Beauty for Truth's Sake Read online

  The third law of church architecture is Iconography, by which Rose means the capacity of the building to convey meaning not only by its overall form, but by the details of its composition and adornment. From the range of Christian iconography one should not exclude the whitewashed elegance of some Protestant and Nonconformist chapels, but what Rose has in mind primarily is the rich heritage of mosaics, frescos, stained glass, panels, and statues that are to be found in Catholic and Orthodox churches. Here again style, which is the organic expression of a living tradition, manifests theology.

  Some years before his election as Pope in 2005, Benedict XVI wrote of the development of Christian iconography as follows:

  But now the idea awakens in Christianity that precisely God’s incarnation was his entry into matter, the beginning of a momentous movement in which all matter is to become a vessel for the Word, but also in which the Word consistently has to make a statement about itself in matter, has to surrender itself to matter in order to be in a position to transform it. As a consequence, Christians are now deriving pleasure from making faith visible, from constructing its symbol in the world of matter. The other basic idea is connected to this: the idea of glorification, the attempt to turn the earth into praise, right down to the stones themselves, and thus to anticipate the world to come. The buildings in which faith is expressed are, as it were, a visualized hope and a confident statement of what can come to be, projected into the present.21

  Church architect Steven J. Schloeder has discussed the “Church as Icon” in his book, Architecture in Communion. A church by its very nature is a symbolic structure, and that symbolism potentially includes its cosmic situation, its orientation in relation to the sun and stars,22 as much as the details of its workmanship and decoration both inside and out. A church is intended to be read like a book—to evoke and provoke contemplation, which is the inward journey. Unfortunately, modern man has largely lost the ability to turn the pages, let alone read the language of symbolism.

  In the case of the Gothic, a deliberate attempt was made by its twelfth-century inventor, Abbot Suger, to incarnate the vision of the New Jerusalem from the twenty-first chapter of the book of Revelation.23 Precious stones were placed in the walls, and the overall impression of light flowing through the huge windows was designed to evoke the luminous crystalline appearance of the Holy City, whose “wall was built of jasper, while the city was pure gold, clear as glass” (Rev. 21:18). The Gothic Cathedral, indeed, in its ordered complexity, resembled a city more than it did a temple within a city. Or else it combined the two ideas, like the New Jerusalem itself. It was a microcosmic model of the universe, as befitted the body of God. And its ordering principles included the Pythagorean and Euclidean mathematics that Suger had inherited from the ancient Greeks by way of Boethius and the Arabs. It was in fact the Arabs who had first developed a form of architecture involving pointed arches, and increased contact with the Muslim world during the Crusades led to this style being adopted gradually in the West, replacing the rounded arches of the Romanesque. When Chartres cathedral burned down and had to be rebuilt in 1145, Adelard’s translation of Euclid (the major text of ancient Greek geometry, until then completely unknown in the West) was being taught in the schools, and especially in the school of Chartres. Other innovations, such as flying buttresses and large stained glass windows, developed from this.

  Of Suger’s prototypical Gothic church of Saint-Denis, Schloeder writes: “Here is a church with integrity in its structural elements, perfect proportion in its ruling geometries, and a radiance that activates its material composition.”24 Integrity, radiance, and proportion were the three elements of beauty as defined later by St. Thomas. The concept of “integrity” here refers not merely to a kind of internal coherence, but to the kind of perfection a thing attains when it has all it needs to be itself, to perform its authentic function (in this case, to facilitate prayer).

  None of this is to say that an authentic church architecture for today will be modeled on the Gothic. According to Rudolf Wittkower, medieval architects tended to build on geometrical principles, using circles, squares, triangles, and pentagons, whereas Renaissance architects preferred arithmetical principles, epitomized in the simple ratios of the musical scale.25 Both could appeal to the Pythagorean tradition and the Timaeus, but Renaissance architecture attempted to implant musical harmony directly into stone in a way the earlier period did not. As a result, Renaissance architects were less interested in irrationals such as the golden ratio or √2 and √3 (the latter, which featured in the design of the Gothic cathedrals, being the diagonals of a square and cube respectively whose sides are one unit long), preferring the rational numbers of musical harmony.

  Wittkower notes the other main differences: the Gothic floorplan echoed the form of Christ’s human body on the Cross, and the distance between heaven and earth was expressed in vertical elongation, whereas the Renaissance, influenced by the Greek Cross of Byzantium, preferred the circular form (a square base topped by a dome) as though peering directly at divine perfection. Another shift took place in the Baroque. While the Renaissance had aimed at perfect harmony, the Baroque was a period of agitation and ecstasy. Reflecting the mood of Romanticism, as well as the cosmology of the period, its architects deliberately employed discord to express tension, feeling, and movement everywhere (albeit mystically resolved in the heavenly choirs of angels and representations of the Trinity)—demonstrating “a new conception of space directed towards infinity: form is dissolved in favour of the magic spell of light.”26

  The traditional principles of harmony in building are not obscure, but they can be applied in many different ways—perhaps in ways not yet imagined. Architects like Christopher Alexander, Duncan G. Stroik, Stephen J. Schloeder, and Daniel Lee are rediscovering the secrets of humane architecture. In architecture as in music, we are beginning to appreciate once more the importance of formal beauty.

