Beauty for Truth's Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education

by Stratford Caldecott

it is only when the last person ceases to remember God that the end will come.

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.

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.

He eventually found the correspondence he was looking for in the variations of the angular velocities of the planets as seen from the sun, by comparing the speed at which they were traveling at different parts of their orbits. This is an example of the right way of doing things: to look at what really happens, and discover the beauty in it.

Not only are the periods of the planets related to each other in fairly precise harmonic proportions (2:5 in the case of Jupiter and Saturn, for example, and 1:Φ in the case of Earth and Venus), but each traces a lovely sequence of loops around the other that reveal aspects of their geometrical relationship.

It is one of the strange coincidences in which the solar system abounds that the problem is “solved” by the respective sizes of the earth and the moon, which are in the ratio of 11:3. Thus if the moon were rolled around the earth’s surface, its center would describe a circle equal to the perimeter of a square inscribed around the earth (31,680 miles).

Everywhere we look in nature, we tend to find structure or form. The planets occupy distinct orbits, rotating in close numerical relation to one another.

Music, architecture, astronomy, and physics—the physical arts and their applications—demonstrate the fundamental intuition behind the Liberal Arts tradition of education, which is that the world is an ordered whole, a “cosmos,” whose beauty becomes more apparent the more carefully and deeply we study it.

Yet at the same time, while studying and appreciating the intuitions that lay behind the cosmological sciences of the quadrivium, we cannot today simply revert to the worldview of the Middle Ages. The ancient mathematical theories of music and astronomy contain elements we need to retrieve, but they were not themselves entirely adequate.

In late 2007, the themes I have been discussing in this book hit the headlines all over the world when a maverick physicist, Garrett Lisi, published online a paper entitled “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything.”44

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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).

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,

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.

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.

Christopher Dawson quote

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.

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.

The change from sacred cosmos to secular universe was due mainly to ideology and the pressure of social change. Science itself has not disproved God, and religion will never disappear, though it may take new forms.

If reason is to be “put in its place,” as merely a mode of participation in the divine Logos, will this not put theology once more in a position of overconfident superiority?

the Liberal Arts were intended to conduce to freedom of mind, and they were developed and nourished by the Catholic Church. But the post-nominalist world has a very strange and dangerous conception of freedom, and this conception distorts the way we think.

We consume more and more to become less and less; we spread ourselves, as Bilbo said to Gandalf, like butter over too much bread. This is a world of pure consumerism.

Faith is not opposed to reason, but it does function as a constant goad, a challenge, a provocation to reason.

The resolution lies not in faith, nor yet in reason, but in love.

We are perennially tempted to reduce Christianity to something less than itself: either to power (will, faith, law) or to philosophy (knowledge, reason, wisdom). Nominalists tend to do the former. Realists tend to do the latter. But the solution to this supreme problem in binary logic is through a third and higher thing: love, in which both will and knowledge are reconciled and held in balance—or rather, in which both are transcended. God is love, in which both will and knowledge are comprised. Whatever your intellectual quarry, if you pursue it to its ultimate lair, you will find the mark of love in the very nature of things.