Simplexity

The world as a whole is complex, but it is also a unity. It is “simplex”, founded on simple principles. Poets, painters, scientists and mathematicians are all searching for simplexity in their own way. Aesthetic pleasure is very largely the delight we feel in seeing order, meaning and relationship – the beauty that Coleridge called unity in variety. But it has to be an order unforced, seemingly spontaneous, rather than brutally imposed upon the material....

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Music of Creation in Tolkien

“There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will." (Hamlet V.II.)Both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien saw the creation of the world as taking place in some way through music. Readers of the Narniad will recall Aslan singing Narnia into being in The Magician’s Nephew. As for Tolkien, he composed a whole “Elvish Book of Genesis” in the form of the Ainulindale, the opening section of the posthumously published Silmarillion, describing...

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Sacred Music

In Beauty for Truth's Sake I introduce the subject of music but for those who wish to go more deeply into it I recommend Jeremy Begbie's Resounding Truth (2007). You may also like to read an article in First Things by David P. Goldman, called "Sacred Music, Sacred Time". Goldman argues that there are objective criteria for achieving a musical form that raises our minds and hearts towards God: Whether it is Bach or Mozart that we hear in church, we...

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Catholic Church Architecture

I have just been reviewing the most gorgeous book for the next issue of Second Spring journal (an issue on "theology of the body" that will be out in the spring). It is by Denis McNamara of the Liturgical Institute, and is called Catholic Church Architecture and the Spirit of the Liturgy. Though it looks like a coffee-table book, it is a feast for the mind and heart as well as the eyes, and completely complementary not only to David Clayton's work,...

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The Mystery of One

Yesterday was the first day of a new decade. The image of two overlapping circles and ten triangles is a geometrical way of representing the interplay between numbers - Ten emerging from One via Two. Thus One is the first number in the Decad. Or is it? In p. 56 of the book I mention that, according to the Pythagorean tradition, One is not a number but the "number beyond number". Saint Maximus the Confessor inherits and explains this tradition, according...

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