I had to read it twice.
It's very dense. Even the title, Beauty for Truth's Sake, is enigmatic. What does that even mean? Even after reading the book twice, I'm still not sure that I can explain it.
Caldecott is making the case for re-enchanting education. He believes we went wrong when we separated Faith and Reason.
He begins with a discussion of the trivium, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and the quadrivium, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy, which together compose the seven liberal arts. As understood by the ancients, it was the study of these things that would lead a student to the ultimate good, which was the study of God. In this world, faith and reason worked together to free the student up for that most good, true, and beautiful. "The assumption of this system of education was that by learning to understand the harmonies of the cosmos, our minds would be raised toward God, in whom we could find the unity from which all these harmonies derive: Dante's 'love that moves the sun and the other stars.'" (53) But western civilization long ago lost the connection between faith and reason and so God and the study of theology became worthless pursuits.
By losing sight of the purpose of education according to Plato, we have lost sight of our very humanity. Plato describes the power of learning on the soul: "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." (22) Knowledge, then, is its own end. It is be valued because it leads us to beauty. And truth resides in beauty. John Newman states, "I have said that all branches of knowledge are connected together, because the subject matter of knowledge is intimately united in itself as being the acts and work of the Creator." (29) True beauty is the harmony found in the universe. To miss or denigrate beauty is to lose both truth and goodness as well. And all beauty is found in acknowledging the Creator.
Caldecott then discusses the poetic imagination and our need to awaken it. This means understanding how the medievals saw at the world. Theirs was a cosmos infused with divine symbolism. "Everything that exists, in whatever mode, having its principle in the Divine Intellect, translates or represents that principle in its own manner 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." (48) It was this elimination of the symbolic and poetic understanding that caused the great divorce between science and religion and art from science.
The author then goes onto discuss how the ancients imbued that first of the quadrivium, arithmetic and numbers, with symbolism. He starts with mathematics and shows how numbers pointed the mind of man to God. It begins with 1 - the ultimate symbol of unity that exists in God, himself. Then 2, which clearly delineates the symbiosis of the Father and the Son. But it is 3 that completes the picture of the Trinity and the love that flows between Father and Son. Caldecott spends quite a bit of time on more number symbolism, including the "golden ratio," and the ways the medieval world used number theory to point the people to the truth of God.
From arithmetic, he moves to the next topic of the quadrivium, geometry. Specifically he shows how circles and other geometric shapes point to the unity of the Trinity. Not only do circles and triangles capture the beauty of the godhead, but proportion as well. Caldecott states, "A single relationship unites the Father to Christ, Christ to his disciples. Christ is the proportional mean between God and the saints." (81) He even relates pi, and its unending string of numbers, to the infinite love of God for his creation. If the Holy Spirit is the circle connecting the two points of Father and Son, then his measure is πd, an infinite number times the distance between Father and Son. We reside in the middle of that circle!
Next in the quadrivium is music and to this Caldecott turns. According to the ancients, the universe is singing! And "to understand the universe is to appreciate its music, the harmonies between its parts, the rhythm of if movement, and the proportion of its elements." (94) This music becomes physically manifest in architecture as well. Unfortunately, we have lost sight of the verticality seen in medieval architecture, with its intentional pointing to God. We have focused on the horizontal, that is man to man and to his environment. Even the tallest skyscrapers are simply horizontal buildings stacked upon each other. He calls for an architecture based on verticality, permanence, and iconography. Not only buildings, but the natural world is singing. "The animals, plants, and minerals, the stars and elements, were universally thought to 'praise' their maker, either simply by their very existence, or when called upon to do so by man (who gives them a voice they do not possess in themselves)." (107)
This universal singing leads naturally to astronomy, the fourth branch of the quadrivium. C.S. Lewis brilliantly reminds us that "The music which is too familiar to be heard enfolds us day and night in all ages." (110) We live in an enchanted creation and we miss it because it is all too familiar. Unfortunately early astronomers missed the mark in their insistence on an earth-centered system, and so lost some credibility. The problem was that the astronomers so believed in the mythical symbolism of creation that they worked backward from that presupposition. Rather than let the actual data guide them and then discover the beauty, they tried to impose their own vision of the beautiful, distorting what God had actually designed. In attempting to "save appearance" they created increasingly complicated descriptions of what was actually a beautiful system: the sun at the center (light) and the elliptical orbits of planets which contain two centers, just as we orbit our lives around the visible and the invisible God. Much beauty exists in the truth of the created order. The ancient astronomers lacked the faith to wait for that beauty to be revealed.
The final subject of astronomy should lead most naturally to the study of God, but in our secular and disenchanted world, we have become buffered selves, disengaged from the world. "Without those ties, without that embeddedness, nature was drained of grace, and our connection to the transcendent God became less a matter of imagination or intellect or feeling than of sheer willpower." (124) To re-enchant the universe, we must return to revelation and worship. If we define "liturgy" as "a formal ritual enacted by those who understand themselves to be participating in an action with the divine..." (Wikipedia), then liturgy may be our salvation.
Can we see liturgy itself, then, as the "lost key" to humane education that we have been searching for in this book; that is, to the reintegration of all things, all subjects, in a vision of sacred order? Would a renewed appreciation of liturgy help to anchor theories about number and symbolism and quality more profoundly in real life, enabling us to introduce some much needed harmony into our own souls too? (126)
Caldecott reminds us that all societies are religious societies and all contain a creation story, a doctrine of the end times, and a liturgy or set of rituals to organize time and space. Ours has moved away from true religion to a secular and God-denying counterfeit religion. We must therefore start with remembering. We were created by God and that knowledge should evoke in us gratitude. That gratitude should turn into worship. This, then, should engender an appreciation of the seven liberal arts as a way to give ontological depth to our universe and point to a harmony that harmonizes our souls with the soul of the Creator. Modernity rejects this vertical dimension and so leads to a fragmented and dissipated self. It is the very definition of hell. The man whose soul seeks to harmonize itself with its creator flies on wings of both reason and faith, all bound up in love. Reason will lead to faith as beauty is revealed and faith will naturally engage in reason to reveal more beauty. It is, as Dante tells us, love that moves it all.
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