  At Home in the Cosmos

  The word “ecology” was coined only as recently as 1873, by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel. He based it on the Greek word oikos meaning “house, dwelling place, habitation” (plus, of course, logos). But though the scientific study of ecology, referring to the complex interrelationships of biological entities with each other and with their environment, is a modern development, the traditional worldview has a great deal to say on the matter. The medievals did not possess posters showing the fragile earth floating in a dark sea of space, but the principles underlying the quadrivium, even today, can help us learn to dwell more wisely in our common home.

  We often talk about the “environmental movement,” or about a modern concern for the “environment.” It is worth noting that these terms are misleading, since they imply an opposition between humanity (or whichever species is under discussion) and its surroundings, reducing the rest of nature to a kind of backdrop—and at worst to a complex set of raw materials and mechanical forces. The insight that ecologists have come to in the second half of the last century runs counter to this view. It reveals the interdependence of all living things in a world that is more than a mechanism, more than the sum of its parts, perhaps even in some sense alive in its own right. But this is little more than a rediscovery in scientific terms of what had already been understood “poetically” in all previous civilizations. C. S. Lewis, who knew and loved the medieval universe, describes it as “tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonial, a festival not a machine.”27

  The full weight of Lewis’s statement will only be felt when we come to the last chapter of this book, but for now the point is that for our preindustrial ancestors the world was not a machine. It was an organic whole, ordered from within, animated by a hierarchy of souls, perhaps even by a “world soul.” This is not pantheism, although it could become so once the transcendence of God had been forgotten. It meant that nature possessed a sacred and spiritual value, by virtue of its creation by God and the immanent presence of God within it. The world was a book, pregnant with mean
ings that God had placed there. All things, even the conjectured world soul, were creatures. The stars were angelic creatures, the movements of their high dance helping to determine the pattern of events unfolding below. The elements themselves were conscious beings, according to the sense of analogy, participating in their own way in the cosmic intelligence. Admittedly, St. Francis of Assisi was hardly a typical medieval man, but his ability to address the animals and even the elements in personal terms—easily dismissed by a modern mentality as superstitious nonsense and the “pathetic fallacy”—was the intensified version of an experience that seems to have been commonplace.

  All praise be yours, My Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air,

  And fair and stormy, all the weather’s moods,

  By which you cherish all that you have made.

  All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Water,

  So useful, lowly, precious and pure.

  All praise be yours, my Lord, through Brother Fire,

  Through whom you brighten up the night.

  How beautiful is he, how gay! Full of power and strength.

  All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Earth, our mother,

  Who feeds us in her sovereignty, and produces

  Various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

  This extract from the Canticle of Brother Sun may be the expression of a new outburst of spiritual feeling for nature, but it is in strictest continuity with many parts of the Christian and Hebrew tradition. The Canticle of Daniel, for example, calls upon all of creation to bless the Lord, including the sun and moon, stars of the heavens, clouds of the sky, showers and rain.28 For G. K. Chesterton in St. Francis of Assisi, the saint was able to attain such pure joy in the things of nature precisely because Christianity had spent the previous millennium trying to purify the world of degenerate forms of paganism that had enslaved man to the living forces of nature, including his own lower nature. Now the natural world could again—in the eyes of a saint—appear as it once was and in its essence always remains, a Garden of Eden. Just as the animals obeyed Adam and permitted him to name them, so the wolf would lay his paw in the hand of Francis, and on one notable occasion a red hot poker would at his request decline to inflict pain on the man who had addressed it with such courtesy.

  The animals, plants, and minerals, the stars and elements, were universally thought to “praise” their maker, either simply by their very existence, or when called upon to do so by man (who gives them a voice they do not possess in themselves). Man, as a microcosm containing in himself all the elements of nature and faculties or powers corresponding to both animals and angels, occupied a central place in the universe. It was because of his ontological importance in the order of being that medieval astronomers placed him at the center.29 They understood—and the earlier church fathers may have understood even better—that Adam’s role in the cosmos was a priestly and mediatory one from the beginning. That role had been restored in Christ, who by assuming human nature had in a way assumed the whole of nature by taking on a body.

