Beauty for Truth's Sake Read online

  For Christians, there was a spontaneous turn at this point from the stellar deities to the choirs of angels that surround God and illumine the universe. Perceiving the “music of the cosmos” thus becomes listening to the song of angels, and the reference to Isaiah chapter 6 [“Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory,” Isaiah 6:3] naturally suggests itself.

  But a further step was taken with the help of the Trinitarian faith, faith in the Father, the Logos [the Son], and the Pneuma [Holy Spirit]. The mathematics of the universe does not exist by itself, nor, as people now came to see, can it be explained by stellar deities. It has a deeper foundation: the mind of the Creator. It comes from the Logos, in whom, so to speak, the archetypes of the world’s order are contained. The Logos, through the Spirit, fashions the material world according to these archetypes. In virtue of his work in creation, the Logos is, therefore, called the “art of God” (ars = techne!). The Logos himself is the great artist, in whom all works of art—the beauty of the universe—have their origin.

  To sing with the universe means, then, to follow the track of the Logos and to come close to him. All true human art is an assimilation to the artist, to Christ, to the mind of the Creator. The idea of the music of the cosmos, of singing with angels, leads back again to the relation of art to logos, but now it is broadened and deepened in the context of the cosmos. Yes, it is the cosmic context that gives art in the liturgy both its measure and its scope. A merely subjective “creativity” is no match for the vast compass of the cosmos and for the message of beauty. When a man conforms to the measure of the universe, his freedom is not diminished but expanded to a new horizon.1

  The big themes in this passage are liturgy, mathematics, art, music, science, and worship. How are they all related? Through the “Logos,” the Pope says. The Logos—meaning “Word,” “Speech,” “Principle,” “Thought,” and “Design,” and identified by the fourth Gospel with Jesus of Nazareth—is the Mediator between heaven and earth, between the invisible One and the visible Many.

  Western civilization has long since lost its sense that cosmic order has to be rooted in a “Logos.” It is no coincidence that it lost its faith in God at the same time. If God is not connected with the universe by some kind of mediation, then he floats off into abstract space and faith starts to seem meaningless. Scientists, especially, have no use for such a God, and rightly so. Angelo Scola, the Patriarch of Venice who is another leading ressourcement theologian, has formulated the problem as follows:

  The question of meaning which Comte forbade us to ask re-surfaces inexorably, like those little clumps of grass that push through in the spring, even in the most desolate wastes. There is no point in avoiding the question of the primordial relationship between God and the human person, but we do need to formulate it in realistic terms. This involves the re-thinking of the mutual interrelationship between the world and the human person, so as to recover the lost wisdom of the world. Cosmocentrism and anthropocentrism can no longer go their separate ways, still less can they be posed as alternatives, if we want to do justice in our thinking to the original relationship between God and the human person.2

  As we search for this “lost wisdom of the world,” we will keep coming back to a rather significant fact. As our own eyes reveal every day, the universe is beautiful. It has majesty, order, and loveliness;3 these three types of beauty are precisely what scientists themselves love to discover in the world. In fact the greatest of them have usually been motivated less by curiosity than by love. Plato would not have hesitated to call the longing for truth that drives them onward to their discoveries a form of erotic desire.4

  And so, the chapters that follow are not just about education, although if taken seriously they would change the way we teach. They are also about the search for beauty in art, science, and the cosmos—in short, the search for the Logos. This search is partly a matter of retrieval, but again, not exclusively so. We must have a proper sensitivity to the positive insights and fruits of the Enlightenment, lest we reject the good along with the bad. Ancient writers too were often misled, and their ideas justly criticized and set aside. Let us apply the words of St. Basil the Great, writing about the Christian use of pagan literature in the fourth century, to the way we draw both from medieval and from modern writers whatever we may need to nourish our souls on wisdom today:

  It is, therefore, in accordance with the whole similitude of the bees, that we should participate in the pagan literature. For these neither approach all flowers equally, nor in truth do they attempt to carry off entire those upon which they alight, but taking only so much of them as is suitable for their work, they suffer the rest to go untouched. We ourselves too, if we are wise, having appropriated from this literature what is suitable to us and akin to the truth, will pass over the remainder. And just as in plucking the blooms from a rose-bed we avoid the thorns, so also in garnering from such writings whatever is useful, let us guard ourselves against what is harmful.5

  The following points may serve to sum up the thrust of the book.

  The way we educate is the way we pass on or transform our culture. It carries within it a message about our values, priorities, and the way we structure the world. The fragmentation of education into disciplines teaches us that the world is made of bits we can use and consume as we choose. This fragmentation is a denial of ultimate meaning. Contemporary education therefore tends to the elimination of meaning—except in the sense of a meaning that we impose by force upon the world.

