Are women more beautiful than men?

In ancient thought, it was often assumed that the male of our species is more beautiful than the female. Certainly this was the assumption in Greece, and Plato’s dialogues reflect a virtual cult of male beauty. However, I think I have theological proof to confirm my longstanding suspicion that woman are more beautiful than men. See what you make of it.

According to John Paul II’s theology of the body, discussed in the latest issue of Second Spring, the real source and meaning of gender lies in the Trinity. The Trinity is love, which means self-gift. Love includes within it both activity and receptivity, and it is an act that necessarily involves three Persons. We might say the Father is the divine nature as Giver, the Son is that same divine nature as Receiver (and then, as Receiver, in turn a Giver, since he is the perfect image of the Father), and the Holy Spirit is the divine nature as Gift. (John Paul II names the Holy Spirit in his encyclical Dominum et Vivificantem “Person-Gift”.) Thus the Spirit is Gift, both given and received, and unites Father and Son in the act of giving.

In the creation, Woman is brought to Man precisely as “gift”, crowning the gift of creation in general, which has been made for him. Woman is brought to man not just as wife but as friend, sister and eventually mother as well, all rolled into one in a way that will never again be the case until the advent of the Virgin Mary, who will form with her Son the new beginning of the human race. (In fact the original gift of Woman could be said to include – obscurely and distantly – the gift of Christ himself, who will descend from her in the fullness of time.) Here in this moment of creation Adam represents the Son, the Receiver of the Father’s Gift, and Eve the Holy Spirit, or that which the Father gives. (Perhaps this is why St Maximilian Kolbe describes Mary, the Second Eve, as a "quasi-incarnation" of the Holy Spirit.) She is the breath of life, the living essence of the man, taken out of him and returned in the one form in which he can find himself in his own solitude – that is, in the form of another person to whom he can give himself.

The nature of Woman, then, the deepest meaning of her gender, is to be Gift for Man, to manifest the Spirit, just as the deepest nature of Man is to be the Receiver of the Gift, and to manifest the Son to her. Thus femininity in its totality, at its deepest level, is the essence of humanity made visible to itself as the definitive beauty and glory of creation. (Similarly the essence of masculinity consists in the loving response to this gift which awakens Woman to her own self.)

Adam and Eve fresco by Masolino da Panicale, 1424.

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Lost Tools of Learning

I thought readers might like to know about an article by Brad Birzer (author of a good book on Christopher Dawson) over on the "Imaginative Conservative" blog concerning the importance of the Liberal Arts revival for the future of Western civilization: What Might Help Hold Us Together. Also recommended is The End of Literature by Ben Lockerd.

Barbara J. Elliott writes on the same blog. In her The Power of Beauty, she says:

Art has the twin functions of reflecting a culture and shaping it. The problem that contemporary artists face is a difficult one: how to express meaning to a world which has become culturally over-stimulated by the spectacular, hyper-sexualized, dumbed-down by inanity, and increasingly antagonistic to manifestations of Christianity. Some of the artists who are here this week struggle to believe that the vocation as an artist – especially a Christian artist – has any meaning or value at all. They are at the edge of redefining and creating anew with moral imagination a vision of the True, the Good and the Beautiful that has been all but exterminated in Western culture.

She goes on to analyse the defects and influence of modernism in the arts, and calls for a "second culture". I get nervous when words like "conservative" are used as labels, so it is worth mentioning that these guys are in the tradition of Russell Kirk, Christopher Dawson and T.S. Eliot.

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Images of heaven

We live in an age of images, in which photography and photoshop, CGI and advertising, surround and enfold us in an inescapable cascade of pictures and fragments of pictures, sometimes to the extent of seeming to create a whole artificial world. The elderly are often dependent on the TV that serves as a companion and tranquillizer, the young live their lives through the computer screen on their phone or laptop. The word "icon" now signifies for most people something purely secular - a tiny image that opens up into an application, or else the trademark appearance of some celebrity. Paradoxically, in this Age of the Image, we have lost the ability to read images - to see through them into their meaning. Instead we go through them to other images, and are caught in an endless chain of distraction. To read images we must appreciate symbolism. The image signifies something ultimately real yet invisible, something grasped by intuition or intellect using the image as a support. We need a revival of "mystagogy". This is something church architects and artists have rediscovered, and as a result many new churches may be easier to pray in than some built in the last generation. Matthew Alderman writes about this in "Heaven Made Manifest" from Antiphon magazine ("The crucifixion is just a symbol, but symbols still have meaning, especially in this age so starved of symbol, sign, and iconography"). The symbolism of the Christian temple is analysed in great detail by Jean Hani in a book of that title. The leader of the new movement in church architecture is Duncan Stroik, who directs the Institute for Sacred Architecture at Notre Dame and its brilliant journal. Take a look, also, at Liturgical Environs by Steven J. Schloeder. The beacons are lit...

Photo of Westminster Cathedral by Rose-Marie Caldecott.

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In praise of tradition

The word tradition derives from trans- "over" and dare "to give".  In every traditional society or civilization, a process takes place that can be called a “handing over” of the stories, the knowledge, the accumulated wisdom of one generation to the next. It is a handing over which makes each new generation into a source of wisdom for the one that will follow. What is handed over is a “gift”. It is not simply a bundle of property whose title deed is being transferred to the next generation. Rather, it carries within it something of the giver. Its transmission is an act of love. Thus the gift of tradition involves and transforms the interiority of both the giver and the recipient.

