Beauty for Truth's Sake

by Stratford Caldecott

  has its own kind of order, that exhibited in exceptionless natural laws. But it is no longer a hierarchy of being, and it doesn’t obviously point to eternity as the locus of its principle of cohesion. The universe flows on in secular time. Above all, its principles of order are not related to human meaning, at any rate not immediately or evidently.3

  There is, he points out, no bar to “rethinking Biblical religion within the universe” as distinct from the cosmos. For Aristotle and other Greek thinkers, the cosmos was necessarily limited and bounded. This aspect of what he calls the “cosmic imaginary” has been superseded even by religious believers, such as Origen, Nicholas of Cusa, Pascal, and others. There may be other features of the ancient view that can be discarded without losing what is of value.

  In this book I have been advocating a return from universe to “cosmos,” but not uncritically or without the revision of many features of the ancient view. With this in mind, it is worth noting Taylor’s point that the transformation from cosmos to universe is not simply due to “the progress of science,” as though empirical science had disproved the hierarchy of being and we had simply moved on, leaving a few pockets of resistance to be mopped up later. The change from sacred cosmos to secular universe was due mainly to ideology and the pressure of social change. Science itself has not disproved God, and religion will never disappear, though it may take new forms.

  Taylor’s account helps us to understand how the philosophical and theological shift brought about by nominalism and voluntarism could be part of a global transformation that is much more than intellectual, involving many social, psychological, political, economic, and spiritual factors. At the end of it all he leaves us in a series of dilemmas, because he explicitly does not want simply to remove us from the “immanent frame” of modernity—which he describes as a natural or this-worldly order understood in its own terms without reference to the supernatural. On the one hand, he is very far from denying the supernatural as essential “for purposes of ultimate explanation, or spiritual transformation, or final sense-making.”4 On the other, he thinks we cannot “fix the contemporary situation” by applying a philosophical and theological analysis, because “history cannot be separated from the situation it has brought about.”5 Nor can we simply escape our dilemmas by flipping back to an earlier Golden Age. What we need to overcome is the very dualism for which “modernity” and “Christendom” are the stark alternatives. His sympathies lie with hard-to-categorize figures such as Charles Péguy and Gerard Manley Hopkins, for whom

  creative renewal was only possible in action which by its very nature had to have a certain temporal depth. This kind of action had to draw on the forms which had been shaped in the deeper past, but not by a simple mechanical reproduction, as with “habit,” rather by a creative re-application of the spirit of the tradition.6

  Taylor’s book puts the challenge very neatly. While we cannot step outside history—and Christianity confirms that view, by redeeming history!—history’s forward movements, its great creative leaps, often involve retrievals of insights and ideas from the past (ressourcement). What we now need to retrieve is the hierarchy of levels of reality, a sense of the “analogy of being,” which allows for an order of divine wisdom (an “ontic Logos,” as Taylor puts it) shaping creation. While we cannot anymore accept the details of medieval cosmology, this fundamental intuition of the Logos has never been disproved. In fact, as we have seen, the most recent developments in science could be said to confirm it.

  Liberate Your Freedom

  Nevertheless, talking in this way is likely to arouse fear for the intellectual gains won in the Enlightenment. If reason is to be “put in its place,” as merely a mode of participation in the divine Logos, will this not put theology once more in a position of overconfident superiority? Under the conditions set by secular modernity, it appears that the legitimate autonomy of the intellectual disciplines, especially the human and natural sciences, must inevitably be threatened by any controlling influence from the side of faith—so that, in order to defend academic and intellectual freedom, the Church must not be allowed to influence academic appointments or the curriculum, for example. But the assumptions that underlie this opposition are false.7 As we have seen, the Liberal Arts were intended to conduce to freedom of mind, and they were developed and nourished by the Catholic Church. But the post-nominalist world has a very strange and dangerous conception of freedom, and this conception distorts the way we think.

  The best way to put this might be that the Christian conception of freedom is larger and fuller than the modern conception, for it includes both vertical and horizontal dimensions. The horizontal dimension encompasses the world we see directly, and the vertical allows for degrees of being and value, invisible realms, formal causality, and so on. A popular misconception has it that medieval man thought the world was flat, and modern science gave us a round world floating in an infinite space. But the truth is almost the opposite of this. Medieval man inhabited a three-dimensional cosmos which has now been largely replaced by a flat universe, with no ontological depth. It is not a question of size, or even of infinite spaces. An infinite field is still essentially flat. In pure modernity there can be no up or down, no getting closer to hell or heaven, and there are no sacred places and times which participate in the divine. Of course, there are parts of the world that we like better than others, and many that we can enjoy intensely while life lasts, or else places where we fear to go, but these all lie within the horizontal plane of the world, defined as that which our senses reveal and explore.

