Beauty for Truth's Sake Read online

  31. Pico della Mirandola, who summed so much of the Christian-Pythagorean tradition in the late fifteenth century, writes along these lines: “It is reasonable that to the same extent that we do injury not only to ourselves but to the universe, which we encompass within us, and to almighty God, the creator of the world itself, we should also experience all things in the world as the most severe punishers and powerful avengers of injuries, with God among the foremost” (Pico 1965, 136).

  32. For a detailed survey of the metaphysical and historical roots of the ecological crisis see Nasr 1996. This book by a Muslim scholar extends the analysis already found in his groundbreaking early work, The Encounter of Man and Nature, which was based on lectures given as early as 1966. Christian treatments of the roots of the crisis have taken awhile to catch up, although Romano Guardini’s Letters from Lake Como, written in the 1920s, already goes to the heart of the matter, and the writings of E. F. Schumacher in the 1970s made an important contribution. Paulos Mar Gregorios worked out an ecological theology in the tradition of Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor for the World Council of Churches in 1987, published as The Human Presence. Catholic teaching on ecological responsibility was summarized in The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican, 2004), and by Cahal B. Daly in The Minding of Planet Earth in the same year.

  33. The Merchant of Venice, act 5, scene 1.

  34. Cited in Ward 2008, 21.

  35. Kepler, cited in Koestler 1989, 264. Koestler’s Kepler is an attractive if bumbling character—he describes himself as a “foolish bird.” I particularly identify with his “peculiar kind of memory which makes him promptly forget everything he is not interested in, but which is quite wonderful in relating one idea to another” (243).

  36. It was Isaac Newton who later found the hidden connections between these three laws of planetary motion, in the form of his theory of gravity. For example, the first law—that the planetary orbits are ellipses—is due to the inverse square law relating force to distance.

  37. There may have been more to Kepler’s poetic intuitions (what Koestler calls his “Baroque fantasies” and Burtt calls “crude inherited superstitions”) than conventional wisdom allows. John Martineau and Richard Heath have recently shown that Kepler’s intuition about the relations of the planetary orbits to the Platonic solids were not so far off the mark after all (see www.woodenbooks.com).

  38. For more on all this, see Martineau 2006 and Schneider 2006.

  39. The so-called “anthropic principle.” Some scientists attempt to escape the obvious implications by positing the existence of multiple domains or universes, making it entirely natural that we would find ourselves in the one that happens to support human life. This is a pretty desperate move. By the way, an extension of the anthropic principle would state that the world’s physical structure is the way it is not only in order to support human life, but to communicate metaphysical truths to us symbolically. In other words we are justified in reading something into the symbolism of the sun “rising” and “setting,” even if we know that it is the earth that moves around the sun.

  40. Ratzinger 1995a, 26.

  41. Begbie 2008, 92–93.

  42. Ibid., 94.

  43. Ibid., 95. On the previous page he quotes Daniel Chua’s striking comment, “The harmony of the spheres has collapsed into the song of the self.” He concludes that the “broad intuition” and “persistent concern” of the Great Tradition, “to construe the making and hearing of musical sounds as grounded in divinely bestowed matrices of order,” is “surely correct and not to be sacrificed thoughtlessly” (233–34).

  44. http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0711/0711.0770v1.pdf

  45. Barr 2003, 106. See also the work of the 2008 Templeton prizewinner, the distinguished priest-physicist Michael Heller, on the mystery of the world’s comprehensibility in “Chaos, Probability, and the Comprehensibility of the World,” available online at www.templetonprize.org. Heller’s statement at the Templeton news conference on March 12, 2008 (available on the same site) summarizes some of his significant insights. To ask about the cause of the universe is not to ask for “a cause like all other causes” but “the root of all possible causes,” and therefore “a cause of mathematical laws.” Contrary to the exponents of evolution by “Intelligent Design,” he argues, chance should not be considered a rival to design. “Chance and random processes are elements of the mathematical blueprint of the universe in the same way as other aspects of the world architecture.” Both are woven together in the symphony of creation. “Elements of necessity determine the pattern of possibilities and dynamical paths of becoming, but they leave enough room for chancy events to make this becoming rich and individual.” In a striking phrase, he speaks of the greatest mystery of all being the “entanglement of the Human Mind with the Mind of God.”

  6

  The Liturgical Consummation of Cosmology

  The sciences become hyper-materialist and reductive when they are severed from their theological ground, and the arts, when celebrated for their own sake, apart from a theological purpose, become morbid, sentimental, or bizarre; even abstract mathematics devolves into a fussy and self-preoccupied rationalism when its link to sacred geometry is lost.

  Robert Barron1

  I have suggested several times in this book that the modern era can be characterized by a certain outlook shaped, in part, by the overthrow or displacement of ancient metaphysics. We call this outlook “secular,” and it may take the extreme form of materialism, though it may also take religious forms. As David L. Schindler has argued in Heart of the World, Center of the Church, even the protection of religion often takes the form of its privatization, with faith being progressively excluded from any real influence over public life, morality, and technology.