  The keys to meaning are (and always have been) form, gestalt, beauty, interiority, relationship, radiance, and purpose. An education for meaning would therefore begin with an education in the perception of form. The “re-enchantment” of education would open our eyes to the meaning and beauty of the cosmos.

  Education begins in the family and ends in the Trinity. Praise (of beauty), service (of goodness), and contemplation (of truth) are essential to the full expression of our humanity. The cosmos is liturgical by its very nature.

  This book can be no more than an initiation, an introduction to a certain view summarized in these three points. For those who wish to go further and deeper, I have tried to indicate in my notes and references resources that will assist. (I particularly recommend Michael S. Schneider’s enormously rich and enjoyable textbook, A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe.) But given the present crisis in education, and the desperate need to rethink the way we approach our whole scheme of human knowledge, I make no apology for offering a kind of “manifesto,” which inevitably skims over many important debates. It will be helpful to those who have recognized the problem, since it points in the only direction a solution may be found. To those who are confused about the purposes of education—including perhaps their own—it may throw some light into the shadows of our time. We do not need to be content with our fragmented worldview, our fractured mentality. It is not too late to seek the One who is “before all things” and in whom “all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). To all those who are on that journey this book is respectfully dedicated.

  1. Ratzinger 2000, 152–54. Some paragraph breaks have been introduced for ease of reading. See also Chapp 2006, for a profound reading of this direction of the Pope’s thought.

  2. Scola 2007 (my emphasis).

  3. Corresponding to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I owe this suggestive distinction to Tom McCormick.

  4. Science is a desire-driven quest—the question is, a desire for what? At its best, it is a desire for reality, attracted by the beauty of truth; at worst, simply for power over nature.

  5. Basil the Great, from a sermon “To Young Men” cited in Gamble 2007, 184–85.

  1

  The Tradition of the Four Ways

  [Socrates:] I am amused, I said, at your fear of the world, which makes you guard against the appearance of insisting upon useless studies; and I quite admit the difficulty of believing that in every man there is an eye of the soul which, when by other
pursuits lost and dimmed, is by these purified and re-illumined; and is more precious by far than ten thousand bodily eyes, for by it alone is truth seen.

  Plato, The Republic, Book 71

  Teachers often tell us that modern students don’t know how to think. Setting aside the fact that this is a perennial complaint, made by teachers about their students in every age, it may be true that the conditions of modern life militate against independent thought in particular ways. Silence is rare, entertainment is all-pervasive, the pressure to consume-and-discard is almost irresistible. No one has put it better than G. K. Chesterton did in 1930: “People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves.”2 The situation has grown worse in every decade since.

  No wonder students come to a college education expecting nothing more than a set of paper qualifications that will enable them to earn a decent salary. The idea that they might be there to grow as human beings, to be inducted into an ancient culture, to become somehow more than they are already, is alien to them. They expect instant answers, but they have no deep questions. The great questions have not yet been woken in them. The process of education requires us to become open, receptive, curious, and humble in the face of what we do not know. The world is a fabric woven of mysteries, and a mystery is a provocation to our humanity that cannot be dissolved by googling a few more bits of information.

  The Great Tradition

  The Liberal Arts tradition stands at the origin of the idea of university education in the West. The Liberal Arts (from liber meaning free) were intended to train man3 in the use of his freedom, and to prepare the student for the higher study of philosophy and theology, through which one may become truly free, fully human.4 (They were contrasted with the so-called “Servile Arts,” which is not a term of contempt but covers branches of knowledge oriented toward practical ends or economic purposes, such as fabric-making, metalworking and architecture, commerce and agriculture, hunting, navigation, medicine, and entertainment.) In other words, philosophy and theology were not—as they have become—“subjects” defined by a certain content, on the same level as everything else, accessible to anyone. We had to become capable of them, and the Liberal Arts were our preparation. In the modern university this preparation is usually missing, and so are the higher studies themselves. Only the names are left.

  University education is usually traced back to the Greek philosopher Socrates and his (moral) victory over his state executioners. In his own life he demonstrated his own teaching, summarized in the Phaedo, that philosophy is a preparation for dying; or rather, for dying well. Of course, Socrates, who wrote nothing down except in the immortal souls of his disciples, would have been unknown to later generations except for the work of one of those disciples, Plato. Through Plato’s Academy from 387 BC and Aristotle’s Lyceum from 335 until their closure possibly in AD 529, and the writings and followers of both men, the principles instilled by Socrates were transmitted and applied by later educators.5

  What were those principles? In essence, that it is the nature and calling of the human being to know: to know truth, being, wisdom, goodness, virtue—the forms, or the highest causes. It is in knowledge that we transcend our limitations (including the limitations of mortality) and become identified with the truth that is our highest and deepest ground, beyond all that the senses can offer. But knowledge can only be attained through the systematic ordering of the soul or personality in pursuit of integrity; that is, the discipline of thought (by logic) and will (by virtue).

