Advent 2015
Eloquentia The Jour nal of the Chavagnes Studium
Ferdi McDermott: Classical education and the state
Dr Thomas Conlon Mathematics: Our Debt to Aristotle
Professor Anthony O'Hear: Ruskin on Beauty
Peter Milward SJ: A Catholic Hamlet?
Professor John Haldane: Godliness and Good Learning
contents:Advent 2015
vol. 1, no. 1
Praefatio
3
Classical education and the state
4
The new Chavagnes BA
7
Ruskin on Beauty and Truth
8
A Catholic Hamlet
Classical education as the key to freedom, and how totalitarian states just don't like it ...
17
Godliness and Good Learning
20
Mathematics : our debt to Aristotle
22
Call for Papers: 2015 Conference
24
Our Lady of Way
A Catholic Hamlet?
ELOQUENTIA Eloquentia is the journal of the Chavagnes Studium, a Centre for study of the Liberal Arts in the Catholic tradition, based at Chavagnes International College. Published three times per year by Chavagnes Studium, 96 rue du Calvaire, 85250 Chavagnes en Paillers, France. Copyright 2015, Chavagnes Studium.
Chavagnes Studium: Qui sommes nous? Le Studium de Chavagnes est un centre d?études des Arts Libéraux, partie intégrante du Collège International, situé à Chavagnes en Paillers, en Vendée, en l?ancien petit séminaire fondé par le Vénérable Louis Marie Baudouin en 1802.
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The Lost Amazing Crown: Ruskin on Beauty
Déjà un collège/ lycée anglophone depuis 2002, le Collège International projette d?ouvrir à la rentrée de septembre 2016, un cursus menant à l?octroi du diplôme de Bachelor des Arts Libéraux. Inspiré par la tradition du Trivium et du Quadrivium, le programme de Chavagnes livre une formation qui se veut large et variée et qui s?inscrit dans le v? u exprimé par St Jean Paul II et aussi par Benoît XVI de renouer le dialogue entre foi et raison. Les matières étudiées sont: la littérature, l?histoire, la philosophie, la théologie, la langue et la littérature françaises, le latin, les mathématiques et la science. Cette formation, dispensée en anglais, et sur deux années (8 trimestres de 10 semaines) est basée sur des offres similaires aux Etats Unis et au Canada et dispensée par des enseignants tirés des meilleures universités anglo-saxonnes. Chavagnes Studium est une association de la loi de 1901, qui sera en conformité avec le Code de L?Education Article L731.
Forgotten Flower
Pour plus d?infos, veuillez contacter: studium@chavagnes.org
John Haldane: The future of the university
Winds of change Ferdi McDERMOTT ?A foul wind is blowing thr ough Eur ope. ... The same wind blew thr ough Munich in 1938.? This foul wind, ?could tur n out to be the death r attle of a continent that no longer under stands what pr inciples to believe. ... A continent whose population is decr easing; whose economy cannot compete; that does not invest in r esear ch; that thinks the pr otective social state is an institution fr ee of char ge; that is unwilling to shoulder the r esponsibilities attendant upon its histor y and its r ole; that seeks to be a counter weight without car r ying its own weight; that, when called upon to fight, always r eplies that fighting is the extrema ratio, as if to say that war is a r atio that should never be used.? That sounds like one of the Afr ican Synod father s war ning Eur ocentr ic ecclesiocr ats (at the r ecent Rome meeting) of the Scylla and Char ybdis waiting to destr oy the Chur ch in Eur ope: r elativism and fundamentalist Islam. And yet that quotation is a decade old. It is fr om a lar gely for gotten book by Italian senator Mar cello Per a and Car dinal Joseph Ratzinger : Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, I slam, published in 2005. As the then Car dinal Ratzinger wr ote in the same book, ?The victor y of the post-Eur opean techno-secular wor ld and the univer salization of its lifestyle and thinking have spr ead the impr ession? that Eur ope?s value system, cultur e, and faith ? in other wor ds, the ver y foundations of its identity ? have r eached the end of the r oad, and have indeed alr eady depar ted fr om the scene.? At that time, the futur e Benedict XVI obser ved that in the United States the spir ituality and values of the old Eur ope wer e still vigor ous and fr uitful. And now,
Praefatio ten year s on, the signs of r evival ar e at last beginning to be visible on this side of the Atlantic. Not a moment too soon. Chavagnes is one of the places wher e the gr een shoots of r evival ar e visible. On the site of a 13th centur y Benedictine pr ior y, in a small Fr ench town in the VendĂŠe, Chavagnes Inter national College is the continuation of a junior seminar y founded by the Vener able Louis Mar ie Baudouin in 1802 and gr anted a r oyal char ter by King Char les X in 1826. Dur ing the Fr ench Revolution, the poor peasants took up ar ms to defend their Faith and their king. In the 19th centur y a her oic pr iest, the Vener able Louis Mar ie Baudouin made Chavagnes a centr e of r e-evangelisation, founding r eligious or der s for pr iests and nuns, building a seminar y, and living an exemplar y Chr istian and pr iestly life. In the 21st centur y a gr oup of Catholic laymen and women established an inter national college, r adically faithful to the spir ituality, cultur e and magister ium of the Catholic Chur ch. In the jungle of moder nity, in the wilder ness of destr uctive change, the genius of this place is sur vival and pr opagation. In the spir it of Father Louis Mar ie Baudouin, who built her e his gr eat wor k of education, we str ive to r emain faithful to our tr aditions; to stand when other s fall, to build when other s pull down, to blaze a tr ail of faith and wor k and joy in a wor ld of cynicism and despair . At Chavagnes we ar e going back to the r oots of the civilisation we love: and putting back in a place of honour the study of the good, the beautiful and the tr ue. We hope you will join us! Ferdi McDermott is Principal of the Chavagnes Studium.
Revivial and refreshment Anthony O'HEAR We saw r evivals of classical lear ning in wester n Eur ope in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and even the twentieth centur ies, each differ ent, each br inging its own distinctive feel and timbr e to the pr ocess, which was always seen as a vital r oute to the r efr eshment of our cultur e. The fifteenth and sixteenth centur y r evivals went under the gener al heading of ?Renaissance? and the r e-bir th was specifically of Gr eek. In the Chr istian West, Latin had never been entir ely lost; even in the middle of the dar kest of the dar k ages ther e was the extr aor dinar y spectacle of an English King (Alfr ed) tr anslating Boethius into Anglo-Saxon English, and Vir gil is, of cour se, Dante?s guide thr ough hell and pur gator y. Far fr om tur ning their backs on their gr eat Gr eek and Roman pr edecessor s, our own Eur opean pr edecessor s saw the wor ks of ancient Gr eece and Rome as the spr ing fr om which they needed to r etur n and fr om which they would always find new and unexpected r efr eshment. It is har dly necessar y to under line the extent to which we, in the twenty-fir st centur y, in Br itain anyway, have tur ned our backs on any sense of Renaissance. Latin is not entir ely dead in school, but less than thr ee hundr ed pupils take the final exam in Gr eek fr om all the schools in the countr y. In this context, a ventur e like Chavagnes Studium is wholly to be welcomed. With the handful of other , similar , enter pr ises in Liber al Ar ts in Br itain and elsewher e, also tr ying to r evive the liber al ar ts tr adition in Eur ope, it could just be the star t of a twenty-fir st centur y Renaissance. Professor Anthony O?Hear is the Director of the Royal I nstitute of Philosophy, London, and a member of the Chavagnes Studium I nternational Advisory Board.
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Classical education and why modern governments want to kill it By FERDI McDERMOTT In Ancient Greece, two strands of thinking in education were current in what we know as the Classical Age, from about 500BC: that of Sparta, where education was the business of the State and sought to breed a resilient warrior citizenry, and that of Athens where education depended on the free choices of parents and aimed at producing intellectual maturity. As we shall see, it was the spirit of Athens that has dominated our approach to education until relatively recent history. St Paul, with his obvious familiarity with Greek philosophy and worship (seen as pointing to Christ) and even his positive references to athletics, had shown long before the supposed Platonist hijack of the second century that a continuity was achievable, and that is why he converted so many Greeks. Greek philosophy was by its very nature skeptical, and looking always for a better answer to profound questions. In this culture where intellectual pursuits were already understood as a means to grow in wisdom and virtue, the Christian message found a ready audience. The Catholic Church was, in cultural terms Greek before it was Roman. And our Gospels were written in Greek. Because St Paul already understood that grace perfects nature rather than supplanting it, he knew that he could carefully build a Christian civilisation on a classical Greek one which he clearly saw as a providentially ordered preparation for Christianity. A Christian classical education, such as later led to the creation of the late medieval and renaissance universities was first seen in Alexandria, at the heart of the meeting of East and West, in about 190AD. Here St Clement, very much a disciple both of Jesus and of Socrates, established what could probably be called the first Christian academy, educating boys and men, mainly, but not exclusively, for the priesthood. They studied the Trivium of logic, grammar and rhetoric, followed by the Quadrivium of arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy, leading on to studies in philosophy and theology. We also know that Clement attached great importance to sport and dance.
LESSO NSFRO MHISTO RY These had been central in the Greek education of boys: gymnastics for the body, music for the soul. This truly classical education within a Christian context was expounded in great depth in Clement's work The Pedagogue, a fascinating, if somewhat rambling synthesis and history of education from the viewpoint of Hellenic Christians, and the first real Christian handbook for teachers. It was not, however, a tremendous success; at least not in the intense and thorough form envisaged by Clement. The stress of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, the rise of Islam in large parts of the Empire in the East, the destruction of libraries, the mistrust of classical civilisation by some Christian clerics, general political instability in the vacuum created by the collapse of imperial Rome; all of these things contributed to the classical tradition's being somewhat sidelined for a time. In outposts of the Roman empire, such as in much of Britain, people suddenly abandoned the cities as they had done when Mycenaean civilization collapsed in Greece towards the end of the second millennium BC.
