Beauty for Truth's Sake Quotes

“Mathematics is the language of science-- but it is also the hidden structure behind art… and its basis is the invisible Logos of God.”
― Stratford Caldecott, Beauty for Truth's Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education

“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.”
― Stratford Caldecott, Beauty for Truth's Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education

“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.”
― Stratford Caldecott, Beauty for Truth's Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education

“For Christians believed not only that the temporal world was an expression of God’s will and wisdom—in something like the way that pagans had believed that it was ruled and shaped by the gods, or that it was a shadow of the world of the Ideas—but that God had entered into that world, using its analogous resemblance to him in order to form it into a vessel for his actual presence.”
― Stratford Caldecott, Beauty for Truth's Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education

“If . . . the world is the effect of the Divine Word uttered at the beginning of time, then all of nature can be taken as a symbol of a supernatural reality. Everything that exists, in whatever mode, having its principle in the Divine Intellect, translates or represents that principle in its own manner and according to its own order of existence; and thus, from one order to another, all things are linked and correspond with each other so that they join together in a universal and total harmony which is like a reflection of the Divine Unity itself.”
― Stratford Caldecott, Beauty for Truth's Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education

“Only in this way, by ordering the soul in harmony and giving it a sense of the meaning of proportion and relationship, can it be induced later to become fully rational, and to derive pleasure from the theoretic contemplation of ideas. The road to reason leads through the ordering of the soul, which implies the necessity of an education in love, in discernment, and in virtue.”
― Stratford Caldecott, Beauty for Truth's Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education

“Modern culture has disenchanted the world by disenchanting numbers. For us, numbers are about quantity and control, not quality and contemplation. After Bacon, knowledge of numbers is a key to manipulation, not meditation. Numbers are only meaningful (like all raw materials that comprise the natural world) when we can do something with them. When we read of twelve tribes and twelve apostles and twelve gates and twelve angels, we typically perceive something spreadsheet-able. By contrast, in one of Caldecott’s most radical claims, he insists, “It is not simply that numbers can be used as symbols. Numbers have meaning—they are symbols. The symbolism is not always merely projected onto them by us; much of it is inherent in their nature” (p. 75). Numbers convey to well-ordered imaginations something of (in Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s metaphor) the inner design of the fabric of creation. The fact that the words “God said” appear ten times in the account of creation and that there are ten “words” in the Decalogue is not a random coincidence. The beautiful meaningfulness of a numberly world is most evident in the perception of harmony, whether in music, architecture, or physics. Called into being by a three-personed God, creation’s essential relationality is often evident in complex patterns that can be described mathematically. Sadly, as Caldecott laments, “our present education tends to eliminate the contemplative or qualitative dimension of mathematics altogether” (p. 55). The sense of transcendence that many (including mathematicians and musicians) experience when encountering beauty is often explained away by materialists as an illusion. Caldecott offers an explanation rooted in Christology. Since the Logos is love, and since all things are created through him and for him and are held together in him, we should expect the logic, the rationality, the intelligibility of the world to usher in the delight that beauty bestows. One”
― Stratford Caldecott, Beauty for Truth's Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education