  In Books 6 and 7 of his dialogue The Republic, Plato spends some time discussing the levels of being and the levels of knowledge, and the ascent of the mind through education. There are four levels of knowledge, the highest of which he calls reason (nous), followed by understanding, opinion, and the “perception of shadows” or mere sensory awareness. The power of learning exists in the soul, but “the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming to that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good.”6

  He then explores how the soul is to be moved as a “whole,” in order to become acquainted with the highest reality, the “good.” The key disciplines he proposes are arithmetic, plane and solid geometry, astronomy, and the study of harmony. In each case he distinguishes a lower and a higher use of the discipline, the lower being its employment for practical and worldly purposes and the higher for the purpose of finding “the beautiful and the good”—seeing through the patterns of the numbers or the stars to the eternal realities they can reveal to the inner eye of the mind. And when these different studies are pursued in this way, they converge and commingle:

  Now, when all these studies reach the point of intercommunion and connection with one another, and come to be considered in their natural affinities, then, I think, but not till then, will the pursuit of them have a value for our objects; otherwise there is no profit in them.7

  It is then that they are severally taken up into what Plato calls the “hymn of dialectic,” or philosophy, attaining “a conception of the essence of each thing” and a vision of the eternal light.

  The “circle of learning” (from which we get our word encyclopedia) was systematized into nine fields of study by the Roman Marcus Varro in the first century after Christ, and refined by Augustine, Boethius,8 and Cassiodorus into a list of seven divided into two groups. The first group, the trivium (three ways), consisted of:

  grammar

  rhetoric

  dialectic

  These three artes sermocinales (“language studies”), taught through the study of literature, would enable a student to express himself, to communicate with others, and to argue effectively for a point of view. The second group comprised the quadrivium (or the four ways) of sacred sciences known as the artes reales, or physicae. These were the disciplines by which Plato believed the inner vision of the soul could be awakened:

  arithmetic

  geometry

  astronomy

  music

  In fact they went back further than Plato, for it was the Pythagoreans who had originally grouped them together.9

  Dorothy Sayers, in a well-known essay “The Lost Tools of Learning,” provides an eloquent argument for the importance of reviving the trivium for young people today. Without a basic training in how to think, argue, and communicate, children are not ready for the study of “subjects” or equipped for the real world. We flood their environment with words, but they “do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being masters of them in their intellects.”10 But Sayers’s essay neglects the quadrivium, almost as though liberal education were a matter of the trivium alone. She implies that the former amounted to little more than a collection of topics, and reduces mathematics entirely to a branch of logic (for her it is “neither more nor less than the rule of the syllogism in its particular application to number and measurement”).11

  On the contrary, the quadrivium is essential to a liberal education in the traditional sense. And since we can normally only advance from sense-perception to intellectual intuition by way of intellectual argumentation, the quadrivium necessarily involved the study of number and its relationship to physical space or time, preparatory to the study of philosophy (in the higher sense of that word) and theology: arithmetic being pure number, geometry number in space, music number in time, and astronomy number in both space and time.12

  Once generally accepted, the list of seven literate and numerate arts created a framework within which civilized thought and behavior could be transmitted down the generations. Classical educational ideals and literacy were preserved through the dark ages after the fall of Roman civilization within oases provided by the Benedictine and other mon
asteries. In the early ninth century, the Emperor Charlemagne, having reunited much of Western Europe by military conquest, tried to instill in his courtiers a love of learning with the help of monks he co-opted for the purpose (the foremost being Alcuin of York, known as the “schoolmaster of Europe”). In England, King Alfred did something similar later in the same century.

  By the twelfth century, Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1141) was able to write in his Didascalicon:

  Out of all the sciences . . . the ancients, in their studies, especially selected seven to be mastered by those who were to be educated. These seven they considered so to excel all the rest in usefulness that anyone who had been thoroughly schooled in them might afterward come to knowledge of the others by his own inquiry and effort rather than by listening to a teacher. For these, one might say, constitute the best instruments, the best rudiments, by which the way is prepared for the mind’s complete knowledge of philosophic truth. Therefore they are called by the name trivium and quadrivium, because by them, as by certain ways (viae), a quick mind enters into the secret places of wisdom.13

  Note the higher sense of “usefulness” operating in this text. Hugh is speaking of a higher-order utility than that of the Servile Arts, since it involves the acquisition of skills that liberate the learner from further dependence on a teacher, and conduce by stages to philosophic wisdom, and meditation on what is revealed by holy scripture, as the highest end of man.