The City of God And yet, before imperial Rome sank another great man arose to ensure that the ideals of a classical and Christian humanism would not be forgotten. Augustine, a Roman of the fourth century, was a professor of classical rhetoric who became a Christian and then Bishop of Hippo in North Africa. In Augustine's day, scholars speculated about whether Virgil had read Isaiah, and this itself is an interesting indicator of how many in the Graeco- Roman world were already looking to the Jews and to their sacred literature with an air of expectancy. We know, however, that Augustine had read Isaiah and Virgil, and in his Confessions, and in the City of God, the two worlds meet completely and a fruitful synthesis is attempted. Now St Augustine, with all the weight of his spell- binding rhetoric and learning, did something akin to what Homer had done at an earlier stage in about the 8th century BC, in preserving and handing over the ancient Mycenaean culture into the hands of the emerging Hellenes. Augustine picked up the torch of Roman learning and in his hands it became one with the new light of Christ. And thus he set a seal on the direction of "the great conversation". Perhaps one may say that it was Christ, acting through him. That is certainly the way Augustine would have understood it. And this new impetus was to last for at least the next thousand years. In his City of God he reassures those who are in a state of panic at
what they see as the collapse of civilisation. But he also shows that the hand of God is guiding human history. God may be punishing the old Rome for her sins but is also giving her a new vocation: the City of God is in spiritual terms, the biblical New Jerusalem, the Church. And the Church will also be the New Rome, washed in the blood of the lamb. And so, in the image of Paul, a Roman citizen, Rome, great persecutor of the Church, thus became God's faithful servant, as we hope she still is today.
1. Greeks see education as leading to wisdom and virtue. 2. Clement of Alexandria attempts a synthesis of Greek learning and Christianity. 3. St Augustine sees the fall of Rome as a punishment for her sins, but the noble aspects of Roman (and Greek) culture become part of the patrimony of a new Rome, the Church of Christ. 4. The collapse of imperial Rome causes political and cultural instability, and yet the Church saves classical heritage from destruction through what, for better or worse, has been called the Dark Ages. 5. In the late middle ages and Renaissance, peace and prosperity facilitate further reflection and research. Christian humanism is born. The cultural achievements of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter- Reformation and the modern age are many, but none of them is as significant as that momentous and humble openness of the Early Church to the weight of human experience and learning that preceded what they saw as God's total self- revelation to man in Christ. This openness was an attitude quite remote from the prophetic traditions of the Old Testament. Perhaps it was precisely the belief in the Incarnation, and the optimistic view of human nature propounded by St Paul that made it possible for Christians to hold fast to so much of the best that has been thought and said in the world (Matthew Arnold?s phrase) and to add to that store.
both sides generally believed that education was for the betterment of the human spirit, not merely to prepare men for war, or trade. True enough, many received more training than they did education, but the distinction between the two was clear, and everywhere, for nearly two millennia, the State had been keeping out of education.
Clement of Alexandria ran the great Catechetical School of Alexandria at the end of the second century AD.
Perhaps more remarkable still was the openness of the whole area around the Mediterranean, subdued by the Roman Empire, to this new chapter of man's history. For despite the persecutions of Domitian, Nero and others, a new idea and a new culture - for the first time in human history - took control of man's destiny not with armies but with argument.
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The tradition under attack
The impact of Rousseau, writing in the eighteenth century is still felt today in pedagogical circles. He promoted (in Emile ou de l?Education) the hugely successful (however erroneous) idea that we have nothing of objective value to teach our children. They will, The Liberal Arts he suggested, teach themselves, given a little encouragement. His Confessions paint a Sister Miriam Joseph CSC, a leading Catholic picture of a young man motivated by a educationalist in 1940s America, explains: ?The profound egotism and self- righteousness often utilitarian or servile arts enable one to be a attributed to religious people, and yet he was in servant - of another person, of the state, of a fact someone who had left religion behind; the corporation, or of a first in a long line of business - and to earn modern `victims' of a living. The liberal arts the seminary system The principle of the liberal arts is [that is, the Trivium who proceed to make that the agent engages in an activity and the Quadrivium], in a living out of contrast, teach us how that perfects him, but which does burning what they to live; they train a once adored. He not produce a product for other person to rise above consigned his own his material people. The teaching of grammar, illegitimate children environment to live an to an orphanage and logic and rhetoric ought to intellectual, a rational, took no interest in constitute, an activity that is - to and therefore a free life their education in gaining truth.? whatsoever.His make an analogy with grammar influence, and that of That is a description of intransitive. A builder builds houses, the other education that no a hairdresser cuts hair, but a philosophical serious western writer thinkers of the siècle or thinker would have schoolboy pursuing the Trivium just des lumières, had an disputed from the time studies, just as a tree grows. important part to of Constantine until play in the thinking the eighteenth century. behind the French But they speak in a Revolution, followed by Communism and very different language to that of most Nazism in the twentieth century. They all educationalists ever since. tended to a view of man that rejected The origins of a different way of thinking about completely the Christian chapter in man's story: education can be traced back to the years for them, man was sufficient unto himself, with before the French Revolution, when a new no need of God or history to help him reach his atheism was beginning to be shaped. full stature.
Later reforms within this Christian tradition can all be seen as efforts, more or less efficacious or reasonable in themselves, to restore the freshness and vigor of Christianity as it was at this time of triumph. The scholastics revived the classics and gave a new impetus to the study of Aristotle and Plato (under the aegis of a now long dead Muslim philosophical school), the excesses of Renaissance neo- paganism were corrected by the Reformers and their excesses, in turn, tempered by the Counter- Reformers. At the beginning of the modern age, then, we see a western Christendom where Christian humanism is the norm of education on both sides of the Reformation divide, so that the Ignatian Paideia of continental Europe and the grammar schools and public schools of England, all train young men in roughly the same disciplines and essentially with the same view of man and his history. More importantly,
Modern totalitarian states introduced state education and limited or eliminated any other educating bodies, such as the Church: Republican France, Prussia, Nazi Germany, Russia and China. Wherever state education has achieved a high level of dominance, the notion, even now, that the state is the best and most natural educator of its citizens goes largely unchallenged.
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Short- circuit back to antiquity ? Hitler idealised the classical world, because he found it refreshingly free of Christianity. And yet the way in which he instrumentalised Greek culture would have horrified the ancients. There had been previous attempts to short- circuit back to Antiquity, by- passing Christianity, but modern attempts have often been especially thorough. Such movements do not so much seek to put man back in touch with an older, purer truth, so much as to deracinate him completely, so as better to control and manipulate him. For many years, the French state, in the tradition of Voltaire, held on to the Classics and to the teaching of chronological history as sacrosanct. In so doing it made a kind of claim to be a continuation of the Roman empire, in competition (and often open hostility) with the Church. But in our times, the study of the Classics and of History might be more likely to lead a young person to Faith, or at least predispose him to conservatism. In modern France, then, the recent abolition of the teaching of Latin and Greek in the state system, the sidelining of History, and the manipulation of its content in order to serve political ideology are all signs that the state is still no great friend of truly liberal education. One educational thinker, Matthew Arnold, wrote that a man out of touch with what has been called ?the great conversation? would be a ?stranger to the human condition?, and it is this state of disorientation that any cunning dictator will want to foist on his followers. Hitler, Stalin and Mao are striking examples, but our modern politicians are still playing the same game. Politics, cut adrift from its moral moorings, becomes a dangerous pirate ship that seeks to run out of the water anything in its way: tradition, morality, and of course the barque of Peter. In this climate of wholesale rejection of the continuum of the classical tradition as it had been mediated by the Church for two thousand years, it is no surprise that all the revolutionary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have promoted the role of the state as educator. And with the benefit of hindsight, we can observe that they all have their similarities with ancient Sparta, described by Hitler as "the first National Socialist state." Now, when I speak of totalitarian regimes, I am speaking of governments who often have a very clear idea of what they want and where they are headed. There is an important difference between revolutionary regimes who are attempting to enact a clear manifesto (Das Kapital, or Mein Kampf, for example) and our modern governments; these simply react to
LESSO NSFRO MHISTO RY events , and having abandoned any definite commitment to a particular code of values of principles are condemned to a kind of blindfolded, uncertain lurching from one problem to the next. And the problems are often of their own making. Historically in the English- speaking world the state has not succeeded in gaining much of a hold on education, even when it has tried. But since the 1960s state involvement has, alas, accelerated. In the UK the abolition of grammar schools in the 1960s was the single most important step in the reduction of "social mobility" between the classes in modern times. It was enacted by a Labour government. seeking to defeat a culture of "elitism". What happened was that elitism was replaced by mediocrity in state schools and a sharper divide created between the poor and the rich (whose private schools kept a traditional curriculum and high standards). Standards have been dropping like a stone ever since, and the educational establishment (still reared on Rousseau's Emile, Dewey and Carl Rogers) has remained dominated by the progressive left for several generations. This means that almost any attempt at reform is doomed, or at least very unstable. A Labour education minister said a few years ago that teachers should be teaching children, not subjects; this just about sums up the Left's attitude to curriculum content. As Archbishop Jean- Louis Bruguès OP (former Secretary of the Congregation for Catholic Education) has pointed out, the educational establishment effectively ditched the "canon" after 1968, for fear of transmitting "bourgeois values" along with Shakespeare and Molière. In the 80s, the UK Conservative government promoted a "back to basics" approach, introduced a national curriculum (ostensibly to raise standards) and outlawed local councils from imposing gay propaganda on children in their schools. But the new exam system introduced at the same time provided the left wing Establishment with the perfect tool for controlling education, and even to a certain extent in private schools. Every election time, spiteful left- wing politicians in the UK and France continue to make veiled threats to private schools. In the United States, the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI), begun a generation ago to raise standards in order to make America a better match for the rising technological and economic threat of China, and to promote "equal opportunity", is now going the same way as the British reforms. Conservative critics such as Joy Pullman say that the new standards are too low, poorly ordered, and that some of the books on the suggested reading list? such as Toni
Morrison?s The Bluest Eye and Cristina Garcia?s Dreaming in Cuban - are, morally speaking, ?piles of trash.? But for the children it does not matter much whether whether you have a government which is calculatedly demolishing classical education, or one which is simply eliminating it through incompetence. For the pupils in our schools and the students in our universities, the result is the same. All this means that today, as people wake up to the truth that the State is not a good or natural educator for its citizens, the only truly free education that is likely to be available to the young is one they will have to pay for. Recommended reads: Sr Miriam Joseph, The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric (3rd ed.). 2002. Joy Pullman, Common Core: A Bad Choice for America (Chicago, IL: The Heartland Institute, 2014).
