Evolution

When you read Beauty for Truth's Sake, you won't find much about evolution, except by implication. I mentioned this omission before, in an earlier posting triggered by a letter in the Catholic Herald. My own summary article about evolution is online here. Ignatius Press have a site dedicated to this question, called IntelligentProject.net, and they select the following passage from Pope Benedict, which goes to the heart of the question:Christianity is faith in the Creator Spiritus, from whom comes everything that is real. Precisely this ought to...

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Queen of the Sciences

Here is a passage from Fr Robert Barron's wonderful book The Priority of Christ (pp. 155-6):In the thirteenth century, Bonaventure maintained that all of the non-theological arts and sciences taught in the university find their proper center in theology, that science which speaks directly of Christ the Logos. As the rationality of God the creator, Christ is the physical, mathematical, and metaphysical center of the universe and hence the point of...

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New educational initiatives

I thought it would be worth drawing attention to some notable new initiatives in education. First, the Living Water College of the Arts in Alberta, Canada. This is committed to the training and development of Christian artists across a wide range of genres including theatre and film. Second, the C.S. Lewis Foundation in California has announced the creation of C.S. Lewis College in Northfield, Massachusetts dedicated to "mere Christianity". Third, there is the Theotokos Institute for Catholic Studies at St David's Catholic sixth-form College in...

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God's Mathematics

Charlotte Ostermann recently reminded me of a wonderful passage in St Bonaventure that sums up the ancient understanding of how mathematics leads us to God:"...since beauty and delight do not exist without proportion, and since proportion exists primarily in numbers, all things are subject to number. Hence 'number is the principal exemplar in the mind of the Creator,' and in things, the principal vestige leading to Wisdom. And since number is most...

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Regenerate science

Sitting in a meeting recently with a group of people each of whom was staring down into one or other electronic gadget, the following quotation came to mind:“In our contemporary world it may be said that the more a man becomes dependent on the gadgets whose smooth functioning assures him of a tolerable life at the material level, the more estranged he becomes from an awareness of his inner reality. I should be tempted to say that the centre of gravity...

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The Pope on Beauty

The "way of beauty" is the theme of the Pope's recent address to artists on 21 November 2009 in the Sistine Chapel. In it he writes - quoting both Hans urs von Balthasar and Simone Weil, who are influences on the book on which this blog is based (see left), and building on the Letter to Artists of Pope John Paul II - as follows: "Beauty, whether that of the natural universe or that expressed in art, precisely because it opens up and broadens the...

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The Way of Beauty program

Readers of my book and blog might be interested to know that a colleague and friend, David Clayton, with whom I worked on these ideas in Oxford, is now the Artist in Residence at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in New Hampshire. There he has developed a course based on the traditional quadrivium called THE WAY OF BEAUTY. He writes, "Literature, art, music, architecture, philosophy—all of creation and potentially all human activity—are bound together...

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The Fate of the Cross

Sitting in an airport recently for several hours - a perfectly smart, pleasant, efficient airport - I had occasion to look around and realise something. Not only could I have been in almost any country of the world, and therefore I was in some sense "nowhere", but I was in a space where signs predominated over symbols. Everywhere I looked there were signs: pictures, advertisements, instructions, those little "icons" that tell you where the toilets...

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The Source of Ugliness

There is a noticeable ugliness in much 20th-century architecture, design, and town planning that expresses a deeply rooted problem in the way we have learned to think. The problem, as I try to show in my book, can be traced back to Descartes (or even further to William of Ockham). If I may caricature somewhat, Descartes lay the foundations of modern instrumental reason by reducing everything to positions on a conceptual grid. Very efficient, very...

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New book by Alasdair MacIntyre

I was just alerted to an important new book by one of the great educational philosophers of our time. Called God, Philosophy, Universities. It is a kind of introduction to the Catholic philosophical tradition, based on an undergraduate course that MacIntyre teaches at Notre Dame. An informative review by Mark Eckel may be read here. Eckel writes: "Key to a Christian university is the unity of the universe and the underlying unity of all subjects of study.... The origin of division (begun in Genesis 3) is dualism – separating the human person into...

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Education in the Family

Anyone who wants to discuss the educational implications of Beauty for Truth's Sake can now do so at our discussion board under EDUCATION. In connection with this you might like to read an article I wrote some time ago in Communio called Towards a Distinctively Catholic School. But these ideas on education are not just for Catholics - and not just for schools and colleges. Parents are the primary educators of their children, and the home is the natural...

