All Saints' Glasses

In York’s All Saints’ Church on North Street is a wonderful collection of stained glass. I usually find the stuff boring, barely bothering to look in most of the churches I visit; it is either garish and modern, or, worst of all, dull and Victorian. All Saints', amazingly, is early fifteenth-century. Quite how it survived the Reformation and Commonwealth I cannot say, though it is thought that Good General Fairfax did much to save the city’s cultural treasure when it fell to the Parliament in the civil wars.

One of these ancient windows, depicting The Nine Orders of Angel dating from 1410-1420 provides useful pictoral teaching on the Biblical record of angelic creature. In the bottom right-hand corner, however, with a gaggle of others, is a man wearing a pair of glasses. Rather cumbersome they look, and not terribly comfortable; one wonders how he keeps them on without their falling off (I daresay that string did the job then as well as now). This is the first depiction of spectacles in glass, and one of the earliest anywhere, the very first being found in paintings by Tomasso da Modena from 1352. Whether our friend from York was a particular individual the artist wished to commemorate, or even himself, one cannot say; he may have marvelled at this wonderful piece of technology and thought it worth recording it in his scene. On the other hand, he might be hinting to us that the angelic world, otherwise invisible, can only be ‘seen’ by those who apply the correct lenses of faith as found in scripture. Just as a father in the New Testament cried “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief!” so, we might cry:

“Lord, I see, help my blindness!”

Christianity is not blind faith, it is seeing faith: seeing and hearing the promises of God and believing them. When our eyes grow dim and our focus blurs, we pray that God will aid our weakness. We do not see fully till we join Him in heaven; till then, it is through a glass darkly, but we Christians are not stumbling around in the dark. There is light to be had and things to be seen if we use God’s word as the lens: then, all things become clearer.