Doubly deracinated : CS Lewis on post- Christian man Modern man is thoroughly marooned, and Christ is the only lifeline that can help him find a way back on to the ship. Because man needs roots, many revolutionaries (Voltaire, Hitler, to name two) have attempted to make a shortcircuit back to a forgotten pagan age, despising the Christian legacy of which they themselves were a product. It is also the commonplace of much new age thinking. But C.S. Lewis has an neat answer for those who think that Europe can come out of Christianity "by the same door as in she went and find herself back where she was. It is not what happens. A post- Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce. The post- Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the Pagan past." in De Descriptione Temporum, a lecture delivered on 29th November 1954
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ThenewChavagnesBAdegreeintheLiberal Arts From September 2016 the Chavagnes Studium is offering a new study programme which will lead to the award of a fully accredited BA Honours degree. At Chavagnes the study of the humanities is in the great tradition of liberal education. This kind of education is not simply a dry theory, nor is it restricted to those subjects now named humanities, although its principles are mostly clearly seen in our teaching of these disciplines. Liberal education is the transmission of our great Western cultural patrimony to our young. But it is more than that: its aim is to make every student his own man: free and capable of using his reason, fit to take part in that ?great conversation? begun in fifth-century Athens and among the people of Israel and continuing to this day. At the centre of that great conversation is the Incarnate Word, ?the Redeemer of man, Jesus Christ ... the centre of the universe and of history?. (St John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis) The Chavagnes Liberal Arts degree is wide-ranging, but not simply so as to stimulate the interest and curiosity of its students. It proposes a complete intellectual formation that provides a coherent world view. In the fast-changing modern world, this is an especially important task, in the face of the ?segmentation of knowledge? which, ?with its splintered approach to truth and consequent fragmentation of meaning, keeps people today from coming to an interior unity,? (Fides et Ratio). St Pope John Paul II emphasises: ?taking up what has been taught repeatedly by the Popes for several generations and reaffirmed by the Second Vatican Council itself, I wish to reaffirm strongly the conviction that the human being can come to a unified and organic vision of knowledge. This is one of the tasks which Christian thought will have to take up through the next millennium of the Christian era.?
The Chavagnes Liberal Arts degree comprises five main areas of study: Literature, History, Philosophy/ Theology, Mathematics/ Science and Latin/ French. The teaching of the degree programme will take the form of 20 hours per week of classes, conducted in a seminar format, supplemented by regular personal assignments and individual study. Additional individual tutoring will be available especially for those involved in the accelerated learning of French as a foreign language.
The academic year will be composed of four 10-week terms, on the model of accelerated BA courses at several UK universities such as the University of Buckingham. For more details, visit our website:
www.chavagnes.org/ studium
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FO CUSO NJohnRuskin
The Lost Amazing Crown ? The Meaning of Ruskin?s Theoretic Faculty Anthony O?Hear ?to us he appears some half-fabulous field-ditcher who prised up, from a stone-wedged hedge root, the lost amazing crown.? (Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love, CXLVI)
Plato's Symposium (Anselm Feuerbach, 1873)
In this essay, I want to examine one of Ruskin?s central doctrines, one which emerged early on in his career, in Volume II of Modern Painters, in the mid-1840s, that is to say. The doctrine in question is that of what he calls there the ?theoretic? faculty, theoretic, as opposed to aesthetic. Both are concerned with the perception of the beautiful, the aesthetic in a broad sense; but as we will see, viewing the beautiful with theoretic eyes, so to speak, enables us to see the beautiful as intimating a reality deeper than the everyday, in terms of a kind of transcendence we are led to see as immanent in things of this world. The aesthetic faculty is limited to seeing the beautiful as no more than what some medievals saw as the ?appeasement of the senses?, and in Ruskin?s view, fatally limited. Certainly if that were all there is to the beautiful, it would be hard to justify the exalted feelings and sentiments often associated with its experience, or the claims made for the beautiful by thinkers and artists from Plato on. In that sense, Ruskin ? and his distinction ? is in the Platonic tradition, but with an important qualification we need to highlight right at the start.
If we look at Plato?s account of beauty in the Symposium (210ff), we will see that our experience of beauty comes in three stages. First we fall in love with one person, and with the beauty of their body; this account is filled out with marvellous poetic detail in Phaedrus (251ff), where all the madness and force of this sort of love is compellingly depicted. But then, when this initial madness is calmed down and the lover returns to his senses, we see that ?it would be absurd to deny that the beauty of each and every body is the same?, so our perception of the beautiful begins to spread itself over many beautiful things (including for Plato institutions and laws, as well as physical objects). The lover will thus ?be saved from a slavish and illiberal devotion to the individual loveliness of a single boy? , turning his eyes toward the open sea of beauty?, as he finds beautiful things, calmly and dispassionately, all over the world. But, for Plato, this is only the second stage; for in this stage there are already intimations of the one, single, eternal, transcendent beauty to which all earthly beauty tends, and to which earthly beauty draws us. The third and final stage, the final revelation, will be of
beauty?s very self, not fleshy or physical at all, not multitudinous, taking many forms, but single, abstract, immaterial and in all ways perfect. Crucially, for Plato, while we need to go through the first and, particularly the second stage (which ?quickens? us), to get to the third, it is the third we are aiming at, or, rather, to which we are aimed, and which, if we are fortunate, ?bursts upon us? in ?a wondrous vision?..
other, as a kind of transcendence in immanence. In theological terms, I see Ruskin as a proponent of transcendence in immanence; though for most readers of Ruskin to-day, what needs defending is not so much that as the fundamental Ruskinian claim that there is a theoretic dimension to our perception of beauty at all. It is the defence and articulation of that which I will be mainly concerned with here.
This third Platonic stage is, I believe, a stage too far for Ruskin (just as he had little sense of the Platonic first stage). Ruskin?s world is that of the second stage, and all his effort in aesthetic matters is devoted to getting us to look at the beauties of this world, as they are in themselves, but in themselves as part or aspect of something beyond, participating in it, perhaps, representative of it, as a sacrament is, but as a sacramental part of the reality itself, and so more than just representative. For Ruskin, beauty is here and now; the transcendence which he agrees with Plato is part of our experience of beauty, even in the second stage, is immanent in the things and experiences of that stage; we are not to seek to downgrade them in favour of something abstract and immaterial. If Ruskin is to be seen as making a distinctive contribution to philosophical aesthetics ? over and above his matchless analyses of individual examples of beauty (and of the opposite) ? it is in his attempt to take us in a Platonic direction, without ever denigrating the beauties of this world, without suggesting that they are no more than a step on the way, which is the perennial Platonic temptation.
One caveat is necessary at the outset. I write as a philosopher, not as a Ruskin scholar. I am trying to make sense of a doctrine I believe is important, and whose essence I believe Ruskin held to throughout his career. I am, of course, aware that Ruskin developed his position on this (as on many things) through his life, but I am not here attempting to chart the development of this doctrine in his writings. I shall allude to some developments in it, but they do not seem to me to affect the fundamental point, as I will make clear as we go on. In any case, the fact that Ruskin, this ?half-fabulous field-ditcher?, struggled, testifies both to his fundamental integrity and openness to experience, and to the difficulty of the questions he was dealing with. So what follows is an attempt to elucidate the importance of one of those questions, and its difficulty, in what I hope is a Ruskinian spirit.
Sarah Coakley has suggested to me that we could or should see Plato not as dispensing with the earlier steps on the ladder when we complete our ascent, but as having the vision of the transcendent ? granted to us in divine grace ? illuminating the earlier stages which remain beautiful to us; and after all Plato (or rather Diotima) does insist on the necessity of the earlier stages. I like the idea that the vision of the beautiful bursts upon us, as a gift of divine grace, but I find it hard to read Plato himself in this more generous way ? Diotima says that the person in the third stage will henceforth ?care nothing for the beauties that used to take your breath away?. However I, and possibly Ruskin, would welcome a reading of the Platonic view which makes all three stages of the ascent remain and infuse one with the
"If Ruskin is to be seen as making a distinctive contribution to philosophical aesthetics ... it is in his attempt to take us in a Platonic direction, without ever denigrating the beauties of this world, without suggesting that they are no more than a step on the way, which is the perennial Platonic temptation."
John Ruskin paint ed by t he Pre-Raphael it e art ist John Everet t Mil l ais, st anding at Gl enf inl as, Scot l and, (1853?54).
Ruskin introduces his point thus: ?The Theoretic faculty is concerned with the moral perception and appreciation of ideas of beauty. And the error respecting it is considering and calling it Aesthetic, degrading it into a mere operation of sense, or perhaps worse, of custom; so that the arts which appeal to it sink into a mere amusement, ministers to morbid sensibilities, ticklers and fanners of the soul?s sleep.? (Modern Painters, Vol II, Part III pp 35-6 ? from 1846) So, from the outset, Ruskin is keen to respect beauty as having Platonic, elevating potential (though with the qualifications of ?Platonic? already made). Note that in this early statement, the aesthetic faculty is merely or purely ?an operation of sense?. This suggestion is reinforced a little later: ?The term ?aesthesis? signifies mere sensual perception of the outward qualities and necessary effects of bodies? But I wholly deny that the impressions of beauty are in any way sensual; they are neither sensual
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Veronese's The Queen of Sheba before Solomon
AnthonyO 'Hear onRuskin nor intellectual, but moral.?(p 42) If by ?sensual?Ruskin means ?sensory?, saying that impressions of beauty are in no way sensual must be doubtful, unless they are of a purely abstract, immaterial beauty, belonging to Plato?s third stage, so to speak. Impressions of beauty (of the first and second stages anyway) usually and centrally have to come in through the senses, and to be related to our modes of perception. Also (from the opposite end) if aesthesis involves human perception, as it surely does, then there will necessarily be more to it than ?the mere operation of sense?. All human perception involves intellect, categorisation and discrimination. The question raised by talk of aesthesis is whether the horizons of the perception in question are limited by and to the material world, by physics and biology, if you like. Ruskin is right that impressions of beauty will take us further than the narrowly sensual or sensory, towards what Geoffrey Hill has termed ?sensuous intelligence?, but this will apply to aesthesis as well as to theoria.
We must prove our nobility But what exactly is meant by Ruskin?s talk of ?moral? in connexion with impressions of beauty? Again, what he says is not quite right, if we take ?moral? in a narrowly philosophical sense, as referring just to right conduct; but even on this narrow interpretation, Ruskin would be more right than the opposite position, that which would deny any moral implications in works of art. Ruskin is right to contest any doctrine of pure formalism in aesthetics, of art for art?s sake. Even Kant, the most distinguished advocate of pure, disinterested aesthesis, admits that in dependent beauty, moral considerations will play a part in our judgements (e.g. if the human figure is degraded by inappropriate body painting, to take Kant?s own example, though I think he had South Sea Islanders in mind, rather than to-day?s celebrity tattoos). More generally, in our reactions to it, literature or art conveying a vision which was humanly wholly repugnant or trivial is bound to seem ultimately questionable, even if we find the vision temporarily powerful ? though conversely the work of a great artist might convince us that an initially apparently
objectionable vision was not actually wholly repugnant or trivial. (Ruskin?s own famous experience in Turin in 1858, when the life-affirming sensuality of a painting attributed to Veronese, contrasted with the dismal Protestant sermon he heard immediately afterwards, blew his evangelical fundamentalism apart, would be an example of this phenomenon.)
