Beauty for Truth's Sake Page 14

  Profane man, on the other hand, lives or tries to live in a desacralized cosmos (or as Taylor says, a disenchanted one), a world of homogeneous geometrical space and undifferentiated time in which no one place or occasion is more special, more holy, than any other. We fail, of course. We all have birthdays, anniversaries, images, and places that are especially dear to us, which help us define and remember who we are. We build ourselves a nest in the world, staking our claim and building an environment where we feel at home. We all tell ourselves stories that make some sense of our lives. These interior narratives may be harmful or helpful, but they are told over and over again in a silent monologue that “fixes” us as members of a world that has a particular shape, that is familiar and to some extent predictable. (It can be an important part of therapy to bring harmful aspects of this narrative to light and alter them in some significant respect.) We are never pure thinking machines; we feel, remember, and imagine. The difference is that profane man possesses a philosophy which does not allow him to connect these central experiences of life to some transcendent realm, and to the origin of all things.

  Desacralized man, Eliade suggests, is the result of a “second Fall” in which even the memory of Eden is lost. Whether such an existence can be sustained for long has yet to be discovered. Historically, it is a rather recent phenomenon, dating back less than a hundred years, even if as we have seen its roots lie in the fourteenth century or earlier. All other civilizations known to us have had a strong religious orientation. And no civilization has survived a failure to transmit that orientation through some process of education, initiating a new generation into its vision of cosmic order.

  Liturgy as Remembering to Give

  A religious society orients itself toward God by having first a cosmogony or a creation story, second an eschatology, a doctrine of the “last things,” of the endings of life and time, and thirdly a liturgy—that is, a set of rituals and a way of organizing time and space that situates us in relation to the beginning and end of things (in via or in process from one to the other). But, of course, we live in a diverse and pluralistic society, as well as a largely secular one. Is liturgy of relevance to any but a very small group of the self-consciously pious? In order to see why it is, we need to remember that the essence or starting point of liturgy is a very simple one.

  Religious service is essentially a work of praise, of giving glory to God. Though it is communal work, and in a sense it helps to create community, it is derived from the primordial action of the individual human being, an action more basic to us—when we are authentically ourselves—than even eating or drinking or sleeping; namely, giving thanks. For prior to everything else we may do, and whether or not we think of ourselves as “religious,” we exist, and liturgy begins by acknowledging that fact with gratitude.

  G. K. Chesterton sums it up in his book Chaucer:

  There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real. It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is unthinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may sometimes be unthinking about it; unthinking and especially unthinking. For he who has realized this reality knows that it does outweigh, literally to infinity, all lesser regrets or arguments for negation, and that under all our grumblings there is a subconscious substance of gratitude. The light of the positive is the business of the poets, because they see all things in the light of it more than do other men.7

  Liturgy therefore starts with remembrance. We do not make ourselves from nothing. To be here at all is a gift, and a gift (even if we are at times only obscurely aware of the Giver) evokes a natural desire to give something back to someone. We have only what we have received, but included in that gift is the capacity to transform what we now possess into something that is truly our own. Furthermore, the more grateful we are, and the more conscious of the greatness of the One, the source who gave us existence, the more beautiful we will try to make the gift. That is partly why liturgy has always inspired art. As I once heard an art historian say, “The fine arts were born on the altar.”8

  If we consider only a setting where the liturgical spirit is implicit, a setting where, say, there is no common agreement on a religious faith (even on Christianity broadly understood), it is easy to see that there are ways in which the “substance of gratitude” can still be expressed and made present. The elemental courtesies of conventional etiquette and good manners are the vital channels for preserving this spirit in everyday life. Friends naturally express gratitude and respect, but an education that actively cultivates such modes of behavior will begin the process of building a society that is liturgical to its very core, in which the “air” of grace can circulate. Harmony of soul can only be restored through effort, and the restoration of manners and kindness is an important beginning. Without it, little else is possible.

  An Education in Beauty

  In a religious setting, of course, the liturgical spirit can be explicit. The giving of thanks is the whole purpose of ritual prayer, the first task of the human being as such. It achieves its highest moment in the act of sacrifice, which is common to every religious tradition. Sacrifice is the offering to God or the gods of a token representing the self or the community. This sacrifice must be continually renewed and repeated according to the rhythms of sacred time by a consecrated official, thus—by means of gift—establishing an exchange or bridge between heaven and earth. In Christianity, where the High Priest and the sacrifice are both the same—Jesus Christ, who is also God—the traditional sacrifice is elevated to an inconceivable level.9 The gifts we bring to the altar are taken up into the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, so that through the priest we are able to give something to God that is of equal value to (because it is identical with) God’s own self-gift.

