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Baker Publishing Group - Stratford Caldecott

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85 pages

English

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Based in the riches of Christian worship and tradition, this brief, eloquently written introduction to Christian thinking and worldview helps readers put back together again faith and reason, truth and beauty, and the fragmented academic disciplines. By reclaiming the classic liberal arts and viewing disciplines such as science and mathematics through a poetic lens, the author explains that unity is present within diversity. Now repackaged with a new foreword by Ken Myers, this book will continue to benefit parents, homeschoolers, lifelong learners, Christian students, and readers interested in the history of ideas.

Sujets

Philosophie et théologie

Christian theology

Education

Informations

Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	16 mai 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781493410606
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0576€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2009 by Stratford Caldecott
Published by Brazos Press
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.brazospress.com
Repackaged edition published 2017
Ebook edition created 2017
Ebook corrections 09.28.2018
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-1060-6
Scripture is taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Moon photograph (p. 115 ) used with permission of Jim Malda, Muskegon, Michigan.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
Foreword by Ken Myers
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Tradition of the Four Ways
The Great Tradition
Adapting the Medieval Model
Beauty for Truth’s Sake
Beauty on the Cross
2. Educating the Poetic Imagination
“A Beauty Which Defies Time”
Rediscovering Poetic Knowledge
The Symbolic Cosmos
A Key to the Ancient Mysteries
3. The Lost Wisdom of the World
Sacred Number
Excursus: The Five Platonic Solids
Beyond Pythagoras
Irrational Beauty
Phi and the Natural Numbers
Symmetry
4. The Golden Circle
A Journey into God
Theology of the Trinity
In Search of the Logos
Geometry as Prophecy
The Golden Circle
5. “Quiring to the Young-Eyed Cherubims”
Good Vibrations
Humane Architecture
At Home in the Cosmos
Secrets of the Sky
The End of the Road
6. The Liturgical Consummation of Cosmology
The Construction of Modernity
A Sense of the Sacred
Liturgy as Remembering to Give
An Education in Beauty
The Holy City
Conclusion: Beyond Faith and Reason
Bibliography
Index
Back Cover
Epigraph
The best ideal is the true
And other truth is none.
All glory be ascribèd to
The holy Three in One.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Summa
Foreword
Perhaps we are lacking the recognition that our response to the whole [world] should not most deeply be that of doing, nor even that of terror and anguish, but that of wondering or marvelling at what is, being amazed or astonished by it, or perhaps best, in a discarded English usage, admiring it; and that such a stance . . . is the only source from which purposes may be manifest to us for our necessary calculating.
George Parkin Grant 1
S ome teachers are bound to be disappointed by this book. If they are in the market for an outline of techniques to elevate test scores or lengthen attention spans or any other quantifiable goal, their response may well be like that of the rich young ruler, who went away sorrowful. Stratford Caldecott’s wise counsel in Beauty for Truth’s Sake involves, as did our Lord’s, a commitment to renunciation—in this case surrendering assumptions about the ends of education that dominate modern culture.
Modern education tends to endorse Francis Bacon’s equation of knowledge with power, and so the Liberal Arts are out of fashion. But while the Servile Arts (which advance technological progress) may be equipped by such a narrow view of knowledge, the power they enable can be properly directed and governed only by the existential orientation encouraged by the Liberal Arts. Within those disciplines, education conveys an understanding of the significance of freedom, which is necessary for the wise exercise of power. Such an education is re-enchanted because it acknowledges the beautiful, Logos-centered order that permeates all of creation.
Early in this book, Caldecott corrects the common mistake of structuring classical education only around the trivium —grammar, logic, and rhetoric—while neglecting the number-based disciplines of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Perhaps in an effort to reconnect education to the truth, many well-intentioned educators have stressed the language-based trio at the expense of the quadrivium . After all, a commitment to the truth requires making and evaluating truth claims, for which the lost tools of the trivium are essential.