  The outlook that was overthrown was based on what the Middle Ages termed “realism”—not in the modern senses of being “down to earth” or “accurate,” but meaning that ideas such as just, beautiful, cat, or five, which can be used to describe many different things in the world, possess a reality of their own distinct from that of the individuals or acts they qualify. What displaced this view, starting with thinkers such as Abelard and William of Ockham—the via moderna mentioned in an earlier chapter—was philosophical “nominalism.” It held that the world consists only of particular individual things, which we need to describe and to which we therefore attach labels. Ideas are simply our way of organizing groups of individual things: they are the labels we choose, for our own purposes, to stick on to bits of reality.

  Another relevant sense of “realism” is that the real world (whether made up exclusively of individual things or not) is ontologically independent of our own thoughts and experience of it. This sense of realism survived the assault of nominalism, but was attacked again by the idealism of Kant and Hegel. It is notable that both senses are opposed by the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, at least in the popular understanding. A well-known paraphrase of Niels Bohr’s view runs as follows: “There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.” Furthermore, this interpretation seems to make reality (for example, the state of an electron) dependent on an act of observation. Einstein was never able to accept it for that reason, while David Bohm and others have proposed alternative “realist” interpretations of the same experimental observations. It seems that modern physics does not necessarily contradict common sense or ancient metaphysics after all. (We have already seen how Bohr and Heisenberg felt able to cite Plato and Pythagoras, and their opponents are even more entitled to do so.)2

  The Construction of Modernity

  The point here is simply that we are living in an era shaped by philosophical battles that most of us are unaware ever took place. The victors wrote the history books, of course, to make the outcome look inevitable. Let me try to connect all this with th
e “secularism” that currently has the world’s intellectual elites under its spell.

  Writers such as Louis Dupré, Charles Taylor, Robert Barron, and Catherine Pickstock confirm that nominalism, or the philosophical voluntarism associated with it, lies behind secular modernity.3 The story these writers tell (setting aside various differences in emphasis) is of a philosophical shift, associated not only with a severing of the intimate bond between cosmology and ethics, facts and values, but with a changing sense of the self, and of the relation between self and society. This shift was also the beginning of modern individualism, and of the subjective turn that led to what Taylor in A Secular Age calls a “buffered self” in a “disenchanted world.” The modern person feels himself to be disengaged from the world around him, rather than intrinsically related to it (by family, tribe, birthplace, vocation, and so forth). He is expected to forge his own destiny by an exercise of choice. He is concerned less with what is right than with what his rights are, or rather he grounds the former on the latter. The world for him is just a neutral space for his action, his free choice, and the greatest mysteries lie not outside but within himself.

  Many puzzling features of the modern world can be understood in this way. With no hierarchy of ordered forms to draw upon (since the existence of such forms had been denied by nominalism), God’s rule over the universe became “free” in the sense of arbitrary, or whimsical: the new image of God was of an absolute, albeit usually benign, dictator. His grand design for the universe was one of “interlocking causes, not harmonized meanings,”4 and as the concept of efficient causality absorbed that of formal causality in the old scheme of things, human as well as divine actions had to be justified as “efficient”: part of a process of exchange for anticipated benefit, as payment for specific desired outcomes. The concept of a “final” cause (goal) or telos was secularized. This is how the whole world became one gigantic market. Finally, if the only Forms are those we invent, the social and political order has to be created by the imposition of will—at first by God, then by a divinely appointed king, and (after the overthrow of the ancient régime) by individual choices made at the ballot box—or by those capable of manipulating those choices, by means subtle or crude.

  In hindsight we can see that this philosophical shift also prepared the ground for the Reformation, which emphasized individual conscience and pared away the fabric of traditions and “sacramentals” by which the self had been embedded in a social cosmos. But without those ties, without that embeddedness, nature was drained of grace, and our connection to the transcendent God became less a matter of imagination or intellect or feeling than of sheer willpower. All that was needed was for us to stop willing it, and it would cease to be, which is what effectively happened in the later stages of the Enlightenment.

  This all-pervasive modern mentality is what we are up against, in education as everywhere else. So the question is now, what can be done about it, if anything? The Enlightenment is not something you can simply unthink. So how are we to combat the negative effects of individualism, without losing the benefits of self-consciousness and rationality?

  The key lies, I believe, with revelation and worship. What defines secularism more than anything is an inability to pray, and the modern world in its worst aspects is a systematic assault on the very idea of worship, an idea that begins with the acknowledgment of a Transcendent that reveals itself in the Immanent. Balthasar was right: once lose the sense of objective beauty, of the Forms in the fabric of the world (confirmed and strengthened by revelation), and eventually the ability to pray goes too. The fully “buffered” self that has no Forms to contemplate in the cosmos, no reality higher than itself, has no God to turn to.

