Beauty for Truth's Sake

On the Re-enchantment of Education

Caldecott, Stratford

• Publisher: Brazos Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781493410606
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Education

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.

1
The Tradition of the Four Ways

[Socrates:] I am amused, I said, at your fear of the world, which makes you guard against the appearance of insisting upon useless studies; and I quite admit the difficulty of believing that in every man there is an eye of the soul which, when by other pursuits lost and dimmed, is by these purified and re-illumined; and is more precious by far than ten thousand bodily eyes, for by it alone is truth seen.

Plato, The Republic, Book 71

Teachers often tell us that modern students don’t know how to think. Setting aside the fact that this is a perennial complaint, made by teachers about their students in every age, it may be true that the conditions of modern life militate against independent thought in particular ways. Silence is rare, entertainment is all-pervasive, the pressure to consume-and-discard is almost irresistible. No one has put it better than G. K. Chesterton did in 1930: “People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves.”2 The situation has grown worse in every decade since.

No wonder students come to a college education expecting nothing more than a set of paper qualifications that will enable them to earn a decent salary. The idea that they might be there to grow as human beings, to be inducted into an ancient culture, to become somehow more than they are already, is alien to them. They expect instant answers, but they have no deep questions. The great questions have not yet been woken in them. The process of education requires us to become open, receptive, curious, and humble in the face of what we do not know. The world is a fabric woven of mysteries, and a mystery is a provocation to our humanity that cannot be dissolved by googling a few more bits of information.

The Great Tradition

The Liberal Arts tradition stands at the origin of the idea of university education in the West. The Liberal Arts (from liber meaning free) were intended to train man3 in the use of his freedom, and to prepare the student for the higher study of philosophy and theology, through which one may become truly free, fully human.4 (They were contrasted with the so-called “Servile Arts,” which is not a term of contempt but covers branches of knowledge oriented toward practical ends or economic purposes, such as fabric-making, metalworking and architecture, commerce and agriculture, hunting, navigation, medicine, and entertainment.) In other words, philosophy and theology were not—as they have become—“subjects” defined by a certain content, on the same level as everything else, accessible to anyone. We had to become capable of them, and the Liberal Arts were our preparation. In the modern university this preparation is usually missing, and so are the higher studies themselves. Only the names are left.

University education is usually traced back to the Greek philosopher Socrates and his (moral) victory over his state executioners. In his own life he demonstrated his own teaching, summarized in the Phaedo, that philosophy is a preparation for dying; or rather, for dying well. Of course, Socrates, who wrote nothing down except in the immortal souls of his disciples, would have been unknown to later generations except for the work of one of those disciples, Plato. Through Plato’s Academy from 387 BC and Aristotle’s Lyceum from 335 until their closure possibly in AD 529, and the writings and followers of both men, the principles instilled by Socrates were transmitted and applied by later educators.5

What were those principles? In essence, that it is the nature and calling of the human being to know: to know truth, being, wisdom, goodness, virtue—the forms, or the highest causes. It is in knowledge that we transcend our limitations (including the limitations of mortality) and become identified with the truth that is our highest and deepest ground, beyond all that the senses can offer. But knowledge can only be attained through the systematic ordering of the soul or personality in pursuit of integrity; that is, the discipline of thought (by logic) and will (by virtue).

In Books 6 and 7 of his dialogue The Republic, Plato spends some time discussing the levels of being and the levels of knowledge, and the ascent of the mind through education. There are four levels of knowledge, the highest of which he calls reason (nous), followed by understanding, opinion, and the “perception of shadows” or mere sensory awareness. The power of learning exists in the soul, but “the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming to that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good.”6

He then explores how the soul is to be moved as a “whole,” in order to become acquainted with the highest reality, the “good.” The key disciplines he proposes are arithmetic, plane and solid geometry, astronomy, and the study of harmony. In each case he distinguishes a lower and a higher use of the discipline, the lower being its employment for practical and worldly purposes and the higher for the purpose of finding “the beautiful and the good”—seeing through the patterns of the numbers or the stars to the eternal realities they can reveal to the inner eye of the mind. And when these different studies are pursued in this way, they converge and commingle:

Now, when all these studies reach the point of intercommunion and connection with one another, and come to be considered in their natural affinities, then, I think, but not till then, will the pursuit of them have a value for our objects; otherwise there is no profit in them.7

It is then that they are severally taken up into what Plato calls the “hymn of dialectic,” or philosophy, attaining “a conception of the essence of each thing” and a vision of the eternal light.

The “circle of learning” (from which we get our word encyclopedia) was systematized into nine fields of study by the Roman Marcus Varro in the first century after Christ, and refined by Augustine, Boethius,8 and Cassiodorus into a list of seven divided into two groups. The first group, the trivium (three ways), consisted of:

• grammar
• rhetoric
• dialectic

These three artes sermocinales (“language studies”), taught through the study of literature, would enable a student to express himself, to communicate with others, and to argue effectively for a point of view. The second group comprised the quadrivium (or the four ways) of sacred sciences known as the artes reales, or physicae. These were the disciplines by which Plato believed the inner vision of the soul could be awakened:

• arithmetic
• geometry
• astronomy
• music

In fact they went back further than Plato, for it was the Pythagoreans who had originally grouped them together.9

Dorothy Sayers, in a well-known essay “The Lost Tools of Learning,” provides an eloquent argument for the importance of reviving the trivium for young people today. Without a basic training in how to think, argue, and communicate, children are not ready for the study of “subjects” or equipped for the real world. We flood their environment with words, but they “do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being masters of them in their intellects.”10 But Sayers’s essay neglects the quadrivium, almost as though liberal education were a matter of the trivium alone. She implies that the former amounted to little more than a collection of topics, and reduces mathematics entirely to a branch of logic (for her it is “neither more nor less than the rule of the syllogism in its particular application to number and measurement”).11

On the contrary, the quadrivium is essential to a liberal education in the traditional sense. And since we can normally only advance from sense-perception to intellectual intuition by way of intellectual argumentation, the quadrivium necessarily involved the study of number and its relationship to physical space or time, preparatory to the study of philosophy (in the higher sense of that word) and theology: arithmetic being pure number, geometry number in space, music number in time, and astronomy number in both space and time.12

Once generally accepted, the list of seven literate and numerate arts created a framework within which civilized thought and behavior could be transmitted down the generations. Classical educational ideals and literacy were preserved through the dark ages after the fall of Roman civilization within oases provided by the Benedictine and other monasteries. In the early ninth century, the Emperor Charlemagne, having reunited much of Western Europe by military conquest, tried to instill in his courtiers a love of learning with the help of monks he co-opted for the purpose (the foremost being Alcuin of York, known as the “schoolmaster of Europe”). In England, King Alfred did something similar later in the same century.

By the twelfth century, Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1141) was able to write in his Didascalicon:

Out of all the sciences . . . the ancients, in their studies, especially selected seven to be mastered by those who were to be educated. These seven they considered so to excel all the rest in usefulness that anyone who had been thoroughly schooled in them might afterward come to knowledge of the others by his own inquiry and effort rather than by listening to a teacher. For these, one might say, constitute the best instruments, the best rudiments, by which the way is prepared for the mind’s complete knowledge of philosophic truth. Therefore they are called by the name trivium and quadrivium, because by them, as by ce...