'Theoria' and the Divine Ruskin goes on to talk about what we have in common with the brutes (embodiment and sensory perception, presumably), but stressing that ?we must not assume that man is the nobler animal?, and then deduce the nobleness of our pleasures. Rather we must ?prove the nobleness of the delights, and thence the nobleness of the animal?. (pp 42-3) This is important, and will eventually provide Ruskin with an answer to Proust?s criticism of his approach to art and morality. On p 47 Ruskin distinguishes Aesthesis from Theoria, in the following terms: ?mere animal consciousness of pleasantness? contrasted with ?the exulting, reverent or grateful perception of it?, contemplation of the Beautiful as a gift of God, perceiving it as kindness on the part of a superior intelligence. Theoria will be received with ?a pure, right, and open state of heart?, and importantly, can be found everywhere, ?in what is harsh and fearful, as well as what is kind, nay even in what is coarse and commonplace? hating only what is self-sighted and insolent of men?s work?. (p 50) The point is that the ?coarse and commonplace? can sometimes be shown to have their own beauty in their strength and honesty. But there is a kind of vulgarity and revelling in the ignoble which will not be acceptable. So, for example, Ruskin criticises the work of artists from the ?lower Dutch schools, continually seeking for and feeding upon horror and ugliness and filthiness of sin?(p 213). (Fair enough if we are thinking of Jan Steen, but Caravaggio is also indicted here, unfairly, I think). At this (early) stage of Ruskin?s thinking, Theoria and the beautiful are seen in the context of divine providence, as part of God?s gift to us, and as part of His providential design. To preserve Ruskin?s insights against the now standard criticisms of design
thinking (that God?s providence is by no means evident on the face of the world), what we need to do is to express them so that, far from resting on an initially sure and given perception of design, they lead by themselves to the qualities Ruskin is looking for in Theoria. Actually one could make a case that the standard Paleyesque-cum-Stoic design argument is not really very Christian, given both that we live in a fallen world and also the centrality in Christian thought of suffering and the Cross, Christ?s own self-emptying and despair. For Christ and the believer, the world and nature might well look as if God is absent, or even as it did for Ruskin himself later on, as blighted by storm clouds and canker worms (the latter as early as the 1860 study of Turner?s Apollo Slaying the Python at the end of Modern Painters). Ruskin himself points out that for Christian painters, ?though suffering was to cease in heaven, it was not only to be endured, but honoured upon earth. And from the Crucifixion, down to a beggar?s lameness, all of the tortures and maladies on men were to be made, at least in part, the subjects of art.? (Modern Painters, V, IX, p 283) This may not, as I say, sit well with any blithe providentialism, which will help us to disengage Theoria from anything like the design argument, and seeing it rather as a glimpse of something transcendent in a religiously ambivalent world.
The Triumph of Love In the perception of Theoria, patience is crucial, first to see the thing properly, and then to sift the genuinely worthy from the merely fashionable or accidentally pleasant, and in humility ?to make ourselves susceptible of deep delight from the meanest objects of creation?. (Modern Painters, III, I, p 62) Then again, the Theoretic faculty sees its objects not in mechanistic or utilitarian terms, but as they are in and for themselves: ?Thus when we are told the leaves of a plant are occupied in decomposing carbonic acid, and preparing oxygen for us, we begin to look upon it with some such indifference as upon a gasometer. It has become a machine; some of our sense of its
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Jan Steen,The Wench, c.1660-62
happiness is gone; its emanation of inherent life is no longer pure.?(p 153) Some biologists would find wonder in explaining the inner workings of a plant. There need be nothing wholly wrong with this from the Theoretic point of view ? providing that we did not lose sight of the wonder of the whole, of its inherent life, of life itself in all its forms, refusing the scientific temptation to reduce life to the operations of the inorganic parts. What Ruskin refers to as the ?unselfishness?of the Theoretic faculty is not simply the standard Kantian disinterestedness (i.e. abstracting from economic or utilitarian considerations in evaluating the beautiful), but over and above that, an appreciation of the sheer wonder and movement and force and rhythm of life itself and its infinite variety ? a sense which in Ruskin?s hands will extend to the inorganic, when he sees the forms of mountains as petrified waves, for instance. Or, as he wrote of the aspen tree which he drew, and in drawing which he had a Coleridgean sense of the mystery and connectedness of things (in the
Fontainbleau chapter of Praeterita): ?Languidly, but not idly, I began to draw it; and as I drew, the languor passed away: the beautiful lines insisted on being traced, without weariness. More and more beautiful they became, as each rose out of the rest, and took its place in the air. With wonder increasing every instant, I saw they ?composed? themselves by finer laws than any known of men. At last, the tree was there, and everything that I had thought before about trees, nowhere.?
does not depend on a prior dogmatic commitment.
A key notion Ruskin gives us here is that in our deployment of the Theoretic faculty we, our selves and egos, recede for a time. We deny ourselves and our interests before the thing. For a time we accept the world and humanity ?in all its light and shadow, without anxiety or lust or spite or remorse?. In Ruskin?s own (early) terms, ?man?s use and function? are to be witnesses to the glory of God?. (Modern Painters, II, III, p 29). We Here we have nature and art conspiring to should not interpret this narrowly. There is reveal an order beyond the artist, which the something only human beings can do, which artist submits to. Maybe even in art of an is to perceive and appreciate the world with abstract sort there can be a sense of an sensory, intellectual, aesthetic and (in a ineluctable necessity or inner logic guiding broad sense) moral dimensions all the artist, and also the reception of the work interpenetrating and criss-crossing, with all by the audience. Thus our sensuous in Hill?s The Triumph intelligence. If this What was important was ?a of Love (CXXV): ?An is not what we are wider division of men than actual play-through/ here for, destined to from the Last Quartets that into Christian and Pagan; be so to speak, it is could prove still our unique before we ask what a man superfluous/ except capacity, in the worships, we have to ask to a deaf auditor?, exercise of which presumably because we achieve a unique whether he worships at all? the music is, so to fulfilment. Aristotle speak, already all and Aquinas both there from the start, in saw human a Platonic world. We are simply cuing fulfilment as involving a degree of ourselves into a transcendent world when contemplation, that is, perceiving and we (over)hear the eternal music, as a kind of understanding the world in and for itself. vision Beethoven ? the original deaf auditor Ruskin is in this tradition, laying a distinctly ? had, and affords us experience of. One Aristotelian gloss on to his basic Platonism. might take (Theoretic) experiences of these He always wants us to see and understand sorts to aspects of nature and to some works the reality we experience, perceiving its of art as stages on a religious journey, which underlying laws of structure and form, but at
J. M. W. Turner, Garden of the Hesperides, 1806.
AnthonyO 'Hear onRuskin the same time embellishing the scholastic doctrine with an essentially aesthetic dimension. Or perhaps one could say that the sort of forms and laws Ruskin was interested in showing us were ones which, as with Goethe, require a fundamentally aesthetic sense of unity and of the relationship of wholes to parts to discern. At all events what is required here is a sensuous intelligence, in its requirement of intelligence, beyond the powers of the brutes, and in its requirement of sensuousness, also unavailable to the disembodied intelligence of an angel. From an anthropological/ phenomenological point of view, Ruskin?s interpretation of Theoria, as the distinctively human accomplishment it is, makes good sense.
For Ruskin, when he had abandoned his evangelical Christianity, what was important was ?a wider division of men than that into Christian and Pagan; before we ask what a man worships, we have to ask whether he worships at all?(The Stones of Venice, 1853, Collected Works, 10, p 67); what distinguished the builders of Venice in the middle ages from the Victorians was that ?they (the Venetians) did honour something out of themselves; they did believe in spiritual presence judging, animating, redeeming them; they built to its honour and for its habitation?. (p 68) The reference to a spiritual presence out of themselves is enough to save Ruskin from the accusation Erich Heller makes of Rilke and Nietzsche (in Chapter V of The Disinherited Mind, 1952), that the reverence they undoubtedly evoke in their works is an ultimately unsatisfactory religio intransitiva (unkindly, a sense of awe with no awe-ful referent). Ruskin does always affirm a splendour in the universe which (in Ezra Pound?s words) is ?beyond man made courage, or made order, or made grace? (Canto LXXXI) ? and he also insists that this splendour is sometimes revealed in man made works (of art). There need be no paradox here if we see the artist as only a secondary creator, attending in his best work to an order not of his own making, in that sense a seer, who teaches others by his work to see similarly. As Ruskin said of Turner, and as Proust said of Ruskin himself, ?it is through these eyes, now closed forever in the grave, that unborn generations will look upon nature.?But look on nature, notice, and not on a wholly idiosyncratic vision. It would
take us too far afield at the moment to do more than note the point, but Ruskin?s essential realism and empiricism undoubtedly raises questions over the visionary art of a Blake or, in our own day, of a Cecil Collins, even (or perhaps especially) in cases such as these, where in some ways Ruskin might be expected to have sympathy for the artist?s intentions.