  The liturgy, and at its heart the Mass, is the ultimate school of thanks. In the circle of giving, receiving, and being given, the one divine essence is revealed as an eternal threefold liturgy of love, prayer, and praise. When we come to Mass—or to the nearest equivalent of that liturgy our faith permits—we should be able to experience a sense that here, at last, all the threads of our education are being brought together. If we don’t, something is wrong with our education or our liturgy. Science and art, mathematics and ethics, history and psychology, the worlds of nature and the spirit, are all present in a liturgy that gives them a home and a meaning.

  In The Crisis of Western Education, Christopher Dawson identifies the crisis as it applies particularly to our schools, colleges, and universities, in the following terms:

  The result [of modern educational reforms] has been an intellectual anarchy imperfectly controlled by the crude methods of the examination system and of payment by results. The mind of the student is overwhelmed and dazed by the volume of new knowledge which is being accumulated by the labour of specialists, while the necessity for using education as a stepping-stone to a profitable career leaves him little time to stop and think. And the same is true of the teacher, who has become a kind of civil servant tied to a routine over which he can have little control.10

  As we saw in the first chapter, the solution or remedy he in fact proposes is not to revive the trivium and quadrivium as such, but to devise a new humanist education with an “intelligible form” based around the historical study of Christian or Western culture.

  What we need is not an encyclopaedic knowledge of all the products of Christian culture, but a study of the culture-process itself from its spiritual and theological roots, through its organic historical growth to its cultural fruits. It is this organic relation between theology, history and culture which provides the integrative principle in Catholic higher education, and the only one that is capable of taking the place of the old classical humanism which is disappearing or has already disappeared.11

  The mul
ticulturalists will naturally object to an exclusive concentration on “Western” culture, but I am sure Dawson is right in this, that the Christian humanists of the future will come from homes and colleges where their own culture has been taught in all its historical depth and with an eye to its intelligible form (which is also ultimately theological, whether we realize it or not). But what I have been suggesting in this book is something more. Dawson’s proposal can be expanded. There is more to the quadrivium than a mere list of subjects, by now of little historical interest. There is a cosmology. If we look at the underlying principles or ideals that led the ancients to codify the seven Liberal Arts in the first place, we find there a vision in which the arts and sciences, faith and reason, are not separated, as they have been since the Reformation and the Enlightenment in our mainstream philosophies; rather they profoundly complement each other. The key to this vision lies in the notion (traceable back to Pythagoras) of beauty as cosmic order, an order that is simultaneously aesthetic, harmonious, symbolic, mathematical, and sacramental. In the present chapter I have argued that the right form of liturgical worship shows us how the universe is ordered from within by the Trinity.

  Now of course not all families will share a religious faith, and not all will attend Mass together. Nor should all students even at a Catholic college be obliged to attend Mass, let alone be expected to profess beliefs they do not own. Nevertheless, as Cardinal Ratzinger pointed out before his election as Pope in an essay “On the Essence of the Academy and Its Freedom,” there was a reason why Plato set up his Academy in a suburban temple precinct. It had to be under the auspices of a cultic association, in which the Muses were venerated.12 The kind of education I am imagining can only take place in an atmosphere of respect toward religion, if not its actual practice.

  Today, a person or community or family or college that tries to place the liturgy as a structural principle at the center of things at the very least will convey implicitly to those without a religious faith the presence of an objective order of truth, beauty, goodness, and love—the Logos of all humane education the world over. By keying the year to liturgical time, and punctuating it with feast days, by trying to respect the sanctity of the Sabbath, by encouraging the presence all around us of artistic and architectural symbols that speak of heaven, by preserving the ethos of the Ten Commandments, and by observing nature and learning from tradition, our lives will be patterned after the same principles that govern the universe, and we will be living in a way that suits our own nature and allows it to flourish.

  The Holy City

  At the end of the book of Revelation, John shows us a holy city descending out of heaven like a bride, a city full of rushing water and wind and the waving branches of trees and the songs of living creatures. This vision of the Church and of the liturgy is also a vision of the cosmos. The Heavenly City is a key to enable the universe itself to be decoded. In it we glimpse the true nature of humanity, and in humanity the purpose and goal of nature. Not that nature only exists to serve fallen man—far from it; but the salvation of man entails the salvation and transformation of the whole cosmic environment in which we live, the animals and plants and minerals, even the colors and numbers and directions that play such an important part in the book of Revelation. These are all reflected in our own being, to which they are inseparably connected, and together with us all these creatures yearn for the coming of the Liturgical City, in which every tear shall be wiped away (Rev. 21:4).

  The New Jerusalem represents the whole world in its final “saved” form, a giant Ark of living crystal—the universe healed and integrated, a glorious Bride in whom everything of value in the world is rescued and redeemed. It is so intensively unified by liturgy that its citizens share the divine life without needing an external “temple.” The city is permeated by the light of God’s glory, in which God is seen face to face, a beatifying vision that unites even as it differentiates.