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Theories of Evolution

A letter published in The Catholic Herald points out that in my analysis of the challenge of evangelization in that paper (October 2), I ignored the "elephant in the room", namely Evolution. It says that my piece was "fine as far as it goes, but, like so many Catholic commentators on the decline of belief in this country, he is either unable or unwilling to take the necessary final step and identify the elephant in the room: namely, the Darwinian...

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The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Beauty for Truth's Sake echoes in places that cult philosophy book of the 1970s, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig, which you can read online here. (Coincidentally there is a conference in Oxford this October comparing Pirsig's ideas on Quality with those of the art historian Ernst Gombrich.) In the course of his Chautauqua, the author seeks to resolve what he calls the "classic-romantic split" in our culture - the world...

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Recent article

In the Catholic Herald recently I published an article arguing that the task of "evangelizing" - that is, communicating the Christian faith - is made more difficult by the split between arts and sciences. "Faith became detached from reason, and reason turned against faith, as a result of the scientific and technological revolution. The intellectual elite accepted the philosophers' suggestion that truth has nothing to do with goodness or 'facts' with 'values'. Art was reduced to entertainment, and science to the quest for power over nature. But...

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Sphere of the Angels

"Rilke was not mistaken when he identified as one the sphere of the angels and the sphere of all that is beautiful. 'For the beautiful is nothing but the first degree of the terrible.' The world of beauty is the world of intermediate hierarchies which are irradiated with the glory that cascades down from the Trinity even into the formless opacity of matter. The beautiful is the world of forms between that which above form, being the sphere of God,...

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Education and Architecture

It seems to me that one of the things a teacher can do to "re-enchant" education is draw his students' attention to the world we live in, and to the world we have built around us - the language of form in architecture. We can connect this easily with mathematics, geometry, astronomy, music, and history. An article by philosopher John Haldane in The Catholic Herald for 30 August 2009 even gives us a way to connect it with biology.The architects of...

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The beauty of mathematics

For many of us, “mathematics” and “beauty” sit oddly together. We may remember math as boring or even frightening, but hardly beautiful. Yet math is the key to science, and science dominates our age. And there is another way to look at it.The single most compelling reason to explore the world of mathematics is that it is beautiful, and pondering its intriguing ideas is great fun…. To study the deep truth of number relationships feeds the spirit as...

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Light

Education is a never-ending process – or should be. And what we learn depends largely on what catches our imagination. Not long agoI learned something by chance that changed the way I look at the world. Like many people, I grew up with the idea that the light by which we see things emanates from a source, bounces off the thing I am looking at, and collides with a cell in my retina. Not true, apparently. When a photon hits something, it is absorbed....

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Reconnect with nature

The word “ecology” was coined only as recently as 1873, by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel. He based it on the Greek word oikos meaning “house, dwelling place, habitation” (plus, of course, logos). But though the scientific study of ecology, referring to the complex inter-relationships of biological entities with each other and with their environment, is a modern development, the traditional worldview has a great deal to say on the matter. The...

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Sacred geometry

The vesica piscis is one of the most important figures in sacred geometry, and symbolically speaking an image of the source of life. It may best be described as a lens shape formed by intersection of two circles with the same radius, intersecting in such a way that the center of each circle lies on the circumference of the other. The name in Latin means the bladder of the fish. The shape is also called, somewhat more poetically, mandorla ("almond"...

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Manifesto

Cosmic order is rooted in the Logos. Today, mathematicians continue to discover truth through beauty, and modern science forgets the “poetic” qualities of nature at its peril. The idea of beauty contains the key to the healing of our fragmented, secularized, and alienated culture. This is how I summed up the thrust of the book at the end of the Introduction:The way we educate is the way we pass on or transform our culture. It carries within it a...

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For Truth's Sake

This blog is jumping off from my new book, details of which are here. (Or if you live in the US, here.) You can post comments of your own, or if you want a more extended discussion you can go here.What is the book about and why bother to discuss it? Education has become splintered and fragmented in our postmodern culture. The arts are divorced from the sciences; faith is at loggerheads with reason. Drawing on ancient traditions of learning, Beauty...

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