Out of impossibility, the Artist creates order Heller?s complaint about Rilke and Nietzsche is precisely this: that finding nothing in the world as it is (except nothingness and suffering), we human beings (especially artists) have by efforts of will and imagination to make something of it, otherwise life is ?impossible?, as Rilke said writing of Malte Laurids Brigge, the hero of his early novel. Interestingly, in that early novel, the heroine, Abelone ?longed to remove from her love all that was transitive?, yet, according to Rilke, not directing her love to God, because she did not appreciate that loving God can be such an intransitive love, needing to ?fear no return from Him?. (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Hogarth Press, 1978, p 234) But what is a God from whom we need to fear no return, or from whom we can hope for no grace? We are left (as Rilke wanted) only with our own lives and loves, our own efforts, pouring themselves out, selflessly maybe, but into the void. An effort of this sort in Nietzsche?s case yields the perception and will of the Superman/ Zarathustra, in which in the Midnight Song, joy is distilled from the dregs of eternal pain (Nietzsche); or, in Rilke?s own case the embracing (and creating ?) of the angel of terror as also the angel of beauty ?serenely disdaining to destroy us?, together with a sense that in a dead and godless world only our activity of naming and perceiving redeems us or it. The key point is that out of life?s impossibility, the artist creates an order (of sorts), though it is, as Rilke suggests, an operation of spiritual acrobatics; in his Fifth Duino Elegy, which is based on Picasso?s painting of acrobats (les Saltimbanques), the smile and the love they (the acrobats) project is achieved through the thuds of their hundred daily falls, and so with us, whether
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artists or lovers. Another way of putting this point is to contrast art which sees itself as reflecting an existing order with that which, out of an abyss of meaninglessness, creates its own order. So is the artist a secondary or a primary creator? In a meaningless world without inherent value or order of any personal or moral sort, the artist is, perforce, a primary creator. In Heller?s words ?every new impoverishment of the world is a new incentive to poetic creativeness.? (op cit, Meridian Books, New York, 1959, p 170) I would add that in this impoverishment, science and materialism has played and continues to play a major role; and, also that this ever-increasing poetic creativeness, imposing meaning and value where none really exists, becomes increasingly hermetic, as well as (in Ruskin?s terms) increasingly a matter of aesthesis, without solidity, justification or promise. Very much in line with Heller?s interpretation, in a letter of 1898 Rilke wrote ?art means to be oblivious to the fact that the world already exists, and to create one?. On the other hand, he also wrote of music as reaching beyond us, as pushing on with no regard for us (1914), and also of a person (an artist) succeeding ?in introducing into something small and mundane the unseen vastness which governs his existence?. (1922), which could be read in a Ruskinian way. (All extracts from Rainer Maria Rilke?s Letters on Life, The Modern Library, New York, 2006, pp 136, 143 and 149.) Perhaps all one can say here is that the interpretation of Rilke has the same sorts of difficulty as that of Ruskin, partly because Rilke was as sensitive to complexity and ambivalence. To return to Ruskin himself, Ruskin always looks in art for revelation of what is there, in reality, of an order not of our making (and so, always raising the question, of whose making?). And hence will arise the possibility of a religio transitiva, even if we can know little of its object of worship. There will still be the sense that our sense of beauty opens on to a being with some form of love and intelligence sustaining the universe. Creation of the sort Heller is criticising would be for Ruskin a type of Aesthesis ? tickling and fanning the soul?s sleep, even though he might well have responded to Nietzsche?s predicament, philosophical and personal (they both
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sufferedPage their10final mental collapse in the same year, 1889, and both lingered on into 1900), and to Rilke?s poetry (and might actually have seen it in a slightly different way from Heller, which, as might be possible as we have just suggested, did not wholly close off the possibility in it of genuine transcendence). ?All great art is the expression of man?s delight in God?s work, not in his own?. Ruskin?s repeated view (as he tells us) and repeated once more in 1858 in Vol V of Modern Painters, at the very time of his loss of dogmatic evangelical faith. At that time, he argued that man was the greatest of God?s creations, the light of the world, but only as long as he knew and loved God?s other creations, animate and inanimate. In loving them, though, he lights them up, as the sun of the world, in ways which combine our spiritual and animal natures. Actually if Ruskin really thought that man was the greatest of God?s creations, he should have been more able than he was to rejoice in men?s (and women?s) bodies, as also divinely created, and as at least as revelatory of the divine as his beloved landscape. (?To what serves mortal beauty?? , as Gerard Manley Hopkins famously asked, and answered, ?dangerous? ; still, Hopkins tells us, it is ?love?s worthiest? world?s loveliest?, and even for Hopkins, as for Plato, it may be (must be ?) met en route to ?God?s better beauty, grace.? Hopkins thought Ruskin ?full of follies?but numbered him among ?the true men?. It would be fascinating to know what Ruskin might have made of Hopkins.) Be that as it may, initially Ruskin?s position on our lighting up the world is not so far from Rilke?s view that we humans are here to name and perceive the things around us, doing what they themselves cannot do and are waiting for us to do them, but for Ruskin it will always be under or within a divine order. But now that order is not clearly that of Christian providence. It can derive from other sources and it can appear in other forms, as it did for the Homeric Greeks: ?The blood (of the heroes), which seemed to be poured out on the ground, rose into hyacinthine flowers. All the beauty of the earth opened to them; they had ploughed into its darkness, and they reaped its gold; the gods in whom they had trusted through all semblance of oppression, came down to love them and be their helpmates. All nature
AnthonyO 'Hear onRuskin round them became Painters, V, IX, p 276)
divine? ? (Modern
I should point out that by this time (around 1860) Ruskin?s faith was tinged with
?Searching for a beauty that is foreign to ... the human search for truth and goodness would become ... a path leading to ephemeral values and to banal and superficial appearances, even a flight into an artificial paradise that masks inner emptiness.?" Benedict XVI agnosticism (on life after death, for instance). Then, twenty years or so later, in The Bible of Amiens (1880-5), he said that ?there is no possibility of attaching infallible truth to any form of human language?. (3. XLIX) He also argued there for the value of revelations he had received from Greek and Roman religions, what he called a ?Sacred classic literature?, to which he had been made sensitive by his earlier study of the Christian bible (and which he saw being taken up in medieval Christianity). We could also point to the delightful way Ruskin points to analogies between pagan and Christian mythology, as between Herakles killing the Nemean lion and St Jerome translating the Bible with the lion at his feet. So with a degree of agnosticism and some caution over infallible formulations, a faith like Ruskin?s could accommodate other faiths, other visions of the divine order, all of which could be pointers. As we have already seen, the important thing for Ruskin became not whether one was Christian or Pagan so much as whether you worship at all. But Ruskin?s worship remained objective, or so it seems to me. However, it is just at this point that we have to consider Proust?s famous criticism of Ruskin (in the introduction to La Bible d?Amiens, his translation of The Bible of Amiens), that far from being really moral or religious in his attitude to beauty, Ruskin was
actually guilty of self-deception and idolatry: ?The doctrines he professed were moral doctrines, and not aesthetic ones, and yet he chose them for their beauty. And as he does not wish to present them as being beautiful, but as true, he was forced to lie to himself about the nature of the reasons which made him adopt them.? (Cobra Editeur, Amiens, 1997, p 80, my translation.) The reason that this is a form of idolatry is because in what he was doing Ruskin was worshipping the beautiful as if it were something other than it was. On the surface he is elevating the moral, but in reality he is compromising both moral and aesthetic senses. According to Proust this self-deception even affects Ruskin stylistically, as when he imports moral-cum-theological attitudes into what should be aesthetic description and criticism, as when he accuses certain critics of ?irreverence?. I wonder about this, though; is it always inappropriate to speak of someone being ?irreverent? in their attitude to, say, Bach?s religious music or, in the case mentioned by Proust, to Amiens Cathedral? Remember that the occasion of Proust?s criticism was that Ruskin had said that the sins of the later, decadent Venetians were that much the worse because they had been committed in the shadow of St Mark?s and, specifically, under the Biblical text inscribed in its dome (?Know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgement.?). But isn?t this, Proust argues, an over-valuation of a mere thing, an inscription, a set of stones, however beautiful, over and above life itself, over and above men and their deeds, over and above what it represented, over and above the deity itself? He would not otherwise, Proust says, have thought the sins of the Venetians worse than those of other men ?because they possessed a church of multicoloured marble instead of a limestone cathedral, because the Doge?s palace was next to St Mark?s instead of at the other end of the town? ?(ibid, p 82) Actually, as Proust knew (because had just referred to the passage in question), Ruskin himself inveighed against this sort of idolatry: ?the serving with the best of our hearts and minds, some dear or sad fantasy which we have made for ourselves, while we disobey the present call of the Master,
AnthonyO 'Hear onRuskin who is not dead, and who is not now fainting under His cross, but requiring us to take up ours?; (Lectures on Art, II. 49) and we hardly need underline the extent to which Ruskin, even as his unbelief waxed, took up his own cross of social reform at the expense of art. So in his person Ruskin cannot really be criticised for according inanimate things, even the most beautiful, value greater than that of life. But what of the potentially more worrying aspect of Proust?s complaint, that Ruskin substitutes aestheticism for something more than it really is, that he attempts mendaciously to dress Aesthesis up as Theoria? It seems to me that Proust would be right if beauty had no moral or intellectual element, but it was just this conception (or, rather, misconception) which Ruskin had fought against all his life.
as noble, and maybe as having a religious destiny, of sorts. For all his occasional wrong-headedness, it was always the nobleness of our delights which Ruskin tried to make us see (and to excoriate those in which there was spite, narrowness and degradation). Ruskin would, I think, have agreed with this: ?Searching for a beauty that is foreign to or separate from the human search for truth and goodness would become (as unfortunately happens) mere aestheticism and, especially for the young, a path leading to ephemeral values and to banal and superficial appearances, even a flight into an artificial paradise that masks inner emptiness.? (Pope Benedict XVI, November, 2008).
When we experience something as very beautiful we get the sense that [this] consciousness takes us to the essence of the world.
Ruskin was, in a qualified but broad sense, a Platonist, as we have already argued. He thought that in and through our perception of the beautiful we could be taken out of ourselves, and brought to love a reality not of our making, which intimated timeless and transcendent truth and goodness ? though, against Plato, with Ruskin we never get the sense that this transcendence in the here and now will ever lose its value for us, even in an immaterial paradise. To repeat what we have already said, one of the most striking aspects of Ruskin?s thought is his almost obsessive attention to the actual empirical detail, not just to the forms and lineaments of things, but even to the extent of describing the way we will take to Abbeville and Amiens, the time of day we will arrive, the way during the course of a day light will fall on a cathedral?s front, and even why (in the case of Amiens) we should enter the cathedral by the south door rather than the west. It is this sense of the sheer physicality of things, and of its importance, that marks Ruskin out from many of those who are Platonic in direction. But it is Ruskin, for all his ?wedded incapacity? (Geoffrey Hill), who gives a proper evaluation of our embodiment, of our vocation as human perceivers, and who can see nobility in what our physicality enables us to perceive.
We could go some distance in the Pope?s direction, I believe, if we consider our experience of beauty, both in the natural world and in some works of art. In our experience of beauty we gain a sense that we are, in a deep sense at home in the world, and that the world responds to our concerns. The aesthetic (or in Ruskin?s terms the theoretic) sense suggests that the world is not that portrayed by natural science, blind, random, humanly indifferent; it also suggests that human suffering and the concomitant impossibility of fulfilling all the demands this might seem to make on us morally is not the whole story. When we experience something as very beautiful we get the sense that consciousness (our consciousness) takes us to the essence of the world. Meaning, intelligibility and a felt harmony with what exists are not simply imposed by us. Somehow, in the beautiful, we sometimes sense a reality in tune with us, as we are drawn to it.