  And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. (Rev. 21:22–3)

  Everyone becomes more himself or herself in such a city, but (at the same time and for the same reason) more intimately present to every other. In the “Liturgical City” of Revelation there is no Temple, for liturgy itself is transcended. Each discovers his true self, but that self has been found by going outward, by pouring oneself away to help others, by ecstatically appreciating and responding to the face of God revealed in the other person and unveiled in Christ.

  Our own earthly cities are not the New Jerusalem, but neither are they the “Babylon” of Revelation 18, the nightmare city of harlots and merchants, heaped high with iniquity and destined to be cast into a burning smoke. Our institutions are a bit of both, for they look in both directions. The “judgment” aspect of Revelation—by which I mean the slaughter and the plagues, the firestorms and earthquakes, the seven bowls of divine wrath, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the casting into a sea of fire, and all the rest of it—is the measure of the distance from earth to heaven, and the cost of the struggle to bring the one down and the other up to meet in the Marriage of the Lamb. The human task is to build up the Liturgical City by turning our lives back into gift.

  1. Barron 2007, 156.

  2. There have been numerous attempts to reconnect quantum mechanics with ancient metaphysics. Cf. Caldecott 1998. For Simone Weil they all start at the wrong place: classical physics was at a dead end, but modern physics lost touch with reality at the moment it invented the notion of the “quantum,” making energy discontinuous when it must by its nature be continuous: “Planck’s formula, composed of a constant whose source one cannot imagine and a number which corresponds to a probability, has no relation to any thought” (1968, 23). She did not dispute that the calculations worked; what she objected to was abandoning the attempt to understand why they worked. Cf. Morgan 2005, 53–58.

  3. See Bibliography. Voluntarism is sometimes traced back to the scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus. Benedict XVI in his talk at Regensburg in September 2006 describes Scotus’s voluntarism as potentially leading to an “image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness.” Pickstock and Barron blame Scotus’s univocal concept of existence, i.e., his placing of God and the creature in the same category of being. Previously the being of God—the sense in which he “exists”—was only analogously related to the being of creatures, but henceforth “God and creatures are appreciated as existing side by side, as beings of varying types and degrees of intensity. Furthermore, unanchored from their shared participation in God, no longer grounded in a common source, creatures lose their essential connectedness to one another. Isolated and self-contained individuals (God the supreme being and the many creatures) are now what is most basically real” (Barron 2007, 14). For Pickstock it is a small jump from there to Descartes and the “necrophilia” of the present age: the embrace of atomized, mechanized nature.

  4. Taylor 2007, 177.

  5. Peterson 1964, 22.

  6. Eliade 1959, 12.

  7. Chesterton 1932, 36–37.

  8. From art one might go on to apply this “liturgical principle” to the redemption of work, and the ordering of the economy through production, exchange, and consumption, as John Hughes does in his book The End of Work, especially chap. 6.

  9. See the letter to the Hebrews, which is an extended reflection on Jesus as High Priest.

  10. Dawson 1989, 119.

  11. Ibid., 137–38.

  12. Ratzinger 1995b, 40.

  Conclusion

  Beyond Faith and Reason

  The emptiness and triviality of so much of the rhetoric of official academia is a symptom of a much deeper disorder.

  Alasdair MacIntyre1

  And yet, and yet . . . We are up against so much. Let us retrace our steps slightly and try to see more clearly exactly what we are dealing with.

  In A Secular Ag
e Charles Taylor contrasts the ancient notion of cosmos with the modern secular universe:

  I use “cosmos” for our forebears’ idea of the totality of existence because it contains the idea of an ordered whole. It is not that our own universe isn’t in its own way ordered, but in the cosmos the order of things was a humanly meaningful one. That is, the principle of order in the cosmos was closely related to, often identical with, that which gives shape to our lives.

  Thus Aristotle’s cosmos has at its apex and centre God, whose ceaseless and unvarying action exemplifies something close to Plato’s eternity. But this action, a kind of thinking, is also at the centre of our lives. Theoretical thought is in us that which is “most divine.” And for Plato, and this whole mode of thought in general, the cosmos exhibits the order which we should exemplify in our own lives, both individually and as societies.2

  He adds that for medieval Christians, as for many of the ancients,

  this kind of cosmos is a hierarchy; it has higher and lower levels of being. And it reaches its apex in eternity; it is, indeed, held together by what exists on the level of eternity, the Ideas, or God, or both together—Ideas as the thoughts of the creator.

  As Taylor, a Catholic philosopher, knows very well, this is the cosmos that most religious believers still inhabit. Partly he is putting himself in the shoes of those to whom this world is alien, and asking how so many have come to see it that way (his account takes in Renaissance humanism, the Scientific Revolution, the Protestant and Catholic movement of Reform, the birth of the police state, the Enlightenment, the Age of Mobilization, and the Age of Authenticity). Modern people who see the religious cosmos as alien, inhabit not a cosmos but a “universe.” A universe, he says,