Beauty for Truth's Sake

by Stratford Caldecott

  On the further side of death, beyond the ugliness converted by an inward act into the supreme expression of love, in the body of the resurrected, even the wounds now shine like jewels. Beauty (as glory) exists in the Trinity before, during, and after time. David Bentley Hart writes:

  God’s beauty is delight and the object of delight, the shared gaze of love that belongs to the persons of the Trinity; it is what God beholds, what the Father sees and rejoices in the Son, in the sweetness of the Spirit, what Son and Spirit find delightful in one another, because as Son and Spirit of the Father they share his knowledge and love as person. This cannot be emphasized enough: the Christian God, who is infinite, is also infinitely formosus, the supereminent fullness of all form, transcendently determinate, always possessed of his Logos. True beauty is not the idea of the beautiful, a static archetype in the “mind” of God, but is an infinite “music,” drama, art, completed in—but never “bounded” by—the termless dynamism of the Trinity’s life; God is boundless, and so is never a boundary; his music possesses the richness of every transition, interval, measure, variation—all dancing and delight. And because he is beautiful, being abounds with difference: shape, variety, manifold relation. Beauty is the distinction of the different, the otherness of the other, the true form of distance.34

  It is, we should add, difference or otherness held in a unity that does not destroy uniqueness. As Hart explains, if the Trinity were instead a Duality, God would not be love but narcissism, and beauty would lose its radiance. It is the Holy Spirit, the fact that true love is always turned away from itself, pouring itself out for others, that makes it open and radiant, and creates room in the Trinity for the creation itself, as well as for all the suffering and all the sacrifice that creation involves. The Trinity is the home of the Logos and the shape of love. These are high secrets of our Western tradition, and together they offer the key to its renewal.

  1. Plato 1892, 3:230.

  2. In a lecture at the University of Toronto called “Culture and the Coming Peril,” paraphrased in Ward 1949, 500.

  3. The concept of universal education, of course, is a modern one. Higher education traditionally excluded women, slaves, and indeed everyone except the free man or citizen whose calling was to rule and to contemplate. My intention in this book, however, is to use the word “man” inclusively as applying to both sexes.

  4. See Pieper 1998, 21–26, and the longer account in Dawson 1989. For a broad selection of classic texts on education from Plato onward, see Gamble 2007.

  5. The teaching of Socrates was imparted by a method of gentle but relentless questioning (elenchus). In this way he encouraged reasoned reflection about matters that the young men of Athens had previously been content to leave in the domain of mythology, awakening in them a desire not merely to “know” but to “understand.” The figure of Socrates is the paradigm of the philosopher-sage. According to Pierre Hadot, ancient philosophy in general is misunderstood if we forget that the words on the page were merely a part, and not necessarily the most important part, of a series of spiritual exercises (Hadot 1995). As for the significant differences between Plato and Aristotle, whose influences on later tradition are intertwined, they cannot be examined here.

  6. Plato 1892, 3:218.

  7. Ibid., 234.

  8. For details see Chadwick 1981, 69–173.

  9. Kahn 2001, 13.

  10. Sayers 1973, 118.

  11. Ibid., 127.

  12. Thus John Henry Newman in The Idea of a University speaks of a liberal education as consisting of four studies—Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, and Mathematics. The fourth contains the entire quadrivium: Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, and Music (Newman 1982, 195).

  13. Hugh of St. Victor 1991, 86–87.

  14. Benedict XVI, Lecture at the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” January 17, 2008. There is an interesting account of this process in MacIntyre 1990, 156–57.

  15. I will touch on this again in chapter 5 (the section on architecture), chapter 6, and in the conclusion. The breakdown of the medieval worldview and the reasons for the decline of sacred science are summarized in Bouyer 1988 (chap. 12) and Nasr 1996 (chap. 4). Cf. Dupré 1993.

  16. See especially St. Bonaventure’s lecture De Reductione Artium ad Theologiam (originally written around 1250), in some ways the most perfect medieval treatise on education.

  17. Sir Francis Bacon formulated the now famous aphorism “knowledge is power” in 1597.

  18. Dawson 1989, 145. Cf. Bloom 1987.

  19. Newman 1982, 86.

  20. Ibid., 92.

  21. Ibid., 105. Newman is sometimes accused of being a nominalist, but a convincing case against this interpretation, based partly on his recognition of moral universals, is made by Merrigan 1991, 116–23.

  22. Newman 1982, 91.

  23. Ibid., 75. This was also the main point of Bonaventure’s De Reductione, though the two approaches are very different.

  24. Benedict XVI 2007.

  25. See the discussion in Reale 1997. Beauty is like light because it “makes us see the One in the proportional and numerical relations by which it unfolds in the physical dimension of the visible as well as at the level of the intelligible” (301). There have of course been many attempts to account for the experience of beauty in neurological terms. H. E. Huntley gives some examples in his book The Divine Proportion. But reductionist explanations have a fundamental weakness. Actual lived experience is irreducible. If consciousness can be correlated with events in the brain, the decision to give the one ontological priority over the other remains a philosophical decision.