To return to Ruskin?s earlier distinction, we do not deduce the nobleness of our delights from the nobleness of the human animal; seeing (some of) our delights as noble puts us on the path of seeing the human animal
It may be argued that there is nothing in the universe which corresponds to these and analogous feelings. In which case, these experiences have no more significance, ultimately, than taking a warm bath, or
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Prozac, or in some other way altering the chemistry of the brain. If this were the case, then aesthesis would be all that there is. All that can be said here is that in listening to Beethoven?s Op 132 or to the Goldberg Variations, or in immersing oneself in Botticelli?s Primavera, or in reading Homer or Dante, or in entering Amiens Cathedral, it does not feel like having a warm bath or taking a drug. We feel ourselves in one way or another close to the spirit which harmonises the universe, close to the mystery of life and to penetrating the veil with which it is normally obscured from us, close to possibilities beyond the mundane, and, for what it is worth, a million miles from the tawdriness, ephemerality and sheer lack of nobility of much of what passes as contemporary art and literature, to say nothing of music. And as Ruskin shows over and over again, the sort of sense I am pointing to can be experienced in the natural world as much as in the world of human creativity. To show that the experiences of art I am pointing to are not confined to artists and thinkers who might be expected to move in a religious direction (from whom it would be easy to glean corroborating sentiments), let me refer you to some of the things Clive Bell says in Art (New York, 1958 edition). ?The contemplation of pure (artistic) form leads to a state of extraordinary exaltation and complete detachment from the concerns of life?(p 54); that it derives from ?the spiritual depths of man?s nature is hardly contested?(p 59). And for Bell these feelings are not conceived of purely subjectively. In the experience of beauty ?we become aware of its essential reality, of the God in everything? The thing I am talking about is that which lies behind the appearance of all things ? that which gives all things their individual significance, the thing in itself, the ultimate reality.? (p54) What Bell is suggesting is very much along the lines of what I was struggling to articulate just now. And we could add that if we have these experiences, and if they are not wholly illusory, they may go some way to reassuring us that, however terrible things are, and however meaningless the world can seem, especially when viewed more scientifico, that is not the whole story.
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?Vain beauty, yet not all vain. Unlike in birth, how like in their labour, and their power over the future, these masters of England and Venice ? Turner and Giorgione. But ten years ago, I saw the last traces of the greatest works of Giorgione yet glowing like a scarlet cloud, on the Fondaco de? Tedeschi. And though that scarlet cloud may, indeed, melt away into the paleness of night, and Venice herself waste away from her islands as a wreath of wind-driven foam fades from their weedy beach; - that which she won of faithful light and truth shall never pass away. Deiphobe of the sea, the Sun God measures her immortality to her by its sand. Flushed, above the Avernus of the Adrian lake, her spirit is still seen holding the golden bow; from the lips of the Sea Sybil men shall learn from ages yet to come what is most noble and most fair; and, far away, as the whisper in the coils of the shell, withdrawn through the deep hearts of nations, shall sound for ever the enchanted voice of Venice.?(Modern Painters, V, IX, pp 438-40) Vain, yet not all in vain? from the lips of the Sea Sybil men shall learn for ages yet to come what is most noble and most fair. So long as we are able to learn this (maybe guided by Ruskin himself), the distinction between Aesthesis and Theoria remains. From Ruskin?s point of view, the distinction is necessarily timeless. So the fact that it is largely ignored to-day would be neither here nor there. But precisely because it is ignored and also because it can be drawn without the support of dogmatic religion, as I have tried to suggest here, its re-statement is ever more urgent, mediating as it does between a dank materialism and a bloodless spiritualism.
AnthonyO 'Hear onRuskin The Hills of Carrara Amidst a vale of springing leaves Where spreads the vine its wandering root And cumbrous fall the autumnal sheaves And olives shed their sable fruit, And gentle winds, and waters never mute, Make of young boughs and pebbles pure One universal lute. And bright birds, through the myrtle copse obscure, Pierce with quick notes, and plumage dipped in dew, The silence and the shade of each lulled avenue.
Far in the depths of voiceless skies Where calm and cold the stars are strewed, The peaks of pale Carrara rise.
"Vain, yet not all in vain? from the lips of the Sea Sybil men shall learn for ages yet to come what is most noble and most fair. "
Nor sound of storm, nor whirlwind rude, Can break their chill of marble solitude; The crimson lightnings round their crest May hold their fiery feudThey hear not, nor reply; their charmed rest No flow'ret decks, nor herbage green, nor breath Of moving thing can change their atmosphere of death.
But far beneath, in folded sleep, Faint forms of heavenly life are laid With pale brows and soft eyes, that keep Sweet peace of unawakened shade, Whose wreathed limbs, in robes of rock arrayed, Fall like white waves on human thought, In fitful dreams displayed; Deep through their secret homes of slumber sought,
This text is based on a lecture to The Ruskin Society, The Athenaeum, London, April 7th, 2009; thanks to members of the audience there for helpful comments, which have enabled me to improve on it in this written version.
They rise immortal, children of the day,
Professor Anthony O'Hear is Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, London. He is a member of the Advisory Board of Chavagnes Studium.
Beneath the low appeal
Gleaming with godlike forms on earth, and her decay. ... Who knows that waves may stir the silent sea, From distant shores, of winds unfelt by thee?
Turner's "Lake Avernus: Aeneas and the Cumaean Sybil", 1814 or 1815.
What sounds may wake within the winding shell, Responsive to the charm of those who touch it well. John Ruskin
Hamlet himself prompts us to doubt, when he roughly tells poor Ophelia, "I never loved you!" And yet, as I say, I have no doubt. And my doubt is based on the play. Or rather, it is based on the playwright behind the play, on what TS Eliot has playfully termed its "objective correlative", namely (what Eliot fails to identify) the real religious situation of Elizabethan England behind the playwright. It isn't what Hamlet means, or doesn't mean, but what Shakespeare does mean ? considering the dating of the play roughly about 1601, towards the end of the Elizabethan age.
"The official Protestantism of the age rejected the old idea of Purgatory as a typical superstition of the Catholic Middle Ages."
ACatholicHamlet? Peter Milward SJ There must be as many interpretations of Hamlet as there are Shakespeare scholars who really think about the play for themselves. But I have yet to come upon a really Catholic interpretation ? in my meaning of the word "Catholic". What, then, is this meaning of mine, which impels me to use the indefinite article, followed by a question mark, in my title? Does it mean I am in any doubt? After all, what is Hamlet but a play of doubt, as it were embodied in the ghost ? in so far as one can speak of a ghost as embodying anything? Yet contradictorily I have no doubt. The doubt may well be in the play, as in Hamlet's poem addressed to Ophelia, "Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move, Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love." But that is surely what
To begin with the ghost, even though he seems to represent what is most doubtful, most questionable, and I would add most enigmatic, in the play. Out of his own mouth, in his impassioned words to Hamlet, he assures him of his provenance from Purgatory, a Catholic Purgatory, where he is "confined to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in (his) days of nature Are burned and purged away." His very words echo those of the great Jesuit controversialist Robert Bellarmine as quoted in English translation in the recently published Synopsis Papismi by Andrew Willet (in the new edition of 1600), with reference to "a certain infernal place in the earth, called Purgatory, in the which, as in a prison-house, the souls which were not fully purged in this life are there cleansed and purged by fire, before they can be received into heaven". But the official Protestantism of the age rejected the old idea of Purgatory as a typical superstition of the Catholic Middle Ages.
More than two sacraments ... What is more, when the ghost goes on to speak of the moment and manner of his death, he particularly laments the fact that he was "Cut off even in the blossoms of (his) sin, Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled, No reckoning made, but sent to my account With all (his) imperfections on (his) head". Thus he was deprived of the three "last sacraments" most desired by the Catholics of old on their death-beds, the "housel" of viaticum, or communion, the appointment of confession, and
the last aneling or extreme unction ? all conglomerated in one verse. And that was for him "O horrible, O horrible, most horrible!" Yet the Protestantism of the Elizabethan age only admitted two sacraments, baptism and communion, neither confession nor extreme unction, and not necessarily on one's death-bed. Anyhow, Hamlet believes this is undoubtedly the ghost of his royal father ? as he goes on to tell his friend Horatio, "It is an honest ghost." But, as with Ophelia, he goes on to express his doubt that this may perhaps be a Protestant ghost, that is to say, the devil in disguise, as he subsequently confesses in soliloquy, "The spirit that I have seen May be the devil? and perhaps Out of my weakness and my melancholy ? As he is very potent with such spirits ? Abuses me to damn me." And so he goes on to take advantage of the arrival of certain players to present a play before his father's supposed murderer, his uncle Claudius, imitating the scene of murder in the garden as described by the ghost, so as to observe his uncle's reaction,
to be". Hamlet may go on to say, "That is the question", but it isn't so much a question in a play filled with such questions as we see embodied in the ghost, as rather a dilemma facing Catholic recusants, namely that between suffering "the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune", that is, continuing to endure their unendurable plight, and taking "arms against a sea of troubles", that is, doing something violent as in the Essex Rebellion of 1601 or the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when many prominent Catholic gentlemen were involved, and perishing in the process.
whether revealing signs of guilt or innocence. Then, when Claudius reacts with a seeming confession of guilt, Hamlet feels he may rely on the word of the ghost to pursue his long delayed revenge. But wait! Can this be a Catholic ghost, when his appeal is not for prayer ? as one might expect of a Catholic ghost coming from Purgatory ? but for revenge, when this is rejected by Paul to the Romans (xii.19), quoting Deuteronomy (xxxii.35), "Vengeance is mine, I will repay." Then there is a third alternative, without having recourse to the Protestant interpretation, in a third P, namely the Paganism of Senecan tragedy, in which the typical ghost appeals for revenge. And such tragedy was very much in the air about the time Shakespeare turned his pen to the composition of Hamlet, at least in its original form as what German scholars call "the Ur-Hamlet", about the same time as Thomas Kyd's popular Spanish Tragedy with its Senecan ghost.
Paris and Wittenberg Now from Hamlet let me turn to Ophelia, with the further question, "What has she to say for herself?" In other words, can she, like Hamlet, be interpreted in terms of Catholic recusancy? From the outset, in her first appearance with her brother Laertes and then her father Polonius, she appears as anything but Catholic. Her family, with their ingrained tendency to offer each other moral advice, especially in sexual matters, would seem to be a typically Puritan family. Her brother Laertes is indeed bound for the Catholic University of Paris, in contrast to Hamlet's provenance from the Lutheran University of Wittenberg. But we may remember that Paris was also the university of the extreme Protestant reformer John Calvin, and there is something typical of Calvin in Laertes' rebellion against Claudius, "as the world were now but to begin, Antiquity forgot, custom not known", which is precisely the Calvinist platform.
