Beauty for Truth's Sake Read online

  © 2009 by Stratford Caldecott

  Published by Brazos Press

  a division of Baker Publishing Group

  P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

  www.brazospress.com

  Repackaged edition published 2017

  Ebook edition created 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  ISBN 978-1-4934-1060-6

  Scripture is taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  Moon photograph (p. 115) used with permission of Jim Malda, Muskegon, Michigan.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Epigraph

  Foreword by Ken Myers

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1. The Tradition of the Four Ways

  The Great Tradition

  Adapting the Medieval Model

  Beauty for Truth’s Sake

  Beauty on the Cross

  2. Educating the Poetic Imagination

  “A Beauty Which Defies Time”

  Rediscovering Poetic Knowledge

  The Symbolic Cosmos

  A Key to the Ancient Mysteries

  3. The Lost Wisdom of the World

  Sacred Number

  Excursus: The Five Platonic Solids

  Beyond Pythagoras

  Irrational Beauty

  Phi and the Natural Numbers

  Symmetry

  4. The Golden Circle

  A Journey into God

  Theology of the Trinity

  In Search of the Logos

  Geometry as Prophecy

  The Golden Circle

  5. “Quiring to the Young-Eyed Cherubims”

  Good Vibrations

  Humane Architecture

  At Home in the Cosmos

  Secrets of the Sky

  The End of the Road

  6. The Liturgical Consummation of Cosmology

  The Construction of Modernity

  A Sense of the Sacred

  Liturgy as Remembering to Give

  An Education in Beauty

  The Holy City

  Conclusion: Beyond Faith and Reason

  Bibliography

  Index

  Back Cover

  The best ideal is the true

  And other truth is none.

  All glory be ascribèd to

  The holy Three in One.

  Gerard Manley Hopkins, Summa

  Foreword

  Perhaps we are lacking the recognition that our response to the whole [world] should not most deeply be that of doing, nor even that of terror and anguish, but that of wondering or marvelling at what is, being amazed or astonished by it, or perhaps best, in a discarded English usage, admiring it; and that such a stance . . . is the only source from which purposes may be manifest to us for our necessary calculating.

  George Parkin Grant1

  Some teachers are bound to be disappointed by this book. If they are in the market for an outline of techniques to elevate test scores or lengthen attention spans or any other quantifiable goal, their response may well be like that of the rich young ruler, who went away sorrowful. Stratford Caldecott’s wise counsel in Beauty for Truth’s Sake involves, as did our Lord’s, a commitment to renunciation—in this case surrendering assumptions about the ends of education that dominate modern culture.

  Modern education tends to endorse Francis Bacon’s equation of knowledge with power, and so the Liberal Arts are out of fashion. But while the Servile Arts (which advance technological progress) may be equipped by such a narrow view of knowledge, the power they enable can be properly directed and governed only by the existential orientation encouraged by the Liberal Arts. Within those disciplines, education conveys an understanding of the significance of freedom, which is necessary for the wise exercise of power. Such an education is re-enchanted because it acknowledges the beautiful, Logos-centered order that permeates all of creation.

  Early in this book, Caldecott corrects the common mistake of structuring classical education only around the trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—while neglecting the number-based disciplines of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Perhaps in an effort to reconnect education to the truth, many well-intentioned educators have stressed the language-based trio at the expense of the quadrivium. After all, a commitment to the truth requires making and evaluating truth claims, for which the lost tools of the trivium are essential.

  Marion Montgomery (echoing Thomas Aquinas) summarizes the task of education as “the preparing of the mind for the presence of our common inheritance, the accumulated and accumulating knowledge of the truth of things.”2 Twenty-first-century readers can be forgiven for missing the cosmological depth assumed by Montgomery. For “the truth of things” is more than the truth about things. Education for truth’s sake must do more than preserve a collection of propositions, however lovely they may be. Luigi Giussani clarifies what is at stake by insisting that “to educate means to help the human soul enter into the totality of the real.”3

  The preparing of the mind is much more than training analytic reason. It requires, as Caldecott makes delightfully clear, the nourishing of the imagination, the orienting of the heart so that we intuit the world aright even before we begin to shape our theories. Education enables (in Josef Pieper’s words) “the capacity of simplex intuitus, of that simple vision to which truth offers itself like a landscape to the eye.”4 And such a capacity is more likely, Caldecott argues, when teachers attend to the proportionate and harmonious aspects of creation explored in the four ways first recognized by the Pythagoreans. Perhaps surprisingly, wonder is awakened and sustained not just through enchanting stories but by the perception of the numberliness of the world we know through the senses.