  In the traditional “three-dimensional” world, the self was encouraged to collect itself together in a point, in order to attach itself to a vertical axis, a spiritual “path.” The way heavenward always involved the integration of the self by a variety of means, the chief of which was continual prayer or remembrance of God. Conversely, the way to “hell,” or eternal frustration, was through the integration of the self around a rejection of prayer, or a hatred of it. Modernity, on the other hand, rejects the existence of the vertical altogether, or the very possibility of thinking in terms of up and down. This leads to a world in which the self is fragmented and dissipated. We consume more and more to become less and less; we spread ourselves, as Bilbo said to Gandalf, like butter over too much bread. This is a world of pure consumerism.

  In a flatter universe, freedom had to be reconceived as entirely a matter of movement within the horizontal plane. I am assumed to be “freer” the more places I can go to, the more things I can choose on the supermarket shelf, the more people I can have relationships with. And that is why the Church claims today to be in the business of liberating human freedom, by making known the beauty of truth in its fullness.8 For she is making known a whole other dimension of human freedom, the “vertical,” and the power of Christ to enable us to ascend in that dimension (with our bodies, as Christ himself did), closer to God through virtue, and eventually into the eternal life of God itself. It takes a power from beyond ourselves (i.e., the grace of God) to liberate our will to that extent, since without that help “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Rom. 7:15). The grace stemming from the sacrifice of Christ frees us to follow him, if we choose to do so.

  The Two Wings

  Recent Catholic debates about the crisis of belief have come to focus on the relationship of “faith and reason.” The separation of the two affects everything: science, economics, art, politics, and education. It lay behind 9/11 and spawned the War on Terror. Debates about contraception and gay marriage are conditioned by it. If faith and reason are indeed incompatible, if they are mutually exclusive, then we are forced to choose between them. Once we have chosen, the energies of human nature will be channeled by our choice and we will shape the world accordingly. Either way, it will be a war for supreme power over the world: in our own name, or in God’s.

  Freedom and knowledge go together. In order to be free, we must know. But religious believers know things both b
y reason and by faith. These two remain distinct, and it is not a choice between one and the other (as it would be if faith were, as its critics allege, simply believing something without evidence and clinging to it no matter what). Their relationship is one of reciprocal illumination. Faith needs reason to illuminate and unfold its own content; reason needs faith to teach it things it cannot know by its own powers, as well as things it may have forgotten. In his 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio Pope John Paul famously likens them to the two wings of a single bird.9

  In speaking of “reason,” however, as Pope Benedict XVI said in his Regensburg Lecture of 2006, we must “overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable.” We are helped in overcoming this limitation by a distinction many ancient authors made between discursive and contemplative intelligence, or between a lower and a higher kind of reason—reason at the level of soul (ratio or dianoia) and reason at the level of spirit (intellectus or nous).

  The medievals distinguished between the intellect as ratio and the intellect as intellectus. Ratio is the power of discursive thought, or searching and re-searching, abstracting, refining, and concluding [cf. Latin dis-currere, “to run to and fro”], whereas intellectus refers to the ability of “simply looking” (simplex intuitus), to which the truth presents itself as a landscape presents itself to the eye. The spiritual knowing power of the human mind, as the ancients understood it, is really two things in one: ratio and intellectus: all knowing involved both. The path of discursive reasoning is accompanied and penetrated by the intellectus’ untiring vision, which is not active but passive, or better, receptive—a receptively operating power of the intellect.10

  This distinction may be correlated with St. Paul’s division of the human person into body, soul, and spirit (soma/psyche/pneuma) in 1 Thessalonians 5:23, and the more ancient division within the human soul between nefesh, ruah, and neshamah (the animal, mental, and spiritual aspect of the soul, according to Jean Borella’s interpretation).11 The Carmelite mystics from St. Teresa of Avila to St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (the martyr-philosopher otherwise known as Edith Stein) have also explored this “tripartite” anthropology,12 and St. Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis in Deum provides us with a model of the fully developed, three-level human person based on St. Francis’s vision of the six-winged seraph.13 It seems to me that we need such a distinction here if we are truly to make sense of the Pope’s argument. In other words, a third dimension has to be introduced into cognition itself, otherwise faith will appear entirely extrinsic to reason. This goes right to the heart of our concern in this book. How do we overcome the dualism of faith and reason? How do we prepare ourselves for flight?

  The divorce of faith from reason led to the subordination either of faith to reason (in modernism, positivism, etc.) or of reason to faith (in the various forms of fideism and extreme biblical fundamentalism). But the seeds of the divorce lay in its reduction of reason to discursive thinking alone. Cognition has been afflicted by the same forces that afflict our freedom, and so in order to bring reason and faith together again we must understand both differently, situating them in a richer, deeper, three-dimensional world. We must understand that faith is not blind, but is a light that enables us to see even the natural world more clearly. And we must understand that reason is naturally open to God and in need of God. If we close it off to the transcendent, we do violence to its nature.