Now, leaving the ghost (with a small letter), we may turn to Hamlet himself and ask a more pertinent question about his religion. From the outset of the play it would seem that he must be Lutheran, recently returned to Denmark from his university of Wittenberg. In other words, he belongs not to the 11th century, as in the original story on which the play seems to be based, but to the 16th century, considering that the University of Wittenberg was only founded in that century and that one of its first professors was Martin Luther. This provenance of both Hamlet and his friend Horatio, not to mention the two spies set on him by his suspicious uncle, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, is mentioned four times in the second scene of Act I, so that it is ? or should be ? inescapable, though there are some scholars who seek to evade the issue. In any case, much of what Hamlet says in the course of the play sounds suspiciously Lutheran, as when he declares to those spies, "Man delights not me!" and when he tells the Lord Chamberlain Polonius concerning his plans for the players, "Use every man after his desert, and who should escape whipping?"
Something rotten in the state
Theatre poster by Alfons Mucha, 1899.
Yet in spite of this Lutheran provenance, on his return home to Denmark, Hamlet is so far out of sympathy with the new regime, imposed by his uncle with the assistance of the Lord Chamberlain, as to appear (in Elizabethan terms) as a "recusant", namely a Papist who refuses to accept the newly imposed requirement to attend the Anglican services. That is why at the end of his first soliloquy he adds, "But break, my heart, for I must
hold my tongue?" On the evidence of this play, however, given the amount of "words, words, words" he utters, it appears that Hamlet, of all Shakespeare's characters, is the least able to hold his tongue. Only on this one issue, that of Catholic recusancy, in view of the existing persecution, he can't help holding his tongue. It is this same issue that is evidently implied in the more famous soliloquy beginning, "To be, or not
As for her father Polonius, his Latinate name (with seeming reference to Poland) is barely a disguise for the Lord Treasurer at the court of Queen Elizabeth, the arch-persecutor of Catholic recusants, Lord Burghley. In those days he was known for his penchant for spying, as he says of himself, "If circumstances lead me, I will find Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed Within the centre." What Claudius says of him to Laertes, "The head is not more native to the heart, The hand more instrumental to the mouth, than is the throne of Denmark to thy father", Elizabeth I might well have said of Lord Burghley, who was then Sir William Cecil at the time of her accession to the throne. On the other hand, once she loses her wits on the death of her father and the departure of her lover, Ophelia seems to revert to a dimly remembered Catholicism of her childhood. For then she recalls an age when it was customary to go on pilgrimage, whether to the shrine of St James at Compostela or to that of Our Lady at Walsingham. The one shrine is implied in her mention of "the cockle hat
Peter MilwardSJ onHamlet and staff", as badges of the former pilgrims, and the other in the poem itself, "How should I your true love know?" ? with its reference to the old ballad beginning, "As ye came from the holy land of Walsingham, Met you not with my true love by the way you came?" She also recalls the former Catholic custom, forbidden to Protestants, of prayer for the dead (with its implication of Purgatory), when she cries, "God have mercy on his soul! And of all Christian souls, I pray God!" ? a custom which the playwright elsewhere puts into the mouths of old people like the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet and Old Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, as well as the grave-digger for Ophelia. (He has to do so in view of the religious circumstances of his age, lest he be denounced by some "suborned informer", cf. Sonnet cxxv.)
Stage photos: from the December 2014 performance of Hamet at Chavagnes, with Arthur de Kerdrel in the title role.
Finally, to clinch my argument for the hidden Catholicism of Hamlet, I may turn to the end, when the hero is dying of the poison smeared on the rapier of Laertes. Then he is concerned above all for his "wounded name", which "things standing thus unknown, shall live behind" him. He desires above all that Horatio will "report (him) and (his) cause aright To the unsatisfied". What, we may ask, is this cause of his? And how
The Studium ?Some Liberal Arts courses do not teach the seven traditional Liberal Arts of Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Astronomy, Geometry, Arithmetic and Music AND All Liberal Arts course say that they are based on the medieval Trivium and Quadrivium SO Some courses that say they are based on the medieval Trivium and Quadrivium do not in fact teach the seven traditional Liberal Arts of Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Astronomy, Geometry, Arithmetic and Music.?
well is it presented by Horatio at the end of the play, in the hearing of Fortinbras and others who are still alive ? in spite of the many corpses littering the stage? All Horatio says is, "Let me speak to the yet unknowing world How these things came about." But he speaks only in generalities, and nothing that isn't already shown to the audience ? yet much that we may infer from what I have already hinted in terms of the religious background of Elizabethan England. After all, as a result of the many sham plots against the life of Elizabeth foisted on the innocent Catholics by the two Cecils father and son, culminating in the Gunpowder Plot, the name of Catholics was ineradicably connected with treason till the age of Queen Victoria. In other words, the place of Horatio is to be taken by Shakespeare himself, in all that is implied at every stage in the course of this play, of whom it is said ? more precisely of Duke Vincentio in the subsequent play of Measure for Measure ? that "His givings out were of an infinite distance From his true-meant design." Peter Milward SJ is Emeritus Professor of English at Sophia University, Tokyo. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Chavagnes Studium.
As for Astronomy, Geometry, Arithmetic and Music, there?s our course on Euclid?s Elements, supplemented by a course on Astronomy composed with the help of the Director of the Vatican Observatory, plus a History and Theory of Music course that includes the essentials of Gregorian chant.
Chavagnes has strong links with Trapani on the island of Sicily, where Greek, Carthaginian and Roman remains are to be seen everywhere. students on the new Chavagnes degree will spend part of the fourth term in Sicily.
That is an example of a syllogism, Modus Bocardo; which is something that an attentive student of the Trivium would know. In the Chavagnes BA programme, we have included in our literature course the study of the first three traditional Liberal Arts of Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric (Dialectic).
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Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing: Chavagnes has a strong tradition of Shakespearean drama, performed in its own 165- seater theatre, or in the open air.
Some of our Rhetoric classes will even be taught in Syracuse, Sicily, where Corax and Tisias in 466BC developed this science for the first time in order to formulate arguments in defence of some of their poor countrymen who had been dispossessed of their property. A liberal education is meant to free your mind, but in fact a liberally educated person may, like Corax and Tisias, end up being called to work for the freedom of others. That is what the Chavagnes Liberal Arts BA is all about; as St John Paul II teaches in Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the Catholic university endeavour is a missionary one ordered to the service of others, because it is ?the ardent search for truth and its unselfish transmission to youth and to all those learning to think rigorously, so as to act rightly and to serve humanity better.? The advent ure begins: Sept ember 2016
G odlinessandgoodLearning
John Hal dane is Prof essor of Phil osophy and Co-direct or, Cent re f or Et hics, Phil osophy and Publ ic Af f airs at t he Universit y of St Andrews and Newt on Rayzor Sr Dist inguished Prof essor of Phil osophy, Bayl or Universit y, Texas. He al so chairs t he Royal Inst it ut e of Phil osophy.
Professor John Haldane on the Future of the University A summary made by Ferdi McDermott of John Haldane, ?The Future of the University: Philosophy, Education and the Catholic Tradition?, in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 87, No. 4. (2013)pp. 731-749. (With thanks to Professor Haldane for his permission.)
Universities are in flux, facing many challenges in education, research, and training. Catholic institutions must also ask what it means to be Catholic. Rather than giving a historical or religious analysis, Haldane approaches the topic from the viewpoint of educational philosophy. In his essay he sets these matters within a historical context, considering Confucius, Augustine, and Aquinas, while focusing on nineteenth-century British discussions of education by Herbert Spencer, Mathew Arnold, J. S. Mill, and J. H. Newman, and then engaging modern challenges to the very idea of humanistic knowledge and understanding. This returns the discussion to Haldane's suggestion as to the distinctive contribution of Catholic institutions : to promote a sense of the Godly, the sacred, and the gracious. There are three ways a university may be Catholic: (i) it has a historic Catholic foundation, (ii) it has a liturgical and sacramental life at its heart, and/ or (iii) it has a Catholic educational vocation which has an impact on the way its members teach and learn. St Augustine sees the educator as continuing God's creative work, bringing the educated man to his full stature in the sight of God. From the Greeks, the Church maintains and develops the tradition of the Humanities as leading men to virtue and wisdom. Modern education has a tendency to reduce to education to job-training. It has been instrumentalised and individualised to such an extent that we risk losing sight of the notion that the desired outcome of education is education: it is ?one of the goods of life?. Haldane traces this tendency back to Spencer (1857), Darwin and others.
?I want to teach you through history. History is an enlargement of personal experience, history pressing the past. We must have the closest contact with the past. How poor and thin a thing is purely personal religion? Baron von H端gel Matthew Arnold (1869), son of the great reforming headmaster of Rugby, and also, one learns, John Stuart Mill (1867) believe that the university's role is ?to cultivate wisdom in those who were capable of it? (Haldane) through a course of studies which would contain ?the best that had been thought and said? (Arnold).
Newman's focus on teaching the young In 1852-58 Newman taught that teaching and not research was the business of universities. Nor did he think that professional studies should be part of the university. University, for Newman, is not primarily about the study of the particular and the temporary, but of the general and
the permanent. Abstraction is the key principle here. It should lead to what Newman calls a "connected view". Haldane holds that Newman, Mill, Arnold, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas all shared a similar view of the university as promoting and inculcating wisdom and virtue by forming in its students an integrated world view. Haldane characterises the increasing specialisation in universities and the promotion of obscure (and largely unread) research as a kind of illness of the system. It might or not be useful, but it does not help the art of teaching. If research happens in a university it should be promoting a shared understanding across the disciplines. Otherwise, piling highly specialised research in with the teaching of undergraduates tends to undermine the humanistic project of the university itself. Here Haldane poses the problem of relativism, but concludes that in fact many of the great educational and philosophical traditions all end up converging. Allow relativism to run its complete course and it is self-defeating, because it tends eventually to confirm universal truths of human experience and nature. Thus Confucius and Aquinas are presented as essentially on the same side in the debate about what education is for and how is should be conducted. Haldane also shows that humility and dedication is required for the student, who must be patient in the
the development and flourishing of society indeed as necessary as technical training. And also, this means that the study of Aquinas is very important for the successful integration of systematic enquiry with sapiential guidance; something which will be important for the emerging economies of Africa and the East, whose own sapiential traditions have much to recommend them to our study. Haldane discusses the modern(ist) claims of Rorty (2012) and Hawking (2010) who with a patent absence of humility make claims that run against the grain for most ordinary people, and yet which seem to be acquiring the power of a new secular dogma. Specifically, Rorty claims that no desires are objectively wrong and Hawking that Philosophy is dead. Scientists, for Hawking, are the new priests, the new ?bearers of the torch of discovery?. Nothing else matters. This kind of narrow and ideological approach is damaging to the whole traditional university idea.