Marion Montgomery (echoing Thomas Aquinas) summarizes the task of education as “the preparing of the mind for the presence of our common inheritance, the accumulated and accumulating knowledge of the truth of things.” 2 Twenty-first-century readers can be forgiven for missing the cosmological depth assumed by Montgomery. For “the truth of things” is more than the truth about things. Education for truth’s sake must do more than preserve a collection of propositions, however lovely they may be. Luigi Giussani clarifies what is at stake by insisting that “to educate means to help the human soul enter into the totality of the real.” 3
The preparing of the mind is much more than training analytic reason. It requires, as Caldecott makes delightfully clear, the nourishing of the imagination, the orienting of the heart so that we intuit the world aright even before we begin to shape our theories. Education enables (in Josef Pieper’s words) “the capacity of simplex intuitus , of that simple vision to which truth offers itself like a landscape to the eye.” 4 And such a capacity is more likely, Caldecott argues, when teachers attend to the proportionate and harmonious aspects of creation explored in the four ways first recognized by the Pythagoreans. Perhaps surprisingly, wonder is awakened and sustained not just through enchanting stories but by the perception of the numberliness of the world we know through the senses.
Modern culture has disenchanted the world by disenchanting numbers. For us, numbers are about quantity and control, not quality and contemplation. After Bacon, knowledge of numbers is a key to manipulation, not meditation. Numbers are only meaningful (like all raw materials that comprise the natural world) when we can do something with them. When we read of twelve tribes and twelve apostles and twelve gates and twelve angels, we typically perceive something spreadsheet-able. By contrast, in one of Caldecott’s most radical claims, he insists, “It is not simply that numbers can be used as symbols. Numbers have meaning—they are symbols. The symbolism is not always merely projected onto them by us; much of it is inherent in their nature” (p. 75). Numbers convey to well-ordered imaginations something of (in Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s metaphor) the inner design of the fabric of creation. The fact that the words “God said” appear ten times in the account of creation and that there are ten “words” in the Decalogue is not a random coincidence.
The beautiful meaningfulness of a numberly world is most evident in the perception of harmony, whether in music, architecture, or physics. Called into being by a three-personed God, creation’s essential relationality is often evident in complex patterns that can be described mathematically. Sadly, as Caldecott laments, “our present education tends to eliminate the contemplative or qualitative dimension of mathematics altogether” (p. 55). The sense of transcendence that many (including mathematicians and musicians) experience when encountering beauty is often explained away by materialists as an illusion. Caldecott offers an explanation rooted in Christology. Since the Logos is love, and since all things are created through him and for him and are held together in him, we should expect the logic, the rationality, the intelligibility of the world to usher in the delight that beauty bestows.
One of the most sobering claims Caldecott makes in this book comes in his concluding chapter, when he observes that “we are living in an era shaped by philosophical battles that most of us are unaware ever took place” (p. 123). Having spent most of my adult life trying to understand the genealogy of contemporary confusions, I wish I had known more about those battles when I was much younger. Many of our cultural institutions (and the shape they give to our lives) have been shaped by the outcome of those battles, formed by sympathies with the winning if mistaken side. And so many countercultural works of re-enchantment are now necessary. But what a marvelous necessity and what a marvelous and hopeful companion Stratford Caldecott can be for us in the way ahead.
Ken Myers, producer and host, Mars Hill Audio Journal

1 . George Parkin Grant, Technology and Empire (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1991), 35.

2 . Marion Montgomery, Liberal Arts and Community: The Feeding of the Larger Body (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 80.

3 . Luigi Giussani, The Risk of Education: Discovering Our Ultimate Destiny , trans. Rosanna Frongia (New York: Crossroad, 2001), 105.

4 . Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (New York: New American Library, 1952), 26.
Acknowledgments
The origins of this book lie partly in a series of discussions and seminars on education conducted at Arkwood in New Hampshire some years ago by David L. Schindler, with Glenn W. Olsen. I want to thank everyone who participated in those groups. Some parts of this book are based on essays I have written elsewhere, but all have been extensively revised or adapted from their original sources. In chapter 3, the sequence on Sacred Number is adapted with permission from David Clayton’s article, “Art of the Spheres” in Second Spring 8. In chapter 5, a version of the section on “Humane Architecture” also appeared in Second Spring 8 (2007). Parts of chapter 6 were given as a paper to a Washington Arts Group conference in May 2007, “Jumping Out of the Self-Referential Box.” I am grateful to David Clayton for his encouragement