  Faith is not opposed to reason, but it does function as a constant goad, a challenge, a provocation to reason. Faith claims to stand beyond reason, to speak from the place that reason seeks. But it does not claim to understand what it knows, and it should not usurp the role of reason in that sense, any more than it should contradict it. The resolution lies not in faith, nor yet in reason, but in love. We are perennially tempted to reduce Christianity to something less than itself: either to power (will, faith, law) or to philosophy (knowledge, reason, wisdom). Nominalists tend to do the former. Realists tend to do the latter. But the solution to this supreme problem in binary logic is through a third and higher thing: love, in which both will and knowledge are reconciled and held in balance—or rather, in which both are transcended. God is love, in which both will and knowledge are comprised.

  Whatever your intellectual quarry, if you pursue it to its ultimate lair, you will find the mark of love in the very nature of things. What is magnetism, asks the Victorian poet Coventry Patmore in The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, “but the echo of the senseless rock to the very voice of far-off Love, and the effect of the kiss of God transmitted through the hierarchies of heaven and earth to the lips of the least of beings?”

  Faith orients reason toward the transcendent, so that reason remains open to a light from above. “The intellect must seek that which it loves: the more it loves, the more it desires to know.”14 But unless we develop some sense of what lies above faith and reason, as well as what lies below, the art of flight will elude us. A disenchanted world is one viewed through the eyes of reason when reason is looking downward. To use the Pope’s metaphor, one wing is drooping, no longer reaching for the sky. Even if the wing of faith flaps frantically on the other side, the person will remain earthbound. The things it sees will become opaque and dark, no longer radiant, because they will no longer seem to possess an interior, or any intrinsic relationship to the ideas and the wisdom and the love of God. This is the world of darkness and dust that many of us inhabit. But it is as easy and as difficult as it has always been to raise our heads to the sky. The angels are closer than we think.

  And the way is open. The intellect seeks truth, and it seeks beauty for truth’s sake, but the substance of truth is love.

  1. MacIntyre 1990, 227. I am quoting him rather out of context. His actual argument is that incommensurable conceptions of rationality in the modern university continually frustrate its inherited Enlightenment aspiration to universal, unified knowledge. The way forward is to find a way to permit rival traditions to challenge each other within the university (“constrained disagreement”), without placing one in a superior position under the false guise of “neutrality”—which of course is what normally happens in our secular age.

  2. Taylor 2007, 60.

  3. Ibid. In vol. 5 of The Glory of the Lord, Hans Urs von Balthasar tells a similar story: “During the Nominalist period the universe lost its theophanic radiance—the devout no longer encounter God outside but only within themselves. At the same time, the universe loses its hierarchic gradation and collapses into ‘matter’ which, itself without essence, becomes that which is merely mathematically calculable and which is present to be exploited by man” (452).

  4. Taylor 2007, 594.

  5. Ibid., 776.

  6. Ibid., 747.

  7. For an extended analysis of why they are false, see again Schindler 1996, in the chapter “On Meaning and the Death of God in the Academy.”

  8. For example, “Although non-Christians can be saved through the grace which God bestows in ‘ways known to him,’ the Church cannot fail to recognize that such persons are lacking a tremendous benefit in this world: to know the true face of God and the friendship of Jesus Christ, God-with-us. Indeed ‘there is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ. There is nothing more beautiful than to know him and to speak to others of our friendship with him.’ The revelation of the fundamental truths about God, about the human person and the world, is a great good for every human person, while living in darkness without the truths about ultimate questions is an evil and is often at the root of suffering and slavery which can at times be grievous” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 2007, # 7).

  9. “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth” (John Paul II 1998, prolog). Cf. The Two Wings of Catholic Thought (Foster and Koterski 2003).

  10. Pieper 1998, 11–12.

  11. Borella 2001 104–9.

  12. Henri de Lubac, SJ, advocates an anthropology bas
ed on the ternary body-soul-spirit rather than a dualism of body and soul in his article “Tripartite Anthropology” (see Bibliography). Edith Stein’s contribution may be found in her Finite and Eternal Being, 459–64.

  13. Here there are three pairs of wings, not just two: sensation and imagination forming the lower pair, faith and reason the middle, and what he terms “intelligence” and “synderesis” the higher. Intelligence and synderesis are the faculties that enable us to contemplate first Being (the One) and then the Good (God revealed as three Persons). They represent the third “level” of the human person, the spirit, first in its natural perfection and second as imbued with supernatural grace. But even the natural perfection of intellect cannot be attained except by virtue of supernatural faith, through contemplative ascent using the middle pair of wings (as John Paul II indicated).

  14. John Paul II 1998, # 42.

  Bibliography

  Al’Arabi, Ibn. 1980. Ibn Al’Arabi: The Bezels of Wisdom. Trans. R. W. J. Austin. New York: Paulist Press.

  Alexander, Christopher. 2004. The Phenomenon of Life. Book 1 of The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe. Berkeley: Center for Environmental Structure. Available from www.patternlanguage.com.