into the fabric—and literally tiled onto the floor—of Christian medieval European society.”8
Endnotes:
1John Pagnotti and William B. Russell III, “Exploring Medieval European Society with Chess: An Engaging Activity for the World History Classroom,” History Teacher vol. 46, no. 1 (2012), 29.
2 Thomas E. Woods, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2012), 76.
3David Shenk, The Immortal Game (New York: Anchor Books, 2006), 49.
4Shenk, Immortal Game, 53-54.
5The Catholic Church through the Ages (New York: Paulist Press, 2014), 136.
6Shenk, Immortal Game, 66.
7Paula Rivera, “Catechism on a Board,” National Catholic Register, December 11-17, 2005.
8Shenk, Immortal Game, 51.
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The article is very much appreciated, the recognition that history is more of a chess game than a linear progression more like checkers. The latter mentality: left-brained, with the past as a validation for C.S. Lewis’ “chronological snobbery.”
The chessboard is more right-brained. More likely to suspect the tragic novelty of our moment on the stage—this novelty being the simultaneous exhaustion of Enlightenment rationalism (rootless 21st-century Secularism) and the resurgence of 7th-century Islamic fideism. The irony for the West is that much of historic Islam does exhibit the radical transcendence of God (totally inscrutable and fatalistic) and, at the opposite bookend, hints of the innate natural law as from “before” historical time began, identified as “the germ of Islam.” (No room there, however, for original sin—and Redemption—as part of the mix.)
But, succumbing to the ideological periodization of history, let’s take the Medieval era, but with both its Muslim and Christian systematizers. Averroes and St. Thomas Aquinas, both, were intent on a broad and yet always vulnerable coherence of faith with human reasoning (the Aristotle factor). But, then, also take the historically earlier—and perennial (!) St. Augustine who uncovers deeper stirrings within “history”—like Alaric’s cosmos-shattering sacking of Rome, and like the West’s self-destructive Enlightenment project.
Curious, then, the fictions of the left-brained and presumptive systematizers like today’s globalists. And, like the seemingly left-brained Synod on Synodality which is so intent on “facilitating,” and then “aggregating, compiling, and synthesizing [!]” our modern incoherence—almost as if “walking together,” alone, is the key to “a future filled with hope” (Jeremiah 29:11). Too easy for intuitionism and identity politics to masquerade as the Holy Spirit? And, too easy for “expert” editing to dispose of the inborn natural law and moral theology, i.e., as merely a disciplinary matter for our “throwaway culture”?
The perennial, one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church…in October 2023 qua vadis? We are thrown back into more Apostolic times, so this from the chess master, St. Augustine:
“So it falls out that in this world, in evil days like these, the Church walks onward like a wayfarer stricken by the world’s hostility, but comforted by the mercy of God . . . It was never any different . . . So shall it be until this world is no more” (St. Augustine, The City of God, Book xviii, Ch. 51).