  26. Alexander 2004.

  27. Cited in Taylor 1998, 17.

  28. None of which is to deny the very real beauty to be found in modern and postmodern works. Beauty exists in many modes as well as degrees, and the definition of beauty is by no means as easy as the medieval scholastics thought.

  29. Bohm 1996, 39–40.

  30. Balthasar 1982, 18.

  31. Balthasar 1968, 114–15.

  32. Balthasar 1982, 18.

  33. Goodness too, although I have not dwelt on the ethical dimension of science. Neither science nor art operate outside the moral sphere, and to emancipate them entirely from morality is just as bad a mistake as to emancipate them from beauty.

  34. Hart 2003, 177.

  2

  Educating the Poetic Imagination

  The whole world of images that surrounds us is a single field of significations. Every flower we see is an expression, every landscape has its significance, every human or animal face speaks its wordless language. It would be utterly futile to attempt a transposition of this language into concepts. Though we might try to circumscribe, even to describe, the content these things express, we would never succeed in rendering it adequately. This expressive language is addressed primarily, not to conceptual thought, but to the kind of intelligence that perceptively reads the gestalt of things.

  Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Logic, vol. 1, 140

  In the preceding sketch of the assumptions and history of the Four Ways, the educational quadrivium, I neglected an important element. For the Platonic and Aristotelian tradition, music was not just one of the subjects to be studied for a master’s degree. In a certain broader sense the choral art was the foundation of the educational process. As we read in Plato’s Laws, “The whole choral art is also in our view the whole of education; and of this art, rhythms and harmonies form the part which has to do with the voice.”1 Music in this wider sense included song, poetry, story, and dance (“gymnastic”).

  If Plato’s dialogues appeared to be harsh on the poets, it was owing to a concern that poetry should be purified by a concern for the truth.

  Thus, a tradition of learning that began with Homeric epics as models of imitation in virtue and delight are now taken up for serious reflection and discourse under the genius of the West’s first great philosopher. All of the educational experiences detailed in The Republic for the child—songs, poetry,
music, gymnastic—are meant to awaken and refine a sympathetic knowledge of the reality of the True, Good, and Beautiful, by placing the child inside the experience of those transcendentals as they are contained in these arts and sensory experiences.2

  Rhythm, harmony, and melody—the subject of formal study at a more mature stage of a child’s growth—must from the earliest age penetrate deeply into mind and soul through imitation and natural enjoyment. 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.

  “A Beauty Which Defies Time”

  The same assumptions were made by Christian teachers. The greatest of these, perhaps, was St. Benedict, the founder of monasticism in the West. Cardinal Newman, himself a great teacher, associates the Poetic element with Benedict in the way he associates the Scientific with St. Dominic and the Practical with St. Ignatius, in what he calls the three eras of Christian education.3 As the Roman Empire collapsed and the barbarians swept across Europe, the monasteries of St. Benedict formed a chain of sanctuaries, where civilization itself was preserved and reforged in the fires of liturgy. The monks were drawn by a stable form of life built on a wise monastic Rule, which itself was a supreme work of the poetic imagination. Their communities instantiated the ancient ideal of a “musical” education: an ordered life, proportionate, harmonious, disciplined, and (often) joyful. Body, soul, and spirit were catered for: manual work and prayer gradually transformed the landscape in the remote locations they chose to live. At the center of this way of life was the Mass, and the Breviary or “Divine Office” created as a way of praying the Psalms seven times a day (and once in the night). Time itself had been sanctified by the sevenfold spirit of Christ,4 and the monk’s soul could be tuned to the rhythm of the cosmos by entering into this spirit.

  Beauty flows from beauty, and from these oases of the spirit flowed art in profusion: music, architecture, painting. Plainsong, developed from the ancient chants of Israel and then transformed by the advent of polyphony, gave the foundation for all that we now know as “Classical” music. The architecture of the great monasteries was devised in service of the harmonies of this music and the duties of prayer. The refined art of illumination grew from the great work of transcription, by which the great books of the past were handed down. In Northumbria the Benedictine movement met and absorbed the Celtic influence from the north and west, resulting in the gorgeous pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels—one of the few fragments of this civilization to survive a later period of iconoclasm. It was out of this milieu that Charlemagne and Alfred summoned the new schoolmasters of Europe.

  In his classic study of monastic culture, Jean Leclercq writes of the monks’ evident appreciation of symbolism and beauty. In the sense that they studied the classics for the enrichment of personality, they were humanists. It is apparent from their choice of texts to be preserved, as well as the ones they wrote, that the reading of pagan literature and philosophy had helped them refine their human faculties. They lived intensely, as well as remotely, and as a result they drew civilization toward them.