  They may not have had (or needed) the term “ecology,” but the ancient writers were deeply aware of the interrelatedness of the natural world, and of man as the focus or nexus of that world, which they expressed in the doctrine of correspondences. It was, of course, more poetic than scientific in its formulation, but it expressed a profound insight that remains valid, and the present ecological crisis could only have developed in a world that has forgotten it, or forgotten to live by it. The fundamental human act is prayer, which is the remembrance and invocation of God (as Simone Weil would say, prayer is “attention”).30 This act is that by which heaven and earth are linked together, and most religious traditions of mankind would agree that it is what keeps the world in existence—it is only when the last person ceases to remember God that the end will come. The harmony of creation depends upon it: once the created world is no longer “attuned” by our prayer to the heavenly harmonies that transcend hearing, only chaos can follow, and the war of one element against another. The Wisdom of Solomon is full of such admonitions. “For creation, serving thee who hast made it, exerts itself to punish the unrighteous, and in kindness relaxes on behalf of those who trust in thee” (Wis. 16:24).31

  One implication from the doctrine that man is a microcosm, a “little world,” is that the disorder in the macrocosm is our fault, being a reflection or projection of our own interior dis-ease. When Adam fell from grace, the whole creation was somehow dis-graced, or put out of joint. The healing of the world therefore cannot be envisaged without a reordering and a healing of the inner world of imagination, intelligence, and will. This intuition is easy to relate to the modern study of ecology and to the broader development of a more holistic worldview in postmodern science. As such it also provides a point of entry for understanding the tradition of virtue ethics. It is hard to develop an adequate moral theory based on rights alone that can address the need to conserve natural resources and biodiversity—although attempts have been made to formulate rights for animals and for future generations. It is easier for the average person to think in terms of the need to act virtuously, both with regard to animals and with regard to our use of material things. The damage we wreak in the world is much more obviously the result of cruelty, greed, selfishness, and impatience than it is the violation of some implicit legal code of rights. By putting the emphasis back on our own integrity, and on the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude, we are laying the foundation for a way of life that would be truly sustainable over time.32

  It is easy to romanticize past ages as times of ecological harmony simply because they did not possess the technology to do the kind of harm we inflict so easily. Human nature was the same then as now, and was certainly not unfallen in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, there is an objective difference between a way of life limited in the damage it can inflict on creation, and a way of life founded on the unlimited aspiration to consume and enjoy, one also equipped with the means to change the planet in unpredictable ways. The stability of a preindustrial economy is one thing; our task is to achieve a similar stability in a postindustrial age, and the challenge may seem impossible. We can start by recognizing in our own hearts the tendencies that lead to greed, injustice, and destruction. Then we must seek to ensure these tendencies do not determine our technology and our economy.

  Secrets of the Sky

  As we have seen, observance of the laws of harmony has been traditionally believed to attune the soul to a heavenly ideal. The spheres associated with the planets, representing levels of the universe or the elements in its construction, were thought to be moved by angels. Each sang a certain note, together expressing the harmony of the universe; a harmony that may be transmitted through music to the human soul.

  The idea was famously expressed by Lorenzo, a character in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, gazing up at the starry sky from the garden of Belmont, a villa near Venice:

  Look how the floor of Heaven

  Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold

  There’s not the smallest orb that thou beholdest

  But in his motion like an angel sings

  Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims

  Such harmony is in immortal souls.

  But, while this muddy vesture of decay

  Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.33

  According to C. S. Lewis, the music of the spheres

  is the only sound which has never for one split second ceased in any part of the universe; with this positive we have no negative to contrast. Presumably if (per impossibile) it ever did stop, then with terror and dismay, with a dislocation of our whole auditory life, we should feel that the bottom had dropped out of our lives. But it never does. The music which is too familiar to be heard enfolds us day and night and in all ages.34

  The last great attempt to discover the ultimate secret of the universe in a grand synthesis of geometry, music, astrology, and astronomy was Jo
hannes Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi (“The Harmonies of the World”), published in 1618. The history of this achievement is enormously instructive. Kepler (d. 1630), like his predecessor Copernicus, was a fervent Pythagorean, and it was a belief in the causal role of perfect geometrical and numerical forms in nature that drove his intellectual quest.

  Why waste words? Geometry existed before the Creation, is co-eternal with the mind of God, is God himself (what exists in God that is not God himself?); geometry provided God with a model for the Creation and was implanted into man, together with God’s own likeness—and not merely conveyed to his mind through the eyes.35

  The hypothesis of a sun-centered planetary system, as opposed to an earth-centered one, was developed not because it could explain the observed facts more accurately (for at first it could not) but for aesthetic and symbolic reasons. But it was Kepler’s Christianity, in combination with his Pythagorean enthusiasm, that made possible the birth of modern science.36 The problem with the traditional method of relating everything to the simple mathematical archetypes of Pythagorean numerology and harmony is that if you start with the archetypes and try to deduce the forms and movements of the universe you will almost certainly go wrong—and you will end up having to bend the facts to reconcile them with your empirical observations. The traditional method is not pragmatic, after all, but contemplative. It is not oriented toward the practical. Science in the modern sense was born when Kepler began to give the same weight to empirical observation as to his theoretical concerns, and that was related to his conviction that a benign Creator was responsible for the way the world worked, on earth as well as in heaven.