  Prayer is a vital dimension of fully human living. But while we can all pray on our own, it is always in some sense a community thing. It turns us away from ourselves toward God, and in so doing it turns us toward each other (or should do). In fact human civilization has always been built around an act of worship, a public liturgy. Liturgy (from the Greek leitourgia: public work or duty) technically means any kind of religious service done on behalf of a community. Liturgical prayer is a way of being in tune with our society, with other people. But if we are to renew our civilization by renewing our worship, we must understand also that liturgy is a way of being in tune with the motions of the stars, the dance of atomic particles, and the harmony of the heavens that resembles a great song. And Catholic liturgy takes us even deeper than that. It takes us to the source of the cosmos itself, into the sacred precincts of the Holy Trinity where all things begin and end (whether they know it or not), and to the source of all artistic and scientific inspiration, of all culture.

  For in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. (Col. 1:19–20)

  Liturgy, therefore, is not something that is confined to the services taking place in a church building. As we saw in a previous chapter, creation, through its very being, gives a kind of liturgical praise to God. Eric Peterson sums this up as follows:

  The . . . worship of the Church is not the liturgy of a human religious society, connected with a particular temple, but worship which pervades the whole universe and in which sun, moon and all the stars take part. And so we read in the introduction to the Sanctus of the Liturgy of St. James: “Him do praise the heavens and the heaven of heavens and their concerted might, sun and moon and all the singing galaxies of stars, earth, sea and all that they contain.”5

  In discerning how to harmonize his liturgical activity to that of heaven, man takes his cue, as it were, from the cosmos.

  Can we see liturgy itself, then, as the “lost key” to humane education that we have been searching for in this book; that is, to the reintegration of all things, all subjects, in a vision of sacred order? Would a renewed appreciation of liturgy help to anchor theories about number and symbolism and quality more profoundly in real life, enabling us to introduce some much needed harmony into our own souls too?

  A Sense of the Sacred

  We need first to establish a clearer sense of the sacred and its meaning, which (for the reasons outlined above) can hardly be taken for granted. It will help to look at this concept not just in the context of Christianity and Judaism, but in relation to religious experience in general. In 1957, Mircea Eliade wrote an influential book called Sacred and Profane. Building on the work of Rudolf Otto, he starts by describing the fundamental religious experience as an encounter with an awe-inspiring mystery (mysterium tremendum et fascinans), the “wholly other,” the numen or divine power. In the face of this Other, the human being “senses his profound nothingness.” This experience is as fundamental to human beings as terror, laughter, love, and the sense of beauty, but, though it is practically universal, there are some people who are more liable to it than others, and some societies where it is encouraged more than others. Eliade’s book is about the many ways the “sacred” is held to reveal itself.

  According to Eliade, a sacred object or place is one that, while belonging to this perceptible world, is set apart in order to manifest something of a wholly different order.

  By manifesting the sacred, an object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu. A sacred stone remains a stone; apparently (or, more precisely, from a profane point of view), nothing distinguishes it from all other stones. But for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transformed into a supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as a cosmic sacrality. The cosmos as a whole can become a hierophany [a revelation of sacred order].6

  Eliade therefore contrasts two ways of being in the world, the sacred and the profane. Traditional or religious man lives in a world permeated and determined by the sense of the sacred—which tends to be equated with being, with reali
ty, and with ultimate creative power. The world we see around us contains objects and places that are sacred in this sense, though not all equally so. Proximity to or representation of the divine determines the graduated structure of the world, with the central point being an axis that connects all-that-is with its origin. Space is not homogeneous (the same in all directions), for the sacred has irrupted within it, revealing the presence of an absolute reality. This manifestation of the truly real is the foundation of the world’s being, and every sacred mountain, tree, shrine, or holy object contains a reference to it. A people or tribe establishes its place in the universe by finding or being given a central place of this sort and orienting its life around it. Even a house becomes a “home” only by situating itself as a symbolic representation of the world in miniature, complete with an opening (upward or inward) toward the divine. I am thinking of the fireplace, the hearth, or the place where food is cooked, and the chimney through which smoke rises to heaven. Traditionally, it was the fire that symbolized the heart of the home. (We might reflect on what it means that today the TV or computer screen has replaced it.)

  The same principles, of course, apply to time as to space. For Christians, the structuring of time—the seven days of the week, the months of the year, the feast days, Easter and Christmas—serves as a way to reconnect us with the transcendent, reminding us of our origin and end. Each cycle leads us back to the alpha, and brings us closer to the omega, by connecting us with the center of time. The season of Advent enables us to share in the pregnant Mary’s state of expectation leading up to the world’s first sight of the God-Child, and Lent to spend forty days with Jesus in the wilderness doing battle with the devil—even though the events themselves took place long centuries ago “by the clock.” (On a personal note, I always feel when in church, especially in Mass, it would be wrong to look at my watch. That is because in a sacred space we are also to some extent in sacred time. For the same reason it would be a kind of desecration to place a clock over the altar.)