Tradition in the sense I am describing is of the highest value because it is not something we simply manufacture, nor something cooked up by our parents, but something our parents themselves have received with gratitude and respect. Its origin is what makes it sacred.  Some kind of revelation of truth, or what is believed to be a revelation, forms the seed of every great tradition. Tradition is venerated because of this. The moment we suspect that our tradition is based on a lie is the moment it loses its authority over us. Thus tradition is based on the act of faith. I adhere not simply because it has been handed down to me, but because I believe it is “true” (even if I cannot directly verify its truth for myself).

The receptivity proper to love makes possible the transmission of tradition from one generation to the next. And when that spirit is present, tradition is never felt like a dead weight on the present. Only a tradition that has lost this spirit can become a deadening force.

Photograph of the Vatican Library by Br Lawrence Lew OP, used with permission.

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The Golden Circle

In chapter 4 of my book I talk about a rectangle inscribed within a circle. Naturally there are an indefinite number of such figures. Take the diagram on the right, kindly produced by Michael Schneider. Look at the outermost circle, and the largest rectangle that lies inside it, touching its circumference at A, B and C. You could move points A and B nearer to the left-hand end of the horizontal diameter of the large circle, or else push them further apart towards the two ends of the vertical diameter, producing an ever-thinner oblong shape. Halfway between these  extremes the rectangle would become a square. But the shape Michael has drawn is a Golden Rectangle, so we can call the whole figure a Golden Circle ("Golden" because of the presence of the Rectangle). The G.R. is famous for being the "most beautiful" of rectangles, possessing the peculiar property that its sides are in the ratio of 1 to Phi (1.618...), so that if you cut off a square portion what remains is a smaller Golden Rectangle - and so forth, forming a logarithmic spiral, as in the following image.

When I wrote the book I was intending to use the Golden Circle as a way of exploring the relationship between Pi and Phi, but I never got around to it. My reason for being intrigued is simple. What we learn from Simone Weil - and what she learned from the Greeks - is that geometry is full of theological meaning. We have forgotten how to make those connections. It is not that we can prove the Trinity or the Incarnation with diagrams, but that the mathematical world is full of analogies that echo theological and spiritual truth. You might even say that mathematical necessities are a portrait of divine freedom, since in God freedom and necessity coincide. The beauties of geometry and arithmetic are a world of metaphors and help to raise our minds towards the contemplation of divine truth. My book only touches on this, but a much fuller and richer account is given by Vance G. Morgan of Providence College in his book Weaving the World: Simone Weil on Science, Mathematics and Love, reviewed here.

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Analogy

The use of analogy is fundamental for human thought and language, and in particular for theology. Derived from the Greek analogia "proportion" (ana- "upon, according to" + logos "meaning" or "word"), it refers to the way we compare one thing with another on the basis of some likeness or similarity. It is more complicated than a simile, which happens when I straightforwardly compare one thing to another ("God is like a light"). It is also more complicated than a metaphor, which is when in poetic language I simply assume the similarity in the way I describe something ("God is a light for my eyes and a path for my feet").

An analogy is built out of similes and metaphors - it extends them not just to things but to relationships between things. If a simile is like a ratio (A : B), an analogy is a ratio of ratios (A:B : C:D, or "the relationship of A to B is like the relationship of C to D"). So to form an analogy we might say, for example, "Clay is to the potter as the world is to God". But "analogy" is also used more generally to cover all the ways we compare things that are similar to each other in some respect but not others. Everything we say about God relies on metaphor and analogy, because the words we use necessarily come from the things we can see and touch.*

So God-talk has to be taken with a pinch of salt. When we talk about God we mustn't take ourselves too literally. There is an analogy here with the problem of "graven images", or the temptation to mistake the image for what it represents. But what if God talks about God? In Jesus, we believe, God spoke as a man. Just as the Incarnation gave a justification for icons, so it gave a justification for saying certain things about God and believing them to be true. Philosophy and mysticism were possible before Christ - but now there is also theology. The things in the world were always "like" God in certain ways, not just as signs of his presence and activity but as expressions of his nature, or natural symbols of him. But now they can also be sacraments and sacramentals.

All of this perhaps serves as background to the use in my book of geometrical and mathematical "analogies" to the Trinity. Thomas Aquinas was perfectly clear on the fact that the Trinity cannot be proved by anything in nature - nevertheless, once we know by revelation that God is triune, we can see traces or impressions of the Trinity everywhere. So, for example, all things (1) subsist, (2) have a definite form, and (3) are ordered to an end (echoing Father, Son and Spirit). Following Simone Weil, I wanted to show that fundamental numbers and shapes also "echo" the Trinity in this way. There is no attempted proof here, just an intellectual intuition or an aid to contemplation, but the point is that knowledge of the Trinity enables us to appreciate the beauty of creation by seeing in its ordered harmony a meaning that we could not know before. Mathematics, in its own way (and you won't hear this said too often!), is a picture of love.

* There is much talk in theology about the "analogy of being", or attempts to compare the existence of God and that of the world. For an interesting discussion of that topic go here.

The photograph is by Tom Bree and is used by kind permission.

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Exploring patterns

If you enjoy geometrical patterns or colouring or even if you are contructing a tiling system for your kitchen or bathroom, you might want to look at this site from Altair Design. Teachers and parents might like to look too, to see some activities to get kids painlessly interested in geometry. Explore the site - it has a huge variety of patterns that you can colour online, a competition you can enter, and a gallery of the best examples done by other people. The middle button at the top gives you some history and context for the site.

I also recently stumbled on some nice tiling patterns based on Escher's drawings in the Alhambra (one of which is shown in the picture). If you go to the page via the link, click on the individual patterns and you'll open up some spectacular PDFs.

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