  Modern culture has disenchanted the world by disenchanting numbers. For us, numbers are about quantity and control, not quality and contemplation. After Bacon, knowledge of numbers is a key to manipulation, not meditation. Numbers are only meaningful (like all raw materials that comprise the natural world) when we can do something with them. When we read of twelve tribes and twelve apostles and twelve gates and twelve angels, we typically perceive something spreadsheet-able. By contrast, in one of Caldecott’s most radical claims, he insists, “It is not simply that numbers can be used as symbols. Numbers have meaning—they are symbols. The symbolism is not always merely projected onto them by us; much of it is inherent in their nature” (p. 75). Numbers convey to well-ordered imaginations something of (in Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s metaphor) the inner design of the fabric of creation. The fact that the words “God said” appear ten times in the account of creation and that there are ten “words” in the Decalogue is not a random coincidence.

  The beautiful meaningfulness of a numberly world is most evident in the perception of harmony, whether in music, architecture, or physics. Called into being by a three-personed God, creation’s essential relationality is often evident in complex patterns that can be described mathematically. Sadly, as Caldecott laments, “our present education tends to eliminate the contemplative or qualitative dimension of mathematics altogether” (p. 55). The sense of tran
scendence that many (including mathematicians and musicians) experience when encountering beauty is often explained away by materialists as an illusion. Caldecott offers an explanation rooted in Christology. Since the Logos is love, and since all things are created through him and for him and are held together in him, we should expect the logic, the rationality, the intelligibility of the world to usher in the delight that beauty bestows.

  One of the most sobering claims Caldecott makes in this book comes in his concluding chapter, when he observes that “we are living in an era shaped by philosophical battles that most of us are unaware ever took place” (p. 123). Having spent most of my adult life trying to understand the genealogy of contemporary confusions, I wish I had known more about those battles when I was much younger. Many of our cultural institutions (and the shape they give to our lives) have been shaped by the outcome of those battles, formed by sympathies with the winning if mistaken side. And so many countercultural works of re-enchantment are now necessary. But what a marvelous necessity and what a marvelous and hopeful companion Stratford Caldecott can be for us in the way ahead.

  Ken Myers, producer and host, Mars Hill Audio Journal

  1. George Parkin Grant, Technology and Empire (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1991), 35.

  2. Marion Montgomery, Liberal Arts and Community: The Feeding of the Larger Body (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 80.

  3. Luigi Giussani, The Risk of Education: Discovering Our Ultimate Destiny, trans. Rosanna Frongia (New York: Crossroad, 2001), 105.

  4. Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (New York: New American Library, 1952), 26.

  Acknowledgments

  The origins of this book lie partly in a series of discussions and seminars on education conducted at Arkwood in New Hampshire some years ago by David L. Schindler, with Glenn W. Olsen. I want to thank everyone who participated in those groups. Some parts of this book are based on essays I have written elsewhere, but all have been extensively revised or adapted from their original sources. In chapter 3, the sequence on Sacred Number is adapted with permission from David Clayton’s article, “Art of the Spheres” in Second Spring 8. In chapter 5, a version of the section on “Humane Architecture” also appeared in Second Spring 8 (2007). Parts of chapter 6 were given as a paper to a Washington Arts Group conference in May 2007, “Jumping Out of the Self-Referential Box.” I am grateful to David Clayton for his encouragement in the development of the ideas in this book through numerous conversations in Oxford, as well as to Michael S. Schneider, Frederick Stocken, Christopher Blum, Michael Augros, and Cyrus and Ben Olsen for reading and constructively criticizing parts of the manuscript. My thanks to Michael S. Schneider for giving me permission to use the illustrations on pages 58, 69, 72, 92, and 116. Finally, I want to thank Dr. Jeffrey O. Nelson and the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts for supporting me during the writing of this book, and my editors Rodney Clapp and Lisa Ann Cockrel for their encouragement and counsel in the final stages.

  Please note that from time to time additional material of interest to readers will be posted in the “Books” section of the author’s Web site at www.secondspring.co.uk.

  Introduction

  “To Sing with the Universe”

  In the modern world, thanks to the rise of modern science and the decline of religious cosmology, the arts and sciences have been separated and divorced. Faith and reason often appear to be opposed, and we have lost any clear sense of who we are and where we are going.

  Most of us are prepared to let developments in science and technology dictate the shape of the future. We see our job as being merely to hang on tight, to survive, and maybe take whatever advantages are offered us along the way. But in the process, despite all the excitement of modern life, we begin to notice not only that we are damaging the earth and destroying our fellow creatures, but that we are becoming less than human ourselves. We are reduced to being consumers and producers, producing merely in order to consume. We have more and more stuff, but the world seems thinner and less substantial, and our own souls also. We have gained much, but we have lost our way in the shadows.

  Education is our path to true humanity and wisdom. By this I do not mean simply what goes on in school and university—which all too often turns out to be a path in another direction entirely away from both humanity and reason. I mean the broader process that engages us all through life. To be alive is to be a learner. Much of the learning we do takes place at home, in the family, or after we leave both home and college and begin the struggle to survive in the wider world. Increasingly, in a society shaped by technology that is continually changing, we need to learn a new skill: how to keep learning. We must be flexible and adaptable enough to survive in any circumstances. Even more important than flexibility is a virtuous character and set of guiding principles that will enable us to keep track of goodness amid the moral and social chaos that surrounds us.