Newman t aught t hat t eaching and not research was t he business of universit ies.
pursuit of the goal of an integrated vision. He should not "swim directly from streams into the sea" (Aquinas.) Education in the west is uncertain as to its goals. In the east and in Africa, the material needs of these developing countries push education in a technical and specialised direction, whilst the memory of their own traditional education as an education in virtue and wisdom is still relatively fresh in people's minds. This sets up a sharp contrast. Haldane then opposes two views of education: first, education as training in useful skills; then education as the freeing of the human spirit so as better to cope with abstract and even metaphysical thought. But, he says, they need not, after all, be always at loggerheads. Quoting Aquinas, he brings to our attention that while practical questions call for practical answers, they also - almost always - raise other theoretical questions such as ?why are we doing this in the first place??. Thus notions of truth, objectivity, causality, etc, can all be seen as necessary to
Finally Haldane turns to the distinctive character of the Catholic university, which ought to be ?an academic institution in which Catholicism is vitally present and operative.? (Ex corde ecclesiae, of Pope St John Paul II). In their service of the truth Catholic universities are called to be poor and humble: ?students must give priority to intellectual and spiritual goods over instrumental and pragmatic ones; academics must be willing to place an educational vocation above peer researcher prestige; and administrators must be willing to forgo financial enrichment in favour of institutional integrity.? It is only to the extent that Catholic universities maintain a sense of the ?Godly, sacred and the gracious? that they will be able demonstrate a vocation which distinguishes them from secular places of learning. The secular university in our day is caught up in the
Medieval monks at st udy
development and also the decline of the outside world. But the Catholic university can be sign of contradiction; it can be counter-cultural, because it is the divine life itself which sanctifies and purifies the university and its members through the life of grace. In the words of Bernard Lonergan, the Catholic university ?is armed against the world,? because the supernatural virtues of faith, hope and charity will ensure that a Catholic university is protected by and oriented towards Almighty God.
Select Bibliography N. G. McCluskey, S.J, The Catholic University, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970). Bernard Lonergan, A Second Collection, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975) Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (1869; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) J. H. Newman, Discourses on the Scope and Nature of a University (Dublin: Duffy, 1852); The Idea of a University, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). J. S. Mill, Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1867) William E. Soothill, The Analects of Confucius (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson, and Ferrier, 1910); available electronically from the Online Library of Liberty http:/ / oll.libertyfund.org/ title/ 1846 Richard Rorty, An Ethics for Today: Finding Common Ground Between Philosophy and Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) S. Hawking and L. Mlodinow, The Grand Design (London: Bantham Press, 2010) Apostolic Constitution of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II on Catholic Universities, Ex Corde Ecclesiae (at www.vatican.va)
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loremipsumdolor sit amet
MathematicsandouRdebt toAristotle
By AUTHOR OF ARTICLE
Plato's Academy
Why we owe the development of the most exact of the exact sciences more to Aristotle than to Plato. Dr THOMAS CONLON
The ancient Gr eeks gave us medicine and mathematics as depar tments of specialised knowledge. To this day people tr ust their doctor s and they tr ust their mathematicians. They of cour se feel the need of doctor s mor e often and acutely than they feel the need for mathematicians, but their tr ust is mor e safely r eposed in mathematics than medicine. In the histor y of mathematics ther e is no equivalent of gr ave faced medical men confidently r ecommending the application of mor e leeches, or muscular sur geons wiping their knives on dir ty coats or white coated psychiatr ists enthusing about the benefits of pr e-fontal lobotomies. Calculation wor ks. A measur e of how ?scientific? our civilisation is the degr ee to which we conduct our affair s in the light of calculations r ather than solely on the basis of tr adition and accumulated exper ience. The medieval cathedr als ar e pr obably the high point of achievement r elying solely on techniques acquir ed by the slow accumulation of pr actical exper ience acr oss the gener ations. However no amount of tr adition or ancestr al wisdom will guide a r ocket to land on Mar s within metr es of a tar get set befor e launch. Only vast amounts of calculation will enable this sor t of achievement to
pass. Medicine has never been shor t of confident, not to say over confident, explanations of what under lies the efficacy r ecommended tr eatments even when such tr eatments have not pr oved to be ver y effective at all. By contr ast mathematicians have been diffident and per plexed as to what the subject matter of their study actually is and why it has been so super bly effective.
Plato vs Aristotle
loremipsumdolor sit amet These centr al per plexities have attr acted thr ee major attempts at r esolution r espectively associated with the names of Plato, Ar istotle and Kant. Plato would like us to believe that mathematical objects, like number s and tr iangles, exist, alongside the for ms of justice and beauty, as immater ial entities in a tr anscendental r ealm of being. The application to the mater ial wor ld ar ises fr om the impr inting by the Demiur ge of these ideal objects on the mater ial wor ld. Thus the imper fect tr iangles one dr aws in the sand stand in much the same r elationship to their ideal ver sions as the behaviour of a just man stands in r elation to the for m of Justice. The ability of men and women to r eason and gain knowledge about immater ial entities stems fr om a dim r ecollection of a pr ior incor por eal existence when we contemplated these entities mor e dir ectly.
At fir st sight it might seem that Catholic Chr istianity might make its peace with Platonism and, in fact, for sever al centur ies it appear ed to do so. However Platonism lends too much comfor t to dualism which mor e insidiously under mines classical or thodoxy than simple atheism or mater ialism, in much the same sense that a for ger thr eatens the integr ity of a cur r ency mor e than a thief. With a r enewed emphasis on cor e anti-dualistic doctr ines par ticular ly the Resur r ection of the Body, Tr anssubstantiation and the Real pr esence, the high Middle Ages saw a fir m and decisive abandonment of any attempt at a pr ofound r econciliation of Platonism and Catholicism. Kant?s view, which had enor mous tr action in the 18th and 19th centur ies can be seen as a r adical anthr opomor phising of a panentheistic view held by von Guer icke and mor e famously by Newton. This view, r adically dissenting not just fr om Ar istotle but also fr om Leibniz and Descar tes, that space and time wer e indeed objective but immater ial and wer e r espectively infinite and eter nal. This position was theologically under wr itten. In Newton?s celebr ated phr ase Space and Time wer e the sensor ium Dei ? the aspects of the Divine natur e by which God contemplated and sustained His mater ial cr eation. Essentially Kant?s
mathematical philosophy is the var iant of Newton?s view obtained by r eplacing the Divine natur e by human natur e or equivalently ?sensor ium Dei? by ?sensor ium omnis hominis venientis in hunc mundum?. Accor ding to Kant we see things in space and time because that is how our faculties of per ception wor k. Our intuitions of time and space r eflect, not a state of affair s in the objective wor ld, but the str uctur e of our br ains. In the well-wor n compar ison, we ar e like a man who is convinced ever ything is blue but only because he is wear ing blue tinted glasses. In a nutshell Kant?s philosophy of mathematics is that the foundational ideas of the subject r epr esented (as it seemed to him) by geometr y and the counting out of natur al number s ar ise r espectively fr om our intuitions of space and of the steady elapse of time. Mathematical tr uths ar e, in the last analysis, not tr uths about an objective wor ld, be it mater ial or immater ial, but about the str uctur e of our own minds. Catholic or thodoxy is uneasy about Kant essentially because the tendency of his philosophy is to downgr ade the gr eat gift of Reason, one of the mar ks of human, as against animal, natur e into a sor t of sophisticated navel gazing. Mathematical r easoning is ultimately mer ely intr ospective while the exter nal objective wor ld eludes tr ue under standing. Mor e gener ally the scientific wor ld is ambivalent. On the one hand Kant is the iconic philosopher of the Enlightenment when (supposedly) our civilisation began to r ebuild itself on new humanist foundations. On the other hand most mathematicians today embr ace the philosophy that makes the gr andest claim for their science, to wit Platonism, and natur al scientists ar e ever y bit as convinced
The state can look at you or me and see a citizen, the people we wor k with a colleague, the people who likes us a fr iend but the mathematician will see each of us mer ely as a unit ? adver ting only to ?that by which we call something a one? (as Euclid, an adher ent of Ar istotle puts it) and see the state, our wor k colleagues and our cir cle of fr iends mer ely as ?ar ithmoi? adver ting to them only as ?multitudes of units?.
Statue of Euclid in Oxford.
as Aquinas that the senses ar e a r eliable, undistor ting conduit between the intellect and the exter nal wor ld. Ar istotle seems at fir st sight a ver y unlikely figur e to have been embr aced by Catholic or thodoxy. Reacting str ongly against the ontological liber alism, not to say pr ofligacy, of Plato?s academy. His philosophy is ontologically par simonious. He r ejects Plato?s idea of a tr anscendental r ealm of being populated by the For ms of Justice and Beauty as well as the mathematical ideal geometr ic figur es, units and ar ithmoi which Plato held to be the tr ue subject matter of mathematics. Whatever exists, exists in the categor y of substance. Objectively ther e ar e only things which ar e often just collections of things and human minds to think about them. Gener ality is achieved not by postulating ideals which actual individuals somehow r esemble but simply by noting the human capacity to adver t only to r elevant aspects of things.
Similar ly geometr ic figur es ar e just or dinar y things ? fishing r ods, br acelets, necklaces, or chestr al tr iangles etc. adver ted to in a geometr ic way. Ther e is no ideal tr iangle mystically hover ing over the quotidian individual instances of tr iangular ity nor any number ?4? hover ing over this br idge par ty, that str ing quar tet, or any other concr ete four some and somehow encapsulating the quar ticity of the individual instances. In developments stemming fr om the 19th centur y Ar istotle?s ?units? and ?ar ithmoi? , now mor e commonly r efer r ed to as ?elements? and ?sets? have become a foundational idea for all mathematical thought. How this came to pass, why it was delayed to the 19th centur y, and why the legacy of the Gr eek theor y of ar ithmoi became in the 17th centur y ?the natur al number s? r ather than a mor e gener al set theor y is a fascinating topic in the histor y of mathematics. Dr Thomas Conlon teaches Mathematics at Chavagnes. He is the author of Thinking About Nothing: Otto Von Guer icke And The Magdebur g Exper iments On The Vacuum, 2011.