  On the one hand, the liturgy developed their feeling for beauty; on the other, asceticism and the cloistered life forbade the pleasures of the senses either crude or refined. Consequently they delighted in beautiful language and beautiful poetry. Certainly they never kept any text which had not charmed them with its beauty. If they read and copied Ovid, for example, it is because his poetry is admirable. At times they drew moral lessons from these authors, but they were not, thanks be to God, reduced to looking to them for that. Their desire was for the joys of the spirit and they neglected none that these authors had to offer. So, if they transcribed classical texts it is simply because they loved them. They loved the authors of the past, not simply because they belonged to the past but because they were beautiful, with a beauty which defies time. Their culture has always been timeless—and it is for that reason that it was effectual.5

  Another wise Benedictine, Denis Huerre OSB, the abbot president of the Subiaco Congregation during most of the 1980s, explores the intimate links between beauty and the process of conversio that is the heart of a monk’s life. “Beauty is unable to bypass the senses,” he writes, “(and this is the reason we can never afford to despise sensual delight), but the function of our senses is to enable beauty to penetrate within, to become that to which the heart of our mind can give assent.” And he goes on to speak of the beginnings of this tradition:

  From the second century onward, beginning with Origen, an entire literature grew up devoted to the “spiritual senses,” which is only a way to help us speak about how we are penetrated by beauty; about what it is to encounter beauty; about how it is that that which beauty engages must be the whole of what we are, the totality that comprises the senses, memory, and imagination, as well as spiritual insight; about how it is that through this action of beauty all these aspects of being human are able to intercommunicate and integrate themselves into ordered harmony.6

  With this spirit flowing through them, the monasteries shaped the poetic imagination of medieval civilization. The twelfth century renaissance was as much a product of the monastic as of the cathedral schools, and the high culture of the Christian humanist was rooted in the labor and contemplation of the monks over many centuries. As James S. Taylor points out, even Thomas Aquinas, though he later became a Dominican, was the product of a Benedictine upbringing, having been placed with the monks at Monte Cassino at an early age. The magnificent synthetic power of his intellect would have owed a great deal to his participation in the Latin chant of the Scola cantorum, the musical education that opened his consciousness to the harmonies of the spirit.

  Rediscovering Poetic Knowledge

  The “poetic” rationality of St. Thomas might appear primitive in the eyes of our more mechanistic age. But though we have gained a great deal in terms of power over nature—enough to begin to reshape the code of life itself—we seem to have lost the ability to understand what it is we control. The modern period has seen a concerted attack on our confidence in the human capacity to know. Deprived of a spiritual foundation, human reason churns away confidently for a few generations, but eventually it comes to a halt because it finds that the world has been ground to dust and ashes which clog up the machinery; it has been ground so small that nothing remains to give it savor or color, depth or inner life. For the truth that reason seeks is not within its own unaided reach. Small wonder, then, that the postmodernists, structuralists, and deconstructionists lose faith in the whole process, telling us that there are no facts, only interpretations, and that we should prefer strategy to truth, rhetoric to rationality.

  The Romantic movement was a reaction against the early stages of this process, the “mysterious vengeance” of beauty, separated from goodness and truth by the assumptions of a narrower rationality. Romanticism sought spiritual light and meaning not through abstract thought but in the world of the imagination, through poetry, images, music, feeling, and story. Already in the older tradition that stems from Aristotle, cognition was thought to depend in part on the imagination, since all mental concepts were abstracted from sensory images or “phantasms.” But empiricism and rationalism opened a gulf between self and object, man and cosmos. In their attempts to bridge it, many Romantics relied on feeling alone. That led to the solipsism and self-indulgence of late Victorian decadence. Some opened themselves to unconscious forces that proved hard or impossible to control. But Romanticism also points toward a more promising road, which we glimpse in the writings of J. W. von Goethe in Germany and his younger contemporary S. T. Coleridge in England.

  Coleridge in a famous passage of his Biographica Literaria linked imagination with perception: “The primary Imagination I hold to be the living p
ower and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.”7 The Oxford “Inklings”—C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, and their friends—who stand partly in the tradition of Coleridge, certainly viewed imagination as a path to truth. Though they differed greatly in their philosophical and religious commitments, and in their styles of writing, they shared a common love of story and poesy without in any way denigrating intellect and reason. Lewis’s discussion of truth in the epilogue to The Discarded Image carefully distinguishes between the types of knowledge embodied in different images and models—comparing those employed in the contemporary sciences, on the one hand, with those of the medieval quadrivium, on the other. Michael Ward has shown how deeply Lewis felt about the continuing importance of the “seven heavens” of ancient cosmology, the distinctive “characters” of the seven planets, which gave him the hidden structure of the Narnia Chronicles. The seven Chronicles were conceived not as mere entertainment but as an imaginative way of communicating truths. Symbolism and atmosphere can sometimes accomplish this more effectively than rational argument. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, for example, presents a “monarchical” (Jovian) picture of the world and human consciousness participating in the cosmic Logos. Within the context of such a world, the Christian Gospel makes much more sense. In the end, as Ward puts it, “Lewis’s septet presents participatory deification, not of the planets in the divine nature, but of the children in the divine nature as it is understood by means of the planets.”8