  I believe it is possible to remain an active learner throughout life, and yet to maintain a moral compass in good working order. But vital though they are, adaptability and ethics are not enough by themselves. There is a structural flaw in our education that we need to overcome. It is related to a profound malaise in our civilization, which by progressive stages has slipped into a way of thinking and living that is dualistic in character. The divisions between arts and sciences, between faith and reason, between nature and grace, have a common root. In particular, our struggle to reconcile religious faith with modern science is symptomatic of a failure to understand the full scope of human reason and its true grandeur.

  The classical “Liberal Arts” tradition of the West once offered a form of humane education that sought the integration of faith and reason, and that combined the arts and the sciences, before these things became separated, fragmented, and trivialized. We need to retrace our steps, to find the “wisdom we have lost in knowledge,” the “knowledge we have lost in information” (T. S. Eliot). The wisdom I am referring to can be traced back via Boethius and Augustine to Plato and Socrates; but before Socrates there was Pythagoras, and the Pythagorean contribution is just as important in helping us understand what was lost. This book is an attempt to discover and enter creatively into that Pythagorean spirit which lies at the root of Western civilization.

  For every great change, every rebirth or renaissance in human culture, has been triggered by the retrieval of something valuable out of the past, making new, creative developments possible. The Italian Renaissance, for example, was triggered by the fifteenth-century rediscovery of the Classical Greek civilization. Similarly today, we may legitimately hope that ressourcement, a “return to sources,” and in particular to the pattern of humane learning as it was traditionally understood in the West, though expressed in new ways, will lead to a renaissance, the birth of a culture more appreciative of life and wisdom.

  It is significant that when the Cardinals of the Catholic Church elected a pope in 2005, they chose a ressourcement thinker—one whose concern was to retrieve, proclaim, and defend elements of the Catholic tradition that had been neglected in recent years. But one of the elements that Benedict XVI was most concerned to retrieve was something of much wider than Catholic interest. Speaking for example at Regensburg in September 2006, following the lead of his predecessor John Paul II in the encyclical Fides et Ratio (“Faith and Reason”), Pope Benedict XVI has attacked in the name of the whole Christian tradition the modern misconception that faith is the enemy of reason. Faith, he says, cannot be opposed to reason if it is placed in the second Person of the Trinity, who is the Word, the Logos, in whom “the archetypes of the world’s order are contained.”

  The phrase I have just quoted comes not from the speech at Regensburg but from a passage in his book The Spirit of the Liturgy. The Pope’s vision is one in which human existence is fundamentally “liturgical.” That is to say, our lives can be oriented toward God by prayer and action in such a way that the interior world of the human soul and the exterior world of the soc
iety and universe are brought into harmony. Thus liturgy—which we often consider a purely human business, something of relevance only to religious believers—is closely related to the mathematical ordering of time, space, and matter. I will quote the whole passage because it is so important. Pope Benedict writes:

  Among the Fathers, it was especially St. Augustine who tried to connect this characteristic view of the Christian liturgy with the worldview of Greco-Roman antiquity. In his early work “On Music” he is still completely dependent on the Pythagorean theory of music. According to Pythagoras, the cosmos was constructed mathematically, a great edifice of numbers. Modern physics, beginning with Kepler, Galileo and Newton, has gone back to this vision and, through the mathematical interpretation of the universe, has made possible the technological use of its powers.

  For the Pythagoreans, this mathematical order of the universe (“cosmos” means “order”!) was identical with the essence of beauty itself. Beauty comes from meaningful inner order. And for them this beauty was not only optical but also musical. Goethe alludes to this idea when he speaks of the singing contest of the fraternity of the spheres: the mathematical order of the planets and their revolutions contains a secret timbre, which is the primal form of music. The courses of the revolving planets are like melodies, the numerical order is the rhythm, and the concurrence of the individual courses is the harmony.

  The music made by man must, according to this view, be taken from the inner music and order of the universe, be inserted into the “fraternal song” of the “fraternity of the spheres.” The beauty of music depends on its conformity to the rhythmic and harmonic laws of the universe. The more that human music adapts itself to the musical laws of the universe, the more beautiful it will be.

  St. Augustine first took up this theory and then deepened it. In the course of history, transplanting it into the worldview of faith was bound to bring with it a twofold personalization. Even the Pythagoreans did not interpret the mathematics of the universe in an entirely abstract way. In the view of the ancients, intelligent actions presupposed an intelligence that caused them. The intelligent, mathematical movements of the heavenly bodies were not explained, therefore, in a purely mechanical way; they could only be understood on the assumption that the heavenly bodies were animated, were themselves “intelligent.”